The Genesis Quest
Page 9
“I’m sorry,” he said, stumbling over the words. “We’re trying to develop a new organism, and they were waiting for a chimeric section they needed from me. I guess I lost track of the time.” A returning flush of pride removed the apology from his tone. “It may turn out to be rather important. You see, it’s a —”
She cut him off. “No time for that. You can tell me later.” She turned to the others. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
The two men struggled up from their seating puffs without particular haste. The woman followed. None of them offered to speak. Bram looked questioningly at Kerthin.
“Oh,” Kerthin said. She tossed her head impatiently. “This is Pite. And that’s Fraz. And she’s Eena.”
Pite acknowledged the introduction with a lazy nod. He was the one with the short blonde beard. He was medium height with a thick chest and wide shoulders. He moved in a sort of controlled prowl.
The one with the scraggly black heard and the red, wide-lipped face was Fraz. The sleeves of his mono were rolled up to show powerfully thewed forearms. He didn’t look overwhelmingly bright — an odd choice of friend for someone like Kerthin. “Hiya,” he said. He stole a glance at Pite, as if to see that it was all right.
“Hello,” Bram replied, still puzzled.
The thin young woman, Eena, gave Bram an actual smile. “Say,” she said, “do you really work for the yellowlegs?”
Bram frowned at the pejorative. “Well … I’ve been taken into one of the touch groups. As an adoptee of the Folk.” He used the Inglexcised form of the term in the Small Language by which the Nar referred to themselves.
“Yuh?” She gave him a blank stare. “What is it you do exactly?”
“Well, I —”
“Come on!” Kerthin said. “We can talk on the way.”
“Where are we going?” Bram asked.
“To a meeting. I mentioned it yesterday. Weren’t you listening? Look, if you don’t want to go, just say so. I’ll go by myself.”
“No, no,” he said hastily. “I’ll go.” His eyes fell on the empty cups and dirty plates scattered on the floor near the seating puffs. It looked as if Kerthin had been entertaining her friends for the last hour or so with cornbrew and nibbles from the cold locker. Bram’s empty stomach reminded him that he had skipped lunch; he would have given anything for a quick brew and a plate of bean-wraps. Kerthin, however, was all but tapping her foot with impatience.
Bram tried to make small talk during the walk to the meeting place. “What kind of meeting is it?” he asked Pite.
“Oh, just a meeting, you know,” Pite replied, his pale eyes shifting. “Politics and all that stuff.”
“He’s all right, I told you, Pite,” Kerthin said. “Just a little politically undeveloped.”
Pite shrugged. “Any friend of Kerthin’s
“Are you a Resurgist?” Bram asked politely.
Fraz, walking ahead with the thin girl, gave a rude hoot of laughter.
“You were right, Kerth,” Eena said. “He is politically undeveloped.”
Bram flushed. He was beginning to get tired of Kerthin’s friends. And he wasn’t too pleased, either, with the form Kerthin’s endorsement of him had taken.
“The Resurgists live in their own dream world,” Pite said smoothly. “They think they can dress up in their play clothes that they get from descriptions in dead books and copy all the old plays and the old music and the old political institutions. And put up one-way walls around human society and live by the sufferance of the yellowlegs in a world where the yellowlegs control all the resources. And they’re willing to go on holding out their hand and begging for whatever crumbs the yellowlegs are kind enough to give them.” His voice contained a chill certainty. “But that won’t work. We humans are going to have to fight for what’s ours.”
“Fight who?” Bram said. “We don’t have any enemies.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Brammo,” Pite said. “Everybody’s our enemy. The yellowlegs for keeping us down. The Partnerites for collaborating with them. The Resurgists for diverting us from the real struggle that’s ahead. And you. For donating your talents to the yellow-legs instead of your own kind.”
“Now, just a minute,” Bram said. “What we do at the biocenter benefits everybody eventually, Nar and human alike. Look at mining bacteria, for example. Or fuel crops. All creating more abundance, more wealth to go around. That one-piecer you’re wearing is probably made of polycotton. Or take the project I was working on today. It could lead to new fibers from meristem hairs. Or new building materials that grow in sheets. Or even a new species of food plant — one that only humans could possibly benefit from, I might add.”
Pite laughed. “Like Kerthin said, you haven’t figured it out yet. But maybe there’s hope for you. You keep your ears open tonight, Brammo, and maybe you’ll wake up someday.”
They walked on in silence. Bram saw that they were heading toward the older section of the human quarter, where ill-nourished lightpoles cast a feeble glow down the side streets and abandoned, discolored shell structures huddled accusingly among the more viable buildings. A few cheap vending stations were still open, dispensing food, drink, and minor comforts.
Eena moved into step with Bram. “Don’t let Pite get on your nerves,” she said. “I wasn’t politically conscious either when I met him, and honest, you should have heard the way he rode me. So, you never finished telling me. What is this work you do with the decs?”
Relieved at the change of subject, Bram started to explain his part in the new project to provide the space poplar with heterochronic genes that might lead to a new, self-replicating organism at the embryonic stage. He talked more loudly than necessary and kept stealing glances at Kerthin. But her face stayed blank, without even the uncomprehending smile that Eena, at least, was favoring him with.
“And so,” he finished lamely, “I guess they’ll keep working on it. If this combination doesn’t work, there’re others we can try.”
“How’ll you know?” Pite said.
“Huh? Know what?”
“Know if this thing, whatever it is, works?”
“Why — they’ll tell me. I’m part of the project.”
“Sure,” Pite said with lazy sarcasm. “Like the thing-amajigee you tried to look up, and they tell you the records aren’t available to humans.”
Bram was almost too flabbergasted to reply. “They weren’t keeping anything from me. From me as a human, I mean. I had some trouble interpreting the touch reader. And when I asked for help, I got it.”
“You’re being naive, Bram,” Eena said earnestly. “They show humans what they want us to see.”
“But — but what motive could they possibly have for concealing data?” Bram asked.
Fraz answered him this time. “To keep human beings down, what else?”
“You’re wrong, dead wrong,” Bram said. “Look here —”
Kerthin nudged him with her elbow to shut him up. “Here we are,” she said. “I hope it hasn’t started. Now for pity’s sake, don’t be getting quarrelsome about things you don’t understand.”
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Chapter 4
The meeting was being held in a back room of a neglected old building that housed a drink shop. A couple of other ground-level shops had long since crusted over. Pite led them through, nodding at a burly man who was hanging around just inside the entrance.
A few customers still sat in the murky outer room, nursing cornbrew or thickened alcohol at the long tables. The place looked shabby. The biolights were elderly and overdue for replacement, and pitting was well advanced on the wall surfaces.
They had arrived just in time, Bram saw. As if on signal, the loitering customers drained their drinks and began to file into the back room. The proprietor, a pale heavyset man in
an apron, locked the door and pulled over the shades before he joined the rest. The burly man stayed behind, presumably to admit latecomers.
The inner room looked like any tired club room, with game tables and a few sagging lounge puffs pushed against the walls. Rows of chairs had been set up to face a small raised platform that once might have been used as a bandstand. A speaker’s rostrum had been improvised out of two boxes resting on trestles. Behind the platform was draped a long homemade banner showing a crude representation of two human hands cupping something that looked like a planet.
Forty or fifty people were already seated. Bram was surprised at the size of the crowd. People talked politics all the time at parties and other gatherings — though Bram tried to avoid them — but he had never really thought of political discussions being organized in the sense that plays and concerts were.
He was surprised further to see people he knew dotting the assembly: Dal Terson, the playcrafter, who never talked politics and who, Bram assumed, took a cynical attitude toward such matters; a Resurgist architect he had met at a viewing party Arthe had invited him to; a sallow clerkish man he recognized from the library annex at the biocenter.
“Over here,” Pite said, and muscled a way through for them to some vacant seats up front.
Nothing much happened for a while. Three or four people at the rear of the platform were having a whispered discussion among themselves. There was a buzz of desultory, low-pitched conversation in the audience. Bram occupied himself by looking around the meeting hall, but there wasn’t much to see.
All of a sudden there was a sharp crack from up front that made Bram jump. The people on the platform had sorted out their differences, and one of them had struck the improvised lectern with a cube of wood. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered individual afflicted with the baldness gene that had not yet been edited out of the human pool because of possible allelomorphic benefits.
“The meeting will come to order,” the bald man said. “I see we have some new faces tonight.”
Bram looked around again, but he could not tell who the new faces were besides himself.
“We’ll clean up some old business first,” the bald man went on, “and then we’ll go on to the committee reports.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I should warn you that we are not going to have the opportunity to vote on the resources allocation resolution tonight, because the resolutions committee has not been able to agree on the wording.”
There were groans and catcalls from the assembly. Somebody shouted, “Damned Schismatist sabotage!” The bald man rapped with his wooden cube and waited for the noise to abate.
Bram looked over at Kerthin. She seemed as agitated as the rest of the audience. “What’s it all about?” he whispered.
“Shhh,” she said. “Just listen.”
The bald man waited until his audience was under control again. “But I have another surprise for you that you’re all going to like. We have some news from Juxt One — an update on how the struggle is going there and a special message from Penser himself.”
The meeting became unruly again. A man stood up and yelled, “Give it to us now, Jupe, and the Inferno with all the other garbage!”
“Now, now, gene brother Hwite,” the bald man said. “All in good time. Patience is a virtue. Besides, our guest isn’t here yet. As you all can appreciate, he’s taking the utmost precautions.”
Eena leaned over from the seat on Bram’s other side. “Huh, we knew all about the laser message from Juxt One. That’s why Pite wanted to be here tonight. Otherwise he wouldn’t bother with this bunch of word dribblers.”
“Shut up, Eena,” Fraz said from the next seat over.
“Shut up yourself, Fraz, honey, and stop trying to act so big,” Eena told him.
“Who’s Penser?” Bram said.
Unexpectedly, it was Pite who answered. “Just a man. With some good ideas. We could use him here on this planet.”
On the platform, the committee reports had begun. A fussy little man in dull-colored pleats was droning on about vote tallies for the planetwide Human Advisory Council and the need to elect representatives who reflected the Ascendist point of view. He read off an endless list of figures from a memory slate, smoothing the surface with his palm at intervals to let the next set of statistics pop up. He was followed by a drab middle-aged woman who reported on the small discussion groups that had been organized to raise the consciousness of politically immature people to the importance of human ascendancy. A fervent young man on the arts and education committee reported on a drive to get Ascendist plays performed. A square-jawed woman with cropped hair reported on poster production and efforts to get Ascendist leaflets into the hands of the human workers at the ethanol plant and other Nar-directed enterprises serving the human quarter.
Bram tried to figure out what it was all about. The concept of a political party was new to him. As near as he could decide, the Ascendists were something like an extended touch group, and the committee reports corresponded to opening amenities. At least the wordage was high and the information content low. A Nar touch group would have disposed of all this, he thought, in a minute or two.
“Word dribblers,” Eena had called them. Evidently Kerthin’s friends belonged to a faction that favored more direct action of some kind.
There were more words during the discussion period that followed. Kerthin took pity on Bram and explained that it had something to do with a vote that was going to take place on various resolutions afterward.
“We need to demand a greater share of this planet’s resources, that’s all there is to it,” said the square-jawed woman who had given one of the committee reports. “We humans have done very well in small-scale enterprises like furniture manufacturing, for example. We even have Nar customers for specialty items, helping us to pay our own way. But we have no say whatsoever in the large-scale enterprises that affect us directly. For a starter, we should demand that the ethanol plant and the grainworks be turned over entirely to us.”
“That will all be in the resources allocation resolution, gene sister,” the bald moderator said. “Any comments on that? Yes, gene brother Lal?”
Lal got to his feet, a hulking man in stained work-clothes. “Seems to me that’s the way to greater dependence, not less. We’re just talking about begging for bigger handouts. But the Nar still pull the strings. We need to go where the power is. Get human representatives in every nook and cranny of Nar society. Transportation, energy, spaceflight. Hell, their food factories, if it comes to that! Put it to them reasonable-like. A token share of control. Proportional to our numbers. Then we work from inside.”
“That’s just the same old Partnerite drivel, spinning on a different shaft,” another speaker objected. “Working from within is a daydream. We can never get inside any Nar institution, let alone influence it. And that’s just a biological fact of life!”
“And what would you suggest, gene brother Gorch?” the bald moderator asked sarcastically.
Gorch stuck out his lower lip pugnaciously. “For starts, we demand planets of our own. Where the human race can develop without interference. As long as we live on the same worlds with the yellowlegs, our initiative’s going to be sapped. We’re nothing but pets to them — about on the same level as a muffbeast.”
An angry mutter rippled through the hall. Evidently Gorch had struck a raw nerve.
“That’s telling it, Gorch,” somebody shouted.
“More Schismatist mischief making,” a dissenter broke in. “We’ve got to solve our problems right here on this world and the other settled planets, not go charging off into space and running away from the struggle!”
Voices in the hall shouted him down. Other voices shouted down the shouters.
In the hubbub, Bram turned to Kerthin. She was leaning forward, straining to hear. “That fellow’s talking nonsense,” he said. “About demanding planets from the Nar. There aren’t any suitable planets anywhere within a human life span that aren’t already pop
ulated by the Nar. What’s he proposing? That we all chip in and buy a ship and go exploring? There isn’t a large enough human population on all the planets added together to command that kind of capital investment.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Kerthin snapped at him.
Hurt, Bram stopped talking. Pite leaned across Kerthin and spoke past Bram to Eena and Fraz. “The guy that called Gorch a Schismatist got it half right. Schismatists don’t demand. We take.”
That got a guffaw from Fraz and an adoring look from Eena. Bram hunched in his seat and tried to look neutral. The argument in the hall was still going on.
“I’ll tell you where Schismatism leads to,” said the man who had disagreed with Gorch. “To outlaws like Penser. Where’s he been the last seven years? Hiding underground. What good does that do the struggle? We’re lucky the Nar permit the Ascendist party to still exist on Juxt One.”
There was a scuffle. A chair was knocked over. Bram couldn’t see clearly what had happened, but a man in a mono, like the ones Pite and Fraz wore, was being held by two or three men around him. The anti-Schismatist was being similarly restrained. The man in the mono spat, “You say anything else against Penser and you’re going to wear your legs for a scarf!”
“Please, please!” The block of wood hammered on the podium. “We mustn’t fight among ourselves,” the bald man said. “If we divide, it can only hurt the struggle.”
“What did Penser do?” Bram asked.
“He took things,” Pite said with a mocking smile. “From the yellowlegs.”
Kerthin gave a sigh and addressed Bram as if he were a child. “Penser was very high in the Ascendist party on Juxt One. There were some who found his ideas too extreme. They tried to read him and his followers out of the party. But he fought back.” She frowned. “There was an