Bram had gotten Kerthin almost to the door when a chair sailed through the air and there was a crash of glass as it went through a window that some human renovator had installed long ago.
“That does it,” Bram said. “We’d better get out of the neighborhood fast, before the monitors arrive.”
There was going to be a terrible stink about this. The proctors dealt severely with disturbances that got so far out of hand that they were likely to come to the attention of the Nar. There would be fines, tongue lashings. As a Nar associate, Bram would be permitted to go to work mornings in order to keep things hushed up, but he didn’t fancy spending his nights in polite confinement for a Tenday if the proctors felt tough.
He pushed Kerthin through the door, and they ran. Other people were dispersing in ail directions. They were just rounding the curve of the street when Bram heard running feet and the clinking of the little hand bells that the monitors carried, converging on the structure that housed the meeting hall.
“Just in time,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” Bram said. “Why didn’t they let him talk? It doesn’t hurt to listen to someone’s ideas.”
“Poor Bram,” Kerthin replied. “You’re too reasonable. You keep trying to understand everybody else’s point of view instead of following the right one. Well, never mind, that’s one of the things I like about you.”
She yawned and snuggled closer to him in the spartan sleeping nest that he still hadn’t gotten around to replacing with a double. The fleecy metaplasmic material readjusted its temperature where her hip touched his, to cope with the increase in body heat. On this hot summer night, it felt pleasantly cool against the skin.
Bram was pleased to see Kerthin acting like herself again. He had felt shut off from the tense, humorless stranger who had dragged him to the political meeting. Perhaps it was his fault for not hitting it off better with her friends. But after they had gotten back to his chamber, Kerthin seemed to have shaken off the touchy mood she had been in. She had fixed the two of them a light repast of grainbean flats and sunflower dabs, topped by a sauce of single-cell protein and tomato — rustled up miraculously out of the leavings in his plundered food chest. A couple of cold brews and a lingering nightcap of alcohol slush had mellowed them further.
“Kerth,” he said, lying back comfortably. “Why don’t we get joined next Tenday?”
“What’s wrong with the way we are now?” she asked sleepily.
“No, I mean have a real welding ceremony. Take a pledge of monandry. Throw a party for our friends.”
“A what ceremony?”
“Welding or wedding. It’s one of the old human forms. They’ve pieced it together out of the old literature. It’s sort of a formal way of bonding permanently, Original Man’s version of a monandry pledge. It’s becoming very popular. Orris and Marg are going to do it before they emigrate.”
“They would,” she said. “I’ve never known a stuffier pair. I don’t see why you bother with them.”
“Orris is an old friend. He lived across the passage from me when I first moved into my own compartment after I was apprenticed. We used to borrow things from each other all the time.” That had been when he was living with Mim, but he did not want to say that to Kerthin.
“You don’t have anything in common with him anymore. Honestly, I could fall asleep when we have to go to one of their tastings.”
“Marg’s on the culinary development project. She’s very good at it.”
“She’s duller than he is. Her head’s stuffed full of assimilationist ideas.”
Bram retreated from the subject. They lay in companionable silence. “Kerth?” he said after a while.
“Hmmm, yes?” she responded, shifting in the nest.
“How about it? Getting welded, I mean. If we signed the pledge, we could join a gene co-op, and if we added up to twenty-five percent and nobody else was higher, we could get custody of the baby.”
“I’m not ready to be tied down yet,” she said lazily. “There are too many things I want to do.”
“Like politics?” he said, and instantly regretted it.
But they were not going to have an argument about it this time. She started to giggle. “Did you see Eena, pounding with both fists on those two heads? They were so busy fighting, I don’t think they even noticed. I wonder if she got out all right.”
“She’s probably cooling off in the proctor’s lockup right now.”
“This is a bad time for Pite to be attracting attention,” she said. “It’s that Fraz. He was the one who got him into it. He’s very hotheaded.”
Please, Bram wanted to say, let’s not talk about Pite right at this moment. But he didn’t want to have another bout with Kerthin, so he bit off the words. “Pite looks as if he can take care of himself,” he said.
“I’m awful, aren’t I?” Kerthin said with a laugh. “Forcing you to sit through all that soft-headed drivel and then getting you involved in a fight. But at least you got to hear Penser’s declaration. Don’t mind Pite. He’s that way with everyone.”
Bram hesitated. He didn’t want to seem to be lecturing Kerthin. The one thing he feared was having her call him stuffy, like Orris. Finally he said, as mildly as he could, “I know Pite is your friend, but you mustn’t let him get you into trouble.”
There was a long silence, and he was afraid that he had muffed it, but Kerthin was still in an affectionate mood.
“Don’t worry, Bram, sweet. We won’t go to any more meetings like that.”
They made love again, then Bram made one more try. “Will you at least go to the gene co-op with me and have them look at a sample? No strings attached.”
“Mmm, we’ll see,” she said comfortably. “Anything to shut you up. Now, go to sleep.”
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Chapter 5
The library annex was tucked away on a lower level near the siphuncle tube. It always smelled a little dank to Bram. Here, near the windowless inner core of the orthocone, one could place a hand flat against the shell partition and feel a deep, slow rhythmic throb as the creature’s mantle alternately dilated and contracted to pump water through its funnel.
The librarian was bare to the waist for convenience in consulting the annex’s sole Nar-style reading machine. He was a large, ruddy, hairy-chested individual named Hogard. He was the only human person Bram had ever met who could get more out of a body reader than Bram himself.
“Well, Bram, you don’t ask for help very often,” he said jovially. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m having a little trouble tracking down some historical data,” Bram said. “There’s a set of artificial genes I’ve traced back to an early stage of fabrication. But I’ve only got the conserved variations, not the discards. I’d like to trace the lineage a little further back. I was wondering if there might be a natural prototype somewhere among the antecedents.”
The librarian gave a nod. “Like the nitrogen-fixing plasmids from terrestrial bacteria that were found in the original corn genome. Well, let’s have a look and see what your problem is.”
He squeezed out of his cubbyhole and accompanied Bram to the row of alcoves that held the visual interface readers that let humans use the Nar library system. The reading machines were a patchwork of individual design, reflecting the varied off-the-shelf components available to the human computer buffs who had volunteered their talents and time over the years. Some of the rigs dated back more than a century. At least half of them could be counted on to be out of commission at any given time.
About a dozen men and women were hunched over the reading screens at the moment — some of them bio-researchers, like Bram, from the center; others, browsers from outside, interested mainly in the historical and cultural material. One of them looked up as Bram and Hogard passed. It was the sallow-faced man whom Bram had recognized at the political meeting.
The man’s eyes encountered Bram’s and instantly darted away. Had there been a flicker of
recognition in them? Bram was sure of it, but the man had gone back to his screen without a sign.
Hogard seated himself at the console Bram had vacated. The screen was still on, the image flickering. Hogard hit the device with the heel of a meaty hand to steady the picture. Bram’s index symbols came into view along with a boxed message that said NO FURTHER RECORD in Inglex and Chin-pin-yin.
Hogard fiddled with the finger bars for a minute or two, following Bram’s references and punching in alternate codes. There were blinks of meaningless text and the reemergence of the boxed message.
“It may be this machine,” Hogard said, frowning. “Did you try one of the others?”
“Three of them,” Bram said. “Same result every time.”
“You understand that the translation program is very basic,” the librarian said. “We couldn’t possibly transcribe the Great Language in anything but a simplified form, because the ultimate limitation is the human sensory apparatus and the human nervous system. Oh, the computer boys will keep working on improved programs, and maybe someday there’ll be computer-mediated brain implants and genetic enhancement of the deep brain structures. Some of the wilder visionaries talk about it, anyway. But for now, what we’ve got is mainly a system that’s good for hard technical data, things that can be expressed in numbers, visual data, human-loaded references, and so forth. And a sort of precis of everything else.”
“I’m not asking for anything subtle,” Bram said. “It’s all perfectly straightforward — just nucleotide sequences. I’ve got the right reference tabs. I know that, because I’ve been following them through.”
“This research program goes back five or six hundred years. In fact, here’s your foster tutor’s name on one of the reference tabs. Voth-shr-voth. Maybe the early work was too inconclusive to enter. Or it’s floating around in another file. We don’t have the resources for locating everything. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we go back to the message of Original Man. There’s a log reference. Maybe you can trace it from that end.”
“There’s a gap there, too.”
Hogard looked up alertly. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s some kind of glitch, then. It may have been improperly entered. We’ll have to try to bypass the interface program and go direct to the source.”
“I’ve already taken a crack at the body reader upstairs, but I didn’t get anything I could make sense of. I’ve had trouble with that file before.”
“Let’s give it another try, shall we?”
Hogard led the way back to his cubbyhole and invited Bram inside. It was a rare honor. Few people were allowed behind the swinging gate. The burly librarian clambered up a step stool and streched himself full length on the star-shaped surface of the body reader. Bram was glad to defer to him. Hogard’s hairy chest and arms, so the joke went among the envious, were really covered with excessively long and curly cilia.
He lay there a long time, his brow knotted with concentration. When he climbed down, he wore a thoughtful expression.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “As far as I can make out, it’s not cataloged.”
“But there’s that log reference,” Bram said.
“Yes,” the librarian agreed. “It goes back half a millennium. It must have been withdrawn from circulation for some reason.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. The only thing I can think of is that somebody must have borrowed the file while it was still at a temporary memory address. And that it’s been gathering electronic dust in a private file all these centuries. Why don’t you ask Voth-shr-voth?”
“I suppose I’ll have to. I didn’t want to bother him. He has a lot on his mind these days.”
Hogard nodded in understanding. “When he goes into the change, a whole era goes with him. He may be the last living member of that touch group. He was one of the youngest associates.”
Bram ran a fingertip along the tens axis of the Nar-style waistwatch he wore for a belt. “It’s almost quitting time. I’m supposed to meet someone at the gene co-op. I’ll talk to Voth tomorrow.”
“You’re already registered, of course,” the gene broker said. “At birth. We’ve called up copies of your charts from the central files. But we like to do our own mapping. You’d be surprised at the discrepancies that can crop up when you’re dealing with more than a hundred thousand genes per person, to say nothing of the chromosomal protein factors.”
He was a plump-cheeked young man in a high-collared tunic that looked uncomfortable where it cut into the underside of his chin. He had turned on a practiced heartiness as soon as he had seated Bram and Kerthin opposite him at the little round console that, Bram supposed, controlled the wall screen.
“Is it legal?” Bram asked.
The broker gave him a pained look. “My dear friend, of course! The Nar reproductive monitors are perfectly happy to have us act as their agents in these matters. After all, human beings are not cabbages. They understand perfectly that an element of free choice must be preserved. All we’re required to do is to stay within the parameters.”
“Their parameters,” Kerthin said scornfully.
Bram’s heart sank. He had hoped Kerthin would be on her best behavior.
But the gene broker was used to coping with difficult clients and their doubts. “Very broad parameters in our generation, fortunately,” he said smoothly. “Essentially, all we’re doing is following Original Man’s plan for avoiding the dangers of genetic drift — extrapolating from the master genome in an orderly mathematical progression. By now we’ve derived enough new genotypes and expanded the human population sufficiently to give us considerable latitude. In fact —” His face took on an expression of professional benevolence. “— our chief function these days, I sometimes feel, is to assign custody of the children. And the Nar very wisely agree that those decisions are best left to a human agency.”
Kerthin’s face softened at the mention of children, and Bram gave a silent sigh of relief. “And what would our chances be of getting jurisdiction of a construct?”
The broker pursed his lips. “Excellent, I’d say. I can’t see that any question would arise. You’re both young, healthy, with no obvious heterozygous matching problems in your charts. You’ll almost certainly qualify for the twenty-five percent minimum, so that if the young lady opts to exercise her prerogative for host mothership as well as gene mothership, that should clinch matters. You understand, of course, that every human child must be assigned a Nar proxy parent — just as we ourselves were — but the baby would be yours to raise.”
“What about it, Kerthin?” Bram asked, looking into her eyes.
She bit her lip. “I’d like time to think about it.”
“Of course, of course, take all the time you wish,” the genebroker boomed. “There’s no hurry.”
“I suppose,” Kerthin said slowly, “that other bits and pieces of our gametes will go into the construction of other babies?”
“That goes without saying,” the broker said. “Look at it this way. Your primary offspring will have dozens of partial brothers and sisters running around the Compound.” He assumed an expression of piety. “When it comes to that, we’re all brothers and sisters in a sense — every human being alive. We all share nucleotide sequences in some degree from the metagenome and its appendices.”
“I don’t know,” Kerthin said. “It seems to me that Bram and I ought to be able to have a child all our own if we want one. The way Original Man did in all the books and plays we have. Without having to get a license from the yell — from the Nar. You said yourself that the human race is large enough now so that we don’t have to worry about losing genes through genetic drift.”
Bram was astonished. He had never thought that Kerthin was capable of being so sentimental. “Twenty-five percent would be fine, Kerth,” he said. “And more than likely, it would be over fifty percent.” He appealed to the gene broker. “Isn’t that so?”
; The gene broker grew sober. “Gene sharing goes back a long way in the history of Original Man,” he assured Kerthin. “At least as far back as Shakespeare.”
“I thought that was before their technological era,” Bram said.
The gene broker smiled broadly and took out a well-thumbed book that had the look of a training manual. “They practiced some primitive form of genetic engineering even then,” he said. “There’s a reference here in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a group of three couples contributing genes to a construct in order to edit out genetic defects. Let me just find the passage … hmm, here it is.”
He spread the book flat on the console and recited aloud:
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be;
And the blots of Nature’s hand
Shall not in their issue stand.
Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.
“So you see,” the broker said, triumphantly snapping the book shut, “the tradition of gene sharing is a very ancient one for humanity. Our prototypes invested it with special ceremonies: visiting the molecular engineering facility as a group rather than separately, swearing oaths of friendship, and conferring their ‘blessing’ on the compound nucleotide matrix — or ‘bed,’ as they termed it.”
Bram nodded, impressed. “We were thinking of going through one of the reconstructed welding ceremonies ourselves,” he admitted.
He turned to Kerthin for confirmation, but she was already rising to her feet.
“Well, thank you very much,” she said. “Bram and I will discuss it and let you know.”
The broker was taken by surprise, but recovered nicely. “Would you like to leave a tissue sample before you go, so that we can at least begin some of the preliminary classification work? It would save quite a bit of time later on. It’s quite painless, and it would only take a few minutes.”
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