“We can see about that later,” she said. “Are you coming, Bram?”
“Uh … yes,” Bram said. He smiled apologetically at the broker.
“I quite understand,” the broker said. “One doesn’t want to hurry a decision like this.” He bestowed a firm handshake on both of them. “We’re available for counseling at any time.”
Outside, Bram turned to Kerthin. “What’s the matter, Kerth? You haven’t changed your mind?”
“I said I’d come,” she said. “And I did.”
“When will you go back with me to give a specimen?” he said.
“I don’t know. Let’s not talk about it right now.”
Later they fed at a repast house that everybody had been raving about in the new extension of the Quarter. The architecture was human-style, designed with straight timbers and sheathing material plastered with a lime compound. Even the roof line was straight. The architects had cleverly braced the beams at right angles, avoiding the more familiar curved vault made of bowed poplar timbers that were planet-grown in great cradles that were progressively tilted as the tree developed.
Everything had been lovingly researched by the proprietors, two young men whose previous enterprise had been a neoteric gallery. The item being served this evening was “steak” — a slab of pressed bacterial protein reinforced by fiber and molded into the shape of a four-legged, bilaterally symmetrical creature with curved antennae, copied from a line drawing in the Inglex dictionary. With it were served potato slices sautéed in sunflower seed oil, baked soyatash, and a tomato compote that Kerthin pronounced too sweet.
“Unusual,” Bram said. He broke a leg off the sculptured steakbeast and bore it to his mouth with his eating tongs. Something inside, tasting suspiciously like soycrisps, provided a crunch. “It’s hard to believe that Original Man actually ate little creatures that looked like this.”
“I’ve heard that there’s a genetic template for this type of food creature in the Nar archives, but that it’s being suppressed,” Kerthin said. “That’s part of the Ascendist program — to demand that it be released. After all, eating animal life is part of the human heritage.”
The idea made Bram lose his appetite. He pushed the soyatash around with the bowl of his tongs. “I’m sure there’s nothing to the story,” he said mildly. “I work at the biocenter. I’d know.”
“Oh, Bram, you’re so naive. What about the egg creature? That’s being suppressed.”
“There’s no secret about it. It’s not Nar policy to reproduce it, that’s all. Anyway, what do we need it for? We’ve got eggs.”
“You let them lead you around by the nose,” she said, more sorrowfully than accusingly.
Bram did not reply. If Kerthin was working up to one of her dudgeons, he wasn’t going to help her. He looked around at the crowd in the big limed and timbered room. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves, laughing and talking while they stuffed themselves with the exotic food.
He said as much to Kerthin in an effort to steer the subject to neutral ground. “I’m surprised they can attract a crowd as large as this, when you think of the size of the allowance transfer it takes to eat here,” he said. Then, suddenly realizing that Kerthin might think he was complaining about the price, he tried to turn it into a general observation: “When you think about this place and some of the other businesses in the Quarter, it sometimes seems as if half the human species exists by selling things to the other half.”
But once again he’d said the wrong thing. “And the other half,” Kerthin said bitingly, “lives on the bounty of their masters. The human species will never get anywhere until it controls its own capital.”
He finally lost his patience. “Kerthin, we’re supposed to be having a good time. What’s got into you lately? Is politics all you think about?”
“One of us had better think about it,” she blazed.
“There are more important things in life.”
“There’s nothing more important. All life is politics, whether you realize it or not.”
“A lot of people in this world seem to get along nicely without it.”
“Like your old artsy-crafty friends, like that little girl from the music department? People who call themselves human Resurgists but who are content to stick their heads in holes in the ground and let themselves be manipulated by external forces! I’ll tell you this — an absence of politics is politics. Noncommitment is a conscious choice. It says that you’ve given up on the idea of being in control of your own destiny.”
“Calm down, Kerth.”
She realized she’d been raising her voice and glanced around at the other diners to see if she’d attracted attention. “Listen, Bram, my innocent swain,” she said, leaning forward. “Like it or not, politics rules your life. And it’s going to become even more important in the times ahead. There are changes coming. And it’s going to be important to be on the right side.”
“Your friends’ side?”
“When it comes to that, yes. But more important than that, to be on your own side — to realize where your own interests lie. Not with a species that’s so different from us that they don’t even have a centralized brain! On the side of the human race!”
“We don’t have to pick sides. We’re all life forms together.”
“More of that soft-headed assimilationist nonsense,” she said scornfully. “We’ll get rid of them when the time comes. Open your eyes, my dreamy pet. The Nar work in their own interest, not ours. They’d be stupid if they didn’t, and they’re not stupid. They have to be worried about what would happen if our numbers got out of hand, for example. We’re controllable now. We have no ecological niche. We’re nothing but potted plants. And they’ll do whatever they have to do to keep us in the pot.”
“The Nar don’t think that way, Kerth,” Bram protested.
She paid no attention. “So it’s perfectly natural for them to want to control information. Information is power. But the great message of Original Man is our property, not theirs. It belongs to humanity, to use as we see fit.”
“Kerthin, you keep seeing plots where there aren’t any. How can I convince you that the Nar aren’t keeping secrets from us? There’s a tremendous amount of data in the archives. Decades and decades worth of transmissions. A lot of it hasn’t been digested yet. But it’s all available. Scholars — both human and Nar — are digging into it all the time.”
“You said yourself that you sometimes have trouble finding the information you want.”
“Sure, but that’s because humans have difficulty using the Nar library system. There’s nothing sinister about it. The cultural package is fairly simple, but a lot of the other data was simply packed away till someone could get around to it. There was a codicil to the first cycle of transmission that lasted fourteen years — apparently additional scientific data and an historical update — that’s hardly been more than cataloged.”
“That’s what we’ve been told, anyway.”
“Kerthin, there’s generations worth of work there,” Bram said, exasperated. “Anybody who wants to is welcome to track it down, if he wants to spend the time.” Seeing the stubborn look on her face, he poured out the tale of the elusive historical data on the heterochronic gene project. “So you see,” he finished, “a little sniffing around will generally lead you to the file you want. I’m going to ask Voth about it in the morning.”
She was instantly alert. “Don’t,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Don’t ask him about it. Could you get access to Voth’s files without him knowing about it?”
“Well, sure. Everything’s right out in the open. But I don’t see —”
“How can anyone as intelligent as you be so dense? If they know you’re after it, they’ll take steps to conceal it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She reached across the rickety eating stand and took his hand. “If I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter, does it? But you have an opportunity to show yo
ur loyalty to the whole human species. And if that’s not important to you, do it as a favor to me. Promise?”
“Kerth, you’re asking me to spy on my own adoptive tutor, the being who brought me up!” Bram exclaimed. Spying was one of the most universal human activities if one could believe fifty centuries of literature, and most of the authors, from Homer to Jarn Anders, didn’t appear to think too highly of those who practiced it.
“How can it possibly hurt Voth — unless he’s deceiving you?”
“But —”
She withdrew her hand. “And to think I was considering sharing genes with you!”
“Don’t be like that, Kerth.”
“Promise?” she asked.
“All right,” he said miserably.
She settled back in her seat. “Let’s have another drink before we go home,” she said. “See if you can catch their eye.”
Voth glided out of his private chamber and headed across the atrium toward the elevators. He paused when he saw the reading light in the human end of the spectrum shining in Bram’s alcove. With a corkscrew swirl of his upper structure, he reversed polarity and retraced his steps.
“You work late, Bram, my child,” he said. “Everyone else has gone.”
Bram looked up at the sound of the words. Voth’s voice was becoming deeper; it was almost as deep as a female’s now. The other Nar tiptoed around him with exaggerated deference these days.
“I … I’m just catching up on a few odds and ends,” Bram said.
He had been within a hairbreadth of getting up and leaving when Voth had finally decided to call it a day. It had seemed almost providential to Bram that Voth had picked this particular night to linger; Bram had been almost grateful to have an excuse to change his mind.
“Are you having difficulties?” the old decapod asked. “I can stay to help.”
“N-no, there aren’t any particular problems. I just want to clear up some work.”
“Your contribution to the embryonic stem project is causing much favorable comment,” Voth said. “The work goes well in the biocrafting department. Soon, we believe, we will have some good news to pass along. I am proud of you, Bram.”
“Thank you,” Bram replied, feeling worse than ever.
“But you ought not to work so hard. You should be at home to give time to the young woman you contemplate pairing with.”
How had Voth known that? Of course! The gene coop would have requested records from the Nar reproductive monitors, and Voth — as preoccupied as he was with the approaching change in his own life — still took the trouble to keep up with the lives of his human foster children.
“I won’t stay long,” Bram said wretchedly.
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Chapter 6
Bram lay spread-eagled across the prickly surface of the pentacle, calling up demons.
He might have thought of it that way if he’d been familiar with the old superstitions, because the data he’d summoned gave off a definite spirit of evil. Evil was the only way to describe the overtones of revulsion, horror, and fear that crawled through the factual coordinates of the touchdocuments.
There was no such thing as neutral data to the Nar. A human being might have written down these documents in the impersonal medium of words and numbers, keeping his feelings to himself. But the Nar who long ago had committed the information to machine memory had written with his living body. And now the machine was reproducing every ripple, every tremble of vibrissae, every chemical nuance, at an information rate that no human brain could absorb even if the connections had been there.
Bram pressed his cheek harder against the palpitating sheet of artificial villi, trying desperately to extract sense out of it all. A scratchy many-legged shape — the ghost of a visual image? — scuttled past his face and disappeared into the broader surface that his body couldn’t cover, leaving little multiplying echoes of itself in the other four points of the star under his forearms and naked thighs. Sweat trickled off Bram’s body, confusing the chemical cues, but a faint acrid whiff traveling past his nostrils made him press his tongue flat against the surface at that spot. He knew he risked being poisoned by Nar proteins if he used his tongue and lips too much, but sometimes a human could pick up more details that way than with less sensitive parts of the body.
At last he rolled off the machine, exhausted. He sat on the floor with his back against the pedestal, resting until his strength came back. He’d been on the body reader for more than two hours by then. He’d had to run it at slow speed, repeating sections over and over again, to riffle through what a Nar might have covered in five or ten minutes.
Was this whole area of information under interdiction?
Bram thought it over. He didn’t think so. Nothing was specifically forbidden, or he wouldn’t have been able to delve farther into layer after layer of the material. But there was something about this area that made the Nar shy away from it. Out of distaste. Out of fear. Out of whatever negative emotions whose blurred phantoms had lapped at him these past two hours.
But, naturally, any human attempting to enter this system through the crude interface program would run up against a confused and ambiguous interpretation of the Nar warning flags: “Stay away.” “Caution.” “Dead end.” “Unclean.” “Proceed at your own risk.” “Adults only.” The “records not available” borderline he’d skirted previously was one of those ambiguities. What it meant was that you pushed your way into this area while figuratively holding your nose.
But Bram had learned one thing while racked on the star-shaped machine — there were visual records associated with this file. And he thought he knew how to get at them.
He put his clothes back on. From somewhere within the great hollow structure he heard the collective patter of Nar footsteps reverberating through the central shaft and then the whir of a descending elevator, but the wing he was in was silent. He felt a stab of self-reproach as he let himself through the oval opening to Voth’s sanctum and reminded himself of what Kerthin had pointed out — that it was not as if he were doing something to hurt Voth. It was not even as if he were doing anything wrong. He used Voth’s vidlink and other peripherals all the time, with invitation and without. He had always felt free to use Voth’s private files whether or not Voth was there, and Voth had encouraged him.
Why, then, should he feel guilty now?
There was a one-tentacle touch pad mounted on a swinging bracket over Voth’s desk — a narrow triangle about three feet long. It served both as an input device and a small-screen tactile reader. It was a good enough computer link for all practical purposes; the Great Language was not petal-specific but was dispersed through all five points to add up to optimum sharpness and clarity, and if need be a one-tentacle reader could be scrolled to build up a five-point impression one point at a time.
The vidscreen was a concave curve with about ninety degrees of arc — adapted to the triple-perspective vision of a Nar using three of its five evenly spaced eyes. But Bram was used to such screens and had long ago found that binocular vision was no obstacle once the initial feeling of disorientation had passed.
He lowered the triangular plate face down on its bracket and inserted his bare forearms beneath it, elbows and wrists pressed together to give him the maximum continuous surface for feedback. His fingertips danced with practiced agility across the input wedge at the tip, smoothing down areas of cilia in complex, shifting patterns and teasing other areas upright. Human fingers were clumsy but good enough to call up menus and submenus and respond to them with yeses and nos and supplemental queries — rather as if he were using his elbows and knees to punch in a few basic routines on a human-style keyboard.
Colors swirled across the curved screen, and images began to take shape. With a thrill, Bram recognized the characteristic loop of a terrestrial DNA strand, enormously magnified.
A moment later he had lost it. Abstract representations of molecules, brightly colored, streamed past at high speed. Bram r
ecognized protein and lipid structures. After another ten minutes of tickling the touch pad, he got more microphotography showing lipids forming a membrane that enclosed DNA and the dark specks of proteins that had to be primitive enzymes.
A simple protocell was being assembled before his eyes. In due course, the protocell divided, then divided again. A viable life form had been created.
He knew he was on the right track then. Protocells like this had no utility except as student exercises. The file he had tapped was very dusty indeed.
For the next two hours, while his arms and shoulders screamed in protest at their cramped position, he browsed through the records, watching as the Nar molecular biologists, lifetimes ago, learned how the terrestrial-style information molecules, enzymes, and lipids worked together to make living organisms. They were practicing for the reinvention of man.
It was strange to think of a young Voth, a Voth without an honorific in his name, as one of those researchers. Long as was the Nar life span, there couldn’t be many survivors of those original teams. At what point had Voth split away to follow other byroads, eventually to found the touch group that had given him his present eminence, while newer teams sprang up and fused and split and recombined to take up the ever-multiplying branches of research? There was a biological treasure trove to explore — a wealth of possibilities that had transformed Nar civilization. They were in no hurry to get to man. The Nar sense of time, with its enormous scale, was not conducive to urgency. Things could be put down, laid aside. Everything was always there, spread out in eternity, to be taken up again by one’s future self or by the future self of some touch brother’s spawn, nearing sentience and ready to be adopted into the touch group.
Bram got up, stretched, and felt his joints crack. Outside, the city was sleeping. Through the clear elastic window, the sprawling lacelike patterns of boulevards, plazas, and junctions glowed with the pale blue biolight of the wee hours. A single strand of bubble cars crept through the black sky, carrying late commuters. A preoccupied snuffling and scraping from somewhere below told where a street-cleaning behemoth was pulling its flat bulk along the avenue. In the human quarter, which was visible as a ragged patch of brightness in the distance, even the most tenacious reveler would long since have staggered home by now.
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