Bram drew a breath. “There are other terrestrial life forms on the shelf, aren’t there, Voth?”
He did not use the word “suppressed,” but the nuance hung between them.
Voth gave a little contraction of embarrassment. “You know of the egg-creature called a hen. We believed it wrong to raise any organism possessing a nervous system for mass slaughter. But the hen genes live on in the self-dividing egg.”
“And there were others, too, weren’t there?” Bram persisted. Kerthin’s accusation about the steakbeast sprang into his mind.
Voth was definitely on the defensive. Bram could feel the searching patterns in the field of cilia. “We created a limited number of terrestrial animal forms before attempting man and allowed them to live out their lives after their usefulness was gone. They were mostly simple creatures — wormlike forms, a mollusk similar to the ancestor of our orthocone creature, a small amphibian called a frog. They were necessary steps in the learning sequence provided by man. But Bram, Original Man used mollusks for food. Would you and most of the human people you know, raised apart from that custom, do the same?”
“No, I guess not,” Bram admitted. He felt deflated. “Still,” he said wistfully, “I can’t help thinking about what a precious reserve of data remains locked up in the archives. Even the dragonfly nymph. Think of what you already got out of it before you slammed the door. The heterochronic egg. The work that’s going forward now on embryonic stem tissue in the poplar —”
“Nothing is lost, my Bram,” Voth said, hugging him. “Knowledge awaits, as it always has. All will be explored in the fullness of time. Research will continue. But under the provisions of the touch concordance. Under the scrutiny of our species. With safeguards.”
“I won’t be here to see it.”
“Nor shall I,” Voth said.
“You didn’t come home last night,” Kerthin said as Bram popped the door shut behind him.
She was kneeling in front of the stove, putting on a pot of brew. Her overcape was flung carelessly across Bram’s writing stand; she must just have come in herself. She twisted around to look at him questioningly, tossing back the thick rope of hair.
Bram sank wearily into a seating puff. His eyes were scratchy, and his limbs felt like lead. “Is there anything to drink?” he said.
She got up without a word and poured him a measure of ethyl, neat, over a scoop of slush from the cryobacterial coldbin. She handed it to him and waited while he took a thirsty sip.
“Well?” she said.
“I traced the file back,” he said. “It took me all night.”
“Was I right?”
“Kerthin, your steakbeast is just a fairy tale, but yes, there’s a certain amount of genetic information that isn’t generally available to researchers — human or Nar.”
“I knew it!” she said.
“You don’t understand, Kerth. There are no secrets. Not exactly. The whole Nar commonwealth is aware that sections of the great transmission have been put aside for the time being. For good reasons. Humane reasons. Reasons of safety. Eventually researchers will get around to reopening some of the material on a file-by-file basis, under proper supervision.”
“They know! They decide!” Kerthin’s voice dripped scorn.
“It’s a Nar world, Kerthin. They’re doing the best they can for us, by their own lights. But there are obstacles that nobody can do anything about. Like the human life span. Even with cloned transplants, even though the genes we carry were selected for longevity and good health, none of us can expect to live much beyond our allotted sevenscore and ten. There isn’t time for us to do things on the Nar scale. Like my little project running up against the nymph cross-file. If you ask me, the Nar’ve been low-key about its existence out of simple tact.”
“The nymph file?” Kerthin’s gray eyes became alert.
Bram explained about the dragonfly nymph and about the belated warning the long-ago humans had tagged it with. “Voth was perfectly right about it,” he finished. “It might have been a danger to the Father World’s ecology. And when you come right down to it, we’re a part of that ecology too, in our little artificial bubble.”
“You went to Voth-shr-voth about it?” she asked incredulously.
“What’s wrong with that? I told you Voth was perfectly open with me.”
“How could you do something that stupid? After I explained everything to you. You were supposed to let him go on thinking he was flimflamming you. People like you are a threat to the movement. At this stage we’re still trying to lull the Nar. We don’t want them to suspect the extent of human dissatisfaction.”
“There isn’t any dissatisfaction. Except for a handful of people like your friend Pite. And this Penser. Most of the people I know are happy just to go on living their lives.”
“I was right about man’s heritage being suppressed, though, wasn’t I? You said as much.”
“Kerthin, let’s not go through all that again.”
“Never mind.” She bit her lip, thinking. “This dragon thing. Can you find out more about it?”
“Of course. I can look through any file I want to, and Voth will help me get into it. In fact, I plan to tell him I intend to go on reading a little further. I just can’t work with the genetic material without a license, that’s all. No one can, not even Voth himself. Whoever tried would need the resources of the whole biocenter, anyway.”
“Hmmm.” She pondered further, “This
“Kerthin! I thought you gave all that up!”
“I told you you didn’t have to go to any more meetings. But who can tell when I might happen to run into Pite or one of the others again?”
“All he can do is get you into trouble.”
She laughed. “Did you hear what he said to the proctors? He gave them better than he got. They didn’t know what to do with him. They threatened to lock him up for a week. He said he’d welcome it. In the end they let him go. He refused even to acknowledge their warning.”
“Kerthin, I don’t want you mentioning what I told you to Pite.”
“Oh, don’t be tiresome.”
“I mean it.”
She tossed her head. “Oh, all right, if it means so much to you.”
“I don’t want you telling anybody!”
“I said I wouldn’t.” She turned away from him. “There are some messages on the screen for you.”
Bram went to the viewer and ran his eyes down the message list. Nothing required immediate reply. He opened a few electronic envelopes at random.
“Hey, Kerthin, how about this? There’s an invitation from Orris and Marg. They’re already aboard their tree. It’s in a parking orbit. All the human passengers are throwing a farewell party. Arrangements have been made with the Nar to lift the guests.”
“I thought they weren’t sailing for a couple of months.”
“They aren’t. They’re living aboard while the tree’s being outfitted. It’s never carried humans before. The purser wants to make sure the ecology of their branch is adjusted properly, and it’ll give them a chance to settle in. Give everybody a chance for a last-minute change of mind, too!”
He looked at her hopefully. He supposed he could go alone if he had to, but he didn’t relish the thought.
“I’d love to go.”
“Hey, that’s great.” He gave her close scrutiny, but she seemed genuinely enthusiastic. “I thought you didn’t care for them. Dull, you said. Stuffy.”
“We’ll never have to see them again, will we? Besides, I’ve never been in orbit.”
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Chapter 7
The orbital ferry was a sandwich of three flattened, sleek craft standing on their flipperlike tails, wrapped in a close embrace that turned them into a single deltoid shape. It was only a shiny toy in the distance, unti
l one’s eye took in the mitelike crowd swarming about its base and adjusted for scale.
“Is that what we’re riding in?” Kerthin asked doubtfully. Her fingernails dug into the meat of Bram’s arm.
“The ferry’s the one in the middle of the stack,” Bram said. “The two outer vehicles peel off and land again after they’ve finished giving us a boost.”
“Let’s take the next one,” she said with a shiver. “We can go back inside the terminal and have a drink while we’re waiting.”
“We’re already booked,” Bram said firmly. “Come on, it’s perfectly safe for humans. Hundreds of people get boosted into space every year.”
“They made that thing for themselves,” she pointed out. “They fly it, they ride in it. And they don’t have any bones to get broken. And they’re not as fussy about breathing as we are. And they don’t even care if they die.”
Kerthin was at her most petulant. But behind the petulance was a genuine anxiety that surprised Bram. He had never known Kerthin to be at a loss before. There were people who were afraid of flying, he knew, people who were afraid even to step into a bubble car, but he would not have placed Kerthin among them. It made him feel responsible and protective.
“There’s every provision for human beings,” he soothed her. “Special safety couches. Everything. Even the amenities, like the little lounge in the terminal. They take good care of us.”
“How do you know?”
“I looked into it. They even spend extra fuel to boost at low g for us.”
“I’d still like to have a drink first,” she grumbled.
“There’ll be plenty to drink up there. Half the crowd’ll have to be poured back into the ferry, I’ll bet.” He smiled reassuringly. “And by the way, it’s not true that the Nar don’t care about dying. They care as much as we do. Until the end, when they’re through with life.”
A spread Nar with one of its arms in a computer sleeve stood in their path.
“May this one know your names, brother persons,” it said in fair Chin-pin-yin except for the gender confusion.
Bram told it, and it waved them on after presumably checking them off through its portable relay. There were no seat tokens — not even the simple plastic counters sometimes used to keep high-density systems like the bubble cars flowing smoothly during rush hours. The Nar did everything on the honor system.
“Is that all there is to it?” Kerthin exclaimed. “Anybody could have taken our places.”
“Who’d do a thing like that?” Bram asked.
“How do I know?” she said peevishly. She turned half away. “Somebody who wanted a free trip into orbit so they could get a close-up look at a tree.”
Bram laughed. “I don’t think that anybody who wanted to crash the farewell party would have to go to lengths like that. I don’t imagine the guest list was checked too carefully. The only reason they took our names here was to give the flight crew a little advance notice that our seats would be occupied on this lift.”
As if to punctuate his words, a great shuddering roar filled the air as some ferry farther down the line took off. Bram looked up and saw a column of yellow fire paint itself across the clear violet sky. He couldn’t see the craft itself, only its blinding tail.
“There goes the first section,” he yelled against the deafening rumble in the sky. “We’re probably next.”
Kerthin clutched at his arm. Her face had gone pale.
“Easy,” he said. “You don’t have to take this ride if you don’t want to. We can still turn back.”
“No.” she said. “I’m going.”
She released his arm. Her lips were compressed with determination. She gave him a forced smile and moved quickly ahead of him toward the waiting jitney. It was an electric vehicle, not one of the big living walkers the Nar usually used for short and intermediate distances. Bram wondered if that was in deference to human sensibilities — a lot of people were made nervous by tons of living flesh that they unreasonably imagined might get out of control — or if mechanical systems were the norm here in this place where enormous energies were dispensed as a matter of course.
He got his answer when they boarded. Except for the three or four Nar sprawled out on splayed bases in the cleared center of the vehicle, all of the passengers were human, sitting around the perimeter on molded benches that had been temporarily glued to the floor alongside what had been the usual pedestal mounts. Thirty or forty people were already in place, dressed in festive multicolored clothes. A couple of preliminary parties were in progress among people who had brought jugs along, and a number of people had used their baggage allowances to take what looked like a variety of housewarming gifts scattered at their feet.
“Hi, over here!”
Bram waved back at the pair who had spotted him and pushed his way through with Kerthin to the empty seats.
“Kerthin, this is Trist and Nen,” Bram said. He didn’t know them very well; Trist had been one of the fellows at the bachelor lodge when he had been staying there, and he had met Nen several times when she had been Trist’s guest at one of the Tenday breakfasts or evening shindys.
“I know,” Kerthin said shortly.
“Kerthin and I were in the same division at middle school,” Nen explained with a quick smile. She was a trim, rangy girl, not quite as tall as Kerthin, with pleasant, freckle-dusted features. “I haven’t seen you for pentayears. Are you still keeping up with your sculpture?”
“I don’t have time for that anymore.”
“I was going to be the world’s greatest actress,” Nen said with a laugh. “I’m working as a med tech now. At the Compound infirmary.” She shrugged. “It’s useful work, and it’s interesting. Better than hanging around on allowance, anyway.”
“She’s too modest,” Trist said. “She practically runs the place.”
“What are you doing these days?” Bram asked.
“I’m in the physics group,” Trist said. “With our old friend Smeth.”
“How is he?”
“You’ll see him at the shindy. Grown oracular beyond his years. He’s trying to calcify himself into a monument, and you know, given a few more feathers in his cap and a lot more gray hairs, he might just do it.”
“He’s doing well, then?”
“He has a first-rate mind for plasma physics, you have to hand him that.”
“What’s happening in your project lately, anyway?”
“I’ll let Smeth tell you that. And tell you and tell you and tell you. If you’re unwary enough to get collared by him, that is. No shoptalk right now. We’re here to have fun.” He slipped an arm around Nen and gave her a fond squeeze.
“Who do you know in the tree?” Bram asked.
“One of the fellows in our team decided to emigrate. Giving up the rigors of intellectual pursuit and signing on for the bucolic life.”
“Juxt One is hardly a frontier society.”
“No … they’ve had several centuries to become civilized. But there’s a lot more openings for humans lately.”
“We brought Lilla and Jao a little going-away present,” Nen said, partially unfolding the wrappings around a cylindrical object and unfurling a couple of feet of it. “It’s a wall hanging to brighten up their quarters during the trip. We got it from an art shop in the new extension. It’s painted with hibernating pigment fungi. Each layer is activated by the decay products of the previous layer so that over a period of several years you get eight different designs. All of them planetary scenes to remind them of home.”
“That way there’s a new picture before you have time to get tired of the old one,” Trist offered. “If the humidity in the tree isn’t too different from what the art shop calculated, then the last design shouldn’t appear till they reach their destination. Keep ’em from getting bored on the trip.”
“I’m afraid we didn’t think of anything as imaginative as that for Orris and Marg,” Bram said. “Just a candy plant.”
Kerthin was carrying the cove
red pot in her holdall. Bram glanced her way, expecting her to show it, but she was staring glumly out the viewdome, paying little attention to the conversation.
“If I know Orris, though,” Bram said hastily, “he’ll tap it for the ethyl.”
They laughed politely, and then a few last-minute passengers came aboard and the jitney started up with a mild hum of electronics.
The trip into orbit was uneventful, made up of bland routines designed to tell passengers that it was no more exciting than being reeled across an ocean in a cable pod. Trist, whose job had taken him to Lowstation before, actually napped. But to Bram, who had never been in space, every moment was an adventure.
First he was led to a yielding nest that accepted his contours and, once a little shifting and wriggling had provided an average, jelled into shape. In the nest beside him, Kerthin lay rigid. By craning his neck over the edge, Bram could look down at rank after rank of similar nests projecting like paddles from what would become the deck of the ferry during reentry but was now a sheer cliff of dizzying height, ascended in an openwork elevator cage. Transferring oneself from the cage to the couch was the tricky part for some humans; Kerthin had kept her eyes squeezed shut, but the Nar flight attendants had been very helpful. Bram supposed that all the nests swiveled to the horizontal when the craft changed attitude. The safety nets between the levels of nests — rigged, Bram was sure, to assuage human anxieties — would then become irrelevant curtains dividing the rows and probably would be drawn open.
The giant palm that pressed him into his nest during takeoff was gentler than he had expected. There was a moment of weightlessness after the outer craft separated — a restraining web kept him from floating away — then the ferry engines kicked in. He was lucky enough to have a window near his face, and he strained to catch sight of the leaflike boosters as they tumbled away and looped over for the long glide down.
Then, half an orbit later, the ferry caught up with its target, and Bram caught his first glimpse of Lowstation.
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