Hogard, the hairy librarian, was becoming inconveniently curious about Bram’s nighttime researches. Bram fobbed him off with snippets of incidental material that kept him busy collating and cataloging. Once Hogard had buttonholed him and asked, “Did you ever turn up anything further on those egg genes, the ones where the historical references just petered out?”
“No,” Bram had answered, startled and wary. “Why do you ask?”
Hogard had nodded in the direction of the sallow man from the Ascendist meeting, who was fiddling with one of the reading machines. “Waller over there asked me what you were up to nights. Said he’d be interested in being kept informed.”
“Waller?”
Hogard’s curly eyebrows had gone up in surprise.
“Don’t you know him?”
“No.”
“That’s funny, he seemed to know you. I got the impression you had friends in common.”
“Who is he? Does he work at the biocenter?”
“Him? Naw. He’s a clerk over at the laser comm center. Routes commercial traffic and separates out the human messages for decoding and forwarding. He’s a human history nut, though — spends half his life at the annex here poring over The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, the sayings of Mao, the entries on Napoleon and Alexander the Great — things like that. Been a help to me, though. He gets me printouts of the new literary works coming from Juxt One and Next so I can enter them here. I enter ’em, but I can’t say I understand some of ’em — like this play, The Interchangeable Man, where all the characters wear masks and the hero begs a tribunal called the ‘control-chorus’ to execute him for what he calls deviation. But I guess you can’t argue with art.”
“You told him about the uncataloged data?”
“Sure, him being interested in history and like that. He says he can’t wait till it gets straightened out.”
Waller had glanced up and seen them looking in his direction, but instead of responding to Hogard’s offhand wave, he had ducked his head and pretended not to notice it. A few minutes later he had switched off his reading machine and, eyes down, left.
Bram had not returned to the library annex since then, but out of curiosity he had gone back to the drink shop in whose back room the Ascendist meeting had been held. He had lingered over a cold toddy and then, on the pretext of looking for the cloaca, peeped into the meeting room. The rows of seats were gone, there was no sign of a rostrum or political banners, and the lounges and game tables had been restored to their places. Two men playing a game with pasteboards seemed not at all familiar.
On this night, some days after his conversation with Hogard, Bram had returned home to find Kerthin away, as she was so often. Half an egg, left over from supper the night before, was in the food locker. He cut off a slice and fixed himself a light repast of yolkballs and cold bean-fry. He had just finished eating and was settling down to work preparing a batch of ribosomes for the protein synthesizer when the door rattle gave an ugly rasp.
He got up to answer, thinking that if Kerthin had decided to spend the evening at home, after all, he would quit work. He could put on some music, make drinks.
The door rattle made another impatient noise. “I’m coming,” Bram called. He opened the oval port and saw Pite standing there with two bulky shadows behind him.
“Hello, Brammo,” Pite said softly.
“What do you want?” Bram said, not bothering to conceal his distaste. “Kerthin’s not here.”
“We didn’t come to see Kerthin, Brammo,” Pite said. “It’s you we want to talk to.”
Before Bram could do anything about it, Pite pushed his way into the chamber, followed by his two hulking friends. All three were wearing gray monos with the sleeves cut off; it seemed to be an unofficial uniform for Pite’s faction. Bram recognized Fraz: red-faced and scraggly-bearded. The other intruder was equally large and muscular, with a broken nose and a bristly head of hair that had been trimmed close enough to show the bumpy contours of his skull.
Fraz clumped past Bram without looking at him and stuck his head and wide shoulders into the little work-chamber. “Hey, Pite!” he yelled. “Come take a look at this stuff.”
Pite stayed where he was, grinning at Bram. “What about it, Brammo? Doing a little private research that the decaboos don’t know about?”
“None of your business,” Bram said. “Now get out of here.”
“Is that any way to talk to a gene brother?” Pite said. “Be nice, Brammo.”
Fraz was rummaging through a basket of Bram’s printouts. He lost interest in them and picked up one of the clay substrates lying next to the protein synthesizer.
“Leave that alone,” Bram said sharply. He started toward the alcove, and the fellow with the close-clipped hair blocked his path. Bram tried to go around him, and a set of thick fingers wrapped themselves around his upper arm.
“Let go of me,” he said.
The grip on his arm only tightened, but Pite said lazily, “Let the man go, Spak. We’re all friends here. Fraz, don’t touch anything. We wouldn’t want to disturb Brammo’s work, would we?”
“Sure, Pite,” Fraz said, replacing the little tablet. “I didn’t hurt anything.”
Bram, with a glare, moved back the things Fraz had disarranged and pushed the workbench against the wall. “Why are you here?” he said to Pite.
“It’s like this, Brammo. Time’s running out, and like Penser says, knowledge is power. We want to make sure that our gene brothers who work with the decaboos aren’t holding out on us.”
“There’s nothing I do here or at my job that would be of any interest to you,” Bram said.
“That’s not what we hear, Brammo,” Pite said softly. “We hear you’re sticking your nose into a restricted area. We think you’ve come up with something that could give the human race leverage against the Nar. Biological leverage or propaganda leverage. We don’t care which.”
“Who told you that?” Bram said. “Waller?”
“Waller?” Fraz said innocently. “We don’t know any Waller. Do we know a Waller, Spak?”
“Shut up, Fraz,” Pite said. “The point is, Brammo, if you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
“I’m not against anybody,” Bram said. “I just want to be left alone to do my work.”
“That’s not possible anymore,” Pite said with a half smile. “When the struggle comes to a head, very soon now, it’ll be too late to choose sides.”
“There’s no struggle. It’s all in your imagination.”
“You see, Brammo,” Pite said, ignoring the interruption, “we’re making our lists now. We expect everybody who’s fit to be called a human being to do his part. Especially people like you, who work for the yellowlegs and who’re in a position to keep us informed about what they’re up to.” His lips stretched humorlessly within their fringe of uncombed blond beard. “So do yourself a favor, gene brother, and tell your friends all about it right now. What is this secret from the heritage of man that the yellowlegs are holding back from us? And what does all this scrambling around you’ve been doing lately have to do with it? It has something to do with the origin of eggs, doesn’t it? Where does this dangerous life form come into the picture? Are they dragon eggs?”
Bram was shocked at the extent of Pite’s information. Garbled though it was, it was uncomfortably close to the truth.
“How about it, Brammo?”
They were all looking at him. The fellow with the broken nose and the bumpy skull, Spak, edged a step closer, his oversize arm muscles working like independent creatures, and glanced toward Pite as if waiting for a signal.
Bram drew a deep breath. Keeping his mouth shut wouldn’t solve the problem now. He had to throw Pite off the trail — concoct some kind of story that would allay Pite’s suspicions. And he didn’t dare stray too far from the facts; he had no idea how much Pite knew or might find out.
Later, he could face the question of where Pite had heard about “dragons.” Neither Waller nor H
ogard could have told him. Kerthin was the only person Bram had confided in. But there was no time to think about that now.
“No, they’re not dragon eggs,” Bram said. “But they contain a few altered genes from — from the dangerous life form you referred to. All the genes do is keep an egg growing without differentiating, to make it suitable as a food source. A complete genome of the — the other organism doesn’t exist.”
“Pity,” Pite said. “Could you use the genes you have to construct a chimeric analog of one of these flying dragons?”
Bram skipped a breath. Pite was not as stupid as he had believed.
“Dragonfly,” he said automatically. “No, it’s not the kind of job that could be done with the resources available to humans, like backtracking potato genes to make a simple vegetable organism like the tomato. And it’s certainly not anything one man could tackle with the equipment I have in the other room. If it could be done at all, it would need all the resources of the biocenter and dozens of Nar specialists.”
Pite nodded as if he had heard it before. “Then what is it, exactly, that you’re up to, Brammo, that you’re being so cagy about?”
“How much do you understand about genetic engineering?”
“Try me.”
Bram made himself look embarrassed, reluctant. “You see, Pite, if I could somehow neutralize the right gene or genes suppressing the embryonic development of the egg, than maybe I could make the yolk give rise to some kind of structured multicellular tissue. Not the original egg creature itself — the egg’s been altered too much for that — but mesoderm tissue in the form of fibrous protein. It ought to be similar to spun bacterial protein or textured protein made from soybeans. If I could do that, it would be the greatest bioengineering achievement by a human being since Willum-frth-willum’s work with the nightshade family. But the Nar wouldn’t like it. It wouldn’t involve the exploitation of a living animal as a food source, but it might come close enough to their definition to offend their sense of values.” He shrugged. “Once it was done, of course, they’d have to accept it.”
Pite stared at him for a moment, then gave a single harsh bark of laughter. “You’re after glory, then, pure and simple? Do the yellowlegs suspect you?”
“No.”
Pite clapped him on the shoulder. “Go to it, Brammo. I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you. But keep us informed.”
Bram nodded.
Pite gathered his two henchmen around him and headed for the door. He paused before leaving to give Bram a penetrating stare. “Just don’t get tricky and try to hold anything back, gene brother,” he said. “Withholding vital information about the Nar is treason. And we know how to take care of traitors.”
Kerthin arrived shortly afterward, almost as if she had been waiting for Pite and his companions to leave. She chattered on about sculpture and her adventures of the day, but she didn’t seem able to meet Bram’s eyes.
“I bumped into Hok-kara — you know, my old teacher, I’ve mentioned him before — and we went back to his studio. He has a new protégée he wanted me to meet, a girl named Ele, and he showed me some of her work, done in resins, very nice. Anyway, there’s exciting news. A starship’s arrived from Juxt One — it’s been on its way for seven years, and no one’s paid much attention to the cargo manifest until now, of course, and it’s brought a representative selection of the new sculpture for exhibition. Not holos or laser-pointed reproductions, but the actual pieces themselves. In stone, wood, polymers. And metal casting — they’re way ahead of us there on Juxt One — they’ve rediscovered some of the old methods. They’re parking the tree now to refurbish it for the return trip, and they’ll be shuttling the pieces down starting in a day or so. I’ll be getting a first look at them through Hok-kara, and I may be asked to help prepare them for exhibition, so I’m going to be very busy.”
After she ran down, Bram said: “Your friend Pite dropped by, with Fraz and another fellow. He seemed to know all about dragonflies.”
“Oh?” Kerthin said vaguely. “Too bad I missed him.”
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Chapter 10
The tree was a silver daystar on the horizon. Bram watched as it crawled up the sky, slowly overtaking its bright twin. It was easy to tell which of the two was the newly arrived starship. It was the one that waxed and waned. It still hadn’t quite damped out all its tumble.
As they climbed, the living stars grew brighter, their reflective undersides catching more light from the late afternoon sun. There was a moment when they seemed to pause and almost touch — an illusion, Bram knew, since their orbits had to be hundreds of miles apart — then they began to separate again.
It was a magnificent sight. There were swarms of the great trees in higher orbit, of course, but none could match these two in brilliance. At the moment they were the only two starships in low orbit — the new arrival to discharge cargo and passengers, the outbound leviathan to complete its refitting and final loading.
Bram kept watching through the elastic window until the glinting motes passed from sight overhead; he used a hand to stretch the clear membrane outward for a final neck-craning glimpse. When he could see no more, he let the window snap back and turned reluctantly back to his desk. Voth was standing there with a sheaf of holos.
“You have friends aboard, do you not?” the elderly decapod inquired solicitously.
He was wearing a skirt now for decency’s sake, a loose wrapper that concealed the dark inflamed tissue rimming his lower petals. Above the waistband, the lower set of eyes — the lensless ones that sent biorhythm signals to the structures that corresponded to the pineal gland in the human midbrain — had gone milky, signifying a new stage of endocrine changes.
“Yes,” Bram said. “They invited me for a visit when the colonists first began to settle in.”
“They will be leaving soon. The tree’s ecology has been certified for extended travel. I am to be a member of the commission making the final inspection. Bram, you should take the opportunity soon to say a last farewell.”
Marg and Orris were, in fact, due to make planetfall in a day or two for a last fling and for Marg’s implantation. The tree-to-surface traffic was picking up considerably as sailing time grew near. Bram had hoped to ask them over with a few friends, but Kerthin was being embarrassingly ungracious about the whole thing, and Bram had just about resigned himself to catching the two of them at the round of goodspeed parties the Quarter would be throwing for embarkees.
“Thank you, Voth, I shall,” he said.
Voth held out the sheaf of holos. “You may find these of some use. They are early records of some of the beginning investigations of my touch group into the precursor heterochronic mechanisms — from before those lines of research were abandoned. I had almost forgotten they existed.” He hesitated, his tentacles delicately weaving. “I have been cleaning out my files and … getting things in order.”
Bram took the documents. They were stiff with age and moldy around the edges, but that wouldn’t affect the readouts. “You are kind, Voth,” he said.
“There are many false starts, many failed lines of inquiry. But perhaps you might notice something which we did not.” A tentacle, feeling feverish, descended on Bram’s shoulder. “There is no one I would rather let have them than you, Bram of my center.”
The Small Language sobriquet could not really be translated, but Bram felt the warm lapping contractions on his shoulder. He was profoundly moved by the gift. Voth must have some inkling of what he was up to by now, and the holos were a reticent form of encouragement.
Bram, ashamed of himself, resolved to bring what he had found to Voth, get it all into the open, as soon as he had more to go on.
Voth gave his shoulder a final squeeze and left. Bram had no taste at the moment for working with the holos. He shoved them into a desk iris and brooded, staring out the window, for a while.
Finally he stood up and took his overgarment from the hook. He would explode if he
stayed here any longer. He decided to go to the spaceport and see the excitement. Kerthin had said something about being there this afternoon for the arrival of the first crated batch of human-made sculpture from Juxt One. Perhaps he would see her there and have it out with her about Pite.
Five or six shuttles from various parts of the tree had landed already that afternoon. From his vantage point in the observation pinnacle atop the port terminal, Bram could see them floating lazily in the artificial lagoons adjoining the landing channel — flat, sleek, finned shapes that resembled some huge mythical sea creatures come to wallow in the shallows.
Passengers were still flowing in a bright yellow tide down the gangway of the nearest shuttle. A half mile farther on, an earlier arrival was being hauled by a gigantic crawler up a service ramp to an unloading area where a number of bowl-shaped cargo vehicles waited for it.
Beyond the lagoons, made tiny by distance, still another orbiter was being prepared for takeoff, standing upright on its flippers next to a service tower. The two matching curvilinear wedges that were the ascent stages stood a little apart, waiting for the orbiter to be fitted between them.
A lively traffic in transfer vehicles, both living and mechanical, poured in two contrary streams along the wide causeway that led from the terminal. Outside the terminal, as Bram had discovered when he arrived, was a traffic jam of beasts and machines ranging from one-passenger pentadactyls to multibuses hired by extended touch groups.
Bram savored the colorful spectacle. In spaceports all over the Father World, similar scenes were being enacted as the tree overhead poured out its worldlet’s hoard of wealth and living inhabitants. It would be at least a five of Tendays before the transfer was completed and the tree could be allowed to rise to a higher orbit, where it would be more comfortable.
Bram tore his gaze from the outside view and gave his attention to the sunlit interior of the cupola. The terminal was bustling with activity today, its floors and ramps a moving forest of undulating tentacles. Bram was not the only human there by any means. There were hundreds of them scattered through the observation cap — people waiting for the touchdown of a landing craft that would bring them a friend or close gene kin they had not seen for decades, merchants waiting for orders they had placed by laser more than seven years before.
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