The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  Kerthin was nowhere in the throng. Bram tried to remember what her old sculpture teacher, Hok-kara, looked like.

  Finally he went to an information kiosk where two harried Nar were using all five abovedecks tentacles simultaneously to service all comers and stood in line to await his turn.

  The information clerk grasped Bram’s hand before he realized he was talking to a human. “What do you wish to know?” he boomed in the Small Language, focusing the apposite eye in the general direction of Bram’s armpit. He kept his tentacle pressed against Bram’s hand for the sake of politeness, though he might, with the split attention made possible by the Nar’s decentralized nervous systems, have used it to talk to a sixth customer.

  “Have passengers or cargo from the human bough landed yet?” Bram asked.

  “Lobe four,” the Nar replied. “A carrier is arriving now.”

  “Thank you,” Bram said.

  He hurried to the downbelt to beat the stampede that was going to develop as soon as the waiting crowd became aware of the arrival. The terminal had been grown in the shape of a single interior space, a haft mile high and a thousand feet across at the base, with a continuous spiral concourse winding from top to bottom along the conical wall. The concourse averaged a hundred feet across, with plenty of area for offices, shops, passenger lounges, and other facilities, and though there was no such thing as level floor anywhere, that didn’t bother the Nar. Bram paused at the railing and looked straight down the spiral to the terminal floor a haft mile below. He was too high to see the ground-level crowds as much more than patches of yellow dust motes, but he could discern the beginnings of movement toward the arrival lobes.

  Outside the observation cupola, a speck grew in the lavender sky and spectators crowded the view wall. Bram loitered, a hand poised on the rail, until the graceful deltoid form glided in over the channel waters and skimmed to a stop, its red-hot underbelly sending up a sizzle of steam. Before the ripples died down, Bram stepped onto the moving belt and let it carry him along its corkscrew path to ground level.

  By the time he got to lobe four, it was solid with humans and decapods converging on the reception area. Bram searched through the crush for Kerthin. He thought he caught a glimpse of her in the middle of the throng, but when he got to that spot, there was no sign of her.

  At that point the first wave of human travelers from Juxt One came through the gates with their hand luggage, and there was a surge to greet them. After some milling around, the place cleared out a bit, and Bram saw her standing with a small group of people.

  “Kerthin,” he cried, and started forward.

  Intent on the arrival gate, she didn’t hear him at first. She turned her head and spoke to the person next to her but broke off as she saw Bram heading toward her. The other person said something, then Kerthin nodded, and hurried to intercept Bram.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. She seemed nervous.

  “I didn’t feel like working. Where’s your teacher? Is he over there?”

  “No. He couldn’t come, after all. There was some mix-up about the pieces of sculpture. They won’t be coming down for a few more days. Those are just some people who came to meet the shuttle. I got to talking with them while we were waiting. Let’s go.”

  She was edging him toward the lobe exit. Bram took a few steps, then, stopped. “What’s the hurry? It isn’t every day a star tree arrives.”

  Another wave of star travelers was coming through the gates. The people in front were leading a pair of exotic pets that were attracting attention — artificial animals that obviously had been bred for conditions on Juxt One. Waist-high and covered with a fine silky floss, they were streamlined, saddle-shaped creatures whose incurvate edges terminated in ten slender legs that were plainly meant for running. A cluster of alert-looking eyes had migrated to what had become, unmistakably, a front end on the Terran plan.

  “Sand-runners,” Bram said. “I’ve seen pictures of them. Long-range errand beasts, but they race them, too. Some people turn them into house pets.”

  Kerthin was not very interested in the sand-runners. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  “Just a minute,” Bram said stubbornly.

  Another passenger had trailed in, unnoticed in the hubbub stirred by the sand-runners. He was a tall, thin man with a pale face and a smear of beard. He kept looking in both directions as he advanced, scanning the place. A group of people — Bram thought that one of them was the man Kerthin had been talking to — surrounded him and, with a minimum exchange of words, hustled him out of the lobe.

  Kerthin was staring, wide-eyed. When she saw Bram looking at her, she jerked her gaze away from the group. “Are you ready to leave yet?” she snapped.

  “Did you know that man?”

  “What man? What are you talking about?”

  Bram gave up. Outside the terminal he left Kerthin standing by the entrance while he went off to look for transportation. He was lucky enough to find a two-passenger jaunting beast outfitted for human riders with a pair of back-to-back chairs and foot rests slung across the creature’s hump.

  When Kerthin saw him leading the jaunting beast toward her, she said, “Oh, no, I’m not getting on that thing. Can’t you find something with wheels?”

  “This is all there is,” Bram said.

  Grumbling, she mounted the conveyance. “This is no way for a human being to travel. They don’t have any trouble hanging on.”

  “You can’t fall off. And it’s a fine way to see the scenery.”

  “I like to face forward,” she said. “Not sideways.”

  The ride home was a silent one, with Kerthin’s tense, rigid back pressed against his shoulder blades and her knuckles white on the gripping knobs. Rocked by the steady, loping motion, Bram let his mind stray back to the scene at the spaceport, when the tall, pale passenger from Juxt One had come through while everybody was being distracted by the sand-runners. Bram kept picturing the way a small group of waiting people had moved with disciplined teamwork to encircle the pale man and hurry him out of sight. Bram had seen their faces only fleetingly, but one of them, he was certain, had been Pite.

  “Are you working again tonight?” Kerthin said.

  “I’m afraid so,” Bram said. “I could —”

  “No, no,” she said hastily. “Do what you have to. I’m sure it’s very important.”

  “It’s repetitive,” he said. “And boring.” He made a show of setting out gels and filters and arranging printouts in neat stacks.

  She bent over and kissed him lightly. “Don’t wait up for me,” she said. “I may be late.”

  He sat back, comfortably full of the meal that she had taken pains to prepare. His relationship with Kerthin seemed to have taken a new turn since the visit from Pite. She was solicitous of his comfort, took care not to ruffle his feelings, and was all sweetness and light. And, he noted wryly, she was paying him the courtesy of providing more plausibility for her mysterious excursions.

  “What is it?” he asked. “More sculpture?”

  “It’s a group work. Hok-kara says that collective art is the only kind that makes sense, because it reflects the shared aspirations of humanity. They’re doing some very exciting things in ensemble sculpture on Juxt One. Hok-kara’s coordinating the creative merger here, and he gave me a chance to be a part of it.”

  Kerthin’s old sculpture tools had suddenly appeared again, and an armature partially covered with clay now stood on a modeling stand in the center of the living chamber. She made a show of working on it every once in a while, but it had been there for several days now, and there was no progress that Bram could see.

  As soon as she left, he got up, put on his overgarment, and went out the door. He was not proud of himself for what he was doing, but he could see no other way.

  Kerthin’s tall, slim figure was ahead of him, already some distance down the thoroughfare. She was walking quickly, looking neither to right nor left. Bram hung back until she turned dow
n a side lane, then darted out of the doorway after her.

  The lane was narrow and cobbleshelled, the architecture a sprawling hodgepodge of styles with the newer square buildings of framed lumber or blocks of refractory materials beginning to crowd out the older organic dwellings. Shrill children dashed back and forth, playing their eternal reinvented games and trying to postpone bedtime. Older people sat in front of their doorways to digest their evening meals and watch the world go by. Bram spotted Kerthin’s swinging gait and hurried to keep her in sight, then ducked behind a databooth when she paused at the next bisection to look around.

  The street plan in this part of the quarter was a net of intersecting rings, and for a moment Bram thought she was going to follow the circular thoroughfare all the way around to its next recrossing, but she turned left, heading for the older part of town where she had taken him to the drink shop that first time for the Ascendist meeting.

  She didn’t lead him there. He followed her almost to the waterfront, to a dilapidated conchate structure that might once have been used as a warehouse. The evening, was well lit, with the lesser sun, now alone in the sky, casting strong shadows. Bram loitered in the groined intersection of two buildings, where a defective lightpole kept it dark. Kerthin climbed a loading ramp, took a quick look backward, and disappeared through the lip of the main opening.

  The building was inhabited; a pale yellow light showed through a blister that provided a skylight on the upper curve. Bram waited a few more minutes, then, feeling foolish, moved quickly toward the building and through the natural opening that had swallowed Kerthin up.

  About thirty feet inside the chasm of an entrance, a wail had once been constructed from the floor all the way up to the vaulted roof, wailing off the interior. There were a number of doors, each with its spiral staircase going up into the various recesses of the converted structure.

  He poked his head through each doorway in turn and got an impression of darkness, hollowness, and dead silence from all except one. He climbed the stairs past three deserted landings in a gloom relieved only by the dirty half-light leaking through a semitransparent blister high overhead.

  At the fourth landing he heard muffled voices coming through a closed door. Cautiously he mounted the last few steps and listened. Several people seemed to be talking at once. None of the voices was Kerthin’s. They ran on, interrupting each other, until another voice, quiet and firm, cut them off. There was a pregnant pause, then the quiet voice continued in the calm, measured tones of authority.

  Bram crept quietly to the threshold and strained to make out the words, but he couldn’t catch enough of them to make sense.

  “… need organization … not satisfied with what I saw … secrecy … but at some point, if we’re going to recruit successfully … have to let them in on it …”

  Bram was so engrossed that he almost failed to hear the footsteps coming up the stairs. Then somebody stumbled and cursed, and from one or two landings below Bram heard someone say, “I don’t like it, handing over the organization to him just like that. His methods are too extreme.”

  “You can’t make an omelet without whipping eggs, gene brother.”

  “I know, but if they find out …”

  Bram barely had time to scuttle out of sight. A doorpeg was by his hand; he pulled on it and stepped inside, closing the door after him.

  He was in a storage room lit faintly by a bowl of bio-lights that had been placed on a shelf and left to die. He held himself still and listened while the new arrivals — five or six of them by the sound of their footsteps — tapped at the door Bram had been eavesdropping at and were admitted after a gruff exchange.

  Bram looked around the storage room. The objects it normally held seemed to have been pushed against the far wall, carelessly enough so that some of them had toppled and lay on the floor. From his early association with Kerthin, Bram recognized the materials of sculpture: pieces of lumber, lumps of clay the size of his head or bigger, wire armatures, wax blanks, elastic molds.

  But the other items were a puzzlement. There were shelves of glass bottles with rags tied around them; a sniff told Bram they were filled with alcohol. There were jars of metallic powder. Wooden billets the size of a man’s forearm, which someone had taken the trouble to whittle down at one end to make a grip. Tools — too many of the same kind for anyone to have a use for them: Fifteen or twenty axes, a half dozen sledgehammers, agricultural implements in the form of poles with curved blades attached at one end.

  Bram was trying to puzzle it out when the door groaned and a pair of men in monos with the sleeves sawed off came into the room with another load of billhooks. They saw Bram and let the implements rattle to the floor. One of them had retained a hook. The other grabbed for one of the wooden billets piled at the entrance.

  “How’d you get in here?” the one with the club demanded.

  Bram could think of nothing to say. They grabbed him roughly and pushed him toward the door. “You’re coming with us.” The end of the club prodded him in the kidney.

  He let himself be herded. Voices stopped and faces swung toward him as he was given a final push into the room. “We found a spy in the armory,” the one with the billhook said.

  “Oh fine, that’s just great,” a disgusted voice said. “Now he’s seen Penser.”

  “Well, what were we supposed to —”

  “Oh, shut up, Chonny. You have the brains of a sweeperbeast!”

  Bram looked about with interest. He was in a huge, tall room: the one with the skylight he’d seen from outside. A draped bulk under the skylight, too big to be moved, was a piece of sculpture in the form of a reclining figure; Bram could make out the general form of a head and shoulders under the covering, and a gigantic unfinished bare foot stuck out at one end.

  About two dozen men and women were scattered in a loose arc across the uneven floor, standing, leaning, or sitting on whatever they could find. One of them was Kerthin; Bram saw her right away, bunched with a small group that included Pite, Fraz, and Eena. Pite raised his eyebrows in ironic salute. Bram smiled at Kerthin, but she flushed and didn’t try to speak to him.

  The gathering, whatever its purpose, was focused on the tall pale man Bram had seen at the spaceport. He was sitting at a small table, flanked by two men in short robes and tight legwear that Bram took to be Juxt One fashions.

  The pale man studied him with pursed lips. So this was Penser? Bram stared back openly. The splinter faction’s notorious leader was not what he had expected. Penser had a pasty, unhealthy face and a body that showed signs of flab under the drab gray garments he affected. The flesh around his eyes looked bruised: heavy lids and bluish pouches. But the eyes themselves were totally compelling. They burned with a dark intensity, an utter certainty. It was impossible not to be impressed by the man.

  Chonny, the one who had been reprimanded for stupidity, was whining a protest. “Well what about you, Treg? You were the one who said Penser’s name out loud. If the fat wasn’t out of the pan before, it is now.”

  Penser put a stop to it firmly. “That’s enough.” He returned his bruised gaze to Bram. “What is your name?” he asked.

  “They call me Bram.”

  “How did you get here?”

  Bram hesitated. Pite spoke out from across the room. “That’s easy. He followed Kerthin.” He looked Kerthin over coldly from top to bottom. “You were kind of careless, Kerth.”

  “Never mind that now,” Penser said. “Can he be trusted?”

  Pite sucked his cheeks in thoughtfully. “Brammo isn’t one of us,” he said. “On the other hand, he isn’t a member of the Accommodationist wing or some Doctrinalist soft-head, so maybe that’s a plus. He knows how to keep his mouth shut, all right. I tested him. Maybe he’s not committed, but he’s got the right number of legs. And he’s bonded to a member of the Cause. I don’t think he’s the type to go running to the council or to the yellowlegs.”

  Penser’s dark-pouched eyes measured Bram. “Pite says y
ou’re not a squealer,” he said. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” Bram said.

  One of Penser’s flanking confederates from Juxt One, a comfortable, well-fed man with red cheeks and an upward-curving gray beard, leaned over and whispered something in Penser’s ear.

  Penser listened, pinch marks forming beside his nose, then said, “I have decided.” He fastened his eyes on Bram again. “I’ve just been advised to have you locked up until it can be decided what to do with you. But I’ll take a chance on you for the time being. In view of what you have already seen, it cannot matter a great deal more if you stay.” His voice grew hard. “But you will stay. I cannot risk having you leave while this meeting is in progress. You will stay, and then you will leave with your friends. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  Penser made a cage out of his fingers and with a curious gesture raised it to his lips. “You are part of us now — Bram, is it? — like it or not. You will not betray my presence here to the Nar?”

  “No,” Bram said.

  He gave his promise without hesitation. Almost, he meant it. Something very peculiar was in the offing, and, Bram decided grimly, he had better go along with it until he found out more.

  Penser nodded. “I’ll accept that. Remember, you will be watched. And I can promise you that the consequences of treasonable behavior are not pleasant.”

  Bram made his way self-consciously to the part of the room where Kerthin sat with her friends. He could feel all the silent, appraising eyes on him. Somebody stepped into his path and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Congratulations, gene brother. I’m glad you decided to join us.”