The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  A colonist, half asleep, came to visit the latrine. He looked curiously at the loitering Bram, but he didn’t say anything. When he left, Bram peeked through the curtain again. The tunnel guard was still preoccupied with his female hanger-on, but he looked up briefly to give the departing colonist an indifferent glance. The interruption had probably been a help; the guard had seen someone leave the latrine, giving Bram more grace in case the guard was counting.

  Now the guard dragged the girl by the hand over to the other side of the tunnel mouth; he was going to pay a visit to his colleague. It was now or never. Bram stood up with the improvised spear in his hand. The biolight tube dipped quite low here, on its way to the reservoir that must be just on the other side of the chamber wall. The circulating pump that sent the living solution through the pipes would be close and strong; Bram could see the pulsating surges that made the light alternately blaze and fade.

  He could just reach the transparent pipe. No good trying to puncture it with the squared-off blade; he slashed and sawed with all his might. The tough chitinous material resisted, and if it had been granted days, it would have repaired the scratches. But at last Bram got a groove going, and he began to saw steadily without the blade slipping. It seemed to him that every eye must be on the waggling pole protruding above the screen, but he dared not stop to take a look.

  A few fiery droplets of cold light rained down on him, and with a savage thrust he pushed the knife all the way through, twisted, and pried the lesion wide open.

  The fluid with its glowing microscopic life spilled out, and the overhead pipes near the tunnel began to drain. The circulating pump worked vainly, forcing a stream of fluorescing solution through the severed end, to splash on the ground and collect in a pool.

  Another sleepy colonist came blundering through the partition at that moment. It couldn’t be helped. Bram pushed past him, almost bowling him over, and ran into the darkness with his spear.

  The biolights faded and died all through the dome. A garish flood of illumination seeped through the plastic partition, dazzling anyone who looked at it. Bram hoped all the guards would be looking in that direction, the light wiping out their night vision. The man he had knocked aside had somehow tangled himself in the plastic sheeting and was tottering around, pulling tarpaulins with him. The sleepers nearest the latrine were up, milling around and adding to the confusion.

  Dim shapes collided with Bram. Feet pounded past him. “Get him!” a hoarse voice shouted. The unfortunate man who had enmeshed himself in plastic and was blundering around at the focus of the spilled light was the object of attention.

  Whatever Penserites were among those who brushed past Bram in the dark must have assumed that, with his weapon, he was one of them. He slipped through the tunnel entrance, keeping close to the wall on the side opposite to where the guards had been chitchatting with their female friend. But by now, Bram reasoned, they would be converging on the center of the commotion, anyway.

  A thousand yards down the tunnel, he paused for breath. When he looked back, the tunnel mouth was a cold flicker of light from the spreading pool of spilled biofluid. That would grow dull and die soon. No one was coming after him. Any minute now someone would think of plugging up the cut pipe and turning on the artificial sunlight.

  Bram darted down the first side tunnel he came to. After traveling another hundred yards and going around a bend that cut off his line of sight, he felt safer.

  The tunnel didn’t seem to be in use, but it was being worked on. A large, multilegged construction machine whose forward end was an enormous auger was half embedded in an unfinished e×cavation in the wood, and there was some casual litter that had been left behind by the workmen. In a stroke of good fortune, Bram found several jugs of biolights that still had some life in them. He picked one up, peeled back enough of the hood to cast some light without giving him away, and moved on.

  He chose a branching passage that seemed to slope slightly upward. Since he didn’t know his way around the tree, it was the best course of action he could think of for the moment. If he kept climbing, he would eventually have to reach the Nar sector, closer to the center of spin. The problem was that it was miles and miles above his head. He’d never be able to reach it on foot — not in the time he had available. But there was no alternative. The tunnel moved laterally, too, and perhaps he might luck into some kind of transportation.

  The passage got steeper. He did not know how long he had been climbing, but his legs ached and his breath was short. He paused to rest and heard his pounding heart — and then he heard a sound in the tunnel behind him.

  He covered the jug of light and listened. The footsteps had stopped when he doused the light, and now they came forward again, cautiously. Whoever it was, he was feeling his way along in the dark and making better progress than Bram was.

  Bram stumbled along, not daring to use the light again. He kept close to the tunnel wall, feeling his way with one hand. After a while it came to him that he was betraying his progress as much by sound as he would have done by sight. He paused again and heard the footsteps gaining on him. There might be more than one; it was impossible to tell.

  He groped his way along the resinous wall for a few more feet, and his hand suddenly slipped off into nothingness. Another side passage. Or an alcove. It didn’t matter. He edged his way inside, careful to be quiet, and stopped a few steps from the entrance.

  If his pursuer was armed with one of the electrical devices, Bram would be finished at the first touch. Even someone with a club or a pole would have an edge over him; the Penserites were used to using such weapons, and he was not.

  Bram had his makeshift spear — a spear not meant for stabbing — but he didn’t know if he could bring himself to use it against another human being. He had never consciously tried to injure anyone before. The thought of using the blade against flesh revolted him. His best bet, he decided, was to wait until he heard the small sound that would mean that his pursuer had reached the side passage. There would be an indrawn breath as a groping hand encountered empty air. A small scuff or the sound of hesitation. Then Bram would snatch away the cover of the biolight jug and in that moment of surprise swing the haft of his spear. Perhaps he could knock the breath out of the other or knock aside whatever weapon he might be carrying.

  He put the jug down on the smooth floor and waited. After a while he heard labored breathing that somebody was trying to suppress. It had been a long climb so far. But the person was not taken by surprise by the side passage as Bram had been. He came to a halt, as far as Bram could tell, just short of the opening, and then the breathing stopped. Bram’s nerve broke; in the dark the man might be coming in after him, holding his breath. He whipped the cover off the lightjug and in the same instant swung his spear, haft end first, at what he thought was rib level.

  In the sudden burst of light he saw a startled red-bearded face poking itself around the corner, and then Jao ducked his head back in time to avoid getting brained. The pole smacked against the edge of the entrance with a smart crack that left Bram’s hands tingling.

  “Hey, hold it!” Jao yelped.

  The covered jug he had been carrying shattered against the floor, spilling luminescence that ran quickly downhill and faded out.

  “Jao!” Bram e×claimed in relief. “I thought they were after me.”

  “I don’t think they know we’re gone,” Jao said. He grinned widely. “You’re pretty good with that thing. Maybe you ought to join Penser’s militia.”

  “What — how —”

  “I saw you slip out. I sneaked away too in all the confusion. For about five minutes there, there wasn’t a guard in sight anywhere near the tunnel entrance.” He looked at Bram more soberly. “I figured out what you were up to. From the way you were talking before. thought you might try something like this. I lost you at first, but I took a chance on this side tunnel, and I saw your light way ahead. I didn’t want to use my own light in case a search party followed, and I was afraid to
yell out to you, but I was able to keep your little glow in sight until you covered it up, and I figured I’d catch up with you sooner or later.”

  “Now what?” Bram said bitterly. “Penser’s probably halfway to the Nar sector by now, and we’re off the main routes.”

  “Don’t give up, my friend. I thought you might need help. I know the tree inside out. Remember, I’ve been living here for the last couple of months.”

  “Where does this channel go?”

  “It’s an old resin duct they’re converting into a secondary thoroughfare. They can bore through to the adjoining tracheids like this one for apartments and workshops. Eventually it’ll intersect a vascular ray with a bucket shaft in it. First, though, let’s find ourselves some transportation.”

  The crawlbubble Jao found for them had seen a lot of hard use, but it was still in operating condition. Workmen had been using it to explore some of the branching vascular rays and had left it parked in a hollowed-out cell that was being used as a toolshed.

  “Not the most elegant way to travel, but it’ll get us there,” Jao said cheerfully. “You know how to drive one of these things?”

  Bram shook his head. He had seen crawlbubbles in operation on the Father World on projects where rough or hilly terrain made other work vehicles impractical, but he had never actually ridden in one. They were squat, six-legged things with a transparent cab big enough for one Nar or two cramped humans. Essentially they were a larger and more sophisticated version of a tripod walker — a form of pseudolife operated by synthetic reselin protein.

  “Nothing to it,” Jao said. “Just point it where you want it to go. It can’t tip over — there’s always three legs in contact with a surface — and it feels out its own footholds.”

  He twanged one of the tendons anchored in the metal-framed control pyramid, and the little biomachine scuttled forward. The basic control was a sort of tiller shaped for a Nar tentacle, but a human being could operate it one-handed by fitting an elbow into the groove at one end; the tiller worked on a universal joint, and one could steer and tilt it forward for more speed at the same time or tilt it backward for reverse. A synthetic electroluminescent organ, focused by a lens and mirror, cast a high-intensity beam forward.

  The resin duct grew steeper, and the crawlbubble dug in and braced itself as it climbed. “Hang on,” Jao said. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.” After another hour of climbing, the duct abruptly came to an end, plugged up by a hardened amber material. “There should be an opening about here,” Jao said. “They hadn’t gotten around to enlarging it yet. There it is!”

  A jagged hole in the smooth wall was just big enough for the crawlbubble to squeeze through. The electroluminescent headlamp threw its light down a long, bare horizontal passage.

  “There ought to be a bucket stage a couple of miles in that direction,” Jao said. “We’d better leave the crawl-bubble here and walk the rest of the way. We don’t want to give ourselves away in case they’ve posted a guard there.”

  “I hate to think of what I might have done if you hadn’t come along,” Bram said. “I probably would have just gone blundering onward.”

  “I don’t know,” Jao said. “You might have blundered your way to the Nar sector by yourself. Then again, you might not have. That’s why I followed you. It was a chance I didn’t want to let you take.”

  “Well, thanks,” Bram said.

  “Don’t thank me,” Jao said with a gesture of dismissal. “It’s my tree.”

  They climbed out of the crawlbubble and stared down the length of the transverse passage. Lighting had not been installed, but there was a dim, pearly visibility anyway. “This tunnel’s still alive,” Jao said. “That’s sunlight we’re seeing, what’s left of it after being pumped through the tree’s own optical fibers. A plant the size of this one has to figure out new ways of carrying on its photochemistry.”

  Bram, after a moment’s hesitation, took his spear with him. Jao produced a wicked-looking curved knife from under his clothing.

  “Where did you get that?” Bram said.

  “It’s a garden tool. From the farm chamber. I was able to lift it without being noticed.”

  “Could — could you use it?”

  “I don’t know. But it feels good in the hand. We’re killers, you know. That’s what you learn if you take a hard look at the literature our unedited forebears sent along with us. Maybe it wasn’t apparent to the Nar when our numbers were small and we still hadn’t formulated anything resembling a real human society. But maybe the Pensers are going to be the natural order of things from now on.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Bram said. “I wouldn’t want to believe anything like that.”

  “Suit yourself.” Jao shrugged. “But you have to admit that Penser wouldn’t have been possible if there hadn’t been large numbers of people dissatisfied with the shape of things in their happy little enclosures down below.”

  Bram was surprised at the unhappiness that suddenly showed in the jovial, red-bearded visage; then he realized that Jao would not have become one of the Juxt One émigrés in the first place If he had been entirely content with his lot.

  “Not so many people,” Bram said. “I still think Penser’s an aberration.”

  They moved down the dim corridor, their unfamiliar weapons at the ready. It was a long walk in an echoing silence. You couldn’t see all the way ahead; the slight irregular curvatures limited visibility to a few hundred yards at a time. But after a mile or so, something — a change in the illumination, a change in the echoes, a different feel to the air currents — told Bram that they were approaching an open space. He and Jao moved more cautiously and pressed closer to the wall on the inside curve. Another few minutes of walking brought them to a tremendous hollow space with the squarish cross section of a tracheid. They stepped out onto a wide natural platform rimming the xylem cell all the way around. A yawning abyss stretched beneath their feet; muted yellow light filtered from somewhere high above. There was no guard-rail, and they both instinctively drew back a little.

  “It’s a bucket station, just as I thought,” Jao said. He pointed across the chasm to where a series of filaments were threaded through circular holes in the rim on the opposite side. Buckets rested in several of the wells.

  “They’ve passed through here,” Bram said, looking at the charred pits in the living wood where Penser’s army had carelessly lit cooking fires and at the litter that surrounded them. “But how long ago?”

  “Not too long,” Jao said, sniffing the ashes. “They had a head start of three or four hours on us, but they must have used most of it up. Stopping to eat. Being held up by the discontinuities in the shaft, then hoisting people a few at a time and regrouping. Sending out scouts along the side passages to make sure they’re not seen.”

  They hurried around to the opposite side of the great shaft, where the bucket cables were stretched.

  “Look, one of them’s moving,” Bram said.

  He could see the slight telltale vibration blurting one of the threads. It was the trailing cable, the one that was anchored to a winch below to keep the bucket from swinging out of control; the hoisting cables were triple, with a pair of safety cords to catch the bucket in case the viral monofilament ever were to snap. That meant that the moving bucket was overhead, not somewhere below.

  “There’s your answer,” Jao said. “You’re looking at the last bucketful of stragglers.”

  “Then there’s still time to warn the Nar!” Bram cried.

  “There ought to be a communications line on the platform.” Jao looked around at the natural pits lining the tracheid walls. “Ah, there’s one with a door on it.” He disappeared into the hole, holding his knife, and reappeared a moment later. “Line’s cut,” he announced. “I guess they didn’t want to bother leaving a guard behind.”

  Bram stared hopelessly at the bucket cable. It had stopped vibrating. “If there were only some way to get past them,” he said.

&nb
sp; “There is,” Jao said.

  “Huh?”

  “Come on.” Jao took him by the arm. “How do you think they traveled before they hung the buckets? There’re some leftover climbers through there. I hope you’re not afraid of heights.”

  He pulled Bram through the pit opening he had emerged from and led him through the cell wall to an adjoining tracheid. The climbers were there — simple, round-bottomed cups with stiff wiry limbs radiating horizontally in two rows, at brim and waist. The nearer ones stirred as Bram and Jao approached.

  “I guess there’s still a few breeding colonies of them here and there,” Jao said. “They have a commensal relationship with the tree — live on water and dissolved nutrients in the vessels. The tree hardly notices. The climbers give back the nutrients, anyway. They may even do some good — when their cups fill up, they move liquid through the vessels faster than the tree could do it.”

  Jao climbed into a cup and motioned Bram to join him. It was a tight fit and not very comfortable; the narrow cup was shaped to fit a Nar’s bundled lower limbs, and there was no way to brace one’s feet. “Hang on!” Jao said as the climber responded to their weight and dragged itself through a tube opening.

  The ascent was terrifying to a human though not, apparently, to a Nar. Bram clung to the muscular ridge around the cup rim and tried not to look downward. The climber was choosy about the route it took. If it encountered an artery whose diameter was too large for its bristling array of limbs, it backed down and tried an alternate path. It apparently was unwilling to climb unless it could brace itself all the way around. Under the circumstances, Bram found that comforting.

  “We’ve got a xylem wall between us and Penser’s expedition,” Jao said close to Bram’s ear. “They won’t see us. From here we just climb all the way to Nar country without stopping. Penser won’t do that. It would take too many bucket trips for his whole crowd, and he’d lose the element of surprise. He’ll regroup, give them a pep talk, and take them the last quarter mile on foot. We’ll have a chance to beat them.”