The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  An extensive holo library covered one wall, and there were rows of body readers on pedestals, computer terminals, and workstations for joined touch groups. A few items of equipment were overturned, and a few shelves of holos were spilled on the floor, but somebody had stopped the vandalism before it had gone any further. A half dozen armed men stood around uneasily, as if on guard.

  But none of that was what caught Bram’s attention. The only thing he had eyes for was the dead Nar who lay sprawled near the pool, leaving a trail of violet ichor behind.

  “Very annoying, indeed,” Penser was saying. “We had intended to keep the thing alive, but it reacted badly to electrical shock.”

  “So now it’s your turn, Brammo,” Pite said. “Why don’t you save yourself some grief.”

  Bram hardly heard them. He started forward with a cry. He knew before he reached the now pale yellow form who it was.

  “Voth,” he choked, kneeling.

  Voth lay in a purple mess, the ruptured follicles showing on the indecently exposed undersides of his lower tentacles. The electric shocks had hastened his time. He had tried, evidently, to crawl to the pool in time to save his children, but he hadn’t made it.

  Blinded by tears, Bram turned his head and saw a pale blob that was Penser’s face. With a low growl that he would not have recognized as his own, had he been aware of it, he hurled himself at Penser. His fingers were satisfyingly around Penser’s throat when there was a flash of astonishing pain that became Bram’s entire universe, and then there was nothing at all.

  He was in a darkness filled with blinking lights. He seemed to have no body, except that there was a generalized sense of hurting. A continuous buzzing sound came from the distant places in his head. After a while, the sounds became externalized, and he was aware of strained, urgent voices around him, the coming and going of footsteps, rattles and clanks.

  He opened his eyes, and harsh sunlight stabbed his brain. His body returned. He was lying curled up on one side, his hands bound behind his back again. His legs seemed to be tied, too. An area of pain localized as a burn under one shoulder blade. Someone seemed to have kicked him while he lay unconscious; at least that was how the bruised ribs and upper arm on his unprotected side felt.

  Bram struggled to sit up. He inched himself up against the wall at his back. The movement brought a wave of headache and nausea. After a moment the headache subsided to a steady throb. He inhaled and tasted smoke in his mouth.

  He was in the same chamber, the one with the deep-set lenticel and the workstations, but now it was full of people. There was activity all around him. People with soot-smudged faces kept running in and out, exchanging scraps of hurried conversation and brief flurries of gestures. They bore axes and sledgehammers. A few carded smoldering bundles that must have been torches. Somebody was passing out firebottles. A thick, wet smoke billowed in through the arched openings that led to the inner suites and the chamber beyond. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Bram.

  Through his headache, he located Penser. Penser was at the center of all the movement, the only one in the room who was weaponless. He stood with his hands behind his back, head lowered to listen to the reports of the runners, occasionally lifting his head and raising an arm to call someone over to him.

  Voth’s corpse was still there, too. Bram forced his eyes to find it. It lay near the pool, the outflung tentacles still reaching. Nobody had bothered to move it.

  Bram felt numb, unable to summon his feelings. Voth’s body seemed curiously flat. The settling and draining of tissues had given the symmetrical decapod form two sides in death — something it had never had in life. The mirror eyes were nothing more than dull pits around the waist. Bram’s head buzzed and throbbed. None of this seemed real. After a moment he realized that he had forgotten to draw a breath for too long; when he did so, it was like a knife along his bruised ribs.

  Pite came over, an axe slung across his back, one side of his mono scorched.

  “Waking up, Brammo?” he said. “You better hope we need you. Penser’s mad, really mad. You shouldn’t have gone after him that way. You’re lucky my little galvanizer happened to be on a low setting. If it had been set for Nar, you’d have been fried.”

  “How long has that been going on?” Bram croaked, pointing his chin at all the frantic movement in and out.

  “About an hour. You weren’t out long. We’ve broken through one compartment wall and burnt out a whole section along one gallery. The yellowlegs’ve barricaded themselves farther back, but we’ll smash through and roast the lot of them. We caught two of them trying to slip away. Got ’em both with firebottles. Know what happens to a yellowlegs when it burns? It sort of pops.”

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  Bram felt ill. “I wish I’d killed him.”

  “See, Brammo.” Pite grinned. “You’re just like us.”

  Bram was opening his mouth to reply when there was a sound like a great whoof. It came from the direction of the inner chambers, where the fires had been burning.

  At the same time, Bram saw the drifting haze of smoke in the room suddenly give a jerk in the direction of the exits, as if somebody had given a sharp tug to an invisible sheet that it was painted on. Then the ribbons of smoke began drifting lazily toward the inner suites.

  An eerie silence descended. Everybody had stopped moving at once. The crackle of flames that had been heard in the distance had abruptly stopped. Then there were cries of alarm and another great whump.

  Pite, Penser, and everyone else were staring toward the exits. Bram was the only one who saw the shadowy blurs on the membrane of the lenticel blotting out the pearly ghosts of stars.

  The blurs were moving purposefully. Bram could not give a shape to them yet. This side of the tree presently faced night, and the interior biolights had flared up to compensate.

  Bram looked away from the lenticel. He didn’t want anyone to notice him staring.

  Penser was barking orders, trying to organize his troops. “Trog, take some men and find out what’s going on! Pite, never mind the incendiaries for the moment! Get your people together and have them prepared to move quickly! Hust, how is the large aggregate coming? We may have to blow another opening!”

  A man stumbled into the chamber, his forehead bleeding from a large gash. “No air there! The next chamber’s all vacuum! It put the fire out! No sign of the yellowlegs! They must have gone farther inside!”

  “Did we lose anybody?” Penser asked.

  The man was weaving and confused, trying to stay on his feet. “Jupe was inside when the air went — he’s dead. I saw somebody else sucked in. I don’t know what happened to him. People hurt.” His hand went to his forehead and came away bloody. He gave a foolish; inappropriate grin. “Hard to stay on your feet. That’s how I got this.”

  Somebody caught him before he fell. The fifty or so people in the chamber milled about uselessly, but Pite and another section leader were gradually whipping them into shape.

  “What happened to Trog?” Penser seemed to be losing control. Bram was surprised. The man had seemed invulnerable to emotion. “Why can’t anyone tell me anything?” Penser complained. “How fast are we losing air?”

  More people from the inside battleground were drifting in, gradually filling up the place. One of them answered Penser.

  “The chamber sealed up again somehow after it drew in all the air. Otherwise, we’d all be dead. Great big floating things, like sticky balloons, slapped up against the hole. I think the tree makes them. Now you can get into the chamber again. Fire’s snuffed out. But there’s air leakage into the next chamber through all the little cracks and breaches!”

  Everybody’s eyes went to the drifting smoke in the air again. It didn’t seem so frightening now. It was still clearing itself out, but the rate of flow was nowhere near the great gulp of air the evacuated area had taken at that first thunderclap.

  Penser’s confidence returned. “Break through the next wall!” he screamed a
t them. “There’s nothing to worry about. That one will seal itself, too. We won’t lose more air than we can afford. This is only a small pan of the tree. It will replenish itself. Keep going. They can’t keep retreating forever! I don’t care how many walls you have to blow! Keep going till you get them all!”

  A cooperative babble broke out. Penser had them all in the palm of his hand again. Pite had his thugs assembled. They were testing the sharpness of spear points, weighing clubs. The person in charge of the explosives yelled that he was almost ready. Bram, with a sense of shock, saw that one of his helpers was Eena, molding the claylike balls together into a new shape with her remaining arm.

  Dawn broke through the lenticel as the tree rotated into sunlight again, and a giant many-legged shadow was suddenly thrown across the room.

  Bram turned his head with the rest. He saw a decapod silhouetted against the light. More silhouettes, less sharp than the one pressed against the membrane, filled the translucent window, making a flickering shadow play inside.

  Somebody gave a strangled cry. “They’re trying to get in!”

  A nipple appeared in the exact center of the membrane and bulged inward. The sharp point of an instrument broke through, and there was a terrifying hiss of air. The people in the room recoiled, drew back. A few broke and fled.

  “Stay where you are!” Penser ordered hoarsely, checking the human movement. Bram watched in fascinated dread.

  The silvery tip of a space-suited tentacle followed the sharp instrument, and the rest of the decapod oozed in against what must have been impossible air pressure. The boneless body seemed to elongate, corking the air. The last tentacle to be drawn in was joined to a limb of another Nar behind him, who squeezed through the elastic opening in an uninterrupted flow.

  Air kept hissing, but Bram did not feel the radical decompression he feared. More Nar continued to ooze through in a continuous chain that was like a single, endless living creature clad in silver. The last one through slapped some sort of seal on the puncture. The seal fastened with a huge sucking whoosh, followed by little bubbling sounds around the edges. Bram could appreciate why the skein of decapods had remained twined together; it must have taken the combined strength of all those tentacles, first to hold the frontrunner down and shove him inside, then to brace themselves and draw the rest in after them.

  It had taken less than half a minute for that silver stream of Nar to gush through the opening. Now the multiple creature broke up into units that quickly dispersed into a chess pattern of tall pieces that moved to engulf the still-paralyzed humans.

  There were about twenty of the space-suited Nar. It had to be the outside docking crew and maintenance personnel, Bram thought, his mind racing. There couldn’t have been time enough for reinforcements to arrive from Lowstation — though, he was sure, they had been getting advice by radio.

  And they must have been in contact with their barricaded brethren, too. The diversion that had put out the fires and let space into the inner chambers had been too well timed to be a coincidence.

  “Kill them!” Penser screamed. “Kill them all.”

  Bram strained at his ropes. There were only twenty Nar against more than a hundred armed and desperate humans in this chamber, but they moved with a bold confidence that seemed to unnerve Penser’s minions.

  The flanking Nar threw scoops of powder at the human crowd. People began coughing and scratching. The other Nar advanced with nets and cords.

  Pite was the first to recover from his paralysis. He ran forward, coughing and wheezing, wiping the tears out of his eyes with the back of his hand, and tried to reach the nearest Nar with a spear thrust.

  But at least twenty tentacles from a half dozen decapods acted in concert to grasp the shaft of the spear, pluck the little electrical device from Pite’s other hand, curl around his ankles and wrists, lift him bodily off the floor, net him, and tie him into a neat bundle.

  It was all done in about five seconds.

  The four or five attackers immediately following Pite received the same treatment. The Nar dispatched them with unhurried ease, acting in unison, as if they were a single creature with two hundred limbs, each of which always knew where the other limbs were and what they were doing. They didn’t split up to take on multiple opponents, and no Nar had to fight alone. It was a case of a limb that had taken a moment to disarm an enemy now being free to hold two ankles together while another Nar tied a knot; of a limb that a second earlier had thrown a net immediately being available to deflect a pike aimed at a brother Nar. Seen that way, limb against useful limb, it was the humans who were outnumbered.

  A bare minute later, with eight or nine humans already trussed up and laid aside, Bram understood why.

  One of the Penserites, gasping and blinking from the powder the Nar had sprinkled, managed to light the wick of a firebottle and hurl it. It whizzed past a Nar and shattered on the wall behind him, drenching the decapod with flame. Twenty silver-clad tentacles instantly shucked the burning Nar out of his space suit and tossed the garment in a flaming arc into the pool. The Nar who was left standing there in his yellow skin wore a portable touch sleeve, the kind that outdoor crews used to communicate with each other by radio.

  The sleeves were both sender and receiver, output and feedback. Wearing them, despite the complaint of some aesthetes of coldness and lack of nuance, the twenty Nar of the work crew were effectively linked into a single extended organism that thought, felt, and acted as one. And, if one theory about cross-connections in the Nar nervous system was correct, they were seeing with one another’s eyes as well.

  The bare Nar immediately took a new place in the pattern of decapod chessmen where he would be shielded from thrown objects. The aggregate organism learned quickly. Subsequent flung bottles of alcohol or corrosives were snatched out of the air and set gently down or, if they were flaming, doused in the pool.

  One of the missile throwers was Eena. Bram, lying helpless, saw her light the wick of the composite bomb she had been molding and, despite the handicap of her half-grown flipper, chuck it high over the toiling mass of decapods and humans.

  Bram, every nerve taut, waited for the explosion that would kill or maim everyone in the room, Nar and human alike, but a dozen silver sleeves rose out of the turmoil, caught the object, snuffed the fuse, and passed it along over everyone’s head to be deposited carefully in a safe spot.

  The phalanx of Nar had chewed halfway through the human ranks by now. Scores of trussed people lay in rows, ankles and wrists lashed together to turn them into convenient basketlike objects to be carried away. Penser’s rear guard was turning into a panic-stricken rabble that fragmented and tried to escape through the inner chambers.

  Penser himself was backing away from the advancing Nar, arms raised as if to ward off a nightmare. The Nar weren’t paying any special attention to him. It was doubtful that they knew who he was. At the rate they were working, it would be another few minutes before they got around to him.

  “No,” Penser said, as if he were speaking to children. “The universe belongs to humankind. Can’t you see that?”

  He began edging sideways along the outer wall, skirting the struggling mass. He was not an object of immediate concern to the Nar, since he was not attacking them.

  Bram watched his crablike progress. Penser seemed to be mumbling to himself. His eyes were half closed and his face even puffier than usual from the powder the Nar had scattered. Bram wondered what the powder could be. It was not totally disabling, as one would expect of the choice of a chemical pacifier when the stakes were so desperate; it was simply a low-level inconvenience to humans, intended to make the Nar’s work easier. Probably, Bram decided, the powder was simply the first harmless irritant the Nar docking crew could grab from their own food stores or cleaning supplies; Nar proteins could be murder on human beings, and vice versa. Some of it, he knew from the way his eyes and nose were stinging, must have gotten to him.

  Penser paused for a moment to survey the blo
odless battle. Tears ran down his doughy cheeks from the chemical irritant, and his lips were pursed in disapproval.

  “The universe must be cleansed, you see,” he said in clear, reasonable tones. “Surely everyone understands that. It must be purged of the foul corruption of other life. Their worlds must be cauterized. The universe must be purified before I may possess it.”

  Nobody except Bram was paying attention to him. The Nar would not have distinguished Penser’s ramblings from the general human babble in the chamber.

  Bram saw a man who was disintegrating before his eyes but whose pieces were still held approximately together by the glue of long habit. It all must have been more than Penser could bear. Penser’s insane vision was crumbling around him. He had seen twenty ordinary Nar workmen, using improvised tactics and with no other tools than their sleeve links, cordage, and other everyday equipment, destroy his empire before it could get started.

  What, Bram wondered, would the wrath of the entire Nar commonwealth have been if it could have been brought to bear here?

  Penser had picked up a knife somewhere, a great sharp thing with a blade as long as his forearm. What could he have wanted it for? He had seen how easily the Nar had disarmed his followers.

  Bram watched as Penser reached the lenticel and hoisted himself up onto its broad sill. The modified gas-exchange pore was deeply inset, and if the Nar noticed him, he must have seemed to be another human looking for a place to get out of the fight. For a moment Penser stood there, flooded from behind by light, and watched the destruction of his dream with dead, meaningless eyes.

  By the time Bram realized what Penser intended to do, it was too late. “Stop him!” he bellowed, but the Nar weren’t listening to human voices.

  Abruptly, Penser whirled and plunged the blade of his knife into the patch over the lenticel membrane. A Nar detatched himself from the linked group and galloped on five legs toward the lenticel, but as quick as he was, he could not reach it in time.