There was a howl of escaping air and the raucous bray of flapping membrane. Everything must have happened in a moment, but to Bram it had the measured eeriness of a dream.
First Penser’s arm — the one holding the knife — was sucked through the puncture up to the shoulder. There was a brief delay while the rip enlarged. The trumpet blare of membrane edges climbed shrieking up the scale. Then the shoulder and head popped through, followed by the other shoulder and arm. Penser’s broad hips were next to get stuck. There was a brief razz of tearing membrane, and the rest of him whipped through and was gone.
The Nar who arrived then was in danger of being caught in the screaming hurricane himself. Bram saw him cling to the lenticel frame with seven tentacles while three more limbs slapped another seal over the gap. The whistle of air stopped. The space-suited Nar pressed his waistplate against the membrane, trying to see out. If Penser’s body could be seen, tumbling through space, it would be rapidly dwindling. Bram wondered if it would ever be recovered.
Penser’s dream of possessing the universe was over. The universe had possessed him instead.
Why had he committed that last mad act? Bram tried to puzzle it out. Penser could not have hoped to kill the Nar, most of whom still had their space suits on. He could only have killed himself and his followers. Perhaps, like a child with a broken toy, he had tried to pull down the remnants of his dream in a rage.
Or perhaps he was mad enough by that time for his overloaded brain to tell him that he was escaping that way — as if he could breathe vacuum.
Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all; maybe it was only a random act of mischief and destruction by a man who had always been a vessel of death.
Only a few Nar were left in the chamber, mopping up, tying up the last prisoners. The rest had departed to round up the humans who had fled and most likely to liberate their Nar brethren who had barricaded themselves behind vacuum.
Two of the remaining Nar were standing over the outstretched body of Voth, their limbs folded, communicating — if they were talking at all — through their radio sleeves. Bram could not read their posture.
One of them came over to examine him. Bram was a loose end. He had been tied up when they had arrived.
The tall shape loomed over him. Bram looked up into the dispassionate saucer eyes. “You mustn’t think that all human beings are responsible,” Bram said in the purest Small Language he could utter.
The Nar turned away. He was not going to bother to talk to the animals.
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Chapter 12
The sea of flesh parted before Bram and closed up again behind him as he and the other prisoners were herded forward. His legs ached; he’d been walking for miles through the crowd. The walls of livid tentacles rose on either side to let the procession of dispirited humans and their grim Nar escort pass, then settled back into the seething golden tide to resume the linkage that was turning the race of Nar into one vast interconnected organism.
The hard-packed sand of the cleared lane was cool and gritty under Bram’s bare feet. He raised his eyes and tried to peer past the living palisade. He could see no end to flesh, except for a hint of dark ocean in the distance, where the shoreline indented the boundaries of this awesome convocation.
By now, he estimated, the immense circular pulsing mass must contain more than a billion individuals and it was still growing, as fliers, ground vehicles, and watercraft deposited more Nar at its perimeter.
The weeping girl trudging along beside him stumbled, and Bram reached out to catch her. “Easy,” he said.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I only stubbed my toe.” She turned a tear-streaked face to him. “You’re Mim’s friend, aren’t you — Bram?”
He took a closer look at her. She was a solid, rosy-limbed young woman with a round serious face, now puffy with misery, and thick untidy swirls of bright yellow hair. Her name escaped him. “Uh, you’re
“Ang,” she supplied. “I was part of the string quartet that was going to Juxt One.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why are we here, Bram? This is some sort of trial, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly,” he hedged. “Not in the human sense. The Nar want to understand what happened, and decide how they feel about it.”
“But I didn’t have anything to do with it,” she wailed. “We were practicing in one of the spare chambers, when those
Bram said lamely, “The Nar haven’t made any distinctions among us yet. I suppose it’s hard for them to understand how one group of humans could coerce another. So for now, everyone who was aboard the tree is a part of
He tried to conceal his dismay as he looked around at the throng moving past them. Penser’s people were here and there among them, tending to keep apart — even from one another, as if they were ashamed to be seen in the company of their former accomplices. The colonists clustered together in small, stunned groups for mutual comfort. But the vast majority were people who simply had been visitors to the tree — friends and gene kin from the planet’s human compounds who’d had the misfortune to attend the bon voyage party.
His gaze passed over a number of litters that were held high aloft in the raised tentacles of Nar attendants — people who had been injured in the fighting aboard the tree and who had not yet recovered sufficiently to walk. Most of those were Penser’s followers.
He also spotted Marg, being carried in a chair sling rigged on a three-legged walker; a silent Nar with its upper tentacles tightly closed in an aloof vertical bundle was leading the little biomachine on a rope. Orris, a wiry jumping jack in grimy shorts and singlet, danced around the walker, keeping close. Marg slumped in her seat, wan and listless. She had lost the blastocyst implant during the retaking of the tree, Bram knew.
“How much further do we have to walk?” said an ashen-faced man limping along next to Bram and Ang. He was middle-aged and not very fit, by the look of his paunch. Bram saw the sweat trickling down the flabby cheeks, though the principal sun had not yet climbed high enough in the violet sky to make the day hot.
“We must be getting close to the center,” Bram said. “You can ask for a litter if you need one.”
The man glanced at the litters bearing the injured combatants. A look of distaste crossed his face. “Have them carry me? No thanks. I’ll get there under my own power.”
He squared his shoulders and put on a burst of speed that pulled him ahead of Bram and the girl, but he couldn’t have been able to maintain the pace for very long, because they overtook him shortly thereafter. Chin thrust out, he pretended not to see them at first, but soon gave it up and fell in step with them again. When he caught his breath, he introduced himself.
“Theron’s the name,” he said. “Theron Chen-martiz Tewart. Maybe you recognize the internomen. I have a demiclone on the council.”
Bram diplomatically acknowledged recognizing the name. The council’s Chen-martiz was a blustery fellow who hogged meetings with long, pompous speeches of vague purpose.
Theron turned a plump, pleading face to Bram. “It must be some kind of mistake. I’m very well thought of in the Compound. My Nar supervisor thinks the world of me. He’s said so, more than once. He’s told me they depend on me to keep my section of the Works humming. They can’t think I have anything to do with that rabble!”
He jerked a thumb toward the litters carrying the disabled Penserites. Bram saw Fraz, head bandaged and face blistered from the effect of his own firebottles, raise himself on one elbow, stare blankly at the horde of moving humans that he was a part of, then sink listlessly back.
Ang was weeping again. “Why did those awful people have to h-hurt Nar?”
“They’ll be punished,” Theron said, his voice rising shrilly. “T
he guilty ones will be sorted out and punished, and then things will get back to normal.”
Bram said nothing. There was no point in frightening them further. It was impossible to believe that this extraordinary convocation of the Nar race had been called to concern itself with questions of individual guilt. By now that vast congregation must have shared every scrap of background information about every human here, including their pedigrees all the way back to gene assembly. Theron’s supervisor would be out there somewhere, as would Ang’s childhood tutors.
Bram’s throat choked up; his own touch brothers would be out there, submerged in the collective consciousness, a few billionths of the whole. He swallowed hard as he thought of Voth. The universe had become strange now that it no longer contained the being who had raised him. He thought he had been prepared, in his human bones, to lose Voth one day — but not in a manner that deprived Voth’s life of its final flowering.
He marched wearily forward, watching the yellow carpet of decapods peel back to let the bedraggled human host through. No, the Nar, in the awful grandeur of their deliberations, would not be concerned with anything as petty as vengeance.
Or forgiveness.
Centuries earlier, such a convocation had been called to consider the creation of man. And the Nar had concluded that it was their obligation to the vanished race whose works, in bioengineering and the basic sciences, had profited them so greatly. Now the debt had been paid. And repaid.
Now the question would be, what is the nature of this alien race we have fostered, and what is their place among us?
An image came unbidden to him: an image from his work at the biocenter with his touch associates. In the laboratory, when a culture went bad, you didn’t bother to pick through it to retain individual organisms. You dumped the whole tray.
The Chen-martiz demiclone, Theron, marched stubbornly along at Bram’s side, still justifying himself to the empty air. “They can’t possibly blame all of us for the actions of a few — why, most of them were foreigners from Juxt One anyway! We’ll simply explain the situation to them and set things right.”
The path before them started to slope upward, and the damp sand under Bram’s feet was replaced by something hard and smooth. Fused glass.
He raised his eyes to the summit of the tremendous structure whose sweeping contour made its own horizon — a horizon that was delineated by the overlapping blanket of Nar spreading over the craterlike rim.
The people around Bram began to hang back, and Bram had to force himself not to drag his own feet. A whimper escaped the blonde girl. Even Theron was subdued enough to cease his chatter.
They had arrived at their destination.
The ancient vitreous bowl had rested on the tidal flats since before the dawn of Nar history. No one knew its origins, though it was generally believed that the surrounding skirt had accreted gradually, through many generations, as the numbers of the Nar increased. The central cup itself was more than a mile in diameter arid could contain two or three million individuals. Once it must have held the entire Nar race.
Now that was no longer possible. But ancestral custom dies hard. The packed, intertwined assembly overflowed the broad rim and spilled across the denuded landscape to make a circle with a diameter of more than twenty miles. A billion folk had become one at this time-hallowed site.
Spaced around the great, throbbing perimeter were scribes, each lending a spare limb to the sleeve transmitters that linked them to the edges of similar gatherings all over the Father World, its inhabited moons, and the nearer planets.
The scribes were living conduits who transmitted the sense of the convocation through their averaged tactile impressions. The chroniclers at the other end became the boundaries of new circles of communion that washed inward in slow, lapping tides of cilia movement. But there was feedback as well. The tides washed back to dilute and modify original apperceptions, until gradually a grand racial consensus could emerge.
Two-way communion, of course, was impractical for the more distant worlds of the companion sun, where the time lag — even for radio waves traveling at the speed of light — began to be measured in hours rather than minutes. And for the colonized stars, a true exchange would mean a delay of years. Those distant outposts would receive touch transcriptions only. But their populations were still scanty compared to the billions of the inner system, and the power of the consensus would carry them along.
Even with modern technology to help, the size of the great primary convocation stretched ancestral custom to its limits. No human gathering — even one of only a few hundred individuals — could have achieved such intimacy through eye contact and vocal communication alone.
But information content in the Great Language was high. Its richness and nonlinear nature more than compensated for the relative sluggishness of those peristaltic ripples of meaning and allusion that took so many minutes to sweep across the packed miles.
The activities of the entire Nar commonwealth of planets would grind to a halt while the deliberations went on. The billions of participants would not eat, would not leave their gathering places. Those who could not attend — mostly because they could not be spared from vital caretaker functions — would be glued to their tactile receivers, adding to the brew of communion through a nexus of averaging computers.
But Nar were never in a hurry. Their civilization would skip a beat while they attended to this matter, then resume its stately tread.
Bram paused at the rim of the bowl and let the rest of the crowd stream past him while he looked out over the living skin that covered the earth. He could see the whole panorama from here, all the way to the horizon. The tesselated ranks of Nar tiled the landscape in an intricate mosaic until distance made them merge. The arrival of the humans in the inner circle was causing reticulated patterns of purple lines to spread outward in concentric rings, as the undersides of tentacles briefly flashed. Bram wondered if the Nar, with their crosslinked senses, were actually seeing what the inner witnesses were conveying by touch and chemical tags alone. No human could ever really know.
He remembered being brought here as a child by Voth to see the great bowl. It had been part of his education. The landscape had been empty then — there had not been one of these great assemblies during Bram’s lifetime. Only a few isolated parties of bathers — both Nar and human — had been in view that day, on their way to the beaches some miles beyond. Voth had introduced him to one of the curators, who had shown them around until Voth had seen that the little boy was getting bored; he had bought Bram a sweet then — one of the polysugar confections that were safe for humans to eat — and flagged down an excursion beast to the oceanfront, and they too had gone swimming.
Bram squinted at the band of sparkling water in the distance. The shoreline itself was farther away than it had been during his childhood — pushed back by the expanding system of dikes that held the natal ocean at bay and created the new tidal pools needed by a growing population.
A shadow fell across his face. It was Orris in his grimy singlet, smelling of sweat. Bram couldn’t blame him; he was a little ripe himself after being cooped up during the trip back from space.
“Think there’ll be showerbaths for us down in there?” Orris asked peevishly. “And maybe a place to wash our clothes?”
Bram looked down past the inner slope of the bowl where Orris was pointing. An inner enclosure of about an acre had been fenced off. Bram saw a circle of benches facing outward, and rows of curtained booths. Some humans were already seated, and there were the tiny dentiform figures of Nar bailiffs moving among the temporary pavilions. “I’m sure they’ve made some provision for us,” he said. “This may go on for days.”
“Days!” Orris exclaimed.
“The accused won’t be expected to fast with their judges,” Bram said with a sudden bitterness that caught him by surprise. He squinted at the bright canopies below, and went on in a more moderate tone. “They realize we’ll need to eat and sleep. Those will be coo
ktents, sanitary facilities, sleeping booths.”
“I don’t care about myself,” Orris said. “It’s Marg I’m worried about. She’s not in good shape. She’ll need privacy, a chance to lie down when she gets tired.” His eyes shifted. “She lost the baby, you know.”
“I heard that. I’m sorry, Orris.”
“Will they let us have a replacement blastocyst, do you think? I suppose we lost our place on the Juxt One list.”
Bram mumbled something vague and noncommittal. But he was appalled at his friend’s evasion of reality. Didn’t Orris realize that there would never be a shipload of human colonists going to Juxt One again? That human fertility itself would now be evaluated? The easy trust between the Nar and their creations was gone. At best, human beings would have to be restricted, isolated from Nar society, their numbers allowed to dwindle to a manageable level.
At worst
Bram shuddered, seeing again his biologist’s image of the dumped tray, the regretful termination of an experiment gone wrong.
He shook off the idea. The Nar were compassionate. Surely, whatever the outcome of this planetwide day of wrath, the existing human beings would be allowed to live out their remaining lives — under supervision and restraint. And if the Nar were generous, perhaps they would even permit the existence of future human beings in small numbers, as curiosities or objects of study, like the dangerous beasts that survived in their zoos.
His eyes were suddenly stinging. Surely, he thought, the human species need not vanish from the universe a second time!
He looked at the straggling file of humans as they picked their way down the slope of the bowl. He hoped they would behave well in the time of judgment to come. He willed them fiercely to understand that they were not there to justify themselves individually, any more than germs in a culture were asked by the pathologist which ones of them were likely to be infectious. The Nar, in this agonized effort at racial comprehension, would consider all these frightened people as a unit. The actions of Pite, who had murdered Voth, would weigh in that collective scale along with the actions of Ang, whose crime had been to play the violin.
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