The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  His lips tightened with purpose. “Orris,” he began.

  “Excuse me,” Orris said. “I don’t want to get separated from Marg.”

  Orris scrambled down the glassy slope to catch up with the tripedal walker that was carrying Marg. Bram saw him skid to a stop, arms flailing, to avoid bowling over the little biomachine, then fall in beside it with a shambling pace. Orris leaned over to say something, but Marg did not look up.

  The last stragglers were flowing past Bram in a trickle. The gap in the solid blanket of Nar was closing behind them, a narrowing furrow between the yellow ramparts of tentacles. A family group went by — a man and a woman dragging a little towheaded girl by the hand. They quickened their steps, not wanting to be left behind. The man glanced at Bram with a look of raw despair. Perhaps he was wondering why Bram was standing there.

  A decapod came along, gently urging Bram forward with a fanning out of his upper tentacles. Bram shrugged in an unconscious analog of the gesture, then realized that this Nar was unused to humans, and that the little pantomime of compliance had meant nothing to it.

  “All right, I go,” he said in the Small Language, and went to join the others.

  “There is a sorrow,” whispered the little loudspeaker on the top of the post. “There is a regret.”

  Bram craned his neck to see who the loudspeaker was talking about. It was the second day, and like most of the other humans in the central pen, he was sitting in the circle of outward-facing seats. The weather had held, which was fortunate for the humans. Bram had the distinct feeling that the solid parquetry of Nar, which was all that could be seen in any direction, would not have noticed even the most pelting of spring rains in the intensity of their preoccupation.

  A few yards away, he found a small salient of three or four Nar who had stretched themselves toward the fence. The human who had drawn their attention was Eena. She looked even more emaciated than usual. Her ribs stood out plainly under the thin stuff of her upper garment, and her spine traced a series of knobs down to her fleshless hips. She had left her seat to press herself against the grillwork of the corral. She was hanging from the fence with both hands — the normal-size one and the miniature claw of her still half-regrown arm. She was talking earnestly to her interrogators in a voice that was too low for Bram to distinguish the words.

  “… expresses a would-that-it-had-not-been,” the loudspeaker struggled on with an approximation in the Small Language of the human idea of repentance. “He pleads that he lived in a false reality constructed of words; that when he saw death he understood that death was not a word, but he remained compelled by fear of what his new brotherlings might think …”

  The Nar interpreter had gotten Eena’s gender wrong — the average Nar had little appreciation of the fact that humans had two permanent sexes — but it wasn’t a bad way to put it. “Why did I ever get mixed up with that Pite?” Eena had complained to Bram when they had been thrown together in the food line the day before. “All that talk about human destiny — and all he wanted to do was hurt things. He used to leave me all black and blue sometimes.”

  The running transcript that the Nar had so scrupulously provided did little to describe what was really happening in the immense composite nervous system that surrounded the human enclosure. Bram knew that if he were to get up and walk around the perimeter, each of the other little loudspeakers would be saying something different, depending on the immediate perceptions of the Nar providing the commentary. Only when this particular scrap of import had traveled through billions of nervous systems and been changed by them would it have meaning.

  It was, Bram thought, as if one tried to deduce the shape of an ocean by the waves it deposited at one’s feet.

  By now, most of the humans had stopped listening consciously to the soundposts. The half-heard murmurings were only the play of the surf, and the prisoners kept their attention on the immense brooding deep around them, as if by staring hard enough they could tell what it contained.

  Bram looked around again to try to find Kerthin. He located her a hundred feet away, sitting by herself, her eyes fixed rigidly ahead. She avoided him and everybody else. Bram could not tell whether her behavior was caused by shock, shame, or anger. All he knew was that she had withdrawn totally into herself.

  The Nar appeared to have finished with Eena. She turned away from the fence, spotted Bram, and came over. “They wanted to know how I felt,” she said. “They know I was one of the ones who manufactured explosive pots for Penser.” The embryonic arm made an unconscious half-gesture to conceal itself. “But they don’t seem to be mad at me or anything.”

  “No, they wouldn’t be,” he said.

  “What’re they thinking?” she said, with a nervous glance at the tiers of overlapping tentacles.

  “It’s impossible to say.”

  “You can tell, Bram,” she said in a wheedling tone.

  “Everybody says you know how to read their machines and everything.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not the same thing.”

  Eena glanced a few seats away at Ang, who had been staying in Bram’s vicinity since their arrival, and dismissed her as not being important. “When it’s your turn, you could put in a good word for me,” she said, leaning forward.

  “Eena, it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  She tossed her head in the direction of the inner enclosure. “We could go in one of the booths. What do you say?”

  “Eena, it’s not necessary. I’ll say something in your favor if you want.”

  “It’s the arm, isn’t it?” she said ruefully. “You don’t have to tell me, I know it puts you off.”

  “That’s not it at all,” he protested.

  “Never mind, I understand. Pite didn’t want to have anything to do with me, either, after I came out of the regeneration clinic. Of course it was only a bud then. I told him it would grow back all the way, that it was only a matter of time. He said we had to dedicate ourselves to the cause, that there was no time for anything personal any more, but I know he was sneaking around with some of those dewey-eyed woman recruits.”

  She flexed the little arm and stared at it thoughtfully.

  “Another couple of years till it’s full-grown, they said. You’d think they could find a way to speed it up.”

  “Eena —”

  “You’re still mooning over Kerthin, aren’t you? Listen, Bram, she’s not worth it, believe me. She was just using you. I’m telling you that even though she’s a friend of mine. You’re better off without her.”

  “I don’t have much say in the matter anyway, it seems.”

  What he meant to say was that Kerthin seemed to have taken that decision into her own hands. For himself, Bram did not know what he thought. The image of Voth’s sprawled body kept coming between Bram and any thoughts of Kerthin, but the sight of her stiff, withdrawn figure sitting alone on the bench made him feel awful.

  Eena misunderstood him. She looked out over the horizon-falling presence outside the penned acre and bit her lip. “Yeah, I guess anything like that may not matter any more after this.” She squeezed Bram’s shoulder with her good hand. “See what you can do for us, Bram. Not just me. I mean all of us.”

  She turned away abruptly. Bran watched her pick her way along the curving row of benches until she came to where Kerthin was sitting. He saw Eena sit next to Kerthin, lay a hand on her arm, and try to talk to her. Kerthin listened dully, said nothing, and after a while got up and left.

  A rustling noise caught Bram’s attention. A few yards away, another small outcropping of Nar stretched itself forward in response to a human who had approached the fence. Bram recognized Theron, the middle-aged man who had denounced the Penserites so vehemently. Theron sucked in his gut and spoke in a loud, clear voice that carried to where Bram sat.

  “My name is Theron Chen-martiz Tewart, and you can check my record if you like. I’ve never caused the slightest trouble, and you can ask my supervisor —”

 
He stopped as he suddenly realized that his Nar supervisor was certainly out there somewhere, his individuality diluted by the billions of vicarious tentacles that filtered his sensory input.

  “Trl-chr-trl,” the man pleaded. “You know how hard I’ve worked trying to get ahead. I’ve risen higher at the starchworks than any human has done before me. All the Nar there respect me. The Chen-martiz internomen is an eminent one in the Compound.” He thumped his chest. “Why would I want to be part of some lunatic scheme to change the natural order of things?”

  He bowed his head. There was no direct response from the proxies communicating his words, but perhaps somewhere in the sea of flesh Trl-chr-trl was radiating a small circular eddy of sympathy and confirmation that would modify the perceptions of the beings around him until it was finally submerged by other eddies arising from other centers.

  A young colonist shouldered Theron aside and addressed the tangled node of decapods before it could withdraw. “We were prisoners in that farm chamber where you found us,” he said in a voice trembling with emotion. “We were victims of Penser’s bullies just as much as the Nar who were attacked.”

  Bram shifted his attention to another developing bulge in the batter of golden flesh. Spak, the bumpy-skulled thug, edged reluctantly forward to face it. They had called him by name. To Bram’s astonishment, Spak broke down and wept. “I’m sorry,” he kept repeating. “I’m sorry.”

  A woman with gray-streaked hair shook off the hand of the man beside her and took Spak’s place, her face red with embarrassment. “You can’t blame them too much,” she said. “Some of the things Penser said sounded good, even to the rest of us. Like taking pride in being human. Like having a place in the cosmos we could call our own. Maybe some of them didn’t realize where all those fine words would lead or how far Penser was prepared to go. I’ve been an Ascendist all my life, and while I don’t hold with Penser’s methods, I share some of his ideals.”

  A gasp came from Ang. Bram got up and sat beside her. “It’s all right,” he said. “Maybe they ought to hear it.”

  A ripple of interest went through the packed tribunal, visible as a froth of lavender across the amber surface. A single Nar heaved its central cup above the mass, its five arms stretched to maintain contact. Bram had the impression that it had been deputized by the entire assembly — that it was not just questioning the gray-haired lady on its own.

  “We know of your brothers,” it said in excellent Inglex. “They are something like an extended touch group, are they not? But do you say that their views differ?”

  Haltingly, the woman tried to explain about political factions and got tangled up in a complicated exposition of the differences between Ascendists and Resurgists, Partnerites and Integrationists and Schismatists. The man she had been sitting with got up and came to her aid. The soundposts were generating a fantastic, garbled version of what they were saying.

  Around the enclosure a half-dozen other people of various political persuasions gathered their courage and approached the barrier to add their own explanations, making matters worse.

  “It’s awful!” Ang whispered to Bram. “They’re quarreling about a lot of hairline distinctions that don’t mean anything. What are the Nar going to think of us?”

  “Maybe it’s all for the best,” Bram said.

  “How can you say that?”

  “It’ll give the Folk some inkling of the extent of the yearning of human beings for a place of our own in the universe, make them see that it didn’t have to express itself Penser’s way.”

  The loudspeaker on the post nearest them sighed on in the soft suspirations of the Small Language. “… they differ in their apartness. The one wishes to share in the great concordance though he is mute, the other to withdraw from the sight of the Folk, the next to seize like an impatient fingerling a greater share of goods and habitat ”

  “I’ve got to try to make them understand,” Ang said faintly. She stood up, her rosy cheeks gone pale, and made her way to the fence.

  “I — I’m a maker of music,” she began in a small clear voice. “I never thought very much about all these things you’ve been hearing. I never wanted to take things or smash things or demand things. All I ever wanted to do was to make the beautiful sounds that Original Man left for us in his Message. I don’t know if you understand what music means to most of us, but we’re all born with it inside us. It’s like — like a language. We were learning more about it all the time. We carved the old instruments out of Earth’s wood. I wanted to go to Juxt One because I wanted to give those sounds to people there who had never heard them firsthand.”

  They questioned her gently with a small part of their joint consciousness, while along the perimeter of the pen other outcroppings of decapods continued examining other humans.

  “But could you not be happy here? There are more humans here with whom to share your art.”

  “It’s a newer human society on Juxt, away from the old constraints. There’s more room for people, and I thought that might change the people themselves. That humans might feel freer to be humans — that the music might be freer, too.”

  “But the practice of the human arts is encouraged by us here on the Father World.”

  “I know. It’s just that — oh, I don’t know what I mean!” Ang was close to tears. She excused herself with the remnants of her Nar-instilled courtesy and sat down.

  Bram became aware that while Ang had been talking, other members of the string quartet had been called. He could see Kesper, the violist, some distance away, gesticulating earnestly. The Nar immediately opposite seemed to be quite interested in what he was saying. Bram had no clue as to what it was all about; the soundpost nearest Kesper doubtless was giving an approximate version.

  More names were called. The pace seemed to be speeding up. Every human being in the enclosure was known personally to at least several Nar out there, and the aggregate of those crosslinked nervous systems was able to shuffle names better than any computer for whatever purpose it chose.

  Bram tried to find a pattern in the types of people being summoned to the fence, but gave it up. They seemed to represent a cross section of human society — from colonists still clinging to the tattered remains of cloaks and tabards made from the leaves of their tree to once-fashionable Resurgists from the Compound, wearing the bedraggled finery of Earth’s presumed past.

  “What’s happening?” Ang asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s some kind of change going on out there.”

  “Wh-what kind of change?”

  “Don’t you see how the color’s deepening? There’s more purple in it. That’s caused by tentacles flattening out more — showing more of the underside along the edge.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “In this case,” he said slowly, “I think it signifies empathy.”

  “I — I don’t understand.”

  “Haven’t you ever noticed that when two people want to open out to one another, they tend to show it by the way they hold their bodies. It’s the same with the Nar. Unconsciously they’re saying, see, I’m offering you a greater communicating surface.”

  He grinned at her suddenly. “I think the Nar have decided they want to get to know human beings better.”

  The declarations went on through the long day and into the time of double shadows. They seemed to feed on each other as more and more people, not waiting to be summoned, were moved to explain themselves.

  The encircling tide of life bulged at a dozen places to hear them. A number of times Bram saw decapods from the outer layers pick their way through the interlocking pattern of tentacles and take their places in the front row of examiners. What this special interest signified, he did not know.

  Twice, Nar bailiffs brought pails of food and ladled it out to the humans where they sat. The benches stayed crowded; people were unwilling to leave to be fed at the kitchen tents.

  Bram sipped from his bowl, hardly tasting the thin puree. He tur
ned to Ang and said, “It’s going well, think.”

  She, too, could sense the changed mood of the Nar. “You don’t think we’ll be punished?”

  “There was never a question of that. The Nar don’t like to cause pain. They imagine it too well.”

  No, he thought, whatever has to be done, they will do it painlessly.

  But now, he dared to hope, perhaps a limited number of babies would be allowed — to maintain the Compound and its microcosm of human culture at a reduced population level. More supervision and more privileges.

  Orris leaned over the back of his seat and said anxiously, “You really think it’s going well?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, but yes, I do.”

  “Marg wants to testify.”

  “Is she up to it?”

  “You know Marg when she’s made up her mind to do something. Nothing can stop her. She’s been awfully depressed, but now she says she thinks someone ought to let the Nar know about how humans feel about parenthood — about raising our own children, not just being part of a pool for genetic constructs.”

  Orris was still pursuing his fantasy of unlimited reproduction. Bram did not want to dash his hopes. “Well, it can’t do any harm,” he said.

  “I’d better get back to her. I don’t like to leave her alone too long.”

  With a nervous backward glance at the penitents lined up along the fence, Orris hopped away toward the rows of privacy booths in the interior of the enclosure. Bram watched him lift up a flap and duck inside.

  For the last hour, the Nar had been summoning Penserites. A few of Penser’s lieutenants clung dully to their revolutionary slogans, though disavowing violence, but most were appalled by the enormity of what they had done, and their shamefaced contrition showed.

  Fraz, when he had seen how things were going, had not waited to hear his name called. He had risen painfully from his invalid’s litter with the help of a couple of colonists and hobbled to the barrier with a little support. Now, leaning heavily on Eena’s good arm, he addressed himself to the jumble of eyes and tentacles.