“We were wrong,” he said hoarsely. He looked round to see who was listening and Bram had a glimpse of red lips writhing within a scraggly black fringe. “We did a terrible thing. Penser misled us
He swayed, and Eena propped him up, bracing her hip against his.
“All we wanted was one little moon we could call our own,” he said brokenly. “A home in the universe for human beings. But we shouldn’t have tried to take it by force. We should have tried to make you understand!”
Eena led him away. Bram could see tears running down her face.
A stir of interest passed along the benches, and Bram saw that Pite had been summoned to the fence. Pite was someone that all of the colonists and their unlucky visitors recognized by now.
Pite swaggered to the grille, his thumbs hooked into his belt. His beard had regrown itself into a bristly half-inch stubble that gave his face a fuzzy indefinite shape.
“It wasn’t our policy to hurt tenlegs, or human beings either,” he said cooly in response to a question from the decapod who was the momentary proxy of the assembly. “It was the fault of those who resisted us. They gave us no choice. It was they who were the cause of the violence.”
Pite was close enough for Bram to hear him directly. The little loudspeaker at the moment was expressing some abstraction of the merged Nar consciousness. The Nar who was examining Pite stretched toward him in a reflex of communication, then recoiled before touching him.
“To resist the destiny of man is a crime,” Pite went on steadily. “The universe belongs to us by right. Those who resisted brought their deaths upon themselves.”
“Why is he saying those awful things?” Ang asked, squirming in her seat. “He’ll get them angry.”
“No,” Bram said. “He won’t get them angry.”
Another front-row Nar withdrew a tentacle from the latticed mass to coil it in agitation around the empty air and framed a question in stilted Chin-pin-yin. Pite stared blankly; the Nar received a correction through his leeward limbs and rephrased the query in Inglex:
“Surely the parturient Voth-shr-voth on the eve of his great change would not have resisted your wishes …”
“If you’re talking about the tenleg biotechnician who was supposed to get the tree moving for us, he didn’t move fast enough to suit me. He needed to be taught a little respect. How did I know he couldn’t take it?”
A vast yellow and violet ripple spread around the rim of the enclosure and receded into the distance until it was invisible. Bram could smell the acrid tang of revulsion hanging in the sir. It was part of the Great Language, a faint trace that even a human could pick up subliminally if he was enwrapped by a Nar. Here, in the middle of a jammed throng of Nar sharing a common emotion, the odor was almost palpable.
Ang knew what it meant. It must have called up childhood memories of her own adoptive tutor, as it had for Bram.
“What is that fool doing to us?” she said in a tiny squeak. “Can’t somebody make him stop?”
Pite went on, oblivious of the distaste he was arousing.
“… we would have succeeded, too, if it hadn’t been for the spineless cowards among us — and the traitors who stabbed Penser in the back.” He was gaining courage and self-importance with every unreprimanded moment. “They’ll be dealt with when the time comes. And the time will come. We’ll rise again. Penser may be dead but his spirit lives on …”
Even in the cowed collection of people within earshot, there were voices telling Pite to shut up. Three tight-lipped men looked at one another, then got up in unison and tried to drag Pite away from the fence. He swung and knocked one of them down. The man got up with a bloody nose and helped the other two to grab Pite’s arms. Pite shrugged, gave up fighting, and let them take him away.
One of the men was burly and red-bearded. Bram was momentarily surprised when he recognized him. It had been Jao.
There were more ripples in the sea of Nar, retreating gradually to the horizon, and another odor replaced the acrid one. A memory came to Bram of himself as a very small child, unable to make himself stop misbehaving and trying to understand why he had saddened Voth.
Sorrow. Disappointment.
Around the rim of the enclosure, all the loudspeakers suddenly went silent.
Ang reached blindly for Bram’s hand and squeezed it so hard that it hurt. “It’s all over, isn’t it?” she said. “We’ve lost.”
As the primary shadows lengthened into the half-night and the moons began to show themselves, people continued to try to attract the attention of the brooding presence around them. They stood and pleaded, or harangued at length, and in one case even shouted. But there was no reaction. No Nar proxy spoke to them, and the front rank of tentacles remained unbroken.
Bram saw Marg get up, her face wan and her shoulders slumped, despite Orris’s hovering effort to dissuade her. She was too far away for Bram to hear what she was saying, but after a while she threw her shoulders back and faced the unresponsive mass with something of her old self-confidence. Orris stood beside her, holding her hand through it all. After a while Marg gave up; her shoulders drooped again and she let Orris lead her away toward the central rest area.
Bram made up his mind shortly after primeset.
The lesser sun was an orange jewel in the sky, casting soft ghostly shadows and deepening the hue of the brimming tide of Nar that licked at the enclosure. The ringed human seats were half empty; people had left to be fed and to try to take some rest after the long day. Pite had not been seen again; some of the men were keeping him hidden away under guard in a privacy booth.
Bram himself had dozed off once or twice. He had not intended to join the procession to the fence. There was very little point to it, he thought, given the circumstances. But he woke from a dream in which his name was being called, softly and persistently, in the deep pure tones of the Small Language.
He looked over at the wall of shadowed tentacles beyond the fence. There was only silence there, except for the ever-present background rustle of billions of respirating bodies, like leaves in the wind.
He shivered. The temperature had dropped several degrees since the setting of the true sun. He looked around and saw the empty benches and the listless postures of those who remained. They had given up. No one had tried to talk to the Nar in the last hour or two.
Bram got up and went to the fence. There was no answering movement from the other side, no sign that anyone had noticed him.
“I am Bram,” he said.
He waited several minutes and thought he heard a change in the rhythm of the vast collective bellows that closeness had made synchronous, but he might have been mistaken.
He spoke again. “I claim the attention of my touch brothers, if they are present.”
There was another long wait, but this time a salient of flesh pressed itself unmistakably toward the fence. A row of mirror eyes reflected orange light toward him.
“You are that Bram who was the ward of Voth-shr-voth?”
“Yes,” he replied. He was surprised that his voice was steady.
“Speak,” said the low resonant tones.
“I am more than a ward of Voth-shr-voth, with touch brothers who have outgrown me as other humans have been outgrown by their touch brothers. Voth-shr-voth adopted me into his own touch group. And though I am mute in the Great Language, I claim membership in this assembly.”
Some of the people drowsing on the benches noticed that a human had succeeded in initiating an exchange with the Nar, and nudged their neighbors. A couple of people ran toward the interior rest area to spread the news.
A stirring of limbs caught Bram’s attention and he looked across to see an unattached Nar stilt-walking on stiffened points through the shadowed mosaic of star-shaped forms. The tall being settled down in the front row without any fuss and plugged two or three tentacles into the group.
“Hello, touch brother,” the newcom
er said in a familiar half-human patois.
“Tha-tha!” Bram exclaimed. Then he remembered and corrected himself. “Excuse me. Tha-shr-tha.”
“We are Tha-tha and Bram,” his childhood playmate said. “We swam as fingerlings together under the shelter of the same foster limb, and that cannot change.”
A free tentacle extruded itself and wrapped itself around Bram’s shoulders, with its final two feet coming to rest along one arm and clasping his hand. Another tentacle snaked through the grillwork of the low fence and slipped under Bram’s shirt to curl around his ribs and cover his bare chest.
The familiar warmth was almost too much to bear. He knew Tha-tha was thinking the same thing, because he could feet the involuntary cilia movement trace a childish outline of Voth’s name.
“Can you bear to touch me, Tha-tha?” he whispered.
“Hush, touch brother. Whatever may be, Voth’s limbs lay across us.”
The feather touch of the fuzzy undersurface was being modified by the input of the Nar to whom Tha-tha was connected, including Bram’s original inquisitor. Bram could feel the overtones of distaste and incomprehension, and Tha-tha’s own constraint in the face of it.
But for whatever it was worth, the surrounding Nar were also straining to accommodate Tha-tha’s perceptions of Bram. Bram could make out secondhand traces of Tha-tha’s name in the Great Language as reflected in its owner’s reaction to its recognition by others. Tha-tha was very young to have been given an honorific. Bram had not seen him in recent years, but he had gathered that Tha-tha’s touch symphonies had marked him as one of those prodigies who come along only once in a Nar generation.
Tha-tha’s presence was only a single bucket of warmth poured into a chilly ocean, but Bram was grateful for it.
“Sesh-akh-sesh spoke of your kindness to him,” the designated inquisitor said unexpectedly.
Bram remembered the trembling decapod whom Pite had turned into jelly with his electric shocks. The image had caused a flutter in the surrounding Nar that Bram could sample in Tha-tha’s tentacles.
“How — how does Sesh-akh-sesh fare?” he asked, swallowing.
“He grieves.” The term in the Small Language denoted a kind of funk into which the Nar sometimes sank, leaving them apathetic and incapacitated. “His touch brothers now try to heal his spirit.”
“I’m sorry,” Bram said miserably.
In counterpoint, Tha-tha was telling the assembly about Voth’s great affection for his human adoptee, reminding them that Bram had not been responsible for Voth’s death or other events on the tree. He stressed that the awful circumstances of Voth’s premature dissolution had been a horror to Bram, too — insofar as human beings, whose reproduction was apart from their lives and deaths, could intuit such things.
There was no vocal transcript from the soundposts, perhaps because Tha-tha wished none, but Bram was utterly sure of the subject matter because of the traces of gross meaning he was able to fit together from Tha-tha’s tactile patterns.
Tha-tha fed him back some of the assembly’s reaction, too. But Bram was unable to make anything of the crawling sensations and the chemical astringencies except for one puzzling moment when the symbolic outline of a human — standing for himself, he was sure — tried to change its shape into the symbol of a decapod. It writhed, failed, and turned into a distorted abomination. That too dissolved, leaving an evaporating impression of a remote, monumental pity.
It was too much for him. Hot tears stung, and without pausing to weigh the consequences, he let the bitter, bottled-up truth spill out.
“No, we humans are not like the Folk. Though some of us have tried to be — with the tragic results you’ve seen. Our lives are short — too short for us to make our mark among the Folk — and we have not the gift of Language.”
He took a deep breath and plunged recklessly on. “But we don’t need your pity. Because we’re not failed Nar, not imitations of you. We’re the human race, and the heirs of Original Man — though part of our inheritance has been denied us!”
He felt Tha-tha’s musculature tighten convulsively. A stir went through the assembly, and then a vast backwash of indulgence. Bram’s sting had been received as a datum, not as an affront. The kneading pulse of Tha-tha’s mantle was uncannily like a phantom echo of Voth, when the old teacher had decided to be lenient to a small alien creature who knew no better.
“Bram-bram,” Tha-tha resonated with the compassion of the gathering filtering though him. “We could not fashion you to be like us, but we gave you existence.”
“You gave us our existence,” Bram agreed. “But you withheld our immortality.”
A shiver went through Tha-tha. There was a long delay while something unnameable surged through the conclave, out to its outer edges, and to the satellite conclaves beyond, then back again, bearing the flotsam of all those decapods who had ever known anything about the creation of man.
“What is this?” Tha-tha asked, speaking for them.
Haltingly at first, then in a fluent torrent that could not be denied, Bram told them all about it.
It took a long time.
A small moon set and another rose while Bram talked. Outside the fence, the dappled expanse of Nar lifted like a tide as each separate decapod strained involuntarily to give full attention.
Within the island of humans, a crowd quickly gathered around Bram in a huge crescent as the word of what he was saying spread. The soundposts remained silent; Bram’s revelations were passed along by word of mouth. Messengers ran to the inner area to carry the word to those who had not yet heard.
Man was meant to live forever.
And the secret of eternal life was locked somewhere in the dusty Message of Original Man.
Bram left nothing out. And he did not spare himself. He told his silent judges how he had deceived Voth, the being who had raised him, and how he had pursued his researches with stolen materials. He told them of Kerthin’s ugly suspicions, and how he had been infected by them. And how he had withheld the knowledge of his discovery from Kerthin and Penser’s other acolytes for fear of the consequences.
“Penser would have used such knowledge to inflame all mankind. But I myself came to believe that it was within the power of the Nar to confer the gift of immortality on humanity.”
The assembled nation of Nar listened in silence. Bram could not tell whether they had guilty knowledge of human immortality or were learning about it for the first time.
When the first human ovum had been assembled, Voth had been the youngest of apprentices. Were other members of that long-ago touch team still alive? Still out there, listening to Bram with the rest? If so, their memories were available to the assembly.
Tha-tha oozed more of himself through the fence, enwrapping Bram more closely and amplifying his imperfect human speech for the multitude. Bram could sense his touch brother’s unease, but he could not even tell if Tha-tha had known. All he knew was that Tha-tha had shared tentacles with Voth.
“You believed,” Tha-tha said, cradling him, “that Voth deliberately withheld this information from you, and that the whole race of Nar kept it hidden for all the generations of man?”
“I — I did for a time,” Bram replied in a shamed whisper. “I could see no other explanation. But later I came to believe that Voth and his touch brothers of long ago had simply turned away from the implications of what they found.”
There was no word for “turning away” in the Small Language, but Tha-tha remembered his childhood Inglex.
“Perhaps,” Tha-tha said, “they did not wish to look closely at what they had found because they feared further understanding, as one fears to put a single limb on a dangerous path because it may tempt the other limbs to follow.”
“I believe that Voth had already put a foot on that path before he died,” Bram said in bitter self-reproach. “He — he gave me the help I needed. He … looked the other way while I did things behind his back.”
Again, Bram had to substitute an
Inglex idiom. Tha-tha gave the decapod equivalent of a nod: a brushlike strum of encouragement.
“I think … Voth wished me success, so that there could be no turning back.” Bram said. “But it must have been
“It is painful for all of us to face, Bram-bram, my brother,” Tha-tha said softly.
The petals enveloping Bram conveyed a strange and complex mixture of emotions from the Nar nation beyond. The eerie realization came to Bram that it went both ways: that all the billions of intertwined Nar on this planet and its neighbor worlds were feeling his body through Tha-tha’s perceptions, knowing what it was to caress a human with their tentacles.
He wondered what they could possibly glean from his mute, alien body.
When he had been a child, wrapped in the cloak of Voth’s limbs and feeling the warm surges of the Great Language against his bare skin, he had sometimes believed that he was transmitting his inner thoughts through the surface of his body to Voth, just as if he were a Nar, too. Now, knowing that the eavesdropping billions could feel his every slight shiver, every droplet of perspiration, his goose bumps, the raising of each individual hair, the very pulse of blood through his capillaries, he had the same mystic illusion of tactile speech.
Understand, he willed them fiercely. Understand!
The crescent of humans contracted more closely around him as he went on talking. Whispered accounts passed through the crowd to the outer fringes. Bram finished by confessing his scheme to assemble the immortality virus with the clandestine help of human specialists from the Compound if that became necessary. “I believed the knowledge was forbidden,” he said, “and that man would have to reach out with his own hand and pluck the gift of eternal life for himself.”
He listened with his skin to the ghostly touch whispers filtered through Tha-tha, but he could not tell if he had swayed the Nar or made matters worse. He had gained their sharp attention — that he did know from the sudden stillness out across the narscape as billions of decapods forgot to breathe.
The Genesis Quest Page 33