Second Genesis gq-2

by Donald Moffitt

  But for these few moments of solitude he could think about home. For that, after all, was what the annual tree-turning celebration was all about—though it had grown lately into a tradition of its own.

  Home.

  Thirty-seven million years ago there had been an intelligent species that called itself the human race—Original Man. They had dwelt, by all the evidence, on a planet of a yellow sun in a rather isolated galaxy that they called the “Milky Way,” part of a sparse cluster consisting basically of two big spirals and their attendant swarms of small satellite galaxies.

  Whether or not human beings still existed there was impossible to know, of course, when the very light that arrived from the Milky Way was thirty-seven million years old. But it was unlikely in the extreme. It was to be presumed that those humans were long extinct—gone the way of other species before them. Or that in the immensity of time they had evolved out of all recognition, into some new species that could no longer be considered human.

  But before they had vanished or changed, they had left their mark on the universe.

  The heights they must have reached had been dazzling, for they had learned how to tame whole stars and squander their energy. The energy, in unimaginable quantities, had been spent on the ultimate purpose of every species—to perpetuate itself.

  Only this species had defeated the final enemy—the witless yawn of time.

  Transformed into radio waves, the energy had been sprayed in the direction of the local universe that contained the richest clusters of galaxies—galaxies by the thousands, each containing hundreds of billions of suns.

  It had taken all of that thirty-seven million years for the radio waves, expanding at the speed of light, to reach the galaxy where the Father World resided—a sprung spiral that those far-away, long-ago humans had known as the Whirlpool. There, a race of intelligent decapods who called themselves the Nar had intercepted the radio waves and deciphered them.

  And a treasure trove had spilled out.

  The lessons in genetic engineering alone had transformed the Nar civilization and given it abundance. Terrestrial starches and sugars had provided cheap energy and construction materials in the form of cellulose and exotic plastics. The bioengineering techniques, adapted to the Father World’s life forms, had boosted the food supply and led to a host of biological devices that had taken the place of inefficient machinery. The genetic blueprint for a fast-growing tree called a poplar, included in the kit, had paved the way for the great living spaceships like Yggdrasil which plied the spaceway at up to one-seventh the speed of light and, with their world-size environments, made interstellar exploration at last practical and inexpensive.

  But the centerpiece of the great Message was the genetic blueprint for humankind itself.

  A mere millennium later—a drop in the bucket of cosmic time—the Nar bioengineers had created the second human race and nurtured several generations of it. A modest cultural package included in the Message had even given the new humans the sketch of a human society to enclose them.

  Bram closed his eyes and remembered what it had been like to grow up as a small human child in a world of frondlike giants who towered so far above a little boy that even their girdle of waistline eyes—the closest thing to a face that a Nar possessed—loomed higher than his own eye level.

  To be something between a house pet and the echo of demigods. To be loved and pitied as someone whose physical limitations would forever bar him from full closeness in the Nar touch group that had adopted him, and would forever bar him from full membership in the wider Nar society beyond.

  For humans were handicapped. By their nature they were unable to speak the Great Language in all its tactile richness. Humans had to make do with the crude unenhanced sounds of the Small Language, or their own Inglex or Chin-pin-yin. And they were painfully short-lived. They died after only a century or two, long before they could earn the honorifics that would gain them an adult’s place in an adult’s word.

  Still, he had been cherished. The new people born aboard Yggdrasil would never know what it was like to have Nar touch brothers.

  Bram let the noise of the revelers in the outside corridor fade from his consciousness, and let the old memories wash over him.

  “Bram-bram, guess what?” Tha-tha had said to him that day, in the blend of Inglex and the Small Language they used when speaking to one another.

  Tha-tha was Bram’s favorite touch brother, even though you weren’t really supposed to have favorites.

  “What?” he said absently, staring longingly through an oval casement at the sunny world outside.

  It was a splendid morning, early in the season when the lesser sun left the night sky and spent most of its time in the day. The bay was bright and cloudless, the sky a vivid lavender blue, and Bram could see the sparkling water, full of Nar bathers and colorful little V-winged pleasure boats.

  He turned to contemplate with disfavor the beehive chamber where he and his touch brothers had their lessons and naps. Ranged along the far curve of the wall were the miniature tilt-top body readers against which Tha-tha and the others pressed their outspread upper tentacles—the star-shaped upper surfaces scaled down to child’s size—and his own little desk with its reading screen and big-buttoned board that took the place of the others’ touch pads. There was the toy box, filled with baby things that most of them professed to have outgrown—the spongy alphabet-letters for Bram, and the pyramids and cones and involute spheroids of various textures, and the small furry, mock-alive things that went through their limited tactile sequence when you squeezed them in the right place.

  Two of the young decapods were wrestling, roiling boisterously around on the floor, their stubby little tentacles entwined as they tested one another’s strength. Roughhousing like this was apt to go on when there was no big Nar around to supervise them. For the moment, the old foster-tutor, Voth, had left them to their own devices; they were supposed to be quietly using the touch readers or otherwise usefully occupying their time, but it was hard to concentrate when the weather was so fine and the smell of the salt ocean was in the air, and the whole world seemed to have gone swimming.

  Bram gave a tragic sigh. Lessons were all right, he supposed, but some days it was better to be outside.

  Tha-tha sidled closer to him, piping happily, “Voth says I can have my own grownup-size reader! And library access to grownup touch scores—the easy ones, anyway. And a real composition matrix!”

  “You’re too little,” Bram said scornfully.

  Actually Tha-tha, during the past year, had shot up a full foot above Bram’s mop of rust-colored hair. But the slender decapod form did not yet outmass him, and besides, in Bram’s perceptions, what really counted was eye level, and Tha-tha’s five mirror-eyes, equally spaced around the narrow waistline from which upper tentacles and lower limbs sprouted, still only came to somewhere around Bram’s ribcage.

  “No, really. Voth says I’m getting very proficient. He submitted one of my toccatas; and they said that even though it wasn’t full span, it used areas just like an adult!”

  In his eagerness to communicate, Tha-tha had wrapped one of his tentacles around Bram’s forearm, and Bram could feel the velvety nap of the limb’s underside writhing with effort.

  “I didn’t see what was so special about it,” Bram said stubbornly.

  Bram knew that Tha-tha was very talented—the most talented of all the younglings in his group. Bram had tried to Understand the little toccata that Tha-tha had composed, and had stretched himself across the five-pointed star of one of the readers to let his human skin sample its rippling patterns of cilia movement. But as always, the meaning had eluded him; it had only been something that tickled in structured rhythms.

  “Anyway,” Bram said, casting about for the perfect squelch, “it was nothing but a lot of squares inside squares that kept marching off the edge. I can make a touch reader do that!”

  In fact, Bram had an unusual facility with the Great Language fo
r a human of any age. He was able to manipulate a cilia board well enough to reproduce a few basic commands, and when Voth absentmindedly pressed a limb against his skin, he was often able to recognize some of the simpler morphemes, like numbers.

  Tha-tha said, with a baffled earnestness that showed in the slow beat of his tentacle lining, “But it’s not the shapes that count, Bram-bram. You can have outlines with nothing inside. It’s the meaning they enclose that’s important.”

  Bram felt all the blood drain from his face. He was numb all over, as he had been the time he had slipped on a sheet of winter ice and come down flat on his belly and had all the wind knocked out of him.

  “It is so the shapes that count,” he insisted feebly. “You can tell lots of things from the shapes.”

  Tha-tha belatedly remembered that he had been admonished by Voth to make allowances for his four-limbed brother. He damped down the cilia movement in the tentacle that held Bram’s arm and concentrated on the fluting sounds of the Small Language coming from deep within his central gullet.

  “Never mind, Bram-bram, Su-su didn’t understand it either.” He gestured with a couple of spare limbs toward one of the wrestling brothers. Su-su was squealing in simpleminded triumph. He had his opponent pinned, with all five of the upper tentacles wrapped up in a tight bundle by Su-su’s encircling grip and the lower limbs off the floor, flailing wildly for purchase.

  Bram’s features screwed up, and he found himself ready to cry. Tha-tha, trying to be kind, had just made it worse. Everybody liked Su-su, but he wasn’t much in the brains department. He had trouble doing the simplest arithmetic and, Bram gathered, even the Great Language had been slow to develop in him. He communicated in the Small Language and in tactile baby talk, and it was obvious that Voth was becoming concerned about him.

  “Leave me alone!” He jerked his arm out of Tha-tha’s grasp and stomped over to his desk reader. It was the only one with a vision screen. The others’ touch readers didn’t need them, Tha-tha said, because the Great Language, even in its juvenile form, provided a sort of perception that was like pictures, only better—just as it was faster to count in the Great Language with its racing ranks of cilia than on a human-style keyboard. The visual cross-connection had something to do with the way the Nar brain worked. Bram’s touch brothers were capable of appreciating the pictures of his vision screen, but most of the time they watched them without much interest, just to be polite.

  Savagely, Bram punched buttons almost at random, but his small fingers were cleverer than his rage, and he found himself looking at some of his favorite sequences from the history lessons about Original Man.

  Here were the human race’s achievements in all their splendor and glory, as imagined by human artists with the help of computer reconstructions drawn from clues in the great Message, and interspersed with everyday scenes of the Father World and its family of planets.

  Bram caught his breath at the sight of the shining cities as they must have been, with their pyramids and cathedrals and the cloud-reaching spires that were very much like the tall calcified spirals of the cities that the Nar had grown with the aid of humankind’s bioengineering legacy.

  The pictures shuffled, and he saw the forests of giant trees grown on comets in the deep beyond the Lesser Sun. And the living spaceships derived-from them—great twinned hemispheres of foliage and roots, hundreds of miles in diameter, voyaging to the nearer stars.

  And here was a simulation of a star itself being enclosed in a sort of sphere—the supposition was hazy—and its energy being transformed into the radio waves of the human Message and traveling across the void between galaxies. The Nar themselves couldn’t do anything like that, and would not be able to match such power for tens of thousand of years, if ever.

  And now there was another uniquely human glory—music. The scene shifted to the concert hall that the Nar had grown for their wards in the human Compound. The camera panned across the rapt faces of the audience as they listened to a scrap of their heritage—a grand songfest called “The Messiah,” which had been lovingly reconstructed from the computer readouts of the Message. A mighty chorus of human voices rang out, singing “Wonderful! Marvelous!” in recognizable Inglex, while tears rolled down the faces of the listeners.

  Bram was fighting his own tears. He put his palms flat against the screen, trying to absorb the experience directly.

  Nothing! There never was! Only the hard smooth surface of the screen with the miniature people in it, and the massed voices coming from the speaker. It could not compare with the touch symphonies that so entranced Tha-tha and kept him stretched out on the star-shaped body reader for hours—and that he had tried without success to explain to Bram.

  Bram gave a choked sob and felt the hot tears come.

  What good was it? What good was it to be a human and talk with your voice, when the Nar could talk with their whole bodies? It was only sounds … or symbols which, when you came down to it, could always be transcribed into sounds.

  He began beating on the machine with his small fists, screaming and kicking at it while his touch brothers stopped what they were doing and stared at him in horrified silence.

  Tha-tha warbled tentatively, “Bram-bram.”

  “Go away!” Bram screamed. “Go away, all of you! I hate you!”

  He was still having his tantrum when Voth came in. The old teacher stood in the tall doorway regarding the scene, his cluster of upper limbs writhing thoughtfully. Tha-tha ran in a five-legged scramble over to him and whispered something with one outstretched tentacle, Voth dipping an upper limb to listen.

  “All right, Tha-tha, you can take your brothers to the beach now,” Voth said aloud in his deep tones. “I’m putting you in charge. Tell the door proctor I said it was all right.”

  As the little decapods swarmed confusedly around Tha-tha and flowed in an intertangled mass out the door, Voth went over to Bram and swept him up in his tentacles.

  Bram made a great gulping sound. “Oh, Voth!” he sobbed.

  “Hush, little one. It’s all right.”

  He let the little boy cry himself out in his warm clasp, then set him down and lowered himself to eye level. “How would you like to go to the observatory with me and see our friend Jun Davd?” he said. “We can take a ride in the bubble car and buy some polysugar candy, and Jun Davd will let you look through his telescope.”

  Bram rubbed his eyes with both fists. A small coil of rebellion still burned within him. “I want to go by myself,” he said.

  Voth acted not at all surprised. “You’ve never traveled alone before,” he said. “It’s a very long way to go. You’d have to ask directions in the Small Language, make yourself understood. And—” He paused delicately. “Since you can’t imprint your Word directly, you’d have to use a credit transfer device, and use it correctly.”

  Bram said stubbornly, “Jun Davd is my human friend, and I want to go see him by myself.”

  Voth thought it over. “All right. I guess you’re old enough. But promise me to be careful.”

  Bram hugged Voth around the middle where the skirt of walking members flared outward; the waxy integument was smooth and unyielding, not at all like the warm fluffy lining of the petallike arms. “I promise,” he said.

  “There are no human conveniences after the departure terminal,” Voth said, becoming brisk. “Jun Davd will see that you’re fed. Remember not to eat anything till you get there—not even polysugar. Not even if some well-meaning person offers you something. Many of the Folk do not realize that human and Nar chemistry are different.”

  “I know, Voth.”

  “Here’s a touch token for when you get on the bubble car. Do you know how to make it say what you want?”

  Voth handed him a small flat wedge with one ciliated surface, the kind Nar used in special circumstances when credit delegation was more convenient.

  “Yes,” Bram said. He demonstrated with a deft flutter of fingertips. Numbers were easy.

  “Good. Eve
n a lot of grownup humans never learn how to do that.”

  He escorted Bram down the spiral ramps to the street; this was an old defunct orthocone whose lower septa had long since been scooped of life and its nutrient pool filled in, allowing a ground-level entrance to be added beneath the original overbridge. He hailed a pentapedal carrying-beast and gave it detailed directions to the terminal before lifting Bram to the passenger howdah. Bram looked about eagerly. The white sun-bleached spires and filigree bridges of the city spread endlessly and magically before him; he had every intention of countermanding Voth’s instructions as soon as the beast was out of sight, and doing a little roundabout sightseeing on his way to the terminal. He knew he could do it. The transport creatures responded to voice as well as touch.

  A string of bubble cars passed overhead on their invisible cable. Bram gawked at them, hardly able to believe that soon he would be traveling in one without supervision, just like an adult Nar. Even Tha-tha had never been allowed to do that.

  “I’ll call ahead and have them tell Jun Davd you’re coming,” Voth said. He tapped one of the upright limbs that formed the framework of the howdah and Bram felt himself rising high into the air as his vehicle straightened its five stiltlike legs. A moment later the beast was trotting down the causeway that led toward the terminal. Bram turned back once to wave to Voth. The old decapod waved back in imitation of the human gesture. Bram thought that somehow Voth seemed sad, but he couldn’t imagine why.

  “Do you think we could look at Original Man’s galaxy now, Jun Davd?” Bram asked.

  “In a little while,” the tall man said—tall for a human, though Jun Davd would hardly have topped Voth’s brachiating midsection, even on tiptoes. “But first I’m going to give you some lunch.”

  “I’m not hungry, Jun Davd, honest.” He looked around impatiently at the enormous chalky chasm that housed the observatory’s big eye. Massive machinery loomed overhead in steel cradles. The interior extruded convoluted catwalks of polycarbonate that reached every nook and cranny. Across the immense floor was the eye itself, a great bowl of living jelly that seemed to Bram to be the size of a swimming pond. Aproned Nar attendants, some of them wearing optical girdles, glided silently about, seeing to its needs.