“I promised Voth-shr-voth I’d feed you,” Jun Davd said, smiling down at him. “Don’t worry—your galaxy won’t go away.”
Bram smiled back. Jun Davd was very nice, with a kindly, creased face that was several shades darker than Bram’s, almost the color of stained wood. His hair was a bush of pure white. He was old for a human, and had risen as high as a human being could go—to a shadowy status somewhere between an apprentice and an intern.
“All right, Jun Davd,” Bram said. He took the slender gnarled hand and let himself be led from the fascinating chamber to the cubbyhole where Jun Davd worked and lived amidst a clutter of instruments and a spartan few personal possessions.
They were stopped several times along the way by Nar personnel who wanted to greet the little boy and inquire after the absent Voth-shr-voth. During the past year they had become accustomed to the sight of the human child who was brought by his Nar guardian from time to time to be shown some of the distant wonders trapped by the big eye’s living system of mirror optics, and to be given some rudimentary tutoring in astronomy by Jun Davd. Voth-shr-voth was held in high esteem, and every courtesy was extended to him—though why he was encouraging a fruitless interest in astronomy in his human ward was unclear, since Voth himself was renowned for his bioengineering achievements, and presumably if he wanted to make a place for the boy, he would do it in his own touch group.
Bram presented the palms of his hands to meet the proffered tentacle tips and answered their inquiries gravely and politely. A nudge from Jun Davd reminded him to add the honorific; it was hard to remember that the eminent Voth-shr-voth was the plain old Voth whom Bram had known since his nursery days, when his own principal gene mother, mama-mu Dlors, had given over the largest part of his care.
Even the observatory’s director, the venerable Pfaf-tlk-pfaf, showed Voth a special deference. Voth was several centuries older than the director, and near to the time of his Change. Bram didn’t know exactly what the Change was, but it had something to do with why you hardly ever saw a lady Nar, except for the rare infirm and draped individual being carried in a biolitter, and why there was no such thing as a little girl Nar, only touch brothers. Bram had asked about it, but Nar grownups were always evasive, the way mama-mu Dlors always changed the subject when he asked how human babies were assembled.
“Pfaf-tlk-pfaf is very busy now,” Jun Davd told Bram, “but perhaps he’ll be able to see you for a few minutes later on.”
“And then will he show me the galaxy of Original Man with the big eye?” Bram asked.
“We’ll see. The big eye is doing some very important work at the moment—a survey of the heart of this galaxy, the one we live in.”
“But you promised.”
“All in due course. First, lunch.”
A short while later, Bram pushed away his half-finished bowl of chimerical soycorn porridge and wiped his lips on the damp cloth Jun Davd gave him. “All through,” he said.
“Would you like a sweetcrisp?”
“No, thank you. Can we see it now?”
Jun Davd went over to a keyboard that had been haywired to a Nar touch pad. An oval screen lit up with fuzzy visual patterns generated by an interface program that Jun Davd had written himself. No one but Jun Davd could make sense of it, but Bram had resolved that some day he would learn to read it, too.
“The big eye’s still busy,” Jun Davd said, “but I can give you the last stored view. We swung that way about a Tenday ago.”
Bram was disappointed. “I wanted to have a really now look, not a picture.”
Jun Davd laughed. “You couldn’t tell the difference. Anyway, there’s no such thing as a really now look. The light from Original Man’s galaxy left there thirty-seven million years ago, and the images are all processed one way or another.”
“I can so tell the difference. It isn’t the same thing.”
Jun Davd’s expression sobered. He squatted on his haunches to look into Bram’s eyes. “I understand, Bram. You want to feel that you’re seeing the actual light of home. But even the big eye only collects photons one at a time and assembles them into an image. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I guess so,” Bram said reluctantly. He brightened. “Could we see it with your telescope—the little one?”
The telescope that Jun Davd tended in an adjacent structure was small only by comparison with the big eye; it was a huge drumlike object mounted on rocker beams. With it you could see the planets of the lesser sun, and even the gas giant that revolved around Juxt, the closest extrasystem star, almost a light-year away.
“No, it’s too small,” Jun Davd said. “You know that, Bram. I’ve explained it all before. Compared to the Milky Way, even our neighbor galaxy, the Bonfire, is practically next door. The Milky Way is so far away that when the light we detect first left it, there weren’t even any Nar here on the Father World—just the little seashore creatures that were their ancestors. So we can never see Original Man’s galaxy as it is now.”
“We could if we waited another thirty-seven million years,” Bram said reasonably.
“I guess we could at that,” Jun Davd laughed. “Come around then and I’ll show it to you. In the meantime…”
He busied himself at the human-style keyboard and a sea of stars appeared in the oval screen. After a lot of jiggling, a fuzzy dot centered itself, grew in size, and sharpened into the image of a feathery coil of light with a golden yolk at the center.
Bram caught his breath. Jun Davd had shown him more spectacular sights through the telescope, but there was none that caused the sudden gripping pain in his small chest that the sight of humankind’s home always did. If he had been allowed to, he could have sat and looked at it for hours, making up stories in his head.
“Jun Davd,” he said at last, “do you think Original Man could speak the Great Language?”
The old apprentice looked at him sharply. “No, I’m quite sure he couldn’t. They were the same as us, those prototype humans who sent the Message—or we’re the same as them, with a few bad genes edited out, of course. Why do you ask?”
“They—they rose so high. Higher than the Nar. Everybody says so, even Voth. How c-could they, if they were like us?”
All of sudden salt tears were rolling down his cheeks. He tried to stop them and smile at Jun Davd, but the smile only made things worse.
Jun Davd took him by the shoulders and turned him gently around to face him. “What happened today, Bram?” he asked softly.
Between sobs, Bram told him about Tha-tha’s promotion to an adult touch reader while he, Bram, couldn’t even understand a toccata on a child’s reader. About the growing facility of his touch brothers in the Great Language while he himself had a growing sense of being left behind. About the feeling of increasingly being left out of things, even though Tha-tha and the others always tried to remember to speak aloud for his benefit.
“I see,” Jun Davd said grimly. “And you wonder what kind of place the world holds for you, especially when you look around at older humans like me and see the limits on how far we can go. I know how you feel, Bram. I was a protégé of the old director—the one before Pfaf-tlk-pfaf—just as you’re a protégé of Voth, and even though he was very close to the Change when I was growing up, he saw to it that I was firmly established before his final metaplasis, and Pfaf-tlk-pfaf has honored his wishes. On the whole, it’s been a good life—the best, I think, that’s reasonably possible.”
Bram flung his arms around Jun Davd’s neck. Hugging a human being was different than hugging a Nar. Human beings had bones that you could feel through the skin. “Why do I have to be different, Jun Davd?” he wailed. “I asked Voth once, and he said it was because I was made of human stuff instead of Nar stuff.”
Jun Davd disengaged him gently and held him at arm’s length so that he could look into his face. “Voth-shr-voth was right; you’re different just because you’re a human being. That doesn’t mean you’re better and it doesn’t mean you�
��re worse. Only a different sort of person. That’s why Voth started to bring you here to the observatory when he first saw that you were interested in where humans come from—so that you could have some sense of your own heritage and be proud of it, not think of yourself as some kind of flawed Nar. I think it would break Voth’s heart to have you apprenticed here instead of with his own touch group, but he was willing to take the chance of losing you so that you could be happy and fulfilled.”
“I’m sorry I cried, Jun Davd.”
“That’s all right, Bram. You cry whenever you feel like it. That’s part of being human, too.”
“I thought that … maybe if Original Man could speak the Great Language, I could learn how someday, too.”
“They reached the heights their own way, Bram. The human way, not the Nar way. And whatever heights the second human race reaches here in this galaxy, we’ll do as humans, too.”
Bram looked at the tiny glowing helix displayed in the viewer. “I’m going to go there someday,” he said with a child’s seriousness.
“You know that’s not possible, Bram. We’ve discussed it often enough. We can reach a few of the nearer stars within a human lifetime—though we’d be very, very old by the time we got much farther than Juxt or Next. And the Nar can travel about ten times farther within their lifetimes. But the limit will always be about a hundred light-years—maybe a few thousand light-years within our own galaxy if we ever learn to travel at relativistic speeds. But that’s a lot different from crossing the void between galaxies—especially galaxies that aren’t even in our own cluster. No, child, it’s a fine thing to be able to look through a telescope at these distant objects, but they can never be reached across an ocean of time, any more than you or I could return to our own egghood. Voth wants you to be happy in your life. And that means making your way here, in the real world, as best you can.”
It was one of those adult speeches that Bram had learned to shut his ears to. His eyes had never left the golden spiral in the screen.
“I didn’t mean right now, Jun Davd,” he said complacently. “I meant someday.”
The someday never came. Bram became immersed in life. As his touch brothers outdistanced him, he spent more and more time with friends from the human enclave and shared their purely human concerns. By adolescence, few of the humans had much in common with their Nar touch brothers anymore, and Bram was no exception. Tha-tha made an effort to keep in touch with him—still peeled down his waxy outer integument and unfolded his inner surfaces while they jabbered away in their childhood patois of Inglex-laced Small Language—but Tha-tha had his own Nar life to live, a life that grew ever more incomprehensible to Bram.
It didn’t matter. Bram, full of the juices of youth, had the heady excitement of human society to sample. All around him was a ferment of art, music, literature, fashion-people busily assimilating the sketchy outlines of human culture as it had been transmitted in the Message, and building on it. People doing things!
He left mama-mu Dlors’ nest and moved into the bachelor lodge. He was on his way to an adult life with new freedom to explore. He forgot childish dreams; the visits to Jun Davd at the observatory became less frequent and finally ceased entirely. Astronomy was a dead end for humans anyway, as Jun Davd’s example had shown. Bioengineering was where the honors lay—where there was a hope of practical results that could have a recognizable impact on the miniature human communities scattered through the Father World. A human named Willum-frth-willum had even been granted a Nar-style honorific for his contributions to the development of viral monofilament, and then had gone on to achieve celebrity among his fellow human beings for recreating additional terrestrial life forms, such as the tomato, by working backward from existing genes of human foodstuffs included in the Message. There was an old human saying to the effect that the invention of a new sauce contributes more to human welfare than the discovery of a new star; how much more important, then, was it to bring more variety to the limited human diet? When it came time for Bram to make a career choice, Willum-frth-willum’s shining example was already there before him.
So Bram made his adult compromise with life. Voth’s bioengineering touch group had always been waiting with open tentacles to take him in as a sponsored human; he was under the mantle of the great Voth-shr-voth, after all. But Bram proved to have a natural talent for the work, and soon he was holding his own. He had a greater affinity for the Great Language than most humans—he could even manipulate a touch reader well enough to call forth basic menus, and could find his way around the files with a minimum of help. In no time at all he was given greater responsibility, formed genuine working relationships with the Nar juniors, and was allowed to run his own subprojects.
Bram threw himself into his work; it was solid and useful, gave form and purpose to his life, and gave him status in the human community.
He avoided Jun Davd; he could not have said why. Every once in a while he would find himself staring at the blank patch of night sky that contained the faraway galaxy of the first human race. But you couldn’t see anything without a telescope. Bram would shake off an obscure, nagging sense of loss—a feeling he was not willing to examine—and allow the realites of daily life to absorb him.
There was a brief affair with Mim—but they lived in two different worlds now. He was part of the larger concerns of the Father World—minor though his role at the biocenter was. Mim had withdrawn more and more into the purely human ambience of the Compound, where a feverish minority of Resurgists tried to ignore the Nar civilization that supported them, and worked to recreate a semblance of an imagined human past. Eventually Bram lost Mim to an older man—Olan Byr, a musician like herself, who had made a name for himself as a tireless interpreter of the old music.
In due course, Bram formed a relationship with an exciting young woman named Kerthin, a sculptress with some radical ideas about human ascendancy in the sea of Nar that submerged them. Bram was entranced by her; he tried to show her that his thinking was as advanced as hers, but she laughed at him, told him that he was stuffy and conventional, but that she liked him anyhow.
Bram was ready to settle down by then; he formally proposed a visit to the gene co-op with Kerthin. Preliminary gene mapping had given him every reason to hope that the two of them would be allowed to contribute a preponderant number of their genes to a composite genome and rear the child as their own. It would be the final step in the settled existence he had contrived for himself.
But Kerthin was evasive. She teased Bram about being too complacent. There were still great things to be done, she told him. She was not ready to settle down.
For the human race had reinvented politics.
The human population of the Father World, small as it still was, had grown to the point where it supported a remarkable number of factions, calling themselves by such names as Partnerites, Schismatists, Resurgists, Ascendists. Kerthin’s friends were a fanatical splinter group of the staid, old Ascendist party.
Unwillingly, Bram was drawn into the conspiratorial schemes of Kerthin and her friends, at first only to keep an eye on Kerthin, and later to protect a startling secret he had uncovered through his work at the Nar biocenter.
Human beings were meant to be immortal!
Bram’s unusual facility with touch readers had provided the key. While rummaging through the old files, he had discovered that the original human genome constructed by Nar bioengineers was incomplete. A codicil to the great Message of Original Man, received some fifty years into the second cycle of the transmission, had contained instructions for a synthetic virus able to infect human cells with the disease of eternal life. The tailored DNA had the ability to insinuate itself into human nucleotides and turn off a “death gene”—a genetic switch that expressed itself after a certain number of cell generations. The information had rested in the files for a thousand years—either unrecognized, or interdicted because of environmental dangers associated with it.
Bram shuddered to think what K
erthin’s wild-eyed friends might do with such information. At best they would use it to inflame human passions, to put an end to the trust between human and Nar. Bram did not believe that the information had been hidden on purpose. He believed in the good will of the Nar, and he waited for the opportune moment to bring the matter up with Voth. But first he wanted to be sure.
While Bram was still trying to decide what to do, a starship arrived from Juxt One. Aboard it, having traveled for seven years, was the Ascendist messiah for whom Kerthin and her friends had been waiting.
His name was Penser, and what he preached was a mindless violence that he described as a “cleansing.” The universe belonged to man by right, he told his disciples, and could not be shared with the Nar. He dismissed Nar largess. “To share is weakness,” he said. “To accept is weakness.” He advocated taking by force what the Nar were giving voluntarily. On Juxt One he had stirred his followers to acts of sabotage in which Nar had been killed. The abortive revolution had been hushed up by the horrified human settlers, and had not been recognized for what it was by the peaceable and unsuspecting Nar. Penser had fled under a false identity stolen from one of his disciples.
Now Penser proposed to hijack one of the great living starships and, with a few hundred followers, use it to take over a thinly inhabited moon of Jumb, the gas giant orbiting the Lesser Sun. The small Nar population there would be deported—killed if they resisted; the human colonists, Penser believed, would have no option but to go along with his plans once the deed was done.
The takeover would be accomplished before the Nar on nearby Ilf, the Lesser Sun’s principal inhabited planet, realized what was happening. After that, according to Penser, the Nar commonwealth would accept the situation to prevent useless further violence.
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