Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

take us out of turn,” Marg told him. “They do that sometimes. Passengers first, freight second.”
    Orris was unfastening his webbing and struggling to sit up, though it wasn’t strictly within the rules. As an old hand of five or six round trips during the past months of acclimatization, he didn’t take the gentle accelerations of docking maneuvers very seriously.
    “Last minute rush,” he said. “It’s mostly freight on this voyage. All the things you need to open up a new world— even though Juxt One’s been settled for generations. Seeds, tools, frozen soil organisms, heavy machinery. It never stops. There’re still whole undeveloped continents, new moons to get started on, and the industrial base there just can’t handle it yet.”
    “How many Nar are making the trip?” Bram asked.
    He gave half his attention back to the window. The great timbered hexagon filled half the black sky. Bram could see the wriggling silver specks swarming around the parked shuttles: space-suited Nar manhandling the cargo flats out of the bays and lashing on the booster units that would send them along to the tree.
    “A couple of thousand,” Orris said. “Close to the minimum for their kind of social dynamics on a seven-year trip. Most of them are still planetside for final touch ceremonies. They’ll be ferried up en masse just before the tree spreads its leaves for departure.”
    Marg gave a tinkling laugh. “At this point, we humans have the tree practically to ourselves. There’s only a skeleton crew of Nar aboard.”
    “That’s right,” Orris said. “With two hundred colonists and all the well-wishers, we outnumber the Nar temporarily.”
    “Do they have their own branch?” Bram asked.
    “No, they’re several miles upstairs from us—same branch, closer to the trunk. Ecology control and life support are more efficient that way—just one set of lines to the sapwood. They’ll be living at about nine-tenths of a gravity. They’ve got a cross section of three or four miles with I don’t know how many levels. Of course, they need a lot more living space than we do.”
    “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted,” Bram said.
    “Good distance makes good neighbors,” Marg said, quoting a Quarter poet who was known for his crusty Resurgist views.
    Bram was shocked. In his involvement with the Ascendists and with Penser’s Schismatist extremists, he’d forgotten that there were others in the human community who had their own reasons for wanting to have little to do with the Nar.
    “Well, humans have their own social institutions,” Bram said diplomatically, “but as kids we all had Nar playmates.”
    “Oh, I have nothing against the Nar,” Marg said hastily, belatedly remembering Bram’s friendship with Tha-tha and his close relationship with Voth. “It’s just that we have our own lives, don’t we?”
    “What Marg means,” Orris said, laughing, “is that she doesn’t really trust anyone she can’t cook for.”
    Outside the port, the enormous mitered joints of the space station’s hub grew until they filled the view. They were among the parked shuttles now. Bram saw a cluster of space-suited Nar dock workers, like a bouquet of double-ended flowers, swimming outward on their thrusters with the wide circular mouth of a docking tube. But it wasn’t meant for Bram’s ship. As Bram watched, they hitched the free-turning collar of the tube to the nose of a shuttle that had just arrived.
    Orris was beside him at the port. “They’re going to make us wait,” he said. “You might as well get out of your webbing and move around.”
     
    “The human traffic was heavier than anticipated,” the Nar attendant said apologetically. “And now I’m afraid there’ll be another wait while additional transfer vehicles are brought over.”
    Orris sighed. “We might as well go to the passenger lounge. There’s a fairly good human canteen there. Though from the look of this mob, it’s going to be overcrowded.”
    Bram looked at the crowd that was swarming around the attendant to ask questions. But they were not the ones who were worrying him. He was disturbed by some of the shuttle passengers who came through the disembarkation tube one at a time and avoided the reception area, swimming along the walls toward the drop chutes, carrying oddly shaped luggage—long narrow parcels or bulbous padded shapes that even in free fall could be seen to mass a lot for their size. Bram didn’t