Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

a hand on Bram’s arm. It was Spak. He looked different, too. Instead of a mono with sawed-off sleeves, he wore ill-fitting holiday garb.
    “That’s not a good idea, Brammo,” Pite said, smiling with his new, narrow little mouth. “You wouldn’t want to make any of the gene brothers nervous. Think what a firebottle would do in a crowded place like this.”
    “You’re crazy,” Bram said. “You people are crazy.”
    “Now, there’s a useful thought, gene brother. Keep hanging on to it in case you’re tempted to do something foolish. We’ll see you at the tree.”
    Bram shook off Spak’s hand and took a backward step. “Are you coming, Kerthin?” he said stiffly.
    “That’s right, Brammo,” Pite said. “You just go back to your friends there and keep your mouth shut, and no one will get hurt. Remember, you’re being watched all the way. Why, if you got any wrong ideas, there’s no telling who might get in the way while you were being dealt with. That pretty little lady over there, for instance.”
    As Bram walked back across the teeming floor with Kerthin at his side, he felt his heart pounding. He would have to wait his chance, that was all. Perhaps he could manage to slip out of Pite’s surveillance long enough to slip a warning to a Nar officer later on—while boarding the transfer vehick or docking at the tree. Till then he would have to be cautious.
    “How could you do it, Kerthin?” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve been lying to me all along, haven’t you? I thought you’d come to your senses. You saw what happened back there in the Quarter. These people are outside any concept of interspecies or even human comity.”
    She gave her bronze hair a toss. “You can’t make an omelet—” she began.
    “I know,” he sighed. “Without stirring an egg. There’s Marg. Try to put a smile on your face, if you can.”
     
    There were no opportunities to break away and inform Nar personnel about the dubious nature of some of their human transients. One or more of Pite’s spurious merrymakers seemed to be at Bram’s elbow at all times. They mingled with the other tourists and tree dwellers, bearing their odd packages, bunching up in groups of not more than two or three. Bram thought there had been nine or ten in his own shuttle load and probably about the same number in the shuttle that had ferried Pite and Kerthin. How many other shuttles had contained a contingent of Penserites, he could not guess.
    Once, as his group of passengers filed through the embarkation area for the orbital transfer vehicle, Bram had caught sight of a Nar communications officer with a portable sleeve slung from his waist in one-tentacle conversation with a pod-festooned port official, and he had tried to edge out of the flow toward them. But Spak was hovering close behind him, and another burly Penserite moved up, hemming him in.
    “Pite doesn’t trust you,” Kerthin said with something like entreaty in her voice, “but he says it won’t matter after we get to the tree. They’re not going to let you out of their sight till then. Please don’t do anything foolish. I’m—I’m afraid of him.”
    “Why won’t it matter?” Bram said. “What’s going to happen in the tree?”
    “It’ll be all right, you’ll see. Nobody has to get hurt.”
    “You’re having second thoughts, aren’t you? What did Pite mean about all of us being conscripted?”
    She opened her mouth to reply, but at that point Orris bumbled over to them and said, “Don’t let’s get separated. We can get seats together on the transfer boat.”
    Orris bobbed impatiently around them in the almost nonexistent gravity of the departure bay and, lifting them delicately off the floor with a hand under their elbows, towed them over to where Marg was doing an efficient low-gravity shuffle toward the tube mouth. Three big Penserites closed in around them and moved right along with them. One of them bumped into Marg, but she didn’t seem to notice.
    During the long process of matching orbits with the tree, Bram had no chance to talk to Kerthin alone. Orris babbled on unchallenged about the marvelous qualities of the blastocycst that Marg was carrying and its glorious future on Juxt One, while Marg glowed at them, looking smug. The three Penserites hemmed them in, sitting stiffly and trying to look like tourists. Bram tried to pick out other Penserites among the passengers. He counted up to eleven—about half the number he’d seen at