Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

querulous man had stirred something up. The import of all that Penser had said was dawning on everyone.
    “I’ve got a new world to go to!” someone yelped. “It’s called Juxt One, and there’s a whole new life waiting for me there. Steal the tree if you think you can get away with it. But I want to be sent back to Lowstation, too!”
    “Why are we standing around listening to this stuff?” growled a young man with two or three friends around him to egg him on. “There’s more of us than there are of them. Let’s get ‘em! We’ll tie them up and hold them for the Nar inspection team!”
    A clump of earth flew past Penser’s ear, just missing him. He didn’t even flinch.
    “Get that man,” he said.
    A flying wedge of Penserites armed with clubs and chunks of rock forged through the crowd and descended on the dissenter. Arms rose and fell. Grunts of effort were mixed with howls of pain. Orris strained forward, his eyes dilated with horror. “They’ll kill him!”
    Bram grabbed a handful of singlet. “There’s nothing you can do.”
    Up front, the Penser supporters had formed a solid phalanx to prevent anyone from getting through to the platform. The crowd swirled in confusion. There were little eddies of activity where the Penserite forces had previously marked out potential trouble spots and now moved in to quash resistance before it could get started. Nothing much had a chance to get started. The crowd was disorganized. Until an hour ago they’d been having a party. They were deprived of anyone they might have rallied around as soon as he raised his head. The Penser minority had the advantage of a single purpose. People dodged the clubs, glad to get out of the way. Debating societies got started on the fringes. There was a babble of voices, randomized crowd motion.
    Then four Penser minions appeared from a side tunnel, carrying a curious long bundle. Other Penserites cleared a path for them, and they dumped the bundle on the platform, almost at Penser’s feet. The bundle writhed and showed itself to be still alive.
    A horrified buzz went up as the bunched limbs untangled themselves and people realized that they were looking at a Nar. It was in a bad way. It didn’t seem to be able to move purposefully. It tried to raise itself a couple of times and flopped down again.
    “We found it in one of the branching xylem passages,” said one of the men who had brought it. “It was on its way down here from the Nar sector. There were two of them.”
    “Did the other one get away?” Penser said.
    “No, gene brother Penser.”
    The dazed Nar by now had succeeded in getting its lower limbs underneath itself. But they remained weak and flaccid, without the hydrostatic stiffening needed for walking. A peculiar wail came from the being’s central orifice—a sound Bram had never heard from a Nar.
    “What’s wrong with it?” Orris said in a whisper.
    “I think I know,” Bram said.
    The decapod, if it was regaining its senses, must have been bewildered at suddenly finding itself in the midst of a huge mass of human beings. It managed to drag itself along feebly on three arms toward the nearest human it could see—Penser, who stood with folded arms watching it while it inched toward him, reaching out pitifully with the two remaining tentacles, forgetting that it could not make meaningful contact that way with a man.
    Bram held his breath. Everyone else in the vast wooden amphitheater seemed to be just as mesmerized.
    And then Pite stepped forward out of Penser’s ring of advisers, holding one of the flat gray cases that Bram had seen before—the device that had needed the high-voltage biocapacitors. Pite touched the thing to the Nar, somewhere near the waist, and the graceful many-limbed body jerked in reflex agony and went limp again.
    Penser stepped forward and gestured scornfully toward the mass of mindlessly weaving limbs. “Behold your master,” he said. “Does anyone doubt now that we shall prevail?”
    A prolonged sigh went up from the human spectators. Somewhere nearby, Bram heard a woman sobbing with emotion.
    Any remaining resistance collapsed at that moment. The sight of the helpless Nar quivering at Penser’s feet subdued the onlookers as nothing else could have done. Quiet, stunned, they allowed themselves to be rounded up and herded into small groups under guard.
    The young Penserite in charge of Bram’s group turned out to know Kerthin. He was friendly to Bram. “It won’t