Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

his waist. The nasty little electrical weapon was stuck carelessly into his belt.
    “Got him? Good,” he said. “I’ll take him in to Penser.”
    The other two left. Pite gripped Bram above the elbow and led him through the hall. Bram saw people pouring clear liquid from demijohns into glass bottles, while others stoppered the containers, wrapped them with impregnated strips of cloth, and bore them away. Quite a collection of them was growing. Bram smelled the agreeable aroma of grain alcohol. “What are they doing?” he said.
    “Making firebottles,” Pite said. He seemed edgy, over-stimulated, his color high and his eyes shining.
    “What’s happening?”
    Pite stopped him and swung around to face him. “Nothing that’s going to change anything. Penser caught them by surprise, the way he figured. We took the whole lower level on our initial sweep. But the place is too big, and the yellowlegs were too dispersed. They reacted faster than we thought they would once they figured out what was going on. I’ve never seen anything move as fast as the ones that got by us. They’ve barricaded themselves in one of the upper levels.”
    “They’ve probably reached the outside crew by radio by now, haven’t they?” Bram said. “And the outside crew will be able to get in touch with Lowstation.”
    Sweat glistened in the yellow stubble over Pite’s upper lip. “There’s nothing the outside crew can do to stop us,” he said. “There aren’t enough of them. And if one of them did get in here somehow, we’d kill him before he got ten feet. They’re no match for us. You saw that. They don’t know how to fight. They don’t get the idea of it.” He wiped a hand across his forehead, making a smudge. “As for Lowstation, they can’t get here in time. As soon as we get past those yellowlegs who’ve barricaded themselves, we’ll get the tree moving.”
    “What are you going to do?” Bram asked, feeling a chill start down his spine.
    “We’re going to burn them out,” Pite said, showing his teeth. “We’ll burn out the whole Nar sector and get every last one of them.”
    “You can’t be serious! What if it spreads? If you don’t care about anything else, there are hundreds of people living in this branch!”
    “Fire spreads upward. Inward in this case. And so does smoke. We can keep any downward movement under control. Wet the lower level down with water from those veins. The Nar sector only goes on for a few miles, anyway. After that, it’s all living wood. Penser says a fire can’t sustain itself in living wood. After a while it’ll smother itself, and we get past to the control center. Jao says there’s a high-speed tube that goes straight through the heartwood.”
    “Penser is out of his mind. There’s deadwood and discarded ducts all through a branch. Maybe a fire would smother itself when it got high enough for diminishing gravity to squelch circulation, but what if the support wood was so weakened by that time that centrifugal force sent the whole branch flying off into space? With all those people in it?”
    “Enough talk,” Pite said. “Penser’s waiting.”
    He pushed Bram along to a line of suites that adjoined the large chamber. The Nar had done well for themselves over the many years since the tree had been commissioned. It was a comfortable habitat, with pools, basking slopes, and garden spots planted with the brilliant yellow foliage of the Father World’s native plant life with its sulfur-based photosynthesis. Real sunlight poured in through the translucent lenticels along the outer walls— sunlight that would turn to starlight as the tree left a system.
    “What does Penser want with me?” Bram asked.
    “It seems,” Pite said, “that you’ve become the indispensable man. Nice of you to come join us on your own.”
    He led Bram to a sunny room where Penser stood staring through one of the tall translucent blisters with his hands clasped behind his back. The room was pure Nar in style, but Penser had taken possession of it by creating a spartan corner with an improvised wooden table surface that had writing materials laid out on it.
    Penser turned, though he could not have heard their approaching footsteps on the spongy material of the floor. He wore the same loose gray costume. His dark remote eyes bored into Bram.
    “Bram,” his hollow voice said. “I gave you my trust, and it seems you have betrayed me.”
    Bram’s throat was desperately dry. He was astounded