Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

Penser continued dryly, “is to point the tree where we want to go. To do that we must induce a secondary phototropism—get the sun behind us and head for the second brightest light source in the sky, as trees tend naturally to do when they migrate from star to star.”
    “The lesser sun,” Bram said, and immediately snapped his mouth shut.
    “You know that?” Penser gave him an incurious glance. “Ah, yes, the young woman would have told you. One cannot do without such enthusiasts, but one uses them sparingly. No matter. The Nar will be tracking us soon enough. But when they see that we are headed for the lesser sun, they will assume that our destination is Ilf.”
    Behind Bram, Pite growled, “The trouble is that our time’s running out.”
    “I thought you said you knew how to operate a tree,” Bram said, unable to keep the hostility out of his voice. “That’s what you told the people down below. Do you mean to say you’ve killed and injured folk for nothing?”
    “We have our own biologist and computer technicians,” Penser said. “They’ll be fully competent to sail the tree once we get started. But there isn’t time to rewire the systems for human operation.”
    “It’s the computer that runs the chemical synthesizer at the pumping station,” Pite said unwillingly. “It only talks the yellowleg language, and we need a yellowleg to feed it the right data out of the operating library.”
    “We were in the process of persuading a Nar biologist to assist us,” Penser said, “but something … unforeseen happened. So you see the problem. We need someone who can understand the touch language to select the right programs for us.”
    “That’s you, Brammo,” Pite said.
    “No.”
    “Let me give him just a touch,” Pite begged.
    Penser sighed. Day broke behind his gray figure as the tree rotated back into sunlight again. “Bring him along, Pite.”
    With Pite prodding him from behind, Bram followed Penser unwillingly to another chamber in the suite. This one, too, had a lenticel in the outside wall, sending light streaming through the interior. A recessed pool added a further note of luxury to the place.
    An extensive holo library covered one wall, and there were rows of body readers on pedestals, computer terminals, and workstations for joined touch groups. A few items of equipment were overturned, and a few shelves of holos were spilled on the floor, but somebody had stopped the vandalism before it had gone any further. A half dozen armed men stood around uneasily, as if on guard.
    But none of that was what caught Bram’s attention. The only thing he had eyes for was the dead Nar who lay sprawled near the pool, leaving a trail of violet ichor behind.
    “Very annoying, indeed,” Penser was saying. “We had intended to keep the thing alive, but it reacted badly to electrical shock.”
    “So now it’s your turn, Brammo,” Pite said. “Why don’t you save yourself some grief.”
    Bram hardly heard them. He started forward with a cry. He knew before he reached the now pale yellow form who it was.
    “Voth,” he choked, kneeling.
    Voth lay in a purple mess, the ruptured follicles showing on the indecently exposed undersides of his lower tentacles. The electric shocks had hastened his time. He had tried, evidently, to crawl to the pool in time to save his children, but he hadn’t made it.
    Blinded by tears, Bram turned his head and saw a pale blob that was Penser’s face. With a low growl that he would not have recognized as his own, had he been aware of it, he hurled himself at Penser. His fingers were satisfyingly around Penser’s throat when there was a flash of astonishing pain that became Bram’s entire universe, and then there was nothing at all.
     
    He was in a darkness filled with blinking lights. He seemed to have no body, except that there was a generalized sense of hurting. A continuous buzzing sound came from the distant places in his head. After a while, the sounds became externalized, and he was aware of strained, urgent voices around him, the coming and going of footsteps, rattles and clanks.
    He opened his eyes, and harsh sunlight stabbed his brain. His body returned. He was lying curled up on one side, his hands bound behind his back again. His legs seemed to be tied, too. An area of pain localized as a burn under one shoulder blade. Someone seemed to have kicked him while he lay unconscious; at least that was how the bruised ribs and upper arm on his