Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

that?”
    He began edging sideways along the outer wall, skirting the struggling mass. He was not an object of immediate concern to the Nar, since he was not attacking them.
    Bram watched his crablike progress. Penser seemed to be mumbling to himself. His eyes were half closed and his face even puffier than usual from the powder the Nar had scattered. Bram wondered what the powder could be. It was not totally disabling, as one would expect of the choice of a chemical pacifier when the stakes were so desperate; it was simply a low-level inconvenience to humans, intended to make the Nar’s work easier. Probably, Bram decided, the powder was simply the first harmless irritant the Nar docking crew could grab from their own food stores or cleaning supplies; Nar proteins could be murder on human beings, and vice versa. Some of it, he knew from the way his eyes and nose were stinging, must have gotten to him.
    Penser paused for a moment to survey the bloodless battle. Tears ran down his doughy cheeks from the chemical irritant, and his lips were pursed in disapproval.
    “The universe must be cleansed, you see,” he said in clear, reasonable tones. “Surely everyone understands that. It must be purged of the foul corruption of other life. Their worlds must be cauterized. The universe must be purified before I may possess it.”
    Nobody except Bram was paying attention to him. The Nar would not have distinguished Penser’s ramblings from the general human babble in the chamber.
    Bram saw a man who was disintegrating before his eyes but whose pieces were still held approximately together by the glue of long habit. It all must have been more than Penser could bear. Penser’s insane vision was crumbling around him. He had seen twenty ordinary Nar workmen, using improvised tactics and with no other tools than their sleeve links, cordage, and other everyday equipment, destroy his empire before it could get started.
    What, Bram wondered, would the wrath of the entire Nar commonwealth have been if it could have been brought to bear here?
    Penser had picked up a knife somewhere, a great sharp thing with a blade as long as his forearm. What could he have wanted it for? He had seen how easily the Nar had disarmed his followers.
    Bram watched as Penser reached the lenticel and hoisted himself up onto its broad sill. The modified gas-exchange pore was deeply inset, and if the Nar noticed him, he must have seemed to be another human looking for a place to get out of the fight. For a moment Penser stood there, flooded from behind by light, and watched the destruction of his dream with dead, meaningless eyes.
    By the time Bram realized what Penser intended to do, it was too late. “Stop him!” he bellowed, but the Nar weren’t listening to human voices.
    Abruptly, Penser whirled and plunged the blade of his knife into the patch over the lenticel membrane. A Nar detatched himself from the linked group and galloped on five legs toward the lenticel, but as quick as he was, he could not reach it in time.
    There was a howl of escaping air and the raucous bray of flapping membrane. Everything must have happened in a moment, but to Bram it had the measured eeriness of a dream.
    First Penser’s arm—the one holding the knife—was sucked through the puncture up to the shoulder. There was a brief delay while the rip enlarged. The trumpet blare of membrane edges climbed shrieking up the scale. Then the shoulder and head popped through, followed by the other shoulder and arm. Penser’s broad hips were next to get stuck. There was a brief razz of tearing membrane, and the rest of him whipped through and was gone.
    The Nar who arrived then was in danger of being caught in the screaming hurricane himself. Bram saw him cling to the lenticel frame with seven tentacles while three more limbs slapped another seal over the gap. The whistle of air stopped. The space-suited Nar pressed his waistplate against the membrane, trying to see out. If Penser’s body could be seen, tumbling through space, it would be rapidly dwindling. Bram wondered if it would ever be recovered.
    Penser’s dream of possessing the universe was over. The universe had possessed him instead.
    Why had he committed that last mad act? Bram tried to puzzle it out. Penser could not have hoped to kill the Nar, most of whom still had their space suits on. He could only have killed himself and his followers. Perhaps, like a child with a broken toy, he had tried to pull down the