Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

remnants of his dream in a rage.
    Or perhaps he was mad enough by that time for his overloaded brain to tell him that he was escaping that way—as if he could breathe vacuum.
    Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all; maybe it was only a random act of mischief and destruction by a man who had always been a vessel of death.
    Only a few Nar were left in the chamber, mopping up, tying up the last prisoners. The rest had departed to round up the humans who had fled and most likely to liberate their Nar brethren who had barricaded themselves behind vacuum.
    Two of the remaining Nar were standing over the outstretched body of Voth, their limbs folded, communicating—if they were talking at all—through their radio sleeves. Bram could not read their posture.
    One of them came over to examine him. Bram was a loose end. He had been tied up when they had arrived.
    The tall shape loomed over him. Bram looked up into the dispassionate saucer eyes. “You mustn’t think that all human beings are responsible,” Bram said in the purest Small Language he could utter.
    The Nar turned away. He was not going to bother to talk to the animals.
     
    CHAPTER 12
     
    The sea of flesh parted before Bram and closed up again behind him as he and the other prisoners were herded forward. His legs ached; he’d been walking for miles through the crowd. The walls of livid tentacles rose on either side to let the procession of dispirited humans and their grim Nar escort pass, then settled back into the seething golden tide to resume the linkage that was turning the race of Nar into one vast interconnected organism.
    The hard-packed sand of the cleared lane was cool and gritty under Bram’s bare feet. He raised his eyes and tried to peer past the living palisade. He could see no end to flesh, except for a hint of dark ocean in the distance, where the shoreline indented the boundaries of this awesome convocation.
    By now, he estimated, the immense circular pulsing mass must contain more than a billion individuals and it was still growing, as fliers, ground vehicles, and watercraft deposited more Nar at its perimeter.
    The weeping girl trudging along beside him stumbled, and Bram reached out to catch her. “Easy,” he said.
    “I’m all right,” she said. “I only stubbed my toe.” She turned a tear-streaked face to him. “You’re Mim’s friend, aren’t you—Bram?”
    He took a closer look at her. She was a solid, rosy-limbed young woman with a round serious face, now puffy with misery, and thick untidy swirls of bright yellow hair. Her name escaped him. “Uh, you’re …”
    “Ang,” she supplied. “I was part of the string quartet that was going to Juxt One.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Why are we here, Bram? This is some sort of trial, isn’t it?”
    “Not exactly,” he hedged. “Not in the human sense. The Nar want to understand what happened, and decide how they feel about it.”
    “But I didn’t have anything to do with it,” she wailed. “We were practicing in one of the spare chambers, when those … those Penser people broke in and ordered us to go with them. They—they shoved Kesper, our violist, when he didn’t move fast enough for them. It isn’t—isn’t fair for the Nar to blame us!”
    Bram said lamely, “The Nar haven’t made any distinctions among us yet. I suppose it’s hard for them to understand how one group of humans could coerce another. So for now, everyone who was aboard the tree is a part of … this.”
    He tried to conceal his dismay as he looked around at the throng moving past them. Penser’s people were here and there among them, tending to keep apart—even from one another, as if they were ashamed to be seen in the company of their former accomplices. The colonists clustered together in small, stunned groups for mutual comfort. But the vast majority were people who simply had been visitors to the tree—friends and gene kin from the planet’s human compounds who’d had the misfortune to attend the bon voyage party.
    His gaze passed over a number of litters that were held high aloft in the raised tentacles of Nar attendants—people who had been injured in the fighting aboard the tree and who had not yet recovered sufficiently to walk. Most of those were Penser’s followers.
    He also spotted Marg, being carried in a chair sling rigged on a three-legged walker; a silent Nar with its upper tentacles tightly closed in an aloof vertical bundle was leading the little biomachine on a