Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

rope. Orris, a wiry jumping jack in grimy shorts and singlet, danced around the walker, keeping close. Marg slumped in her seat, wan and listless. She had lost the blastocyst implant during the retaking of the tree, Bram knew.
    “How much further do we have to walk?” said an ashen-faced man limping along next to Bram and Ang. He was middle-aged and not very fit, by the look of his paunch. Bram saw the sweat trickling down the flabby cheeks, though the principal sun had not yet climbed high enough in the violet sky to make the day hot.
    “We must be getting close to the center,” Bram said. “You can ask for a litter if you need one.”
    The man glanced at the litters bearing the injured combatants. A look of distaste crossed his face. “Have them carry me? No thanks. I’ll get there under my own power.” He squared his shoulders and put on a burst of speed that pulled him ahead of Bram and the girl, but he couldn’t have been able to maintain the pace for very long, because they overtook him shortly thereafter. Chin thrust out, he pretended not to see them at first, but soon gave it up and fell in step with them again. When he caught his breath, he introduced himself.
    “Theron’s the name,” he said. “Theron Chen-martiz Tewart. Maybe you recognize the internomen. I have a demiclone on the council.”
    Bram diplomatically acknowledged recognizing the name. The council’s Chen-martiz was a blustery fellow who hogged meetings with long, pompous speeches of vague purpose.
    Theron turned a plump, pleading face to Bram. “It must be some kind of mistake. I’m very well thought of in the Compound. My Nar supervisor thinks the world of me. He’s said so, more than once. He’s told me they depend on me to keep my section of the Works humming. They can’t think I have anything to do with that rabble!”
    He jerked a thumb toward the litters carrying the disabled Penserites. Bram saw Fraz, head bandaged and face blistered from the effect of his own firebottles, raise himself on one elbow, stare blankly at the horde of moving humans that he was a part of, then sink listlessly back.
    Ang was weeping again. “Why did those awful people have to h-hurt Nar?”
    “They’ll be punished,” Theron said, his voice rising shrilly. “The guilty ones will be sorted out and punished, and then things will get back to normal.”
    Bram said nothing. There was no point in frightening them further. It was impossible to believe that this extraordinary convocation of the Nar race had been called to concern itself with questions of individual guilt. By now that vast congregation must have shared every scrap of background information about every human here, including their pedigrees all the way back to gene assembly. Theron’s supervisor would be out there somewhere, as would Ang’s childhood tutors.
    Bram’s throat choked up; his own touch brothers would be out there, submerged in the collective consciousness, a few billionths of the whole. He swallowed hard as he thought of Voth. The universe had become strange now that it no longer contained the being who had raised him. He thought he had been prepared, in his human bones, to lose Voth one day—but not in a manner that deprived Voth’s life of its final flowering.
    He marched wearily forward, watching the yellow carpet of decapods peel back to let the bedraggled human host through. No, the Nar, in the awful grandeur of their deliberations, would not be concerned with anything as petty as vengeance.
    Or forgiveness.
    Centuries earlier, such a convocation had been called to consider the creation of man. And the Nar had concluded that it was their obligation to the vanished race whose works, in bioengineering and the basic sciences, had profited them so greatly. Now the debt had been paid. And repaid.
    Now the question would be, what is the nature of this alien race we have fostered, and what is their place among us?
    An image came unbidden to him: an image from his work at the biocenter with his touch associates. In the laboratory, when a culture went bad, you didn’t bother to pick through it to retain individual organisms. You dumped the whole tray.
    The Chen-martiz demiclone, Theron, marched stubbornly along at Bram’s side, still justifying himself to the empty air. “They can’t possibly blame all of us for the actions of a few—why, most of them were foreigners from Juxt One anyway! We’ll simply explain the situation to them and set things right.”
    The