Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

path before them started to slope upward, and the damp sand under Bram’s feet was replaced by something hard and smooth. Fused glass.
    He raised his eyes to the summit of the tremendous structure whose sweeping contour made its own horizon—a horizon that was delineated by the overlapping blanket of Nar spreading over the craterlike rim.
    The people around Bram began to hang back, and Bram had to force himself not to drag his own feet. A whimper escaped the blonde girl. Even Theron was subdued enough to cease his chatter.
    They had arrived at their destination.
     
    The ancient vitreous bowl had rested on the tidal flats since before the dawn of Nar history. No one knew its origins, though it was generally believed that the surrounding skirt had accreted gradually, through many generations, as the numbers of the Nar increased. The central cup itself was more than a mile in diameter and could contain two or three million individuals. Once it must have held the entire Nar race.
    Now that was no longer possible. But ancestral custom dies hard. The packed, intertwined assembly overflowed the broad rim and spilled across the denuded landscape to make a circle with a diameter of more than twenty miles. A billion folk had become one at this time-hallowed site.
    Spaced around the great, throbbing perimeter were scribes, each lending a spare limb to the sleeve transmitters that linked them to the edges of similar gatherings all over the Father World, its inhabited moons, and the nearer planets.
    The scribes were living conduits who transmitted the sense of the convocation through their averaged tactile impressions. The chroniclers at the other end became the boundaries of new circles of communion that washed inward in slow, lapping tides of cilia movement. But there was feedback as well. The tides washed back to dilute and modify original apperceptions, until gradually a grand racial consensus could emerge.
    Two-way communion, of course, was impractical for the more distant worlds of the companion sun, where the time lag—even for radio waves traveling at the speed of light—began to be measured in hours rather than minutes. And for the colonized stars, a true exchange would mean a delay of years. Those distant outposts would receive touch transcriptions only. But their populations were still scanty compared to the billions of the inner system, and the power of the consensus would carry them along.
    Even with modern technology to help, the size of the great primary convocation stretched ancestral custom to its limits. No human gathering—even one of only a few hundred individuals—could have achieved such intimacy through eye contact and vocal communication alone.
    But information content in the Great Language was high. Its richness and nonlinear nature more than compensated for the relative sluggishness of those peristaltic ripples of meaning and allusion that took so many minutes to sweep across the packed miles.
    The activities of the entire Nar commonwealth of planets would grind to a halt while the deliberations went on. The billions of participants would not eat, would not leave their gathering places. Those who could not attend— mostly because they could not be spared from vital caretaker functions—would be glued to their tactile receivers, adding to the brew of communion through a nexus of averaging computers.
    But Nar were never in a hurry. Their civilization would skip a beat while they attended to this matter, then resume its stately tread.
     
    *
     
    Bram paused at the rim of the bowl and let the rest of the crowd stream past him while he looked out over the living skin that covered the earth. He could see the whole panorama from here, all the way to the horizon. The tesselated ranks of Nar tiled the landscape in an intricate mosaic until distance made them merge. The arrival of the humans in the inner circle was causing reticulated patterns of purple lines to spread outward in concentric rings, as the undersides of tentacles briefly flashed. Bram wondered if the Nar, with their crosslinked senses, were actually seeing what the inner witnesses were conveying by touch and chemical tags alone. No human could ever really know.
    He remembered being brought here as a child by Voth to see the great bowl. It had been part of his education. The landscape had been empty then—there had not been one of these great assemblies during Bram’s lifetime. Only a few isolated parties of bathers—both Nar and