Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

human— had been in view that day, on their way to the beaches some miles beyond. Voth had introduced him to one of the curators, who had shown them around until Voth had seen that the little boy was getting bored; he had bought Bram a sweet then—one of the polysugar confections that were safe for humans to eat—and flagged down an excursion beast to the oceanfront, and they too had gone swimming.
    Bram squinted at the band of sparkling water in the distance. The shoreline itself was farther away than it had been during his childhood—pushed back by the expanding system of dikes that held the natal ocean at bay and created the new tidal pools needed by a growing population.
    A shadow fell across his face. It was Orris in his grimy singlet, smelling of sweat. Bram couldn’t blame him; he was a little ripe himself after being cooped up during the trip back from space.
    “Think there’ll be showerbaths for us down in there?” Orris asked peevishly. “And maybe a place to wash our clothes?”
    Bram looked down past the inner slope of the bowl where Orris was pointing. An inner enclosure of about an acre had been fenced off. Bram saw a circle of benches facing outward, and rows of curtained booths. Some humans were already seated, and there were the tiny dentiform figures of Nar bailiffs moving among the temporary pavilions.
    “I’m sure they’ve made some provision for us,” he said. “This may go on for days.”
    “Days!” Orris exclaimed.
    “The accused won’t be expected to fast with their judges,” Bram said with a sudden bitterness that caught him by surprise. He squinted at the bright canopies below, and went on in a more moderate tone. “They realize we’ll need to eat and sleep. Those will be cooktents, sanitary facilities, sleeping booths.”
    “I don’t care about myself,” Orris said. “It’s Marg I’m worried about. She’s not in good shape. She’ll need privacy, a chance to lie down when she gets tired.” His eyes shifted. “She lost the baby, you know.”
    “I heard that. I’m sorry, Orris.”
    “Will they let us have a replacement blastocyst, do you think? I suppose we lost our place on the Juxt One list.”
    Bram mumbled something vague and noncommittal. But he was appalled at his friend’s evasion of reality. Didn’t Orris realize that there would never be a shipload of human colonists going to Juxt One again? That human fertility itself would now be evaluated? The easy trust between the Nar and their creations was gone. At best, human beings would have to be restricted, isolated from Nar society, their numbers allowed to dwindle to a manageable level.
    At worst …
    Bram shuddered, seeing again his biologist’s image of the dumped tray, the regretful termination of an experiment gone wrong.
    He shook off the idea. The Nar were compassionate. Surely, whatever the outcome of this planetwide day of wrath, the existing human beings would be allowed to live out their remaining lives—under supervision and restraint. And if the Nar were generous, perhaps they would even permit the existence of future human beings in small numbers, as curiosities or objects of study, like the dangerous beasts that survived in their zoos.
    His eyes were suddenly stinging. Surely, he thought, the human species need not vanish from the universe a second time!
    He looked at the straggling file of humans as they picked their way down the slope of the bowl. He hoped they would behave well in the time of judgment to come. He willed them fiercely to understand that they were not there to justify themselves individually, any more than germs in a culture were asked by the pathologist which ones of them were likely to be infectious. The Nar, in this agonized effort at racial comprehension, would consider all these frightened people as a unit. The actions of Pite, who had murdered Voth, would weigh in that collective scale along with the actions of Ang, whose crime had been to play the violin.
    His lips tightened with purpose. “Orris,” he began.
    “Excuse me,” Orris said. “I don’t want to get separated from Marg.”
    Orris scrambled down the glassy slope to catch up with the tripedal walker that was carrying Marg. Bram saw him skid to a stop, arms flailing, to avoid bowling over the little biomachine, then fall in beside it with a shambling pace. Orris leaned over to say something, but Marg did not look up.
    The last stragglers were flowing past Bram in a trickle. The gap in the solid