Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

blanket of Nar was closing behind them, a narrowing furrow between the yellow ramparts of tentacles. A family group went by—a man and a woman dragging a little towheaded girl by the hand. They quickened their steps, not wanting to be left behind. The man glanced at Bram with a look of raw despair. Perhaps he was wondering why Bram was standing there.
    A decapod came along, gently urging Bram forward with a fanning out of his upper tentacles. Bram shrugged in an unconscious analog of the gesture, then realized that this Nar was unused to humans, and that the little pantomime of compliance had meant nothing to it.
    “All right, I go,” he said in the Small Language, and went to join the others.
     
    “There is a sorrow,” whispered the little loudspeaker on the top of the post. “There is a regret.”
    Bram craned his neck to see who the loudspeaker was talking about. It was the second day, and like most of the other humans in the central pen, he was sitting in the circle of outward-facing seats. The weather had held, which was fortunate for the humans. Bram had the distinct feeling that the solid parquetry of Nar, which was all that could be seen in any direction, would not have noticed even the most pelting of spring rains in the intensity of their preoccupation.
    A few yards away, he found a small salient of three or four Nar who had stretched themselves toward the fence. The human who had drawn their attention was Eena. She looked even more emaciated than usual. Her ribs stood out plainly under the thin stuff of her upper garment, and her spine traced a series of knobs down to her fleshless hips. She had left her seat to press herself against the grillwork of the corral. She was hanging from the fence with both hands—the normal-size one and the miniature claw of her still half-regrown arm. She was talking earnestly to her interrogators in a voice that was too low for Bram to distinguish the words.
    “… expresses a would-that-it-had-not-been,” the loudspeaker struggled on with an approximation in the Small Language of the human idea of repentance. “He pleads that he lived in a false reality constructed of words; that when he saw death he understood that death was not a word, but he remained compelled by fear of what his new brotherlings might think …”
    The Nar interpreter had gotten Eena’s gender wrong— the average Nar had little appreciation of the fact that humans had two permanent sexes—but it wasn’t a bad way to put it. “Why did I ever get mixed up with that Pite?” Eena had complained to Bram when they had been thrown together in the food line the day before. “All that talk about human destiny—and all he wanted to do was hurt things. He used to leave me all black and blue sometimes.”
    The running transcript that the Nar had so scrupulously provided did little to describe what was really happening in the immense composite nervous system that surrounded the human enclosure. Bram knew that if he were to get up and walk around the perimeter, each of the other little loudspeakers would be saying something different, depending on the immediate perceptions of the Nar providing the commentary. Only when this particular scrap of import had traveled through billions of nervous systems and been changed by them would it have meaning.
    It was, Bram thought, as if one tried to deduce the shape of an ocean by the waves it deposited at one’s feet.
    By now, most of the humans had stopped listening consciously to the soundposts. The half-heard murmurings were only the play of the surf, and the prisoners kept their attention on the immense brooding deep around them, as if by staring hard enough they could tell what it contained.
    Bram looked around again to try to find Kerthin. He located her a hundred feet away, sitting by herself, her eyes fixed rigidly ahead. She avoided him and everybody else. Bram could not tell whether her behavior was caused by shock, shame, or anger. All he knew was that she had withdrawn totally into herself.
    The Nar appeared to have finished with Eena. She turned away from the fence, spotted Bram, and came over. “They wanted to know how I felt,” she said. “They know I was one of the ones who manufactured explosive pots for Penser.” The embryonic arm made an unconscious half-gesture to conceal itself. “But they don’t seem to be mad at me or anything.”
    “No, they wouldn’t be,” he said.
    “What’re they thinking! ” she said, with a nervous