Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

hobbled to the barrier with a little support. Now, leaning heavily on Eena’s good arm, he addressed himself to the jumble of eyes and tentacles.
    “We were wrong,” he said hoarsely. He looked round to see who was listening and Bram had a glimpse of red lips writhing within a scraggly black fringe. “We did a terrible thing. Penser misled us … but I’m not making any excuses. We shouldn’t have listened to him.”
    He swayed, and Eena propped him up, bracing her hip against his.
    “All we wanted was one little moon we could call our own,” he said brokenly. “A home in the universe for human beings. But we shouldn’t have tried to take it by force. We should have tried to make you understand!”
    Eena led him away. Bram could see tears running down her face. A stir of interest passed along the benches, and Bram saw that Pite had been summoned to the fence. Pite was someone that all of the colonists and their unlucky visitors recognized by now.
    Pite swaggered to the grille, his thumbs hooked into his belt. His beard had regrown itself into a bristly half-inch stubble that gave his face a fuzzy indefinite shape.
    “It wasn’t our policy to hurt tenlegs, or human beings either,” he said cooly in response to a question from the decapod who was the momentary proxy of the assembly. “It was the fault of those who resisted us. They gave us no choice. It was they who were the cause of the violence.”
    Pite was close enough for Bram to hear him directly. The little loudspeaker at the moment was expressing some abstraction of the merged Nar consciousness. The Nar who was examining Pite stretched toward him in a reflex of communication, then recoiled before touching him.
    “To resist the destiny of man is a crime,” Pite went on steadily. “The universe belongs to us by right. Those who resisted brought their deaths upon themselves.”
    “Why is he saying those awful things?” Ang asked, squirming in her seat. “He’ll get them angry.”
    “No,” Bram said. “He won’t get them angry.”
    Another front-row Nar withdrew a tentacle from the latticed mass to coil it in agitation around the empty air and framed a question in stilted Chin-pin-yin. Pite stared blankly; the Nar received a correction through his leeward limbs and rephrased the query in Inglex:
    “Surely the parturient Voth-shr-voth on the eve of his great change would not have resisted your wishes …”
    “If you’re talking about the tenleg biotechnician who was supposed to get the tree moving for us, he didn’t move fast enough to suit me. He needed to be taught a little respect. How did I know he couldn’t take it?”
    A vast yellow and violet ripple spread around the rim of the enclosure and receded into the distance until it was invisible. Bram could smell the acrid tang of revulsion hanging in the air. It was part of the Great Language, a faint trace that even a human could pick up subliminally if he was enwrapped by a Nar. Here, in the middle of a jammed throng of Nar sharing a common emotion, the odor was almost palpable.
    Ang knew what it meant. It must have called up childhood memories of her own adoptive tutor, as it had for Bram.
    “What is that fool doing to us?” she said in a tiny squeak. “Can’t somebody make him stop?”
    Pite went on, oblivious of the distaste he was arousing.
    “… we would have succeeded, too, if it hadn’t been for the spineless cowards among us—and the traitors who stabbed Penser in the back.” He was gaining courage and self-importance with every unreprimanded moment. “They’ll be dealt with when the time comes. And the time will come. We’ll rise again. Penser may be dead but his spirit lives on …”
    Even in the cowed collection of people within earshot, there were voices telling Pite to shut up. Three tight-lipped men looked at one another, then got up in unison and tried to drag Pite away from the fence. He swung and knocked one of them down. The man got up with a bloody nose and helped the other two to grab Pite’s arms. Pite shrugged, gave up fighting, and let them take him away.
    One of the men was burly and redbearded. Bram was momentarily surprised when he recognized him. It had been Jao.
    There were more ripples in the sea of Nar, retreating gradually to the horizon, and another odor replaced the acrid one. A memory came to Bram of himself as a very small child, unable to make himself stop misbehaving and trying to understand why he had saddened Voth.
    Sorrow.