Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

Disappointment.
    Around the rim of the enclosure, all the loudspeakers suddenly went silent.
    Ang reached blindly for Bram’s hand and squeezed it so hard that it hurt. “It’s all over, isn’t it?” she said. “We’ve lost.”
     
    As the primary shadows lengthened into the half-night and the moons began to show themselves, people continued to try to attract the attention of the brooding presence around them. They stood and pleaded, or harangued at length, and in one case even shouted. But there was no reaction. No Nar proxy spoke to them, and the front rank of tentacles remained unbroken.
    Bram saw Marg get up, her face wan and her shoulders slumped, despite Orris’s hovering effort to dissuade her. She was too far away for Bram to hear what she was saying, but after a while she threw her shoulders back and faced the unresponsive mass with something of her old self-confidence. Orris stood beside her, holding her hand through it all. After a while Marg gave up; her shoulders drooped again and she let Orris lead her away toward the central rest area.
    Bram made up his mind shortly after primeset.
    The lesser sun was an orange jewel in the sky, casting soft ghostly shadows and deepening the hue of the brimming tide of Nar that licked at the enclosure. The ringed human seats were half empty; people had left to be fed and to try to take some rest after the long day. Pite had not been seen again; some of the men were keeping him hidden away under guard in a privacy booth.
    Bram himself had dozed off once or twice. He had not intended to join the procession to the fence. There was very little point to it, he thought, given the circumstances. But he woke from a dream in which his name was being called, softly and persistently, in the deep pure tones of the Small Language.
    He looked over at the wall of shadowed tentacles beyond the fence. There was only silence there, except for the ever-present background rustle of billions of res-pirating bodies, like leaves in the wind.
    He shivered. The temperature had dropped several degrees since the setting of the true sun. He looked around and saw the empty benches and the listless postures of those who remained. They had given up. No one had tried to talk to the Nar in the last hour or two.
    Bram got up and went to the fence. There was no answering movement from the other side, no sign that anyone had noticed him.
    “I am Bram,” he said.
    He waited several minutes and thought he heard a change in the rhythm of the vast collective bellows that closeness had made synchronous, but he might have been mistaken.
    He spoke again. “I claim the attention of my touch brothers, if they are present.”
    There was another long wait, but this time a salient of flesh pressed itself unmistakably toward the fence. A row of mirror eyes reflected orange light toward him.
    “You are that Bram who was the ward of Voth-shr-voth?”
    “Yes,” he replied. He was surprised that his voice was steady.
    “Speak,” said the low resonant tones.
    “I am more than a ward of Voth-shr-voth, with touch brothers who have outgrown me as other humans have been outgrown by their touch brothers. Voth-shr-voth adopted me into his own touch group. And though I am mute in the Great Language, I claim membership in this assembly.”
    Some of the people drowsing on the benches noticed that a human had succeeded in initiating an exchange with the Nar, and nudged their neighbors. A couple of people ran toward the interior rest area to spread the news.
    A stirring of limbs caught Bram’s attention and he looked across to see an unattached Nar stilt-walking on stiffened points through the shadowed mosaic of star-shaped forms. The tall being settled down in the front row without any fuss and plugged two or three tentacles into the group.
    “Hello, touch brother,” the newcomer said in a familiar half-human patois.
    “Tha-tha!” Bram exclaimed. Then he remembered and corrected himself. “Excuse me. Tha-shr-tha.”
    “We are Tha-tha and Bram,” his childhood playmate said. “We swam as fingerlings together under the shelter of the same foster limb, and that cannot change.”
    A free tentacle extruded itself and wrapped itself around Bram’s shoulders, with its final two feet coming to rest along one arm and clasping his hand. Another tentacle snaked through the grillwork of the low fence and slipped under Bram’s shirt to curl around his ribs and cover his bare chest.
    The familiar warmth was almost too