Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

much to bear. He knew Tha-tha was thinking the same thing, because he could feel the involuntary cilia movement trace a childish outline of Voth’s name.
    “Can you bear to touch me, Tha-tha?” he whispered.
    “Hush, touch brother. Whatever may be, Voth’s limbs lay across us.”
    The feather touch of the fuzzy undersurface was being modified by the input of the Nar to whom Tha-tha was connected, including Bram’s original inquisitor. Bram could feel the overtones of distaste and incomprehension, and Tha-tha’s own constraint in the face of it.
    But for whatever it was worth, the surrounding Nar were also straining to accommodate Tha-tha’s perceptions of Bram. Bram could make out secondhand traces of Tha-tha’s name in the Great Language as reflected in its owner’s reaction to its recognition by others. Tha-tha was very young to have been given an honorific. Bram had not seen him in recent years, but he had gathered that Tha-tha’s touch symphonies had marked him as one of those prodigies who come along only once in a Nar generation.
    Tha-tha’s presence was only a single bucket of warmth poured into a chilly ocean, but Bram was grateful for it.
    “Sesh-akh-sesh spoke of your kindness to him,” the designated inquisitor said unexpectedly.
    Bram remembered the trembling decapod whom Pite had turned into jelly with his electric shocks. The image had caused a flutter in the surrounding Nar that Bram could sample in Tha-tha’s tentacles.
    “How—how does Sesh-akh-sesh fare?” he asked, swallowing.
    “He grieves.” The term in the Small Language denoted a kind of funk into which the Nar sometimes sank, leaving them apathetic and incapacitated. “His touch brothers now try to heal his spirit.”
    “I’m sorry,” Bram said miserably.
    In counterpoint, Tha-tha was telling the assembly about Voth’s great affection for his human adoptee, reminding them that Bram had not been responsible for Voth’s death or other events on the tree. He stressed that the awful circumstances of Voth’s premature dissolution had been a horror to Bram, too—insofar as human beings, whose reproduction was apart from their lives and deaths, could intuit such things.
    There was no vocal transcript from the soundposts, perhaps because Tha-tha wished none, but Bram was utterly sure of the subject matter because of the traces of gross meaning he was able to fit together from Tha-tha’s tactile patterns.
    Tha-tha fed him back some of the assembly’s reaction, too. But Bram was unable to make anything of the crawling sensations and the chemical astringencies except for one puzzling moment when the symbolic outline of a human—standing for himself, he was sure—tried to change its shape into the symbol of a decapod. It writhed, failed, and turned into a distorted abomination. That too dissolved, leaving an evaporating impression of a remote, monumental pity.
    It was too much for him. Hot tears stung, and without pausing to weigh the consequences, he let the bitter, bottled-up truth spill out.
    “No, we humans are not like the Folk. Though some of us have tried to be—with the tragic results you’ve seen. Our lives are short—too short for us to make our mark among the Folk—and we have not the gift of Language.”
    He took a deep breath and plunged recklessly on. “But we don’t need your pity. Because we’re not failed Nar, not imitations of you. We’re the human race, and the heirs of Original Man—though part of our inheritance has been denied us!”
    He felt Tha-tha’s musculature tighten convulsively. A stir went through the assembly, and then a vast backwash of indulgence. Bram’s sting had been received as a datum, not as an affront. The kneading pulse of Tha-tha’s mantle was uncannily like a phantom echo of Voth, when the old teacher had decided to be lenient to a small alien creature who knew no better.
    “Brambram,” Tha-tha resonated with the compassion of the gathering filtering though him. “We could not fashion you to be like us, but we gave you existence.”
    “You gave us our existence,” Bram agreed. “But you withheld our immortality.”
    A shiver went through Tha-tha. There was a long delay while something unnameable surged through the conclave, out to its outer edges, and to the satellite conclaves beyond, then back again, bearing the flotsam of all those decapods who had ever known anything about the creation of man.
    “What is this?” Tha-tha asked, speaking for them.
    Haltingly