Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

at first, then in a fluent torrent that could not be denied, Bram told them all about it.
     
    It took a long time.
    A small moon set and another rose while Bram talked. Outside the fence, the dappled expanse of Nar lifted like a tide as each separate decapod strained involuntarily to give full attention.
    Within the island of humans, a crowd quickly gathered around Bram in a huge crescent as the word of what he was saying spread. The soundposts remained silent; Bram’s revelations were passed along by word of mouth. Messengers ran to the inner area to carry the word to those who had not yet heard.
    Man was meant to live forever.
    And the secret of eternal life was locked somewhere in the dusty Message of Original Man.
    Bram left nothing out. And he did not spare himself. He told his silent judges how he had deceived Voth, the being who had raised him, and how he had pursued his researches with stolen materials. He told them of Kerthin’s ugly suspicions, and how he had been infected by them. And how he had withheld the knowledge of his discovery from Kerthin and Penser’s other acolytes for fear of the consequences.
    “Penser would have used such knowledge to inflame all mankind. But I myself came to believe that it was within the power of the Nar to confer the gift of immortality on humanity.”
    The assembled nation of Nar listened in silence. Bram could not tell whether they had guilty knowledge of human immortality or were learning about it for the first time.
    When the first human ovum had been assembled, Voth had been the youngest of apprentices. Were other members of that long-ago touch team still alive? Still out there, listening to Bram with the rest? If so, their memories were available to the assembly.
    Tha-tha oozed more of himself through the fence, enwrapping Bram more closely and amplifying his imperfect human speech for the multitude. Bram could sense his touch brother’s unease, but he could not even tell if Tha-tha had known. All he knew was that Tha-tha had shared tentacles with Voth.
    “You believed,” Tha-tha said, cradling him, “that Voth deliberately withheld this information from you, and that the whole race of Nar kept it hidden for all the generations of man?”
    “I—I did for a time,” Bram replied in a shamed whisper. “I could see no other explanation. But later I came to believe that Voth and his touch brothers of long ago had simply turned away from the implications of what they found.”
    There was no word for “turning away” in the Small Language, but Tha-tha remembered his childhood Inglex.
    “Perhaps,” Tha-tha said, “they did not wish to look closely at what they had found because they feared further understanding, as one fears to put a single limb on a dangerous path because it may tempt the other limbs to follow.”
    “I believe that Voth had already put a foot on that path before he died,” Bram said in bitter self-reproach. “He— he gave me the help I needed. He … looked the other way while I did things behind his back.”
    Again, Bram had to substitute an Inglex idiom. Tha-tha gave the decapod equivalent of a nod: a brushlike strum of encouragement.
    “I think … Voth wished me success, so that there could be no turning back.” Bram said. “But it must have been … painful for him to come to grips with the realization that the sentient beings he had helped to create had been condemned in all their generations to brief, unfinished lives.”
    “It is painful for all of us to face, Brambram, my brother,” Tha-tha said softly.
    The petals enveloping Bram conveyed a strange and complex mixture of emotions from the Nar nation beyond. The eerie realization came to Bram that it went both ways: that all the billions of intertwined Nar on this planet and its neighbor worlds were feeling his body through Tha-tha’s perceptions, knowing what it was to caress a human with their tentacles.
    He wondered what they could possibly glean from his mute, alien body.
    When he had been a child, wrapped in the cloak of Voth’s limbs and feeling the warm surges of the Great Language against his bare skin, he had sometimes believed that he was transmitting his inner thoughts through the surface of his body to Voth, just as if he were a Nar, too. Now, knowing that the eavesdropping billions could feel his every slight shiver, every droplet of perspiration, his goose bumps, the raising of each individual hair, the very pulse of blood through his capillaries, he had