Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

Bram found himself nodding off several times. When the sky started to lighten, a number of people left their places to get something to eat. Somebody woke Bram out of a light doze and handed him a cup of something warm. He looked up, thinking for a moment that it was Kerthin, but it was the string quartet player, Ang.
    “When do you think they’ll decide?” she said.
    “Soon.”
    He could feel some kind of process coming to a head through Tha-tha’s blanket of cilia. For some time now the crosscurrents had been seeking to merge, and now there was a steady procession of wave fronts, tide after tide, rolling on and gathering force. He had tried several times to speak to Tha-tha, but he could get no response. Except for the activity of the inner surfaces, Tha-tha’s limbs had gone slack, and he seemed to be in a sort of trance.
    Dawn broke. Bright sunlight spilled over the tremendous arena, and the Nar nation, acre after acre, shook itself like an awakening waterbeast.
    The little loudspeakers on their low posts hummed to life, and the humans throughout the enclosure stopped whatever they were doing and looked at them. One by one, the seated people at the rim rose to their feet.
    A few preliminary warbles came through the background sizzle—the Nar equivalent of throat clearing— but no intelligible sounds could be discerned as yet.
    Tha-tha stirred to life. The deep, long rhythms of racial communion had abruptly ceased, and though Tha-tha was still plugged into the whole, the random patches of movement on his inner mantle—thinking aloud—showed that he was once more aware of his surroundings.
    “Good morning, Bram,” Tha-tha said, and Bram could sense a wave of compassion from him. “The time is here.”
    “I know,” Bram said.
    All the loudspeakers began to speak in one voice, first in Inglex, then in Chin-pin-yin.
    “Hear us, for we would have you understand …”
    (“Ting wo men, ni-man pi hsu dong …”)
    “Humankind has multiplied beyond our custodianship, and the nature of man has become apparent …”
    (“Jen djang gwe kuan-wo, shung-djir jen-chung hsien jan te …”)
    “Therefore, this is what we have decided …”
     
    “Congratulations,” Bram said, lifting his cup. “Here’s to the new head of the physics team.”
    “Not the physics team,” Jao protested. “A physics team. More of a task force. The task being to keep our vehicle from frying us. The head of the physics team is still Smeth. The Nar are being scrupulously careful not to step on human toes now that we’ve shown ourselves to be such sensitive creatures.”
    “But you’re going to work independently?”
    “Yes.” Jao grinned wickedly. “And the first thing I’m going to do is to steal our friend Trist from under Smeth’s nose.”
    “It must be good to be back in physics, though.”
    “Beats going to Juxt One. The best part is the total independence I’m going to have. Smeth may be a sensitive toe, but he’s still only an appendage on a Nar foot.”
    Mim choked on her drink. “ Stop it!” she said when she was able to stop laughing. “I’ll never be able to get that image out of my mind. A swollen red toe with a little Smeth face where the toenail ought to be!”
    She broke into peals of laughter again. The long night without any sleep had made her a little giddy. Most of the people at the impromptu celebration were acting a bit too animated. Collapse would come later.
    Similar parties were taking place throughout the Compound and wherever human beings lived. The Nar verdict had been more than compassionate; it had been magnanimous. A generation of Nar had grown to midlife taking human beings for granted as a fact of their environment, like house plants and touch pets. When one did encounter the occasional human being, it was as a handicapped creature incapable of true speech, abroad on some errand and asking directions in a halting approximation of the Small Language. One knew, of course, that they lived pitiably short lives without the final flowering that gave existence meaning, and so one was as kind and helpful to them as possible.
    Now, all of a sudden, human beings had proved to have free will and murky purposes of their own. And they could sting.
    The grand touch conclave had for the first time given the entire Nar nation the opportunity to share the perceptions of those few thousand Nar who had known human beings intimately—raised them as foster children, grown up with them as touch