Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

brothers, worked with them in joint enterprises. The sentience of these queer boned beings could no longer be ignored. And a great injustice had been done to them.
    And so things had to be set right—at whatever cost. The first item of redress was to help them, with all the resources of Nar civilization behind them, achieve the longevity that was their due. The second was to assist them to full citizenship, despite their handicap. Immortality would help. Who could say what a human being might achieve in a thousand years of learning—even though biologically mute?
    And finally, this newly surfaced wish of a majority of humans to go “home” could not be denied—any more than one could prevent a Nar, at the final fruition of his life, from reaching a spawning pool. The interstellar probe project would have to be speeded up and adapted to the purposes of the humans. The probe represented a stunning gift, but fortunately it was a gift that could be repaid: The newly immortal humans could use the vehicle to perform an errand that the Nar, with their mere thousand-year lifespans, could not do for themselves.
    Olan Byr gave a small cough and got everybody’s respectful attention. His face was drawn. He hadn’t held up under the lack of sleep on this festive day as well as some of the younger people. Mim had settled him in a comfortable chair and seen to it that his needs were attended to.
    “While we’re passing out the congratulations,” Olan said graciously, “let’s save a few for the new director of the immortality project.” His eyes, keen as ever, came to rest on Bram. “I never thought I’d have a good word to say about science, Bram, but it seems that it’s good for something, after all.”
    “Thank you, Olan,” Bram said, uncomfortably aware of everybody’s eyes on him.
    All of a sudden, he and Jao had become the first citizens of the Compound. The celebrating populace hadn’t had time yet to absorb the full import of the Nar decree, but word had gotten around that Bram and Jao had been instrumental in the reprieve. Olan and Mim had had to rescue Bram from the jubilant mob that had spilled over the tidal flats in the wake of the dissolving Nar assembly. They had been waiting for him in a small groundcar as the exhausted defendants trudged wearily out. “Get in, Bram,” Mim had said, holding the door open. “We’re just having a few friends in. Nobody will bother you, and you won’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
    “Hurry up and take their offer,” Jao had said, hiking along beside Bram. “Think of my feet.”
    “Is human immortality really possible, do you think?” Olan asked now, his thin fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. The chair was a poplarwood replica of a gothic seat from a Diirer cartoon; Olan had hired a Resurgist craftsman to copy it.
    “Yes,” Bram said. “We know that Original Man achieved it. All we have to do is unscramble it from the Message archives, and after that it’s just a lot of dull, hard, grinding work. It’s going to be a strictly human-run project. The Nar insist on that. In case difficulties crop up along the way—and they’re sure to—the Nar don’t want to take the blame. They don’t want the slightest imputation that they’re suppressing anything or dragging their limbs. But they’re throwing the full resources of the biocenter at our disposal. And we’ve got absolute priority. It’s better that way. Humans work faster than Nar. We’ve always had to.”
    Some of Olan’s and Mim’s other guests moved closer to hear what Bram was saying. “They feel guilty,” the violinist, Ang, said indignantly. “At having withheld the gift of eternal life. It doesn’t matter if they intended to or not.”
    “We’ll never know that,” Bram said. “And I suspect that the Nar will never really know it, either. The Nar are generous, but all living things have an instinct of species survival, and maybe deep down they were afraid of the fast-breeding pets they’d conjured up.”
    “Exactly how does one go about cooking up immortality?” Olan Byr asked.
    Bram tried to keep his explanation simple, conscious of Olan’s ignorance of scientific matters. “It’ll be a combination of several different approaches, I think, including a way to coax the cell to manufacture an enzyme to unsnarl crosslinked DNA. I got that theory from a wonderful old character named Doc Pol. But the real key, I think, is something else that Doc Pol put me on