Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

Mim locked eyes.
    “So it wasn’t a dream, after all,” she said softly. “After all these years, it’s all coming true.”
    “It wasn’t only my dream, Mim,” Bram said. “A lot of people had it. They just didn’t know it till now. They had to be told that it was possible.”
    She looked across the room at her friends and Olan’s— musicians, artists, poets, artisans—people who had spent their lives walling themselves off from the Father World’s civilization and had created a cosy facsimile of an imagined human culture instead.
    “It’s not a dream for everybody, though,” she said. “You won’t get all of these people to risk their new eternal lives on some crazy quest across half the universe in search of a bubble that for all we know might have burst more than thirty million years ago.”
    “No,” he agreed. “We’ll just get the adventurous ones. The troublesome ones, from the Nar point of view. The tame ones can stay behind and spend the next million years trying to learn the Great Language if they want.”
    He had spoken too vehemently. At the hurt look in Mim’s eyes, he backtracked. “The Nar are beginning a program to call back humans from Juxt One and the farther stars, you know. It’ll take another three years before the news even reaches Next, and then those who want to be included will have to start back without delay.”
    She looked at Olan, sitting with fragile dignity in his imitation gothic chair. “And those of us who choose to stay behind?”
    “They—” He made a point of not saying you. “—they won’t have a wall around them any more. The Nar are determined to make humans equal partners in their society from now on. One of the two big obstacles is gone now. Mim, do you realize that human beings won’t be ephemeral curiosities in a long-lived culture any more— to be pitied and coddled. They’ll outlive the Nar from now on.”
    “Mayflies.”
    “What?”
    “Mayflies. It’s a term from the old Inglex literature. It’s going to be the Nar who are the mayflies now. That will be very strange.”
    “Not that the Nar are capable of envy. A millennium or so is quite long enough for them. They don’t want immortality for themselves—couldn’t even conceive of such a thing. I suppose if they could, they’d have mounted their own immortality project long ago. But they have to flower and die to reproduce, and to thwart that would be to thwart their own natures.”
    “We must have seemed very odd to them.”
    “Yes, indeed.” He scanned the predominately Resurgist crowd to avoid looking directly into Mim’s eyes. “The stay-at-homes will have all the time they need to get along in a Nar world. And after a few thousand years of that, who knows? Maybe something could be done about the second big obstacle. Perhaps with a little genetic modification and biological-electronic interfacing, one day the first human will say his first halting word in the Great Language.”
    “I can’t conceive of such a thing. But it’s a better solution than Penser’s was.”
    “Yes.”
    Bram’s part as an unwilling accessory remained unspoken between them, but Mim must have been thinking about it because the next thing she said was, “Your … friend, Kerthin. Will she go with you?”
    “No,” he said shortly.
    “I’m sorry, Bram.” She touched his hand.
    “That’s all right.”
    At this moment, Bram thought, Kerthin would be clearing her things out of their quarters. She had spoken to him long enough to at least let him know that she was leaving. The brief, unsatisfactory exchange had taken place during the interval when the penned humans waited for the Nar assembly to disperse. Bram had been glad of Olan’s and Mim’s invitation. He had no wish to go home while Kerthin was still there.
    Jao’s voice was still booming over the background conversation. Bram and Mim turned in tacit accord to listen.
    “You want to know why we don’t simply take the Nar ramjet and run off with it once we’re out of reach?” he was saying in response to some question. “In the first place, it wouldn’t be nice. In the second place, we have to take a detour through the center of the galaxy if we want to get to where we’re going, so we might as well do the Nar’s little chore for them on the way. Right?”
    There was a buzz of inquiry around him, and Jao held up a meaty red hand to silence it.
    “Why?” he said in mock exasperation. “Haven’t you been paying attention?