Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

curled over the surrounding moat of nutrient solution. The waters were an achingly beautiful blue, garnished with bright ornamental floaters, and Bram had to fight the impulse to loiter for a while at the balustrade.
    Really, he thought, he ought to move closer to his work. There was a small cluster of human housing nearby, mostly young singles who worked in the neighborhood, with adequate vending stations for the basic necessities. If he lived there, he could walk to his job every morning and not have to spend time and allowances riding.
    But then he’d be farther away from Kerthin. She’d never consent to living outside the Compound even if the two of them decided to make their relationship permanent.
    He quickened his step, throwing off the thought. A dignified Nar who was festooned with message bandoliers and carrypods “nodded” to him with a perfunctory flexing of his tentacle tips; Bram recognized him as an affiliated project director from one of the upper septa and returned the greeting with a two-handed spreading of fingers.
    The bridge debouched into the lowest usable septum of the nonliving part of the orthocone. It was an enormous, sweeping chamber with an avenue of clerical pavilions and reception booths around the outer perimeter. A central well looked down through two or three siphuncle holes to the chamber where the orthocone creature now resided, with a stout railing as protection against any random heavings of those thousands of tons of living flesh. Not that there was any danger of the creature breaking through to this level. It had lived here a couple of centuries ago. It would no longer fit through the siphuncle; at most a small hillock of itself might bulge through the opening. When it was feeling blue or threatened, the best it could do at this stage was to retreat to a larger, more recent septum one or two levels below. Now it was almost finished secreting its latest bottom story, and in a few more decades the bio institute would be able to expand one more chamber downward.
    Bram ascended a ramp to the buttressed gallery that had been erected over the central well and waited with the crowd for an elevator car to come down the spiral. In the dark chasm below he thought he saw a suggestion of gray, oily movement, but it might have been his imagination. One of the cars, a pearly ovoid that matched the biological building material of the chamber interior for esthetic reasons but was actually a manufactured polycarbonate, whirred down on its helical gears. Bram got on with the rest and rose through the spiral from septum to septum until he came to a level about halfway up the orthocone. He stepped off and proceeded through a maze of foamed corridors until he came to Voth’s worksuite, a spacious, sunny series of compartments whose tall oval windows, cut out of the shell material, provided a spectacular view of the city.
    A small subgroup of junior associates was already at work, having an early-morning conference. Three of them were crammed at the entrance of a crescent desk, arms melded, a litter of touch pads scattered over the desk top. Bram waved at them as he walked by and got a frondlike flutter in return—one raised member serving for all three. Voth was not in yet; at least he was not visible in what could be seen of his chamber through the doorway. Bram proceeded to his own cubbyhole, a dusty space cramped by stacks of improvised shelving that contained piles of old records and reference materials that he kept promising himself he would sort out someday. The crescent desk wasn’t really a comfortable height for a human being, but it sat right up against one of the huge airy oval windows, and he enjoyed the openness of it—the feeling, when he turned from his work to take a brief break, of hanging in midair over the bustling, miniature activity of the city below.
    He sat down inside his desk and leaned back in the human-style chair that Smeth had helped him lug up here— how long ago?
    Seven years.
    The first four of those years had been spent mostly in intensive study. Oh, Voth had put him to work from the very first day, giving him little problems to nibble around the edges of—problems that were always just the smallest distance beyond his reach. He’d had to bone up for everything, step by tiny step. But there was always a reward at the end of each step. Nothing was abstract. He was always learning something he needed to know, something he could use. It was a good way to