Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

cooperative communication. And an efficient body plan presupposes radial symmetry and a diffuse neural network with most of the brain at the center of the body, where it’s well protected and where it can send impulses to all the extremities with minimum delay.”
    “Yes, I’m familiar with the thesis.”
    “A similar case is made for the evolution of Language. Certain it is that Language seems to be inborn in children—it’s found even in those unfortunates who somehow escape the harvesting nets and grow in isolation before they can be ingathered—though of course they need to catch up to their new touch brothers.”
    The director used a lee eye to steal a glance at the field of antennae. “I doubt that the message will turn out to be in anything as complex as Language. Across intergalactic distances, the information density would be too low. More likely we’ll find, that it’s in some sort of symbolic code that translates to one of the simpler senses, like hearing or vision.”
    “Then how will we ever understand the senders?”
    “You’d be surprised at how much hard information can be conveyed that way. Enough so that we can infer some of the rest.”
    Together they watched the rippling patterns on one of the console’s touch screens. Even with vision alone, you could easily make out the regular structure of the transmission. On impulse, the director reached out and absorbed a brief section of the transmission directly, sharing it with his visitor through their linked limbs.
    The transmission meant nothing, of course: It was devoid of affective content. But in the simple pulses, the director imagined that he could sense the shadow of … something. These patterns were an artifact of intelligent life, after all.
    “There’s no sign of a repeat yet, except for the periodic insertion of the prime number sequence. The message must be a very long one—perhaps one that will take years to complete.”
    Like the director, the visitor was moved to awe by some portent he could sense beyond the unadorned vibrations. “What can it be that they’ve sent?” he asked uneasily.
    “Perhaps,” the director joked in an attempt to relieve the sudden tension, “they sent themselves.”
    And that, in fact, was what turned out to be the case.
     

Part 1

GULF

CHAPTER 1
     
    “Why am I different?” the boy, Bram, asked.
    Voth, his adoptive tutor, stretched to three times the boy’s height on the five lower limbs that supported him and spread his crown of slender petals. “I have told you many times,” the old teacher sighed from somewhere within his maw.
    “Tell me again,” the little boy persisted. He sat cross-legged on the yielding floor of the cluttered beehive chamber that served as nursery and classroom, surrounded by wooden blocks and bright spongy pyramids and touch objects of various shapes, and looked up expectantly into two or three of the five mirror eyes spaced around Voth’s waist at the forks of his upper limbs.
    Patiently, the flowerlike being settled a bit closer to the child’s level and bent toward him. The pliant upper limbs opened out wider to show still more of the velvety inner surfaces whose rich plum shades contrasted so vividly with the yellow of the smooth, waxy outer integument that the Nar presented to the world.
    “Because,” Voth said carefully and distinctly in the deep thrum of the Small Language, “you’re made of human stuff, like other human folk, and your touch brothers are made of Nar stuff, like me.”
    The little boy considered the matter, his dark eyes wide and grave. He was five in the problematical human years— a little less than that in Nar reckoning—wiry and big-headed, with a mop of russet hair. He had always thought of himself as “Bram,” though it was only a pet name in the Small Language and he owned a perfectly good human name with three words in it.
    “No,” he said, frowning. “That’s not what I really, really meant. I meant, why is human stuff different?”
    He contemplated his own skinny bare limbs and wiggled his toes experimentally, then transferred his gaze to the graceful ten-limbed shape of his mentor. Like the other members of the dominant life form on the planet, Voth was a decapod, built on a body plan of two five-pointed stars joined at a common waist. Evolution had elongated the stars and stretched them upward and downward for height and mobility. The sensible radial design was not quite a mirror image; the lower star was