Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

acquire an education.
    Voth himself had been his tutor most of the time. With infinite patience, Voth had given freely of his dwindling life span, when he might have used those thousands of hours in the winding up of his own life’s purpose, in the grand summing up that the Nar set so much store by.
    But Voth had also sent him to others, both Nar and human, for some of the specialized knowledge he must have. Mathematics, in particular, had been taught by a succession of human tutors. Nar and human brains were wired differently when it came to numbers. In particular, the Nar had the faculty of perceiving whole orders of mathematical operations directly, by totting up in computer fashion millions of digits at blinding speed on their ciliated undersurfaces. Mathematics was simply another sensory experience for them, generating higher orders of abstraction in the brain. In an analogous manner, a musically talented human might directly perceive the sensory information contained in a sound recording, deduce from it the organizational principles known as musical form, and, if sufficiently talented, even be able to reproduce exactly such details as harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. The Nar faculty wasn’t precisely a matter of counting on their “fingers,” either. Specific areas of cilia didn’t seem to be involved. A Nar could temporarily remove a tentacle or two to talk, eat, or scratch while the process went on. In the same way, the musical human might hear his symphony on an inferior loudspeaker, with part of the information missing, and still arrive at the same results, note for note. A more serious difference between Nar and human conceptualization was that imaginary numbers had no meaning for the Nar; instead of the idea of the square root of a negative number, they thought in terms of a sort of inside out number that, in operations involving hybrid complex numbers, made both the imaginary axis and the real axis simultaneously and equally concrete to them.
    But Bram, his tutors informed Voth, had a rare talent for Nar conceptual thought. Perhaps it went with a high level of empathy. Bram had a greater affinity for the Great Language than any human Voth had ever known. He could even use the star-shaped touch readers in a primitive fashion—at least to point himself in the right direction for searches of indexed material—and he could plug himself into the periphery of a group conference and get something out of it beyond the shorthand information contained in vocalized talk. By now, Voth’s touch associates had grown used to the human adoptee who sometimes squeezed into a packed meeting, and they often drew him inward with two or three casual tentacles.
    Seven years.
    For the last three of those seven, Bram increasingly had been doing solid, useful work that was beginning to come to the attention of other touch groups in the institution. Learning never ended, of course, but now he was spending four-fifths of his time on subprojects. Word of his subtle metamorphosis to graduate status had even filtered down to the human community. It was Smeth who had made Bram realize this.
    “I hear they’ve given you the responsibility for tailoring one of the synthetic genes in the new viral monofilament project, Smeth had remarked one day when they had bumped into each other in the washroom of the bachelors’ lodge where they were both living at the time. “Keep it up, old son, and you’ll be another Willum-frth-willum by the time you’re thirty.”
    “It’s only a modification of one of the genes they’re using now,” Bram had told him. “They want to change an initiation codon to provide an extra loop. Where did you hear about it?”
    “Oh, they’re raving about you. You’re a real pet. A shining example of what a human can do despite our limitations.” The breezy inflection didn’t quite come off. “One of the Nar at the biocenter has a touch brother in the physics group our team is assigned to. I’ll tell you this, old son, it’ll be all over the batch house by tomorrow.”
    Smeth hadn’t changed much in the seven years except to get a little skinnier and a lot more pedantic. He had tried a beard for a while, but someone had told him it made him look scruffy. He had run twice for the presidency of the physics society and was sanguine about his chances in a third try. He could be heard in the common room evenings, talking about the need for a guild. Bram had grown rather fond of him despite