Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

punched in the main entries on the touch pad at the tip of one of the five points of the pentacle, adjusted the tilt of the top surface for comfort, and crucified himself on the machine. He could feel the ghostly tingle of thousands of tiny bristles against his outstretched arms, bare chest, and cheek. The chemical traces that were an integral part of the Great Language’s nuances manifested themselves as a series of ambiguous perfumes and passing astringencies on the surface of his skin, but he closed his eyes and concentrated on the broad recognition factors.
    The machine scrolled through a menu of major subject headings. When it reached terrestrial DNA, he slowed it down and let it run through the list of the thirty basic human food crops until it came to eggs. It did not occur to him that there were no more than a dozen human beings in the universe who could do what he was doing now. It was part talent, part practice, part early conditioning, all factoring out to a rather small twig on the probability tree.
    But now he was stymied. His fingers fluttered over the touch pad again and again, but he got no further. The broad bands of cilia movement he could feel against his chest kept fragmenting and marching off into a dozen directions, all of them useless. Whatever his adroitness with the machine, he still would never be a Nar. It was a little like a clumsy person using a shod foot to find the right page in a tissue-paged reference book.
    Reluctantly, he asked for help. One of the Nar juniors found the information for him in a moment, using no more than a few square inches of tentacle surface.
    “You kept wandering into a ‘records not available’ area,” the Nar explained. “The manufacture of those genes goes back a long way. Lots of dead ends, lots of useless stuff thrown out.”
    Bram thanked him and took the reference coordinates over to the other side of the atrium for a printout. He got a thick sheaf of holos that would have translated into a series of minute-long, information-packed sessions on the touch reader. With a sigh he began the long, boring task of showing them one by one to the optical scanner of his desk computer and poring through the visual display that the interface program called forth.
     
    It was dark outside by the time he wound up his work for the day. Through the tall oval window, Bram could see the city glowing softly. The biolights inside had come on, too, casting a shadowless illumination over everything. The building was mostly emptied out by now, a silent shell that made audible the faint hollow gurglings from below.
    The biocrafting team was still at work, though, one floor down in the big lab with its special equipment. They had told Bram that his construct looked promising, that there was nothing more for him to do today, and that he could go home. But there were still some hundreds of nucleotide combinations in the chimeric stretch that might yet be profitably explored, and Bram had gotten immersed in making a start toward cataloging them.
    He thumbed the face of his watch and got a shock. It was 7:85. He had promised Kerthin that he’d be home before the eighth hour. He’d never make it in time, even if he found transport right away,
    Guiltily, he stacked the holos and filed them away in his desk. He switched off his visual display and got up to leave. He had to wait a long time for an elevator. At this hour four-fifths of them were out of service, having their low-density flywheels recharged in anticipation of the following day’s traffic—the energy being supplied gratis by random shifts of body mass of the orthocone creature down below.
    When he reached ground level, he found that he was in luck. One of the short-range transport beasts was discharging a Nar passenger at the edge of the nutrient lagoon. Bram was out of polysugar bars, but the leggy little pentadactyls carried a supply of them in a locked box that only the passenger could open, with suitable credit transfer.
    Bram settled into the howdah and gave the beast its instructions with a few strokes of his fingers. Not being a Nar, he couldn’t give it a door-to-door destination, but when they got to the human quarter he could steer it manually.
    The howdah teetered and rose. Bram settled back to enjoy the ride as best he could while he rehearsed an explanation for Kerthin of why he was late.
     
    There were three people he had never seen before in his compartment, sprawled about as if they owned the place.