Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

like any tired club room, with game tables and a few sagging lounge puffs pushed against the walls. Rows of chairs had been set up to face a small raised platform that once might have been used as a bandstand. A speaker’s rostrum had been improvised out of two boxes resting on trestles. Behind the platform was draped a long homemade banner showing a crude representation of two human hands cupping something that looked like a planet.
    Forty or fifty people were already seated. Bram was surprised at the size of the crowd. People talked politics all the time at parties and other gatherings—though Bram tried to avoid them—but he had never really thought of political discussions being organized in the sense that plays and concerts were.
    He was surprised further to see people he knew dotting the assembly: Dal Terson, the playcrafter, who never talked politics and who, Bram assumed, took a cynical attitude toward such matters; a Resurgist architect he had met at a viewing party Arthe had invited him to; a sallow clerkish man he recognized from the library annex at the biocenter.
    “Over here,” Pite said, and muscled a way through for them to some vacant seats up front.
    Nothing much happened for a while. Three or four people at the rear of the platform were having a whispered discussion among themselves. There was a buzz of desultory, low-pitched conversation in the audience. Bram occupied himself by looking around the meeting hall, but there wasn’t much to see.
    All of a sudden there was a sharp crack from up front that made Bram jump. The people on the platform had sorted out their differences, and one of them had struck the improvised lectern with a cube of wood. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered individual afflicted with the baldness gene that had not yet been edited out of the human pool because of possible allelomorphic benefits.
    “The meeting will come to order,” the bald man said. “I see we have some new faces tonight.”
    Bram looked around again, but he could not tell who the new faces were besides himself.
    “We’ll clean up some old business first,” the bald man went on, “and then we’ll go on to the committee reports.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I should warn you that we are not going to have the opportunity to vote on the resources allocation resolution tonight, because the resolutions committee has not been able to agree on the wording.”
    There were groans and catcalls from the assembly. Somebody shouted, “Damned Schismatist sabotage!” The bald man rapped with his wooden cube and waited for the noise to abate.
    Bram looked over at Kerthin. She seemed as agitated as the rest of the audience. “What’s it all about?” he whispered.
    “Shhh,” she said. “Just listen.”
    The bald man waited until his audience was under control again. “But I have another surprise for you that you’re all going to like. We have some news from Juxt One—an update on how the struggle is going there and a special message from Penser himself.”
    The meeting became unruly again. A man stood up and yelled, “Give it to us now, Jupe, and the Inferno with all the other garbage!”
    “Now, now, gene brother Hwite,” the bald man said. “All in good time. Patience is a virtue. Besides, our guest isn’t here yet. As you all can appreciate, he’s taking the utmost precautions.”
    Eena leaned over from the seat on Bram’s other side. “Huh, we knew all about the laser message from Juxt One. That’s why Pite wanted to be here tonight. Otherwise he wouldn’t bother with this bunch of word dribblers.”
    “Shut up, Eena,” Fraz said from the next seat over.
    “Shut up yourself, Fraz, honey, and stop trying to act so big,” Eena told him.
    “Who’s Penser?” Bram said.
    Unexpectedly, it was Pite who answered. “Just a man. With some good ideas. We could use him here on this planet.”
    On the platform, the committee reports had begun. A fussy little man in dull-colored pleats was droning on about vote tallies for the planetwide Human Advisory Council and the need to elect representatives who reflected the Ascendist point of view. He read off an endless list of figures from a memory slate, smoothing the surface with his palm at intervals to let the next set of statistics pop up. He was followed by a drab middle-aged woman who reported on the small discussion groups that had been organized to raise the consciousness of politically immature people to the importance of human