Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

underground. What good does that do the struggle? We’re lucky the Nar permit the Ascendist party to still exist on Juxt One.”
    There was a scuffle. A chair was knocked over. Bram couldn’t see clearly what had happened, but a man in a mono, like the ones Pite and Fraz wore, was being held by two or three men around him. The anti-Schismatist was being similarly restrained. The man in the mono spat, “You say anything else against Penser and you’re going to wear your legs for a scarf!”
    “Please, please!” The block of wood hammered on the podium. “We mustn’t fight among ourselves,” the bald man said. “If we divide, it can only hurt the struggle.”
    “What did Penser do?” Bram asked.
    “He took things,” Pite said with a mocking smile. “From the yellowlegs.”
    Kerthin gave a sigh and addressed Bram as if he were a child. “Penser was very high in the Ascendist party on Juxt One. There were some who found his ideas too extreme. They tried to read him and his followers out of the party. But he fought back.” She frowned. “There was an … accident. Some people got hurt. Died. Including some of his political opponents. His enemies tried to place the blame on him. They tried to get the Nar to do their dirty work for them—have Penser deported to some small colony in the Juxt system where the people are enroofed and he wouldn’t be able to move around freely. But Penser went into hiding before the monitors could lay hands on him. He’s been underground for seven years. But he’s carrying on the struggle till the day he can come out into the open again. He issues manifestos, and his followers distribute them on Juxt One and carry the word to humans on other worlds.”
    “Including people here on the Father Planet?”
    “Yes. He’s an inspiration to thousands. Oh, Bram, you’ll have to hear his words for yourself. They’re stirring.”
    Eena nodded in solemn agreement, a transfixed expression on her face. “The struggle will be long, the victory eternal,” she quoted. “No egg grows until it first divides.”
    “What did Pite mean—he took things?” Bram said.
    Kerthin’s tone became defensive. “He took—he takes what he needs to carry on the struggle. Penser teaches that the resources of the universe are there for the human hand to seize. ‘Ownership is power,’ he says. It isn’t fair for the Nar to own it all.”
    “The Nar share it with us,” Bram said.
    “To share is weakness,” Eena said. “That’s another of the things that Penser says. And to accept is weakness.”
    “I don’t understand the reason for all the antagonism,” Bram said. “Human beings and the Nar have always existed together in harmony. If the Nar knew how you people felt, they’d be terribly upset. But I forgot. They know about Penser.”
    “Not everything, gene brother.” Pite’s colorless eyes flicked over Bram’s face. “The little fracas that caused all the trouble was because Penser intended to take over one of the islands that were still under development on Juxt One. To serve as a starting place for his grand plan. There were installations already in place and a fair-size human population to work from, and not too many Nar to get rid of. He had reliable, trained people around him, and he’d already laid his hands on the equipment he needed—a lot of it from Nar warehouses.”
    “What do you mean, not too many Nar to get rid of?” Bram asked with a growing sense of horror. “You don’t mean that—that this Penser actually contemplated … interfering with Nar physically and removing them from the island?” The idea was almost unthinkable, but Bram was beginning to believe that this Penser person was capable of anything.
    Pite gave an unpleasant laugh. “Let’s just say that they’d be out of the way.”
    “It would never be allowed.”
    “Oh, yes, it would. It would all be over by the time they finished one of their touchy-talky meetings to decide what to do. And then they wouldn’t do anything about it, because there wouldn’t be any point to it—to them. They’d have let Penser keep his island, you can count on it. They’d probably even feed the animals—at first. The yellowlegs don’t fight. They can’t. Touchy-talky, touchy-talky—that’s how they’re made. But we humans know how to fight for what we want. It’s in our history. It’s all there in the King James book and the Shakespeare plays that the Resurgists are so fond of. Except that they