Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

the breast pocket of his mono.
    The spell was broken. The people in the seats began to move and talk as if awakening from a dream. Bram heard the arguments starting to break out.
    He turned to Kerthin to say something, but the sound of a chair overturning made him crane his neck. The two who had almost gotten into a fight before were at it again.
    “Take your hands off me!” the anti-Schismatist sputtered. “You and your kind are risking all the progress we’ve made because of the words of that maniac on Juxt One!”
    “Shut your traitorous mouth,” the other spat.
    They scuffled around the floor while others tried to pry them apart, as before. But this time one of them got in a punch. Somebody grabbed his arm, but then another partisan hit the peacemaker, and the fight became general.
    “Stop it, stop it!” The wood block pounded on the lectern, but nobody paid attention. A few people made hastily for the exit, but others poured toward the focus of disturbance.
    “What are we waiting for?” Fraz cried joyfully, and waded into combat, knocking aside vacant chairs as he went.
    Pite gave Bram an ironic glance. “Still sitting on the fence, Brammo?” he asked before heading toward the milling center of the fray.
    Bram grabbed Kerthin by the wrist. “Come on,” he shouted above the din. “We’re getting out of here.” She tried to pull away from him, but he held fast. A fist struck him on the shoulder from behind; whether it was a would-be savior coming to Kerthin’s rescue or a stray blow from the scuffle going on around him, Bram could not tell. He kept hauling on Kerthin’s arm and headed toward the exit.
    “We’ve got to stay and help,” Kerthin railed at him, twisting around to look at the little riot. “Where’s Eena?”
    “She’s doing all right by herself,” Bram said. He could see Eena, standing on a chair and drumming her skinny fists on the top of the head of one of two men who were trying to throttle each other in front of her. As the locked forms swayed back and forth, shifting position, Eena impartially banged on both heads, first one, then the other.
    Bram had gotten Kerthin almost to the door when a chair sailed through the air and there was a crash of glass as it went through a window that some human renovator had installed long ago.
    “That does it,” Bram said. “We’d better get out of the neighborhood fast, before the monitors arrive.”
    There was going to be a terrible stink about this. The proctors dealt severely with disturbances that got so far out of hand that they were likely to come to the attention of the Nar. There would be fines, tongue lashings. As a Nar associate, Bram would be permitted to go to work mornings in order to keep things hushed up, but he didn’t fancy spending his nights in polite confinement for a Ten-day if the proctors felt tough.
    He pushed Kerthin through the door, and they ran. Other people were dispersing in all directions. They were just rounding the curve of the street when Bram heard running feet and the clinking of the little hand bells that the monitors carried, converging on the structure that housed the meeting hall.
    “Just in time,” he said.
     
    “I don’t understand,” Bram said. “Why didn’t they let him talk? It doesn’t hurt to listen to someone’s ideas.”
    “Poor Bram,” Kerthin replied. “You’re too reasonable. You keep trying to understand everybody else’s point of view instead of following the right one. Well, never mind, that’s one of the things I like about you.”
    She yawned and snuggled closer to him in the spartan sleeping nest that he still hadn’t gotten around to replacing with a double. The fleecy metaplasmic material readjusted its temperature where her hip touched his, to cope with the increase in body heat. On this hot summer night, it felt pleasantly cool against the skin.
    Bram was pleased to see Kerthin acting like herself again. He had felt shut off from the tense, humorless stranger who had dragged him to the political meeting. Perhaps it was his fault for not hitting it off better with her friends. But after they had gotten back to his chamber, Kerthin seemed to have shaken off the touchy mood she had been in. She had fixed the two of them a light repast of grainbean flats and sunflower dabs, topped by a sauce of single-cell protein and tomato—rustled up miraculously out of the leavings in his plundered food chest. A couple of cold brews and a lingering nightcap of alcohol