Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

foster children.
    “I won’t stay long,” Bram said wretchedly.
     
    CHAPTER 6
     
    Bram lay spread-eagled across the prickly surface of the pentacle, calling up demons.
    He might have thought of it that way if he’d been familiar with the old superstitions, because the data he’d summoned gave off a definite spirit of evil. Evil was the only way to describe the overtones of revulsion, horror, and fear that crawled through the factual coordinates of the touchdocuments.
    There was no such thing as neutral data to the Nar. A human being might have written down these documents in the impersonal medium of words and numbers, keeping his feelings to himself. But the Nar who long ago had committed the information to machine memory had written with his living body. And now the machine was reproducing every ripple, every tremble of vibrissae, every chemical nuance, at an information rate that no human brain could absorb even if the connections had been there.
    Bram pressed his cheek harder against the palpitating sheet of artificial villi, trying desperately to extract sense out of it all. A scratchy many-legged shape—the ghost of a visual image?—scuttled past his face and disappeared into the broader surface that his body couldn’t cover, leaving little multiplying echoes of itself in the other four points of the star under his forearms and naked thighs. Sweat trickled off Bram’s body, confusing the chemical cues, but a faint acrid whiff traveling past his nostrilsm made him press his tongue flat against the surface at that spot. He knew he risked being poisoned by Nar proteins if he used his tongue and lips too much, but sometimes a human could pick up more details that way than with less sensitive parts of the body.
    At last he rolled off the machine, exhausted. He sat on the floor with his back against the pedestal, resting until his strength came back. He’d been on the body reader for more than two hours by then. He’d had to run it at slow speed, repeating sections over and over again, to riffle through what a Nar might have covered in five or ten minutes.
    Was this whole area of information under interdiction?
    Bram thought it over. He didn’t think so. Nothing was specifically forbidden, or he wouldn’t have been able to delve farther into layer after layer of the material. But there was something about this area that made the Nar shy away from it. Out of distaste. Out of fear. Out of whatever negative emotions whose blurred phantoms had lapped at him these past two hours.
    But, naturally, any human attempting to enter this system through the crude interface program would run up against a confused and ambiguous interpretation of the Nar warning flags: “Stay away.” “Caution.” “Dead end.” “Unclean.” “Proceed at your own risk.” “Adults only.” The “records not available” borderline he’d skirted previously was one of those ambiguities. What it meant was that you pushed your way into this area while figuratively holding your nose.
    But Bram had learned one thing while racked on the star-shaped machine—there were visual records associated with this file. And he thought he knew how to get at them.
    He put his clothes back on. From somewhere within the great hollow structure he heard the collective patter of Nar footsteps reverberating through the central shaft and then the whir of a descending elevator, but the wing he was in was silent. He felt a stab of self-reproach as he let himself through the oval opening to Voth’s sanctum and reminded himself of what Kerthin had pointed out—that it was not as if he were doing something to hurt Voth. It was not even as if he were doing anything wrong. He used Voth’s vidlink and other peripherals all the time, with invitation and without. He had always felt free to use Voth’s private files whether or not Voth was there, and Voth had encouraged him.
    Why, then, should he feel guilty now?
    There was a one-tentacle touch pad mounted on a swinging bracket over Voth’s desk—a narrow triangle about three feet long. It served both as an input device and a small-screen tactile reader. It was a good enough computer link for all practical purposes; the Great Language was not petal-specific but was dispersed through all five points to add up to optimum sharpness and clarity, and if need be a one-tentacle reader could be scrolled to build up a five-point impression one point at a time.
    The vidscreen was a concave curve with about ninety