Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

one end, much like some of the small aquatic forms here on the Father World. There must have been, Bram realized with wonder, at least fifteen or twenty separate varieties of plants and animals represented in the picture.
    There was a puzzle here. The creatures didn’t exist. Or at least, if they once had existed, they were no longer being manufactured. They had no obvious utility, of course. Were they steps on the road to man? It seemed unlikely. Not all of them, surely.
    The senders of that stupendous genetic message from the dim past had necessarily been parsimonious. It took a thousand genes or more to specify the enzymes for a single cell, such as a simple soil bacterium. To construct a human being, one needed more than a hundred thousand genes adding up to well over a billion nucleotides; Bram had seen the cupboards where copies of those magnetic storage records were kept, and they contained more shelf space than the cabinets for all the cultural records combined.
    Potatoes were simpler than people, of course. The limited selection of food plants needed to support reconstructed man, the necessary microorganisms, the handful of useful life forms like the poplar tree—none of them had required anywhere near as much transmission time. And additional variations, even new species, could be derived from short nucleotide inserts and from protoplast-derived clones that were somatic variants. But it all added up in terms of transmission priorities.
    So there didn’t seem to be much point in making an aquarium like the one Bram saw before him.
    Perhaps only visual footage had been transmitted. Maybe the aquarium had existed on man’s world. Even so, it seemed profligate. It had been running for some minutes. How many thousands of color frames had been lavished on this presentation? The art historians would have given their eyeteeth for a fraction of this precious time.
    Bram rotated his forearms slightly, trying to pick up additional clues. The prickly sensations continued; they constituted a running commentary on what he was seeing. And they contained the same overtones of dread that he had detected on the whole-body reader.
    And something else.
    This section of the record came from the codicil he had imprudently mentioned to Kerthin—the supplement that had added fourteen years of transmission time the second time around, before the message had been cut off. So whatever genetic information was contained in this electronic bin could not have been needed to draw up the blueprint of man.
    It was an afterthought.
    An afterthought somehow connected with the idea of heterochronic genes and with man himself.
    The sense of dread built. Bram’s trembling arms strained to hold their position. On the screen he watched a scuttling multilegged creature whose resemblance to man was poignant.
    Discount the armor-plated body, the segmented legs, the feelers it waved ahead of itself as it climbed a green blade. It possessed bilateral symmetry, paired eyes in a sort of face, and, obviously, some sort of central nerve pathway instead of a neural net.
    More to the point, it possessed the same sort of DNA as did Bram himself, not the Father World’s sort with its uracil-adenine pairs and reversed sugars. Bram could not take his eyes off it. He realized that tears were running down his face.
    And then the water exploded into motion.
    A nightmare creature filled the screen, all head and hairy legs, with a long slender body trailing behind. Its eyes were like green tomatoes, its mouth a vertical cleft. The armored creature was gone, simply vanished. Bram had just time enough to glimpse a twitching leg disappearing into that strange maw, and then the two hemispheres of the face snapped shut again.
    An afterimage lingered in Bram’s vision. He could not be sure he had really seen it, but there was the impression of something long and scooplike that had whipped out of that bisected face and drawn the segmented creature inside.
    Bram blinked again, and now the monster itself was gone, flicking itself away by some process too fast to follow.
    His fingers scrabbled for the touch pad, trying to bring the picture back so that he could study it one frame at a time. But the machine misunderstood his human input. Somehow he had triggered a search program. He could feel the successive ridges of raised pinpricks marching across his joined arms, the forward edge of a great arc of rotating wheel. Random images flashed across the screen. But try as