Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

he might, he could not call up the sequence he had just seen.
    He was back on the fringes of the heterochronic egg project, following one branch after another—decades, perhaps centuries, of diverging data. None of it told him how the long codicil was supposed to be connected with the genetic program for man—a program that already had been complete in itself. What kind of synthetic gene, destined for man, was supposed to come out of these tomato-eyed horrors? Bram shuddered.
    He tried for the next couple of hours to backwind the search program to the point he wanted. He got back to the assembly of the early terrestrial protocells without any problems, but then the database began skipping all over the place. When daylight began to show through the window, he gathered up the holo printouts he had generated, cleaned up, and went back to his own cubbyhole and sat down at his desk.
    He was still sitting there when the orthocone awakened to morning life. The elevators hummed, daylight flooded through the oval ports and washed out the bioglow, and the resonant thrum of Nar voices spread through the passages. A pair of co-workers came in, holding hands in conversation—early arrivals from the proteins assembly subgroup. They saw Bram sitting at his desk and, after a twitch of surprise, saluted him with a flared tentacle apiece.
    “Greeting, Bram-brother. You are at work early this morning.”
     
    Voth came drifting in about midmorning, large and imposing with hydrostatic pressure. He was gaining actual mass as well, with his increased appetite these days. He gave a preoccupied top flutter to the juniors in the atrium and sailed past them to his office, moving in the absentminded spiral gait of five-way equipoise.
    Bram gave him a few minutes to get settled, then followed him inside. Kerthin would have seventeen fits at what he was about to do, but he could not leave the matter as it now stood.
    It went against his grain to behave conspiratorially, as Kerthin wanted him to do. He could not bring himself to believe that there was anything sinister in Nar motives. If anything, the Nar were paternalistic and overprotective toward their human wards. Bram had never known anything but affection from Voth and his touch brothers.
    He didn’t care if Voth knew that he had dipped into forbidden knowledge—if it was forbidden. The only thing that bothered him was that he could not now be totally forthright with Voth. It would have been too embarrassing to admit that he had succumbed to Kerthin’s suspicions— that he had gone sneaking about in the middle of the night.
    But he could be oblique.
    “You’re tired, Bram,” Voth said, turning a couple of eyes on him. “It is not good to stay awake nights.”
    Bram gave a guilty start, then realized that Voth merely had interpreted correctly his bloodshot eyes and stiff movements. Voth, even for a member of a naturally empathetic species like the Nar, was a superb reader of the human body.
    “I’m all right,” Bram said.
    Voth, noticing his hesitation, beckoned inwardly with his crown if tentacles. “Don’t hang about by the door, youngling. Come over here.”
    Bram perched beside Voth and let him wrap a tentacle around his bare forearm. It was the only comfortable way for a Nar to talk, even in the Small Language. Bram needed the contact almost as much; it was how he had been raised.
    “Now, tell me what is troubling you,” the decapod said before Bram could speak.
    “There is a thing I do not understand,” Bram said.
    Hesitantly at first, then with increasing fluency, he let his doubts pour out. He summarized his problems in retracing the origins of the heterochronic genes, told of his encounter with the warning bells in the file from the codicil and the elusive footage of the voracious underwater monster. He left out the circumstances under which he had run across it and hoped that his blush would not betray him.
    “What was it, Voth?” he concluded lamely.
    The old decapod was silent for several seconds. The wrapped tentacle gave a little squeeze, as if Voth were trying to hold onto him more tightly. It recalled for Bram the way, when he was a small child, that Voth had restrained him in the presence of moving machinery or dangerous heights.
    “I am surprised at your interest,” Voth said finally. “Those archives have been untouched for centuries. I had almost forgotten that they exist.”
    “It was a terrestrial life form, wasn’t it?” Bram prompted.