Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

gave a little contraction of embarrassment. “You know of the egg-creature called a hen. We believed it wrong to raise any organism possessing a nervous system for mass slaughter. But the hen genes live on in the self-dividing egg.”
    “And there were others, too, weren’t there?” Bram persisted. Kerthin’s accusation about the steakbeast sprang into his mind.
    Voth was definitely on the defensive. Bram could feel the searching patterns in the field of cilia. “We created a limited number of terrestrial animal forms before attempting man and allowed them to live out their lives after their usefulness was gone. They were mostly simple creatures—wormlike forms, a mollusk similar to the ancestor of our orthocone creature, a small amphibian called a frog. They were necessary steps in the learning sequence provided by man. But Bram, Original Man used mollusks for food. Would you and most of the human people you know, raised apart from that custom, do the same?”
    “No, I guess not,” Bram admitted. He felt deflated. “Still,” he said wistfully, “I can’t help thinking about what a precious reserve of data remains locked up in the archives. Even the dragonfly nymph. Think of what you already got out of it before you slammed the door. The heterochronic egg. The work that’s going forward now on embryonic stem tissue in the poplar—”
    “Nothing is lost, my Bram,” Voth said, hugging him. “Knowledge awaits, as it always has. All will be explored in the fullness of time. Research will continue. But under the provisions of the touch concordance. Under the scrutiny of our species. With safeguards.”
    “I won’t be here to see it.”
    “Nor shall I,” Voth said.
    “You didn’t come home last night,” Kerthin said as Bram popped the door shut behind him.
    She was kneeling in front of the stove, putting on a pot of brew. Her overcape was flung carelessly across Bram’s writing stand; she must just have come in herself. She twisted around to look at him questioningly, tossing back the thick rope of hair.
    Bram sank wearily into a seating puff. His eyes were scratchy, and his limbs felt like lead. “Is there anything to drink?” he said.
    She got up without a word and poured him a measure of ethyl, neat, over a scoop of slush from the cryobacterial coldbin. She handed it to him and waited while he took a thirsty sip.
    “Well?” she said.
    “I traced the file back,” he said. “It took me all night.”
    “Was I right?”
    “Kerthin, your steakbeast is just a fairy tale, but yes, there’s a certain amount of genetic information that isn’t generally available to researchers—human or Nar.”
    “I knew it!” she said.
    “You don’t understand, Kerth. There are no secrets. Not exactly. The whole Nar commonwealth is aware that sections of the great transmission have been put aside for the time being. For good reasons. Humane reasons. Reasons of safety. Eventually researchers will get around to reopening some of the material on a file-by-file basis, under proper supervision.”
    “ They know! They decide!” Kerthin’s voice dripped scorn.
    “It’s a Nar world, Kerthin. They’re doing the best they can for us, by their own lights. But there are obstacles that nobody can do anything about. Like the human life span. Even with cloned transplants, even though the genes we carry were selected for longevity and good health, none of us can expect to live much beyond our allotted sevenscore and ten. There isn’t time for us to do things on the Nar scale. Like my little project running up against the nymph cross-file. If you ask me, the Nar’ve been low-key about its existence out of simple tact.”
    “The nymph file?” Kerthin’s gray eyes became alert.
    Bram explained about the dragonfly nymph and about the belated warning the long-ago humans had tagged it with. “Voth was perfectly right about it,” he finished. “It might have been a danger to the Father World’s ecology. And when you come right down to it, we’re a part of that ecology too, in our little artificial bubble.”
    “You went to Voth-shr-voth about it?” she asked incredulously.
    “What’s wrong with that? I told you Voth was perfectly open with me.”
    “How could you do something that stupid? After I explained everything to you. You were supposed to let him go on thinking he was flimflamming you. People like you are a threat to the movement. At this stage we’re still trying to lull the Nar. We don’t want