Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

guess it’s a stage most kids go through. I went through it myself. But there’s not much use for human star travelers. Not when we wouldn’t live long enough to reach most of the places you’d go to.”
    “No, but there is work for human astronomers. And some day, human beings will be with us at our farthest extent, though it will take many stages, many lifetimes, both human and Nar.” The voice within grew more muffled. “We Nar have our limitations too.”
    “Ah, well, let the boy dream. When he grows up, he might want to settle on Juxt One—if he’s willing to spend ten years of his life getting there.”
    “You are fond of Bram?”
    “He’s a nice little kid. Quiet. No trouble.”
    Dlors came from an inner chamber, leading Bram by the hand. “I dressed him. It’s a little chilly,” she said. He was wearing a belted tunic of felted polymer with wide, elbow-length sleeves.
    Seen together, the two showed little resemblance, though Dlors was his principal gene mother and the woman who had borne him. Her round face, thick blond hair, and blue eyes with their epicanthic folds were at odds with his dark, serious eyes and fine-boned facial architecture, though there was a premonition of Bram in the shape of her chin and the long sensitive hands. Before her figure had grown a bit too comfortable, Dlors had been a dancer, part of a company that had attempted to reinvent ballet.
    “Voth!” Bram cried. He ran to the decapod, who swept him up in a nest of petals and gave him a hug.
    “How would you like to stay up late tonight, Bram?” his custodian asked.
     
    *
     
    They were in a bubble car high over the coastal megacity. Bram twisted around in his seat to see the human compound, a pebbled polygon of dim chalky spherules and knobs interspersed with the queer new boxy shapes of the wood and stone buildings that the Reconstructionist architects, Arthe among them, were starting to put up. At this height and distance, the lightpoles at the squares and intersections were mere incandescent filaments. Bram tried to pick out his own home but could not.
    Below the speeding bubble car and stretching far into the distance, the coastal flats were cobbled with the tall calcified spirals of the Nar structures, connected by a lacework of fairy bridges and cambered roadways and beginning to glow with their own bioluminescence now that the sky was darkening. Glittering motes of light moved along the grid, and in the sky above, strings of illuminated bubble cars crawled along their invisible threads like translucent beads.
    The real sun had set long ago, and the lesser sun was low over the edge of a glassy black sea, a brilliant topaz point that made the coiled spires of the city cast ghostly shadows across the miles. The brighter stars were already twinkling in the deepening sky, and the enormous blob of light known by Nar and humans alike as the Bonfire, with its bridge of blue stars and starfog, was growing brighter, dominating the night sky.
    “Do you know what that is?” Voth said, sitting beside Bram with his lower limbs coiled into a ball that would fit in one of the cuplike seats.
    “Sure, that’s the Bonfire,” Bram said. He was perched with his knees drawn up in the center of a seat that was too big for him, his attention transferred to the other passengers in the bubble car. They were mostly Nar, though there were a few humans who were traveling alone. One of them, trying to preserve his dignity in the yielding bowl that left his sandaled feet dangling, was a bald middle-aged man with a self-important expression. He carried a transparent portfolio stuffed with body-reader holos that proclaimed him to be one of those fortunates chosen to be an intern in some Nar enterprise.
    “Can you guess what the Bonfire is made of?” Voth asked.
    Bram squinted at the bright fog with its central blaze of light. “It’s clouds,” he decided. He had an inspiration. “Of thousands and thousands of little biolights all coming together in the middle and getting squashed.”
    “It’s made of stars, Bram. It’s a collection of stars called a galaxy. And it’s very close, as galaxies go.”
    The little boy gazed at the sky’s other glory, the long luminous streamer with its embedded blue sparks that seemed to pour itself into the Bonfire.
    “I guess I can see that, sort of,” he said. “Where Skybridge comes out of it.”
    “Good guess, Bram,” Voth said with an encouraging pat of a tentacle. “But actually,