Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

to question you like that.”
    “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” she asked quickly. “That you recognized Pite?”
    “Kerthin …” he began wearily.
    “You said it yourself. It could get me into trouble.”
    “All right,” Bram said. “I won’t say anything.”
     
    In the shuttle on the way down, after the reentry trajectory changed the gimballed overhead tiers into horizontal rows on the deck in front of him, Bram saw Pite’s shaggy blond head in a nest ahead. Kerthin gave no sign that she knew Pite was there, and neither did Bram.
    Just before touchdown, Pite twisted his head around and gave Bram a single hard stare. Bram stared past him, showing no reaction. Pite treated him to a small, mocking smile of approval, not much more than a flicker, and turned to face front again. When the shuttle landed and cooled down enough for exit, Pite was the first one out. Bram looked for him in the electric jitney to the terminal, but Pite did not reappear.
     

Part II

GENESIS

CHAPTER 9
     
    The library annex was dimming for the night as the overhead tubes drained and the biolight fluid flowed back to its holding tanks. A few diehards were still bent over the screens in the reading booths, waiting for Hogard, the librarian, to kick them out.
    “Are you all set?” Hogard asked. “You got everything you need?”
    Bram glanced at the neat stacks of holos he had arranged in a semicircle around the apparatus that the librarian had helped him carry into the cubbyhole and set up. There was an ordinary, rather beat-up, viewscreen that had been cannibalized from an older machine, and a human-style lap console with touch bars, but there was also a jumble of connections slaving everything to a Nar-type desk reader, with curved screen and input sleeve. Another set of temporary connections led to the librarian’s prized whole-body reader on its wooden platform.
    “Yes,” Bram said. “I’ll be all right.”
    “Be sure to turn everything off when you’re finished. How long do you think you’ll be here?”
    “I don’t know. Two or three hours.”
    Hogard shook his head, looking aggrieved. “If Voth-shr-voth fixed it up, I guess it’s all right. But I don’t do this for everyone.”
    “I appreciate that. Thanks.”
    Hogard pointed at the first stack of holos. “That the new translation program?”
    “Yes. An interim realization of it, anyway. There are still years of work to go into it. The hackers who took the job on are working with Voth-shr-voth’s second touch brother, and at his request they pasted together a test model from their unassembled routines to date.”
    “I don’t like it. It should have come to me first.”
    “It was only delivered this afternoon. I’ll leave you a copy. You’ll find it on your desk in the morning.”
    “I hope it doesn’t blow anything.”
    “It won’t. It’s been tested in a closed system.”
    “That’s no guarantee. This library system has been growing for thousands of years. Nobody knows where all the forks and interconnections are.”
    “Voth’s taking full responsibility.”
    Hogard scratched his chest. “He must sure think a lot of you.”
    “The results will interest him, too. There’s a lot that’s still not known about Man’s codicil.”
    “Well, go to it, Bram. Let me know what you turn up.”
    Some instinct of caution prompted Bram’s reply. “Don’t expect anything startling for a while. I’ll just be noodling my way through the datastreams for the next few months.”
    Hogard gave a final worried look to the interface bulbs attached to his precious whole-body reader, then set about the task of shooing the late browsers out of the annex. One by one, they reluctantly switched off their reading machines and got up to go. The last to leave was the clerkish, sallow-featured man Bram had recognized from the political meeting where Penser’s manifesto had been read. He seemed to hang around the annex a lot. He saw Bram looking at him and dropped his eyes. Bram resolved to find out who he was and if he worked at the biocenter, then promptly forgot about him.
     
    *
     
    He found it on the fourth night. It was down one of the endlessly dividing data branches growing out of that single muffled reference to the set of synthetic genes that had been derived from the embryonic switching mechanisms of the axolotl and the fearsome dragonfly nymph.
    It back-referenced to another tangle of data branches arising from a cultural package that had been