Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

DNA, never did it for themselves. I’ll grant you, of course, the fact that for the Nar to go chasing after immortality would be to flout a biological imperative that’s stronger than the sex urge is for us—given the fact that they can mate only once, like a flower going to seed.”
    “Yes,” Bram said. “I suppose you’re right.”
    “I’d rather be told I’m wrong,” the old man said. His expression became sly. “Care for a game of backgammon?”
    “I’m not sure I—”
    “Nothing to it. I can refresh your memory about the rules as we go along.”
    Doc Pol began briskly to set out the board and pieces. With a sigh, Bram gave in to the inevitable. It was a cheap way to pay for the information he’d gotten from Doc.
    Halfway through the first game, the steward sought Bram out in the common room to remind him that the second serving was about to begin. “Torm said you’d be staying for supper,” he said.
    Doc Pol snapped peevishly, “Bring him a tray! He can eat while he’s playing. He’s having too much fun to stop.”
     
    A new individual was in charge of stores—a young Nar who knew only a few words of Inglex. Patiently, Bram explained in the Small Language and with some creative boneless gestures what he wanted.
    “I’ll need a container of uranyl acetate for negative staining and some standard head and tail proteins from the multipurpose insertion provirus. And an amino acid kit and some clay substrates—oh, yes, and I’ll want to check out one of the small protein synthesizers for a few days.”
    Sweat broke out on his brow as he waited for the stores clerk to question him, but the slender being merely gave the perfunctory triple unzipping of tentacle edges that was a Nar nod and went soundlessly prowling through the honeycomb spaces of the supply room.
    After the clerk had helped him load everything onto the carry straps and shelves of the three-legged walker that he had borrowed for the purpose, Bram asked casually, “And would you book me some hours on the muon scope?”
    The Nar clerk checked a touch list tacked to the wall. “The schedule is filled for the remainder of this quint, but if it is important to a project of Voth-shr-voth, I can get authorization from him to rearrange viewtime.”
    “No, don’t bother,” Bram said hastily. “Can you just book me for next Tenday morning?”
    “No one will be there to assist you then. Shall I arrange for a technician?”
    “No, don’t do that. I don’t want to put anyone to any trouble. I know how to operate the equipment myself.”
    He gave the walker a kick to get it started, and the synthetic resilin protein that was its motive power unsnapped and got the tripod legs going in syncopated rhythm. A walker wasn’t alive, strictly speaking—it couldn’t feel the pain of a kick, didn’t take nourishment, and merely went on dispensing the mechanical energy it could store in its fibers until one day it wore out.
    With one hand, he guided it through the corridors, nudging it up to a walking speed just short of a pace that would attract attention, and halted it in a small cul-de-sac outside the septum where he worked. Some unused furniture had been temporarily dumped here, and an unattended walker was not likely to be noticed.
    Bram draped the upper tiers of the biodevice with a tarpaulin he had brought for the purpose, then went back to his department and plunged into the work he was supposed to be doing. Today he was screening gene libraries for one of the junior subgroups. The job involved using synthetic oligonucleotide probes to trace amino acid sequences of proteins, and Bram was able to sneak in a few side searches of his own.
    He waited until past quitting time, when he wasn’t likely to bump into anyone who knew him, and returned to the storage alcove. The walker was still there, its tarpaulin undisturbed. Bram triggered the elastic tendons again and got the draped biomachine into an elevator and out into the street.
    He was halfway to the hackstand at the crossing when the walker quit on him. He gave it a push; it staggered on a few steps and quit again.
    With a nervous glance around him, Bram dropped to one knee and felt under the skirts of the tarpaulin for the tripod legs. The bunched artificial muscles had gone completely flabby. Bram cursed himself for not having made sure the walker was fully wound up before borrowing it; a simple few minutes with a high-speed mechanical flexor would have done it.
    He massaged