Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

the reselin bundles manually until he felt them knotting up, keeping a jittery eye on the incurious crowds flowing past. The sight of a human using a walker to move his possessions was not that unusual; what Bram was afraid of was that some helpful soul from the nearby biocenter would come along and get a look under the tarp. A protein synthesizer was not something that one generally borrowed.
    He nursed the walker along for a dozen yards before it came to a halt again, then had to stop twice more to message it before he could coax it to the transport post. He hired a small pentabeast with a palanquin, heaved the walker aboard when its legs gave out again at the last moment, and high-legged it for home.
     
    Kerthin was not there. She was out almost every night now, going to her secret meetings. She hardly bothered to keep up a pretense any longer; once Eena had come to call for her, and the two of them had gone off together after some unconvincing light conversation and an evasive exchange of glances.
    She and her disgruntled friends were up to something; Bram was sure of it. What it might be, he could not guess. Some event was on the way; that was all he could surmise. Kerthin showed a suppressed excitement these days, an excitement that mounted Tenday by Tenday. Bram dated the change in Kerthin from the visit to the orbiting tree, when she had covered up for Pite, and that had been months ago. Now Kerthin kept putting him off whenever he tried to talk about a welding ceremony or a return visit to the gene co-op. She would only tell him, with an impatient toss of her head, that she needed more time to think about things, that she didn’t want to make any long-range plans before Yearsend—as if she had some hidden agenda in her mind.
    Bram could hardly complain. He was keeping secrets from Kerthin, too.
    In fact, he thought as he steered the lurching walker into the little spare chamber where he worked at home, Kerthin’s absence tonight had been a relief, in a way. It saved explaining. And, he thought guiltily, her frequent absences would make it a lot easier for him to do what he had to do.
    To manufacture an immortality virus—even with the active cooperation of the Nar hierarchy, if he dared seek it—would be a long and elaborate enterprise. It would take a lot of manpower and a lot of Narpower, and it would require the full resources of the biocenter. It was not something to be done by one man in secret.
    But he had to make a start somewhere. He could begin work on the outer structure of that tantalizing icosahedral capsid—the protein overcoat worn by the carrier virus.
    Even there, Bram knew, he could proceed so far and no farther without medical accomplices and human volunteers. But he would face that problem later.
    With a sigh, Bram began unloading the walker. He got out the amino acid kit and unpacked the clay substrates. For the moment, at least, he could begin the tedious job of assembling proteins.
     
    It was after middark before Kerthin got back. She stood in the elliptical opening to the small chamber and looked suspiciously at the run-down walker and the equipment Bram had set up. “What’s all that stuff?” she said.
    “Oh, just some things I brought home,” he said. “There are a few ideas I want to try out. Where’ve you been?”
    She avoided the question. “That doesn’t look like the kind of thing you just bring home,” she said with a nod toward the synthesizer. “What does it do?”
    “It puts chemicals together in different combinations,” he told her.
    She came farther into the chamber. Her face was flushed, he noticed. She had come home with a flushed face on quite a few occasions recently, as though she were living at a stepped-up pace on her nights out.
    “Bram,” she said, moving closer.
    He turned the synthesizer off and stood up. He grabbed her by one wrist and pulled her to him. She melted against him. Her body felt hot and feverish, full of untapped excitement that he was expected to relieve. She had been keyed up by something tonight.
    Later, lying in the nest together, there was a languid ease between them that had been absent for some time. Bram was almost tempted to bring up the subject of the gene co-op again but was afraid it would spoil the moment.
    “Wouldn’t it be nice,” Kerthin sighed, “if we could stop time whenever we wanted and lie here like this and not worry about anything?”
    “Hmmm,” Bram agreed. Then, reasonably, “That’s what