Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

was narrow and cobbleshelled, the architecture a sprawling hodgepodge of styles with the newer square buildings of framed lumber or blocks of refractory materials beginning to crowd out the older organic dwellings. Shrill children dashed back and forth, playing their eternal reinvented games and trying to postpone bedtime. Older people sat in front of their doorways to digest their evening meals and watch the world go by. Bram spotted Kerthin’s swinging gait and hurried to keep her in sight, then ducked behind a databooth when she paused at the next bisection to look around.
    The street plan in this part of the quarter was a net of intersecting rings, and for a moment Bram thought she was going to follow the circular thoroughfare all the way around to its next recrossing, but she turned left, heading for the older part of town where she had taken him to the drink shop that first time for the Ascendist meeting.
    She didn’t lead him there. He followed her almost to the waterfront, to a dilapidated conchate structure that might once have been used as a warehouse. The evening, was well lit, with the lesser sun, now alone in the sky, casting strong shadows. Bram loitered in the groined intersection of two buildings, where a defective lightpole kept it dark. Kerthin climbed a loading ramp, took a quick look backward, and disappeared through the lip of the main opening.
    The building was inhabited; a pale yellow light showed through a blister that provided a skylight on the upper curve. Bram waited a few more minutes, then, feeling foolish, moved quickly toward the building and through the natural opening that had swallowed Kerthin up.
    About thirty feet inside the chasm of an entrance, a wall had once been constructed from the floor all the way up to the vaulted roof, walling off the interior. There were a number of doors, each with its spiral staircase going up into the various recesses of the converted structure.
    He poked his head through each doorway in turn and got an impression of darkness, hollowness, and dead silence from all except one. He climbed the stairs past three deserted landings in a gloom relieved only by the dirty half-light leaking through a semitransparent blister high overhead.
    At the fourth landing he heard muffled voices coming through a closed door. Cautiously he mounted the last few steps and listened. Several people seemed to be talking at once. None of the voices was Kerthin’s. They ran on, interrupting each other, until another voice, quiet and firm, cut them off. There was a pregnant pause, then the quiet voice continued in the calm, measured tones of authority.
    Bram crept quietly to the threshold and strained to make out the words, but he couldn’t catch enough of them to make sense.
    “… need organization … not satisfied with what I saw … secrecy … but at some point, if we’re going to recruit successfully … have to let them in on it …”
    Bram was so engrossed that he almost failed to hear the footsteps coming up the stairs. Then somebody stumbled and cursed, and from one or two landings below Bram heard someone say, “I don’t like it, handing over the organization to him just like that. His methods are too extreme.”
    “You can’t make an omelet without whipping eggs, gene brother.”
    “I know, but if they find out …”
    Bram barely had time to scuttle out of sight. A doorpeg was by his hand; he pulled on it and stepped inside, closing the door after him.
    He was in a storage room lit faintly by a bowl of biolights that had been placed on a shelf and left to die. He held himself still and listened while the new arrivals— five or six of them by the sound of their footsteps—tapped at the door Bram had been eavesdropping at and were admitted after a gruff exchange.
    Bram looked around the storage room. The objects it normally held seemed to have been pushed against the far wall, carelessly enough so that some of them had toppled and lay on the floor. From his early association with Kerthin, Bram recognized the materials of sculpture: pieces of lumber, lumps of clay the size of his head or bigger, wire armatures, wax blanks, elastic molds.
    But the other items were a puzzlement. There were shelves of glass bottles with rags tied around them; a sniff told Bram they were filled with alcohol. There were jars of metallic powder. Wooden billets the size of a man’s forearm, which someone had taken the trouble to whittle down at one end to make a grip.