Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

what was so special about it,” Bram said stubbornly.
    Bram knew that Tha-tha was very talented—the most talented of all the younglings in his group. Bram had tried to understand the little toccata that Tha-tha had composed, and had stretched himself across the five-pointed star of one of the readers to let his human skin sample its rippling patterns of cilia movement. But as always, the meaning had eluded him; it had only been something that tickled in structured rhythms.
    “Anyway,” Bram said, casting about for the perfect squelch, “it was nothing but a lot of squares inside squares that kept marching off the edge. I can make a touch reader do that!”
    In fact, Bram had an unusual facility with the Great Language for a human of any age. He was able to manipulate a cilia board well enough to reproduce a few basic commands, and when Voth absentmindedly pressed a limb against his skin, he was often able to recognize some of the simpler morphemes, like numbers.
    Tha-tha said, with a baffled earnestness that showed in the slow beat of his tentacle lining, “But it’s not the shapes that count, Bram-bram. You can have outlines with nothing inside. It’s the meaning they enclose that’s important.”
    Bram felt all the blood drain from his face. He was numb all over, as he had been the time he had slipped on a sheet of winter ice and come down flat on his belly and had all the wind knocked out of him.
    “It is so the shapes that count,” he insisted feebly. “You can tell lots of things from the shapes.”
    Tha-tha belatedly remembered that he had been admonished by Voth to make allowances for his four-limbed brother. He damped down the cilia movement in the tentacle that held Bram’s arm and concentrated on the fluting sounds of the Small Language coming from deep within his central gullet.
    “Never mind, Bram-bram, Su-su didn’t understand it either.” He gestured with a couple of spare limbs toward one of the wrestling brothers. Su-su was squealing in simpleminded triumph. He had his opponent pinned, with all five of the upper tentacles wrapped up in a tight bundle by Su-su’s encircling grip and the lower limbs off the floor, flailing wildly for purchase.
    Bram’s features screwed up, and he found himself ready to cry. Tha-tha, trying to be kind, had just made it worse. Everybody liked Su-su, but he wasn’t much in the brains department. He had trouble doing the simplest arithmetic and, Bram gathered, even the Great Language had been slow to develop in him. He communicated in the Small Language and in tactile baby talk, and it was obvious that Voth was becoming concerned about him.
    “Leave me alone!” He jerked his arm out of Tha-tha’s grasp and stomped over to his desk reader. It was the only one with a vision screen. The others’ touch readers didn’t need them, Tha-tha said, because the Great Language, even in its juvenile form, provided a sort of perception that was like pictures, only better—just as it was faster to count in the Great Language with its racing ranks of cilia than on a human-style keyboard. The visual cross-connection had something to do with the way the Nar brain worked. Bram’s touch brothers were capable of appreciating the pictures of his vision screen, but most of the time they watched them without much interest, just to be polite.
    Savagely, Bram punched buttons almost at random, but his small fingers were cleverer than his rage, and he found himself looking at some of his favorite sequences from the history lessons about Original Man.
    Here were the human race’s achievements in all their splendor and glory, as imagined by human artists with the help of computer reconstructions drawn from clues in the great Message, and interspersed with everyday scenes of the Father World and its family of planets.
    Bram caught his breath at the sight of the shining cities as they must have been, with their pyramids and cathedrals and the cloud-reaching spires that were very much like the tall calcified spirals of the cities that the Nar had grown with the aid of humankind’s bioengineering legacy.
    The pictures shuffled, and he saw the forests of giant trees grown on comets in the deep beyond the Lesser Sun. And the living spaceships derived from them—great twinned hemispheres of foliage and roots, hundreds of miles in diameter, voyaging to the nearer stars.
    And here was a simulation of a star itself being enclosed in a sort of sphere—the supposition was hazy—and