Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

several centuries older than the director, and near to the time of his Change. Bram didn’t know exactly what the Change was, but it had something to do with why you hardly ever saw a lady Nar, except for the rare infirm and draped individual being carried in a biolitter, and why there was no such thing as a little girl Nar, only touch brothers.
    Bram had asked about it, but Nar grownups were always evasive, the way mama-mu Dlors always changed the subject when he asked how human babies were assembled.
    “Pfaf-tlk-pfaf is very busy now,” Jun Davd told Bram, “but perhaps he’ll be able to see you for a few minutes later on.”
    “And then will he show me the galaxy of Original Man with the big eye?” Bram asked.
    “We’ll see. The big eye is doing some very important work at the moment—a survey of the heart of this galaxy, the one we live in.”
    “But you promised.”
    “All in due course. First, lunch.”
    A short while later, Bram pushed away his half-finished bowl of chimerical soycorn porridge and wiped his lips on the damp cloth Jun Davd gave him. “All through,” he said.
    “Would you like a sweetcrisp?”
    “No, thank you. Can we see it now?”
    Jun Davd went over to a keyboard that had been hay-wired to a Nar touch pad. An oval screen lit up with fuzzy visual patterns generated by an interface program that Jun Davd had written himself. No one but Jun Davd could make sense of it, but Bram had resolved that some day he would learn to read it, too.
    “The big eye’s still busy,” Jun Davd said, “but I can give you the last stored view. We swung that way about a Tenday ago.”
    Bram was disappointed. “I wanted to have a really now look, not a picture.”
    Jun Davd laughed. “You couldn’t tell the difference. Anyway, there’s no such thing as a really now look. The light from Original Man’s galaxy left there thirty-seven million years ago, and the images are all processed one way or another.”
    “I can so tell the difference. It isn’t the same thing.”
    Jun Davd’s expression sobered. He squatted on his haunches to look into Bram’s eyes. “I understand, Bram. You want to feel that you’re seeing the actual light of home. But even the big eye only collects photons one at a time and assembles them into an image. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    “I guess so,” Bram said reluctantly. He brightened. “Could we see it with your telescope—the little one?”
    The telescope that Jun Davd tended in an adjacent structure was small only by comparison with the big eye; it was a huge drumlike object mounted on rocker beams. With it you could see the planets of the lesser sun, and even the gas giant that revolved around Juxt, the closest extrasystem star, almost a light-year away.
    “No, it’s too small,” Jun Davd said. “You know that, Bram. I’ve explained it all before. Compared to the Milky Way, even our neighbor galaxy, the Bonfire, is practically next door. The Milky Way is so far away that when the light we detect first left it, there weren’t even any Nar here on the Father World—just the little seashore creatures that were their ancestors. So we can never see Original Man’s galaxy as it is now. ”
    “We could if we waited another thirty-seven million years,” Bram said reasonably.
    “I guess we could at that,” Jun Davd laughed. “Come around then and I’ll show it to you. In the meantime …”
    He busied himself at the human-style keyboard and a sea of stars appeared in the oval screen. After a lot of jiggling, a fuzzy dot centered itself, grew in size, and sharpened into the image of a feathery coil of light with a golden yolk at the center.
    Bram caught his breath. Jun Davd had shown him more spectacular sights through the telescope, but there was none that caused the sudden gripping pain in his small chest that the sight of humankind’s home always did. If he had been allowed to, he could have sat and looked at it for hours, making up stories in his head.
    “Jun Davd,” he said at last, “do you think Original Man could speak the Great Language?”
    The old apprentice looked at him sharply. “No, I’m quite sure he couldn’t. They were the same as us, those prototype humans who sent the Message—or we’re the same as them, with a few bad genes edited out, of course. Why do you ask?”
    “They—they rose so high. Higher than the Nar. Everybody says so, even Voth. How c-could they, if they were like us?”
    All of sudden salt tears