Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

were rolling down his cheeks. He tried to stop them and smile at Jun Davd, but the smile only made things worse.
    Jun Davd took him by the shoulders and turned him gently around to face him. “What happened today, Bram?” he asked softly.
    Between sobs, Bram told him about Tha-tha’s promotion to an adult touch reader while he, Bram, couldn’t even understand a toccata on a child’s reader. About the growing facility of his touch brothers in the Great Language while he himself had a growing sense of being left behind. About the feeling of increasingly being left out of things, even though Tha-tha and the others always tried to remember to speak aloud for his benefit.
    “I see,” Jun Davd said grimly. “And you wonder what kind of place the world holds for you, especially when you look around at older humans like me and see the limits on how far we can go. I know how you feel, Bram. I was a prot é g é of the old director—the one before Pfaf-tlk-pfaf—just as you’re a prot é g é of Voth, and even though he was very close to the Change when I was growing up, he saw to it that I was firmly established before his final metaplasis, and Pfaf-tlk-pfaf has honored his wishes. On the whole, it’s been a good life—the best, I think, that’s reasonably possible.”
    Bram flung his arms around Jun Davd’s neck. Hugging a human being was different than hugging a Nar. Human beings had bones that you could feel through the skin. “Why do I have to be different, Jun Davd?” he wailed. “I asked Voth once, and he said it was because I was made of human stuff instead of Nar stuff.”
    Jun Davd disengaged him gently and held him at arm’s length so that he could look into his face. “Voth-shr-voth was right; you’re different just because you’re a human being. That doesn’t mean you’re better and it doesn’t mean you’re worse. Only a different sort of person. That’s why Voth started to bring you here to the observatory when he first saw that you were interested in where humans come from—so that you could have some sense of your own heritage and be proud of it, not think of yourself as some kind of flawed Nar. I think it would break Voth’s heart to have you apprenticed here instead of with his own touch group, but he was willing to take the chance of losing you so that you could be happy and fulfilled.”
    “I’m sorry I cried, Jun Davd.”
    “That’s all right, Bram. You cry whenever you feel like it. That’s part of being human, too.”
    “I thought that … maybe if Original Man could speak the Great Language, I could learn how someday, too.”
    “They reached the heights their own way, Bram. The human way, not the Nar way. And whatever heights the second human race reaches here in this galaxy, we’ll do as humans, too.”
    Bram looked at the tiny glowing helix displayed in the viewer. “I’m going to go there someday,” he said with a child’s seriousness.
    “You know that’s not possible, Bram. We’ve discussed it often enough. We can reach a few of the nearer stars within a human lifetime—though we’d be very, very old by the time we got much farther than Juxt or Next. And the Nar can travel about ten times farther within their lifetimes. But the limit will always be about a hundred light-years—maybe a few thousand light-years within our own galaxy if we ever learn to travel at relativistic speeds. But that’s a lot different from crossing the void between galaxies—especially galaxies that aren’t even in our own cluster. No, child, it’s a fine thing to be able to look through a telescope at these distant objects, but they can never be reached across an ocean of time, any more than you or I could return to our own egghood. Voth wants you to be happy in your life. And that means making your way here, in the real world, as best you can.”
    It was one of those adult speeches that Bram had learned to shut his ears to. His eyes had never left the golden spiral in the screen.
    “I didn’t mean right now, Jun Davd,” he said complacently. “I meant someday.”
     
    The someday never came. Bram became immersed in life. As his touch brothers outdistanced him, he spent more and more time with friends from the human enclave and shared their purely human concerns. By adolescence, few of the humans had much in common with their Nar touch brothers anymore, and Bram was no exception. Tha-tha made an effort to keep in touch with him—still peeled down his waxy outer