Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

integument and unfolded his inner surfaces while they jabbered away in their childhood patois of Inglex-laced Small Language—but Tha-tha had his own Nar life to live, a life that grew ever more incomprehensible to Bram.
    It didn’t matter. Bram, full of the juices of youth, had the heady excitement of human society to sample. All around him was a ferment of art, music, literature, fashion—people busily assimilating the sketchy outlines of human culture as it had been transmitted in the Message, and building on it. People doing things!
    He left mama-mu Dlors’ nest and moved into the bachelor lodge. He was on his way to an adult life with new freedom to explore. He forgot childish dreams; the visits to Jun Davd at the observatory became less frequent and finally ceased entirely. Astronomy was a dead end for humans anyway, as Jun Davd’s example had shown. Bioengineering was where the honors lay—where there was a hope of practical results that could have a recognizable impact on the miniature human communities scattered through the Father World. A human named Willum-frth-willum had even been granted a Nar-style honorific for his contributions to the development of viral monofilament, and then had gone on to achieve celebrity among his fellow human beings for recreating additional terrestrial life forms, such as the tomato, by working backward from existing genes of human foodstuffs included in the Message. There was an old human saying to the effect that the invention of a new sauce contributes more to human welfare than the discovery of a new star; how much more important, then, was it to bring more variety to the limited human diet? When it came time for Bram to make a career choice, Willum-frth-willum’s shining example was already there before him.
    So Bram made his adult compromise with life. Voth’s bioengineering touch group had always been waiting with open tentacles to take him in as a sponsored human; he was under the mantle of the great Voth-shr-voth, after all. But Bram proved to have a natural talent for the work, and soon he was holding his own. He had a greater affinity for the Great Language than most humans—he could even manipulate a touch reader well enough to call forth basic menus, and could find his way around the files with a minimum of help. In no time at all he was given greater responsibility, formed genuine working relationships with the Nar juniors, and was allowed to run his own subprojects.
    Bram threw himself into his work; it was solid and useful, gave form and purpose to his life, and gave him status in the human community.
    He avoided Jun Davd; he could not have said why. Every once in a while he would find himself staring at the blank patch of night sky that contained the faraway galaxy of the first human race. But you couldn’t see anything without a telescope. Bram would shake off an obscure, nagging sense of loss—a feeling he was not willing to examine—and allow the realites of daily life to absorb him.
    There was a brief affair with Mim—but they lived in two different worlds now. He was part of the larger concerns of the Father World—minor though his role at the biocenter was. Mim had withdrawn more and more into the purely human ambience of the Compound, where a feverish minority of Resurgists tried to ignore the Nar civilization that supported them, and worked to recreate a semblance of an imagined human past. Eventually Bram lost Mim to an older man—Olan Byr, a musician like herself, who had made a name for himself as a tireless interpreter of the old music.
    In due course, Bram formed a relationship with an exciting young woman named Kerthin, a sculptress with some radical ideas about human ascendancy in the sea of Nar that submerged them. Bram was entranced by her; he tried to show her that his thinking was as advanced as hers, but she laughed at him, told him that he was stuffy and conventional, but that she liked him anyhow.
    Bram was ready to settle down by then; he formally proposed a visit to the gene co-op with Kerthin. Preliminary gene mapping had given him every reason to hope that the two of them would be allowed to contribute a preponderant number of their genes to a composite genome and rear the child as their own. It would be the final step in the settled existence he had contrived for himself.
    But Kerthin was evasive. She teased Bram about being too complacent. There were still great things to be done, she told him. She was not ready to