Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

settle down.
    For the human race had reinvented politics.
    The human population of the Father World, small as it still was, had grown to the point where it supported a remarkable number of factions, calling themselves by such names as Partnerites, Schismatists, Resurgists, Ascendists. Kerthin’s friends were a fanatical splinter group of the staid, old Ascendist party.
    Unwillingly, Bram was drawn into the conspiratorial schemes of Kerthin and her friends, at first only to keep an eye on Kerthin, and later to protect a startling secret he had uncovered through his work at the Nar biocenter.
    Human beings were meant to be immortal!
    Bram’s unusual facility with touch readers had provided the key. While rummaging through the old files, he had discovered that the original human genome constructed by Nar bioengineers was incomplete. A codicil to the great Message of Original Man, received some fifty years into the second cycle of the transmission, had contained instructions for a synthetic virus able to infect human cells with the disease of eternal life. The tailored DNA had the ability to insinuate itself into human nu-cleotides and turn off a “death gene”—a genetic switch that expressed itself after a certain number of cell generations. The information had rested in the files for a thousand years—either unrecognized, or interdicted because of environmental dangers associated with it.
    Bram shuddered to think what Kerthin’s wild-eyed friends might do with such information. At best they would use it to inflame human passions, to put an end to the trust between human and Nar. Bram did not believe that the information had been hidden on purpose. He believed in the good will of the Nar, and he waited for the opportune moment to bring the matter up with Voth. But first he wanted to be sure.
    While Bram was still trying to decide what to do, a starship arrived from Juxt One. Aboard it, having traveled for seven years, was the Ascendist messiah for whom Kerthin and her friends had been waiting.
    His name was Penser, and what he preached was a mindless violence that he described as a “cleansing.” The universe belonged to man by right, he told his disciples, and could not be shared with the Nar. He dismissed Nar largess. “To share is weakness,” he said. “To accept is weakness.” He advocated taking by force what the Nar were giving voluntarily. On Juxt One he had stirred his followers to acts of sabotage in which Nar had been killed. The abortive revolution had been hushed up by the horrified human settlers, and had not been recognized for what it was by the peaceable and unsuspecting Nar. Penser had fled under a false identity stolen from one of his disciples.
    Now Penser proposed to hijack one of the great living starships and, with a few hundred followers, use it to take over a thinly inhabited moon of Jumb, the gas giant orbiting the Lesser Sun. The small Nar population there would be deported—killed if they resisted; the human colonists, Penser believed, would have no option but to go along with his plans once the deed was done.
    The takeover would be accomplished before the Nar on nearby Ilf, the Lesser Sun’s principal inhabited planet, realized what was happening. After that, according to Penser, the Nar commonwealth would accept the situation to prevent useless further violence.
    “They’ll let the humans have their one little world,” Kerthin assured Bram, mouthing Penser’s words.
    The seized moon was to be the focal point from which humans would crowd the Nar out of the cosmos. Penser intended to step up the human breeding rate without bothering about gene editing. Humans could easily outbreed the Nar. “Do you realize that the human population of the universe could be doubled every twenty years?” Kerthin had said, her eyes shining.
    Other worldlets would be taken over, one at a time—each as an accomplished fact to be presented to the Nar, with the dust allowed to settle between conquests and the Nar encouraged to believe that this time was the last. Penser had studied the ancient history of Original Man. Hitler, Napoleon, and Alexander had failed because they had bitten off more than they could chew. By the time the Nar woke up, Penser said, the human race would be ready to swallow Ilf—even scour the Father World itself!
    But the starship hijacking went horribly wrong. The Nar, with a casual swipe of their great powers, put a stop to the mutiny and took all the humans aboard