Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

into custody—Penser’s followers and innocent passengers alike, making no distinction between them. Bram was one of the innocent bystanders caught up in the net.
    It was very bad. Penser was dead—a suicide. But there were dead Nar, as well. Among them was Bram’s old tutor, Voth-shr-voth.
    Voth’s death was a particular atrocity to the Nar. He had died under torture when Penser’s henchmen had attempted to force him—as the space tree’s acting biologist—to override the tree’s tropisms and make it spread the leaves of its lightsail on a course to the target moon.
    Worse than that, Voth’s death had interrupted the final flowering of his life—his terminal change from male to female. All of Voth’s budding children had died with him when he had failed to reach a breeding pool in time.
    The Nar had not understood until this time that their pets could bite. Their civilization ground briefly to a halt while they met in one of their grand touch conclaves to decide what to do about the human species.
    Tentacle pressed to tentacle, radio sleeves linking the parallel meetings on all the nearby worlds, the entire Nar race became a single immense organism whose process of deliberation passed human understanding. The humans at the center of the vast tribunal—a sea of living Nar that stretched mile upon mile—waited and shuddered.
    It was the Day of Wrath.
    The humans were heard. When it was Bram’s turn to speak, he told them about the immortality virus that had been withheld from all the generations of reconstituted man, condemning humans to short, unfulfilled lives in a long-lived Nar society. He told them of his childhood dream of returning home—home to the distant, unreachable galaxy where the first human race once had dwelt, and from which the tremendous Message of Original Man had been sent. His touch brother, Tha-tha, emerged from the packed throng to speak to him directly, and perhaps to intercede for him. “It is true, then, Bram-bram,” he asked sadly, “that all your life you felt you had no place here?”
    All around Bram, other humans were simultaneously unburdening themselves to the collective Nar consciousness: Partnerites telling of their struggles to be accepted in a society that saw them as ephemeral mutes; Resurgists admitting why they had given up and surrendered to a daydream of past human glory; even some Penserite radicals attempting to explain why they had been driven to violence in their effort to find a place for humans in a Nar universe.
    Perhaps the Nar had never before realized the depths of human alienation and anguish. But they were getting an earful now. The sea of tentacles seethed. Bram could not read what was happening out there. No human could. But he could sense a great surge of sorrow and revulsion, distress and pity.
    The human race might get off lightly, he dared to hope. The present generation might be allowed to live out their lives comfortably—under closer supervision, of course. It was even possible that the human species need not vanish from the universe a second time; limited breeding or in vitro gene assembly might keep a few dozen specimens around as curiosities for future generations of Nar to gawk at.
    But the Nar, in a huge tide of nonmammalian empathy, were more compassionate than Bram could have imagined.
    When the verdict was announced, the human race found that it had been sentenced to immortality.
    The Nar had no use for immortality themselves; for them an eternity without aging and what lay at the end of it was an eternity without fulfillment. So perhaps they simply had not realized what such a gift would mean to humankind.
    Bram was put in charge of a human-run project to reconstruct the virus; the Nar, with exquisite tact, had recognized that this must be a human achievement, not an act of charity. It would be the work of years or decades, even with Original Man’s blueprint. For Bram would have to find an alternate route to the same result to avoid the biological dangers associated with the immortality nucleotides—dangers that, some thought, may have contributed to the demise of Original Man.
    But immortality was only part of the Nar gift—a means to an end. With the complete gift, the Nar gave Bram back his dream.
    The Nar species was on the verge of an enormous technological leap. Travel between stars, until now, had meant riding the worldlet-size space-dwelling trees that were part of Original Man’s bioengineering bequest. They had