Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

great-great-great-grandmother.” She held up the twins for inspection, one in the crook of each arm. They were beginning to lose the wrinkled, recently boiled look, and it could be seen from their coloring and button features that they were going to take after Ame, not Smeth.
    “Never mind, they’re beautiful babies,” Mim said, nudging Bram in the ribs to keep him quiet. “And dizygotic twins are nobody’s fault.”
    Smeth puttered nearby, a fatuous grin on his face. Ame’s firm stewardship had done wonders for him; the rough edges, if not gone, were ground down a bit, and his friends pronounced him almost civilized. He and Ame had been together for ten Robbings now. She teased him by telling him that it had simply become too much trouble keeping him at arm’s length and that she had decided that maybe he was salvagable after all, despite five hundred years of bachelordom; to which he responded by swelling with pride and pleasure.
    “I’ve used up my quota on my first try,” Ame said ruefully.
    One child per century was the rule nowadays, enforced by society’s unspoken displeasure. Those who had bred too thoughtlessly during the profligate days of middle-passage now sheepishly waited for the passing years to rehabilitate their reputations.
    “You can have a share of mine or Lydis’s,” Mim said. “We’re not a prolific family. It all averages out.”
    “Yah, you want to talk embarrassed, look at Marg and Orris,” Jao said heartily. “Five children, like clockwork. Hey, I bet they have a cesium clock hanging over their sleeping nest so they can start working on number six the nanosecond it’s licit.”
    “Jao, you’re awful—stop that!” Ang exclaimed. “Excuse him, everybody.”
    “Why? What did I say?” Jao said innocently.
    Bram, suppressing a smile, said to Ame, “Quotas may be a thing of the past sooner than you think. We ought to be ready to leave this system in a few years, and then it’s just a question of time till we hit on a suitable planet.”
    He carefully refrained from specifying the father world of Original Man. He didn’t want to appear to be too much of a visionary to these practical young people like Ame and her friends. It was generally accepted that there ought to be any number of suitable planets of G-type suns in Original Man’s neck of the galaxy that once had been used by the vanished race and that therefore would possess breathable atmospheres and benign ecologies. Any sensible person aboard ought to be ready to settle for one of these. And any one of them would be a treasure trove for the paleontologists and the archeologists and the rest of the practitioners of the new theoretical sciences.
    “Yah, as soon as your cohabitant here starts up the fusion engine, we’ll be on our way,” Jao said. “How’s it going, Smeth?”
    Smeth, startled out of his slack-jawed adoration of his firstborn, replied, “I’ve got a crew aboard the probe overhauling the systems now. The four-wave mirrors need realignment, and there’s been some minor damage to the web of the scoop, but it held up pretty well, considering. I’d say we ought to finish in a two of Tendays, and then we’ll be ready to travel again.”
    “We ought to be able to land on the outside of whatever’s walling off the sun!” Jao said enthusiastically. “The temperature’s a nice comfortable three hundred degrees Absolute. Then we hightail it out of the system and start looking at yellow dwarfs. There’s only eight or nine possibles within a twenty-light-year radius, and I’m betting one of them is the birthplace of Original Man. The stars around him would’ve had different relative motions—the guidepost constellations in the Message are no good to us now—but they’d have the same general orbits around the galactic center, and I’m betting they didn’t drift too far apart. This beacon would’ve been one of the two or three closest.” He showed all this teeth to Ame in a gargantuan grin. “You’ll be able to multiply with a clear conscience by the time the twins are grown.”
    Bram marveled that Jao was able to be so bluff and nonchalant on the subject in the fact of his own tragedy. His second child, by some fluke, had proved to be immune to the immorality virus. The boy had grown into a humorous, likable chap with Jao’s talent for physics. He had made some notable contributions and had left offspring himself before dying at the age of a hundred and thirty. That had been two