Donald Moffitt: Second Genesis

Theth-theth tugged at Bram’s arm with an encircling tentacle; Bram could feel the impatient rippling of the cilia.

“The Story!” the little decapod piped. “You promised, Bramfather!”

“Eh? I’m sorry. I must have been daydreaming. Too much lunch.”

He was comfortably full and heavy from the Safepassage Day picnic; Mim had gone off to pick wild flowers with Ang and Lydis, and some of the men were playing a game of quoits in the grass, but he had not had the ambition to join them.

“The Message,” the small flowerlike creature prompted. “How the race of Nar entrusted their faithful humans with it, but there was no one to receive it after the worlds ended. And—and how the humans sailed between Scylla and Charybdis, and how Yggdrasil saved the human race when the whole universe caught fire and burned up, and how the humans used the Message themselves to bring a new race of Nar into the world, just as the Nar had done for them—”

“Slow down a minute!” Bram laughed. “It seems to me that you’re on the way to telling the whole Story yourself!”

“Go ahead, Bramfather,” Theth-theth said. “You tell it really !”

Bram took a deep breath and began. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful planet called the Father World…”

He was winding the tale down, with Theth-theth’s tentacles waving in a pleasurable trance, when Jao came hiking up the slope.

“There you are!” Jao blared at them. He bent to scratch Methuselah’s head and offer a palm and bared forearm to Theth-theth. “Here you go, youngster, a little something for Safepassage Day.”

He produced a miniature plumb bob molded of gaily painted polysugar. Theth-theth accepted it and said, “Thank you, Jao-uncle. May I save it till later? Mama-mu Mim says I’ve had enough candy for now.”

“Sure you can,” Jao said.

Bram took charge of the candy bob, while Theth-theth ran off to play with the other children. Methuselah scampered off after him. The two were inseparable.

“Have to do something about the way Safepassage Day runs through the year—adjust it to Haven’s seasons,” Jao said. “Doesn’t seem right celebrating it in the summertime, anyway. It ought to stay put.”

“The children don’t care,” Bram said. “They don’t stay children long enough to be confused by it. For Theth-theth, it’s always been a summer holiday.”

Both of them looked over to where the children were playing. Methuselah was getting underfoot, but they were tolerating him. Theth-theth had a tentacle twined around the forearm of a boy wearing a touch sleeve; they seemed to be choosing up sides.

“We’ll have to keep improving the hardware,” Jao said absently. “That induction cap’s too bulky. Maybe something like a permanent implant … a second-generation mediation program … neural cloning. We can’t let them grow away from each other, you know.”

“No,” Bram agreed. “But the real problem is life span.”

They watched the frolicking youngsters, both of them reflecting on the tragedy of Nar mortality. “We could work on it,” Jao said after a while, “but how do you keep them young without suppressing the Change? It would be like preserving a flower to keep it from going to seed. And that’s what you’d have—a preserved flower.”

“Well, the second generation of Nar is still a thousand years off. Maybe we’ll think of something by then. In the meantime, we’ll do our best for Theth-theth and the others.”

“We’ve got to make sure that they grow up to be equal partners in whatever kind of society we develop, at the very least.”

“Yes,” Bram said.

Jao brightened. “We’ll work something out. At least we have this little corner of the universe to ourselves, for this hour of cosmic time, to do with what we want. Still no intelligent signals from the Milky Way, and when we hear any, it’ll probably be the Cuddlies. But there’s one thing I can’t help thinking of…”

The summer heat and the digesting lunch made Bram too relaxed and comfortable to get really alarmed, but he knew that tone in Jao’s voice. He sat up straighter against the bole of the resurrected oak tree and said, “What?”

“It’s been almost seventy-five million years since Original Man began broadcasting his genes to the universe. That shell of signals is still expanding. It’s reached its target, the Virgo Cluster, by now and enveloped hundreds—thousands—of galaxies…”

“Go on.”

“Does the human race exist elsewhere in the universe?”

“We couldn’t possibly know,” Bram said. “Not for another seventy-five million years, at best.”

“There’s one other thing.”

Bram sighed. “I think I know what it is.”

“We’ve been edited. Oh, just for health, intelligence—things like that. And for all we know, the Nar did a little editing of their own. We did with them, so they could eat what we eat.” He paused. “If these other human races out there were edited by their makers—what are they going to be like?”

They grinned at each other. “We’ll just have to wait and see,” Bram said.