Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

thicker and fleshier, and the five vestigial eyes at its crotches were lensless, though still light-sensitive for whatever endocrine processes were affected by light. The upper structure was more supple and willowy, its divided tips more adroit at handling things.
    Now one of those supple limbs descended to Bram’s shoulder, velvety side out. The tiny cilia of the warm surface tickled Bram’s skin as they rippled in a reflex of frustrated communication. The Nar frequently thought aloud in the Great Language when they talked in the vocal mode, just as humans often made involuntary hand and body gestures while speaking. Except that with the Nar it was the other way around: the Great Language was richer and subtler than speech. Bram, though only five, was better than most at picking up traces of meaning and emotion from skin contact, and he could tell that Voth was sad.
    “Because,” Voth said patiently, “human stuff started out on another world.”
    “Like Ilf ?” the boy asked, naming the principal inhabited planet that swung around the sun’s companion star. Ilf was only a few months distant in the great living spaceships—less by fusion-fission drive—and there was a lively commerce between the two worlds.
    “Well, like Ilf,” the old decapod conceded, “but much, much farther away.”
    “How far?” Bram demanded.
    “Very far. Too far to see.”
    “Even through a telescope?”
    “Even through a telescope.” They had played this game many times before.
    “I bet I could see it if I had a really big telescope,” Bram said stubbornly.
    “No, not even then.”
    “A really big, big, big telescope!”
    “No, little one, it’s not possible,” Voth said, reverting to Inglex, which with Chin-pin-yin was one of the two principal human languages. Even when they spoke to each other in the Small Language, the Nar used a lot of human loan words.
    “But why not?”
    Bram could feel the agitated writhing of the hairlike filaments against his shoulder as the decapod debated with himself whether to go further with his information this time. Without looking, he knew that bands of deeper purple were marching up the underside of the tentacle, and he could detect a faint smell that he would have described as lemony if he had ever seen a lemon.
    “Bram, you must understand just how far away the world that human people originated on is. If we could see the light from its sun, we would be seeing light that left there more than thirty-seven million years ago. We Nar didn’t even exist then. We were just little primitive creatures as big as your hand that lived along the seashore, and we were just learning to walk upright on our lower five. We—” Voth hesitated. Bram felt a tingling sensation on his shoulder. “We think that human beings don’t exist there anymore. And if they did, they would have changed into something else. For all we know, their sun itself could have stopped existing thirty-seven million years ago.”
    “Well, then,” Bram said with five-year-old logic, “why don’t we go there to find out?”
    The feathery touch of another tentacle brushed his cheek. “People and things could never, ever travel so far,” Voth said. “If it takes light thirty-seven million years to get here from the human sun, it would take a full-grown spaceship seven times as long to go there. Can you figure out how long that is?”
    Bram screwed up his small features. “Two hundred and fifty-nine million, ” he finally announced.
    “Very good, Bram.”
    “Well, then, why couldn’t we go in a rocket?”
    “It would take almost as long, and besides, a fusion-fission ship is too small to live on for any length of time. And if you could live two hundred million years, you’d forget who you were and why you went. No, it’s just not possible.”
    “Well,” Bram said, pouncing triumphantly, “how did human people get here, then?”
    There was a cautious circularity of cilia movement. “Didn’t one of your gene mothers ever discuss it with you?”
    Bram dropped his eyes and traced a geometric figure on the floor with his big toe. “I asked mama-mu Dlors about it once, and she said I’d understand when I got older.”
    “I see. I think you’re old enough to understand now, Bram. That was a very intelligent question. The answer is they didn’t.”
    Bram warmed to the praise. “But human stuff did, though? And then you grew people out of it, the way you grow potatoes and spaceships and things?”
    The old