The telescope that Jun Davd tended in an adjacent structure was small only by comparison with the big eye; it was a huge drumlike object mounted on rocker beams. With it you could see the planets of the lesser sun, and even the gas giant that revolved around Juxt, the closest extrasystem star, almost a light-year away.
“No, it’s too small,” Jun Davd said. “You know that, Bram. I’ve explained it all before. Compared to the Milky Way, even our neighbor galaxy, the Bonfire, is practically next door. The Milky Way is so far away that when the light we detect first left it, there weren’t even any Nar here on the Father World—just the little seashore creatures that were their ancestors. So we can never see Original Man’s galaxy as it is now.”
“We could if we waited another thirty-seven million years,” Bram said reasonably.
“I guess we could at that,” Jun Davd laughed. “Come around then and I’ll show it to you. In the meantime…”
He busied himself at the human-style keyboard and a sea of stars appeared in the oval screen. After a lot of jiggling, a fuzzy dot centered itself, grew in size, and sharpened into the image of a feathery coil of light with a golden yolk at the center.
Bram caught his breath. Jun Davd had shown him more spectacular sights through the telescope, but there was none that caused the sudden gripping pain in his small chest that the sight of humankind’s home always did. If he had been allowed to, he could have sat and looked at it for hours, making up stories in his head.
“Jun Davd,” he said at last, “do you think Original Man could speak the Great Language?”
The old apprentice looked at him sharply. “No, I’m quite sure he couldn’t. They were the same as us, those prototype humans who sent the Message—or we’re the same as them, with a few bad genes edited out, of course. Why do you ask?”
“They—they rose so high. Higher than the Nar. Everybody says so, even Voth. How c-could they, if they were like us?”
All of sudden salt tears were rolling down his cheeks. He tried to stop them and smile at Jun Davd, but the smile only made things worse.
Jun Davd took him by the shoulders and turned him gently around to face him. “What happened today, Bram?” he asked softly.
Between sobs, Bram told him about Tha-tha’s promotion to an adult touch reader while he, Bram, couldn’t even understand a toccata on a child’s reader. About the growing facility of his touch brothers in the Great Language while he himself had a growing sense of being left behind. About the feeling of increasingly being left out of things, even though Tha-tha and the others always tried to remember to speak aloud for his benefit.
“I see,” Jun Davd said grimly. “And you wonder what kind of place the world holds for you, especially when you look around at older humans like me and see the limits on how far we can go. I know how you feel, Bram. I was a protégé of the old director—the one before Pfaf-tlk-pfaf—just as you’re a protégé of Voth, and even though he was very close to the Change when I was growing up, he saw to it that I was firmly established before his final metaplasis, and Pfaf-tlk-pfaf has honored his wishes. On the whole, it’s been a good life—the best, I think, that’s reasonably possible.”
Bram flung his arms around Jun Davd’s neck. Hugging a human being was different than hugging a Nar. Human beings had bones that you could feel through the skin. “Why do I have to be different, Jun Davd?” he wailed. “I asked Voth once, and he said it was because I was made of human stuff instead of Nar stuff.”
Jun Davd disengaged him gently and held him at arm’s length so that he could look into his face. “Voth-shr-voth was right; you’re different just because you’re a human being. That doesn’t mean you’re better and it doesn’t mean you’re worse. Only a different sort of person. That’s why Voth started to bring you here to the observatory when he first saw that you were interested in where humans come from—so that you could have some sense of your own heritage and be proud of it, not think of yourself as some kind of flawed Nar. I think it would break Voth’s heart to have you apprenticed here instead of with his own touch group, but he was willing to take the chance of losing you so that you could be happy and fulfilled.”
“I’m sorry I cried, Jun Davd.”
“That’s all right, Bram. You cry whenever you feel like it. That’s part of being human, too.”
“I thought that … maybe if Original Man could speak the Great Language, I could learn how someday, too.”
“They reached the heights their own way, Bram. The human way, not the Nar way. And whatever heights the second human race reaches here in this galaxy, we’ll do as humans, too.”
Bram looked at the tiny glowing helix displayed in the viewer. “I’m going to go there someday,” he said with a child’s seriousness.
“You know that’s not possible, Bram. We’ve discussed it often enough. We can reach a few of the nearer stars within a human lifetime—though we’d be very, very old by the time we got much farther than Juxt or Next. And the Nar can travel about ten times farther within their lifetimes. But the limit will always be about a hundred light-years—maybe a few thousand light-years within our own galaxy if we ever learn to travel at relativistic speeds. But that’s a lot different from crossing the void between galaxies—especially galaxies that aren’t even in our own cluster. No, child, it’s a fine thing to be able to look through a telescope at these distant objects, but they can never be reached across an ocean of time, any more than you or I could return to our own egghood. Voth wants you to be happy in your life. And that means making your way here, in the real world, as best you can.”
It was one of those adult speeches that Bram had learned to shut his ears to. His eyes had never left the golden spiral in the screen.
“I didn’t mean right now, Jun Davd,” he said complacently. “I meant someday.”
The someday never came. Bram became immersed in life. As his touch brothers outdistanced him, he spent more and more time with friends from the human enclave and shared their purely human concerns. By adolescence, few of the humans had much in common with their Nar touch brothers anymore, and Bram was no exception. Tha-tha made an effort to keep in touch with him—still peeled down his waxy outer integument and unfolded his inner surfaces while they jabbered away in their childhood patois of Inglex-laced Small Language—but Tha-tha had his own Nar life to live, a life that grew ever more incomprehensible to Bram.
It didn’t matter. Bram, full of the juices of youth, had the heady excitement of human society to sample. All around him was a ferment of art, music, literature, fashion-people busily assimilating the sketchy outlines of human culture as it had been transmitted in the Message, and building on it. People doing things!
He left mama-mu Dlors’ nest and moved into the bachelor lodge. He was on his way to an adult life with new freedom to explore. He forgot childish dreams; the visits to Jun Davd at the observatory became less frequent and finally ceased entirely. Astronomy was a dead end for humans anyway, as Jun Davd’s example had shown. Bioengineering was where the honors lay—where there was a hope of practical results that could have a recognizable impact on the miniature human communities scattered through the Father World. A human named Willum-frth-willum had even been granted a Nar-style honorific for his contributions to the development of viral monofilament, and then had gone on to achieve celebrity among his fellow human beings for recreating additional terrestrial life forms, such as the tomato, by working backward from existing genes of human foodstuffs included in the Message. There was an old human saying to the effect that the invention of a new sauce contributes more to human welfare than the discovery of a new star; how much more important, then, was it to bring more variety to the limited human diet? When it came time for Bram to make a career choice, Willum-frth-willum’s shining example was already there before him.