So Bram made his adult compromise with life. Voth’s bioengineering touch group had always been waiting with open tentacles to take him in as a sponsored human; he was under the mantle of the great Voth-shr-voth, after all. But Bram proved to have a natural talent for the work, and soon he was holding his own. He had a greater affinity for the Great Language than most humans—he could even manipulate a touch reader well enough to call forth basic menus, and could find his way around the files with a minimum of help. In no time at all he was given greater responsibility, formed genuine working relationships with the Nar juniors, and was allowed to run his own subprojects.
Bram threw himself into his work; it was solid and useful, gave form and purpose to his life, and gave him status in the human community.
He avoided Jun Davd; he could not have said why. Every once in a while he would find himself staring at the blank patch of night sky that contained the faraway galaxy of the first human race. But you couldn’t see anything without a telescope. Bram would shake off an obscure, nagging sense of loss—a feeling he was not willing to examine—and allow the realites of daily life to absorb him.
There was a brief affair with Mim—but they lived in two different worlds now. He was part of the larger concerns of the Father World—minor though his role at the biocenter was. Mim had withdrawn more and more into the purely human ambience of the Compound, where a feverish minority of Resurgists tried to ignore the Nar civilization that supported them, and worked to recreate a semblance of an imagined human past. Eventually Bram lost Mim to an older man—Olan Byr, a musician like herself, who had made a name for himself as a tireless interpreter of the old music.
In due course, Bram formed a relationship with an exciting young woman named Kerthin, a sculptress with some radical ideas about human ascendancy in the sea of Nar that submerged them. Bram was entranced by her; he tried to show her that his thinking was as advanced as hers, but she laughed at him, told him that he was stuffy and conventional, but that she liked him anyhow.
Bram was ready to settle down by then; he formally proposed a visit to the gene co-op with Kerthin. Preliminary gene mapping had given him every reason to hope that the two of them would be allowed to contribute a preponderant number of their genes to a composite genome and rear the child as their own. It would be the final step in the settled existence he had contrived for himself.
But Kerthin was evasive. She teased Bram about being too complacent. There were still great things to be done, she told him. She was not ready to settle down.
For the human race had reinvented politics.
The human population of the Father World, small as it still was, had grown to the point where it supported a remarkable number of factions, calling themselves by such names as Partnerites, Schismatists, Resurgists, Ascendists. Kerthin’s friends were a fanatical splinter group of the staid, old Ascendist party.
Unwillingly, Bram was drawn into the conspiratorial schemes of Kerthin and her friends, at first only to keep an eye on Kerthin, and later to protect a startling secret he had uncovered through his work at the Nar biocenter.
Human beings were meant to be immortal!
Bram’s unusual facility with touch readers had provided the key. While rummaging through the old files, he had discovered that the original human genome constructed by Nar bioengineers was incomplete. A codicil to the great Message of Original Man, received some fifty years into the second cycle of the transmission, had contained instructions for a synthetic virus able to infect human cells with the disease of eternal life. The tailored DNA had the ability to insinuate itself into human nucleotides and turn off a “death gene”—a genetic switch that expressed itself after a certain number of cell generations. The information had rested in the files for a thousand years—either unrecognized, or interdicted because of environmental dangers associated with it.
Bram shuddered to think what Kerthin’s wild-eyed friends might do with such information. At best they would use it to inflame human passions, to put an end to the trust between human and Nar. Bram did not believe that the information had been hidden on purpose. He believed in the good will of the Nar, and he waited for the opportune moment to bring the matter up with Voth. But first he wanted to be sure.
While Bram was still trying to decide what to do, a starship arrived from Juxt One. Aboard it, having traveled for seven years, was the Ascendist messiah for whom Kerthin and her friends had been waiting.
His name was Penser, and what he preached was a mindless violence that he described as a “cleansing.” The universe belonged to man by right, he told his disciples, and could not be shared with the Nar. He dismissed Nar largess. “To share is weakness,” he said. “To accept is weakness.” He advocated taking by force what the Nar were giving voluntarily. On Juxt One he had stirred his followers to acts of sabotage in which Nar had been killed. The abortive revolution had been hushed up by the horrified human settlers, and had not been recognized for what it was by the peaceable and unsuspecting Nar. Penser had fled under a false identity stolen from one of his disciples.
Now Penser proposed to hijack one of the great living starships and, with a few hundred followers, use it to take over a thinly inhabited moon of Jumb, the gas giant orbiting the Lesser Sun. The small Nar population there would be deported—killed if they resisted; the human colonists, Penser believed, would have no option but to go along with his plans once the deed was done.
The takeover would be accomplished before the Nar on nearby Ilf, the Lesser Sun’s principal inhabited planet, realized what was happening. After that, according to Penser, the Nar commonwealth would accept the situation to prevent useless further violence.
“They’ll let the humans have their one little world,” Kerthin assured Bram, mouthing Penser’s words.
The seized moon was to be the focal point from which humans would crowd the Nar out of the cosmos. Penser intended to step up the human breeding rate without bothering about gene editing. Humans could easily outbreed the Nar. “Do you realize that the human population of the universe could be doubled every twenty years?” Kerthin had said, her eyes shining.
Other worldlets would be taken over, one at a time—each as an accomplished fact to be presented to the Nar, with the dust allowed to settle between conquests and the Nar encouraged to believe that this time was the last. Penser had studied the ancient history of Original Man. Hitler, Napoleon, and Alexander had failed because they had bitten off more than they could chew. By the time the Nar woke up, Penser said, the human race would be ready to swallow Ilf—even scour the Father World itself!
But the starship hijacking went horribly wrong. The Nar, with a casual swipe of their great powers, put a stop to the mutiny and took all the humans aboard 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 light-sail on a course to the target moon.