But for these few moments of solitude he could think about home. For that, after all, was what the annual tree-turning celebration was all about—though it had grown lately into a tradition of its own.
Home.
Thirty-seven million years ago there had been an intelligent species that called itself the human race—Original Man. They had dwelt, by all the evidence, on a planet of a yellow sun in a rather isolated galaxy that they called the “Milky Way,” part of a sparse cluster consisting basically of two big spirals and their attendant swarms of small satellite galaxies.
Whether or not human beings still existed there was impossible to know, of course, when the very light that arrived from the Milky Way was thirty-seven million years old. But it was unlikely in the extreme. It was to be presumed that those humans were long extinct—gone the way of other species before them. Or that in the immensity of time they had evolved out of all recognition, into some new species that could no longer be considered human.
But before they had vanished or changed, they had left their mark on the universe.
The heights they must have reached had been dazzling, for they had learned how to tame whole stars and squander their energy. The energy, in unimaginable quantities, had been spent on the ultimate purpose of every species—to perpetuate itself.
Only this species had defeated the final enemy—the witless yawn of time.
Transformed into radio waves, the energy had been sprayed in the direction of the local universe that contained the richest clusters of galaxies—galaxies by the thousands, each containing hundreds of billions of suns.
It had taken all of that thirty-seven million years for the radio waves, expanding at the speed of light, to reach the galaxy where the Father World resided—a sprung spiral that those far-away, long-ago humans had known as the Whirlpool. There, a race of intelligent decapods who called themselves the Nar had intercepted the radio waves and deciphered them.
And a treasure trove had spilled out.
The lessons in genetic engineering alone had transformed the Nar civilization and given it abundance. Terrestrial starches and sugars had provided cheap energy and construction materials in the form of cellulose and exotic plastics. The bioengineering techniques, adapted to the Father World’s life forms, had boosted the food supply and led to a host of biological devices that had taken the place of inefficient machinery. The genetic blueprint for a fast-growing tree called a poplar, included in the kit, had paved the way for the great living spaceships like Yggdrasil which plied the spaceway at up to one-seventh the speed of light and, with their world-size environments, made interstellar exploration at last practical and inexpensive.
But the centerpiece of the great Message was the genetic blueprint for humankind itself.
A mere millennium later—a drop in the bucket of cosmic time—the Nar bioengineers had created the second human race and nurtured several generations of it. A modest cultural package included in the Message had even given the new humans the sketch of a human society to enclose them.
Bram closed his eyes and remembered what it had been like to grow up as a small human child in a world of frondlike giants who towered so far above a little boy that even their girdle of waistline eyes—the closest thing to a face that a Nar possessed—loomed higher than his own eye level.
To be something between a house pet and the echo of demigods. To be loved and pitied as someone whose physical limitations would forever bar him from full closeness in the Nar touch group that had adopted him, and would forever bar him from full membership in the wider Nar society beyond.
For humans were handicapped. By their nature they were unable to speak the Great Language in all its tactile richness. Humans had to make do with the crude unenhanced sounds of the Small Language, or their own Inglex or Chin-pin-yin. And they were painfully short-lived. They died after only a century or two, long before they could earn the honorifics that would gain them an adult’s place in an adult’s word.
Still, he had been cherished. The new people born aboard Yggdrasil would never know what it was like to have Nar touch brothers.
Bram let the noise of the revelers in the outside corridor fade from his consciousness, and let the old memories wash over him.
“Bram-bram, guess what?” Tha-tha had said to him that day, in the blend of Inglex and the Small Language they used when speaking to one another.
Tha-tha was Bram’s favorite touch brother, even though you weren’t really supposed to have favorites.
“What?” he said absently, staring longingly through an oval casement at the sunny world outside.
It was a splendid morning, early in the season when the lesser sun left the night sky and spent most of its time in the day. The bay was bright and cloudless, the sky a vivid lavender blue, and Bram could see the sparkling water, full of Nar bathers and colorful little V-winged pleasure boats.
He turned to contemplate with disfavor the beehive chamber where he and his touch brothers had their lessons and naps. Ranged along the far curve of the wall were the miniature tilt-top body readers against which Tha-tha and the others pressed their outspread upper tentacles—the star-shaped upper surfaces scaled down to child’s size—and his own little desk with its reading screen and big-buttoned board that took the place of the others’ touch pads. There was the toy box, filled with baby things that most of them professed to have outgrown—the spongy alphabet-letters for Bram, and the pyramids and cones and involute spheroids of various textures, and the small furry, mock-alive things that went through their limited tactile sequence when you squeezed them in the right place.
Two of the young decapods were wrestling, roiling boisterously around on the floor, their stubby little tentacles entwined as they tested one another’s strength. Roughhousing like this was apt to go on when there was no big Nar around to supervise them. For the moment, the old foster-tutor, Voth, had left them to their own devices; they were supposed to be quietly using the touch readers or otherwise usefully occupying their time, but it was hard to concentrate when the weather was so fine and the smell of the salt ocean was in the air, and the whole world seemed to have gone swimming.
Bram gave a tragic sigh. Lessons were all right, he supposed, but some days it was better to be outside.
Tha-tha sidled closer to him, piping happily, “Voth says I can have my own grownup-size reader! And library access to grownup touch scores—the easy ones, anyway. And a real composition matrix!”
“You’re too little,” Bram said scornfully.
Actually Tha-tha, during the past year, had shot up a full foot above Bram’s mop of rust-colored hair. But the slender decapod form did not yet outmass him, and besides, in Bram’s perceptions, what really counted was eye level, and Tha-tha’s five mirror-eyes, equally spaced around the narrow waistline from which upper tentacles and lower limbs sprouted, still only came to somewhere around Bram’s ribcage.
“No, really. Voth says I’m getting very proficient. He submitted one of my toccatas; and they said that even though it wasn’t full span, it used areas just like an adult!”
In his eagerness to communicate, Tha-tha had wrapped one of his tentacles around Bram’s forearm, and Bram could feel the velvety nap of the limb’s underside writhing with effort.
“I didn’t see what was so special about it,” Bram said stubbornly.