Donald Moffit - Genesis Quest

The Genesis Quest

Donald Moffitt

An [e - reads ] Book

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage

retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or

persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First e-reads publication 1999

www.e-reads.com

ISBN 0-7592-0180-3

Author Biography

Donald Moffitt was born in Boston and now lives in rural Maine with his wife, Anne, a native of

Connecticut. A former public relations executive, industrial filmmaker, and ghostwriter, he has been

writing fiction on and off for more than twenty years under his own name and an assortment of pen

names. His first full-length science-fiction novel and the first book of any genre to be published under his

own name was THE JUPITER THEFT (Del Rey, 1977).

Other books by Donald Moffitt also available in e-reads editions

The Second Genesis

Table of Contents

Prologue One

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part II

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Prologue Two

The Genesis Quest

Prologue One

Message

One entire hemisphere of the little moon had been turned into an ear. The great radio bowls spread to

the sharp curve of the horizon like the lacy skeletons of sea creatures left behind by some unimaginable

tide, their serried ranks bristling against the airless black of the sky.

It was still some hours before worldrise. The stars were huge and brilliant across the empty night. The

listening was still good. The immense shells yearned toward the void, collecting the random crackle of

radio noise from beyond, as they had done now for half a thousand years.

Without result.

In the observatory dome rising at the center of the tremendous array, the project director refocused two

or three of the eyes he had been keeping on the control panel and indulged himself for a moment with a

full-circle view of the surrounding system. He never tired of the sight, though he had been here from the

beginning, watching the field of antennae grow outward for nearly half his lifetime.

One of the bowls in the middle distance was being serviced, he noticed. He could see the tiny

outstretched shapes of space-suited technicians crawling over the vast curved surface like so many

animated snowflakes. That one bowl was out of order didn’t matter. A few inactive bowls out of all those

thousands could not affect the total picture.

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He touched limbs with his visitor from the Father World and said soundlessly, “It will be in a moment

now.”

The visitor wore a radio sleeve and was doubtless in communication with whatever touch group he

represented on the home planet. There was the familiar delay of a couple of seconds while the

transmission was relayed to the other side of the moon and bounced down to the planetary surface and

back, and then, through the limb he had linked with the visitor, the project director felt the faint ghostly

feedback from all those absent voices.

The visitor was too courteous to express the skepticism of his touch brothers overtly; but he couldn’t

entirely suppress his own involuntary reaction to it.

“You’ve listened to thousands of stars,” he said aloud, “and found nothing?”

“Tens of thousands, actually,” the project director said good-naturedly. “One at a time, within our own

galaxy. But now we’re about to listen to two hundred billion stars at once.”

“How can you do that?” The visitor let an eye or two wander to the endless thicket of antennae outside.

“Even with this marvelous facility. How can you possibly sort them out?”

“We don’t have to sort them out. The galaxy that we have chosen as our target is so far away that we

may consider it as a single radio source. In effect, we will accomplish two million years of listening in an

hour. All we have to do is to search the preferred wavelengths until we find one in which a modulated

signal outshines the background noise by a significant factor.”

“And then?”

“And then we shall know that life is possible elsewhere. That we need not be alone in the universe.”

At the prompting of his radio sleeve, the visitor said apologetically, “But what’s the good of it? You

can’t answer such a signal.”

“True,” the project director conceded. “Any message we received would necessarily have been sent

tens of millions of years ago — not the mere tens of thousands of years for signals from our own galaxy’s

farther stars. Any conceivable reply we might make would take additional tens of millions of years to

bridge the gulf. By that time they — and we — likely would be long extinct.”

“Then why bother?” the visitor persisted.

The project director had answered such questions many times over his centuries of stewardship.

Demands on the time of the great radio telescope grew ever more insistent as the race expanded into

space. There was competition from other astronomers, other project directors, each with a convincing

claim to priority, and soon, with the interstellar probes about to be sent to the nearer stars, the

magnificent instrument would be pressed into service as a communication device. The director had fought

jealously to protect the fraction of time devoted to the search for intelligent life. One day, he knew, he

would have to face a convocation of his fellows and defend the whole monumental enterprise all over

again.

For now, he said simply, “We would have much to learn from the very existence of such a message.

And more, doubtless, from the message itself.”

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The visitor listened to his sleeve for a moment. After a suitable interval he posed the question in his own

voice, a little less rudely than it probably had been asked. “And how will you know that you have not

been deceived by natural phenomena, as you were before?”

The director sent a ripple of laughter down his arm. “One of your touch brothers is very astute. The

incident he refers to took place in the early days of radio astronomy, when our observations were still

planet-bound. I was hardly past my apprenticeship at the time. A stellar radio source was found whose

pulses were so regular that it was thought at first to be an artificial signal. Today, of course, we know

about such things as neutron stars. We won’t jump tothat conclusion again.”

“And if you find nothing at all?”

“Then we’ll try another galaxy.”

Across the dome an aproned assistant waved a signal, and the director forestalled more questions by

saying, “We’re aiming now. Look outside. It’s a sight you won’t want to miss.”

Beyond the transparent wall the surface of the moon seemed to writhe like a live thing as the closely

packed bowls all turned simultaneously to face in anew direction. The silent rumble of the vast collective

movement could be felt through the floor of the observatory itself.

And the world changed, never to be the same again.

The first signals were detected almost at once. They were found mostly in the part of the spectrum

between the hydrogen and hydroxyl radical lines, where theory had long predicted that water-based life

would be apt to concentrate its communication efforts.

An excited assistant hurried up. “We’re locked onto them now. There’s remarkably little frequency drift.

They’re also utilizing the first harmonic of the hydrogen frequency.”

He passed over a touch pad that was beating rhythmically with repeating data. The director pulsated

with emotion. “The very first time!” he murmured to himself. “We’ve found them the very first time!”

He’d forgotten completely about his visitor, who was still sharing his thoughts through a patch of contact.

A diffident query reached his consciousness: “Can you be sure?”

“Eh? Yes. It’s unmistakable.” He thrust the throbbing datapad at him. “Have a look at this. It’s the first

ten prime numbers — counted out plainly in a steady rhythm and sitting in the middle of what looks like

an ongoing message in binary code. That’s to get our attention. It’s their beacon. I’m willing to bet that

it’s repeated every few minutes.”

And then the director linked with assistants and with data input devices and became very busy. The

visitor discreetly withdrew a short distance.

Several hours later, when the excitement had died down somewhat and matters could be safely left to

the scribes and the mechanical recorders, the director belatedly remembered his patiently waiting

visitor — remembered, too, that every conceivable touch group on the Father World would soon be

vying for a say in the allocation of resources — and apologetically groped for contact again.

“We’ve only begun the job, of course. We astronomers will go on recording as long as the message lasts

and continue refining our techniques in case we’re missing anything. And we’ll try to learn more about the

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signal source itself — its orbital motion and so forth — through Doppler analysis and other methods. But

now it will be the task of others — our greatest group minds — to interpret this <ellipsis> gift from the

stars.”

“What can you tell so far?”

“They must be a very advanced race. Our entire civilization does not generate enough power to

broadcast such a signal across so great a distance and with so high an information rate.”

“But what are theylike ?”

The director thought it over. “To begin with, their arithmetic is to the base ten, so they must have ten

limbs like ourselves.”

“That much is obvious,” the visitor said with a trace of impatience. “Any intelligent life form would

necessarily resemble us more or less.”

Not wanting to give offense, the director said cautiously, “I’ve heard religious people advance the

argument that sentience cannot exist except in the image of the Father-of-All.”

“No, no, I’m talking about the scientific argument. That whatever evolutionary path life takes to arrive at

intelligence, it will need tool-handling limbs, vision, a sense of touch for cooperative communication. And

an efficient body plan presupposes radial symmetry and a diffuse neural network with most of the brain at

the center of the body, where it’s well protected and where it can send impulses to all the extremities with

minimum delay.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the thesis.”

“A similar case is made for the evolution of Language. Certain it is that Language seems to be inborn in

children — it’s found even in those unfortunates who somehow escape the harvesting nets and grow in

isolation before they can be ingathered — though of course they need to catch up to their new touch

brothers.”

The director used a lee eye to steal a glance at the field of antennae. “I doubt that the message will turn

out to be in anything as complex as Language. Across intergalactic distances, the information density

would be too low. I more likely we’ll find that it’s in some sort of symbolic code that translates to one of

the simpler senses, like hearing or vision.”

“Then how will we ever understand the senders?”

“You’d be surprised at how much hard information can be conveyed that way. Enough so that we can

infer some of the rest.”

Together they watched the rippling patterns on one of the console’s touch screens. Even with vision

alone, you could easily make out the regular structure of the transmission. On impulse, the director

reached out and absorbed a brief section of the transmission directly, sharing it with his visitor through

their linked limbs.

The transmission meant nothing, of course: It was devoid of affective content. But in the simple pulses,

the director imagined that he could sense the shadow of … something. These patterns were an artifact of

intelligent life, after all.

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“There’s no sign of a repeat yet, except for the periodic insertion of the prime number sequence. The

message must be a very long one — perhaps one that will take years to complete.”

Like the director, the visitor was moved to awe by some portent he could sense beyond the unadorned

vibrations. “What can it be that they’ve sent?” he asked uneasily.

“Perhaps,” the director joked in an attempt to relieve the sudden tension, “they sent themselves.”

And that, in fact, was what turned out to be the case.

|Go to Table of Contents |

Part I

Gulf

Chapter 1

“Why am I different?” the boy, Bram, asked.

Voth, his adoptive tutor, stretched to three times the boy’s height on the five lower limbs that supported

him and spread his crown of slender petals. “I have told you many times,” the old teacher sighed from

somewhere within his maw.

“Tell me again,” the little boy persisted. He sat crosslegged on the yielding floor of the cluttered beehive

chamber that served as nursery and classroom, surrounded by wooden blocks and bright spongy

pyramids and touch objects of various shapes, and looked up expectantly into two or three of the five

mirror eyes spaced around Voth’s waist at the forks of his upper limbs.

Patiently, the flowerlike being settled a bit closer to the child’s level and bent toward him. The pliant

upper limbs opened out wider to show still more of the velvety inner surfaces whose rich plum shades

contrasted so vividly with the yellow of the smooth, waxy outer integument that the Nar presented to the

world.

“Because,” Voth said carefully and distinctly in the deep thrum of the Small Language, “you’re made of

human stuff, like other human folk, and your touch brothers are made of Nar stuff, like me.”

The little boy considered the matter, his dark eyes wide and grave. He was five in the problematical

human years — a little less than that in Nar reckoning — wiry and big-headed, with a mop of russet hair.

He had always thought of himself as “Bram,” though it was only a pet name in the Small Language and he

owned a perfectly good human name with three words in it.

“No,” he said, frowning. “That’s not what I really,really meant. I meant, why is humanstuff different?”

He contemplated his own skinny bare limbs and wiggled his toes experimentally, then transferred his

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gaze to the graceful ten-limbed shape of his mentor. Like the other members of the dominant life form on

the planet, Voth was a decapod, built on a body plan of two five-pointed stars joined at a common

waist. Evolution had elongated the stars and stretched them upward and downward for height and

mobility. The sensible radial design was not quite a mirror image; the lower star was 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 reallybig 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

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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-ninemillion ,” 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 gethere , 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 humanstuff did, though? And then you grew people out of it, the way

you grow potatoes and spaceships and things?”

The old decapod’s crown quivered in a manner that was equivalent to a man’s shaking his head. “No. I

told you that people and things can never travel so far. But information can — information in the form of

radio waves, spreading outward at the speed of light. Before they vanished from the universe, human

beings had achieved the power to tame whole suns and use their energy to shout across the space

between galaxies. They told us many useful things. And one of the things their message contained was

a — a sort of plan. A plan of how to make a human egg.”

“They must have been very smart,” Bram said with a yawn.

Voth squeezed Bram’s shoulder gently. The four star points that were not occupied stood straight up in

the air and drooped symmetrically outward in a formal gesture of respect.

“They were a very great people at the height of their powers,” Voth said. “We Nar were fortunate that

during the years the human message was being broadcast, we were in the early stages of our own space

age. We had already begun to colonize the worlds of the lesser sun, and we had sent our first primitive

boron-drive ships to the nearest star outside our system, almost a whole light-year away. So we had a

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large enough radio ear already in place — a field of thousands of receivers covering a hemisphere of one

of our smaller airless moons. We knew something of genetic engineering even then, but the human

message was a revelation. As were the genetic building blocks the humans gave us — useful things like

terrestrial starches and woody stems that made it possible for us to expand more quickly and cheaply

into space. Within a single Nar lifetime, the whole direction of our civilization had changed. We had the

beginnings of abundance. And then, half a Nar lifetime ago, we were ready to try to recreate man himself.

I was fortunate to be a part of that new beginning, though I was but a small finger of the bioengineering

touch group entrusted with the project. Yes, little one, we are very grateful for human beings.”

Bram’s attention had wandered. He rubbed at a sleepy eye with one fist. “Voth, can I play with

Tha-tha?”

The tentacle whose tip rested on Bram’s shoulder uncreased all the way up and enfolded the boy in its

comforting mantle. “First I think you had better have your nap.”

“Tha-tha’s very nice. He’s my favorite touch brother.”

“Yes, he is nice. He’ll grow into a fine person one day.”

“Will he still be my friend when we grow up?”

Again there was that sensation of sadness from the downy undersurface of Voth’s limb. “Touch brothers

are always friends. For as long as they live.”

“Will I be able to speak the Great Language to him then?”

“Let’s not talk about that now. It’s a very complicated subject.”

“Sometimes he forgets to talk the Small Language and he just hugs me and I can’t understand him.”

“Don’t worry about that, little one. I’ll speak to Tha-tha. Young creatures are sometimes forgetful.”

“Voth?”

“What, child?”

“Does Tha-tha have a gene mother too?”

A startled ripple traveled down Voth’s tentacle. “Well, yes, of course. All Nar had mothers.”

“I asked him, but he didn’t know.”

“He wouldn’t remember. He was just a little swimming thing. After sentience, of course, he was raised

by me and my touch brothers.” The edges of the fleshy mantle curled in a way that Bram had come to

recognize as the usual grown-up reticence, like when he asked mama-mu Dlors where they grew babies.

“Where do all the lady Nargo ? You hardly ever see them, the way you see human ladies all the time,

and then they’re all old. And you never see a little girl Nar.”

“That’s enough for one day,” Voth said firmly. “Time for your nap.”

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Bram allowed himself to be guided past the toy box, past his own little desk with the styluses and

reading screen, past the miniature star-shaped whole-body reader that his touch brothers stretched

themselves out on for hours at a time, to the cot in the corner, which still had his baby touch objects and

alphabet letters dangling over it.

“Some day,” Bram said as Voth started to tuck him in, “I’m going to go back to the world that human

people started out on and see what it’s like.”

“Hush now, and go to sleep. I’ve told you it’s not possible.”

“I’ll find a way to go anyhow,” Bram said.

The old decapod gathered the boy compassionately in his petals. “Oh, Bram, you are a child!” he said.

“You will understand when you are older!”

Wrapped in the warm velvety cloak, Bram felt the waves of soft bristles caress him as Voth crooned to

him in the Great Language. The meaning was muzzy but comforting, like a lullaby hummed without the

actual words.

“You’ll see,” said a sleepy little boy.

Dlors was pouring a drink for her new friend, Arthe, when the door rattle made a diffident noise.

“Stay where you are,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

She rose from the low orange pouf she had been sitting on and set the pitcher of iced and flavored

distillate down on the fragile wooden stand between them. Arthe had made the little five-legged table out

of vacuum-poplar; he was handier with edged tools than Bram’s gene fathers had been.

“If it’s Lan and Elaire, send them away,” Arthe groaned. “He’ll only want to drone on for hours about

that mote drama he’s got himself a part in.” The thirtieth-century mote dramas of Jam Anders that were

now being deciphered were the latest fad in the human community. Arthe’s tastes in theater were more

conservative, running to the neo-Shakespeare movement.

“Quiet, they’ll hear you,” Dlors said.

She went to the door, a wooden oval set in the nacre of the curving wall, and opened it. The tall spindle

shape of a Nar was there, its tentacles raised and clustered with their waxy sides out in a mode of

nonpresumptive courtesy.

“Oh … Voth-shr-voth,” she said. After a moment she remembered her manners and held up her hands,

palms outward.

The decapod unpeeled two of its limbs and touched her palms in formal greeting.

“Good evening, Dlors Hsin-jen Jons,” the being said in mid-Inglex. “May I see Bram?”

“Yes … of course. I’ll get him. I wasn’t expecting you at this hour.”

“Forgive me for intruding on your Tenday.” The hidden baritone vibrations were a little muffled by the

palisade of tentacles. “There is a place I must take him to this night if you do not mind giving up his

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Donald Moffit - Genesis Quest

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