Read Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02 for Free Online Page A

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 faraway, 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 world.
    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