Read Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02 for Free Online Page B

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, rolling 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.
    Bram knew that Tha-tha was very talented—the most talented of all the younglings in his group. Bram had tried to understand the little toccata that Tha-tha had composed, and had stretched himself across the five-pointed star of one of the readers to let his human skin sample its rippling patterns of cilia movement. But as always, the meaning had eluded him; it had only been something that tickled in structured rhythms.
    “Anyway,” Bram said, casting about for the perfect squelch, “it was nothing but a lot of squares inside squares that kept marching off the edge. I can make a touch reader do that!”
    In fact, Bram had an unusual facility with the Great Language for a human of any age. He was able to manipulate a cilia board well enough to reproduce a few basic commands, and when Voth absentmindedly pressed a limb against his skin, he was often able to recognize some of the simpler