The Genesis Quest
Page 35
“While we’re passing out the congratulations,” Olan said graciously, “let’s save a few for the new director of the immortality project.” His eyes, keen as ever, came to rest on Bram. “I never thought I’d have a good word to say about science, Bram, but it seems that it’s good for something, after all.”
“Thank you, Olan,” Bram said, uncomfortably aware of everybody’s eyes on him.
All of a sudden, he and Jao had become the first citizens of the Compound. The celebrating populace hadn’t had time yet to absorb the full import of the Nar decree, but word had gotten around that Bram and Jao had been instrumental in the reprieve. Olan and Mim had had to rescue Bram from the jubilant mob that had spilled over the tidal flats in the wake of the dissolving Nar assembly. They had been waiting for him in a small groundcar as the exhausted defendants trudged wearily out. “Get in, Bram,” Mim had said, holding the door open. “We’re just having a few friends in. Nobody will bother you, and you won’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“Hurry up and take their offer,” Jao had said, hiking along beside Bram. “Think of my feet.”
“Is human immortality really possible, do you think?” Olan asked now, his thin fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. The chair was a poplarwood replica of a gothic seat from a Dürer cartoon; Olan had hired a Resurgist craftsman to copy it.
“Yes,” Bram said. “We know that Original Man achieved it. All we have to do is unscramble it from the Message archives, and after that it’s just a lot of dull, hard, grinding work. It’s going to be a strictly human-run project. The Nar insist on that. In case difficulties crop up along the way — and they’re sure to — the Nar don’t want to take the blame. They don’t want the slightest imputation that they’re suppressing anything or dragging their limbs. But they’re throwing the full resources of the biocenter at our disposal. And we’ve got absolute priority. It’s better that way. Humans work faster than Nar. We’ve always had to.”
Some of Olan’s and Mim’s other guests moved closer to hear what Bram was saying. “They feel guilty,” the violinist, Ang, said indignantly. “At having withheld the gift of eternal life. It doesn’t matter if they intended to or not.”
“We’ll never know that,” Bram said. “And I suspect that the Nar will never really know it, either. The Nar are generous, but all living things have an instinct of species survival, and maybe deep down they were afraid of the fast-breeding pets they’d conjured up.”
“Exactly how does one go about cooking up immortality?” Olan Byr asked.
Bram tried to keep his explanation simple, conscious of Olan’s ignorance of scientific matters. “It’ll be a combination of several different approaches, I think, including a way to coax the cell to manufacture an enzyme to unsnarl cross-linked DNA. I got that theory from a wonderful old character named Doc Pol. But the real key, I think, is something else that Doc Pol put me on to. A sort of … of death gene that we carry around inside us. A switch that’s programmed to turn itself on after a certain number of cell generations.”
“I know Doc Pol,” Olan mused. “I had no idea the old fellow was still alive.”
Bram finished quickly, knowing he had lost Olan’s attention but not wanting to disappoint the audience he had acquired.
“At any rate, Original Man devised a synthetic virus to
“What about brain cells?” Jao put in. “Turning off the death switch wouldn’t affect them. They don’t divide anyway. You just keep losing them one by one after birth. We know how to autoclone cortical tissue, sure, but there has to be a limit to brain grafts. I don’t want to be walking around without a brain a million years from now.”
“I told you it’s not a simple problem,” Bram said. “My guess is that there’s a separate nucleotide sequence to induce the periodic renewal of fetal neurons — at a replacement rate mediated by the loss of our old ones, so as not to disturb our memories.”
“Well, it all sounds very wonderful,” Olan said absently. “Imagine having an eternity to delve into Bach — not that you’d ever run out of new things to discover.”
He seemed to retreat into himself. Two of the music students had found a corner at the other end of the room, had broken out their instruments, and were playing something intricate together. Olan slowly nodded in time to the music.
Mim watched him silently, then turned her huge dark eyes on Bram. “How long will your project take?” she asked.
“It isn’t only a matter of following Original Man’s blueprint, Mim,” Bram said. “We’ve got to devise our own procedures every step of the way. The Nar took centuries to create the first viable human ovum, centuries more to learn how to bring it to term.” He smiled. “But this is a simpler job, and we’ve got a little more incentive than the Nar had. We’ll do better.”
She glanced at Olan again and bit her lip. “Don’t take too long at it, Bram. Please.”
Bram opened his mouth to reply, but Jao’s booming voice interrupted him.
“Oh, Bram’s got the easy part of the job! He’s going to be in complete charge of a human-run program with human concepts of time. Pity me, Mim! I’m autonomous, sure, but I’m an autonomous bump on a big, slow-moving Nar project that they thought was whizzing along with a completion date of one or two hundred years in the future.” He struck a mock-tragic pose. “I’m the one who’s got to talk them into speeding up their timetable.”
Mim smiled wanly in a pale reflection of her vivacity of a short while before. The lack of sleep was starting to catch up to her.
“Oh, dear,” she said gamely. “First Smeth as a toe, now Jao as a bump.”
“Isn’t that asking a lot, Jao?” Bram said. “The ramjet probe project is going to represent a tremendous drain on the resources of Nar society as it is — even spread out over a century or two. We
“No!” Jao roared. Several more people came over from the thick of the party to be entertained. “We’re not going to wait a year longer than necessary! We humans come cheap at the price. We’re going to operate and maintain their roving beacon for them — much more satisfactory than robot systems. We’re going to exercise judgment in their behalf.” He smiled crookedly. “The Nar always preferred living things to machines.”
“How did you ever persuade the Nar to turn the project over to us, Jao?”
The question came from one of the people who had drifted over. Soon Jao was happily holding forth about hadronic photons and the uncertainty principle and the gamma factor. Bram and Mim locked eyes.
“So it wasn’t a dream, after all,” she said softly. “After all these years, it’s all coming true.”
“It wasn’t only my dream, Mim,” Bram said. “A lot of people had it. They just didn’t know it till now. They had to he told that it was possible.”
She looked across the room at her friends and Olan’s — musicians, artists, poets, artisans — people who had spent their lives walling themselves off from the Father World’s civilization and had created a cosy facsimile of an imagined human culture instead.
“It’s not a dream for everybody, though,” she said. “You won’t get all of these people to risk their new eternal lives on some crazy quest across half the universe in search of a bubble that for all we know might have burst more than thirty mi
llion years ago.”
“No,” he agreed. “We’ll just get the adventurous ones. The troublesome ones, from the Nar point of view. The tame ones can stay behind and spend the next million years trying to learn the Great Language if they want.”
He had spoken too vehemently. At the hurt look in Mim’s eyes, he backtracked. “The Nar are beginning a program to call back humans from Juxt One and the farther stars, you know. It’ll take another three years before the news even reaches Next, and then those who want to be included will have to start back without delay.”
She looked at Olan, sitting with fragile dignity in his imitation gothic chair. “And those of us who choose to stay behind?”
“They —” He made a point of not saying you. “— they won’t have a wall around them any more. The Nar are determined to make humans equal partners in their society from now on. One of the two big obstacles is gone now. Mim, do you realize that human beings won’t be ephemeral curiosities in a long-lived culture any more — to be pitied and coddled. They’ll outlive the Nar from now on.”
“Mayflies.”
“What?”
“Mayflies. It’s a term from the old Inglex literature. It’s going to be the Nar who are the mayflies now. That will be very strange.”
“Not that the Nar are capable of envy. A millennium or so is quite long enough for them. They don’t want immortality for themselves — couldn’t even conceive of such a thing. I suppose if they could, they’d have mounted their own immortality project long ago. But they have to flower and die to reproduce, and to thwart that would be to thwart their own natures.”
“We must have seemed very odd to them.”
“Yes, indeed.” He scanned the predominately Resurgist crowd to avoid looking directly into Mim’s eyes. “The stay-at-homes will have all the time they need to get along in a Nar world. And after a few thousand years of that, who knows? Maybe something could be done about the second big obstacle. Perhaps with a little genetic modification and biological-electronic interfacing, one day the first human will say his first halting word in the Great Language.”
“I can’t conceive of such a thing. But it’s a better solution than Penser’s was.”
“Yes.”
Bram’s part as an unwilling accessory remained unspoken between them, but Mim must have been thinking about it because the next thing she said was, “Your … friend, Kerthin. Will she go with you?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“I’m sorry, Bram.” She touched his hand.
“That’s all right.”
At this moment, Bram thought, Kerthin would be clearing her things out of their quarters. She had spoken to him long enough to at least let him know that she was leaving. The brief, unsatisfactory exchange had taken place during the interval when the penned humans waited for the Nar assembly to disperse. Bram had been glad of Olan’s and Mim’s invitation. He had no wish to go home while Kerthin was still there.
Jao’s voice was still booming over the background conversation. Bram and Mim turned in tacit accord to listen.
“You want to know why we don’t simply take the Nar ramjet and run off with it once we’re out of reach?” he was saying in response to some question. “In the first place, it wouldn’t be nice. In the second place, we have to take a detour through the center of the galaxy if we want to get to where we’re going, so we might as well do the Nar’s little chore for them on the way. Right?”
There was a buzz of inquiry around him, and Jao held up a meaty red hand to silence it.
“Why?” he said in mock exasperation. “Haven’t you been paying attention? It’s because only by diving straight through the interior of the galaxy, where the H-II regions are thickest, we can scoop up enough ionized gas to build up our gamma factor to the point we need. We also get a bonus. We pick up some of the rotational energy of the galactic core itself when we whip around it. By the time we head out of the galaxy, we’ll be traveling at a speed of —” His eyeballs rolled back in his head while he mumbled figures to himself. “— call it a fraction of the speed of light represented by a decimal point followed by ten nines. Apply the relativity equations and anyone can see that’ll give us a gamma factor of about seventy thousand.”
Ang, the blonde girl from the string quartet, was part of the group listening to Jao. She was leaning forward with an adoring expression on her face. Jao winked at her.
“Excuse me,” someone ventured timidly, “but what do those figures mean?”
“What do they mean?” Jao bellowed in outrage. “They mean that while the outside universe ticks off thirty-seven million years, we make the crossing between galaxies in only about five hundred years, our time.”
“Plus the detour through the center of the galaxy,” someone pointed out.
Jao decided his questioners were hopeless. “The detour will only add about another forty years of subjective time to the journey,” he said, spacing his words carefully. “And if you don’t like it, I might as well warn you that we’ll have to perform the same maneuver at the other end in order to brake. Fortunately, the Milky Way’s a good match in mass and configuration.”
“Still,” his listener demurred, “that’s a long time for a bunch of people to spend shut up in a spaceship.”
“Want me to skip the detour?” Jao growled. “Fine. How would you like me to drop a couple of nines off that string of figures I mentioned? That’d give us a gamma factor of —” Again, the eyes rolled back. “— seven oh seven point one. And you could spend fifty thousand years twiddling your thumbs while we make the crossing.”
“He has a point, Jao,” Bram said. “No matter how big we build this ramjet — and I’m assuming it might be as big as Lowstation — won’t it be rather close quarters?”
“Yes,” Jao’s blonde admirer said. “What about that?”
Jao scowled, clearly stung by the criticism. He thought hard for a moment or two, then a beatific expression crossed his face. “Why not?” he mumbled to himself.
He turned to them with a broad smile. “We’ll travel in style,” he said. “We’ll live in a tree.”
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Prologue Two
Exodus
The passengers who came crowding onto the bridge at the pilot’s invitation were mostly elderly. But they all seemed to be in marvelous health, and they were quite as lively and eager as the younger people among them as they grabbed safety lines and hauled themselves to the viewports for a look at their destination.
A handsome, erect old man of about seventy, with deep-etched features and an impressive white mane, took the elbow of the trim, gray-haired woman beside brim and steadied her as she took her turn at the port.
“There it is, Mim,” he said. “Our home for the next five hundred years.”
She drew closer to him. “Oh, Bram!” she said. “It’s beautiful!”
The star tree floated in space before them, looking like a perfect green globe. From the cargo vessel’s angle of approach — head on toward the center of the crown — the matching ball of root growth could not be seen, nor could the stubby trunk which connected them.
Hanging beside the green puff was a brassy skewer with a trumpet end — Jao’s hydrogen-scooping robot vehicle. The flaring bell looked solid enough from a distance, but Bram knew it was as insubstantial as gossamer. It was hundreds of miles in diameter and had to spin to maintain its shape. Still, its electromagnetic fields would shield the tree from the howling storm of radiation into Which it would sail at near-light speeds, and the tree’s own reflective leaves, bred to handle anything up through X-rays, would take care of stray ionization — and even soak up the energy and use it.
Space tugs — tiny motes to the eye — were maneuvering to haul an enormous crystalline tether whose colossal links were forged of viral monofilament; the probe’s long shaft would be threaded between the tree’s two hemispheres at right angles to the hidden trunk. At relativistic speeds, the probe would tow the tree; for local
star-hopping or intrasystem travel, it would be the other way around.
“Jao picked it himself,” Bram said. “He insisted on traveling out to the cometary halo with the Nar foresters and choosing the one perfect vacuum poplar in the system.”
“I remember.” Mim laughed.
“The Nar’ve spent all these years outfitting it and stocking it for us. I guess it’s as ready as it’ll ever be. The Nar have been generous. They’ve given us everything from a fleet of landing craft to ground vehicles and heavy-duty mining equipment. Factories, distilleries, a complete duplicate of the Father World’s central library, and frozen cell samples of every known life form. They’ve thought of everything.”
“I hope so.” She shivered. “If we’re all going to be cooped up in the tree together for all those centuries. I hope we won’t get on each other’s nerves.”
He smiled. “Cooped up is hardly the way to describe it, Mim. The tree’s a fair-size worldlet — bigger than any of the Father World’s moons. We’ll have a lot more elbow room than we did in our old human enclaves.”
Mim brightened. “We will, won’t we? And we’ll have a bigger population than any we’ve ever known in any single Compound. We won’t get bored with each other.”
“No, we’ll get comfortable with each other.”
She squeezed his arm. “I think I’m going to like eternity.”
“We’ll live in our own little villages at first, in the branch they’ve gotten ready for us. But it will take us at least half the trip to explore the tree, develop it, and tame the wild branches for settlement. We’ll have plenty to do, never fear.”
“And there’ll be babies, won’t there?” Mim said, softening.
“The tree’s parasite ecology ought to support a human population of twenty-five thousand or more,” Bram said. “We’ll be well on the way to populating our home planet before we even get there. And the ones who’ve gotten too used to the tree to want to leave it can stay aboard and start exploring our neighbor stars.”