There was a commotion behind them. They turned to see Smeth, struggling with baggage that kept floating away from him in the zero gravity and haranguing a long-suffering Nar steward.
“What do you mean, you don’t know where the rest of my luggage is? I have six walker-loads of priceless records and irreplaceable instruments stowed in the cargo hold, and I insist on supervising the transfer personally!”
The years had turned Smeth into a crochety old man with bent shoulders and a frail pipestem neck. He was still a bachelor. Nobody took his crankiness seriously anymore; he held the affection of the human race because of his work on the probe project.
The steward twisted his upper tentacles into a corkscrew and untwisted them again in the Nar version of hand-wringing. “I’ll attend to it myself, Smeth-brother,” he said, gliding off at the horizontal.
Smeth followed him, grumbling. “Nothing ever gets done properly anymore!” He stomped off as well as one can stomp in free fall.
“Poor Smeth!” Bram said.
“Poor steward, you mean,” Mim said.
“I never thought he’d come. I didn’t really believe it till he actually showed up at the shuttleport leading that baggage train.”
“Practically every human in his department signed up for the trip,” Mim said tartly. “He had to come. He’d have had no one left to preside over!” She relented a little. “Still, I’m glad he’s coming with us. It wouldn’t be the same without him.”
Bram’s eyes strayed to a viewport farther down the bridge, where Marg and Orris were holding hands like a pair of young lovers. Marg had evolved into the most formidable of dragons these last decades, but Orris saw nothing except the winsome flirt he had first been welded to so long ago.
“Marg’s talking about having a baby as soon as she gets young enough,” Mim said, following his gaze. “She and Orris are actually picking out names now.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t have one years ago,” Bram said. “When the restrictions were lifted.”
“They’d already decided to emigrate by then. I guess like most of the other emigrating couples, they decided to wait till we were actually underway. After all, it doesn’t matter if you get too old when you know your biological clock’s going to run backward again.”
“Still, they must have had a lot of faith in the immortality project,” Bram said. “That’s surprising, considering all those early setbacks.”
There had been a nine year delay in developing one of the crucial segments of heterochronic nucleotide from scratch; Original Man had extracted it from living dragonflies, but the complete dragonfly genome did not exist on the Father World, and the prohibition against it remained in force, with Bram’s total acquiescence.
Mim squeezed his hand. “Oh, Bram, it still seems so miraculous. Are we really going to he young again?”
“It’s already begun,” he said. “Do you remember how sick and miserable you were after the injection? That was your body trying to fight off the virus. By now you’re totally infected. The viral DNA’s settling into every cell in your body, where your immune system can’t take exception to it any more.”
“All that sneezing and itching and swelling! I thought I’d die!”
“You took it harder than most.” He traced the line of her jaw with his fingertips. “But you’ve lost some wrinkles in the last year, and we’re all a lot more spry than we have any right to be.”
“Just when I was used to us growing old together,” she said with another squeeze.
“You’ll have to get used to us growing young together.”
They had been well into their fifties when they finally had become joined — Bram after a second failed marriage with someone who, he now realized, he had become infatuated with while on the rebound from Kerthin, and Mim after ten years of nursing an ailing Olan Byr. They had seen one another around the Compound and had thought that they were merely good friends, and it had come as a surprise to both of them to realize that the old attraction between them had been rekindled. Mim had needed time to get over the feeling that she was being disloyal to Olan’s memory. Bram had no such qualms. These last twenty years with Mim had been the best years of his life.
The immortality virus had come too late for Olan, as it had for too many humans. The project had taken almost forty years, and there had been many unexpected difficulties. But a surprising number of oldsters had hung on until Bram’s team had finally succeeded. Jun Davd, his childhood tutor in astronomy, had been one of them. And old Doc Pol, who must have been more than two hundred and a patchwork of cloned transplants, had volunteered to be the first human guinea pig and had won his gamble. Bram had seen him board the shuttle under his own power, with two canes.
Jao floated over to them with his arm around Ang. The red beard was pure white now, and looked patriarchal. Ang, who had been bent and frail, had started to fill out again and straighten up almost immediately after her immortality injection a year and a half ago. The two had been separated during their middle years, and Jao had had his middle aged fling, but they had been back together for a decade now. “We went through the best years together,” he’d confided to Bram at the time. “Why go looking for something you already have?”
“A beautiful sight, isn’t it?” Jao commented, thrusting a bearded chin at the spectacle outside.
“That’s what I was just saying to Bram,” Mim said. “It’s strange to think of that ball of green life hurtling between the galaxies, nurturing almost the entire human race with its air and water.”
“It’s a well-tested life-support system, Mim,” Jao said. “That’s what originally gave me the idea. But I wasn’t talking about the tree. I was talking about our relativistic hobbyhorse. Beautiful and deadly. You wouldn’t want to be within a couple of hundred miles of it when it’s operating, even with all the baffles along the shaft, but of course we won’t have to be. And the nice thing about relativistic geometry is that the electromagnetic umbrella that’s protecting us up front will automatically open up our cone of safety the faster we go and the fiercer the gamma storm becomes.”
“Will that contraption really take us home in only five hundred of our treeboard years?” Bram asked hastily, to prevent Jao from launching into an involved technical explanation.
Jao preened his white beard. “It will after we dive through the center of this galaxy, cut a swath through all the hydrogen clouds we’ll find along the way, and use the mass of the galactic nucleus to fling us up out of the plane toward the Milky Way. You know, theoretically there’s no limit to how closely we could crowd the speed of light if we had enough hydrogen to gulp, but there has to be a terminal velocity imposed by what we’ve got available to us, plus the slingshot effect of the core maneuver. But I figure that getting within one ten millionth of one percent of the speed of light ought to do the job.”
He gave them a toothless grin. Bram could see the little white dots where a new generation of baby teeth was starting to show through the gums. Bram’s own teething, in just the few missing gaps, was still bothering him; he knew now what babies complained about.
“Is this character still bragging about that shiny new toy of his out there?” Bram turned to see Trist hanging jauntily in midair. “That’ll give you a sample of what we’re in for during the next five hundred years. And does everybody realize that if he’s off by one decimal point in his calculations, it’ll be a lot longer than five hundred years? The time dilation factor will work out to a trip of one thousand seven hundred years.”
The rangy physicist had weathered welt over the years; he looked like a somewhat faded version of his youthful self. He was going to be in charge of the program to broadcast the Nar genetic code at all the suns that might be listening as the human expedition, in its queer hybrid craft of living tree and robot ramjet, plunged into the galaxy’s crowded heart.
“Hello, Trist,” Bram said. “Before all the technical blather, Mim was saying that it’s a strange ship we’ll be traveling in — a wor
ld, really, and one that will nurture us between the galaxies.”
“People used to name their ships long ago, didn’t they?” Mim asked. “We ought to have a name for this one.”
Trist peered out the port. Only a few miles away now, the tree was no longer a geometrically perfect ball. The huge twisting green branches seemed to fill all space.
“Yes,” he said. “They broke a jug of wine over it first.”
Jao snorted. “Waste of good alcohol.”
Bram furrowed his brow. “Trist, didn’t you once —”
“Didn’t I once tell you the story of the tree that was the world — the all-spanning tree that nourished and sustained the entire race of humankind and protected them from the burning heavens while they made the transition from one universe to another? Yes, I did.”
“The burning heavens,” Jao interposed. “That’d be the gamma rays and relativistic particles that we’re going to have to sail through.”
Bram said, “What —”
“Yggdrasil,” Trist said. “The world tree was called Yggdrasil.”
“That settles it, then,” Mim said firmly. “That’s what we’ll name ours.”
Bram’s mind drifted seventy years into the past, when a sleepy little boy had assured his ten-legged tutor, with all the certitude of childhood, that one day when he grew up he would find a way to return across the impassable void to the home of the first human race. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that it would be like this, in a giant space-dwelling tree towed by a device that shrank time. Now, it seemed, there would always be time to spare; his seventy years were only a prelude.
Mim’s voice nudged him back to the present. “What are you thinking?” she said.
He looked at the familiar faces and saw them as they would be again. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that we’re about to start a great adventure.”
The boat settled gently into the gigantic branches. The tree’s rotation had been stopped for the probe-threading maneuver, so the swarming vehicles that contained the human race could land anywhere, not just at the docking facilities in the trunk. The immortal people filed through to the airlocks, not looking back.
Second Genesis, the fascinating conclusion to The Genesis Quest, will be published by Del Rey books next month!
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