“They’ll let the humans have their one little world,” Kerthin assured Bram, mouthing Penser’s words.
The seized moon was to be the focal point from which humans would crowd the Nar out of the cosmos. Penser intended to step up the human breeding rate without bothering about gene editing. Humans could easily outbreed the Nar. “Do you realize that the human population of the universe could be doubled every twenty years?” Kerthin had said, her eyes shining.
Other worldlets would be taken over, one at a time—each as an accomplished fact to be presented to the Nar, with the dust allowed to settle between conquests and the Nar encouraged to believe that this time was the last. Penser had studied the ancient history of Original Man. Hitler, Napoleon, and Alexander had failed because they had bitten off more than they could chew. By the time the Nar woke up, Penser said, the human race would be ready to swallow Ilf—even scour the Father World itself!
But the starship hijacking went horribly wrong. The Nar, with a casual swipe of their great powers, put a stop to the mutiny and took all the humans aboard into custody—Penser’s followers and innocent passengers alike, making no distinction between them. Bram was one of the innocent bystanders caught up in the net.
It was very bad. Penser was dead—a suicide. But there were dead Nar, as well. Among them was Bram’s old tutor, Voth-shr-voth.
Voth’s death was a particular atrocity to the Nar. He had died under torture when Penser’s henchmen had attempted to force him—as the space tree’s acting biologist-to override the tree’s tropisms and make it spread the leaves of its light-sail on a course to the target moon.
Worse than that, Voth’s death had interrupted the final flowering of his life—his terminal change from male to female. All of Voth’s budding children had died with him when he had failed to reach a breeding pool in time.
The Nar had not understood until this time that their pets could bite. Their civilization ground briefly to a halt while they met in one of their grand touch conclaves to decide what to do about the human species.
Tentacle pressed to tentacle, radio sleeves linking the parallel meetings on all the nearby worlds, the entire Nar race became a single immense organism whose process of deliberation passed human understanding. The humans at the center of the vast tribunal—a sea of living Nar that stretched mile upon mile—waited and shuddered.
It was the Day of Wrath.
The humans were heard. When it was Bram’s turn to speak, he told them about the immortality virus that had been withheld from all the generations of reconstituted man, condemning humans to short, unfulfilled lives in a long-lived Nar society. He told them of his childhood dream of returning home—home to the distant, unreachable galaxy where the first human race once had dwelt, and from which the tremendous Message of Original Man had been sent. His touch brother, Tha-tha, emerged from the packed throng to speak to him directly, and perhaps to intercede for him. “It is true, then, Bram-bram,” he asked sadly, “that all your life you felt you had no place here?”
All around Bram, other humans were simultaneously unburdening themselves to the collective Nar consciousness: Partnerites telling of their struggles to be accepted in a society that saw them as ephemeral mutes; Resurgists admitting why they had given up and surrendered to a daydream of past human glory; even some Penserite radicals attempting to explain why they had been driven to violence in their effort to find a place for humans in a Nar universe.
Perhaps the Nar had never before realized the depths of human alienation and anguish. But they were getting an earful now. The sea of tentacles seethed. Bram could not read what was happening out there. No human could. But he could sense a great surge of sorrow and revulsion, distress and pity.
The human race might get off lightly, he dared to hope. The present generation might be allowed to live out their lives comfortably—under closer supervision, of course. It was even possible that the human species need not vanish from the universe a second time; limited breeding or in vitro gene assembly might keep a few dozen specimens around as curiosities for future generations of Nar to gawk at.
But the Nar, in a huge tide of nonmammalian empathy, were more compassionate than Bram could have imagined.
When the verdict was announced, the human race found that it had been sentenced to immortality.
The Nar had no use for immortality themselves; for them an eternity without aging and what lay at the end of it was an eternity without fulfillment. So perhaps they simply had not realized what such a gift would mean to humankind.
Bram was put in charge of a human-run project to reconstruct the virus; the Nar, with exquisite tact, had recognized that this must be a human achievement, not an act of charity. It would be the work of years or decades, even with Original Man’s blueprint. For Bram would have to find an alternate route to the same result to avoid the biological dangers associated with the immortality nucleotides—dangers that, some thought, may have contributed to the demise of Original Man.
But immortality was only part of the Nar gift—a means to an end. With the complete gift, the Nar gave Bram back his dream.
The Nar species was on the verge of an enormous technological leap. Travel between stars, until now, had meant riding the worldlet-size space-dwelling trees that were part of Original Man’s bioengineering bequest. They had replaced the first crude boron fusion-fission starships of the Nar’s early space age, and could travel at up to one-seventh of the speed of light. With them, the Nar could spread slowly from star to star and hope to populate the galaxy in a million years or two.
But only recently a conceptual breakthrough had raised the possibility of a relativistic spacecraft that could reach the core of the galaxy in only fifty thousand years. With it, the Nar could do on a smaller scale what Original Man had done so grandly—use it as a robot beacon to broadcast their own genetic code to the billions of stars that would come within its range, If the probe hit the jackpot only once or twice, then the Nar race could spread from new foci, sending brothers among the stars who would be waiting to greet them.
To this lofty purpose, the Nar species had allocated a tremendous share of the wealth of their civilization. The robot spacecraft project had been given a timetable that might make it a reality in only a few centuries—a fraction of a Nar lifetime.
Now, in an act of stunning generosity, the Nar decided to speed up the timetable—and bequeath the relativistic engine to the human race.
With it, those humans who wished to—the restless ones, the unhappy ones, the adventurous ones—could return to their mythical home in another galaxy. The trip would take thirty-seven million years of real time, of course, but it had been calculated that by traveling within one hundred millionth of one percent of the speed of light, the time dilation factor predicted by the theory of relativity would have a value of approximately seventy thousand. So to the travelers, the journey would seem to last only about five hundred and forty years.
And when you had eternity to play with, that didn’t seem like too high a price to pay.
To reach that tremendous terminal velocity—to become pregnant with enough kinetic energy to coast between the galaxies in a fuel-less void—the ramjet craft would first have to dive to the heart of the departure galaxy, gulping the rich H-II clouds as it went, then let the gravitational center of the galaxy sling it above the plane and out into emptiness.
So it all worked out to everybody’s benefit. The humans would be able to do the Nar’s little chore for them on the way home.
One problem remained. Robot ramjets were not very hospitable to life. They were hot! And even if a way were found around that problem, there was still the question of living space and a reliable supportive environment for a substantial fraction of the human race on a trip that would last for more than five hundred years.
How would it be managed?
It was simple. The spacecraft would tow a tree.
Mim appeared in a stunning green off-the-shoulder party dress with a five-pointed h
em that, though it was a bit old-fashioned compared to some of the newer styles, suited her very well. Over it she wore a short pleated chlamys that left her right arm bare—an old cellist’s habit.
She bent over the chairpuff and kissed Bram lightly above one eyebrow. “What are you sitting here brooding about?” she said.
“Oh, I was just thinking about the Father World,” Bram said, getting up. “It seems very far away now.”
“It is far away! Tens of thousands of light-years away!”
“Which means that tens of thousand of years have passed since we left. We’re in their historical past, Mim. After only a couple of decades of travel. I wonder if they’ve forgotten us.”
“Not a chance. The Nar never forget anything.”
“All the Nar we knew are dead now. But there ought to be some fifty-thousand-year-old humans that we used to know walking around. I wonder what it’s like to be fifty thousand years old. We’re still under a hundred.”
“And getting younger every day,” she reminded him.
“Yes. I wonder if fifty thousand years is long enough for a human being to learn the Great Language. Jao swears that it’s possible, with cortical transplants, electronic interfacing, and prosthetic touch sleeves.”
“It must be a very different society from the one we grew up in,” she commented.
“We’ll never know,” he said. “The people who stayed behind made their choice and we made ours. Speaking of which…”
He inclined an ear to the noise in the outside corridor. Some drunk was singing a Bobbing Day carol—off key—and his friends were making it worse by attempting harmony. Mim winced.
“Yes, we’re developing our own traditions, aren’t we? How would you like to try to explain All-Level Eve to the folk back home?”
“It’s all very natural to the younger set. Mim, do you realize that there are children who’ve been born on Yggdrasil—who’ve never known anything else? Some day they’ll outnumber us old-timers. By the time we get to the Milky Way—”
She took his arm. “Right now we’d better worry about getting to the Forum. It wouldn’t do for the year-captain to be late.”
He smiled at her and drew her a little closer. Together they stepped out into the corridor and let the crowd carry them along.
CHAPTER 3
The Bob dangled from five hundred feet overhead, its displacement showing just how badly askew the wooden chasm of the Forum was. Its carved onion shape, taller than two men, had been repainted in gaudy green and vermilion stripes by this year’s Bobbing Day committee. Though it was only about twenty degrees out of plumb—Yggdrasil had prematurely swung the bough ten degrees toward the true before being checked—that was enough to hang it above the chalked line at a point that was nearly two hundred feet from the painted bull’s-eye in the center of the floor.
“I don’t like sitting this close to it,” Mim said, taking a sip of her All-Level Eve cocktail. “I always think it’s going to fall and roll right over us.”
“It would roll in a circle,” Orris said. “That’s why it’s that shape.”
“It won’t roll at all because it’s not going to fall,” Marg said firmly. “I won’t allow anything to spoil Bobbing Day.”
Everybody at the table laughed. Marg was still the commanding presence she had always been. She was large, formidable, and matronly at this stage of her youthening, and poor Orris seemed a collection of sticks beside her.
“You’d better have a word with the acrobats, then,” Bram teased her. “If the one on top isn’t careful, he’s liable to get himself brained.”
They all looked across to where the acrobats were forming a human pyramid, no more than thirty feet from their table. There were six of them: five brawny lads in loincloths and a little lightweight fellow in rainbow skin-tights at the apex. They had managed to hoist the little fellow high enough to reach the Bob and set it spinning.
“Who are they?” Trist asked. “I think I recognize the one at the bottom right.”
“They all work together in the glucose-extraction plant. Nice boys. They’ve been practicing for months.”
Next to Trist, who had been holding her hand as if they were still in their early bonding years together, Nen said, “We all have to congratulate you, Marg. This is one of the best All-Level Eves ever. The decorations, the food, the entertainment—everything!”
Marg flushed with pleasure, and Orris beamed proudly. “Everybody on the committee worked very hard,” Marg said.
Bram looked around the Forum at Marg’s handiwork. The immense arena was lit by torches in wall brackets that cast a resinous red glow around the perimeter, where almost the entire population of the tree, with the exception of the few hundred who remained on duty tonight, were seated at tables, each defined by a circle of light cast by a sputtering resin stick. Garlands of silver leaves crisscrossed the walls, making a pattern of reflections.
There was no way to decorate so vast an area as the main floor of the ellipse, so Marg had very wisely left it in darkness, except for a central blaze of illumination where colored spotlights mounted high on the walls picked out the bull’s-eye where the Bob would come to rest. A few reddish glints here and there, where leaf arrangements had been strategically placed, gave an abstract geometric shape to the pool of darkness. More spotlights were aimed at the Bob itself and followed the entertainers.
The final touch, lending a sense of awe and mystery to the annual rite of rotation, was the beam of sullen, red-shifted light from the starbow, filtering down from a lenticel somewhere high above. On past All-Level Eves, the starlight had been jolly, multicolored, but now the surrounding vault of higher frequencies had contracted to a point forward of the direct line of vision from here, leaving only the bloody light that preceded darkness.
“Yes, here’s to the committee,” Bram said, raising his glass. “What else are you going to have in the way of entertainment?”
“Oh, we’ll have pattern dancing—three very talented couples from hydroponics—and some people who sing, and some very clever body puppets.” Marg turned to scold Mim. “And I’m very disappointed in you, Mim. I thought you were going to play the cello for us tonight.”
“Oh, nobody wants to hear concert music tonight,” Mim said. “This is an evening to have fun in. Besides, some of these people have been waiting a whole year for a chance to be on stage.”
The acrobats had given the little fellow a boost that allowed him to do a backflip past the onion bulge of the Bob, and now he hung by one knee from the suspending cord and swung the Bob in greater and greater arcs while the audience clapped and cheered.
Across the table from Bram, Ang dug her fingers into Jao’s beefy arm. “He’s going to swing right over us!” she squealed.
“Somebody pass the poor fellow a drink, then.” Jao belched. He took a mighty gulp from his glass and set it down. He squinted critically at the surface of his. drink. “Still an ellipse,” he said. “You know, it’s an awesome thought. At the very moment the Bob becomes plumb, five thousand ellipses in five thousand glasses are going to become five thousand circles.”
“And we’ll stop being all tipsy,” Ang said.
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” Jao said with a sly wink at the company. “The geometry of alcohol is not the same as the geometry of space. The object of All-Level Eve is for the people to become progressively more tipsy while the environment becomes progressively less so.”
“In that case, you’re doing very well,” Mim said with a laugh.
Out on the floor of the Forum, the rainbow-clad acrobat had dropped lightly to the shoulders of his fellows, to the applause of the surrounding ring of revelers. Noisemakers razzed and rattled. The human pyramid disassembled itself, acknowledged the applause with outflung arms and a curtsy, and tripped offstage. A singing duo took their place—a man and woman in clown costume: she with enormous quilted breasts, he with a braided rag phallus that trailed on the floor—and began singing bawdy songs to the rowdy en
couragement of the onlookers.
“Who’s the Momus?” Trist asked.
“Don’t you recognize him?” Marg replied. “It’s Willum-frth-willum.”
“He’s lost considerable dignity.”
“He doesn’t need it anymore. He’s got his youth to look forward to.”
“I didn’t know he had such a good singing voice,” Mim said.
“He’s kept it hidden all these years.”
A lot of table hopping was going on as the time grew near for the swing of the Bob. People made their way across the tilting floor to drop off little Bobbing Day gifts, drink a toast with friends, embrace and kiss.
“It seems as if there’s always been a Bobbing Day,” Mim said, leaning against Bram’s shoulder. “I can hardly remember how it got started. What are we going to do when we leave the galaxy and stop accelerating and there’s no more annual tree turning?”
“We’ll think of something,” Bram said. “Human beings will always celebrate some sort of a year-festival.”
“It’s going to be a long, featureless ride between the galaxies,” Jao said. “Nothing to mark the years.”
“Sounds dull,” Orris said. “But like Bram says, we’ll think of something. We ought to appoint a revels committee to look into it.” He looked fondly at Marg. “We’re putting you in charge of it.”
“Almost time,” Bram said, feeling his waistwatch with his fingertips. Some of the younger generation had taken to wearing timepieces on their wrists—clever little holo displays that showed the ten hours of the day visually, in human numerals—but for Bram, old habits died hard.
At this moment, in the heart of the tree, Jao’s granddaughter would be checking and rechecking her meters, adjusting the voltages and gas pressures that would tickle Yggdrasil into one-twelfth of a revolution—or, rather, the portion of those thirty degrees it had not already anticipated. Once, early in the voyage, the humans had tried to accomplish the maneuver by brute force, using the plentiful hydrogen trapped by the drive section. But Yggdrasil had fought back and returned to starting position four times before the humans finally gave up. It was better to trick Yggdrasil into following its own imperatives.
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