Bram, startled out of his reverie, said, “Uh, certainly. The Milky Way turns out to have a very strong magnetic field at the center from what certain of our observations seem to indicate, and we ought to be able to use its rotation to slow us down considerably—just the opposite of the magnetic assist we got at departure.”
He glanced at the peculiar arc that could be seen growing out of the center of the galaxy’s golden yolk like a spray caused by a pinprick. It wasn’t a very large scale feature—only a few thousand light-years in extent—and its meaning was still being debated by the astronomy department; there was no need to go further into it at this moment.
“The galaxy’s made a quarter rotation in the last seventy-four million years,” Jun Davd interposed smoothly. “Or, rather, Original Man’s neighborhood in one of the spiral arms has. We had to allow for that, too. I hope everyone appreciates the brilliant job of orbital plotting that Jao’s department did.”
Jun Davd was as imposing as a young man as he had been when he was old. He’d become even taller with the reversal of calcium loss in his spine and carried his slim, smooth-muscled body with an easy grace that his older incarnation had only hinted at. Bram could never quite get used to seeing him without white hair, though.
“Well, I suppose if we’ve come this far, we can wait another forty years,” Jao’s heckler conceded grudgingly. Bram recognized him as one of the younger passengers who had been born on the trip. He was probably under a century old, and forty years would seem like forever to him.
“Oho, hold on minute,” Jao said with a malicious glint in his eye. “After we get to the volume of space we think Original Man’s message came from seventy-four million years ago, we still have to find the suns he used. That could take us another century or two if we don’t get lucky right away. We can do some preliminary sifting from a distance, but every time we want to stop and examine a G-type star firsthand, we’ve got to spend a year boosting down from relativistic speeds, a year boosting up to get to the next one, and at the low gamma we build up for these short hops, at least a couple of years in between. Unless you don’t mind gaining a lot of weight, that is!”
“Why do we have to find one of Original Man’s worlds at all?” grumbled the slender youth who had once been Doc Pol. Young he had become, but he hadn’t lost his grumpiness. “We’re here, we’re safe in a galaxy that isn’t exploding—why not settle down in the first G-type system we find? Put down roots. Let our descendants go gallivanting around looking for Original Man’s world if they’ve a mind to.”
There was a chorus of opposition to squelch that idea. Nobody wanted to give up on the search now that they were so close. Doc Pol hunched his faunlike head between his shoulders and looked stubborn.
“We’ve waited this long—we can wait a little while longer,” said a woman wearing one of the leaf tabards that had been popular five hundred years back. The costume placed her as one of the old hands—now a minority.
“That’s right,” another person said authoritatively. “Man’s worlds are our best bet, anyway. There’s bound to be some sort of a surviving DNA-based ecology we can adapt to instead of having to start an ecology from scratch from our vats and gardens here. In the meantime, Yggdrasil is a fine world to live on.”
“Too fine,” someone else said. “We have folk aboard who’ve never known any other world. There may be some who’ll prefer to stay in orbit with Yggdrasil. It makes a more benign environment than most planetary surfaces. I know I’d be tempted to stay myself.”
“Until one day you found yourself sailing off to the cometary halo or heading for a nearby star that Yggdrasil thought had the right absorption lines,” some wag said, and everybody laughed.
Jao’s granddaughter, Enyd, claimed attention with a frown and a gesture. She was still chief tree systems officer after all these years, still smooth, cool, and unapproachable. She picked a lover briefly every twenty years or so, but most of the time she remained seemingly wedded to Yggdrasil. The unattached men who had wooed her to no avail called her “the dryad” behind her back.
“Whatever we do, we’ll have to slow down enough to let Yggdrasil absorb a comet or two before too long,” she said. “It’s been showing the effects of drought these last few years.”
The current year-captain, a colorless hydroponicist named Ploz who’d had the support of the sociometrics clique, said with quick concern, “How critical is it?”
“We’re not losing leaves or anything like that. But the reproductive cycle is on hold. And the more recent xylem rings are getting extremely narrow—Yggdrasil’s pretty much shut down its growth these last few years.”
“How much longer before it gets critical?” Ploz persisted.
“I wouldn’t want to wait more than another century or so,” Enyd said severely.
There was a general sigh of relief. Jun Davd said, “Yggdrasil will have its comet long before then.”
Bram hung around until the press of people got too thick for comfort. Then, with a last regretful look at the galaxy’s swollen heart of fire, he elbowed his way out to make room for someone else.
“Don’t forget the meeting tomorrow,” Jao called after him. Bram waved acknowledgment.
When he emerged from the crowd, he found a delegation of four waiting to intercept him—three members of the glib younger set who seemed to be running things these days and one of the former oldsters who’d been around at the start of the journey.
Silv Jaks was the group’s spokesperson, and that was Bram’s clue that the sociometricians had taken a hand in whatever this would turn out to be. Bram wasn’t quite sure what sociometrics was, other than the fact that it had something to do with people in groups—it was one of the jargon-packed new sciences that had sprung up during the trip’s later generations—but its disciples had definite ideas about the running of the tree, and they wielded a lot of influence among the new people.
“Bram—we hoped we’d find you here,” she said briskly. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Sure, Silv.” Bram nodded to the group’s senior member. “Hello, Torm.”
“I’ll come to the point,” Silv said. “We represent a committee that wants you to run for year-captain this term.”
“That’s very flattering,” Bram said warily, “but I haven’t been year-captain for over two hundred years. just a working biologist and part-time astronomy assistant these days. There are plenty of qualified people around.
She set her jaw and drew a breath. “We believe you’re the candidate who’s needed at this time.”
“I thought you were going to throw your weight behind Ploz again. Everyone says he’s doing a good job.”
“He was the sort of year-captain we needed while we were still coasting. With deceleration, we’ve become a migratory society again. And there will be further upheavals as the populations of the outlying branches are assimilated into the annual branch once more. We’re going to undergo a lot of societal stress in the coming years. More important, our goal is in sight now.” She gestured past the crowds toward the overpowering panorama of the Milky Way’s bright center. “We need a renewal of our sense of purpose as a society.”
“What’s it got to do with me? It seems to me that we’ve hung on to our sense of purpose all right—even though the Father World is only a legend to most of the folk who were born between the galaxies. As to adjusting to an annual migration again, I wouldn’t worry. People manage.” He smiled reassuringly. “It might even breathe some life into All-Level Eve and Bobbing Day again.”
Silv was having none of his levity. “You’re a symbol of the old days for a lot of the people who weren’t around then. And for the original embarkees, you’re the leader who started them on this voyage. You were the first year-captain—I looked that up! We’ve run profiles of all the old leaders through the computer, and we believe you’re the one who’s best suited to bring the two moieties together.”
“The two what?”
It sounded like mo
re of the jargon that Silv’s colleagues in the Theoretical Anthropology group were always culling out of the primal Inglex dictionary. They were always creating computer models of imaginary human societies and drawing fanciful conclusions from them. They claimed to use rigorous statistical methods, too, but from what Bram had seen, some of the more overweening practitioners of the arcane speciality had a rather shaky grasp of real math.
Silv metered her words to him carefully. “One-third of the population of the tree had been born within the last hundred and fifty years. Approximately one-fourth consists of the original embarkees and the generation immediately following, who share their values to a large degree. In between is an amorphous group who tend to be polarized in one direction or the other. Thus there has been an evolution toward endogamous moieties which—”
Torm interrupted with a twinkle. “What she’s trying to say is that the older and younger voyagers tend to divide into two groups as defined by their cross-mating practices.” He winked. “Not that I’ve noticed it myself.”
Bram laughed. “Tell that to my great-great-great-granddaughter Ame,” he said. “She’s been trying to fight off Smeth’s attentions for years.”
“Naturally, in an evolving culture the lines aren’t yet rigidly drawn,” Silv said with Signs of annoyance, “but we’ve drawn up charts and applied statistical methods, and we believe there’s a developing pattern of custom and taboo.”
Torm allowed his eyes to glaze, though not enough to be impolite. The lively old fogy of the Bachelors’ Lodge had again become the smallish, dapper young blade he must once have been. Bram would not have put it past him to have cast an eye on Silv herself for a little endogamous tumble.
“What it sublimates down to,” Torm said, “is that Silv’s crowd think I have enough influence with the old-timers to be worth cultivating and that if we can get together behind a candidate with across-the-moieties appeal, we’ll have the votes to win.”
“And that’s me?”
“You’re the only one we can agree on. If you say yes, the votes are guaranteed.”
“Will you accept?” Silv asked.
Bram looked past them at the fiery egg in the holo projection. “I’ll think it over,” he promised.
“A symbol of the old days,” Bram repeated with relish. “That’s what they’re calling me now. They want to dust me off and set me up as year-captain again.”
Mim paused in her work. She was feeding the score of a new string quartet by one of her protégés into her computer and punching in the program that would separate it into players’ parts for next Tenday’s performance. “That might not be such a bad idea,” she said.
“Oh, Mim, you know the job’s nothing but a headache,” he protested.
His daughter, Lydis, said, “What are you going to tell them?”
Lydis had hardly changed at all in the last five hundred years. She was still the same slender, dark-haired edition of her mother that she had been when she reached her final age, without an added ounce, worry line, or shift of body mass. Even her teeth seemed always to come in as identical replicas, not changing the shape of her mouth an iota. Lydis had not inherited Mim’s talent for music, though; she was a gifted and relentlessly practical engineer who had designed the hardware for some of the tree’s most important industrial biosynthesis plants. Currently she had taken an interest in piloting and was spending a lot of her time exploring the hangars where Yggdrasil’s fleet of landers was stored and practicing in the simulators.
“I haven’t decided,” Bram said. He went to the coldall and helped himself to a gourd of sapbrew. “The next few years are going to be very exciting ones for astronomy. We have the chance to study the galaxy we’re going to live in from the inside out, over a real-time frame of tens of thousands of years, so we can observe processes There’s that peculiar feature in the nucleus—the gas arc I mentioned. It suggests a powerful magnetic field, but at right angles to where one ought to be. We may find an answer in the inner parsec of the galaxy. We’ll never have the chance for a close-up view again. Jun Davd’s offered me the chance to be an important part of it. Being year-captain is time-consuming.”
He took a sip from the gourd. “And then there’s my own bioengineering project. Genesis Two. I’d have to shut that down entirely for a while.”
Mim put the string quarter score aside. “The observations will get made whether you’re there or not,” she said. “It will take years—decades—to sort them out and draw conclusions from them. You have all the time in the world. There are still tons of data from the explosion of the old galaxy that are lying there waiting for someone to go through them. Jun Davd can wait. And as for your genetics project, I know it means a lot to you, but that can wait, too. Your assistants can keep it warm. In any case, you couldn’t implement the project until we’re resettled.”
“I don’t know, Mim,” he temporized.
“I’ll tell you this,” she said. “For the last two hundred years we’ve had year-captains who immersed themselves more and more in the housekeeping details of the job. When they weren’t officious busybodies who tried to interfere with people’s lives, that is. Because for at least that long, a majority of the population have been people who think that the human past is a sort of fairy tale. They’ve never lived on a planet, never had a Nar touch brother—never even seen a real Nar, for that matter. They think that babies have always been made by two people in a nest together—not constructed out of nucleotides. They don’t have any real comprehension of the fact that the human species ceased to exist for thirty-seven million years, and that we’re here now by the grace of a wonderful race that’s ceased to exist itself, and that we escaped by the skin of our teeth, and that Yggdrasil is just a temporary habitat to get us back to the original seedbed of humanity.” She paused for breath. “Bram, do you realize that most of the people on this tree have never in their lives seen a real star—only holo projections? Maybe Silv is right. Maybe we do need to remind ourselves of what this trip is all about!”
He grinned at her. “I think you just like the privileges that go with being married to a year-captain. Like always having a meal or your sleep interrupted by some problem, and never having any privacy, and sitting through long boring meetings where everybody pushes their point of view on you for the thousandth time, and you smile and nod for the thousandth time so that nobody thinks their views are being slighted.”
She grinned back at him. “Shall I tell you why Lydis is here?”
“To check up on the old folks and make sure their synapses haven’t gotten all stuck together?”
“Oh, Bram!” Lydis said.
Mim said, “So I could ask her how she’d feel about being older sister to a new sibling. A five-hundred-year-older sister.”
’”I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Lydis said. “It’s about time. The new people hardly wait till one child is grown up before having another one. They breed like yeast. I certainly think the demographics of the tree entitle you to another baby. And I’d enjoy having a sibling.”
Both of them looked Bram’s way. He said with feeling, “Lyd is right, Mim. The end of our journey’s in sight. Yggdrasil could handle five or ten times our current population without any strain—but I doubt that even the new people can breed fast enough to fill it up before we reach home territory. You’re certainly as eligible as any centenarian to have a second child. But are you sure you don’t want to wait until we find a planet?”
“No,” she said. “Call it an act of faith.”
Bram embraced her. “Careful, oldsters,” Lydis said. “You might tempt me to have a second child, too, like my silly granddaughter.”
Mim, her dark eyes shining, said, “Think of the exciting younghood the child’s going to have. A plunge through the heart of the galaxy. The strange sights at the core. A trip to the spiral arm that was the cradle of humanity. And—and the stars coming back!” Her voice took on fervor. “A curtain of stars drawing back little by little as we slow down, st
ars spreading till they fill the sky again, shifting back to their true colors … until finally one day our destination star lies before us, big as a sun.”
“Yes,” Bram said, caught by the vision. It was what another child had dreamed thirty-seven million years ago in another galaxy.
Mim, warm in his arms, felt what he was thinking. “It’s come true, hasn’t it, Bram?” she said softly.
“I wonder what we’ll find there,” he said.
“You’re seeing the husk of a quasar,” Jun Davd said, “left over from the quasar epoch of the cosmos.”
He gestured toward the dizzying scene behind the observatory’s holo wall. The fabric of the universe seemed to writhe as stars were wrenched from their true positions and yanked into the illusory halo surrounding the black hole’s event horizon. Then, as Yggdrasil continued its headlong dive past the hole, the stars smeared around the heart of darkness pulled free and popped back into place. The queer stellar mirage was visible because Yggdrasil, on its first pass, was in a polar orbit—dropping down from above the nuclear bulge, where the hole’s accretion disk did not obscure the view.
You could see the inferno of light representing the disk if you stepped close to the transparent shield and looked down into the imaginary space behind the wall. But most people took a look and stepped right back again. You knew it wasn’t real, but something about it made you feel as if you were falling.
Smeth, working hard to impress Ame, cleared his throat to get noticed. “It might be a husk, but if so, it’s a husk of a hundred million solar masses. Not in the same league as the binary holes at the center of the Father World’s galaxy, but massive enough to have caused periodic core explosions of its own. We’ve detected a sort of smoke ring ten thousand light-years out that seems to be a remnant of the last explosion.” Then he made the mistake of condescending to her. “Of course,” he said importantly, “you weren’t born yet when we made the passage between Scylla and Charybdis—that’s what we old hands call the binary hole maneuver, from an old legend of Original Man—but those were the great days! You had to have been there!”
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