Second Genesis gq-2

by Donald Moffitt

  She looked at the gray patch of the dragonfly colony and shuddered again. She had been practically in hysterics, Bram knew, when the last shuttle had returned to the tree without him. The tapes of the dragonfly nymphs were something no one could forget.

  “And the science, too,” Trist said, brightening. “The latter-day physics of Original Man, when we’re finally able to understand it. The vistas it opens up!”

  “Let’s not forget the human diet,” Bram said. “It’s going to be considerably more interesting from now on. What’s that you’re drinking?”

  “Marg calls it elderberry wine. Made mostly from tree glucose, of course, but with an infusion of cloned cells added to the fermentation vats. She’s bullied the gardening section into growing the actual plants, though, from cuttings that Oris developed.”

  “May I try it?” Mim asked.

  Trist held out his glass, and she took a sip. She wrinkled her nose. “Sweet,” she said.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Marg said, appearing at Mim’s elbow with Orris in tow. She eyed Mim’s gown, then relaxed as she decided that hers was more attention-getting. Marg’s opulent figure spilled out of a wisp of a frock that she would not have dared to wear the first time she had been young, but the centuries had taken away a lot of inhibitions. Orris was still the same lanky, self-effacing consort he had always been. She had made him dress for the party in one of the Old-Earth costumes that the archaeological excavations had made briefly popular: great, puffy, striped thigh breeches and skintight leg coverings that showed his knobby knees.

  “Too sweet, I think,” Marg went blithely on. “Cloying, actually. I’m going to make wine from grapes, next. That’s what Original Man did, mostly. The secret is to allow most of the glucose to ferment out, evidently. Orris is cloning cells now from the samples we brought back. But it will take two years to grow the rootstocks.”

  Orris’s shaggy head bobbed up and down in agreement.

  The telescopic display caught Marg’s eye. Even she was sobered by it. She bit her lip. “I wonder what we missed,” she said. “I know it will take tens and tens of years to sort through what we’ve already got, but I can’t help thinking about what we might have missed. Do we have parsley, for example?” She fluttered her long eyelashes at Bram. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea if we went back? The disks are identical, aren’t they? There must be other biological museums we could dig up before those horrid creatures get to them.” She pouted. “I can’t stand the thought of them swarming over it all!”

  “We were just talking about that.” Bram floundered uncomfortably.

  Mim came to his rescue. “You know what I can’t stand? The idea of the Cuddlies being hunted by those awful things.”

  Orris nodded vigorously. “Yes, they may be the last survivors of the mammalian age on earth. They were safe here for eons. And now they’re just fodder for probably the most voracious life form that evolution ever produced.”

  “I don’t know,” Trist protested. “They’re tenacious little animals. The rat-people couldn’t exterminate them. They’ve prospered for millions of years in an inimical environment. They’ll learn to keep out of the nymphs’ way. Life may get tougher for them. But I have a hunch they’ll be around for millions of years more.”

  “In any case, they won’t become extinct now,” Bram said. “All the pets taken aboard Yggdrasil will see to that.”

  That led to a rash of Cuddly stories. Cuddly owners could be terrible bores.

  “Our little Mittens is such a scamp!” Marg gushed. “She’s into everything, but I haven’t the heart to scold her.”

  “Our Loki, too,” Mim said. “He was determined that he was going to come to the party. We had to lock him up to keep him from following us.”

  “I hear from Jao that you’ve adopted another one,” Trist said politely.

  “Yes … Methuselah,” Bram said. “He’s pretty spry for an old fellow. Walked right in and took possession of the place. No nonsense about him. Right now, I think he’s in the process of showing Loki who’s the boss.”

  “Loki’s an unusual color,” Orris said. “Almost the same shade as Jao’s beard. Say, you wouldn’t consider letting us mate him with Mittens, would you? We’ve always wanted a red—”

  He was interrupted by the arrival of Edard. Edard was tired and dusty, still wearing coveralls with a treeguard armband; he hadn’t gone to his quarters first to change for the party.

  “Creation, but I could use a drink!” he said. Bram handed him his glass, and he drained it. Marg signaled one of her assistants for refills.

  “What happened?” Bram asked.

  “We found one,” Edard said. “One of the patrols flushed it out of a tunnel in the sapwood. We lost two men, but we got it.” He looked around for another drink. “It was full of eggs.”

  “Do you think there are any more?” Trist asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope not. We’ll have to build up the treeguard with more volunteers, step up the patrols. I’m going on duty again tomorrow. We may have to keep this up for years if we want to be sure.”

  “How horrible,” Mim said.

  “Inside the tree, of course, they’re not at the disadvantage they are in space suits. Spears aren’t the whole answer. We need something smaller that can kill at a distance.”

  “A dart of some kind, maybe?” Trist suggested.

  “Could be. With something like a spring to hurl it.”

  “Interesting idea. Maybe the physics department could come up with something.”

  “I’ve thought of one thing,” Edard said. “A sort of bow, like a violin bow. With the string under lots of tension. It could throw a short shaft with a pointed end. Of course, it would take a lot of practice to learn how to aim a thing like that so you could hit something with it.”

  “Oh, Edard, you sound so bloodthirsty,” Mim said.

  “Sorry, Mother. But if you’d seen two men killed by one of those filthy creatures…”

  “It’s only for self-defense, Mim,” Bram said. “When we’re sure this crisis is over … why, we’ll just disinvent this bow thing.”

  Everybody’s eyes were drawn to the telescopic image hanging in the bolo backplate. “We should have burned them with the photon drive instead of being so finicky about where we aimed it,” Trist said.

  “Now who’s being bloodthirsty?” Bram said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Their father ship’s dropped bubbles all around the rim, and even if we’d spent a year in orbit around the disk, there’d be other ships, now that they’ve found the way.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Trist said. “The dragonflies are now in possession of the diskworld transmission apparatus. What if some day it occurs to them to use it?”

  It was a horrifying thought. “It would take thousands of years to get the disks into operating condition,” Bram said.

  “The universe has got thousands of years,” Trist said.

  “Before the dragonflies could seed the universe with their kind,” Mim said, “their transmissions would have to reach a race advanced enough to synthesize their DNA. And what race would be that naive?”

  “The Nar created us, Mim,” Trist said. “And we gave them Penser.”

  “You may be overlooking one thing, Trist,” Bram said. “Before you can induce another species to unriddle your genetic code, you’ve got to be able to communicate with them. And the dragonflies aren’t very good at that. In fact, they may be inherently incapable of it.”

  “They won’t need to broadcast their genetic code,” Trist said grimly. “They’ll just spread from star to star. And when their ships are good enough they’ll reach other galaxies the way we did.”

  “Don’t be so gloomy, Trist,’ Marg said. “You’ll spoil the party.”

  “Sorry, Marg.” He swallowed the last of his elderberry wine. “I think I’ll get myself another drink. Who’ll join me?”

  Before he could carry out his intention, Jun Davd came hurrying into the lounge, fo
llowed by an assistant. He spoke briefly to. the assistant, who nodded and went to the holo to make some kind of adjustment; then Jun Davd came through the crowd to Bram and his group.

  “You’ll want to see this,” he said. “We’ve been tracking the dragonfly father ship for the past few hours. They’ve finished seeding the rim with their spawning bubbles, evidently, and they’re ready to go on to the next diskworld. They’ve been following the rim around, using their fusion engine to build up velocity.”

  “Oh, no!” Mim exclaimed.

  “They’ve sterilized a swath over ten million miles long so far.”

  “Why … they’ll burn their own colonies,” Orris said.

  “No, they shut down when they drop one,” Jun Davd said. “They’re not mindless, you know.”

  “Not when it involves their own species,” Trist said tightly.

  “They’re flying low,” Jun Davd went on, as if he were discussing an abstract problem in ballistics. “The interesting thing is that they haven’t passed under a moon yet. It’s over twenty-two million miles between moons. Ah, here we are. We’re picking them up now.”

  The telescopic display at the end of the lounge jiggled and blurred, then centered on a brilliant spark skimming the top of the fantastic wall that stretched across the stars. People stopped their conversation to look.

  “They’re awfully close to the rim edge, aren’t they?” Trist observed, his face suddenly alight with interest.

  “Yes, aren’t they?” Jun Davd said.

  The spark died without warning. Bram could see the ship itself, a tiny splinter that he knew was twenty miles long from end to end. The cluster of bubbles at one end didn’t seem appreciably smaller. It was hard to tell. The few dozen that might have been expended on this world still left hundreds with which to seed the rest of the system.

  “They’re not cutting it too fine,” Jun Davd drawled. “They’re about a half million miles from their first colony next to our digs. They’re closing at a hundred miles per second. It won’t be many minutes longer now.”

  The ellipsoidal moon hovered, waiting. The dragonfly ship was going to pass under its pointed end. Even at the scale of distance involved, the progress of the bubble-ended splinter seemed swift.

  “They’re going to—” Mim said, and bit her lip.

  The splinter hurtled onward, its axis aimed obliquely in preparation for the escape orbit that would take it to the next big disk of the outer trio. The angle gave it a wider cross section along its line of flight. That would make matters worse, Bram thought.

  At the last moment, a dragonfly eye must have seen a hairline flicker of movement and a dragonfly brain must have made an instantaneous connection. The fusion flame flared in a desperate attempt to push the ship out of the plane of the disk.

  “That was a mistake,” Jun Davd said.

  The splinter sheared in half, peeling back along its entire length. Hundreds of tiny glistening beads spilled into space. Bram thought that a collision at a hundred miles per second would have smeared the occupants to paste, but—incredibly—he could see chemical jets starting up in some of them as the pilots tried uselessly to save themselves.

  Then the primitive deuterium-helium three reactor—smashed, flooded, and compressed all at once—blew.

  A ball of terrible fire appeared in an instant, engulfing the spilled bubbles, spreading outward in growing circles across the diskscape, lighting up the underside of the pointed moon.

  The moon gave a jerk.

  It joggled for a moment, like a balloon being yanked by a child, and then the second set of moonropes on the other side of the rim, weakened by heat and impossibly stressed, parted.

  Like a stone released from a sling, the moon flew into space.

  Mim gasped. She clutched at Bram’s arm, her fingers digging into his biceps.

  “It can’t hit us, Mim,” Bram said softly, watching the moon sail upward, blunt end first. “It left the disk’s orbit on a different tangent than we did.”

  Jun Davd heard him. “No, there’s nothing left in the outer system that it can hit. It will probably take up a tilted orbit somewhere between here and the cometary halo.”

  Slowly, like ocean billows, the surface of the diskworld collapsed under the place where the moon had hung. A great scalloped depression spread out on either side. Eventually, when that wave of collapse ceased, there would be a forty-five-million-mile bite taken out of the disk between moons.

  Throughout the lounge, sobs were heard as stunned people realized that the city of man had tumbled into that abyss.

  “It’s all gone, isn’t it?” Mim asked. “Everything we found. Buried, crushed under an earthquake that could have swallowed worlds.”

  Bram found her hand. “They’re gone too, Mim. The dragonflies.”

  “They’ll be back, though,” Trist said, staring out the curving view wall as the universe outside came tumbling down. “There are billions of them, less than twenty light-years away.”

  Bram’s holo, fifty feet tall, stood on the rostrum and looked out across a sea of faces. It always made him feel self-conscious to be magnified this way—you didn’t even dare to scratch your nose—but it was the only way for a crowd this size to have any connection with the speakers. He thanked his stars that the year-captain election was only a few Tendays away. He had resolved not to let his name be entered this time. It was someone else’s turn.

  The hall of the tree had been enlarged over the years with the increase in population, until now it could seat more than twenty thousand people. But that still wasn’t enough to handle the crowd that had shown up tonight; the overflow had been consigned to the small adjacent amphitheater, watching the same holos, but without the reinforcing sight of the distant minikin figures whose shadows they were.

  Over two hundred ushers with ballot boxes on poles were stationed at the ends of the aisles, each responsible for ten rows. This was a vote that nobody was going to miss.

  “All right, I guess we’ve heard from everyone who said they wanted to speak—and a few who said they didn’t,” he said, while the simulacrum of himself that towered over him boomed out the words through the sound system. “And I guess the experts have answered all our questions. So I’m going to call on Jun Davd to sum it up, and then we can get on with the vote.”

  He left the podium to sit with Mim and the others, mopping his brow a little too soon, so that a departing slice of the holo image made a swipe with a bedsheet-size handkerchief before he was completely offstage.

  Jun Davd nodded as he squeezed past, then got up and took his place on the podium. His holo image, lithe with the common youth of the human race, leaned toward the crowd and said mildly, “We’re still on the previously set course that will take us to the star we believe to be Sol. If we want to change that course, we should do so now. We’ve reached approximately one-fortieth of the speed of light, and within a few more days we’ll be beyond the effective limits of this system.”

  A vast troubled murmuring went through the audience, and voices were raised in different parts of the hall.

  Jun Davd’s holo raised a billboard palm. “Please, we’ve been through it all before. We believe that all the nearby stars, to a distance of about twenty light-years from Sol, are—or soon will be—inhabited by our dragonfly successors on earth. If that’s the case, we have no home here. There is a sizable faction among us who want to flee this sector of space without further ado and search for a home elsewhere in the galaxy. And I can’t say I blame them, after what we’ve seen here.”

  There were shouts of agreement from the crowd. A man near the front rose, shaking his fist, and was shushed by his neighbors.

  “But there is another faction,” Jun Davd went on, “who believe we should have a look at Sol anyway. We’ve heard from some of them tonight. They argue that we can’t know for sure that our recent adversaries come from Earth, though all the biological studies indicate that they do. What if we’re mistaken? What if Earth is not denied to us? W
hat if the dragonfly ship came from elsewhere or was a lone survivor fleeing some planetary disaster? In that case, it would be a shame to have journeyed so far without even getting a glimpse of our goal.”

  There were more angry shouts from the audience. Jun Davd’s looming holo waited them out, hands on its hips.

  “There’s one more thing to consider,” he said when the noise subsided. “Even if the worst is true, oughtn’t we to know more about these terrifying creatures? How far have they advanced since they launched their colony ship? How fast are they likely to spread? How far ought we to flee before we’re safe? A thousand light-years? Ten thousand? To the opposite side of the galaxy? And when we get there, will we find them waiting for us—having arrived in ships that set out centuries after we did but were a few decimal places faster?”

  That got to everybody. A subdued silence fell over the massed rows as Jun Davd went on.

  “We believe that we can fly through the Sol system without danger and make a survey from space. With our engine off, we’re unlikely to be spotted. And even if we were, we ought to be safe from being boarded unless we went into the close planetary orbit, as we did here. I doubt that they would be able to match velocities with us on a hyperbolic orbit through the system.” He paused. “And if they tried—why, we’d see them coming from a long way off, and we’d turn on our engine and outrun them.”

  A flurry of voices went through the audience as people turned to their neighbors to comment. Jun Davd let the commotion run on for a bit, then raised a flat palm again.

  “Of course, after the terrible events that we’re all familiar with, it would be perfectly understandable if we voted not to take that chance. On that subject, perhaps we ought to hear from a member of the patrol, who I believe has something to tell us.”

  Edard got up. He evidently had just come off duty and still had his treeguard armband on. His voice was tense as he spoke.