“We just found two more and killed them. No casualties this time. We have a new weapon that doesn’t let them get close to us—provided we outnumber them by a fair margin, of course. We believe that was the last of them. Except…”
He looked troubled. He pushed back a mop of dark hair and continued. “Except that one of them evidently bored holes in the cambium of a passage and laid eggs—several tens of them. We came upon one of the hatchlings. They’re about as long as your thumb and they look exactly like the adults, except that perhaps they’re stubbier. And they bite.”
His holo held up a bandaged hand.
“We destroyed all the eggs we could find—and we had some help. When our Cuddlies saw what we were doing, they took a hand, too. They’re good at getting into small places … and they’re wild about eggs! We saw them chase down hatchlings, as well. Let me tell you that Cuddlies can bite, too.”
A subdued sound of nervous laughter went through the chamber.
Edard smiled in response. “At the moment, there are several hundred Cuddlies prowling through the passageways, looking for eggs and hatchlings. They’re very imitative beasts, as we all know. Pickings were slim after the first few hours—but we’ve all seen how persistent a Cuddly can be. I don’t think that after a few Tendays we’ll have to worry about nymphs being aboard the tree.” He sobered. “But of course, we intend to keep the treeguard patrols going indefinitely.” His holo gave a grin. “And on that subject, we’d be pleased to have more volunteers.”
He sat down next to Bram and Mim. Jao leaned across and said, “Nice going.”
Jun Davd was smiling to himself. Bram said, “Why are you so pleased with yourself, you old reprobate?” Bram asked. You undermined your own case when you let Edard remind everybody how dangerous the nymphs are.”
“We’ll see,” Jun Davd said.
The ushers moved swiftly down the aisles. A ballot box was shoved at Bram on its long pole, and he pushed the yes button. The box slid past him to pause at Mim and Edard. Jao tried to vote twice and looked unabashed when the usher caught him at it and said, “None of that, brother.”
The voting was over in twenty minutes. Yes and no votes went much faster than multiple-choice votes, as when there was a slate of candidates. The ushers brought their boxes to the clerk, who plugged them one at a time into a tabulator.
The tally figures floated in holographic projection, huge, glowing, and changing so rapidly that the final digits were a blur. But the trend was clear.
“It’s going to be almost unanimous,” Jao said. “I don’t believe it.”
The last few figures clicked into place. The crowd waited a moment to take it in, then a great cheer went up.
“That’s it,” Jun Davd said. “We’re going to Sol.”
CHAPTER 11
Earth hung before them, a soiled brown ball swirled around with dingy clouds. Its moon had an atmosphere, too, if that yellowish soup could be called air.
“What have they done to it?” someone whispered.
Brown oceans, brown air—it was a planet drowned in swill. But incredibly, there was life there. The planet was thick with life, in fact, to judge by all the microwave radiation, the chemical pollutants revealed by infrared spectra, the hydrocarbons that choked the clouds, the orbital junk.
“There are simply too many of them,” Jun Davd said sadly. “A population of half a trillion if we’ve estimated their demographics correctly from that … city.”
Radar imaging had exposed a spongelike warren of habitation that stretched from end to end of the single sprawling continent—an irregular heap of stacked cubes that staggered miles high in places, reaching to where the filthy air thinned to the merely fetid.
The radar imaging had sparked a lot of controversy. There was a strong feeling that the close-up look at Earth should be limited to passive observation—radio eavesdropping, infrared, and the like. But Yggdrasil was a naked-eye object by now, and further caution seemed pointless.
At any rate, the radar didn’t seem to have alerted the inhabitants of the Earth-Moon system. Perhaps their own microwave background was simply too noisy. When there had been no sign that the dragonfly civilization was paying attention to them, the treeload of humans had voted to risk putting Yggdrasil into a remote orbit a hundred thousand miles out, with the fusion engine kept warmed up.
“I thought somehow it would be … lovely,” Mim said, turning a disappointed face to Bram. “Like the Father World seen from space.”
Alis Tonia Atli, now a historian, was among the people who had come crowding into the observatory. “Is it possible that they inherited this? Evolved for it?” the thin woman suggested. “Perhaps it was Original Man who poisoned Terra, millions of years ago. We know he had a population in the billions.”
“No, it wasn’t Original Man that did this,” said a thick-featured man with blue-black ringlets. It was Dal, the dramatist, inspired by the diskworld finds to return to the writing of his verse plays. “Earth didn’t look like this when he was still around. I remember the words of one of the lunar poets of the twenty-eighth century … Taine, I think.”
He struck a professional pose and declaimed:
Oh, fair blue world, marbled in glory,
Teach us beauty as you rise
Above our bleak horizon…
He was interrupted by Hogard, the librarian. “I don’t think that’s Earth at all. I know it has a large moon, but that one big land mass with its three lobes doesn’t fit any of the maps I’ve seen.”
“Continental drift,” Enry said stolidly. “Seventy-four million years of it. They came together in one supercontinent.”
“The rest of the system doesn’t fit, either,” Hogard said stubbornly. “Where are the gas giants? The solar system was supposed to have four of them, including one with spectacular rings. Instead, those orbits are occupied with a whole collection of terrestroid planets, all of them crawling with dragonflies.”
Jun Davd stepped in. “We know that the moon was terraformed with carbon dioxide from Venus and hydrogen from Jupiter. Carbon dioxide broken down to liberate oxygen, hydrogen reacting with some of the oxygen to make water. We can assume that the process went on. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen are very useful commodities for an industrial society expanding into space. Jupiter and Venus were gradually stripped. Both became habitable. Venus, with the crushing load of its hothouse atmosphere removed and a modest helping of hydrogen brought in to react with liberated oxygen to make oceans—and perhaps even an infusion of cometary ice. And Jupiter—”
“Jupiter stripped down to its rocky core,” Bram said in a flash of insight. “But more important, with that terrible pressure released, the shell of metallic hydrogen surrounding the core could’ve changed state and boiled off. Which would have removed Jupiter’s magnetic field. And with it, the deadly radiation belt that Jovians have.”
Jun Davd nodded approvingly at his former pupil. “Which would have made the moons of Jupiter habitable.”
“Five new worlds,” the stocky playwright, Dal, said. “The four large moons plus Jupiter itself. All the real estate Original Man could have used. Seven, counting Mars and Venus. That bears me out. Original Man was not responsible for that stinking stew down there!”
He gestured vehemently at the observation window, where the blotched brown world floated against the cleanliness of space.
“No, they have abused their legacy most grieviously,” murmured Jun Davd. “Original Man once had a ring city and linked synchronous satellites draped around the waist of his lovely world, did you know that?”
There were oohs and ahs from the visitors. While Jun Davd explained, Bram turned his attention to the most interesting of the holographic displays that had been set up around the observatory—the one produced by gravitational imaging. It showed a tangled belt of overgrown wreckage around the equator of the slowly revolving planet, The buried debris must have been millions of years old. It made ridges in the sea floor, a single straight line of low hi
lls across the land. The devastation when it crashed must have been inconceivable. Perhaps it had been the planetary disaster that had cleared an evolutionary path for the ascent of the rat-people.
Hogard was still insistent. “Okay, there are five rocky worlds doing a complicated dance around one another where Jupiter ought to be. But what about the other three gas giants this system is supposed to have? Did Original Man strip them, too?”
“No!” Mim cried with sudden heat. “I’ve seen the pictures of Saturn’s rings! Human beings never would have done that to her!”
Bram followed her gaze to the long gallery wall of planetary images that Jun Davd had put on display. It was a selection made from the hundreds that had been taken while Yggdrasil plunged through the Sol system. The one that upset Mim showed a grim, yellow-stained ball of rock where a scummy ocean lapped at a tarnished shore. Yggdrasil had passed within a million miles of it. Even at that distance one could distinguish the scab of habitation that covered much of the land surface.
“I agree, Mim,” Jun Davd said. “Perhaps the rat-people did that. Saturn was the next world out. They may not have had our sense of aesthetics.”
“Atmospheric mining is simple in principle,” Bram said. “A satellite in low orbit with a couple of hundred miles of siphon suspended beneath it. The vacuum of space operates the siphon. The orbit has to be readjusted every once in a while to compensate for atmospheric drag on the hose, but there’s plenty of reaction mass available to do it with. The rat-people could have mined their hydrogen that way and had another planet available after Saturn was sucked dry.”
“Eight planets,” Jun Davd said. “Of Saturn’s satellites, seven are more than three hundred miles in diameter—including one moon as big as Mercury—and the dragonflies are using them all.”
“That wasn’t enough for them,” Bram said grimly. “We’ve detected dragonfly broadcasts from the leftover cores of what must have been Uranus and Neptune—and all of their moons that we were able to get any separation on.”
“They’re breeders!” Dal blazed. “Any piece of rock big enough for them to light on!”
“Yes, indeed,” Jun Davd agreed. “Our resident sociobiologist, Heln Dunl-mak, tells me that she estimates the total dragonfly population of Sol system to be more than ten trillion.”
The figure was mind-boggling—too big to grasp. Bram heard the gasps around him.
“And they’re pushing outward,” Jun Davd went on. “If the diskworld system of Delta Pavonis represents their present limit of expansion, then they now occupy a volume of space forty light-years in diameter.”
He was about to go on, when an alarm went off. He picked up an interphone and listened briefly. He reached out and switched on a display. “Yes, yes, I see them now,” he said.
He put down the interphone set and faced the circle of suddenly quiet people. “That was Smeth,” he said. “Our sensors have detected the firing of launch vehicles. It appears that the dragonflies have decided that Yggdrasil is a likely-looking piece of real estate.”
Bram watched through the scope as a pattern of orange sparks rose above the brown curve of the atmosphere and died out one at a time.
“End of boost phase,” Jun Davd said from his console a few feet away. “I make that eighty-four vehicles, launched from twelve separate locations.”
“Eighty-four!” Bram exclaimed, remembering the colony-size environmental bubbles that had tried to settle in Yggdrasil’s branches in the diskworld system. “So many for a target our size?”
“These are relatively small multistage vehicles,” Jun Davd said. He put a computer-enhanced image on the big screen so that everybody could see it. Bram saw a flecked bottle shape with a pinched waist jiggling at the approximate center of the field. Glowing green lines showed where the computer had used its imagination to fill in the outline.
“Designed to come up through atmosphere, with a final stage carrying no more than fifty or a hundred passengers, from its size. Probably their regular Earth-Moon bus. Their numbers, I assume, reflect those they happened to have standing by in a state of near-launch readiness. Yggdrasil is a target of opportunity. A new world that appeared suddenly out of the miraculous plenum.”
Somebody said, “Don’t they have shuttles?”
“No, these are throwaway vehicles,” Jun Davd said. “Typical of them.”
On the screen, the bottle shape divided in two at its pinched waist. Bram looked through his scope again and saw a fresh shower of sparks.
“Their parking orbit didn’t last very long,” Jun Davd said. “Not long enough, really, to qualify as a parking orbit at all. They hardly bother to calculate, do they—just eyeball it.”
The minutes crawled by as the blanket of sparks moved perceptibly against the murky face of the planet, then slowed, then stopped moving and seemed to hover there. Jun Davd had removed the isolated ship from the big screen and replaced it with the wide view for the benefit of his visitors. What they were seeing was not strictly an honest telescopic image but one enriched by infrared, gravitational sensors, and synthetic aperture radar.
Then the sparks went out.
“Final velocity of somewhat over a hundred thousand miles an hour,” Jun Davd said. “They’ve done very well on their hydrocarbons and oxygen. They don’t appear to have injected themselves into Yggdrasil orbit. They’re going to try for a direct landing.”
The visitors waited in silence, trying to make sense out of the dancing dots on the screen. But there was really nothing to see except the background planet.
A voice on the edge of hysteria finally said, “Aren’t we going to do something?”
“We’re going to have weight very soon,” Jun Davd said soothingly. “I suggest that everyone orient themselves toward the floor.”
The floaters drifted to upright positions. People used walls and handholds to nudge themselves into foot contact as best as possible.
Bram felt returning weight: a few ounces at first, then a steadily increasing poundage. Smeth had gotten the fusion engine going in record time.
Yggdrasil groaned and creaked with the stresses of acceleration. The tree didn’t like this at all. It had come into this system under its own power—the ramjet having been shut down at about one hundred astronomical units—and finished the last seven percent of braking with its lightsails. It had broken out of its hyperbola and taken up its present orbit under the hormonal and mechanical inveigling of its human passengers, and it was just settling down to enjoy the sunlight only to be subjected to the rude yank of the tether again.
Slowly, the tree began to outdistance the gnats that were pursuing it. The one-hundred-thousand-mile orbit straightened out into a larger curve. The pursuing craft were in no danger from the photon exhaust yet, but they would be when their interception trajectory intersected the line where Yggdrasil had been.
After an hour, when the tree had built up a velocity of twenty miles a second and it became obvious that the gap would continue to widen, radar showed that the dragonfly landing stages had simultaneously flip-flopped.
“Now, why would they do that?” Bram asked.
“I’m afraid I know,” Jun Davd said.
The answer came a moment later. Once again, a cloud of orange sparks twinkled into life. The burn lasted for several minutes, then extinguished.
“They used their retrorockets to give themselves an extra boost!” Bram said unbelievingly. “There’s no way they can come to a soft landing on the Moon, now! All they can hope to do is—”
“Crash into Yggdrasil,” Jun Davd finished for him. “Project our delta-vee and gamble that by the time they intersect our path, the angle will be acute enough and the relative velocity close enough to zero to enable them to survive the crash.” His face was somber. “They don’t care about being able to get back, of course.”
Bram scrambled for a console and punched out figures, while Mim watched him, biting her lip in apprehension. After a bad couple of minutes, he gave her a reassuring smile a
nd turned to Jun Davd.
“They can’t catch up to us,” he said.
A general sigh of relief went through the observatory, though anxiety still showed on many faces.
Jun Davd said, “No, an eye—even a wondrous thing like a dragonfly eye—isn’t a computer. Orbital interceptions can be misleading. But they had to try. It seems to be an imperative with them. Spread their wings, figuratively speaking—the wings they haven’t got—and set out for new worlds. Nature can be profligate. It doesn’t matter if most don’t survive.”
Something like pity appeared on Mim’s face. “Can they be rescued, Jun Davd?”
“I doubt that the lunar dragonflies would care to make the effort,” Jun Davd said. “Their territory’s overcrowded as it is. In any case, the question is immaterial.”
It took another hour to demonstrate that. Jun Davd slid back the cover of the observation well in the floor. It gave a good view backward along their line of flight, between the twin puffs of foliage and foliated root. The people in the observatory crowded around the safety rail and stared downward.
Jun Davd fiddled with dials, and the tough, transparent membrane became a magnifying lens. The expanse of tree crown fled past in a blur as the focus came to rest somewhere beyond. Filters masked the glare of the caged sun, spitted on the slender shaft of the probe; the darkened circle of eclipse also made bearable the beam of virtual photons, briefly swollen with abnormal energy by a factor of ten billion before it satisfied quantum theory by decaying into pions.
The swarm of dragonfly vehicles peppered the view. They were harshly lit on the side facing the hadronic beam, and their shape could be clearly seen as squat bells, with the spent cone of the descent engine for a clapper.
“No way they can stop,” Jun Davd said. “Nor can we.”
The beam was very tight, but there was a certain amount of scattering. To the watching humans, it seemed that each bell instantly evaporated while still some distance away. One by one, they flicked out of existence, soaked up by the terrible light.
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