The blank part of the holo was suddenly filled with the Milky Way, making the disembodied head appear to be cloaked in the magnificence of stars. Jao had improved on the crude animated holo of finger-painted orange lines that he had first sketched so many years ago to illustrate his theory. Now a realistic image was there, drawn from the observatory’s photographic files and turned on its side to show an edge-on representation of the galaxy, with the central bulge glowing yellow.
The lines of force were still orange, though now they were an elegant computer sketch that made them flow in magnetic loops. The Milky Way tilted slightly, and now one could see the loops spinning faster around their common axis and flattening out to lie more within the galactic plane. Not all the lines of force were trapped, however. A small arclike spray still rose at the pole.
“The magnetic field was much more powerful than it ought to have been,” Jao said, “and it was growing. There was twice as much mass rotating around the galactic center as there should have been—the equivalent of two hundred million solar masses. It should have been gobbled up by the black hole, swept out by core explosions during the quasar epoch of the universe. But some process is replenishing it—maybe from a universe on the other side of the plenum.”
The Milky Way spun all the way up like a coin and presented its face. Now it could be seen as a great swirl of stars with an incandescent center. Jao’s holographic head presided over it like some raffish deity.
He had their attention now. The crowd had stopped fidgeting, and the background buzz of conversation had died down.
“We set up a long-term computer model at that time and started feeding data into it. The program was authorized to change its suppositions if data didn’t fit. We left the model running and plunged into the galactic core. All the senses of the tree were plugged into it. It saw, it listened, it sensed radiation and magnetism and gravitation, and it drew maps covering whole slices of the galaxy as we passed through.”
Shaded areas appeared briefly in the hologram to show the path swept by Yggdrasil’s spiraling orbit.
“Since our brush with the black hole, the computer has been processing sixty thousand years’ worth of real-time observational data. It’s a large enough sample of the history of the galaxy to show us how the charged arms grow. And to project into the past and future with the help of data from other sources. I’ve been awake for the last twenty hours polishing the results. And there’s no possible doubt…”
Now Jao’s theoretical plan of eight revolving spokes could be seen, superimposed in coruscating orange on a galaxy that was rotating at half their speed. They swept the spiral arms of stars like great flexible pinions, their ends trailing. They were growing outward all the time, becoming more vivid as they gained in power. It was very graphic.
The sun appeared as a yellow dot in the spiral arms of the galaxy, between spokes. And now one of the orange spokes brushed it.
“That happened three hundred million years ago,” Jao said. “Half of all animal families on earth were wiped out. In the oceans, ninety percent of species disappeared.”
Pictures floated in the holo, superimposed on the spinning wheel. They showed queer, scaly, flipper-limbed creatures with flat heads and big jaws, armored swimmers, many-legged bottom crawlers. They had come, Bram supposed, from Ame’s files.
Another orange pinion swept past Sol, then another, and another. Some of them were thick and bright, some were feeble. Some of them had not yet grown long enough to reach the yellow dot. Images of strange life forms flashed, disappeared.
“Those were the dinosaurs,” Jao went on. “They were big—bigger than our paleobiologists could believe at first, but we found bones in the diskworld museums. We’ll remake those animals some day for our game preserves.”
People gasped at the images: enormous armored quadrupeds with horned heads, finned backs, and spiked tails; great, plodding, thick-legged creatures with long necks, tiny heads, and massive tails; a fearsome monster with stalactite teeth and tiny front limbs rearing high and trying to smash through the eighty-foot steel fence that held it so as to get at a human zookeeper who was only as tall as its knee.
“Gone,” Jao said. “That was a major extinction. No land animal weighing more than twenty pounds survived. The little furry creatures who were humankind’s ancestors were among them.”
The great spoked mill continued to revolve. It had begun to subdivide again so that tenuous threads were trapped between some of the major arms, beginning their own growth.
“The extinctions come regularly now—about every twenty-six million years,” Jao’s floating head said somberly. “Some large, some small. And now we have some minor extinctions caused by these trailing arms, at intervals of from twelve to fifteen million years. The new arms haven’t quite settled into place yet.”
A thin orange wire passed across Sol like a wand.
“Twelve million years before the heyday of Original Man,” Jao said. “Followed by the return of that first, powerful arm that wiped out half of all animal families on earth. Only this time, Original Man was the dominant species.”
The audience sat stunned. In the silence, someone shouted, “I don’t believe it. A technical civilization could have found some way to protect itself!”
Jao waited it out. “The rats survived in their burrows,” he finally said. “They were small, prolific. They took mankind’s place. And twenty-six million years later, it was their turn.”
A thick orange arm, grown in intensity since its last circuit, came around and swatted the sun.
“There was no place for them to run, even if they’d known what was coming,” Jao said. “The arms sweep the edge of the galaxy, now. They’re thousands of light-years thick. An individual ship, shielded against radiation and traveling very close to the speed of light, might have been able to choose an orbit that would keep it between the advancing arm and the retreating arm till it got out of the galaxy entirely. But the rat-people weren’t that advanced technologically.”
The man who had previously interrupted Jao stood up and tried to speak again. Smeth nodded, and a monitor got to him with a portable pickup. His image sprang up on the bolo stage in a double exposure that made the galaxy shine through him.
“But Original Man must have been advanced enough,” he said. “Couldn’t he have moved his whole population out and fled to another galaxy, leaving his beacon behind? Maybe that’s the reason why the Message stopped—not man’s extinction.” His eyes, magnified against the swirling stars, pleaded at them.
“I don’t know,” Jao said. “With a population in the billions—maybe tens of billions … And anyway, he might not have known what was coming. We know, because we came to Sol straight out of the galactic core. Even if they had a ramjet like ours and sent a scout to the center of the galaxy, the round trip would have been better than sixty thousand years in objective time, and by that time it might have been too late—just as it was for the Nar.”
Jun Davd stepped quickly into the bolo frame and said, “Perhaps it is possible. The universe hasn’t heard from Original Man since the Message was cut off, but perhaps that’s because he hasn’t reached refuge yet. He might have targeted a galaxy more than seventy-four million light-years away—in the Virgo cluster, for instance.”
The man thanked him with grateful eyes and sat down.
Jun Davd said, with mild rebuke, “You’d better get on with it, Jao. “These people can’t stand much more suspense.”
Jao’s holographic lips widened in a grin that was bigger than the entire central bulge of the galaxy.
“It’s been twenty-six million years since the rat-people became extinct.”
It took a moment for the impact of that to sink in, and then the entire hall erupted into a vast rumbling chaos. People leaped to their feet, shouting unintelligible questions at the rostrum.
Jao held up a hand that appeared in giant size beside the holo of his face and got partial silence.
“I wanted to be sure o
f my data before I came to this meeting. With twenty-six million years to play with, a five percent margin of leeway could have the dragonflies spilling out of this galaxy and halfway to Andromeda before the charged arm took its swipe. But that’s not the case.”
He grinned more broadly. “The leading edge of the next spoke is already brushing the dragonfly sector of space. We’re getting radio noise from it now. It will meet the expanding dragonfly shell in less than ten thousand years. At this radius of the galaxy, it’s only about eleven thousand light-years between charged arms. The dragonflies will have expanded to their limit by then, trapped between two arms.”
The holo display showed the event graphically. A sphere of twinkling dots was growing outward from Sol, toward the orange barriers that fenced it in on either side. The arm swept inexorably onward, slicing the ball of lights thinner and thinner until nothing was left.
“Scrubbed clean,” Jao said. “The universe is safe from dragonflies.”
The assembly went wild. Jao could not have made himself heard even if he had wanted to go on. People were weeping, laughing, embracing—showing every form of emotion. Jao stood watching for long minutes, hands on hips, then left the platform. Jun Davd took his place and waited.
People crowded around Jao as he walked down the aisle, clapping him on the back, grabbing his arm, jabbering at him. He nodded pleasantly at everyone, mouthed words against the din.
He stopped at Bram’s row and crowded in to loom over everybody. “This arm that’s coming,” he said. “It’s grown since the last time around. It’s going to make the Cretaceous extinction look like—what does Marg call them?—a tea party.”
“No chance of the dragonflies surviving as a species?” Bram asked.
Jao shook his head. “Not a chance in a googol. If it doesn’t get the dragonflies, it’ll get what they eat. Evolution will have to start at the bottom again. There’ll be breathing space of twenty-six million years. Time enough for another species to find its destiny.”
Ame was there, leaning over the back of Mim’s chair. She gave Mim a great-great-great-granddaughterly peck. “Maybe that species will be the Cuddlies,” she said. “They’re well established on the diskworlds, and they’ll have a better chance than most of surviving in their shielded burrows. They can wait out the radiation for a few millennia. They’re bright little creatures, well on their way to intelligence, and their weight lies below the twenty-pound danger zone.”
“Oh, Ame,” Mim said. “I hope you’re right.”
On the stage, Jun Davd had succeeded in getting a measure of attention. “It appears that spiral galaxies are not very healthy places to live,” he said. “They tend to have hypermasses ticking away at their centers. Binary black holes splashing into one another and causing core explosions. Leftover black holes from the quasar epoch powering galactic dynamos. Perhaps it might he better to find a smaller, more congenial neighborhood.”
He must have come to the meeting prepared for this, because Jao’s holo of the Milky Way suddenly started to recede into the distance. As it dwindled, the field enlarged to show the fuzzy patches of globular clusters and some small, irregular satellite galaxies. The holo zeroed in on a pair of them.
“The Clouds of Magellan are not too far from home, I think,” Jun Davd said. “The Large Magellanic Cloud is only one hundred fifty light-years away. The Milky Way would fill the sky…”
Loki and Methuselah came scampering over when Bram and Mim entered their quarters. It was past suppertime, and the two Cuddlies had firm ideas about when it was time to be fed.
Loki tried to lead Bram toward the cupboard, but Methuselah pawed at Mim’s legs until she bent over and picked him up. Holding him in her arms, she frowned and said to Bram, “He’s been acting a little funny the last few days. Do you think he’s all right?”
“What do you mean, funny?”
“His appetite’s been off. And I think his nose feels too warm.”
Bram inspected the little beast. Methuselah’s big brown eyes seemed as button-bright as usual. Were they a bit too bright? Bram ruffled the soft fur—brown, salted with gray. Methuselah’s face seemed somehow different.
“Mim,” Bram said. “Do you think his muzzle’s getting darker?”
“Let me see.” She pursed her lips. “Yes, there’s less gray in it. It was almost pure white before. Some of the brown’s coming back. What could make it do that?”
“I don’t know. Original Man had animal doctors…”
“Well, we don’t.” She gave the little creature a hug. “We’re taking him to Doc Pol.”
“Fourth Cuddly I’ve seen this Tenday,” Doc Pol said. “Marg and Orris were in with that spoiled pet of theirs just before you got here. Pesky critter nips a little too hard! Marg was carrying on. Thought her precious Mittens was at death’s door.”
“What was wrong with it?” Mim asked in alarm.
He looked up in annoyance. His irascibility was at odds with his boyish face and slender form. “Wrong with it? Nothing was wrong with it! It was pregnant, that’s all!”
“Oh.”
“Don’t know what the fool woman expected, letting her pet run free like that. All the half-tame Cuddlies living in the branches. She said she thought her precious was too old—past the age of fertility.”
“But that’s right!” Mim said. “She wanted to mate her Mittens with our Loki … oh, about six ship-years ago, and Mittens was past the breeding age even then.”
“That so?” Doc Pol said. He raised a faunlike eyebrow. “Well, let’s have a look at your little feller.”
For the next ten minutes, Doc Pol poked, prodded, tapped the tiny chest, shone lights into eyes and ears, managed to insert a thermometer abaft the twitching tail, and peered down the pink throat while Methuselah tried earnestly to bite him.
At last he released the Cuddly, who immediately settled in Mim’s arms, clinging with all his might.
“Well?” Bram said.
“He’s picked up a virus,” Doc Pol said.
“Virus? How? What kind of virus? What could he have possibly caught?”
Doc Pol fiddled with his instruments and took his time about replying.
“Immortality,” he said. “There’s a lot of it going around.”
Ame set it up. “Molecular taxonomy,” she said. “The whole department’s pitching in. We’ve got a team working on amino acid sequencing, another working on protein sequencing, and Doc Pol and his apprentices are helping us to measure the antigenic distances between humans, Cuddlies, and a number of primates whose serum albumin we’ve been able to clone from our diskworld biological samples. And, of course, we’re doing extensive comparative anatomy studies.”
“All of a sudden we’re getting a rash of similar cases reported by Cuddly owners,” Bram said. “Some of the children may have spread it after getting their booster shots. Or it may have been going on a long time. People today aren’t really very familiar with the concept of aging. Oh, they understand it intellectually. But it wouldn’t occur to a lot of them to wonder why their pets aren’t getting old.”
Ame bit her lip. “We really should have gotten around to a study of the Cuddlies sooner. But there was just so much for us to wade through in all those records and the frozen molecular zoo we took away with us from the diskworld…”
“How soon?” Bram asked.
“I’ll have an answer for you in a few days.”
“The Cuddlies are Homo post-sapiens,” Ame announced.
A wave of shock went through the chamber. A reporter for the datanet said, “You mean these little animals are Original Man?”
“We believe they’re a divergent species growing out of the extinct Homo sapiens branch, yes,” Ame said.
An uproar started in the chamber. Ame looked helplessly around at her colleagues for support. She hadn’t expected a mob this size when she had told datanet that she had a modest announcement to make. The announcement had had to be moved from the department’s conference room to a s
mall adjacent auditorium.
“What does that mean?” somebody demanded.
Ame faced them squarely. “It means that during the time of extinction, whatever Homo sapiens stock briefly survived on earth underwent adaptive radiation. Man himself would not have survived long, but a number of subbranches might have evolved to fit different ecological niches. The Earth would have become a very different place. Size and brainpower might not have been survival characteristics. Size certainly wasn’t. There might have been back-mutations for such characteristics as tails and fur, night vision. The ancestors of the Cuddlies were among those divergent species. They were small, quick, burrowing omnivores. We know the rat-people considered them pests and tried to exterminate them. But they spread to the diskworlds as stowaways on spaceships, got into the granaries, learned to survive in pockets of trapped air. And they had millions of years after that to evolve into their present form—able to live in vacuum, to do without breathing for long periods of time, like Earth’s extinct sea mammals.” She shook her head ruefully. “It was obvious that the Cuddlies were terrestroid mammals, but we failed to take the step further that would have identified them as primates.”
The datanet reporter waved for attention. “Couldn’t the Cuddlies be descended from some other primate? Weren’t there things like monkeys and apes? Lemurs?”
Ame shook her head. “We know the Cuddlies are hominids from the comparative anatomy studies—the teeth, for instance. But more important is the amino acid and protein sequencing. Molecular analysis shows that Cuddlies are as far removed from apes and monkeys as humans are. The cytochrome c sequence in man and Cuddly is almost identical.” She paused, got some encouragement from Doc Pol, who was sitting behind her, and continued. “And there is no immunological distance at all.”
“Is that why Cuddlies were able to catch the immortality virus?” asked someone else, probably a Cuddly owner.
“Yes,” Ame said. “They’re our very close cousins. They’re what we could become.”
At the back of the auditorium, Jun Davd turned to Bram with an amused smile. “How does it feel, Bram? You brought us across thirty-seven million light-years, hoping to find Original Man, and when we found him, we made him our house pet.”
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