Second Genesis

CHAPTER 10

“He went back for the Rembrandts,” a terrified assistant babbled. “He said he couldn’t bear to leave them behind.”

Bram shook the man into coherence. “How long ago?”

“About two hours ago. He took a walker.”

Bram released him. “The fool,” he said. “The idiotic fool.” He pushed his way across the crowded shuttle deck to the raised platform of the control section, where Jao stood conferring in low tones with the pilot.

The pilot turned a worried face toward him. She was a big-boned woman with brown curly hair, a member of Lydis’s comet-chasing squadron and, therefore, a crack flyer. “We’re ready to go,” she said. “We ought to lift off within the half hour or…”

She trailed off and glanced meaningfully out the arbitrary forward port across the pale ribbon of landscape.

“Is everyone else accounted for?” Bram asked Jao.

“Yar. The curator was accounted for, too, on our preliminary name check. He must have slipped away right afterward.”

“He ought to have been back by now. Unless something happened to him.”

Jao, without apology, reached past the pilot and punched a telescopic view of the plain into one of the screens. He adjusted the angle of incidence until he got what he was looking for, then refined the focus. Bram saw a thin haze of dust, its forward edge advancing, its rearward margin slowly settling.

“Less than fifty miles away,” he said. “They could be here in an hour.”

Bram checked the latches of his helmet before putting it on. “I’d better go look for him.”

“Are you crazy?” Jao exploded. “There isn’t time. If he doesn’t get back in time for lift-off, we’ll have to leave without him.”

Bram turned to the pilot. “Don’t wait for me,” he said. “I’ll keep in radio contact, but if I go off the air or if I’m late, lift off without me. Is that understood?”

“I’ll wait till the last possible moment, Year-Captain,” the pilot said.

“Don’t cut it too fine,” Bram said. He lifted the helmet to his shoulders.

Jao retrieved his own helmet. “I’m going with you. No argument.”

They squeezed into the air lock together. “Leave the outside door open.” The pilot’s voice rang in his radio. Jao nodded and deployed a rope ladder, but they didn’t waste time using the ladder to climb down; they let themselves drop, with a little shove to speed them on their way.

“This way,” Jao said.

He led the way across the field to where a helter-skelter collection of walkers and wheeled machinery had been abandoned. Boxes, bundles, and personal possessions were strewn at random where they had been dropped. Some of the walkers stirred nervously, giving the illusion of life. They had no consciousness, of course—they were just protein machines—but still Bram hated the thought of leaving them here on a dragonfly world. Though, he reflected, if a dragonfly tried to eat one, the walker would poison it.

“This one,” Jao said. “It’s Old Speedy, the one that won all the races last summer.” He checked the reselin tendons to make sure they were hard and taut, eyed the diameter of the central ball of muscle to see that it still retained sufficient running time, and climbed inside. Bram followed him through the flap, and Jao put the biomachine in motion with a slap of the reins.

The walker ran flat out toward the digs, Jao urging it on at a gallop. Bram twisted around for a look at the launching pad. The first shuttle was mounting the sky on a tail of fire. There were six more to go, with the approximately one hundred eighty remaining evacuees crowded into them. The life-support facilities would be strained, but they’d survive until they reached Yggdrasil.

A half hour later, the moon ladder came into view, with the stalled car dangling from it. The low, regular rubble mounds of the outskirts of the city lay only a few miles ahead of them.

“We’re running late,” Bram said. “Do you see any sign of him?”

“No.”

Behind them, another shuttle rose into the sky. It was the fourth. There were only three left to go.

“There’s his walker,” Jao said, slowing down.

The derelict walker stood spraddle-legged in a patch of loose gravel, its blunt prow facing the digs, not the landing field. There was no sign of the curator in the vicinity. Bram got out and examined the interior of the driver’s bubble.

“Ran out of power,” he announced to Jao. “He must have taken a walker that was already run down. I saw a few footprints. I guess he decided to walk the rest of the way in.”

“What was it that he was after, anyway?” Jao said.

“A collection of Rembrandt engravings.”

“You’d think they were germ plasm samples. Couldn’t he have holoed them or something?”

“He said they were originals from Earth.”

Jao looked nervously behind him. “There goes another shuttle.”

Their pilot heard him. “I think you’d better start back now,” she said. “Your time’s running out.”

“How close are they?”

“About thirty miles. They can probably see our shuttles by now. But they’re still sticking pretty closely to the inner rim route that their scouts took. So far they’ve shown no sign of veering inland for a look at us.”

“That’s because as far as they know, all of the goodies are still waiting for them at the digs,” Jao said gruffly. He turned to Bram. “Where would your Rembrandt lover have been headed?”

“Back to the sports arena, I suppose. That’s where he left the things he wasn’t able to carry.”

“Serve him right if he got left behind himself,” Jao growled, He made no move to start up the walker again.

“Bee butchers,” Bram said softly. “That was one of the names for dragonflies. Bees were another kind of insect. They lived in communal hives. Original Man raised them for a substance called honey that they produced. Some dragonflies learned to hang around bee yards and wait for the workers to return with their loads. They’d dismember the bees on the wing, Harld told me, until the ground was littered with bee fragments.”

“Like the way they massacred us in the arena,” Jao said harshly.

“Yes.”

Jao reached to the tiller. “You’re right, of course, chaos take it. We can’t leave the little fellow there.”

The walker unlimbered its long legs and in a moment was flying at top speed toward the oval of reflected moonlight that marked the central city.

They came upon the curator a couple of miles farther on. He staggered toward them out of the rubble, carrying a huge portfolio that he seemed unable to lift high enough to keep from dragging, even in the microgravity. Jao came jolting to a halt, and he and Bram climbed down. The curator stared dully at them through his helmet, his face gray. They hustled him into the walker and cracked his helmet, while Bram checked his tanks.

“His air’s, almost gone,” Bram said. “He never would have made it back on foot.”

Jao tossed the portfolio into the back of the inflated compartment. “I hope these were worth it,” he snarled at the curator. “You risked a shuttleful of lives for them.”

Through blue lips, the curator said defiantly, “They’re irreplaceable.”

“So are we,” Jao snapped.

The walker’s long strides ate up the miles. Through the radio, the pilot’s strained voice kept them informed. “Year-Captain, the main body of the dragonfly force just passed our position. But several vehicles have separated from it and are crossing the plain toward us. The other remaining shuttle is going to take off now.”

Ahead, flame boiled from the landscape and climbed the black sky. Bram looked across at the rim road and saw a line of tiny specks heading toward the city.

“I can see the vehicles,” Bram said. “We should reach your position in about ten minutes.”

“I’m warming the engines. Please hurry.”

“Oh, oh,” Jao said. “Take a look at that.”

The walker’s movement had attracted attention. On the rim road, four of the specks left the dragonfly cavalcade and headed inland.

“Trying to cut us off,” Jao said. “But a walker can outrun one of those rolling travel tubes without half trying.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Bram said. The tilted cylinders were picking up speed, streaking across the surface like gigantic writing pens guided by an invisible hand. Now their speed was too much for the low gravity. They began to jounce into the air, higher and higher, between the brief scrabbling of the wheels at the ground. One of them bounced a good thirty feet and came down upright, still moving. The passengers within must be shifting their weight around to keep it stable. Wingless the nymphs might be, but they still had the instincts of fliers.

Bram could see the shuttle now, a minuscule dome on stilts. A haze of escaping gas covered its skirts. Beyond, a wave of the angled tube vehicles rolled toward it.

“It’s going to be close,” Jao said.

“Too close,” Bram said. “We’re drawing them toward you,” he told the pilot. “It’s no good. You’d better lift off now!”

“No,” the pilot said. “I can see you now. The outside air lock door is open, and everybody’s in a suit and helmet just in case. I’ll hold for you until the last minute. Jump for the door, hold on to the ladder or a strut—anything—if you have to. I’ll use the docking jets to get us space-borne, so you don’t have to worry about being cooked.”

In the rear of the walker, the curator hugged his portfolio to himself and moaned. Bram wondered about jumping for the air lock one-handed. Perhaps he could throw the curator at the door. No, Jao could jump first, catch the curator and fling him inside, then catch the portfolio.

It would be a shame to leave the etchings behind after they had risked their lives for them.

“We’re not going to make it,” Jao said.

Bram gave up the idea. The tube vehicles were fanning out to engulf the base of the lander—fanning out to engulf the walker when it arrived.

“Do as I say,” Bram ordered. “You’ve got thirty people there to think of.”

The pilot’s voice was filled with anguish. “We’ll wait. We’ve talked it over together.”

Bram’s eyes stung. Beside him on the narrow bench, Jao cursed and brought the walker to a rearing halt.

Off to the side, the four dragonfly vehicles that had moved to cut the walker off instantly made a slight course correction to adapt to the new vector.

“Listen,” Jao said roughly, “there’s still a pallet out there ready to go. I strapped the rockets to it myself. We’re going for it. So forget about waiting for us.”

In the rear, the curator sat goggle-eyed. He clutched the portfolio with a death grip.

“When you get back to the tree,” Bram told the pilot, “tell Jun Davd to watch for us. If we miss, Lydis can try for a catch.”

“Yar,” Jao said. “It’s line of sight all the way. It’s not as if I have to compute it to the last decimal place.”

With a sob, the pilot said, “Good-bye, Year-Captain,” and cut off.

Jao started the walker up again. Bram peered through the transparent bubble at the lander. At its base, tube vehicles were jolting to a stop. Nymphs popped out of the ends of tubes and swarmed around it. Bram could see the sticklike figures clinging to the landing legs. Two of them were at the air lock door. One of them disappeared inside. It must have blown the inner door and been caught by the gust, because seconds later it came tumbling out. The big, box-shaped helmet made it top-heavy; by the time it hit the ground, it was falling head first. The transparent cage shattered.

“Glass,” Bram said. “Their helmets are made of glass.”

“So?” Jao, wrestling with the walker’s controls. “They must have a very strange industrial base.”

A brilliant puff of flame bloomed underneath the shuttle. She was using the main propulsion unit, after all—using it as a weapon. The flame spilled over the nearer dragonfly machines, swallowed the square-helmeted figures clamoring around the landing legs. Slowly the shuttle lifted, shedding dragonfly forms that twisted in the air and fell helmet-down. A few of them still clung to the air lock ladder and upper structures, to be carried like an infection to the tree. The humans would have to keep them outside somehow. Surely they couldn’t carry enough air in their suits to last the whole trip.

That raised another specter. “Jao, are there any spare air bottles loaded on the pallet?”

“No. It wasn’t intended to be manned. We’ll have to take the walker with us for our life support.”

Their four pursuers were closing in fast, along a broad front. Jao wrenched at the controls and spun the walker around. What made it scary was the fact that he was heading toward them at a slant, trying to beat them to the pallet. The other dragonfly vehicles—those which hadn’t been seared by the lander’s flame—abandoned the site where they had been deprived of their prey and decided to come after the walker.

“They’re coming at us from all sides,” Bram grimaced.

“Just hold on,” Jao said. He pulled up at the pallet and scrambled out of the walker. “Help me unload some of this junk!” Bram tumbled out after him, leaving the helmetless curator huddled within, clutching his precious portfolio.

The pallet was dangerously unbalanced. The last-minute effort to load it had been abandoned halfway through. Piles of crates surrounded it, and more crates and sacks were heaped indiscriminately on its edges, waiting to have their weight distributed evenly and to be tied down.

Bram started heaving cargo overboard. He did not care to imagine what priceless human artifacts were being jettisoned. Jao worked beside him with frantic haste.

“That’s good enough,” Jao panted. “Just pray that it doesn’t tip over when we get off the ground.”

Together they lashed a cargo net over the remaining load. The top surface was fairly level; Bram could only hope that the different weights averaged out, too.

He stayed outside while Jao squeezed back into the walker and jumped it to the top of the load. Bram tied down the walker’s legs while Jao crawled over obstacles to find the detonator.

Then a dragonfly vehicle skittered up, hitting the edge of the wooden platform with a jolt. The impact swerved it around. Bram looked up and saw the overhanging end of the tubular chassis above him. A hatch popped open, and box-helmeted forms came pouring out. The first of them floated downward—not so high as to make it fall on its head, but just high enough to give it a lazy half turn in midair and enable it to land on all fours.

More of the vehicles were crowding around, more hatches popping open, and then Jao set off the rockets.

He must have given it almost everything he had, because the platform lifted with an abrupt acceleration that batted the overhanging dragonfly transport aside and slammed Bram down.

The edge of the platform caught the helmet of one of the descending nymphs and shattered it. The mass of green jelly inside exploded sickeningly. Another nymph flailed for a clawhold, missed, and fell away under the rocket exhaust.

But two of the nymphs were on the platform, scuttling toward him. Bram had just time enough to note that one of the nymphs was carrying a flanged, open-sided box as big as its helmet, and then they were on him.

A pronged sleeve lashed out at him. He ducked and took it on his helmet. If it had ripped open his suit, he would have been done for.

The flexible abdomen, tipped with claspers, whipped around at him. He caught the pincers and then, with his toes hooked into the cargo net, swung the insect like a sling while the upper body twisted around trying to get at him. The glass helmet smashed against the corner of a crate, and the claspers relaxed just on the point of crushing his gloved hand between them.

But then the other nymph had him by two legs and its claspers and was trying to stuff him into the box. He struggled, but it was lifting him from behind, and he couldn’t reach it.

Then he was in the box, staring through its open end into the cleft face of a tomato-eyed monster that was lifting him upward with blurring speed.

He tried to get his legs under him, but crammed into the box as he was, he couldn’t untangle himself fast enough. The rockets had stopped firing. The pallet was coasting now, and free-fall turned him into the creature’s plaything.

It held him at arm’s length for inspection. The blank green eyes loomed through the glass, and the facial legs within the helmet stirred restlessly on their shelf. There was a latch at the bottom of the faceplate, a simple catch meant to be operated from inside, and one of the facial limbs was reaching for it…

And then all of a sudden Jao was there with a wooden stake in his hand.

Jao swung, driving the stake through the glass of the square helmet. The glass showered in fragments. The lobed face burst, and the hinged eating apparatus—unfolding limply from the smooth mask—lolled amid the jellied ruin.

Jao helped him out of the box. “What are those flanges for? It looks like it’s made to fit on to something … it’s built sort of like a little air lock, isn’t it?”

Bram looked over at the shattered helmet. He could see now that the front plate was made to slide up and down on grooves. His knees were suddenly weak from delayed reaction.

“It’s an eating box,” he said.

The tethered moon was far behind them, showing itself as pear-shaped with the wide end up. Even without Jao’s crude thumb-and-nose sightings, it was obvious by now that they were way off course. The cargo platform had gone sailing hundreds of miles past the edge of the disk’s rim, and they were looking down a ninety-million-mile cliff side.

“Too wide and too high,” Jao said gloomily. “I had to fire all the rockets at once for a quick getaway. That jolt the nymphmobile gave us didn’t help any, either.”

The three of them had been cooped up together inside the walker’s inflated bubble for an hour now, breathing by courtesy of the walker’s hydrogen-oxygen submetabolism. The curator had recovered somewhat and was getting snappish.

“Does that mean it’s going to take longer?” he complained. “I’m getting hungry. And my eyes and throat are burning from the atmosphere in here.”

“Be thankful you’re breathing at all,” Jao said. “We’re all going to be a little hungry after a while, but at least we won’t die of thirst.”

“See here,” the little man said. “I insist—”

Bram interrupted. “If we keep on this way much longer, by the time we overtake Yggdrasil, we’ll be thousands of miles off the rim. They won’t know where to look for us. And our suit radios don’t have that kind of range.”

“Yah, I guess we better have a little course correction about now,” Jao said.

“With what? I thought you said you shot off all our rockets.”

“Oh, there were a couple of spares left over from when I rigged the pallet,” Jao said casually. “They were still in the corner where I stowed them, fortunately. Under a tarpaulin. The stevedores must’ve thought they were part of the cargo. I lugged them over here while that walking appetite was trying to package you for its dinner.”

He gestured negligently at the thousand square feet of lumpy cargo net on which the walker rested. Bram saw the two solid-propellant canisters lying several feet away.

“What good will those do?” he asked. “Two little booster rockets aren’t enough to nudge a mass like this after the kick it got.”

“Oh, we don’t have to push the whole mass,” Jao said.

“Even if we dumped everything—at least as much as we could manage in the next hour, working at top speed—the platform itself has too much mass. We’d never be able to kill enough momentum to come out with the right vector.” He gestured at the receding rimscape and shrugged. “And after another hour of this…”

“We’ll ride the walker in!” Jao said impatiently. “Use it as our lifeboat. It weighs practically nothing, and there’s just the combined mass of the three of us. There’s enough thrust in just one of those boosters to change our vector while conserving the useful momentum toward Yggdrasil!”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s all in the angles. I’ll retrofire the second rocket to slow us down at the other end enough to compensate for the extra momentum. Or most of it, anyway. We’ll hang in Yggdrasil’s space for hours—more than enough to zero in on our suit radios. And if we’re still out of range, I can rig up a hydrogen flare or something.”

They set to work with a will. There was more than enough cordage to lash the two canisters in position on the walker’s spindly frame. “Best to secure the retro-rocket now, while we have some footing underneath us,” Jao said. “I can align it precisely with the median axis. When it’s time to fire, we’ll aim the whole walker by squirting oxygen or something.”

“You going to clear the pallet the same way?”

“No … too many variables. I’m using the pallet as our launch platform. I know how it’s tumbling.”

Jao had done wonders with a few simple tools—the timer of his neck computer, a couple of wooden stakes marked off with measuring lines, a loop sight made of bent wire. “We can’t miss,” he said. “It’s a three-hundred-mile-wide target.”

Overcoming their distaste, they scavenged the dragonfly air tanks, then discovered that they were unusable. The air was thick with contaminants. One whiff set the curator coughing and wheezing.

“What’s the air of their world like if they can breathe that?” Bram wondered aloud.

“Never mind,” Jao said. “Take ’em along. We’ll use ’em for attitude jets.”

They were about to leave when they saw movement amid the jumbled cargo. “We’ve got a stowaway,” Jao said.

Bram tensed, but it was only a Cuddly. They coaxed the little fellow closer, then grabbed him. His fur was beginning to lose the trapped air that made it fluffy.

“We’d better take him with us,” Bram said. “He can’t last much longer here.”

The small creature went willingly with them into the walker’s inflated bubble, eagerly sniffing the air. He immediately made a nuisance of himself by attempting to curl up in the lap of the one person there who didn’t care for animals—the curator.

“Get him off me,” the curator yelled. “I don’t want him messing up these etchings.”

“Oh, for Fatherbeing’s sake, he’s not going to hurt anything,” Jao said. “You’ve got them in nitrogen envelopes, anyway.”

Bram lifted the little beast away. “He’s an old one,” he said. “Look at that grizzled fur.”

“Yar, he’s lived a long time, all right. His string almost ran out here, though. He would have gone spinning through vacuum for eternity. Lucky we saw him in time.”

“Smart of him to come out and show himself, you mean.”

Jao cocked his head. “Going to bring him home to Mim?”

The Cuddly settled contentedly in Bram’s lap. “I guess I’ve got myself another Cuddly,” he sighed. “I hope he gets along with Loki.”

The furry animal responded to Bram’s voice by lifting its gray muzzle and blinking at him with big trusting brown eyes.

“What are you going to name him?” Jao asked.

“Who was that character in King James who lived so long? Methuselah. I’ll call him Methuselah.”

“Hear that, Methuselah? I guess you’ve got yourself a new home.” Jao spoke absently, his eye on the changing chronograph display of his pendant computer. “Five more seconds, then we’ll be pointed just right. Hold on, here we go.”

He set off the solid fuel booster with the yank of a wire, and the walker flew like a cork into space. The square bulk of the pallet tumbled away from them and grew smaller against the disk-filled night.

“Hold tight,” the voice of Lydis crackled through the static. “I’m coming to pick you up.”

“Did everybody make it?” Bram asked.

“Yes, the last shuttle got here hours ago. Smeth’s into his countdown. We blast off within the fivehour.”

That explained why Yggdrasil had stopped spinning. The tree’s green hemispheres filled the sky ahead of them, a sandwich with the void of space for a filling. The trunk was a stubby bar in the middle, eclipsing stars, seemingly pierced by the long skewer of the probe behind it. They were still too far above the surface to make out any detail of branches or leaf-clothed roots, but scattered here and there across the greener dome were the pinpoint lights of human habitation.

Bram looked for the yellow wink of Lydis’s drive and found it to one side. There was a more ominous sight beyond it—the pearly motes of dragonfly bubbles floating among the stars.

“How far from Yggdrasil do you make them?” Bram asked.

“We’ll beat them,” she said shortly, and switched off.

The burn was a long one, lasting almost an hour. Bram watched the flame until it winked out. Ten minutes later it flared up again, many times brighter now that it was facing them.

“That daughter of yours doesn’t fool around,” Jao said admiringly. “Burn till turnover, and no corrections.” He glanced at the chronograph window of his display. “She’ll be here in less than nine decaminutes.”

Actually it took a full hour; Jao had forgotten to allow for the fact that Lydis would have to shut off her engine a little early to avoid cooking them and coast the last few miles. Even so, she was still killing momentum with her hydrazine maneuvering jets when she arrived.

They watched through the clear bubble as the rhombohedral bulk bore down on them. Lydis was flying a heavy-duty space tug—a comet chaser—instead of one of the lightweight interbranch shuttles.

“Come on, let’s go,” Jao said.

He picked up one of the scavenged dragonfly air tanks—a ribbed ovoid with a stopcock in the form of two levers meant to be squeezed together—and slipped one arm through its webbing. Bram screwed the curator’s helmet back on while the man fussed at him. After a moment’s thought, he replaced the curator’s depleted air bottle with his own half-full one; actually, any of them could breathe for about nine minutes on the cubic foot or so of oxygen-rich walker air trapped in their suits, but the curator wouldn’t know that, and Bram didn’t want the little man getting panicky and thrashing around.

Together, he and Jao grabbed the curator by the arms and hauled him bodily through the air flap. The Cuddly came tumbling out on the blast of released air and, making an agile recovery, landed on Bram’s shoulder.

The tug hovered a few hundred feet away, its nets spread like wings. Bram could see the mists of the hydrazine jets as Lydis nudged the behemoth toward them.

While the curator squirmed in their grasp, Jao aimed the nozzle of the dragonfly tank at a spot ahead of the tug and squirted polluted air into space. Lydis saw what he was doing and compensated her vector for lateral motion.

They sailed across the gap, with Methuselah riding happily on Bram’s shoulder, and slammed into a net with rather more force than was elegant. The curator’s mouth popped open as the breath was driven out of him. Methuselah went head over heels, caught a strand in his tiny paws, and scrambled back to Bram’s shoulder.

They hauled themselves and the curator’s wriggling form toward the open air lock door while Lydis positioned the tug for the return journey. She hardly looked up as they came squeezing through into the cabin.

“Strap yourselves down,” she said. “We’re going back in a hurry.”

The tug skimmed bare miles above Yggdrasil’s branches as Lydis followed the curve of the crown. Close—too close to the tree’s edges—was the vanguard of the dragonfly force. Bram saw the lead bubble, a whitish orb a half mile in diameter, floating to a landing in the treetop.

“Lydis,” came Jun Davd’s strained voice through the radio. “We’re about to start fusion. Smeth’s evacuated the probe, and all his technicians are aboard Yggdrasil. What are you doing?”

“Go ahead and start up,” she said through clenched jaws. “Don’t worry about us.”

“Get in to the trunk,” he said. “A docking crew’s waiting for you.”

“I can set down anywhere, even if we lose the tug. With no spin on the branches, I don’t need to rendezvous with the trunk. That’s the problem. Neither do those dragonfly hatcheries out there. How close is the first of them?”

Jun Davd hesitated. “We’ll be under way before it makes contact,” he admitted reluctantly, “but not by much of a fraction of a g.”

Lydis gave Bram an inquiring glance. He nodded.

“That’s not good enough,” she said. “If any of those … things … get inside Yggdrasil and start to breed…”

She shuddered, and Bram shuddered with her. The thought of a bubble alighting in the branches and disgorging thousands of voracious nymphs was too horrible to contemplate.

“Yes, the same thought had occurred to me,” Jun Davd admitted. “We have a number of armed groups waiting outside around the likeliest points of contact. But we’re no match for them.”

Bram leaned over Lydis’s shoulder and told Jun Davd about the glass helmets.

“Thank you, Bram,” Jun Davd said. “That ought to help. We can throw missiles. Humans are good at playing ball, at least. But we’re spread too thinly through the branches. We’ll be vastly outnumbered at any given attack site, until we can rush reinforcements—and that’s going to take too long under acceleration, using the internal transport system.”

“That’s why I’m doing this,” Lydis said.

“Good luck,” Jun Davd said simply.

“What’s going on?” the frightened curator asked. “Why aren’t we landing?”

Bram tried to calm him down. The little man drew himself up. “You don’t understand,” he said with mustered dignity. “I’m not concerned for myself. But nothing must be allowed to happen to these Rembrandts.”

“If the dragonflies get into the tree, they’ll use them for napkins,” Jao said. “So shut up.”

The curator assumed an aggrieved expression. “If I can help…”

“I’ll let you know,” Bram said. “In the meantime, hang on to that portfolio.”

The tug rounded the curve of the treetop with a virtuoso application of lateral jets by Lydis. Ahead, the dragonfly bubble rose into view. Its pilot was applying the brakes with a skill that matched Lydis’s. It hovered a bare quarter mile above the crown of leaves, its chemical jets scorching the branches. The other bubbles were some tens of miles away, not yet a threat.

The opalescent sphere crowded the viewport. With sickening clarity, Bram saw hundreds of space-suited nymphs crawling over its surface, ready to swarm over the branches at the instant of touchdown.

The tug hit it broadside with its cushioned nets. The work vehicle was a mere speck next to the sphere, but its powerful engines had moved comets larger than this.

Bram saw a shower of nymphs wriggling against the void, shaken loose by the impact. The pilot of the bubble frantically tried to bring his own maneuvering jets into play—either to try to burn the tug or to slip out of its clutches. He and Lydis dueled, two masters of the pilot’s art. But Lydis anticipated every parry. Slowly she drove the hovering bubble off its landing pattern, moving it farther and farther along a tangent away from Yggdrasil.

The bubble’s main thruster was pointed down toward the tree, still spouting fire and helping Lydis. There was only one way the pilot could hope to break away from the mite that was pushing so hard at his ship. He turned the braking blast on full force, driving himself away from the tree so that he could start over again—and incidentally char the tug to a cinder.

Lydis was ready for him. The instant she felt herself losing contact, she spun the tug one hundred eighty degrees on its steering jets. By the time a haft mile of globe had slipped past her, she was zooming away at full acceleration. It was the dragonfly bubble that was licked by her flame.

Bram could see the cloudy orb fighting for control. They were still alive in there, but they were in trouble. The nymph pilot was trying to spin the globe around so that he could kill his outward momentum and dive toward the tree again, but his key maneuvering jets must have been damaged because he could achieve only an erratic wobble.

Again, he did the only thing he could. He cut the main jet to stop his headlong outward flight and began, slowly and painfully, to spin the sphere around by some internal means.

“Either they’ve got a whopping big flywheel in there,” Jao said, “or there’re thousands of nymphs running around an inside track.”

The globe receded into the distance. But the rest of them were drifting toward the giant tree like a clot of foam.

But by this time, Yggdrasil itself was moving beneath them. Bram saw the bright ball of the fusion sun in its cage, shining through the polarized disk that had appeared on the viewport to eclipse it. A brilliant pathway of hadronic photons reached thousands of miles into space, like a sword with the probe as its haft.

“Now to get down there before they build up to a g,” Lydis said through clenched jaws.

Her fingers flew over the console, and the tug began its downward descent.

An incoherent choking sound came from the curator. “L-look, they’re all over us!”

Bram whipped his head around. All of the viewports were filled with dragonfly faces, boxed in glass. Armored claspers hammered at the hull.

“We’re covered with them,” Lydis said. “They must have swarmed over us when we jolted them loose.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Tens of them, maybe.”

Jao assumed a noble pose. “We can’t take them back with us. We’ll have to—

“Too late,” Bram said. “Some of them are already breaking free. They can drift down to Yggdrasil on their own.”

“There’s only one thing to do, then,” Lydis said. “Deliver them to one spot.”

She conferred by radio with Jun Davd. The outside defenders were alerted. They were all keeping their eye on the approaching tug. A flare went up to indicate where Lydis should try to land.

It was tricky. Fortunately, they were headed toward the leading edge of the tree crown, so there was no danger of sliding down the effective side of an accelerating object and falling into the photon stream. But Lydis had to contend with a rough landing field whose surface was rising toward her at an increasing but unknown rate and whose counterfeit gravity was mounting by the second.

Jao tried to help her with the variables and derivatives until she told him to shut up and let her concentrate.

Below, where the flare had been, Bram could see a ring of bobbing lights—men and women with torches. The ring expanded, dispersed, as the defenders scrambled outward, away from the touchdown point.

From all directions, other lights converged on the target ring as other defenders abandoned their positions and came to help.

Bram waited out the descent, sweating. A nymph scrabbled at the viewport opposite him and seemed to be making progress in creating a loose place for prying away the frame.

Then the nymphs were hurling themselves away from the hull, abandoning the tug before it touched down and spreading outward to get away from the rocket blast.

“Hold on!” Lydis cried.

She cut the drive twenty feet up, motionless in respect to Yggdrasil. But Yggdrasil continued to accelerate, and when it met the undercarriage of the tug, there was a respectable jolt. The tug settled into a nest of charred leaves, broke through smaller twigs, and came to rest at a crazy angle.

Bram hoped the landing had been as hard for the nymphs that had jumped ship before the impact. He saw one snatch at a twig, miss it, and smash its glass helmet against a projecting branch. But other nymphs were managing to land right side up or to grab branchlets with their four legs and abdominal claspers and swing themselves around.

“Let’s go!” Jao roared, and he headed for the air lock with a grappling hook in his hand.

“Stay inside!” Bram said sharply.

Jao turned slowly around, an incredulous expression on his face.

“We’d only get in their way,” Bram said. “We’re inside the circle with the nymphs.”

The curator sat with his teeth chattering, hugging his portfolio to his knees. It would have been an injustice to say he looked relieved.

Bram went with Lydis and Jao to look out the main port. Methuselah leaped off his shoulder and scampered ahead of him, taking a lively interest in the proceedings. “That’s right, old fellow,” Bram said, patting his head. “We’ve got lots of friends out there.”

The circle of torches converged inward, making a pool of light as big as a teamball field. Bram saw the flickering nymph figures darting back and forth amidst the shadows of leaves.

One of them made a run at the perimeter of the circle. It was met by a hail of small thrown objects. It scuttled back and forth, trying to escape, but several missiles found their target. The glass helmet flew apart in fragments. There was a brief greenish snowstorm within the square frame, and the long tubular body curled up in the agony of death.

The circle of lights moved inward. Bram could see more lights rising above the sharp curve of the branch’s horizon and approaching in ragged lines from the longitudinal directions.

Another dragonfly made a rush and was driven back by brickbats. The circle of lights contracted again.

“Throwing things,” Bram said. “That’s what Ame says our treetop ancestors were good at. It gives us a longer reach than creatures like these. They don’t understand throwing.”

“They’re learning,” Jao said. “Any minute now it’s going to occur to them to rush in a group, and then some of them will break through.”

Bram glanced at the approaching lights. Reinforcements. He wished they would hurry up.

“We’d better get out of this system fast,” Jao went on. “Because the next time we meet these things in space, they’re going to be wearing wire mesh over their helmets.”

Two dragonflies charged the line of defenders, one behind the other. The first one went down, but the second reached the perimeter. Bram saw a man go down, then there was a flurry of activity as a dozen humans swung at the insect with bats and pikes until it stopped moving.

By now the contracting circumference of men and women had closed up the gaps in the line, and more people were arriving every moment. A hard rain of missiles filled the circle. Bram heard metal ring off the hull of the tug, and something sharp and fast made a small star in the plastic of the viewport.

“What a pitch,” Jao said. “There must be a lot of team-ball players out there.”

“The gravity keeps changing,” Lydis said. “It must be hard to judge.”

“The human brain’s a marvelous computer, Lydis,” Bram said. “You ought to know that.”

The pelting shower of hard objects grew thicker as more people joined in. The nymphs, with their wraparound eyes and their superb ability to detect motion, were good at dodging. But it did them no good when they were bracketed on all sides.

The flat trajectories of the missiles became shallow arcs as gravity increased. But by the same token, the rain of brickbats from above grew harder and harder.

The pitchers were learning to act in unison—picking out one or two targets at a time and concentrating fire on them. By the time the nymphs made the concerted rush that Jao had predicted, there were too few of them left.

These, too, went down under the concentrated stoning. The fact that they were bunched together even helped the humans. Bram tuned into the common wavelength and heard a cheer go up. The defenders swarmed all over the battlefield, making a muddle of light. When Lydis opened the air lock door, quite a crowd was waiting outside.

The elongated figure in the old-fashioned accordion-jointed space suit was Jun Davd. A transparent sack that still held a few unused lumps of metal and ceramic dangled from his hand. He grinned at Bram.

“Did you get them all?” Bram said.

“Yes.”

“There were some that jumped free early. And there are clouds of nymphs out there that the bubble ship shed when we bumped it. They had a net vector toward the tree at the time. I doubt that any of them could survive impact at what the relative velocity was at the time, but…”

“We’ll search the tree. We’ll hunt them down. We won’t rest until we know for sure.”

The curator came swiftly out, clutching the big floppy portfolio he had risked his life for. He refused to let anyone take it from him. Friendly hands led him away toward the nearest entrance to the branch.

“Another iota of the human heritage.” Jun Davd sighed. “We’ve got more of it than we ever bargained for. But we’re leaving so much more behind. After coming all this way, through black holes and exploding galaxies, it doesn’t seem fair to have to run away like thieves.”

Lydis came over and joined them. She had plenty of willing helpers pitching in to secure the tug to the big branch. It would not be sacrificed, after all; somewhere between stars, before Yggdrasil spun again, it could be flown or towed under no-g conditions to an airdock in the trunk.

She pointed at the clot of bubbles that was sinking below Yggdrasil’s horizon. “We ought to be safe from them now,” she said. “There’s no way they can match velocities with us anymore.”

“Let’s be sure,” Jun Davd said.

Five minutes later he had a patch in to Smeth in probe control central, in the trunk. An assistant had hurried over with portable equipment. Bram hadn’t realized the extent of the communication coordination effort that had gone into repelling the dragonfly invaders. There was even a small videoscreen in color—though it was flat, not holo.

They sat outside on the branch to watch; there would not have been time to go inside. Smeth’s voice came in, clear as a bell, from one hundred fifty miles away.

“The bubbles are rising over the horizon now,” Smeth said. “They’re very low—not more than a hundred miles from the treetop. Can you see them?”

In the little portable screen, flecks of spume emerged from behind the curve of the aft horizon. Some remote camera on the other side of Yggdrasil was taking the pictures—probably one of Smeth’s probe monitors. Bram was horrified to see the fiery sprays of exhausts coming from the bubbles, pointing outward; the dragonflies were still trying to land on the tree.

“They don’t realize…” someone murmured. Bram recognized Ame’s voice; she must have gone to probe central to be with Smeth when he returned from the ramjet with his black gang.

“I don’t think they use instruments,” Smeth said in a strained voice. “I think they do everything by vision and instinct.”

“Are you running a parallax on them?” Jun Davd asked.

“Of course,” Smeth snapped. “I’m doing a continuous prediction.”

Bram put the question that was on everyone’s lips. “Are they going to make it?”

“I don’t think so. They think they are. But it’s going to be very close.”

The remote camera tracked the bubbles across Yggdrasil’s sky, gave it up, and another camera—evidently on the trailing branches—picked them up.

“There—they’ve seen their error,” Smeth said.

The bubbles must have rotated all at once; the exhaust plumes now faced Yggdrasil, trying to push the colony vehicles away. But they’d been picking up momentum too long; they continued to fall inward toward a tree that was slipping inexorably past them. They fell past the edge and into the blinding stream of the hadronic photon drive.

They simply vanished. The energy that had instantly vaporized them was such an infinitesimal fraction of the energy flowing around them that they didn’t even make a brief flare.

Bram heard all the sighs of relief through his suit radio. He did a little sighing himself.

A million miles out, they allowed themselves to feel safe. Yggdrasil was hitting almost its full one-gravity acceleration by then—far beyond anything dragonfly technology was able to approach. In a few Tendays, they would be out of the system.

Bram had time enough to clean up, eat something, and grab a few hours’ sleep before he and Mim had to attend the impromptu celebration that was being held in the observation lounge. Marg had decided to cater it at short notice. Word was out that it would feature wines fermented with the help of terrestrial yeasts that had been retrieved from storage on the diskworld.

When he and Mim entered the great curved gallery arm in arm, a couple of thousand people were already milling around. The atmosphere seemed a little subdued for a party. People’s eyes kept stealing to the sweeping expanse of clear plastic that showed the rearward view.

There was no sky behind them—just a solid wall against the firmament. It was blank-faced, featureless, lit only by the receding inferno of Yggdrasil’s artificial sun. Even at a million miles, the top of the wall showed almost no curvature.

Bram got drinks for himself and Mim at one of the bars, then steered her over to the big holo display at the end of the lounge. That had its share of spectators, too. Jun Davd was keeping his telescopes trained on the hairbreadth of rim where what was left of the human race had spent a year digging up its past, and was piping the images to the public displays throughout the tree. Though the images used the holo apparatus, they were flat, showing only what the telescope saw.

Somehow, that made the sight more immediate.

At extreme magnification, the tethered moon was a child’s top poised just above the knife edge of the rim. Its waistline harness and the grid of its engineering structures could be seen fuzzily.

Directly beneath the moon’s small end was the excavated city they had quit. There was no individual building large enough to be seen, except for a tiny bump that might have been the sports arena—if that wasn’t merely an irregularity in the telescope’s charge-coupled retina. But the crosshatched pattern of the streets could be made out, and the two moon plazas—one on either side of the rim—were a pair of tiny eyelets.

But what really drew the fascinated attention of the people standing around the display was the dragonfly settlement a couple of hundred miles farther along the plain.

It had grown large enough to be seen from space.

At its center, the original dragonfly bubble was a small white bead. A grayish honeycomb was spread around it, like dirty froth. The froth seemed to have crept a little farther toward the buried city than it had in other directions.

Trist drifted over with a drink in his hand. “I hate to think of that wonderful storehouse being overrun by those monsters,” he said, nodding at the telescopic image.

Bram agreed. “All the buildings and underground tunnels need only a little patching to make them habitable—they’ll just be breeding spaces for the creatures. Still, there are other human sites—on that disk and the others, and on all the tethered moons.”

“They’ll get around to them,” Trist said, taking a sip of a pink concoction. “It won’t take long for them to spread through this entire system, the way they spawn.”

Mim, lovely in a gown that left her arms and shoulders bare, shivered. “I’m just glad we’re away from there. And we’ve managed to take away so much in spite of every-thing—from the life work of thousands of tale tellers and composers to the genome of the giraffe.”

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, followed 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? What 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.

“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:

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 hills 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 and 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.

In minutes, space was swept clean of the glittering cloud.

“We’re safe,” Dal said. “Let’s get out of this cursed system.”

He spoke too soon. Yggdrasil’s straightening course was taking it past the Moon. It lay before them, huge and yellow through the grand observation blister that formed one wall, Through sulfurous wisps of clouds could be seen a landscape of round lakes, patches of sparse unhealthy vegetation, pocked scars softened by weather, oily seas dotted with ring islands that had once been craters.

And popping up through the murky atmosphere was a shower of orange sparks.

An alarm went off. Jun Davd picked up the interphone, said “I see them,” and hung up.

Bram was already busy at the computer touch board. Jun Davd leaned over his shoulder to see what he was entering, nodded approval, and started feeding in supplementary data from the tree’s sensors.

“What can they hope to accomplish?” Bram whispered when the answer appeared on the screen. “At best they’ve matched roughly for our present velocity. Those vehicles could be waiting for us in our projected flight path if we stopped accelerating in the next decihour. But we’re still boosting. They’ll only end up behind us, like the others, and get themselves vaporized in our drive exhaust.”

“Then they must expect us to stop accelerating,” Jun Davd said.

“Missiles,” exclaimed Alis Tonia Atli, then had to explain the specialized meaning of the word from her knowledge of twentieth-century earth history.

“No,” Jun Davd said. “We’d have seen them by now. At any rate, they wouldn’t do much better at catching us than those piloted craft. It has to be something faster.”

“A fusion exhaust,” said Dal. “Remember how reckless they were with it around the diskworld? They might not quail at using it this close to home. And they might not realize Yggdrasil’s combustible. If all they want to do is kill the probe and stop us, they. wouldn’t mind turning us into a ball of slag. We’d be another moon to settle on—bigger than most of those they use.”

“There’s nothing the size of their interstellar ship in orbit,” Jun Davd said. “I’m sure they launch them as soon as they make them. The largest objects I see in orbit are those bulky cylindrical structures attached to mirrors—” He stopped.

“Light,” Bram said. “Light would be fast enough.”

Jun Davd looked shaken. “I thought they had something to do with solar power. I can see that even now we don’t fully understand these creatures. They’ve mounted laser defenses against unwanted colonization by their brethren on Earth.”

Even as he spoke, the laser beams struck Yggdrasil. There was a flickering of images on the big screen as some of the antennae elements dispersed across Yggdrasil’s crown burned out, then the computer redistributed data to compensate. Bram saw the beams, hundreds of them, sending their threads of light through space in a complex skein that focused on Yggdrasil. The computer had assigned different colors to the threads to distinguish the types of lasers—violet, red, blue, green, magenta, and a deadly gray to represent x-rays.

One of the visitors went into hysterics, a little round man who was calmed by two women and given a glass of water.

Bram reached for the interphone before he remembered that he was no longer year-captain. He turned to Jun Davd. “Somebody should get Enyd to rotate the tree—distribute the heat absorption. Even though we’re boosting, another few percent of g wouldn’t—”

“We needn’t bother,” Jun Davd said. “We couldn’t get rotation started fast enough. Besides…”

He trailed off, looking thoughtful.

The tree continued to accelerate. One of the women with the hysterical man said soothingly, “See, we’re still going.”

“The sensitive part of the ramjet shaft’s in the umbrage of the leaves at this angle,” Jun Davd said. “And as for the leaves themselves, our sensors haven’t yet detected any fires.”

He was trying to suppress a smile. He gave up the effort and let his long face split in a big grin.

Bram took the call from Smeth when it came. He listened briefly, then hung up and addressed the expectant throng.

“Smeth wanted to warn us that we’re all a few pounds heavier—but I’m sure you’ve all noticed that already. The laser beams are giving us a small additional boost—enough to take a little of the load off the ramjet and turn more of its work into acceleration.”

A few of the people looked puzzled. Bram drew a breath and said, “Yggdrasil thrives on light. Up to and including x-rays—the Nar found space trees happily in orbit around x-ray stars.”

He added his own grin to Jun Davd’s. “When Yggdrasil felt things getting a little too hot, it turned its leaves reflective side out, in the lightsail mode. The dragonflies will take a while to realize it, but they’re helping to speed us out of their system.”

An hour later, they watched the second fleet of dragonfly ships fall into the consuming flame of the drive beam. Long before then, the lasers had been switched off.

As Yggdrasil sped past the orbit of the planet that had been called Pluto, Jun Davd sought Bram out during an intermission at one of Edard’s concerts. It was a Tenday later, and life in the tree was returning to normal. “The next time we meet them,” Jun Davd said, “they may be more advanced.”

“Then we’ll have to go far enough to be sure we won’t meet them,” Bram said.

Jun Davd did not reply directly. “Trist is looking for volunteers to help repair the antenna system,” he said.

“What’s the hurry? We don’t have a Message to broadcast anymore.”

“No. But we’d better start listening.”

Seven years of listening had taken their toll on Trist. He had the same ready smile, the same willingness to banter. But his ice-blue eyes had acquired something of the haunted look that Bram remembered from the years when Trist had monitored the spread of Nar civilization through the Whirlpool galaxy—until the wave of radiation from the exploding core had put a stop to the radio emissions forever.

Trist had monitored the Nar emissions for fifty thousand years. He had listened to the spread of dragonfly civilization for only fifty-odd years—about seven years in terms of tree time. But his eyes had aged at the same rate as the outside universe, Bram thought.

Trist looked up from his console as Bram entered the control booth. The Message Center had been stripped of its library over the centuries, as the archivists had gradually integrated its contents with the growing central databank. But its equipment—the leaning stacks of power and control elements that made long avenues down the cylindrical cavity—had been left intact and placed at the service of the astronomy department.

“They’ve reached Aldebaran now,” he said before Bram could speak.

“Red giant,” Bram said, searching his memory. “With a companion.”

“It’s a white dwarf now,” Trist said. “The dragonflies have settled both components. They’re not very fussy. Outer planets of the dwarf would be pretty cold but that wouldn’t bother the kind of creatures who settled Pluto. Any inner planets, if they survived the red giant phase and resolidified, wouldn’t be much more habitable. Airless slagballs.”

“How far?” Bram asked.

“About sixty light-years from Sol. It was one of the stars that stayed in the same neighborhood.”

A crawling sensation went down Bram’s spine. “Their technology’s improving. They’re spreading outward at about half the speed of light.”

Trist nodded. “Since we first met them at Delta Pavonis, the sphere of space they occupy has grown to a diameter of nearly one hundred twenty light-years. At this rate, it will take them only two hundred thousand years to overrun the entire galaxy.”

“Jun Davd said that we could flee to the opposite ends of the Milky Way and find them waiting for us.”

“If they learn how to attain relativistic speeds any time in the next few centuries, yes.” Trist was gloomy. “And if they don’t, they could come calling fairly soon, anyway.”

“The nearest large galaxy is two million light years away. Andromeda, former man called it.” Bram swallowed hard as he remembered the first breathtaking sight he’d had of the Milky Way’s sister galaxy, centuries ago, as a child at the observatory with Voth. “At one g, we could be there in thirty years, our time.”

“Two million years, dragonfly time,” Trist said. “Plenty of time for them to invent relativistic ramjets. And improve on them.”

“Yes,” Bram said. “And intergalactic beacons that broadcast their genetic code. They’re already in possession of the prototype.”

“We’re using frozen Nar technology for the most part,” Trist said. “We won’t have a better intergalactic machine till we’ve settled down somewhere, expanded our population, developed an industrial-based society—”

“While the dragonflies have had two million years to develop theirs.”

Trist spoke with a sort of controlled terror. “Long before then, they’ll have swallowed the entire Milky Way. Trillions of them around every G-type and K-type star. Billions, maybe, around less hospitable stars … And … two hundred billion stars! Two hundred billion separate dragonfly civilizations, all of them competing to be the first for the next leap outward.”

“Jun Davd was right,” Bram said. “All they have to do is to learn to crowd the speed of light by one decimal place better than we can.”

He turned to listen for a moment to the speakers, which were pouring out a torrent of dragonfly clicks and snaps from whatever lumps of rock were in orbit around Aldebaran and its companion. When he spoke again, it was half to himself.

“There’s no place we can go in the entire universe where we’d be safe from them. No place at all.”

Both of them listened to the clicks for a while. Then Trist spoke. “You’d better call a ship’s meeting.”

“I’m not year-captain.”

Trist showed rare exasperation. “Oh, for Fatherbeing’s sake, by the time we get Smeth to do it and wait for him to sort out all the ifs, buts, and maybes, the dragonfly sphere will be another fifty light-years across!”

“I’ll post a notice in the datanet,” Bram said.

“I say we go back!” the man on the holo stage bleated. “Go back and sterilize all their worlds with our engine exhaust! All of them, down to the smallest asteroid! That’s the only way we’ll ever be safe?

He was a narrow-faced man with an incongruously thick and muscular neck sticking up out of protective coveralls, and his voice was shrill with fear.

“Who is he?” Bram whispered to Trist in the seat next to him.

“Name’s Perc. He’s one of Smeth’s technicians. Fusion specialist, I think. Big talker—always trying to organize the black gang, whatever that means. He’s always at loggerheads with Smeth.”

“The way to do it,” Perc blathered on, “is to start back far enough to build up a tremendous gamma factor. Build up enough relativistic mass so that we devastate them by gravitational effects, too, just to make sure. But the main thing about going in at relativistic speeds is that we can flash by in fractions of a second, before they have time to react. They might not even realize we were there, in fact. To them it would just seem as if the surface of their planets just sizzled and went up in flame.”

“Ferocious, isn’t he?” Bram said.

“He’s just frightened,” Mim said. “We all are.”

“He’s one of the post-Milky Way generation,” Nen said, leaning across Trist. “Have you noticed how all of the really bloodcurdling comments tonight came from the new people?”

Mim nodded agreement. “It’s hard for those of us who were raised among the Nar to think of a life form—any life form—as being a threat.”

“We’re learning,” Bram said grimly.

“Oh, my dear, yes,” Mim said, reaching blindly for Bram’s hand. She seemed on the verge of bursting into tears; she might have been remembering the long vigil when Bram had failed to return to the tree with the evacuees. But it took her only a moment to recover her usual spunk. “That was another time, another universe.”

Perc’s outside holo image was waving its mammoth arms around. “Just one quick pass over each planet,” Perc said earnestly and reasonably. “We needn’t go into a polar orbit that would cover the entire surface—and we couldn’t, anyway, with the kinetic energy of relativistic speeds. Our exhaust would boil away the crust—melt a channel of slag from pole to pole. Split the planet like a rotten fruit. Turn the oceans to steam and strip away the atmosphere. Nothing could survive—not anywhere. And think of Yggdrasil’s mass at seventy—or seven hundred—gamma. We’d rip them apart! I move that we start back at once. Burn them out. Descend on them like an avenging angel. Bring them their time of fire.”

The holo lurched off the stage, and the little man who had cast it seated himself again. Smeth thanked Perc for his views as if it hurt his teeth, then gaveled down the uproar that started.

“Jun Davd, I think you wanted to make a comment, he said.

Jun Davd’s holo rose, courteous and grave, and looked down at the audience. “There’s no doubt that we could wipe out planets if we had a mind to do so,” he said. “But I’m afraid that for us to exterminate the entire dragonfly race is a mathematical impossibility. You can’t make U-turns in space, and by the time we backed up far enough for a second run—decelerated and built up gamma again—years would have passed. We’d have to do that for every single planetary body … divided, perhaps, by a factor of three or four for those we could align, of course. In Sol system, there are thirty-five inhabited bodies of fair size, plus an unknown number of asteroids, cometary nuclei, and possibly space habitats. We could not be sure of … sterilizing … them all. And if we could, there still would be numbers of dragonfly vehicles in transit within the system, ready to settle on some of the cooling cinders after we passed.”

A babble of voices broke out. Smeth pounded his gavel, and Jun Davd went on.

“And, of course, we’re not talking about only one system. There are approximately one thousand five hundred stars and multiple star systems within a sixty-five-light-year radius of Sol. Most of them, by the evidence of Trist’s radio survey, are inhabited. Even if we spent only five or ten objective years dealing with each, it would be millennia before we finished the task.”

He paused. The hall of the tree had gone silent.

“And by then, the dragonfly sphere of habitation would have grown to a diameter of at least fifteen thousand light-years.”

“Then you’re saying that we can’t keep up with their expansion?” shouted a man in the front row.

Smeth tried to gavel him out of order, but Jun Davd bent forward to reply. His holo loomed like a cloud over the first ten rows, but it was the man in front whom he addressed.

“We’d have to disinfect every star in the galaxy. And then we’d have to start all over again.”

There was a clamor of competing voices, and Smeth granted the stage to a woman who wanted to be assured that flight was not entirely hopeless. “Can’t we find just one little star they won’t want—where they’ll leave us alone? Somewhere between the galaxies where they wouldn’t find us?”

“Where’s Jao?” Bram whispered to Trist. “I don’t see him up there. I thought he had something he wanted to contribute to this.”

“The last I heard, he was still working on some calculations. He has a computer model he wants to stir some more figures into.”

“What good will that do?” Nen said angrily. “Words, numbers—what difference will any of it make?”

“It’s something he’s been cooking up with Jun Davd,” Trist said. “All I know is that they think it has some bearing on the present situation.”

On the platform, Smeth was trying to stem further discussion and bring the proceedings to some kind of conclusion. The company had been at this for hours now, everything had been said at least twice, and people were getting cranky and tired.

“The time’s come for us to make a decision,” Smeth said harshly. “We have a problem that can’t be solved. But we’ve got to choose a course of action, nonetheless. Put quite simply, do we fight, run, or hide? Or pretend it isn’t so? I don’t believe I’ve heard any other suggestions tonight. So if anybody wants to start making motions, I’ll put them on the board and we can—”

The ushers were already starting to move down the aisles to get into position with their long-handled ballot boxes, when a burly figure dragging a bulky piece of electronic equipment shouldered his way past them.

“Hold it, Smeth!”

Smeth’s face showed annoyance. “The discussion just closed, Jao. There’s nothing more left to say. Take a seat with the others.”

Jun Davd leaned over to whisper something in Smeth’s ear. A slice of his face appeared in the holo projection, but the words weren’t audible.

“All right,” Smeth said. “Have your say. But try not to hold things up.”

Jao climbed to the stage with his gear and started plugging light fibers into the exposed holo panel while the projectionist hovered nearby. He said something to the projectionist, who nodded and took over the task while Jao strode to the lectern. A gigantic red-bearded face, disembodied, hovered over the auditorium; he hadn’t bothered with the niceties when he made his rough-and ready connections.

“When we dropped into the nucleus of the Milky Way from above the galactic plane about fifty of our years ago,” Jao began without preamble, “we saw a peculiar sight. It was a sort of arc of hot gas rising up out of the core at right angles to where you’d expect it to be for a galactic magnetic field.”

The audience stirred restively at what seemed to be an astronomy lecture coming when everybody was wound up with tension and ready to release it in the form of group action.

Jao appeared not to notice. The suspended face cocked a gigantic red eyebrow and went blithely on. “We postulated that something at the center of the galaxy was acting like a stupendous dynamo. The obvious candidate was a rotating black hole—the one we later used as a brake when we dived through the core.”

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 of 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 small 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.”

“We’re Original Man, though, aren’t we, in a sense?” Bram said. “And if you want to look at it the way Ame just did, he’s descended from us.”

The datanet reporter persisted in his questions. “Are you saying that we’re going to evolve into little furry animals like Cuddlies, then?”

“No,” Ame said. “Evolution doesn’t repeat itself. We still have a long way to go. And so have they.”

The Large Magellanic Cloud lay before them, a ruddy tiara spread across the night. From only a few tens of thousands of light-years away, it was brilliant, the teeming stars laced with torches of red fire.

“It’s lovely,” Mim said, holding Bram’s hand. “What a breathtaking sky we’re going to live under.”

“Yes, the skies will be spectacular,” Jun Davd said. “That red nebula at the end—the Tarantula, Original Man called it—will be brighter than Earth’s full moon. And of course the Milky Way will be huge, and we’ll see it almost head on. It will fill half the night sky—almost as large as we’re seeing it now.”

He switched on the rearward view for a moment to show them what he meant. The heartbreaking swirl of humankind’s birthplace blazed against the darkness, a splendid pinwheel that revealed nothing of the deadly mill that was churning within her.

Bram felt the ache of its loss. “We’ll be able to keep watch over it,” he said with a smile he hoped was on straight.

“Don’t look so glum,” Jao boomed. “Not a dragonfly click coming from it, and it’s been a hundred thousand years.”

They had been fleeing for twenty-two years, ship time, and three years previously the dragonfly radio emissions had ceased—almost abruptly because of the extreme temporal condensation of the gamma factor they had built up by then. It meant that the dragonfly civilization had ceased to exist some ten to twenty thousand years after they had departed the galaxy and that, after a hundred thousand years, there was still no sign of it. For the first year of those three, Bram had lived in terror that one day Trist’s listening post would pick up the clicking sounds that would mean that somewhere a dragonfly planet had survived and struggled back to the technological level again.

“You’re right,” he said with returning cheer. “It’s the Cuddlies’ turn now, on their diskworlds. They’ve got twenty-six million years to make the most of their opportunity. And who knows—before their time is up, we may even learn how to shut off galactic dynamos. In that case, we could go back and save them.”

“Oh, Bram,” Mim said. “What a wonderful thought!”

“But crazy,” Jao said. “A crazy dream.”

“Yes,” Bram said. “I’ve been told that before.”

Jun Davd switched on the forward view again. The torches of the Large Cloud shone forth once more. “We’ll be safe in there,” he said. “You can see there’s no hypermass giving it shape. There are fifteen billion stars in there—old, young, and in-between. We ought to be able to find one small yellow star that the human race can call home.”

“Amen to that,” Bram said.

He smiled at Mim and squeezed the hand clasping his. Methuselah pressed against his leg. Humans and posthumans drew closer together to share an ancient tribal comfort. They stood in sacramental silence as the living tree that bore them hurtled out of the dark toward the cloud of fire.