Donald Moffitt - Second Genesis

Trist hadn’t heard about the tails. Bram told him.

“Whew!” Trist whistled. “That explains it. You’d need a tail to work in a place like that.”

“Ame thinks they may have been a species other than man. But the verdict isn’t in yet.”

“A new species to supersede man. I’m not sure I like that idea. It was one thing to deal with the idea that human beings were extinct. We’ve more or less accepted that from the beginning. But the idea of another species taking our place—that’s something else again. Gives us competition in this neck of the galaxy, Bram. The planet Earth may be overrun by these long-footed characters. Where do we go, then?”

“They may be our cousins.”

“Makes no difference. The fact that they were getting ready to patch up Original Man’s beacon tells us all we need to know. Different species or different order entirely, they were preparing to spread their own image through the universe. It bears out that old idea we used to talk about long ago, before the Nar sped us on our way to this galaxy—that there comes a time in the life of every intelligent species when it begins to dawn on them that the means is at hand for species immortality.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Now we’ve got three cases. Original Man, broadcasting his genetic code to the Virgo cluster and beyond. The Nar, sending us to the heart of their own galaxy to do the same job for them. And now these people with tails. Except that they’re a little premature. They were able to take advantage of an installation that somebody else built. Bram, I just had another thought!”

“What is it?”

’You said that these tailed people weren’t immortal. Neither were the Nar. Neither was Original Man when he started broadcasting. What if this compulsion to spread around your genetic code is a stage that a species goes through before it attains personal immortality?”

“Hmmm. The night doesn’t seem so dark, then. The universe isn’t a bottomless hole. There’s time. Time to travel to the ends of the universe yourself someday. At least that’s what the little nagging voice inside you would be saying. Trist, you don’t suppose…”

“That Original Man never became extinct? That he simply gave up, packed up and went home after he’d been infected with eternal life long enough for the idea to sink in?”

“Yes. And then, somewhere along the way, acquired an immunity to immortality. Forgot things. Evolved into a new species. And then one day set out on a path to the stars again. And found the old beacon.”

“As I said before, it hardly matters. Whoever they were, they’re not us.”

“I’d like to send an expedition to one of the inner disks. And to the next disk ahead of us in orbit—see how close a duplicate it is to this one. We may have landed in the wrong place.”

“I’d give my spare shirt to go. But Bram, there isn’t time—”

“I’m going to call a tree meeting and call for a vote to stay here an extra year. We’re digging up treasure troves of material—whole libraries of it, and we’ve only scratched the surface. I want to get as much material transferred to Yggdrasil as we can. We can’t abandon a working party here, no matter how many eager volunteers there’d be. Not when the only habitable body in the known universe also happens to be our only starship. And there’s no telling when we’ll be back this way. It may be centuries before we grow another Yggdrasil and outfit it and can spare a population to crew it.”

“A year.” Trist furrowed his brow. “I’ll have to work out some orbits. The distances are huge, of course, but it’s not like ordinary interplanetary travel here … hmmm, we’ve got a body whose own orbital period is a year as our catapult, with no gravity to speak of to fight … add a modest boost… de boost to end up a hundred twenty degrees ahead … and for the return trip, a retro-orbit to lose orbital energy and rendezvous with your starting point in somewhat less than a year.” He gave Bram an engaging smile. “But I get Nen to go along with me as a medical officer.”

“Done,” Bram said.

Mim appeared with a tray. “Don’t worry, it isn’t tea,” she said. “Just old-fashioned cornbrew and some snacks.”

“Mim watch out!” Bram shouted.

A little ball of fluff streaked between her ankles and almost tripped her. She recovered her balance and managed to keep the tray level without spilling anything.

“Loki!” she scolded.

The Cuddly scampered up Trist’s leg, paused at his knee to be patted, then climbed to his shoulder and pulled at his yellow hair.

“Loki, get down and behave yourself,” Bram said. He apologized to Trist. “He gets into everything.”

“Oh, that’s all right, we have one of our own,” Trist said. He scratched the little creatures’s neck. “Where’d you get the name?”

“Loki? It was an old human god who was always getting into mischief. It seemed to fit.”

“Nen named ours Fluff. If she doesn’t stop overfeeding it, we’ll have to rename it Sphere.”

“It’s hard to resist one,” Mim said. “They’re the best thing we’re taking with us from the diskworld.”

Loki sat up and chittered at her as if he knew what she was saying. Trist broke off a corner of one of his cornsnacks and gave it to the little beast, which held the morsel in both paws and began nibbling at it.

“Yes,” Bram said. “I think they mean more to us than we realize. They’re the first terrestrial life form that humans have ever seen, after all.”

“Other than vegetables,” Trist said, popping a potato crisp into his mouth.

“Vegetables that we engineered ourselves or the Nar engineered for us. But Trist, just think of it, these little creatures carry an unbroken line of DNA that goes all the way back to the world that gave us birth.”

“DNA calls out to DNA, is that it?”

“Something like that. We know without having to think about it that these little animals are a precious link with an earthly heritage.”

Idly, Trist scratched the Cuddly behind one ear. It made a contented sound and snuggled against him. “There’s something wrong there,” he said lazily. “The first human being, as far as we’re concerned, was mixed up in a test tube by a Nar bioengineer. From native materials.”

“Ravel is Ravel,” Mim said. “No matter what instruments play it.”

“Hah! Good for you, Mim!” Trist conceded. “I’ll desist.” He took a sip of his drink. Loki tried to poke his muzzle into the cup, and Trist let him have a taste. The Cuddly sputtered and spat it out. Everybody laughed.

“Abstemious,” Bram said. “Maybe we can learn something from them.”

Trist fed the little pet another fragment of cornsnack to appease it. “It would be nice,” he said, “to go home to an Earth that was inhabited by Cuddlies instead of those tailed people with the long skinny feet.”

“Not likely,” Bram said. “Ame says the Cuddlies evolved on the diskworld from more primitive forms. That isn’t to say that some collateral branch with similar traits couldn’t have evolved on Earth in the meantime.” He frowned. “But we know what life form achieved dominance on Earth, don’t we?”

“They were rats,” Ame said.

She stepped back to let Bram have a better look at the exhibit that she and her section had prepared. Two of her colleagues—Jorv, the bouncy baby-faced zoologist whom Bram had met before, and a tall bony young woman named Shira, who was something called a “paleobiologist”—stood by with eager expressions on their faces.

Bram raised an eyebrow. “Rats? The pests of the ‘Dappled Piper’ legend?”