Donald Moffitt - Second Genesis

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.