Donald Moffitt - Second Genesis

The tree named Yggdrasil plunged toward the heart of the galaxy at very nearly the speed of light, safe within a cone of shadow from a sleet of radiation that otherwise would have charred it to ash in microseconds.

It still clutched the remains of a comet in its roots, so water was not yet a problem. But light and gravity were strangely wrong, interfering with its tropisms.

Yggdrasil was a very confused tree.

Ahead, always, was a funnel of dancing sparks. Behind was a terribly bright light. Yggdrasil’s senses told it that it was in the terrifying grip of a one-g gravitational field that was tugging it toward that unnatural sun. It had been trying for twenty years to escape. But when it tried to turn the reflective surfaces of its leaves toward the perpendicular, something always frustrated it.

Yet, wonder of wonders, Yggdrasil never fell. An equal and opposite force applied to a small region of its central trunk prevented that. Yggdrasil knew in its vegetable fashion that a girdle of foreign substance encircled its waist, but its senses were not adequate to tell it about the tether and the gargantuan turnbuckle that anchored the girdle.

A strange thing had happened to the stars as well. They swarmed around the tree in rainbow hoops of color—violet, then blues, greens, and yellows ahead; orange and progressively darker reds behind. Both ahead and behind, blind disks had blossomed as the stars marched in both directions through the spectrum and disappeared. The rearward blind spot was larger. Over the years it had kept expanding, compressing the rainbow hoops and pushing them forward until now they circled the coruscating funnel of sparks like concentric halos.

Scores of times Yggdrasil had tried to pick a yellow target star, only to have it change colors and vanish from the universe.

Only the odd pursuing sun had not dopplered through the spectrum. It remained fixed in color and distance, seeming to grow ever brighter against the expanding dark region behind it.

Fretting, Yggdrasil tried to concentrate on growing one of its branches. Its crown—since it had been prevented from spinning—was no longer perfectly symmetrical, and this was a branch that needed to catch up. Fortunately, the direction of the tug of gravity was always a guide. Growth, Yggdrasil knew in its simple wisdom, was supposed to be perpendicular.

There was commensal life within the cavities of the errant branch, but it was too insignificant to be noticed. Yggdrasil ignored it. The only verities were light, gravitation, and water.

“I think Yggdrasil needs a tranquilizer again,” the tree systems officer said. “It’s starting to show signs of trauma.”

Bram set down the carton of housewares he had been packing and turned to face her. “Are you sure?” he said.

“I’m afraid so, Captain,” she said. “The monitors indicate enzymatic reactions in the heartwood, and gallic acid’s showing in the contents of the parenchymal cells.”

Mim, coming through into the observation veranda with another armload of empty cartons, heard the exchange, “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Right in the middle of moving week!”

Bram shot her an affectionate glance. Mim was well past middle age now—the mirror showed fewer gray hairs every day—but her handsome face still preserved some of the lines it had acquired during their four decades together. To Bram’s way of thinking, the lines gave her a strength of character and a beauty that he had come to love; it was hard to imagine Mim without them, but youthing was inevitable, and he supposed he would have to get used to it.

“Have you tried readjusting the auxin balance?” Bram said.

The tree systems officer looked worried. “We’re close to the limit on that, Captain,” she said. “Any more might be dangerous. Yggdrasil knows it’s edge-on to something that looks like a sun to it and that half of its crown’s in shadow. We can only deceive it so far, then the separate deceptions start to contradict each other. Too many auxins on the lit side, and we could have a very sick tree.”

She waited diffidently for his response. The tree systems officer was a grandchild of Jao and Ang, and like many of her contemporaries she tended to treat Bram like a monument. She had not even been born yet when he had begun the immortality project. But Bram knew that she was a first-rate botanist, and he trusted her judgment.

Bram sighed. “All right. I suppose we’d better keep Yggdrasil tranquilized at least through moving week. We can’t afford a delay. The branch we’re living in is getting a bit bosky. And we’re already ten degrees out of plumb.” His eyes crinkled humorously. “Besides, we’d have a mutiny on our hands if we held up Bobbing Day.”

“Very good, Captain,” she said without cracking a smile. She turned smartly on her heel and left.

Bram watched her go. She had made him feel old and hoary. There was no reason for it, he told himself. His apparent age was down to somewhere in the midforties by now. But his body still carried the memory of being much older, and it showed sometimes in the way he moved and in the habit of protective postures. That, too, would pass with time, Bram supposed.

“The new ones are so earnest,” Mim said, reading his thoughts.

“I just wish they wouldn’t call me ‘Captain’ all the time.”

She laughed. “But you are captain this year. And you’ve been elected seven times. That’s more than anybody.”

“It’s only ancestor worship,” he said. “Exaggerated respect for all the old father figures. And mother figures,” he added hastily.

“Then why was Jao elected only once?” she teased him.

“And never again—I know, it was a disaster! Jao’s the first one to tell you that himself.”

“Jao never wanted to be captain in the first place. I sometimes suspect he sabotaged his first term on purpose so they’d never ask him again. But pity poor Smeth. He keeps campaigning, and he hasn’t been elected once yet.”

“Save your pity. Give him time. He has the next five hundred years to round up the votes. I’ll bet that by the time we get to the Milky Way, he’ll hold the record for being elected the most often. Because by then he’ll be the only one who wants the job.”

She giggled appreciatively, though she never would have hurt Smeth’s feelings by doing it in his presence.

“And when you remember how he kept telling everybody that he had no intention of coming with us—that he wouldn’t trust his life to an overgrown plant and a jerry-built ramscoop drive!”

Smeth had been a surprise to both of them. Bram had been sure that Smeth would stay behind. By the time the probe project had reached fruition, Smeth had accreted a huge department, with more than a hundred humans beneath him. He had attached himself like glue to the Nar organizational superstructure, and the Nar, thinking they were stepping softly on human sensibilities, funneled everything through him, snowballing his authority. He had nothing to gain by deserting the new egalitarian society that human immortality had brought about. With eternity ahead of him, he had nowhere to go but up.

But when the day had come to board Yggdrasil or be left behind, Smeth had showed up at the shuttleport with a small bag of personal belongings and a string of six biosynthetic walkers, led by a Nar porter bearing his library, instruments, and accumulated records.

“I guess he decided that it was better to be a big floater in a small pool,” Bram said.

“Or maybe he simply couldn’t bear the idea of all of us leaving without him.”