Worse than that, Voth’s death had interrupted the final flowering of his life—his terminal change from male to female. All of Voth’s budding children had died with him when he had failed to reach a breeding pool in time.
The Nar had not understood until this time that their pets could bite. Their civilization ground briefly to a halt while they met in one of their grand touch conclaves to decide what to do about the human species.
Tentacle pressed to tentacle, radio sleeves linking the parallel meetings on all the nearby worlds, the entire Nar race became a single immense organism whose process of deliberation passed human understanding. The humans at the center of the vast tribunal—a sea of living Nar that stretched mile upon mile—waited and shuddered.
It was the Day of Wrath.
The humans were heard. When it was Bram’s turn to speak, he told them about the immortality virus that had been withheld from all the generations of reconstituted man, condemning humans to short, unfulfilled lives in a long-lived Nar society. He told them of his childhood dream of returning home—home to the distant, unreachable galaxy where the first human race once had dwelt, and from which the tremendous Message of Original Man had been sent. His touch brother, Tha-tha, emerged from the packed throng to speak to him directly, and perhaps to intercede for him. “It is true, then, Bram-bram,” he asked sadly, “that all your life you felt you had no place here?”
All around Bram, other humans were simultaneously unburdening themselves to the collective Nar consciousness: Partnerites telling of their struggles to be accepted in a society that saw them as ephemeral mutes; Resurgists admitting why they had given up and surrendered to a daydream of past human glory; even some Penserite radicals attempting to explain why they had been driven to violence in their effort to find a place for humans in a Nar universe.
Perhaps the Nar had never before realized the depths of human alienation and anguish. But they were getting an earful now. The sea of tentacles seethed. Bram could not read what was happening out there. No human could. But he could sense a great surge of sorrow and revulsion, distress and pity.
The human race might get off lightly, he dared to hope. The present generation might be allowed to live out their lives comfortably—under closer supervision, of course. It was even possible that the human species need not vanish from the universe a second time; limited breeding or in vitro gene assembly might keep a few dozen specimens around as curiosities for future generations of Nar to gawk at.
But the Nar, in a huge tide of nonmammalian empathy, were more compassionate than Bram could have imagined.
When the verdict was announced, the human race found that it had been sentenced to immortality.
The Nar had no use for immortality themselves; for them an eternity without aging and what lay at the end of it was an eternity without fulfillment. So perhaps they simply had not realized what such a gift would mean to humankind.
Bram was put in charge of a human-run project to reconstruct the virus; the Nar, with exquisite tact, had recognized that this must be a human achievement, not an act of charity. It would be the work of years or decades, even with Original Man’s blueprint. For Bram would have to find an alternate route to the same result to avoid the biological dangers associated with the immortality nucleotides—dangers that, some thought, may have contributed to the demise of Original Man.
But immortality was only part of the Nar gift—a means to an end. With the complete gift, the Nar gave Bram back his dream.
The Nar species was on the verge of an enormous technological leap. Travel between stars, until now, had meant riding the worldlet-size space-dwelling trees that were part of Original Man’s bioengineering bequest. They had replaced the first crude boron fusion-fission starships of the Nar’s early space age, and could travel at up to one-seventh of the speed of light. With them, the Nar could spread slowly from star to star and hope to populate the galaxy in a million years or two.
But only recently a conceptual breakthrough had raised the possibility of a relativistic spacecraft that could reach the core of the galaxy in only fifty thousand years. With it, the Nar could do on a smaller scale what Original Man had done so grandly—use it as a robot beacon to broadcast their own genetic code to the billions of stars that would come within its range, If the probe hit the jackpot only once or twice, then the Nar race could spread from new foci, sending brothers among the stars who would be waiting to greet them.
To this lofty purpose, the Nar species had allocated a tremendous share of the wealth of their civilization. The robot spacecraft project had been given a timetable that might make it a reality in only a few centuries—a fraction of a Nar lifetime.
Now, in an act of stunning generosity, the Nar decided to speed up the timetable—and bequeath the relativistic engine to the human race.
With it, those humans who wished to—the restless ones, the unhappy ones, the adventurous ones—could return to their mythical home in another galaxy. The trip would take thirty-seven million years of real time, of course, but it had been calculated that by traveling within one hundred millionth of one percent of the speed of light, the time dilation factor predicted by the theory of relativity would have a value of approximately seventy thousand. So to the travelers, the journey would seem to last only about five hundred and forty years.
And when you had eternity to play with, that didn’t seem like too high a price to pay.
To reach that tremendous terminal velocity—to become pregnant with enough kinetic energy to coast between the galaxies in a fuel-less void—the ramjet craft would first have to dive to the heart of the departure galaxy, gulping the rich H-II clouds as it went, then let the gravitational center of the galaxy sling it above the plane and out into emptiness.
So it all worked out to everybody’s benefit. The humans would be able to do the Nar’s little chore for them on the way home.
One problem remained. Robot ramjets were not very hospitable to life. They were hot! And even if a way were found around that problem, there was still the question of living space and a reliable supportive environment for a substantial fraction of the human race on a trip that would last for more than five hundred years.
How would it be managed?
It was simple. The spacecraft would tow a tree.
Mim appeared in a stunning green off-the-shoulder party dress with a five-pointed hem that, though it was a bit old-fashioned compared to some of the newer styles, suited her very well. Over it she wore a short pleated chlamys that left her right arm bare—an old cellist’s habit.
She bent over the chairpuff and kissed Bram lightly above one eyebrow. “What are you sitting here brooding about?” she said.
“Oh, I was just thinking about the Father World,” Bram said, getting up. “It seems very far away now.”
“It is far away! Tens of thousands of light-years away!”
“Which means that tens of thousand of years have passed since we left. We’re in their historical past, Mim. After only a couple of decades of travel. I wonder if they’ve forgotten us.”
“Not a chance. The Nar never forget anything.”
“All the Nar we knew are dead now. But there ought to be some fifty-thousand-year-old humans that we used to know walking around. I wonder what it’s like to be fifty thousand years old. We’re still under a hundred.”
“And getting younger every day,” she reminded him.
“Yes. I wonder if fifty thousand years is long enough for a human being to learn the Great Language. Jao swears that it’s possible, with cortical transplants, electronic interfacing, and prosthetic touch sleeves.”