“Yes,” Trist said. “We picked up a tremendous boost not only from Jao’s gravity machine, but from all that dense stuff the ramscoop swallowed on the way out.” He grinned at Jao. “Jao, my hairy friend, what’s your refined estimate of our terminal velocity, and how long before we reach the galaxy of Original Man?”
Jao fidgeted on a seating puff next to the maternal nest. Mim had passed the baby to a cooing, clucking Ang, and he was afraid that he was going to be asked to hold it.
“Well,” he said, “there’s still a lot of plus and minus in the observations, but Jun Davd’s latest figures show us coasting at within a hundred millionth of one percent of the speed of light. That means we should cover thirty-seven million light-years in about five hundred and twenty-eight years, our time.”
There was a harrumph from the fringe of the little group, where Smeth had parked himself at a safe distance from the baby.
“Not precisely,” he said. “The ramscoop is still on standby. We’re bound to pick up a stray hydrogen cloud or two, even between galaxies. We still may shave a few years from that estimate.”
Smeth had finally been elected year-captain. He took it very seriously, even though there wouldn’t be much to do during the next five hundred years. He was driving everyone crazy, poking his nose into the cellulose plant, the glucose-processing operation, housing expansion, and the kitchens.
“How about it, Jao?” Bram asked.
Jao scowled. “I hope not,” he said. “We’ve got too much velocity to shed as it is. The Milky Way was supposed to be a pretty fair match for our galaxy in mass and configuration. Nobody figured on binary black holes and core explosions.”
“How are you going to brake?”
Jao shrugged. “We’ll spiral in, spiral out. We’ve got thirty-seven million years to figure out an approach. By that time the Milky Way’s own hypermass may have grown some.”
There was an uneasy shifting in the circle of people around Mim’s nest. Jun Davd said quickly, “A larger black hole at the center of a galaxy should in itself present no dangers. In any case, with a normal accretion rate, no black hole could swallow its galaxy within the probable lifetime of the universe.”
“Hey, hear that, little Lydis?” Trist said with theatrical heartiness. “Your new home is going to be around for what passes for forever!”
People made themselves laugh, but a small pall had invaded the maternity chamber. Bram knew that everyone was thinking about the Nar and their vanished civilization.
His eyes strayed to the window wall. There was nothing to see out there anymore except Yggdrasil itself—mile after mile of great twisting subbranches and carpets of leaves, lit up by the banks of spotlights that were trained on them from the shaft of the probe: not only to give Yggdrasil a sense of its own rotation, but to provide the human passengers with a sense of place in a universe that otherwise had gone blank.
Somewhere beyond Yggdrasil’s horizons was an exploding galaxy, its light blotted out by red shift. It didn’t bear thinking about. But it was impossible to shut it out of the mind.
Nen cleared her throat. “What heights must they have reached in the fifty thousand years they had left to them?” she asked. “They spread so fast through their arm of the galaxy in that little time. Expanding their domain. As if they knew they were racing against the end of everything.”
On the way out of the galaxy, Trist had used the antenna array to monitor the radio emissions of the spreading Nar civilization until they stopped—replaced by the random radio noise of frying suns. Bram had watched Trist change, become progressively haunted during those last years, and he knew that Trist must have brought some of his despair home to Nen in their quarters at the end of each day.
“In another million years they might have started up Skybridge, toward the Bonfire,” Trist said softly.
“That wonderful web of life—it’s all gone now!” Jao’s granddaughter said with unexpected fervor. “The Nar, the humans and other organisms they brought into being, the forests of space poplars multiplying through the cometary halos from star to star!”
Bram wished the conversation hadn’t taken this turn. All this was upsetting Mim on what should have been a happy day for her.
But it was Mim herself who wouldn’t let it go. “Trist,” she said. “Do you think they ever received our warning?”
“We can’t ever know,” he said. “It couldn’t have made any difference anyway.”
Mim had retrieved the baby from Ang. Bram thought that it made a pretty picture—Mim’s dark hair spilled down around her shoulders, the baby nuzzling at her breast. Life, he thought. Life out of the ashes of universal death.
“They gave life to humankind twice, you know,” Mim said almost in a whisper. “And there’s no way we can pay the debt.”
A slow dawning overtook Bram. He smiled at Mim. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, there is.”
Halfway across the night, Yggdrasil encountered a star. It was a fading red dwarf, so dim that they were almost upon it before the sensors reacted. In minutes of treeboard time, it was light-years behind them—too quick to call the passengers for a real-time look—but Jun Davd made a record for later replay by anyone who was interested.
“It must have broken free from its parent galaxy a very long time ago,” Bram said to Mim as they watched the replay in their quarters. “Any star much higher on the main sequence would have burnt out long ago.”
“Oh, Bram,” Mim said, moved by the sight. “Could a star like that have planets? With living creatures on them?”
He touched her arm. “If so, they live in a very lonely universe. Under a sky with nothing in it except a fuzzy patch or two.”
“Like us,” Mim whispered.
“No,” Bram said, “not like us. Someday we’ll have stars in our sky again.”
CHAPTER 4
“It’ll take us about forty more years to stop,” Jao said. “But we should end up in the approximate volume of space that Original Man used to inhabit.”
People were starting to bunch around the optical boundary of the gigantic holo projection that dominated what, by convention, was the forward end of the observation lounge. More spectators were trickling into the fan-shaped chamber. Yggdrasil had just burst out of one of the globular star clusters above the plane of the Milky Way, and word was going around that there was a magnificent view to be seen.
Bram stood a little aside with the rest of the astronomy and physics group, so as not to block the view. He’d been here about a half hour now, but he still couldn’t take his eyes off the image.
The central bulge of the galaxy loomed head on out of darkness: a spectacular incandescent yolk with the flattened disk spread out around it. The fires of the nucleus glowed yellow, those of the disk shading to the paler blues of older stars. Nearer, a hail of intervening stars streamed by, Yggdrasil’s tremendous speed putting them in visible motion.
The holo vista was startlingly realistic—much more so than the kind of flat computer display Jun Davd had made do with at the beginning of the voyage. But that was hardly surprising. He’d had centuries to improve on it and five generations of brilliant engineers to assist him.