He grinned at her. “I think you just like the privileges that go with being married to a year-captain. Like always having a meal or your sleep interrupted by some problem, and never having any privacy, and sitting through long boring meetings where everybody pushes their point of view on you for the thousandth time, and you smile and nod for the thousandth time so that nobody thinks their views are being slighted.”
She grinned back at him. “Shall I tell you why Lydis is here?”
“To check up on the old folks and make sure their synapses haven’t gotten all stuck together?”
“Oh, Bram!” Lydis said.
Mim said, “So I could ask her how she’d feel about being older sister to a new sibling. A five-hundred-year-older sister.”
’”I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Lydis said. “It’s about time. The new people hardly wait till one child is grown up before having another one. They breed like yeast. I certainly think the demographics of the tree entitle you to another baby. And I’d enjoy having a sibling.”
Both of them looked Bram’s way. He said with feeling, “Lyd is right, Mim. The end of our journey’s in sight. Yggdrasil could handle five or ten times our current population without any strain—but I doubt that even the new people can breed fast enough to fill it up before we reach home territory. You’re certainly as eligible as any centenarian to have a second child. But are you sure you don’t want to wait until we find a planet?”
“No,” she said. “Call it an act of faith.”
Bram embraced her. “Careful, oldsters,” Lydis said. “You might tempt me to have a second child, too, like my silly granddaughter.”
Mim, her dark eyes shining, said, “Think of the exciting younghood the child’s going to have. A plunge through the heart of the galaxy. The strange sights at the core. A trip to the spiral arm that was the cradle of humanity. And—and the stars coming back!” Her voice took on fervor. “A curtain of stars drawing back little by little as we slow down, stars spreading till they fill the sky again, shifting back to their true colors … until finally one day our destination star lies before us, big as a sun.”
“Yes,” Bram said, caught by the vision. It was what another child had dreamed thirty-seven million years ago in another galaxy.
Mim, warm in his arms, felt what he was thinking. “It’s come true, hasn’t it, Bram?” she said softly.
“I wonder what we’ll find there,” he said.
“You’re seeing the husk of a quasar,” Jun Davd said, “left over from the quasar epoch of the cosmos.”
He gestured toward the dizzying scene behind the observatory’s holo wall. The fabric of the universe seemed to writhe as stars were wrenched from their true positions and yanked into the illusory halo surrounding the black hole’s event horizon. Then, as Yggdrasil continued its headlong dive past the hole, the stars smeared around the heart of darkness pulled free and popped back into place. The queer stellar mirage was visible because Yggdrasil, on its first pass, was in a polar orbit—dropping down from above the nuclear bulge, where the hole’s accretion disk did not obscure the view.
You could see the inferno of light representing the disk if you stepped close to the transparent shield and looked down into the imaginary space behind the wall. But most people took a look and stepped right back again. You knew it wasn’t real, but something about it made you feel as if you were falling.
Smeth, working hard to impress Ame, cleared his throat to get noticed. “It might be a husk, but if so, it’s a husk of a hundred million solar masses. Not in the same league as the binary holes at the center of the Father World’s galaxy, but massive enough to have caused periodic core explosions of its own. We’ve detected a sort of smoke ring ten thousand light-years out that seems to be a remnant of the last explosion.” Then he made the mistake of condescending to her. “Of course,” he said importantly, “you weren’t born yet when we made the passage between Scylla and Charybdis—that’s what we old hands call the binary hole maneuver, from an old legend of Original Man—but those were the great days! You had to have been there!”
“Yes, I’ve played back the sequence many times,” Ame said offhandedly. “Jun Davd, is there any danger of the next core explosion wiping out life in this galaxy, as it did in the old one?”
Bram watched Ame with a pride of authorship he felt for all his descendants—though in Ame’s case he could claim only one thirty-second of the credit. His great-great-great-granddaughter had turned out well, he thought. She was a pert, direct, lively girl with wide green eyes and corn-colored hair. Though she was scarcely forty years old, she was a complete person with good sense and integrated views.
Her interest was in something she called reconstructive paleontology, and with a small group of similar-minded young people who styled themselves such things as comparative geologists and theoretical terralogists, she was attempting to come up with a self-consistent picture of the bygone planet, Earth, that had spawned Original Man. The store of data they had to go on was skimpy—the highly condensed primers of various descriptive sciences that had been included in the Message plus whatever clues they could gather from literary works, dictionary line drawings, parallel processes on the Father World, and similar sources. But she and her friends had been ingenious and had gone surprisingly far with their small database.
To Smeth’s chagrin, Ame had brought along two colleagues from the paleoearth department: a woman named Abiga, whose specialty was comparative geology, and a young man named Jorv, who was only in his twenties and who bubbled over with enthusiasm for something he called “deductive zoology.”
Bram felt sorry for Smeth, watching him hover and fuss around Ame. Youth had not been kind to the gawky physicist; it had robbed him of a certain acquired gravity and left him awkward and abrasive again. When Smeth had invited Ame to watch the hole approach with the astronomy and physics group, he had expected to monopolize her—and now she could not be pried loose from her chums. Smeth still was trying to figure out if Jorv was attached somehow to Abriga or whether he represented sexual competition.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Jun Davd was being courtly.
“No, we believe the Milky Way is reasonably tame now,” Jun Davd said in answer to Ame’s question. “The quasar epoch used up the tremendous quantity of material within the core that might fuel an event on that titanic a scale and stored it conveniently in the form of the black hole we’re orbiting now. The subsequent explosions—like the one that caused the ‘smoke ring’ Smeth mentioned—obviously could not have been violent enough to wipe out life in the Milky Way … though they might have had some minor effect on species.”
Ame and Jorv exchanged a peculiar glance.
“When did the last core explosion take place?” Ame asked. “Or is there any way of estimating it?”
“Yes, indeed, there is,” Jun Davd said. “We’ve been observing the so-called smoke ring over a period of more than fifteen thousand objective years during our dive into the galactic bulge. It keeps expanding and contracting to strike a balance between its rotantional velocity and the gravitational attraction of the center. From the rate of oscillation, we calculate that the last core explosion took place approximately one hundred and forty-one million years ago.” He smiled. “And I gather that Original Man evolved after that event, since he broadcast his Message only seventy-four million years ago.”