It was going to be hard to pry Yggdrasil away from the comets after its long thirst. Bram—year-captain again for the fiftieth time—was under a lot of pressure to let the tree graze peaceably for a while in the outer reaches of the cometary halo. The human population of the living spaceship was now up to twenty-five thousand. It was getting a bit crowded along the axis of acceleration. The younger generation in particular had its eye on all the congenial real estate that would open up in the other branches if Yggdrasil went on permanent rotation mode.
But Bram did not dare give in. He had the feeling that if the populace spread out this time, he’d never get them back to the axis.
At Yggdrasil’s leisurely rate of travel, it would take decades to drift from star to star—centuries or even millennia to search out the G-type dwarfs in this sector of the galaxy for the traces of Original Man. The new people did not have the same sense of urgency—the idea of a goal. For them, Yggdrasil was a way of life. It was more than possible than the citizenry could vote to settle in the first system that had rocky bodies to mine, a cometary shell to seed with a crop of more Yggdrasils.
Sometimes, on bad nights, Bram had a nightmare that he would never make planetfall again.
No, he thought. The only solution was to get his little convoy under fusion acceleration as quickly as possible, investigate the mystery at the heart of this system, then boost out again at one g.
Certain it was that Yggdrasil, left to its own devices, was not going to get much of an outward kick from the starlight to be found here!
Beside him, Jun Davd said, “I saw something just then.”
Bram looked, but saw nothing except the faint scratch in the darkness and its attendant squiggles.
“Within the curve of the larger arc,” Jun Davd said.
Large, at this distance, meant nothing much more than a fairy’s hangnail, even under full magnification, but Bram stared till his eyes watered.
Then he could just make it out—the dimmest of patches, like a foggy speck in his faceplate.
“It’s leaking light,” Jun Davd said. “There are holes in it. That’s diffuse reflection on a surface. Keep watching. And if I’m not mistaken…”
As if someone had punctured the fabric of space with a pin, a star peeped forth.
“It’s not the whole star, of course,” Jun Davd mused. “It’s probably the light from no more than ten or twenty percent of its surface to judge by the apparent magnitude. But we wouldn’t have seen a disk, anyway, at this distance, just a point of light.”
Bram didn’t need a spectroscope to tell him what he was looking at. “It’s a G-type sun,” he said.
“Yes, indeed,” Jun Davd said. “Well, we’d better uproot poor Yggdrasil again and go in for a closer look.”
“It’s embarrassing,” Ame said. “I have as many children as my great-great-great-grandmother.”
She held up the twins for inspection, one in the crook of each arm. They were beginning to lose the wrinkled, recently boiled look, and it could be seen from their coloring and button features that they were going to take after Ame, not Smeth.
“Never mind, they’re beautiful babies,” Mim said, nudging Bram in the ribs to keep him quiet. “And dizygotic twins are nobody’s fault.”
Smeth puttered nearby, a fatuous grin on his face. Ame’s firm stewardship had done wonders for him; the rough edges, if not gone, were ground down a bit, and his friends pronounced him almost civilized. He and Ame had been together for ten Bobbings now. She teased him by telling him that it had simply become too much trouble keeping him at arm’s length and that she had decided that maybe he was salvagable after all, despite five hundred years of bachelordom; to which he responded by swelling with pride and pleasure.
“I’ve used up my quota on my first try,” Ame said ruefully.
One child per century was the rule nowadays, enforced by society’s unspoken displeasure. Those who had bred too thoughtlessly during the profligate days of middle-passage now sheepishly waited for the passing years to rehabilitate their reputations.
“You can have a share of mine or Lydis’s,” Mim said. “We’re not a prolific family. It all averages out.”
“Yah, you want to talk embarrassed, look at Marg and Orris,” Jao said heartily. “Five children, like clockwork. Hey, I bet they have a cesium clock hanging over their sleeping nest so they can start working on number six the nanosecond it’s licit.”
“Jao, you’re awful—stop that!” Ang exclaimed. “Excuse him, everybody.”
“Why? What did I say?” Jao said innocently.
Bram, suppressing a smile, said to Ame, “Quotas may be a thing of the past sooner than you think. We ought to be ready to leave this system in a few years, and then it’s just a question of time till we hit on a suitable planet.”
He carefully refrained from specifying the father world of Original Man. He didn’t want to appear to be too much of a visionary to these practical young people like Ame and her friends. It was generally accepted that there ought to be any number of suitable planets of G-type suns in Original Man’s neck of the galaxy that once had been used by the vanished race and that therefore would possess breathable atmospheres and benign ecologies. Any sensible person aboard ought to be ready to settle for one of these. And any one of them would be a treasure trove for the paleontologists and the archeologists and the rest of the practitioners of the new theoretical sciences.
“Yah, as soon as your cohabitant here starts up the fusion engine, we’ll be on our way,” Jao said. “How’s it going, Smeth?”
Smeth, startled out of his slack-jawed adoration of his firstborn, replied, “I’ve got a crew aboard the probe overhauling the systems now. The four-wave mirrors need realignment, and there’s been some minor damage to the web of the scoop, but it held up pretty well, considering. I’d say we ought to finish in a two of Tendays, and then we’ll be ready to travel again.”
“We ought to be able to land on the outside of whatever’s walling off the sun!” Jao said enthusiastically. “The temperature’s a nice comfortable three hundred degrees Absolute. Then we hightail it out of the system and start looking at yellow dwarfs. There’s only eight or nine possibles within a twenty-light-year radius, and I’m betting one of them is the birthplace of Original Man. The stars around him would’ve had different relative motions—the guidepost constellations in the Message are no good to us now—but they’d have the same general orbits around the galactic center, and I’m betting they didn’t drift too far apart. This beacon would’ve been one of the two or three closest.” He showed all this teeth to Ame in a gargantuan grin. “You’ll be able to multiply with a clear conscience by the time the twins are grown.”
Bram marveled that Jao was able to be so bluff and nonchalant on the subject in the face of his own tragedy. His second child, by some fluke, had proved to be immune to the immorality virus. The boy had grown into a humorous, likable chap with Jao’s talent for physics. He had made some notable contributions and had left offspring himself before dying at the age of a hundred and thirty. That had been two centuries ago. Jao and Ang had never had another child after that.
Bram thought about his own new son, Edard. He and Mim had been lucky. Edard was a fine young man, still in his twenties but already making a contribution to human culture. From the first it had been evident that he had inherited Mim’s musical talent. He had picked out tunes on the keyboard at the age of three, and by five he was well on the way to teaching himself to play Mim’s cello, when Mim had taken a hand and started giving him formal lessons. Now, Edard was devoting himself to composition. He was obsessed by the six old symphonies that had been transmitted in score in the Message of Original Man and had applied himself to the task of recreating a live symphonic texture. He was probably the first composer in the history of the tree who was in a position to do so. With the increase in population, there were now enough first-rate players for an orchestra of thirty-eight people. They gave a concert every Tenday evening. Tonight they were going to introduce Edard’s twenty-second symphony, the first in which he had totally abjured all electronic fill-ins for missing instruments and had limited himself to what the live players could produce. It promised to start a new, revolutionary trend.