The rasp of the intercom made him wince.
“I’ll get it!” Mim called. He heard her speak to someone, then she poked her head in and said, “That was Smeth from the trunk. The expedition’s just docked. Trist is on his way down now.”
“What’s his hurry? You’d think he’d want a little time to collapse first and get reacquainted with Nen. Or at least allow himself to be lionized for a few hours.”
Bram had been back on board Yggdrasil for only a few days himself; he’d left the disk city with the question of longfoot ancestry still unresolved. He’d had to plunge immediately into his accumulated paperwork and other duties, with no time to think about the matter further.
“Nen’s in surgery with Doc Pol,” Mim said. “Somebody managed to fall down a tracheid and smash an ankle. Trist prepared a preliminary report on the trip back. But he said he thought you’d want to know right away.”
“Know what?”
“That,” she said, “is what he’s on his way down to tell you.”
Trist arrived twenty minutes later; he must have been in free fall all the way. His yellow hair was disheveled, and he had a ripe space suit aroma—Lydis was still making her passengers suit up for drops and dockings—but he was full of unleashed energy, and his blue eyes, though rimmed with fatigue, sparkled.
He refused Mim’s offer of tea—a new custom instituted by Marg after she had read about it in some of the library material that had been brought up from the diskworld, subsequently experimenting with infusions brewed from Yggdrasil’s bark—and got right to the point.
“We did a thorough survey from space, of course,” he said. “Went as close to the hub as Lydis dared. Spotted over a hundred of the sites over a nine-hundred-billion-square-mile area. Some of the structures were still inflated after all this time; others were flat as corncakes. It was pretty obvious what they’d been up to. But we couldn’t be absolutely certain till we made a landing and deployed the climbers. We managed to visit four locations—brought back some goodies for the archaeologists, too.”
“And,” Bram said, knowing the answer, “what were they?”
“Camps,” Trist said promptly. “Work camps. They must have lived there deciyears at a time, repairing antenna elements, installing their own equipment to fill in the breaks.”
“They were trying to make the system operational again?”
“That’s the only conclusion that can be drawn.”
Bram leaned back and stared into space for a moment. “That would have been a tremendous undertaking, even with a work force of tens of thousands—or many times more than that, it may turn out. It would have meant committing themselves for generations.”
“They were willing to do that, apparently. Bram, can you imagine the conditions they must have endured in those inflatable camps? The ones closer to the horizontal gravity sectors were built out on scaffolding—with no place even to stand for kilodays, except for the tents and stringers. Dangling over eternity all that time while they worked. It wasn’t much better closer to the hub. Trying to adjust to the crazy angles, under heavy gravity with your weight tearing sideways at you. With the danger of falling with every step and an awareness of the penalties if you did. We didn’t set foot within ten million miles of some of the farther camps, and I can tell you, I still didn’t like it!”
Trist hadn’t heard about the tails. Bram told him.
“Whew!” Trist whistled. “That explains it. You’d need a tail to work in a place like that.”
“Ame thinks they may have been a species other than man. But the verdict isn’t in yet.”
“A new species to supersede man. I’m not sure I like that idea. It was one thing to deal with the idea that human beings were extinct. We’ve more or less accepted that from the beginning. But the idea of another species taking our place—that’s something else again. Gives us competition in this neck of the galaxy, Bram. The planet Earth may be overrun by these long-footed characters. Where do we go, then?”
“They may be our cousins.”
“Makes no difference. The fact that they were getting ready to patch up Original Man’s beacon tells us all we need to know. Different species or different order entirely, they were preparing to spread their own image through the universe. It bears out that old idea we used to talk about long ago, before the Nar sped us on our way to this galaxy—that there comes a time in the life of every intelligent species when it begins to dawn on them that the means is at hand for species immortality.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Now we’ve got three cases. Original Man, broadcasting his genetic code to the Virgo cluster and beyond. The Nar, sending us to the heart of their own galaxy to do the same job for them. And now these people with tails. Except that they’re a little premature. They were able to take advantage of an installation that somebody else built. Bram, I just had another thought!”
“What is it?”
’You said that these tailed people weren’t immortal. Neither were the Nar. Neither was Original Man when he started broadcasting. What if this compulsion to spread around your genetic code is a stage that a species goes through before it attains personal immortality?”
“Hmmm. The night doesn’t seem so dark, then. The universe isn’t a bottomless hole. There’s time. Time to travel to the ends of the universe yourself someday. At least that’s what the little nagging voice inside you would be saying. Trist, you don’t suppose…”
“That Original Man never became extinct? That he simply gave up, packed up and went home after he’d been infected with eternal life long enough for the idea to sink in?”
“Yes. And then, somewhere along the way, acquired an immunity to immortality. Forgot things. Evolved into a new species. And then one day set out on a path to the stars again. And found the old beacon.”
“As I said before, it hardly matters. Whoever they were, they’re not us.”
“I’d like to send an expedition to one of the inner disks. And to the next disk ahead of us in orbit—see how close a duplicate it is to this one. We may have landed in the wrong place.”
“I’d give my spare shirt to go. But Bram, there isn’t time—”
“I’m going to call a tree meeting and call for a vote to stay here an extra year. We’re digging up treasure troves of material—whole libraries of it, and we’ve only scratched the surface. I want to get as much material transferred to Yggdrasil as we can. We can’t abandon a working party here, no matter how many eager volunteers there’d be. Not when the only habitable body in the known universe also happens to be our only starship. And there’s no telling when we’ll be back this way. It may be centuries before we grow another Yggdrasil and outfit it and can spare a population to crew it.”
“A year.” Trist furrowed his brow. “I’ll have to work out some orbits. The distances are huge, of course, but it’s not like ordinary interplanetary travel here … hmmm, we’ve got a body whose own orbital period is a year as our catapult, with no gravity to speak of to fight … add a modest boost…deboost to end up a hundred twenty degrees ahead … and for the return trip, a retro-orbit to lose orbital energy and rendezvous with your starting point in somewhat less than a year.” He gave Bram an engaging smile. “But I get Nen to go along with me as a medical officer.”
“Done,” Bram said.
Mim appeared with a tray. “Don’t worry, it isn’t tea,” she said. “Just old-fashioned cornbrew and some snacks.”