He looked up in annoyance. His irascibility was at odds with his boyish face and slender form. “Wrong with it? Nothing was wrong with it! It was pregnant, that’s all!”
“Oh.”
“Don’t know what the fool woman expected, letting her pet run free like that. All the half-tame Cuddlies living in the branches. She said she thought her precious was too old—past the age of fertility.”
“But that’s right!” Mim said. “She wanted to mate her Mittens with our Loki … oh, about six ship-years ago, and Mittens was past the breeding age even then.”
“That so?” Doc Pol said. He raised a faunlike eyebrow. “Well, let’s have a look at your little feller.”
For the next ten minutes, Doc Pol poked, prodded, tapped the tiny chest, shone lights into eyes and ears, managed to insert a thermometer abaft the twitching tail, and peered down the pink throat while Methuselah tried earnestly to bite him.
At last he released the Cuddly, who immediately settled in Mim’s arms, clinging with all his might.
“Well?” Bram said.
“He’s picked up a virus,” Doc Pol said.
“Virus? How? What kind of virus? What could he have possibly caught?”
Doc Pol fiddled with his instruments and took his time about replying.
“Immortality,” he said. “There’s a lot of it going around.”
Ame set it up. “Molecular taxonomy,” she said. “The whole department’s pitching in. We’ve got a team working on amino acid sequencing, another working on protein sequencing, and Doc Pol and his apprentices are helping us to measure the antigenic distances between humans, Cuddlies, and a number of primates whose serum albumin we’ve been able to clone from our diskworld biological samples. And, of course, we’re doing extensive comparative anatomy studies.”
“All of a sudden we’re getting a rash of similar cases reported by Cuddly owners,” Bram said. “Some of the children may have spread it after getting their booster shots. Or it may have been going on a long time. People today aren’t really very familiar with the concept of aging. Oh, they understand it intellectually. But it wouldn’t occur to a lot of them to wonder why their pets aren’t getting old.”
Ame bit her lip. “We really should have gotten around to a study of the Cuddlies sooner. But there was just so much for us to wade through in all those records and the frozen molecular zoo we took away with us from the diskworld…”
“How soon?” Bram asked.
“I’ll have an answer for you in a few days.”
“The Cuddlies are Homo post-sapiens,” Ame announced.
A wave of shock went through the chamber. A reporter for the datanet said, “You mean these little animals are Original Man?”
“We believe they’re a divergent species growing out of the extinct Homo sapiens branch, yes,” Ame said.
An uproar started in the chamber. Ame looked helplessly around at her colleagues for support. She hadn’t expected a mob this size when she had told datanet that she had a modest announcement to make. The announcement had had to be moved from the department’s conference room to a small adjacent auditorium.
“What does that mean?” somebody demanded.
Ame faced them squarely. “It means that during the time of extinction, whatever Homo sapiens stock briefly survived on earth underwent adaptive radiation. Man himself would not have survived long, but a number of subbranches might have evolved to fit different ecological niches. The Earth would have become a very different place. Size and brainpower might not have been survival characteristics. Size certainly wasn’t. There might have been back-mutations for such characteristics as tails and fur, night vision. The ancestors of the Cuddlies were among those divergent species. They were small, quick, burrowing omnivores. We know the rat-people considered them pests and tried to exterminate them. But they spread to the diskworlds as stowaways on spaceships, got into the granaries, learned to survive in pockets of trapped air. And they had millions of years after that to evolve into their present form—able to live in vacuum, to do without breathing for long periods of time, like Earth’s extinct sea mammals.” She shook her head ruefully. “It was obvious that the Cuddlies were terrestroid mammals, but we failed to take the step further that would have identified them as primates.”
The datanet reporter waved for attention. “Couldn’t the Cuddlies be descended from some other primate? Weren’t there things like monkeys and apes? Lemurs?”
Ame shook her head. “We know the Cuddlies are hominids from the comparative anatomy studies—the teeth, for instance. But more important is the amino acid and protein sequencing. Molecular analysis shows that Cuddlies are as far removed from apes and monkeys as humans are. The cytochrome c sequence in man and Cuddly is almost identical.” She paused, got some encouragement from Doc Pol, who was sitting behind her, and continued. “And there is no immunological distance at all.”
“Is that why Cuddlies were able to catch the immortality virus?” asked someone else, probably a Cuddly owner.
“Yes,” Ame said. “They’re our very close cousins. They’re what we could become.”
At the back of the auditorium, Jun Davd turned to Bram with an amused smile. “How does it feel, Bram? You brought us across thirty-seven million light-years, hoping to find Original Man, and when we found him, we made him our house pet.”
“We’re Original Man, though, aren’t we, in a sense?” Bram said. “And if you want to look at it the way Ame just did, he’s descended from us.”
The datanet reporter persisted in his questions. “Are you saying that we’re going to evolve into little furry animals like Cuddlies, then?”
“No,” Ame said. “Evolution doesn’t repeat itself. We still have a long way to go. And so have they.”
The Large Magellanic Cloud lay before them, a ruddy tiara spread across the night. From only a few tens of thousands of light-years away, it was brilliant, the teeming stars laced with torches of red fire.
“It’s lovely,” Mim said, holding Bram’s hand. “What a breathtaking sky we’re going to live under.”
“Yes, the skies will be spectacular,” Jun Davd said. “That red nebula at the end—the Tarantula, Original Man called it—will be brighter than Earth’s full moon. And of course the Milky Way will be huge, and we’ll see it almost head on. It will fill half the night sky—almost as large as we’re seeing it now.”
He switched on the rearward view for a moment to show them what he meant. The heartbreaking swirl of humankind’s birthplace blazed against the darkness, a splendid pinwheel that revealed nothing of the deadly mill that was churning within her.
Bram felt the ache of its loss. “We’ll be able to keep watch over it,” he said with a smile he hoped was on straight.
“Don’t look so glum,” Jao boomed. “Not a dragonfly click coming from it, and it’s been a hundred thousand years.”
They had been fleeing for twenty-two years, ship time, and three years previously the dragonfly radio emissions had ceased—almost abruptly because of the extreme temporal condensation of the gamma factor they had built up by then. It meant that the dragonfly civilization had ceased to exist some ten to twenty thousand years after they had departed the galaxy and that, after a hundred thousand years, there was still no sign of it. For the first year of those three, Bram had lived in terror that one day Trist’s listening post would pick up the clicking sounds that would mean that somewhere a dragonfly planet had survived and struggled back to the technological level again.
“You’re right,” he said with returning cheer. “It’s the Cuddlies’ turn now, on their diskworlds. They’ve got twenty-six million years to make the most of their opportunity. And who knows—before their time is up, we may even learn how to shut off galactic dynamos. In that case, we could go back and save them.”