“Oh, Bram,” Mim said. “What a wonderful thought!”
“But crazy,” Jao said. “A crazy dream.”
“Yes,” Bram said. “I’ve been told that before.”
Jun Davd switched on the forward view again. The torches of the Large Cloud shone forth once more. “We’ll be safe in there,” he said. “You can see there’s no hypermass giving it shape. There are fifteen billion stars in there—old, young, and in-between. We ought to be able to find one small yellow star that the human race can call home.”
“Amen to that,” Bram said.
He smiled at Mim and squeezed the hand clasping his. Methuselah pressed against his leg. Humans and posthumans drew closer together to share an ancient tribal comfort. They stood in sacramental silence as the living tree that bore them hurtled out of the dark toward the cloud of fire.
Epilogue
SECOND GENESIS
“Why am I different?” the little decapod said.
He was about rib-high to Bram, hardly out of babyhood, his saucer eyes disproportionately large around his waist, the undersides of his stubby tentacles still an immature mauve. Theth-theth, Bram had named him when the time had come to fish him out of the nursery pool. In the Small Language, it was a derivative of Voth. Mim had suggested the name: Little Theth.
Bram laughed and ruffled the velvety inner surface of a tentacle. He could feel the words that were trying to take shape there, gaining in form and lucidity with every passing day.
“Because I’m made of human stuff and you’re made of Nar stuff,” he said tolerantly. “We’ve been through it before.”
“Just one more time,” the small being begged.
“You want me to tell you the Story,” Bram said.
“Yes,” Theth-theth said contentedly, and snuggled up against Bram. Methuselah, trying to insert himself into the group, nestled against the little decapod’s other side, making a sandwich of him, and Theth-theth stroked him with a lazy tentacle.
Bram sighed and settled back against the thick bole of the oak tree. There were oak trees now—whole forests of them—and this one was over a hundred years old. It had been planted, he remembered, the very day the bio-project to resurrect the Nar had begun.
He looked out across the wide valley, green with the grass and trees of Earth that had taken root here and flourished. A stream ran down the slopes, sparkling silver, and he could see a herd of zebra pausing to drink at one of the wide pools. The air was alive with the songs of birds.
Haven was a fair world, its contours softened by weather but barren of life until the coming of humanity. Now, after more than a century, the green cloak of vegetation was beginning to spread across the blue oceans to the other continents, and the oceans themselves were exploding with life—plankton and small fish, so far. Someday there would be whales, Bram thought.
The sky was a rich blue, piled high with fleecy white clouds. Bram could see Yggdrasil near the zenith, a bright star visible in daytime. People still lived there. Yggdrasil had scattered its seeds in the cometary belt, and other space poplars were growing there. In a couple of centuries, it would be time to harvest them; humankind would need more starships by then. The shuttles brought from the Father World were still in good repair, but a move was already afoot to start handcrafting orbital spacecraft here on Haven.
The sun overhead was warm and yellow—a perfect match for lost Sol. Jun Davd had searched long and hard before he was satisfied, and he had chosen well.
The twittering voices of children, both human and Nar, came floating on the summer breeze from somewhere close at hand. Bram turned his head and saw a group of them playing a children’s game. In hide-and-seek, the Nar children were never “it”; their 360-degree vision and eyes that never closed gave them an unfair advantage. They were better at footraces, too. But the human children were better at playing catch and at such games as jacks, so it all evened out.
Some of the older human children, he saw, were wearing touch sleeves and the lightweight induction helmets that Jao’s project had designed. It was a first crude step that filtered some of the touch language into the speech center of the human brain through mediation circuits. It would do for a start—human and decapod children could begin to learn the Great Language together. At this point, no Nar child in this first bioengineered crop was much older than Theth-theth.
Theth-theth tugged at Bram’s arm with an encircling tentacle; Bram could feel the impatient rippling of the cilia.
“The Story!” the little decapod piped. “You promised, Bramfather!”
“Eh? I’m sorry. I must have been daydreaming. Too much lunch.”
He was comfortably full and heavy from the Safepassage Day picnic; Mim had gone off to pick wild flowers with Ang and Lydis, and some of the men were playing a game of quoits in the grass, but he had not had the ambition to join them.
“The Message,” the small flowerlike creature prompted. “How the race of Nar entrusted their faithful humans with it, but there was no one to receive it after the worlds ended. And—and how the humans sailed between Scylla and Charybdis, and how Yggdrasil saved the human race when the whole universe caught fire and burned up, and how the humans used the Message themselves to bring a new race of Nar into the world, just as the Nar had done for them—”
“Slow down a minute!” Bram laughed. “It seems to me that you’re on the way to telling the whole Story yourself!”
“Go ahead, Bramfather,” Theth-theth said. “You tell it really!”
Bram took a deep breath and began. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful planet called the Father World…”
He was winding the tale down, with Theth-theth’s tentacles waving in a pleasurable trance, when Jao came hiking up the slope.
“There you are!” Jao blared at them. He bent to scratch Methuselah’s head and offer a palm and bared forearm to Theth-theth. “Here you go, youngster, a little something for Safepassage Day.”
He produced a miniature plumb bob molded of gaily painted polysugar. Theth-theth accepted it and said, “Thank you, Jao-uncle. May I save it till later? Mama-mu Mim says I’ve had enough candy for now.”
“Sure you can,” Jao said.
Bram took charge of the candy bob, while Theth-theth ran off to play with the other children. Methuselah scampered off after him. The two were inseparable.
“Have to do something about the way Safepassage Day runs through the year—adjust it to Haven’s seasons,” Jao said. “Doesn’t seem right celebrating it in the summertime, anyway. It ought to stay put.”
“The children don’t care,” Bram said. “They don’t stay children long enough to be confused by it. For Theth-theth, it’s always been a summer holiday.”
Both of them looked over to where the children were playing. Methuselah was getting underfoot, but they were tolerating him. Theth-theth had a tentacle twined around the forearm of a boy wearing a touch sleeve; they seemed to be choosing up sides.
“We’ll have to keep improving the hardware,” Jao said absently. “That induction cap’s too bulky. Maybe something like a permanent implant … a second-generation mediation program … neural cloning. We can’t let them grow away from each other, you know.”
“No,” Bram agreed. “But the real problem is life span.”
They watched the frolicking youngsters, both of them reflecting on the tragedy of Nar mortality. “We could work on it,” Jao said after a while, “but how do you keep them young without suppressing the Change? It would be like preserving a flower to keep it from going to seed. And that’s what you’d have—a preserved flower.”