Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

local star-hopping or intrasystem travel, it would be the other way around.
    “Jao picked it himself,” Bram said. “He insisted on traveling out to the cometary halo with the Nar foresters and choosing the one perfect vacuum poplar in the system.”
    “I remember.” Mim laughed.
    “The Nar’ve spent all these years outfitting it and stocking it for us. I guess it’s as ready as it’ll ever be. The Nar have been generous. They’ve given us everything from a fleet of landing craft to ground vehicles and heavy-duty mining equipment. Factories, distilleries, a complete duplicate of the Father World’s central library, and frozen cell samples of every known life form. They’ve thought of everything.”
    “I hope so.” She shivered. “If we’re all going to be cooped up in the tree together for all those centuries. I hope we won’t get on each other’s nerves.”
    He smiled. “Cooped up is hardly the way to describe it, Mim. The tree’s a fair-size worldlet—bigger than any of the Father World’s moons. We’ll have a lot more elbow room than we did in our old human enclaves.”
    Mim brightened. “We will, won’t we? And we’ll have a bigger population than any we’ve ever known in any single Compound. We won’t get bored with each other.”
    “No, we’ll get comfortable with each other.”
    She squeezed his arm. “I think I’m going to like eternity.”
    “We’ll live in our own little villages at first, in the branch they’ve gotten ready for us. But it will take us at least half the trip to explore the tree, develop it, and tame the wild branches for settlement. We’ll have plenty to do, never fear.”
    “And there’ll be babies, won’t there?” Mim said, softening.
    “The tree’s parasite ecology ought to support a human population of twenty-five thousand or more,” Bram said. “We’ll be well on the way to populating our home planet before we even get there. And the ones who’ve gotten too used to the tree to want to leave it can stay aboard and start exploring our neighbor stars.”
    There was a commotion behind them. They turned to see Smeth, struggling with baggage that kept floating away from him in the zero gravity and haranguing a long-suffering Nar steward.
    “What do you mean, you don’t know where the rest of my luggage is? I have six walker-loads of priceless records and irreplaceable instruments stowed in the cargo hold, and I insist on supervising the transfer personally!”
    The years had turned Smeth into a crochety old man with bent shoulders and a frail pipestem neck. He was still a bachelor. Nobody took his crankiness seriously anymore; he held the affection of the human race because of his work on the probe project.
    The steward twisted his upper tentacles into a corkscrew and untwisted them again in the Nar version of hand-wringing. “I’ll attend to it myself, Smeth-brother,” he said, gliding off at the horizontal.
    Smeth followed him, grumbling. “Nothing ever gets done properly anymore!” He stomped off as well as one can stomp in free fall.
    “Poor Smeth!” Bram said.
    “Poor steward, you mean,” Mim said.
    “I never thought he’d come. I didn’t really believe it till he actually showed up at the shuttleport leading that baggage train.”
    “Practically every human in his department signed up for the trip,” Mim said tartly. “He had to come. He’d have had no one left to preside over!” She relented a little. “Still, I’m glad he’s coming with us. It wouldn’t be the same without him.”
    Bram’s eyes strayed to a viewport farther down the bridge, where Marg and Orris were holding hands like a pair of young lovers. Marg had evolved into the most formidable of dragons these last decades, but Orris saw nothing except the winsome flirt he had first been welded to so long ago.
    “Marg’s talking about having a baby as soon as she gets young enough,” Mim said, following his gaze. “She and Orris are actually picking out names now.”
    “I’m surprised they didn’t have one years ago,” Bram said. “When the restrictions were lifted.”
    “They’d already decided to emigrate by then. I guess like most of the other emigrating couples, they decided to wait till we were actually underway. After all, it doesn’t matter if you get too old when you know your biological clock’s going to run backward again.”
    “Still, they must have had a lot of faith in the immortality project,” Bram said. “That’s surprising,