Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

considering all those early setbacks.”
    There had been a nine year delay in developing one of the crucial segments of heterochronic nucleotide from scratch; Original Man had extracted it from living dragonflies, but the complete dragonfly genome did not exist on the Father World, and the prohibition against it remained in force, with Bram’s total acquiescence.
    Mim squeezed his hand. “Oh, Bram, it still seems so miraculous. Are we really going to be young again?”
    “It’s already begun,” he said. “Do you remember how sick and miserable you were after the injection? That was your body trying to fight off the virus. By now you’re totally infected. The viral DNA’s settling into every cell in your body, where your immune system can’t take exception to it any more.”
    “All that sneezing and itching and swelling! I thought I’d die!”
    “You took it harder than most.” He traced the line of her jaw with his fingertips. “But you’ve lost some wrinkles in the last year, and we’re all a lot more spry than we have any right to be.”
    “Just when I was used to us growing old together,” she said with another squeeze.
    “You’ll have to get used to us growing young together.”
    They had been well into their fifties when they finally had become joined—Bram after a second failed marriage with someone who, he now realized, he had become infatuated with while on the rebound from Kerthin, and Mim after ten years of nursing an ailing Olan Byr. They had seen one another around the Compound and had thought that they were merely good friends, and it had come as a surprise to both of them to realize that the old attraction between them had been rekindled. Mim had needed time to get over the feeling that she was being disloyal to Olan’s memory. Bram had no such qualms. These last twenty years with Mim had been the best years of his life.
    The immortality virus had come too late for Olan, as it had for too many humans. The project had taken almost forty years, and there had been many unexpected difficulties. But a surprising number of oldsters had hung on until Bram’s team had finally succeeded. Jun Davd, his childhood tutor in astronomy, had been one of them. And old Doc Pol, who must have been more than two hundred and a patchwork of cloned transplants, had volunteered to be the first human guinea pig and had won his gamble. Bram had seen him board the shuttle under his own power, with two canes.
    Jao floated over to them with his arm around Ang. The red beard was pure white now, and looked patriarchal. Ang, who had been bent and frail, had started to fill out again and straighten up almost immediately after her immortality injection a year and a half ago. The two had been separated during their middle years, and Jao had had his middle aged fling, but they had been back together for a decade now. “We went through the best years together,” he’d confided to Bram at the time. “Why go looking for something you already have?”
    “A beautiful sight, isn’t it?” Jao commented, thrusting a bearded chin at the spectacle outside.
    “That’s what I was just saying to Bram,” Mim said. “It’s strange to think of that ball of green life hurtling between the galaxies, nurturing almost the entire human race with its air and water.”
    “It’s a well-tested life-support system, Mim,” Jao said. “That’s what originally gave me the idea. But I wasn’t talking about the tree. I was talking about our relativistic hobbyhorse. Beautiful and deadly. You wouldn’t want to be within a couple of hundred miles of it when it’s operating, even with all the baffles along the shaft, but of course we won’t have to be. And the nice thing about relativistic geometry is that the electromagnetic umbrella that’s protecting us up front will automatically open up our cone of safety the faster we go and the fiercer the gamma storm becomes.”
    “Will that contraption really take us home in only five hundred of our treeboard years?” Bram asked hastily, to prevent Jao from launching into an involved technical explanation.
    Jao preened his white beard. “It will after we dive through the center of this galaxy, cut a swath through all the hydrogen clouds we’ll find along the way, and use the mass of the galactic nucleus to fling us up out of the plane toward the Milky Way. You know, theoretically there’s no limit to how closely we could crowd the speed of light if we had enough hydrogen to gulp,