Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

greatest actress,” Nen said with a laugh. “I’m working as a med tech now. At the Compound infirmary.” She shrugged. “It’s useful work, and it’s interesting. Better than hanging around on allowance, anyway.”
    “She’s too modest,” Trist said. “She practically runs the place.”
    “What are you doing these days?” Bram asked.
    “I’m in the physics group,” Trist said. “With our old friend Smeth.”
    “How is he?”
    “You’ll see him at the shindy. Grown oracular beyond his years. He’s trying to calcify himself into a monument, and you know, given a few more feathers in his cap and a lot more gray hairs, he might just do it.”
    “He’s doing well, then?”
    “He has a first-rate mind for plasma physics, you have to hand him that.”
    “What’s happening in your project lately, anyway?”
    “I’ll let Smeth tell you that. And tell you and tell you and tell you. If you’re unwary enough to get collared by him, that is. No shoptalk right now. We’re here to have fun.” He slipped an arm around Nen and gave her a fond squeeze.
    “Who do you know in the tree?” Bram asked.
    “One of the fellows in our team decided to emigrate. Giving up the rigors of intellectual pursuit and signing on for the bucolic life.”
    “Juxt One is hardly a frontier society.”
    “No … they’ve had several centuries to become civilized. But there’s a lot more openings for humans lately.”
    “We brought Lilla and Jao a little going-away present,” Nen said, partially unfolding the wrappings around a cylindrical object and unfurling a couple of feet of it. “It’s a wall hanging to brighten up their quarters during the trip. We got it from an art shop in the new extension. It’s painted with hibernating pigment fungi. Each layer is activated by the decay products of the previous layer so that over a period of several years you get eight different designs. All of them planetary scenes to remind them of home.”
    “That way there’s a new picture before you have time to get tired of the old one,” Trist offered. “If the humidity in the tree isn’t too different from what the art shop calculated, then the last design shouldn’t appear till they reach their destination. Keep ‘em from getting bored on the trip.”
    “I’m afraid we didn’t think of anything as imaginative as that for Orris and Marg,” Bram said. “Just a candy plant.”
    Kerthin was carrying the covered pot in her holdall. Bram glanced her way, expecting her to show it, but she was staring glumly out the viewdome, paying little attention to the conversation.
    “If I know Orris, though,” Bram said hastily, “he’ll tap it for the ethyl.”
    They laughed politely, and then a few last-minute passengers came aboard and the jitney started up with a mild hum of electronics.
     
    The trip into orbit was uneventful, made up of bland routines designed to tell passengers that it was no more exciting than being reeled across an ocean in a cable pod. Trist, whose job had taken him to Lowstation before, actually napped. But to Bram, who had never been in space, every moment was an adventure.
    First he was led to a yielding nest that accepted his contours and, once a little shifting and wriggling had provided an average, jelled into shape. In the nest beside him, Kerthin lay rigid. By craning his neck over the edge, Bram could look down at rank after rank of similar nests projecting like paddles from what would become the deck of the ferry during reentry but was now a sheer cliff of dizzying height, ascended in an openwork elevator cage. Transferring oneself from the cage to the couch was the tricky part for some humans; Kerthin had kept her eyes squeezed shut, but the Nar flight attendants had been very helpful. Bram supposed that all the nests swiveled to the horizontal when the craft changed attitude. The safety nets between the levels of nests—rigged, Bram was sure, to assuage human anxieties—would then become irrelevant curtains dividing the rows and probably would be drawn open.
    The giant palm that pressed him into his nest during takeoff was gentler than he had expected. There was a moment of weightlessness after the outer craft separated—a restraining web kept him from floating away— then the ferry engines kicked in. He was lucky enough to have a window near his face, and he strained to catch sight of the leaflike boosters as they tumbled away and looped over for the long glide down.
    Then, half an orbit