Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

at Bram and turned around in his seat to adjust his safety harness.
    The two-tone crown of the tremendous tree began to slide from view. The line of green, Bram noticed, was keeping pace with the ponderous rotation as millions of leaves turned over ahead of it and turned back again behind it.
    Kerthin seemed just as fascinated as he was. She kept her eyes on the colossal shrub until it was gone. She licked her lip and turned to Bram with moisture glistening on it. “If only we had one of those,” she said.
    “We?”
    “The human race. We could migrate to another star and start out again on our own. Away from the Nar.”
    “We’d have to travel at least a hundred light-years to get to a habitable planet that wasn’t already settled by the Nar,” Bram said reasonably. “At no more than about seven percent of the speed of light. And when our descendants got there, fourteen hundred years later, they’d probably find that the Nar had arrived there ahead of them.”
    She gave him a strange look. “Maybe there’s someplace closer,” she said.
     
    “We’ll land on the trunk,” the attendant was saying. “It would be too dangerous to attempt to dock on the outer branches. At one hundred and fifty miles from the axis of rotation, we’d acquire one gravity immediately, at the moment of contact. I’m sure you can all appreciate the wisdom of avoiding that kind of brush. But the trunk is only twenty miles in diameter at its thickest, so that no point along its surface is more than approximately ten miles from the center of rotation. For all practical purposes, gravity—if we can call it that—is negligible anywhere along its length. We’ll be landing at about the midpoint, by the way, so you needn’t worry about our colliding with either canopy. We’ll have miles and miles of leeway for maneuvering.”
    “How are we getting to the tip, then?” somebody grumbled. “Do we have to transfer to another vehicle?”
    “No, we’ll stay inside this one all the way,” the attendant said in a voice that, despite the nonhuman way in which it was produced, suggested smugness.
    “But how?” another passenger cried.
    “You’ll see when the time comes,” the attendant replied. “If you’ll all think about it, I’m sure you’ll realize that there’s a very simple method by which we can acquire the one-gravity force of the outer rotation period gradually and then dock at our final destination. I think I can promise you an interesting experience.”
    “How? Tell us!” several cries went up. But the attendant was enjoying his little moment of suspense.
    “Like children,” Kerthin said. “Guessing games and treats. That’s what they’ve brought us to.”
    “He’s only trying to make it more fun for us,” Bram said.
    The passenger boat continued to drop.
    Dropping was the way Bram’s perceptions interpreted the motion now, as did the perceptions of the people around him. The up-down sense had been reinforced by the feeble but regular bursts of the braking jets under their feet.
    So the astonishing horizon that now began to rise through the clear viewdome became the distant edge of a flat plain—a green and silver forest that stretched for hundreds of miles before it was cut off by the black knife-edge of space.
    He knew it was an illusion. He was looking down a vertical wall of greenery, not across a forest landscape. The g forces were outward from the center of that vast canopy of leaves. But the seat of his pants kept contradicting his common sense.
    The horizon marched toward him as the passenger boat continued its descent. There was enough curvature across the tree crown to do that. Now the down-sloping plain was hidden behind the skyline. He appeared to be looking uphill toward the shallow arc of the crest. But the passenger boat was not going to land among those mighty branches. It would fall past the fringes of the crown at a safe distance.
    The mound of silvery green rose up and filled the universe. They had dropped past the edge. Now Bram could see the flat underside of the umbrella. Close up, the circumference wasn’t the geometrically perfect curve he had seen from afar. Great twisting growths poked into space, any one of them big enough to have swallowed up a small city in its foliage. But the tree averaged out the mass.
    The boat dropped another forty miles and, with a long, finely tuned burn of its thrusters, hovered. Bram drank in the tremendous sight.
    Above, the roof of foliage