Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

tentacles. Bram followed the line with his eyes to where it ran back to a massive spool mounted within a skeleton housing on the bare trunk. There were several bubble structures seemingly growing out of the bark at that point, and dozens of space-suited Nar swarmed around the spot.
    The two decapods landed with the tiniest of jolts on the overhead dome and clung to one of the radial struts that framed it. Some of their momentum must have been transferred to the passenger craft, but it was so relatively slight that Bram, though he was watching for it, could not detect any alteration in the boat’s hovering position.
    The workmen waved at the passengers inside the cabin and got friendly waves in return. They set about attaching the hook to the large ring at the top of the dome where the struts met. Bram had noticed the ring when he had boarded the vehicle, but he hadn’t been able to figure out what it was for. He had thought it might be an antenna.
    The cable that he saw looping away from the hook did not seem particularly thick. It was about the diameter of Bram’s thumb. But if it was made of the same long-chain viral filament thread that was used for bubble car trams, then it had strength to spare.
    The space-suited pair got the hook attached, then retreated hastily along separate struts to the perimeter of the cabin. They were showing the cable a lot of respect.
    The looping thread slowly straightened itself out. So some of the workmen’s momentum had been transferred to the boat. Bram glanced at the trunk overhead and saw that it was indeed some tens of meters farther away.
    There was the smallest of jolts as the last of the slack was taken up, and the passenger boat began a pendulum swing that carried it to a point below the opposite side of the giant spool above and then back again. The cable must have been winding out somewhat to ease the shock, because Bram could see the ceiling of bark retreating farther before there was a final jolt. And now, he realized, he weighed something again. Not very much—probably not more than a few ounces. But it was funny the way the body could tell.
    In the seat ahead, Trist was testing the sensation by letting a small object from his pocket drift to the floor and timing its fall. “Don’t mind me,” he said cheerfully. “We physicists are a compulsive lot.”
    The work crew above reeled them in partway so that the hook handlers would have less distance to climb. The pair gave a final wave to the occupants of the cabin, then swarmed up the cable.
    The boat hung there for some minutes while the pendulum motion damped itself out. The Nar attendant had a dialog with the pilot through his glove. Then the descent began.
    Yes, Bram agreed, it was an eminently simple and straightforward way to match rotational forces gradually with the outermost branches. And yes, it promised to be an interesting experience.
    The attendant was being bombarded with questions from his passengers.
    “What happens if the line breaks?”
    “It never has.”
    “Yes, but what if? ”
    The Nar laughed: an explosive exhalation of air from the modified alveoli that formed the vocal syrinx. “The transfer vehicle can develop accelerations of up to one-fifth gravity. At this point we could easily cancel the outward motion. We would simply start over again.”
    “What about when we pass the one-fifth-g mark?” This was from Trist, pausing in his experiments to help the attendant with his lecture.
    “There are crews waiting at the rim who could snare us and reel us in. If worse came to worst, they would send a rescue ship after us at several g’s acceleration. Our direction would be along a choice of degrees in the known plane of a circle. They would catch up in a few hours. I assure you there is no danger.”
    Everybody was watching the wall of greenery slide by, some twenty or thirty miles to the side. Bram could pick out no details at this distance other than the half-buried contours of the main branches, radiating outward like gargantuan spokes. If there were any artificial structures tucked among them, they were invisible to the naked eye.
    Trist whistled. “If you hollowed out just one of those branches, it could house a population of millions. Hmmm. Think of it as a tower, a hundred fifty miles high and maybe five or six miles in diameter at the roof and tapering to a half mile at the base. Conic sections. Remember your middle school math? Figure fifty-foot levels—fifteen thousand of