Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

them, with a floor area of … care to do the honors, Bram, old chum?”
    “They don’t use the branches,” Kerthin said unexpectedly. “Except for travel tubes and way stations. They leave the tree mostly alone. It’s a life-support system. It has to stay healthy. They probably use less than one percent of it. The trunk for low gravity. And the tips of some of the twigs and branchlets for living space. But its mostly wild growth in between.”
    Bram looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t realize you knew so much about star trees,” he said. “I thought you weren’t interested.”
    “Oh, I heard someone talking about them,” she said, and fell silent.
    Some of the other passengers were still pestering the attendant. “When we reach the end of the line, we’ll be dangling in midspace, between the roots and the crown. Miles and miles from anything. What happens then?”
    “Wait and see,” the Nar said.
    Kerthin made a disgusted sound. “More guessing games,” she said.
    The boat picked up speed as the cable unwound, almost—but not quite—falling. Descent had to be somewhat slower than what would have been the normal rate of “fall” in order to maintain tension on the cable. The differential was great enough to give the passengers noticeable weight—weight that increased proportionally—as the great circle around which they were being swung grew in diameter.
    They had not made a full revolution when the line played out, buffered by the skill of the winch operator one hundred and fifty miles above them and by the elasticity of the viral filament itself.
    The boat swayed gently at the end of its line, an upside-down captive balloon straining for the stars. Everybody craned for a look at the strange, green, topsy-turvy horizon that was their destination.
    Its curvature was quite noticeable, of course, dropping off sharply in either direction. But the diameter of the foliage crown still put it in the same class as a good-sized planetoid.
    Or would have, if it had been a complete ball instead of an oblate hemisphere. The boat was suspended midway between two such slices of world—the halves of a yoyo, as Trist had described the shape—and it was rather like hovering within some enormous canyon. A canyon with a log bridge across it halfway up and stars at the top and the bottom.
    “Yggdrasil,” Trist said.
    “What?”
    “Don’t you know your Norse mythology? Yggdrasil, the world tree.”
    “There are so many different legends,” Bram apologized. “I’m afraid they all got mixed up in my head when I was a child.”
    “Its roots spanned the earth and the heavens,” Trist said. “And when at the end of the world the universe was devoured by fire, a new race of men emerged from its wood.”
    “Thoughtful of Original Man to give it to us, then.” Bram laughed. “But you’ve got the story wrong. We emerged from radio waves.”
    “The tree could nourish us through a transition, though, couldn’t it?” Nen said, joining in. “Yggdrasil was supposed to have given the water of life.”
    “Well, this one will certainly do that for the Juxt One colonists,” Bram said.
    “Look, they’re coming for us,” Kerthin said, touching his arm.
    Bram followed her gaze and saw a bright dot of flame perched on the inverted horizon. It moved to a point fractionally within the green arc, burned for another minute, and winked out. He kept his eyes on the spot where it had been, trying to hold his line of sight, and after a few minutes was rewarded by the appearance of a polyhedral framework that had moving dots clinging to it. The dots resolved themselves into a Nar work crew dressed for space.
    Some day, Bram thought, someone would design a space suit for humans—if humans ever became numerous enough to be more than mere baggage! What would it look like? It would have to have a transparent dome at one end, for the head. Accordion joints for knees and elbows. Twisting around might be awkward. The Nar anatomy was better designed for space. A Nar space suit looked for all the world like two silvery gloves joined by a transparent wristlet that provided 360-degree vision. No sore necks for them!
    The service frame floated past at a respectful distance. Why weren’t they braking? Of course! For the same reason they weren’t being swung outward by the line they must be trailing. Having canceled their own centrifugal motion with respect to the tree, they wanted nothing to do with the one-g force the