Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

passenger boat had picked up during its long unreeling.
    Bram squinted and confirmed his guess. The line the service frame was hauling behind it had plenty of slack, bellying outward at an arc that must have carried its invisible portion at least fifty miles into space. Though tethered at its point of origin, and obeying the laws of physics itself, the minute tug it exerted had not yet materially altered the trajectory of the service frame.
    The passengers waved as the frame drifted by, but the work crew was too occupied to wave back. “Why aren’t they stopping?” Kerthin asked.
    “You’ll see in a minute,” Bram said.
    “Oh, good gods, you too?” she exploded.
    A Nar crewman clinging with all five legs to the putative top of the polyhedral frame was swinging a length of free line with a grapnel hook attached to it around and around his splayed top. Skillfully he played out the line little by little, keeping it safely away from the outward-looping portion of the cable. He’d timed the arcs nicely. Bram watched as the line intersected the cable from which the passenger boat was dangling and wrapped itself around it. The grappling hook fetched up against the cable in a final spasm of angular momentum, and then the low-friction filament began to slide. The Nar roping artist hauled in smartly, keeping tension on the unwinding line until the grappling hook engaged. Now the service frame moved outward with a quick spurt of its jet, while the Nar let the guy rope slide through his grip. The bellying line, whose far end was attached to the rim of the tree crown, straightened out as somebody began to winch it in.
    The Nar lasso specialist let go at the last possible moment and allowed the line to twang taut. The little shiver of momentum was hardly noticeable within the passenger cabin; the tether lowered from the trunk had already matched g-forces.
    It took the high-speed winch at the rim less than a quarter hour to reel the boat in while the service frame followed behind. Willing tentacles snagged the lines and made them fast. It was a primitive way to bring in a spacecraft for docking, but when he thought it over, Bram had to concede that it made sense. It was simply the application of known forces, just as was maneuvering by rocket power. In fact, brute muscle power and simple mechanical forces were probably more accurate and economical. It was a good thing the Nar hadn’t forgotten the skills learned in their days of wind-driven sailing vessels.
    The boat was resting on a wooden ledge carved out of the trunk. When the Nar ground crew was satisfied that all was secure, they cast off the hawser bound to the faraway trunk. Released from its vector of forces, the cable began a slow pendulum swing outward.
    The boat was winched from the ledge into a dome-shaped vacuole that was a hundred feet across. Airtight hangar doors in the shape of vast triangular sections flapped shut and sealed at the center. Air billowed into the vacuole with a force powerful enough to rock the boat and knock one unwary Nar workman off his tentacles before he could latch on to something. Bram knew it was safe when the Nar crew began peeling off their double-ended space suits. A moment later the flight attendant announced that they could leave the vessel.
    A welcoming committee was waiting for them inside the next chamber: a half dozen men and women in scanty shipboard attire. They looked for friends among the several dozen disembarked passengers and in a few minutes were exchanging multiple embraces.
    Orris and Marg had not been among the greeters. Trist’s friend Lilla was, and Trist and Nen were babbling eagerly at her. Bram took the opportunity to look around the chamber he was in.
    It was vast—bigger than the vacuole that had been converted into an air lock. The tree’s simulated gravity had forced a generally domelike shape, and the floor was fairly flat, with a little help from carpenters. The dome overhead had a burnished velvety sheen, lovely in the glow of the biolights that seeded the chamber. The air was clean and forest-fresh.
    “What do you think of it?” he asked Kerthin.
    “What did he call it—the world tree?”
    “Yggdrasil,” Bram said.
    “It’ll do,” she said, quite seriously. She sounded like a prospective buyer considering its merits.
    “Do for what?”
    She presented a face to him that was totally devoid of humor. “As a way to start a new world,” she said.
     
    CHAPTER 8
     
    Over a thousand people