Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

CHAPTER 1
     
    The tree named Yggdrasil plunged toward the heart of the galaxy at very nearly the speed of light, safe within a cone of shadow from a sleet of radiation that otherwise would have charred it to ash in microseconds.
    It still clutched the remains of a comet in its roots, so water was not yet a problem. But light and gravity were strangely wrong, interfering with its tropisms.
    Yggdrasil was a very confused tree.
    Ahead, always, was a funnel of dancing sparks. Behind was a terribly bright light. Yggdrasil’s senses told it that it was in the terrifying grip of a one-g gravitational field that was tugging it toward that unnatural sun. It had been trying for twenty years to escape. But when it tried to turn the reflective surfaces of its leaves toward the perpendicular, something always frustrated it.
    Yet, wonder of wonders, Yggdrasil never fell. An equal and opposite force applied to a small region of its central trunk prevented that. Yggdrasil knew in its vegetable fashion that a girdle of foreign substance encircled its waist, but its senses were not adequate to tell it about the tether and the gargantuan turnbuckle that anchored the girdle.
    A strange thing had happened to the stars as well. They swarmed around the tree in rainbow hoops of color— violet, then blues, greens, and yellows ahead; orange and progressively darker reds behind. Both ahead and behind, blind disks had blossomed as the stars marched in both directions through the spectrum and disappeared. The rearward blind spot was larger. Over the years it had kept expanding, compressing the rainbow hoops and pushing them forward until now they circled the coruscating funnel of sparks like concentric halos.
    Scores of times Yggdrasil had tried to pick a yellow target star, only to have it change colors and vanish from the universe.
    Only the odd pursuing sun had not dopplered through the spectrum. It remained fixed in color and distance, seeming to grow ever brighter against the expanding dark region behind it.
    Fretting, Yggdrasil tried to concentrate on growing one of its branches. Its crown—since it had been prevented from spinning—was no longer perfectly symmetrical, and this was a branch that needed to catch up. Fortunately, the direction of the tug of gravity was always a guide. Growth, Yggdrasil knew in its simple wisdom, was supposed to be perpendicular.
    There was commensal life within the cavities of the errant branch, but it was too insignificant to be noticed. Yggdrasil ignored it. The only verities were light, gravitation, and water.
     
    “I think Yggdrasil needs a tranquilizer again,” the tree systems officer said. “It’s starting to show signs of trauma.”
    Bram set down the carton of housewares he had been packing and turned to face her. “Are you sure?” he said.
    “I’m afraid so, Captain,” she said. “The monitors indicate enzymatic reactions in the heartwood, and gallic acid’s showing in the contents of the parenchymal cells.”
    Mim, coming through into the observation veranda with another armload of empty cartons, heard the exchange, “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Right in the middle of moving week!”
    Bram shot her an affectionate glance. Mim was well past middle age now—the mirror showed fewer gray hairs every day—but her handsome face still preserved some of the lines it had acquired during their four decades together. To Bram’s way of thinking, the lines gave her a strength of character and a beauty that he had come to love; it was hard to imagine Mim without them, but youthing was inevitable, and he supposed he would have to get used to it.
    “Have you tried readjusting the auxin balance?” Bram said.
    The tree systems officer looked worried. “We’re close to the limit on that, Captain,” she said. “Any more might be dangerous. Yggdrasil knows it’s edge-on to something that looks like a sun to it and that half of its crown’s in shadow. We can only deceive it so far, then the separate deceptions start to contradict each other. Too many auxins on the lit side, and we could have a very sick tree.”
    She waited diffidently for his response. The tree systems officer was a grandchild of Jao and Ang, and like many of her contemporaries she tended to treat Bram like a monument. She had not even been born yet when he had begun the immortality project. But Bram knew that she was a first-rate botanist, and he trusted her judgment.
    Bram sighed. “All right. I suppose we’d better