Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

renewed their connection?”
    “For the time being. They had something to say to each other. You can imagine what it is.”
    “I take your meaning, Jun Davd. I’ll try to speed up the evacuation.”
    “It’s hard to abandon what we’ve found of our heritage, I know. But we were going to leave soon, anyway.”
    Bitterness clogged Bram’s voice. “Yes, but we always meant to come back one day. Now…”
    “Yes,” Jun Davd said somberly. “They’ll have spread to the other disks by then. But Bram, we’ve done wonders in the year we’ve been here—thanks in large part to the spadework the rat archaeologists did for us. We’ve got the great libraries of mankind and a whole biological repository of extinct life forms …”
    “I know, Jun Davd. We never thought we’d regain so much of our heritage. Still …” He felt suddenly weary. For the first time, the centuries of wandering seemed to have caught up with him—more than six of them by now, while the clock of the universe had ticked off its tens of millions of years.
     
    “What did Jorv mean, ‘Odonata’?” Bram said.
    Jorv’s assistant, Harld, faced him, a scalpel in his hand, still looking pale and shaken. He had a thick white bandage on his head, covering the scalp wound he’d received trying to save a woman from the jaws of an insect-creature, and there were deep scratches down one long bony cheek.
    Harld put the scalpel down, looking thoughtful. He paused to look around behind himself where the other two surviving members of the zoology department continued their dissection of one of the insect corpses. The body cavity was laid open, with internal organs spread out fanwise, and Bram did not care for too close a look.
    “Odonata? Is that what he said?”
    “Yes. Just before he died. He said it after he saw the way the creature grabbed the Cuddly, as if that had made him remember something.”
    “It comes from a root in a pre-Inglex language called Greek. It means ‘tooth.’ Original Man used Greek prefixes a lot in scientific classification. Ever since Jorv got back from his trip to the insect camp, he’d been poring over the old archives for insect references, especially from an institution known as the Smithsonian. But there was just so much material to absorb…”
    “What does ‘tooth’ have to do with it?”
    “It sounds as if it may be the name of the insect order.”
    “Can you …”
    “There’s nothing to it, now. It’s all alphabetical. Come back in an hour.”
    Bram spent the hour arguing with one of the curators from the art team, who wanted to pack an entire shuttle with a collection of paintings and photoplastic art that had been discovered at the last minute.
    “It’s irreplaceable,” the man pleaded. “Originals that were on loan from Earth museums. Art that was produced here on the diskworld over a period of several centuries— some of it of the very highest order. We can make a selection—let me assure you that we’re prepared to be very stringent with ourselves—and have it vacuum crated within a Tenday.”
    Bram tried to explain that there was neither the space nor the time. “There are still crates of last-minute finds out next to the shuttle pad that are going to have to be abandoned,” he said. “Can’t you make microreproduc-tions of it?”
    “You don’t understand !” the curator wailed. “These are originals !”
    In the end, it was decided that the curator and his staff would be allowed to take a selection of some of the smaller objects with them as their personal baggage. “The Rembrandt engravings,” the curator decided. “The little votive figurines from the Falwellite thearchy. The photoplastic diskscapes from the neo-literalist period. And some of the small table sculpture. Oh, dear, how will I ever winnow it down?”
    Bram suggested that the museum staff load all the excess artwork that they could manage during the next twenty hours on one of the unused rocket-assisted pallets. Some tens of the pallets were slated to be left behind along with a lot of cargo walkers and heavy machinery. “See Jao,” Bram said. “He’ll compute a rough trajectory for you. We’ll have to shoot it off unmanned, but with luck, one of the interbranch vehicles from Yggdrasil will snare it and bring it in.”
    “B-but it could be lost forever,” the curator said. “Better to leave it here.”
    “No,” Bram said, looking him in the eye. “It wouldn’t.”
    That got through. The curator