Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

the nymph to create an organism that would keep insect pests under control in their arctic regions. They thought it would remain an aquatic form and do man’s work for him. But it got out of hand.”
    “What?” The three zoologists gave their full attention. “Do you know something of this, Bram?”
    It all came flooding back. It had been buried for almost seven hundred years in a mind that had become overlaid by other experiences. Slowly at first, then with increasing fluency, Bram told them about the synthetic heterochronic gene that had made the self-reproducing hen’s egg possible—about the way a DNA chimera had been contrived out of genetic material derived from the dragonfly and the axolotl. How, generations later, Original Man had discovered the dangers lurking in the construct and had radioed a warning in a codicil to his first great Message. And how the Nar, accordingly, had suppressed the file— though it contained the seeds of man’s immortality. How he, Bram, a rare human apprentice in a Nar touch group, had stumbled upon the reference and confronted his mentor, Voth, with it. How the entire Nar nation had carried their burden of guilt and finally, stunningly, made amends.
    “You’re saying, then, that it was the nymphal dragonflies that exterminated Original Man?” Harld asked.
    His eyes were filled with horror. He was wondering, Bram knew, if it was all about to happen again.
    “No, no,” Bram said. “Original Man solved the problem. Or thought he had. At great cost. The near destruction of his arctic ecology. But the mutation must just have been biding its time. It waited, buried in dragonfly nu-cleotides, for forty million years … fifty million years. Long enough for the human race to go the way of the dinosaurs and to be replaced by a dominant species evolved from rats. Long enough for the rat-people to go the way of humankind—according to that timetable of periodic extinctions that your department drew up when we first arrived at the Milky Way. And when the rat-folk were gone, there was an ecological niche vacant, waiting for a new intelligent, cooperating species about the size of a man. No mammal, no vertebrate, could have competed with such as the nymphs had become.”
    All of them, the three zoologists and Bram, involuntarily looked over to the dissection table where the latest inheritor of the Earth lay. Harld swallowed hard.
    “Man did this?” he asked.
    “No, we must not be so arrogant,” Bram said. “Perhaps it would have happened without us.”
    Harld opened his mouth as if he were about to say something further. But at that moment Jao came bursting into the improvised morgue.
    “Better come quick!” Jao panted. “They’re on their way!”
    “Here?”
    “Yar. About a hundred of those ground vehicles of theirs. We’ve got to round everybody up and get out to the shuttles before we’re cut off.”
    Bram whirled around to the three zoologists. “Get going. Put on your vacuum suits and tell everybody you see to do the same. We’re going to let the air out of this place.”
    He turned to Jao again. “All right, let’s start deputizing people. How many of those shuttles are ready to be flown?”
    “Enough—if we jam them full of people and dump everything else. In a couple of hours we can strap pallet rockets to some of them. It won’t take much of a boost to at least get them off the ground out of harm’s way. The pilots can finish their countdowns in space if they have to.”
    “Good. Let’s get going.”
    Jao was sweating. “There’s more,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Jun Davd’s been watching the ship through his telescopes. He radioed at almost the exact time our own lookouts saw the ground vehicles starting our way.”
    A chill ran down Bram’s spine. “Go on,” he said.
    “More of the environmental bubbles are detaching themselves from the stick-ship. They’re just boiling off it. Drifting down to the rim of the diskworld. And some of them are heading toward Yggdrasil.”
     

Part III
    SECOND EXODUS

CHAPTER 10
     
    “He went back for the Rembrandts,” a terrified assistant babbled. “He said he couldn’t bear to leave them behind.”
    Bram shook the man into coherence. “How long ago?”
    “About two hours ago. He took a walker.”
    Bram released him. “The fool,” he said. “The idiotic fool.” He pushed his way across the crowded shuttle deck to the raised platform of the control section, where Jao stood conferring