Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

right. His string almost ran out here, though. He would have gone spinning through vacuum for eternity. Lucky we saw him in time.”
    “Smart of him to come out and show himself, you mean.”
    Jao cocked his head. “Going to bring him home to Mim?”
    The Cuddly settled contentedly in Bram’s lap. “I guess I’ve got myself another Cuddly,” he sighed. “I hope he gets along with Loki.”
    The furry animal responded to Bram’s voice by lifting its gray muzzle and blinking at him with big trusting brown eyes.
    “What are you going to name him?” Jao asked.
    “Who was that character in King James who lived so long? Methuselah. I’ll call him Methuselah.”
    “Hear that, Methuselah? I guess you’ve got yourself a new home.” Jao spoke absently, his eye on the changing chronograph display of his pendant computer. “Five more seconds, then we’ll be pointed just right. Hold on, here we go.”
    He set off the solid fuel booster with the yank of a wire, and the walker flew like a cork into space. The square bulk of the pallet tumbled away from them and grew smaller against the disk-filled night.
     
    “Hold tight,” the voice of Lydis crackled through the static. “I’m coming to pick you up.”
    “Did everybody make it?” Bram asked.
    “Yes, the last shuttle got here hours ago. Smeth’s into his countdown. We blast off within the fivehour.”
    That explained why Yggdrasil had stopped spinning. The tree’s green hemispheres filled the sky ahead of them, a sandwich with the void of space for a filling. The trunk was a stubby bar in the middle, eclipsing stars, seemingly pierced by the long skewer of the probe behind it. They were still too far above the surface to make out any detail of branches or leaf-clothed roots, but scattered here and there across the greener dome were the pinpoint lights of human habitation.
    Bram looked for the yellow wink of Lydis’s drive and found it to one side. There was a more ominous sight beyond it—the pearly motes of dragonfly bubbles floating among the stars.
    “How far from Yggdrasil do you make them?” Bram asked.
    “We’ll beat them,” she said shortly, and switched off.
    The burn was a long one, lasting almost an hour. Bram watched the flame until it winked out. Ten minutes later it flared up again, many times brighter now that it was facing them.
    “That daughter of yours doesn’t fool around,” Jao said admiringly. “Burn till turnover, and no corrections.” He glanced at the chronograph window of his display. “She’ll be here in less than nine decaminutes.”
    Actually it took a full hour; Jao had forgotten to allow for the fact that Lydis would have to shut off her engine a little early to avoid cooking them and coast the last few miles. Even so, she was still killing momentum with her hydrazine maneuvering jets when she arrived.
    They watched through the clear bubble as the rhombohedral bulk bore down on them. Lydis was flying a heavy-duty space tug—a comet chaser—instead of one of the lightweight interbranch shuttles.
    “Come on, let’s go,” Jao said.
    He picked up one of the scavenged dragonfly air tanks— a ribbed ovoid with a stopcock in the form of two levers meant to be squeezed together—and slipped one arm through its webbing. Bram screwed the curator’s helmet back on while the man fussed at him. After a moment’s thought, he replaced the curator’s depleted air bottle with his own half-full one; actually, any of them could breathe for about nine minutes on the cubic foot or so of oxygen-rich walker air trapped in their suits, but the curator wouldn’t know that, and Bram didn’t want the little man getting panicky and thrashing around.
    Together, he and Jao grabbed the curator by the arms and hauled him bodily through the air flap. The Cuddly came tumbling out on the blast of released air and, making an agile recovery, landed on Bram’s shoulder.
    The tug hovered a few hundred feet away, its nets spread like wings. Bram could see the mists of the hydrazine jets as Lydis nudged the behemoth toward them.
    While the curator squirmed in their grasp, Jao aimed the nozzle of the dragonfly tank at a spot ahead of the tug and squirted polluted air into space. Lydis saw what he was doing and compensated her vector for lateral motion.
    They sailed across the gap, with Methuselah riding happily on Bram’s shoulder, and slammed into a net with rather more force than was elegant. The curator’s mouth popped open as the breath