Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

being aboard the tree.” He sobered. “But of course, we intend to keep the treeguard patrols going indefinitely.” His holo gave a grin. “And on that subject, we’d be pleased to have more volunteers.”
    He sat down next to Bram and Mim. Jao leaned across and said, “Nice going.”
    Jun Davd was smiling to himself. Bram said, “Why are you so pleased with yourself, you old reprobate?” Bram asked. You undermined your own case when you let Edard remind everybody how dangerous the nymphs are.”
    “We’ll see,” Jun Davd said.
    The ushers moved swiftly down the aisles. A ballot box was shoved at Bram on its long pole, and he pushed the yes button. The box slid past him to pause at Mim and Edard. Jao tried to vote twice and looked unabashed when the usher caught him at it and said, “None of that, brother.”
    The voting was over in twenty minutes. Yes and no votes went much faster than multiple-choice votes, as when there was a slate of candidates. The ushers brought their boxes to the clerk, who plugged them one at a time into a tabulator.
    The tally figures floated in holographic projection, huge, glowing, and changing so rapidly that the final digits were a blur. But the trend was clear.
    “It’s going to be almost unanimous,” Jao said. “I don’t believe it.”
    The last few figures clicked into place. The crowd waited a moment to take it in, then a great cheer went up.
    “That’s it,” Jun Davd said. “We’re going to Sol.”
     
    CHAPTER 11
     
    Earth hung before them, a soiled brown ball swirled around with dingy clouds. Its moon had an atmosphere, too, if that yellowish soup could be called air.
    “What have they done to it?” someone whispered.
    Brown oceans, brown air—it was a planet drowned in swill. But incredibly, there was life there. The planet was thick with life, in fact, to judge by all the microwave radiation, the chemical pollutants revealed by infrared spectra, the hydrocarbons that choked the clouds, the orbital junk.
    “There are simply too many of them,” Jun Davd said sadly. “A population of half a trillion if we’ve estimated their demographics correctly from that … city.”
    Radar imaging had exposed a spongelike warren of habitation that stretched from end to end of the single sprawling continent—an irregular heap of stacked cubes that staggered miles high in places, reaching to where the filthy air thinned to the merely fetid.
    The radar imaging had sparked a lot of controversy. There was a strong feeling that the close-up look at Earth should be limited to passive observation—radio eavesdropping, infrared, and the like. But Yggdrasil was a naked-eye object by now, and further caution seemed pointless.
    At any rate, the radar didn’t seem to have alerted the inhabitants of the Earth-Moon system. Perhaps their own microwave background was simply too noisy. When there had been no sign that the dragonfly civilization was paying attention to them, the treeload of humans had voted to risk putting Yggdrasil into a remote orbit a hundred thousand miles out, with the fusion engine kept warmed up.
    “I thought somehow it would be … lovely,” Mim said, turning a disappointed face to Bram. “Like the Father World seen from space.”
    Alis Tonia Atli, now a historian, was among the people who had come crowding into the observatory. “Is it possible that they inherited this? Evolved for it?” the thin woman suggested. “Perhaps it was Original Man who poisoned Terra, millions of years ago. We know he had a population in the billions.”
    “No, it wasn’t Original Man that did this,” said a thick-featured man with blue-black ringlets. It was Dal, the dramatist, inspired by the diskworld finds to return to the writing of his verse plays. “Earth didn’t look like this when he was still around. I remember the words of one of the lunar poets of the twenty-eighth century … Taine, I think.”
    He struck a professional pose and declaimed:
    Oh, fair blue world, marbled in glory, Teach us beauty as you rise Above our bleak horizon …
    He was interrupted by Hogard, the librarian. “I don’t think that’s Earth at all. I know it has a large moon, but that one big land mass with its three lobes doesn’t fit any of the maps I’ve seen.”
    “Continental drift,” Enry said stolidly. “Seventy-four million years of it. They came together in one supercon-tinent.”
    “The rest of the system doesn’t fit, either,” Hogard said stubbornly. “Where are