Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

keep Yggdrasil tranquilized at least through moving week. We can’t afford a delay. The branch we’re living in is getting a bit bosky. And we’re already ten degrees out of plumb.” His eyes crinkled humorously. “Besides, we’d have a mutiny on our hands if we held up Bobbing Day.”
    “Very good, Captain,” she said without cracking a smile. She turned smartly on her heel and left.
    Bram watched her go. She had made him feel old and hoary. There was no reason for it, he told himself. His apparent age was down to somewhere in the midforties by now. But his body still carried the memory of being much older, and it showed sometimes in the way he moved and in the habit of protective postures. That, too, would pass with time, Bram supposed.
    “The new ones are so earnest, ” Mim said, reading his thoughts.
    “I just wish they wouldn’t call me ‘Captain’ all the time.”
    She laughed. “But you are captain this year. And you’ve been elected seven times. That’s more than anybody.”
    “It’s only ancestor worship,” he said. “Exaggerated respect for all the old father figures. And mother figures,” he added hastily.
    “Then why was Jao elected only once?” she teased him.
    “And never again—I know, it was a disaster! Jao’s the first one to tell you that himself.”
    “Jao never wanted to be captain in the first place. I sometimes suspect he sabotaged his first term on purpose so they’d never ask him again. But pity poor Smeth. He keeps campaigning, and he hasn’t been elected once yet.”
    “Save your pity. Give him time. He has the next five hundred years to round up the votes. I’ll bet that by the time we get to the Milky Way, he’ll hold the record for being elected the most often. Because by then he’ll be the only one who wants the job.”
    She giggled appreciatively, though she never would have hurt Smeth’s feelings by doing it in his presence.
    “And when you remember how he kept telling everybody that he had no intention of coming with us—that he wouldn’t trust his life to an overgrown plant and a jerry-built ramscoop drive!”
    Smeth had been a surprise to both of them. Bram had been sure that Smeth would stay behind. By the time the probe project had reached fruition, Smeth had accreted a huge department, with more than a hundred humans beneath him. He had attached himself like glue to the Nar organizational superstructure, and the Nar, thinking they were stepping softly on human sensibilities, funneled everything through him, snowballing his authority. He had nothing to gain by deserting the new egalitarian society that human immortality had brought about. With eternity ahead of him, he had nowhere to go but up.
    But when the day had come to board Yggdrasil or be left behind, Smeth had showed up at the shuttleport with a small bag of personal belongings and a string of six biosynthetic walkers, led by a Nar porter bearing his library, instruments, and accumulated records.
    “I guess he decided that it was better to be a big floater in a small pool,” Bram said.
    “Or maybe he simply couldn’t bear the idea of all of us leaving without him.”
    Bram nodded. “After he saw the stampede that developed.”
    Smeth had not been the only surprise. More than five thousand people had elected to go along on the genesis quest—almost a third of the human race. The project had tapped a deep longing. The Nar had not underestimated the strength of the buried feelings unearthed in their pets. About ten years into the project, they had begun a program to gather all candidates from the farther worlds, and it had taken another twenty years to bring them all in. Those who had waited too long or who had changed their minds at the last minute had been out of luck.
    “Well, I’m glad he decided to come along. It wouldn’t be the same without him.”
    “Yes. I have to admit he’s improving.”
    Mim fell silent. Bram knew she was thinking about Olan Byr. Immortality had come too late for Olan. The project had been a long, hard one, even with the blueprints of Original Man to work from and the full cooperation of the Nar. There had been times when Bram had thought that he himself would grow too old to benefit from it.
    Mim had had fifty years to get over her grief for Olan. Forty of them had been spent with Bram. By the time they had drifted together, she had been too old for children. But her fertility had returned during the last few years, and lately she had been thinking