Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

in some heavy weather. Not that they’d know anything. The instant they left the shadow of our intake area—”
    “Please, I don’t want to know about it!”
    “Sorry. But as I was saying, the chief effect is extra acceleration. And that may have put us a few days ahead of schedule on our black hole flyby.” He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking about sending everybody to the trunk when the time comes, to wait it out.”
    Mim looked alarmed. “Will that be necessary?”
    “Oh, I doubt there’s any real danger. If we ever ran into something we couldn’t handle, the trunk wouldn’t be any safer than an outer bough. But while I’m still year-captain, everybody’s safety is my responsibility, and moving to the trunk would put us in toward the center of our umbrella, where the field is strongest, just while we’re swinging around.”
    He caught Trist looking at him from across the table. Trist compressed his mouth as a signal for Bram to shut up.
    “That wouldn’t make you very popular,” Mim said. “Everybody’s getting settled into their new quarters, unpacking and sweeping out rooms they haven’t seen for twelve years, and tomorrow morning the floors will finally be level.”
    Bram left it there. Across the table, Trist said loudly, “Who wants another drink? I think we’ve got time for one more before Leveltide.”
    “Look,” Orris said. “Here come the clowns!”
     
    Jao still hadn’t returned when the Bob began to swing. “Twenty… nineteen and a half… nineteen…” the crowd chanted in unison, counting the degrees as the bulbous painted shape followed the chalk line toward the bull’s-eye in the center of the Forum. Globular membrances lit from within by a coating of biolights drifted down, released from somewhere high above. Hitherto invisible sparklers were touched off, making a star pattern on the floor. To one side, the clowns were still gamely performing their skit, though nobody was watching: Two of them wearing twelve-foot body puppets were vying for possession of a papier-mache imitation of the Bob, while three more, making a Nar with too many legs, danced around them, trying to make peace.
    “Where is he?” Ang fretted. “He’s going to miss it.”
    “Never mind,” Trist said gallantly. “I’ve saved an extra kiss for you. Jao’ll have to kiss Smeth. It’ll serve him right.”
    “Five …” the crowd chanted. “Four …” Bram could feel the faint trembling in the floor as Jao’s granddaughter, a hundred and fifty miles overhead in the trunk, began to cancel inertia in order to bring the Bob precisely level. He had to admit that she was an artist at it. In some previous years, before she had become tree systems officer, the Bob had been as much as three or four degrees off. Everybody had had to make the best of it—the clowns would rush out with a big, round target-painted rug and wrestle it into place under the Bob while people egged them on, and Yggdrasil would gradually be corrected over the next few days. But Jao’s granddaughter—he must remember that her name was Enyd—never missed.
    “Here’s to all you lovely people and another safe year,” Marg said, raising her glass.
    The Bob settled into place, swinging in a small diminishing arc that finally came to rest. More sparklers went off, and noisemakers raised a din. People were shaking hands, kissing, embracing.
    Bram felt the shudder.
    Others must have felt it, too. Around the arena there was a sudden dip in the noise level, then, as people decided they had been mistaken, things warmed up again.
    Trist was staring at the Bob, his eyebrows knit together. Bram followed his lead. The Bob had started swinging again, making a small ellipse that finally settled precisely over the center of the bull’s-eye once again and hovered there, trembling, only a few feet above the floor.
    “Your granddaughter’s losing her touch,” Orris teased Ang. “She usually gets it on the first try.”
    Bram and Trist exchanged glances. Orris had missed the point, and so had most of the others at the table and in the festivities beyond. The babble of happy ringside voices continued undiminished.
    It was not some small adjustment in the angle of radius that had set the Bob swaying again. If that had been the case, the Bob would not have returned to the same spot.
    No, something had bumped Yggdrasil here in the interstellar night. Something violent enough to buffet a planetoid-size object stubborn with relativistic