Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

about having a baby after she grew another ten or fifteen years younger. But only if tree demographics permitted, she was always quick to add whenever the subject came up. Yggdrasil could easily support another twenty thousand humans— in fact, about five hundred babies had been born already. But everyone was aware that a long trip lay ahead of them.
    Bram reached for her hand, and they exchanged smiles. “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll finish the packing. You’d better see to Yggdrasil’s tranquilizer. If the drinks gel sloshed over the rims of all the glasses on All-Level Eve, Marg will have a fit.”
    “Life would certainly be simpler,” he said, “if we didn’t have to rotate our environment thirty degrees every year to keep Yggdrasil from getting lopsided.”
    She squeezed his hand. “But it wouldn’t be half as much fun,” she said.
     
    *
     
    It was an hour’s ride to the trunk even by slingshot, but Bram always enjoyed the view. There was no real reason to make the trip—the tree systems staff was fully competent and, in fact, knew more about the operation of the tree than he did—but the approaching tree-turning maneuver made a good excuse for the excursion.
    He reeled in an empty travelpod, eased it through the lips of the gasket, and clambered inside. The absurdly simple arrangement made the expense of air locks for the external travel system unnecessary; otherwise, twelve air locks would have had been installed. The main rack of cables, like an abacus one hundred fifty miles long, was anchored at a new terminus every year, thirty degrees farther along the rim of the tree’s crown, leaving a couple of permanent cables behind for standby access to the abandoned branch.
    So far, the only major internal fast-transit system was limited to one branch—the one the human population would be living in during the half millennium when they were coasting between galaxies, and Yggdrasil could be allowed to have its normal one-g spin again. But that was one hundred and twenty degrees away at the moment, its halls and compartments standing on their heads, its pools drained, and everything important either moved or lashed down.
    Bram took a moment to check out the pod’s systems. Nothing could go wrong, of course; there was an FM rescue beeper in every pod that would quickly summon help in an emergency. But for someone serving as year-captain, it would be embarrassing to be stranded halfway along the guide rope and have someone come to fetch him.
    He made sure the air bladder carried enough reserve for the hour’s trip and that the emergency bottle under the seat was full. He squinted through the hyaloid membrane of the docking chamber’s blister and sighted upward along the elastic cable. The several hundred feet of it that he could see before it came invisible against the distant trunk were reassuringly opaque, indicating that the molecular structure was in a mostly crystalline state.
    He grinned as he prepared to change that. He got the little bottle of boron trifluoride out of the dashboard and applied a few drops with an eyedropper to the elastomer line, just forward of the bowline knot that hitched it to an interior stanchion.
    The pod gave a shudder as the line began to contract. Bram could see the triggered section turning transparent as its molecular structure became amorphous. The transparent portion shot outward, erasing the cable from sight. A few minutes later, when enough miles of cable had been triggered to overcome the one-g force stretching the line, the pod picked up speed, burst through the gasket, and flew up the guideline toward Yggdrasil’s distant trunk.
    Bram held on. He was glad the process wasn’t instantaneous. He wouldn’t have fancied a snapped neck. There was a lot of energy stored in a hundred and fifty miles of superelastic line. As it was, the pod would accelerate at a comfortable rate, never passing two g’s at its zenith, then slow to a bounce as the trailing cable began to tighten.
    The organic elastomer, with a stretch ratio of over a thousand to one, was a by-product of the exodus research program and, by departure time, had already found wide industrial application on the Father World. The raw materials came from Yggdrasil itself—derived from the adaptive mechanism by which a tree with a three-hundred-mile diameter synchronized the turgor movements of its leaves.
    Bram gazed unabashedly through the transparent skin of his rubbery container and admired the