Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

squeezing his hand in a death grip. “Can such things be?”
    The screen was blinding, even though it showed a bowdlerized version of the radiance outside. They passed between cascades of fire that sheeted to infinity. The eye followed those ravening walls along a path of bent light that made nonsense of perspective—on and on past the point where they should have recurved and eclipsed themselves.
    At the center of each infinity, the fires poured into an iris: nothingness surrounded by violet inferno.
    “I wasn’t sure we’d be able to see the holes themselves,” Jun Davd’s awed voice said. “I thought the accretion disks and the surrounding infall would block them from sight. But geometry doesn’t mean anything here. We’re within a few billion miles of each of them—less than a light-day away. If you’re willing to accept an arbitrary definition of distance in the vicinity of gravitational fields like these, that is.”
    Bram’s fear that there would be no path between the two accretion disks proved to be unfounded. What had appeared from a distance to be a merging of the twin vortices was a less substantial barrier up close. The accretion disks traded material, it was true, but the gaseous zone between them was tenuous enough to pass through. And Yggdrasil wasn’t going to be here long enough to worry about orbital decay. As they plunged between the fountaining sheets of flame, a curtain seemed to open up continually before them.
    There was a moment when a giant eye looked in at them through the observation wall. People cried aloud in wonder. In the yawning eternity that the hole’s gravity had made of time, light was downshifted even more than Yggdrasil’s tremendous speeds had done thus far. Theoretically, there should have been nothing visible.
    And nothing was what they were seeing.
    Then the hole flung them away. The tree whipped around the loop, its path bent back on itself, and headed out of the galaxy. The transfer of orbital energy had been tremendous, and the hole’s precession had given the tree the additional vector that would angle its path above the ecliptic.
    The weight of acceleration returned. People picked themselves up and started to move about. The g-forces were back to normal now. There was no need to force the pace. Whatever the danger from the front of radiation that would inevitably overtake them at some undetermined time in the years ahead, they had successfully navigated between those terrible whirlpools without being caught in the ultimate collapse.
    Bram helped Mim to her feet. Together they went to the view wall. Other people were lined up along the safety rail, looking out.
    There was something to see now, for the first time since the starbow had moved out of sight.
    The universe was filled with light. Light of all colors, in wisps and ribbons and streamers.
    An elongated blob of mottled blues and greens stretched, writhed, broke up into smaller blobs of violet and orange. A long pennant of pale blue flapped and disintegrated into a thousand filaments. Iridescent tendrils reached after the craft and fell behind. The striations of color played against a background of white radiance that cast long multiple shadows behind the people at the rail.
    Yggdrasil was riding the shock waves out of the galactic center. In the nearby volume of space, collimated beams of accelerated matter were traveling in the same relativistic frame as Yggdrasil and shedding some of their radiation in the visible part of the spectrum.
    The grateful tree dwellers drank in the spectacle, chattering happily after the tension of the past hours. Nobody was stopping to think about what it meant.
    “It’s beautiful,” Mim said.
    Bram said nothing. It was the beauty of death.
     
    “It’s hard to believe two hundred thousand years have gone by since we left the galaxy,” Marg said. The tiny curved smile on her lips indicated an attempt at whimsy. “You don’t look a day older, Mim. In fact, quite the reverse.”
    Mim, holding the new baby, beamed. “I’m going to name her Lydis,” she said. “It comes from the tonality that Beethoven chose for a quartet movement he intended as a song of thanksgiving.”
    “Very appropriate,” Orris said, “seeing that she was born on Safepassage Day.”
    “I was going to wait a few more years before getting pregnant,” Mim said. “But then I decided I was young enough.”
    “You’re not going to get much younger,” Marg said. “None of us