Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

are.”
    Marg’s own baby was two years old now. She and Orris had finally taken the plunge when Jun Davd had announced that they had officially left the exploding galaxy behind. There had been a rash of births that year.
    “Oh, I don’t know.” Jun Davd laughed, trying to extricate a gnarled finger from the baby’s grip. “Some of us elders still have quite a few years to go before we lose our wrinkles.”
    Bram, hovering proudly over Mim and the baby and trying not to look too smug, said, “I don’t like to think of it as two hundred thousand years. Let the outside universe take care of itself. I prefer to count it in Safepassage Days—three more of them. We’re all still alive, and we’re even ahead of schedule.”
    The first Safepassage Day had been celebrated the year after the black hole maneuver. Nobody had thought it up—it had just seemed to happen by itself. It came the day after Bobbing Day, and the two holidays had naturally merged into one extended festivity. A new set of rituals had quickly sprung up around Safepassage Day, with gift giving, overeating, and much hilarity. Bobbing Day was still observed, though the reason for it was now gone, with Yggdrasil under spin. It was mostly for the children, who celebrated with miniature trees, candy, and little gaily painted plumb bobs.
    “Yes,” Trist said. “We picked up a tremendous boost not only from Jao’s gravity machine, but from all that dense stuff the ramscoop swallowed on the way out.” He grinned at Jao. “Jao, my hairy friend, what’s your refined estimate of our terminal velocity, and how long before we reach the galaxy of Original Man?”
    Jao fidgeted on a seating puff next to the maternal nest. Mim had passed the baby to a cooing, clucking Ang, and he was afraid that he was going to be asked to hold it.
    “Well,” he said, “there’s still a lot of plus and minus in the observations, but Jun Davd’s latest figures show us coasting at within a hundred millionth of one percent of the speed of light. That means we should cover thirty-seven million light-years in about five hundred and twenty-eight years, our time.”
    There was a harrumph from the fringe of the little group, where Smeth had parked himself at a safe distance from the baby.
    “Not precisely,” he said. “The ramscoop is still on standby. We’re bound to pick up a stray hydrogen cloud or two, even between galaxies. We still may shave a few years from that estimate.”
    Smeth had finally been elected year-captain. He took it very seriously, even though there wouldn’t be much to do during the next five hundred years. He was driving everyone crazy, poking his nose into the cellulose plant, the glucose-processing operation, housing expansion, and the kitchens.
    “How about it, Jao?” Bram asked.
    Jao scowled. “I hope not,” he said. “We’ve got too much velocity to shed as it is. The Milky Way was supposed to be a pretty fair match for our galaxy in mass and configuration. Nobody figured on binary black holes and core explosions.”
    “How are you going to brake?”
    Jao shrugged. “We’ll spiral in, spiral out. We’ve got thirty-seven million years to figure out an approach. By that time the Milky Way’s own hypermass may have grown some.”
    There was an uneasy shifting in the circle of people around Mim’s nest. Jun Davd said quickly, “A larger black hole at the center of a galaxy should in itself present no dangers. In any case, with a normal accretion rate, no black hole could swallow its galaxy within the probable lifetime of the universe.”
    “Hey, hear that, little Lydis?” Trist said with theatrical heartiness. “Your new home is going to be around for what passes for forever!”
    People made themselves laugh, but a small pall had invaded the maternity chamber. Bram knew that everyone was thinking about the Nar and their vanished civilization.
    His eyes strayed to the window wall. There was nothing to see out there anymore except Yggdrasil itself— mile after mile of great twisting subbranches and carpets of leaves, lit up by the banks of spotlights that were trained on them from the shaft of the probe: not only to give Yggdrasil a sense of its own rotation, but to provide the human passengers with a sense of place in a universe that otherwise had gone blank.
    Somewhere beyond Yggdrasil’s horizons was an exploding galaxy, its light blotted out by red shift. It didn’t bear thinking about. But it was impossible to shut it out