Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

she had taken an interest in piloting and was spending a lot of her time exploring the hangars where Yggdrasil’s fleet of landers was stored and practicing in the simulators.
    “I haven’t decided,” Bram said. He went to the coldall and helped himself to a gourd of sapbrew. “The next few years are going to be very exciting ones for astronomy. We have the chance to study the galaxy we’re going to live in from the inside out, over a real-time frame of tens of thousands of years, so we can observe processes. There’s that peculiar feature in the nucleus—the gas arc I mentioned. It suggests a powerful magnetic field, but at right angles to where one ought to be. We may find an answer in the inner parsec of the galaxy. We’ll never have the chance for a close-up view again. Jun Davd’s offered me the chance to be an important part of it. Being year-captain is time-consuming.”
    He took a sip from the gourd. “And then there’s my own bioengineering project. Genesis Two. I’d have to shut that down entirely for a while.”
    Mim put the string quarter score aside. “The observations will get made whether you’re there or not,” she said. “It will take years—decades—to sort them out and draw conclusions from them. You have all the time in the world. There are still tons of data from the explosion of the old galaxy that are lying there waiting for someone to go through them. Jun Davd can wait. And as for your genetics project, I know it means a lot to you, but that can wait, too. Your assistants can keep it warm. In any case, you couldn’t implement the project until we’re resettled.”
    “I don’t know, Mim,” he temporized.
    “I’ll tell you this,” she said. “For the last two hundred years we’ve had year-captains who immersed themselves more and more in the housekeeping details of the job. When they weren’t officious busybodies who tried to interfere with people’s lives, that is. Because for at least that long, a majority of the population have been people who think that the human past is a sort of fairy tale. They’ve never lived on a planet, never had a Nar touch brother—never even seen a real Nar, for that matter. They think that babies have always been made by two people in a nest together—not constructed out of nucleotides. They don’t have any real comprehension of the fact that the human species ceased to exist for thirty-seven million years, and that we’re here now by the grace of a wonderful race that’s ceased to exist itself, and that we escaped by the skin of our teeth, and that Yggdrasil is just a temporary habitat to get us back to the original seedbed of humanity.” She paused for breath. “Bram, do you realize that most of the people on this tree have never in their lives seen a real star—only holo projections? Maybe Silv is right. Maybe we do need to remind ourselves of what this trip is all about!”
    He grinned at her. “I think you just like the privileges that go with being married to a year-captain. Like always having a meal or your sleep interrupted by some problem, and never having any privacy, and sitting through long boring meetings where everybody pushes their point of view on you for the thousandth time, and you smile and nod for the thousandth time so that nobody thinks their views are being slighted.”
    She grinned back at him. “Shall I tell you why Lydis is here?”
    “To check up on the old folks and make sure their synapses haven’t gotten all stuck together?”
    “Oh, Bram!” Lydis said.
    Mim said, “So I could ask her how she’d feel about being older sister to a new sibling. A five-hundred-year-older sister.”
    “I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Lydis said. “It’s about time. The new people hardly wait till one child is grown up before having another one. They breed like yeast. I certainly think the demographics of the tree entitle you to another baby. And I’d enjoy having a sibling.”
    Both of them looked Bram’s way. He said with feeling, “Lyd is right, Mim. The end of our journey’s in sight. Yggdrasil could handle five or ten times our current population without any strain—but I doubt that even the new people can breed fast enough to fill it up before we reach home territory. You’re certainly as eligible as any centenarian to have a second child. But are you sure you don’t want to wait until we find a planet?”
    “No,” she said. “Call it an act of faith.”
    Bram embraced her. “Careful,