Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

willing to do that, apparently. Bram, can you imagine the conditions they must have endured in those inflatable camps? The ones closer to the horizontal gravity sectors were built out on scaffolding—with no place even to stand for kilodays, except for the tents and stringers. Dangling over eternity all that time while they worked. It wasn’t much better closer to the hub. Trying to adjust to the crazy angles, under heavy gravity with your weight tearing sideways at you. With the danger of falling with every step and an awareness of the penalties if you did. We didn’t set foot within ten million miles of some of the farther camps, and I can tell you, I still didn’t like it!”
    Trist hadn’t heard about the tails. Bram told him.
    “Whew!” Trist whistled. “That explains it. You’d need a tail to work in a place like that.”
    “Ame thinks they may have been a species other than man. But the verdict isn’t in yet.”
    “A new species to supersede man. I’m not sure I like that idea. It was one thing to deal with the idea that human beings were extinct. We’ve more or less accepted that from the beginning. But the idea of another species taking our place—that’s something else again. Gives us competition in this neck of the galaxy, Bram. The planet Earth may be overrun by these longfooted characters. Where do we go, then?”
    “They may be our cousins.”
    “Makes no difference. The fact that they were getting ready to patch up Original Man’s beacon tells us all we need to know. Different species or different order entirely, they were preparing to spread their own image through the universe. It bears out that old idea we used to talk about long ago, before the Nar sped us on our way to this galaxy—that there comes a time in the life of every intelligent species when it begins to dawn on them that the means is at hand for species immortality.”
    “Yes, I remember.”
    “Now we’ve got three cases. Original Man, broadcasting his genetic code to the Virgo cluster and beyond. The Nar, sending us to the heart of their own galaxy to do the same job for them. And now these people with tails. Except that they’re a little premature. They were able to take advantage of an installation that somebody else built. Bram, I just had another thought!”
    “What is it?”
    “You said that these tailed people weren’t immortal. Neither were the Nar. Neither was Original Man when he started broadcasting. What if this compulsion to spread around your genetic code is a stage that a species goes through before it attains personal immortality?”
    “Hmmm. The night doesn’t seem so dark, then. The universe isn’t a bottomless hole. There’s time. Time to travel to the ends of the universe yourself someday. At least that’s what the little nagging voice inside you would be saying. Trist, you don’t suppose …”
    “That Original Man never became extinct? That he simply gave up, packed up and went home after he’d been infected with eternal life long enough for the idea to sink in?”
    “Yes. And then, somewhere along the way, acquired an immunity to immortality. Forgot things. Evolved into a new species. And then one day set out on a path to the stars again. And found the old beacon.”
    “As I said before, it hardly matters. Whoever they were, they’re not us. ”
    “I’d like to send an expedition to one of the inner disks. And to the next disk ahead of us in orbit—see how close a duplicate it is to this one. We may have landed in the wrong place.”
    “I’d give my spare shirt to go. But Bram, there isn’t time—”
    “I’m going to call a tree meeting and call for a vote to stay here an extra year. We’re digging up treasure troves of material—whole libraries of it, and we’ve only scratched the surface. I want to get as much material transferred to Yggdrasil as we can. We can’t abandon a working party here, no matter how many eager volunteers there’d be. Not when the only habitable body in the known universe also happens to be our only starship. And there’s no telling when we’ll be back this way. It may be centuries before we grow another Yggdrasil and outfit it and can spare a population to crew it.”
    “A year.” Trist furrowed his brow. “I’ll have to work out some orbits. The distances are huge, of course, but it’s not like ordinary interplanetary travel here … hmmm, we’ve got a body whose own orbital period is a year as our catapult, with no gravity to