Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

speak of to fight … add a modest boost … deboost to end up a hundred twenty degrees ahead … and for the return trip, a retro-orbit to lose orbital energy and rendezvous with your starting point in somewhat less than a year.” He gave Bram an engaging smile. “But I get Nen to go along with me as a medical officer.”
    “Done,” Bram said.
    Mim appeared with a tray. “Don’t worry, it isn’t tea,” she said. “Just old-fashioned cornbrew and some snacks.”
    “Mim watch out!” Bram shouted.
    A little ball of fluff streaked between her ankles and almost tripped her. She recovered her balance and managed to keep the tray level without spilling anything.
    “Loki!” she scolded.
    The Cuddly scampered up Trist’s leg, paused at his knee to be patted, then climbed to his shoulder and pulled at his yellow hair.
    “Loki, get down and behave yourself,” Bram said. He apologized to Trist. “He gets into everything.”
    “Oh, that’s all right, we have one of our own,” Trist said. He scratched the little creatures’s neck. “Where’d you get the name?”
    “Loki? It was an old human god who was always getting into mischief. It seemed to fit.”
    “Nen named ours Fluff. If she doesn’t stop overfeeding it, we’ll have to rename it Sphere.”
    “It’s hard to resist one,” Mim said. “They’re the best thing we’re taking with us from the diskworld.”
    Loki sat up and chittered at her as if he knew what she was saying. Trist broke off a corner of one of his cornsnacks and gave it to the little beast, which held the morsel in both paws and began nibbling at it.
    “Yes,” Bram said. “I think they mean more to us than we realize. They’re the first terrestrial life form that humans have ever seen, after all.”
    “Other than vegetables,” Trist said, popping a potato crisp into his mouth.
    “Vegetables that we engineered ourselves or the Nar engineered for us. But Trist, just think of it, these little creatures carry an unbroken line of DNA that goes all the way back to the world that gave us birth.”
    “DNA calls out to DNA, is that it?”
    “Something like that. We know without having to think about it that these little animals are a precious link with an earthly heritage.”
    Idly, Trist scratched the Cuddly behind one ear. It made a contented sound and snuggled against him. “There’s something wrong there,” he said lazily. “The first human being, as far as we’re concerned, was mixed up in a test tube by a Nar bioengineer. From native materials.”
    “Ravel is Ravel,” Mim said. “No matter what instruments play it.”
    “Hah! Good for you, Mim!” Trist conceded. “I’ll desist.” He took a sip of his drink. Loki tried to poke his muzzle into the cup, and Trist let him have a taste. The Cuddly sputtered and spat it out. Everybody laughed.
    “Abstemious,” Bram said. “Maybe we can learn something from them.”
    Trist fed the little pet another fragment of cornsnack to appease it. “It would be nice,” he said, “to go home to an Earth that was inhabited by Cuddlies instead of those tailed people with the long skinny feet.”
    “Not likely,” Bram said. “Ame says the Cuddlies evolved on the diskworld from more primitive forms. That isn’t to say that some collateral branch with similar traits couldn’t have evolved on Earth in the meantime.” He frowned. “But we know what life form achieved dominance on Earth, don’t we?”
    “They were rats,” Ame said.
     
    She stepped back to let Bram have a better look at the exhibit that she and her section had prepared. Two of her colleagues—Jorv, the bouncy baby-faced zoologist whom Bram had met before, and a tall bony young woman named Shira, who was something called a “paleobiologist”—stood by with eager expressions on their faces.
    Bram raised an eyebrow. “Rats? The pests of the ‘Dappled Piper’ legend?”
    He scuffed cautiously closer. He hadn’t had time to readjust to diskworld gravity yet, and he was still stiff and tired from the ferry trip to the surface, though it was down to five days now.
    “ Rattus norvegicus to be exact,” Ame said. “The most successful member of the family and the one that would have been in the best position to succeed Original Man after man’s activities had changed the environment. They were highly adaptable, they were omnivores as humankind’s ancestors were, and in fact they resembled some of the primitive specimens on our own family tree.”
    The