“We have become the Others,” Alten murmured. “In a way we never could have expected—in the form of a new branch of the human species.”
“Daddy, we mustn’t turn on the Higgs drive again,” Nina said urgently. “Not till we’re sure.”
“Never fear, little lady,” Chu said. “We can chug along at interplanetary speeds for the time being. That will get us out of the cometary halo and into the inner system. Maybe as far as what used to be the orbit of Jupiter. And we can see what happened to the planet we used to call home.”
“But not till we find out more about Torris,” Nina said. “Maybe he’d like to go home too.”
CHAPTER 24
“Our numberers say that the Trees will be at their closest approach to each other in just a few days,” Irina said, using Torris’s words for the concept and pronouncing them carefully.
“Bad,” Torris said.
“Why is it bad, Torris?” Irina asked.
They were looking at a floor-to-ceiling screen in one of the lecture halls, away from the gawking crowds. The ship’s spin was at about half a gravity, so Torris was watching from Jonah’s travel pod, his elbows resting on the rim. Irina’s study group had grown to about a dozen people, arranged in a rough semicircle at a respectful distance.
“Because now the war starts. People will be killed. Our women will be taken.” He paused to consider it. “Theirs too.”
He’d been using the word war at Laurel’s hesitant suggestion to stand for the single harsh syllable that meant bride raid in his own language. Laurel had gone on at inordinate length to explain to the others about bride raids in primitive cultures.
“There’s nothing we can do about it, Torris,” Irina said gently.
“I should be there with them to fight,” Torris said, showing them the little bow he took everywhere with him now.
“No, Torris! Don’t say that!” Nina cried out.
Torris looked at her sadly. “Yes, but they would kill me, little Nina,” he said placatingly. He brightened. “But maybe not. No one has ever returned from the great dark before. So perhaps it would be taken as a Sign.”
Laurel looked helplessly at Irina. It was obvious that she wanted to say something, but it always took her a while to get her tongue around one of her convoluted sentences.
Torris turned to the viewscreen. “Can they see us?”
“Not really,” Irina said. “Not as an object. We’re too far away. Maybe we’d be barely visible as a faint mote of reflected light, rising and setting with the fixed stars.”
One of the newly minted paleontology undergraduates spoke up before Irina could keep him from pursuing the matter. “It would take at least eight days ship’s time to get close. We’d be accelerating at a fraction of a gravity on the auxiliary drive.”
Torris understood at least the first sentence. He became pensive, and Irina could see him fingering his bow.
“Let’s get on with it,” Irina said hastily. “We still have a lot to do. Who’s here from taxonomy?” She nodded as a hand shot up. “Nina, Jonah, heads up. You’re going to have to help me explain to Torris about tissue samples.”
“Here we go,” Chu said, watching the figures unreeling in front of him. The numbers were slowing down, almost at a full stop now, except for those still flickering at the ends of their long strings.
“We’re less than a half million miles from Torris’s Tree,” he said, “in a pretty stable co-orbit around the system’s mutual center of gravity, somewhere between Sol and the Alpha Centauri twins, but closer to Sol. Proxima isn’t a factor. It’s orbiting the whole system, far out. We couldn’t go into orbit around the Tree itself, of course, because we weigh more than it does, and we’d be the tail that wags the dog. We don’t want to do anything to disturb it as a habitat till we know more.”
Irina nodded. “We don’t want them to be aware of us either,” she said.
“No danger of that,” he said. “We’re just another Tree in the sky. A speck with an odd shape.”
“I don’t see any activity yet,” she said, looking at the magnified image. “Those batlike creatures seem to be concentrating their efforts in the space around the top of the Tree.”
“They pretty much stay away from the base of the Tree, where the people live. They’ve learned to be wary of arrows.”
“Perhaps they’re intelligent enough to remember what happened to the one that tried to gobble up Torris,” Alten offered.
“He’s still reticent about that,” Irina said. “We might never know why his tribe sentenced him to death.”
“Or he might not have the words yet,” Joorn offered. “Keep working on it, Irina.”
“The linguists have an interesting theory,” she said. “They’ve been going through the ship’s library, poring through all the languages of Earth up until Time’s Beginning’s departure. It seems that contrary to what most people assume, languages don’t evolve from simplicity to complexity. It’s the other way around. Primitive languages can be quite complex, with all sorts of arbitrary rules. But as time goes on, they tend to lose some of their linguistic baggage. Sexing verbs to match the gender of the nouns, for example. Getting rid of the affixes that are attached to a stem or root. Dropping or trimming tenses or cases and other syntactic relationships. Modern English, so-called, is much simpler than Middle English.”
“Chinese is a good example,” Chu said. “Our grammar and syntax is as simple as you can get. It’s positional. You just string words together and let them fight it out.”
“I’ll have to bring Laurel up here to explain it,” Irina said. “She’s discovered something called semiotics, and now we’ve got four graduate students specializing in it.”
Alten shook his head in mock wonder. “Semiotics,” he said. “And what is it that Laurel’s discovered?”
“Laurel’s team,” Irina said.
“Laurel’s team. What is it that this semiotics … theory tells us about Torris?”
“It is a theory, you know, not a hypothesis, Alten. What does quantum theory tell us about zero-point motion?”
Joorn held up a hand. “Let’s not fight, children. Irina, what’s this about?”
She was still locking eyes fiercely with her husband. “Is this about Nina?” she said.
“Irina,” Joorn repeated with practiced patience.
She transferred her gaze to him. “Torris’s language diverged from an Earth language presumed to be English not more than two hundred and fifty thousand years ago.”
Joorn drew in his breath. “But Earth disappeared not less than a billion years ago.”
“Precisely.”
“Then that means …” Alten had that faraway look that meant he was doing calculations in his head.
“Are you forming a theory, Alten?” Irina said sweetly.
“More of a hypothesis,” he said. “I’ll need more information before it’s a theory.”
Before she could reply, the door to the control room opened, and Nina came scurrying in. She gave her father and grandfather a cursory glance and went running to Irina.
“Mother,” she said breathlessly, “Andrew’s group just finished sequencing Torris’s mitochondrial DNA and comparing it with samples from the ship! They had separate teams working on protein sequencing and amino acid sequencing and measuring the antigenic distances and—”
“Slow down, Nina,” Irina said. “Take a breath.”
“… and they’re almost identical. There’s hardly any difference at all!”
“Do they have a number?”
“Yes, and they’re sure of it. They went through over sixty PCR amplification cycles and made a phylogenetic analysis of the result.”
“And?”
“And it agrees pretty much with the language divergence study by Laurel’s people. They’re too close to be a coincidence!”
“Nina,” Joorn said gently. “What exactly does that mean?”
She turned to him, her face shining. “It means that it pretty well confirms that Torris’s people began to diverge from us less than two hundred and fifty thousand years after you and Grandma left Earth!”
“But that’s impossible!”
“No it isn’t,” Alten said. He paused sheepishly. “I have a theory.”
Torris frowned, struggling with ideas that were turning his world upside down. “And you say that man created the God-Trees, not the other way around?”
Alten was impressed. Torris was showing admirable courage in facing concepts that must have seemed heretical to him. For a supposed primitive, he seemed to have a surprising grasp of notions for which there weren’t even words in his own language. If Torris was typical of the comet-dwellers, Alten thought, they must be a very superior folk indeed. But then, they would have to be. Living in the dangerous environment of the Oort cloud without technology would kill off the fools very quickly.
“Yes,” he said. “It was a long, long time ago, when your people and ours were one.”
“You mean we were dwarfs too?” Torris said, and everybody laughed. After a moment, Torris, despite his embarrassment, laughed too, out of courtesy.
They’d brought him to the bridge so that Alten and Chu could use the ship’s displays to make things clearer when necessary. It made things easier that Chu was there. He was a familiar face, and so was Martin. Jonah had come along in his travel pod, to help with the dolphin chirps that were as much a part of Torris’s new vocabulary as English. And Irina had allowed Laurel to bring along two of her linguists, though everyone agreed that direct conversation would be filtered through Nina to avoid overwhelming Torris.
The ship’s spin, in its distant co-orbit with the Tree, had been lowered to one-quarter gravity to allow Torris to get out of the dolphin pool. Nobody minded; daily life in the ship went on as usual, and the low gravity was a lark. Torris himself was tottering along like an old man, even at a quarter G, but he was managing quite well.
“And we returned from a long journey, like you?” Torris said.
“Yes, and probably even farther than we went. But your ship was faster, so although you left later, you returned sooner.”
That was too much for Torris. He turned to Nina, and she confirmed it, elaborating with the help of Jonah and his dolphin dictionary.
“So we could do magic, like you?” Torris said with a hint of pride in his voice.
“Probably even greater magic,” Alten said. “But to no avail. By that time the sun had grown into the red giant you call the ‘Stepsister’ and swallowed the world we both had left from, as well as the other inner planets.”
To illustrate his point, Alten brought up Sol in the display. One of the linguists whispered to Nina, providing a word that meant, approximately, a very large person in Torris’s language.
“But that is not big enough to swallow a world,” Torris objected. “The Stepsister swallows the Sisters from time to time, but they are only stars too. It couldn’t swallow a world any more than a hopper could swallow a meatbeast. It’s only a dot.”
“It only looks that way because it’s so far away. Let’s bring it closer.”
Alten fiddled with the display and got a zoom going. The red dot grew rapidly until it was an inferno that filled the display from floor to ceiling. Laurel and the two assistants gasped. The others, who had seen it before, still drew back at the intimidating sight.
Only Torris remained unimpressed. “It’s a fire,” he said. “Like any other. It’s bigger than a man, to be sure, but hardly able to swallow a world.”
It dawned on Alten that Torris must have seen other globular fires in the air-filled caverns where people lived, fires that had separated from their anchoring by the pressure of rising air. There must be fires aplenty in a world mostly made of wood. But there was never any danger of them consuming the Tree; they would be snuffed out when they encountered a vacuum.
Then it struck him that Torris could not imagine a “world” larger than a comet. He looked to his daughter for help.
“Daddy, show him some landscapes with people in them,” she said. “Punch in the ‘Scenes from old Earth’ footage from the re-creation archive. Here, I’ll do it.”
She reached across and tapped on an auxiliary keyboard that connected with the ship’s com. An African veldt replaced the sun, wide-angle enough to show the distant curvature of the horizon.
There were wheeled vehicles with canvas tops and people in bright holiday clothes to provide scale. A welcoming committee of giraffes had approached the people, lowering themselves stiffly on splayed legs and bending their long necks to mooch food.
Torris gasped at the sight. The wheeled vehicles couldn’t have meant anything to him; they wouldn’t have worked on a comet, where there wasn’t enough gravity to hold them to the ground. But the giraffes would have made eminent sense to a man who had been elongated by evolution in a microgravity enviroment.
It was the horizon that was the true marvel to him. He grasped its immensity immediately. “Far, so far,” he whispered in his own language. Jonah provided a translation in a synthetic voice for Alten, adding that the Delphinese equivalent meant, literally, a long swim.
“Then this is the world we came from, your people and mine?” Torris asked. “Bigger than the Tree, bigger than the Ship. Where people walk about in the open without airsuits, and everyone is heavy.”
“Yes,” Nina said before Alten could answer.
“But it is gone now, eaten by the fire you showed me.”
“Yes.”
“And the fire was once that yellow thing that I saw in the sky? And the sky was blue, not black.”
“He’s getting it,” Laurel said to her assistants. She still had not lost the habit of talking about Torris as if he were not there.
“You see, the red star and the orange and white stars that you call the Sisters are …” Alten began weightily but stopped when Nina motioned him to silence.
Torris said nothing for a long time. His brow furrowed as he worked it all out in his head. He glanced at the canned astronomy lesson that Alten had brought up, showing the merger of a younger solar system with Alpha Centauri’s twins, even though diagrams and animations didn’t work with Torris.
Finally Torris was ready to summarize what he had learned. He furrowed his brow and said, “Then we all came from the red star, before it grew. And then we went far away into the dark, and some of us came back. But when you travel so far, time melts—like ice near a fire. So that more time passed here than for the other travelers.”
Alten couldn’t help marveling. For a preliterate autochthon to have grasped and articulated one of the basic principles of relativity was nothing short of amazing. He turned to Nina, and she shot back an I-told-you-so look.
He cleared his throat. “Just so, Torris,” he said.
Torris looked troubled. “Our priest did not tell us these things.”
Alten turned to his daughter for help. She looked at her mother, who nodded her permission.
“Your priest didn’t know, Torris,” Nina said. “It all happened so long ago that it isn’t even a memory or a tale to be passed down, even turned to legend.”
The taxonomy people had finally settled on an estimate of two to three hundred thousand years for the evolution of Homo cometes, about the same distance separating the Cro-Magnons from the archaic Homo sapiens. The sun had long since devoured the inner planets when they returned from whatever galaxy they’d tried to colonize, but the Tree-based ecology of the cometary cloud would have been spreading for billions of years. They might have made a go of it at first, but without a sustainable technological base and the resources provided by a planetary surface, things had inevitably gone wrong. Their technology might have been more advanced than that of Time’s Beginnin
g, but when equipment wore out or broke down, it couldn’t be replaced. Over who knew how many generations, they degenerated to a primitive society, sustained by the giant Trees and the plants and animals that the early Oortian lumberjacks had brought with them to their work camps. And the returnees began to evolve themselves.
Nina looked at Torris’s overdeveloped chest, incongruous on his stretched-out frame, and wondered what his lung capacity was. She knew for a fact that he could hold his breath longer than Jonah.
She shuddered, wondering if her shipload of Homegoers was destined for the same fate. But no, Time’s Beginning had brought along everything needed to get an industrial society going, and her grandfather’s followers were determined to find a planetary surface to terraform. Moreover, from an earlier generation than Torris’s forebears, they were less dependent on their technology and thus more resourceful.
She smiled, thinking of her brother, Martin. He could fix anything, from the mechanical reels that played out the cargo netting to the conjugate mirrors that made the Higgs drive work.
Torris hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away from the display, which had returned to its close-up of the Tree. It must have been very frustrating to him. He could have no conception of the distances involved. He only remembered the unfortunate slip of the garrulous paleontology undergraduate, who had said it would be an eight-day journey. He knew he could survive eight days in naked space with his primitive equipment. Ning had survived even longer, though she had taken extra air supplies, and he himself had survived more than half that long.
It was to Martin that he appealed. “Take me back to the airlock,” he said.
He used the word he had learned for the double barrier that kept out the airless Outside. It seemed more appropriate than his own word for an air-trapping space, to describe the hugeness and solidity of the space that had accommodated the—he had learned that word too—boat.
Everybody looked at him aghast. “Torris …” Nina began.
“I have decided,” he said. “I will need several of those … tanks … your people use instead of airbags, and Martin, I will need your help in contriving a valve that will attach to my intake.” Martin was the only person he had seen work with hand tools; everybody else seemed to use magic.
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