“These little animals were pests,” Jorv said. “They got into the longfoots’ food supply. They were probably unsanitary. And they probably bit.”
“The longfoots tried diligently to exterminate them back on Earth. We found a sort of children’s picture book with a story about it. But the creatures must have been too clever, or too prolific, to be stamped out entirely. The longfoots must have been horrified to find that they’d transported them here.”
“Well, the Cuddlies outlasted the longfoots here, at any rate,” Bram said grimly. “Long after these … rat-people packed up and went back to Earth, The Cuddlies were able to survive on the diskworld long enough to adapt for vacuum. To adapt for space travel, when you stop to think about it—when you see the way they scamper around Yggdrasil’s branches and seem to enjoy it.”
“Their root stock must have adapted back on Earth, too,” said Shira.
“Yes,” Ame said “If the human race was never able to exterminate rats, and the rats developed into an intelligent species after man was gone, the same might be true for the proto-Cuddlies. They might be the longfoots’ successors back on earth by now. After all, they occupied a similar ecological niche.”
“What a delicious thought, Ame!” Shira exclaimed. “A world ruled by cousins of the Cuddlies! But would a six-foot intelligent Cuddly be as huggable?”
Ame laughed. “I can hardly wait to get to Sol and see. But Bram-tsu, we mustn’t leave till we finish our work here.”
“That won’t be for a while,” Bram said. “We had an all-tree meeting before I left. You’ve been voted an extra year.”
The long plain was dotted with depots of crated material, each with a little band of partisans gathered around it vying for priority. Processions of cargo walkers, roped together in long caravans led by space-suited drovers, plodded across the starlit diskscape toward the staging areas where the rocket-assisted pallets were being loaded. All the wheeled vehicles had been pressed into service, too, and they could be seen bumping lazily across the flat vista, some of them achieving temporary flight.
Bram, helping Jun Davd to cinch a saddlebag full of astronomical data in place on a kneeling walker, paused in his work to watch a shower of sparks lift above the horizon and rise toward the blob of silver light that was Yggdrasil, hovering just to the right of the pendant moon.
“That’s the third in an hour from the other side,” he said. “The museum’s launchpad, it looks like. They must be working overtime.”
“They’re overloading their pallets,” Jun Davd said. “I’m surprised some of ’em got off the ground. I was over there yesterday helping the dispatcher to figure weights and balances, and we had to make them take off a big statue of three naked men wrestling a snake. Would have spoiled the trim—had the platform tumbling end over end. Had one of those art fellows almost in tears.”
“I’m sure they got it off later.”
“They’ve had a year and a half to loot that museum. I thought the idea was to take a small representative sample and leave the rest for the ages—or for whenever we can get back this way.”
“You know how it is. All of a sudden we’re about to leave, and they start having second thoughts. There’s this last-minute rush. Everybody’s suddenly discovered that there are things they just can’t bear to leave behind—the historians, the archaeologists, the agronomists, everybody.” He laid a hand on the saddlebags. “You, too, it looks like.”
Jun Davd grunted. “It just occurred to me that it might be a good idea to abscond with part of the backlog of original plates—do you know, their astronomers were still recording images on light-sensitive paper for centuries after they had more advanced methods available? Oh, I’ve got all the electronically stored data I need, but it’ll take years—decades—to go through it all, and I started worrying about accumulated signal errors.”
“Have you made any more progress in locating Sol?”
“There are four candidates in the immediate stellar neighborhood. I’ve all but ruled out three of them—but I want to refine my mass estimates a bit further before I set a course out of this system.”
“Waiting until the last minute, are you?”
Jun Davd hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the red-rimmed world-edge that overlooked the masked sun.
“I think I’ve identified our hidden friend, though. It must have been the star they called Delta Pavonis.”
Bram tried not to show his disappointment. “Well, it’s a possible reference point, I suppose. Though the relative positions of the stars in the neighborhood will have changed a lot in seventy-four million years.”
“Delta Pavonis was almost Sol’s twin,” Jun Davd went on serenely. “It was a G-type star with ninety-eight percent of Sol’s mass. It was about nineteen light-years distant. The other nearby G stars had masses of eighty or ninety percent of Sol, except for one called Beta Hydri—that was about one and a quarter solar masses—and one other exception. So the invisible star we’re circling almost has to be either Sol or Delta Pavonis—and I think we’ve already agreed that Original Man would hardly have dismantled his own system for a radio station.”
“Or it could be an interloper. A wanderer they used.”
“In that case, the proper motion of all the nearby stars would be much greater than we’ve observed during our stay.”
“Oh, right.” Bram blushed like an apprentice. After more than five centuries of subjective time, Jun Davd could still make him feel like the little boy whom Voth had sent to the observatory to take astronomy lessons.
“The interesting thing is that the other exception is also almost a twin of Sol—a G-4 of one point oh eight solar masses.”
“So we still can’t tell which—”
“Except for the fact that it was part of a triple star system that went by the name of Alpha Centauri. Which also happened to be Sol’s closest neighbor—just a shade over four light-years away.”
With mounting excitement, Bram began, “That means—”
Jun Davd nodded. “On the assumption that stars that close might have been gravitationally bound—however tenuously—I searched for matching G stars about that distance apart, one of which was part of a triple system.” A grin spread slowly across his dark face. “They’re still there, drifting hand in hand through the spiral arms, and they haven’t changed position much with respect to Delta Pavonis, either.”
“Jun Davd, you’re incorrigible! I’ll never forgive you for keeping me in suspense like that. How far?”
“Less than twenty light-years. Boosting at one gravity, we can be home in seven subjective years.”
Home. The word had a strange ring to it. Bram slapped Jun Davd on the back. “Let’s hurry and get started, then.”
The walker, misinterpreting the slap, rose to its full height. The drover came over and said, “Are you ready to go?”
“In a minute,” Jun Davd told him. He turned back to Bram. “There’s one more datum.”
“What’s that?”
“The G star that seems to be Sol happens to be at the exact center of the sphere of radio clicks that’s growing our way. As if it were the focal point.”
“Original Man!” Bram whispered. “He has come back!”
Jum Davd shook his, head. “That doesn’t seem likely. We’ve had the longfoots in between. We may be about to meet the next contender on the evolutionary treadmill. Or Smeth may be right. It may be a natural phenomenon. In any case, we’d better go. see.”
He picked up the remaining pair of saddlebags and slung them over his own shoulder. The other walkers in the caravan, feeling the tug of the rope, struggled to their feet. In a few minutes, Bram and Jun Davd were following the swaying line of biotransports down the well-scuffed trail to the staging area.
There were plenty of willing hands at the other end to help the caravan unload. Ame was there, supervising the lashing of some bulky crates to an enormous wooden frame whose booster rockets, bolted to the corners and along the sides, must have added up
to a hundred thousand pounds of thrust. Bram also spotted his son, Edard, clambering around at the top of a mountain of freight, unfurling a cargo net. Edard saw him and took a nicely calculated leap that brought him floating down to within a foot of where Bram and Jun Davd were standing.
“Hello, Father. Hello, Jun Davd. What have you got there? Documents mostly? If you have anything fragile, I’ve got room for it with my stuff. I’m riding with the supercargo this load, and I can keep an eye on it for you at the other end.”
Edard was fair and slender, with a suggestion of epicanthic folds at the corners of his eyes that must have come from mama-mu Dlors after skipping a generation. Bram was sorry that Edard had never met his partial gene grandmother; Dlors had elected to remain on the Father World. As a dancer, she had been part of the musical world, and she would have been as proud of Edard as if she had been any latter-day grandmother contributing a full complement of grandmotherly genes.
“You’re going to ride that thing?” Bram asked, casting a dubious eye at the rickety pile. “In nothing but a space suit?”
“It’s only a few hours to Yggie now, and the super’s got an extra bottle of air he’s willing to share,” Edard said cheerfully.
Ame sauntered over. “Everybody’s hitching rides now,” she said. “I’m going to ride up with my last load, too. I’m saving the delicate stuff for then.”
Edard cast a glance upward to where the silver shape of the space tree hung overhead. “Got to take advantage of Yggie’s favorable position while it lasts. Look at these mountains of souvenirs around us. It’ll be half a Tenday before we load it all, and then we’ve got to get the walkers and heavy equipment up there, not to mention packing up our own personal odds and ends.”
Bram conceded the point with a nod. Before coming down to the surface on this final trip, he had given the order for Yggdrasil’s rotation to be stopped. The tree’s inhabitants could put up with weightlessness for the few days it took to make the final transfer of goods. The swarms of cargo pallets were landing all over the branches. The limited docking facilities at the hub were being reserved for passenger vehicles.
“I’ll accept your offer with thanks,” Jun Davd said to Edard. “Here, give me a hand with these boxes of instruments. Be careful—there’s a lot of glass.”
Edard pitched in, and he and Jun Davd made a number of soaring trips in tandem to the top of the heap with boxes slung between them, while Bram unloaded the walker. Fifteen minutes later it was done. The cargo net was tied down securely over the mound of bales and crates, and the supercargo, after inspecting all the fastenings, walked all the way around the wooden platform, checking the weight distribution at intervals with a jack arrangement that lifted the whole thing off the ground.
While they waited, Bram said to Edard, “What have you got there?”
Edard’s face lit up. “Musical instruments. Hundreds of them, all gathered into one place by the longfoot archaeologists. We would never have been able to collect them all ourselves in twenty years of digging! This is my fourth load. Bramfather, the violin—and the other stringed instruments—are entirely different from the way we’ve conceived them! They had only four strings, and they were played with an ordinary manual bow, not motorized disks or powered friction wands. And the instruments themselves are beautiful, curved, complex shapes sculpted of wood. We’ll have to learn how to copy them! We’ll hear music we never heard before! But learning to play such devices well will take a lot of practice!”
“Your mother will be pleased.” Bram could not help thinking of Olan Byr, who had devoted his life to reinventing the old instruments.
“I’ve already given her one of the cellos,” Edard said. “On my last trip a few days ago. She was practicing on it when I left.”
“We’re filling in all the blank places in human culture,” Ame said. “Books of art reproductions—shelves of them. And thousands of actual paintings and pieces of sculpture from the later centuries. And holos of opera, dance, and dramatic performances. And in my field, a complete survey of terrestrial paleontology going back four and a half billion years.”
“Biology, too,” Bram said. “We have a complete DNA library of thousands and thousands of plant and animal species.” Those had been among the first treasures to be moved; they now were in storage aboard Yggdrasil.
Edard hardly listened; he was carried away by his own enthusiasms. “And musical scores! More than nine hundred compositions by someone named Schubert—songs, symphonies, quartets! He must have lived after the discovery of immortality to have written so much! And thirty-two piano sonatas by Beethoven, all of them strikingly different. I never knew he’d written so many! And operas by Mozart! Oratorios by Handel! They all belong to us again!”
“We’ll look forward to your next concerts,” Jun Davd murmured.
The super made a few last notations on a tablet with a vacuum stylus, scribbled his initials, and tacked the sheet to the pallet frame. “All set,” he said.
Edard climbed to a perch atop his possessions, got a firm grip on the cargo net, and waved. A Cuddly rode his shoulder. Bram, Ame, and Jun Davd stood well back with the caravan master and line of walkers. Flame bloomed behind the splash skirt, and the heavily laden platform lifted ponderously, seemed to hang poised for several seconds, then rose with increasing speed into the black sky.
Around Bram the tethered walkers pawed the ground in response to the vibrations. Their attendants calmed them by stroking the affected pseudoganglions. Bram followed the yellow square of flame with his eyes as it climbed toward the hovering tree.
Bram’s eyes were still turned upward when Jun Davd grabbed his sleeve and said, “Look!”
Somewhere past Yggdrasil a new star bloomed. It was a bright blue spark, moving rapidly across the field of stars. It lost its proper motion and turned brighter.
“I believe it’s a fusion flame,” Jun Davd said calmly.
The caravan master and drovers, following their gaze, gaped skyward. On the surrounding plain, activity slowed and stopped as other people noticed.
The blue spark was the brightest star in the sky. It moved not at all against the constellations now.
“They made their course correction,” Jun Davd said. “It appears that this is the disk they’ve chosen.”
“Where…” began a stunned Ame.
Jun Davd squinted at the strange new constellations that had taken shape after seventy-four million years. By now he knew them by heart. “They seem to have come from the general direction of Sol,” he said. “Of course, it was inevitable that they’d get around to Delta Pavonis sooner or later.”
“All those clicking stars…” Bram said.
Jun Davd nodded. “They had to be some manifestation of their message traffic, whether we could extract a pattern out of it or not. And they spread like a tide—not by exercising choice. Inhospitable places like red giants and the burnt-out cinders of white dwarfs, whose planets have no future. You’d think they would have skipped to a few of the more congenial stars first. And now their wave front’s arriving here, like clockwork.”
Bram drew a sharp breath. “But why now?” he said. “Why not sooner? Or later? No one’s visited the disk-worlds for over fifty million years. And just as we get here…”
Ame’s face was flushed behind the sparkling curve of her helmet. “Because it’s their turn, don’t you see, Bram-tsu!”
“Your extinction timetable?”
She nodded vigorously. “The figures work out about right, don’t they, Jun Davd?”
Jun Davd spoke without removing his eyes from the distant fusion flame. “We came back here in a multiple of thirty-seven million years—just as fast as we could after the Message reached the Father World, not counting the few insignificant millennia that fell through the cracks while the Nar remade us, and so forth. They got here in a rough multiple of twenty-six million years after the Message stopped.” He pursed his lips. “They seem to have arrived about four million years early. That’s within
the limits of your timetable, isn’t it, Ame?”
“Divided by three, yes,” she said.
Around them on the booty-littered plain, people were gathering into groups, pointing excitedly at the sky. Bram knew that if he switched to the general frequency he would hear a babble of voices. A delegation of about a dozen people, spotting Jun Davd’s tall space-suited figure and his own well-worn tabard, were bouncing across the fiat ribbonscape toward them.
“Who?” Bram said. “Relatives of the Cuddlies? The collateral branch you postulated that might have evolved from the same root stock after the longfoots carried the Cuddlies here?”
“No,” Ame said. “That would have been the last cycle—twenty-six million years ago. The proto-Cuddlies missed their chance. They never traveled to the stars.”
Bram stared at the blue spark that was heading toward them. “Who then?” he said.
“We’ll know very soon,” Jun Davd said.
CHAPTER 9
The alien ship resembled a long jointed stick studded with budlike structures and a cluster of bubbles like white foam at one end. It was very large, as starships must be. It was not worldlike in Yggdrasil’s sense, but the segmented shaft was many miles long, and each individual bubble was easily a half mile in diameter.
“It’s a fusion vessel, all right, but not a ramjet,” said Jun Davd’s deep, composed voice from the screen. “They carried their fuel with them. They’re using a deuterium-helium three reaction. But there are traces of tritium from previous burns.”
Bram saw the implications immediately. “They started their trip with a deuterium-tritium reaction. And they’ve been at it long enough to have to switch fuels because of the decay of their tritium.”
He turned his eyes from the sticklike image on the portable viewscreen long enough to exchange glances with Jao. Jun Davd had returned to the tree in order to have the full resources of the observatory at his disposal, but the burly physicist had left Trist to hold the fort and returned to the diskworld, where, he said, “the action’s going to be.”
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