Bram looked across at the grisly specimen, the liplike structure with its hooked clasping lobes was spread out to more than a fourth of the creature’s body length. He shuddered.
“Dragonflies spent most of their lives as nymphs,” Harld went on. “Years, sometimes. They lived underwater, breathing through gills, eating voraciously till they grew to size. They’d attack anything that moved—creatures bigger than they were. When it came time for them to change, they’d climb up a reed, split their skin, and emerge as that glorious winged creature you see there. The adult form—the imago—was the one that reproduced. It lived only a few Tendays and died after laying its eggs.”
He handed Bram another photoplastic readout. This one showed a dragonfly climbing out of a pale, cast-off ghost of itself and spreading its gossamer wings.
“What confused the issue,” Harld said, warming to his subject, “was that Odonata’s like no other insect order. There was a separate evolution of the nymphal and imagal forms—probably dating back to before Earth’s Carboniferous period. The dragonfly larva lacked the specialized regeneration centers—’imaginal disks,’ they’re called—that in other insects formed the adult tissues from latent embryonic cells, while the larval tissues melted away. They never went through an intervening pupal stage. They changed by direct growth.”
He was shoving more readouts at Bram. “The nymph adapted for an aquatic life, while the adult dragonfly remained virtually the same,” he said. “The nymph evolved independently. It developed gills. Then, at some point, apparently—like other aquatic creatures—it left the water in its immature form and developed the ability to breathe air.”
Something ugly stirred in Bram’s memory, the shadow of an ancient image.
Harld was trying to show him something on the autopsy table. “Jorv was perfectly right about the way they developed the equivalent of lungs. A portion of the alimentary canal just anterior to the rectum became enlarged into a sort of bellows.”
One of the other zoologists, a freckle-faced fellow, grinned crudely. “What a way to inhale,” he said.
Harld looked annoyed. “It was an obvious evolution-dry step—that’s where the gills were, with their ready-made oxygenating apparatus. In human beings, the embryonic gill structures are derived from the upper alimentary canal—and that’s why breathing and swallowing are interrelated in us.”
The shadowy memory nagged at Bram. There had been something, a long, long time ago…
Harld was saying, “So it was through these aquatic forms that evolution got around the problem of the breathing spiracles that had formerly placed limits on the size and intelligence of land insects. Plus the modification of the exoskeleton into a partially internalized support. It gave the Odonata access to the evolutionary niche previously occupied by the large mammals.”
“And now they’re the inheritors of the earth,” Bram murmured.
Harld frowned. “But first they had to learn how to reproduce in the nymphal stage. Without having to metamorphose into the adult winged form. Because otherwise the need to fly would have placed a limiting factor on their size.”
And then Bram suddenly remembered.
“It was an unstable allele. Original Man spliced a set of synthetic chimeras into dragonfly DNA. They were trying to modify the nymph to create an organism that would keep insect pests under control in their arctic regions. They thought it would remain an aquatic form and do man’s work for him. But it got out of hand.”
“What?” The three zoologists gave their full attention. “Do you know something of this, Bram?”
It all came flooding back. It had been buried for almost seven hundred years in a mind that had become overlaid by other experiences. Slowly at first, then with increasing fluency, Bram told them about the synthetic heterochronic gene that had made the self-reproducing hen’s egg possible—about the way a DNA chimera had been contrived out of genetic material derived from the dragonfly and the axolotl. How, generations later, Original Man had discovered the dangers lurking in the construct and had radioed a warning in a codicil to his first great Message. And how the Nar, accordingly, had suppressed the file—though it contained the seeds of man’s immortality. How he, Bram, a rare human apprentice in a Nar touch group, had stumbled upon the reference and confronted his mentor, Voth, with it. How the entire Nar nation had carried their burden of guilt and finally, stunningly, made amends.
“You’re saying, then, that it was the nymphal dragonflies that exterminated Original Man?” Harld asked.
His eyes were filled with horror. He was wondering, Bram knew, if it was all about to happen again.
“No, no,” Bram said. “Original Man solved the problem. Or thought he had. At great cost. The near destruction of his arctic ecology. But the mutation must just have been biding its time. It waited, buried in dragonfly nucleotides, for forty million years … fifty million years. Long enough for the human race to go the way of the dinosaurs and to be replaced by a dominant species evolved from rats. Long enough for the rat-people to go the way of humankind—according to that timetable of periodic extinctions that your department drew up when we first arrived at the Milky Way. And when the rat-folk were gone, there was an ecological niche vacant, waiting for a new intelligent, cooperating species about the size of a man. No mammal, no vertebrate, could have competed with such as the nymphs had become.”
All of them, the three zoologists and Bram, involuntarily looked over to the dissection table where the latest inheritor of the Earth lay. Harld swallowed hard.
“Man did this?” he asked.
“No, we must not be so arrogant,” Bram said. “Perhaps it would have happened without us.”
Harld opened his mouth as if he were about to say something further. But at that moment Jao came bursting into the improvised morgue.
“Better come quick!” Jao panted. “They’re on their way!”
“Here?”
“Yar. About a hundred of those ground vehicles of theirs. We’ve got to round everybody up and get out to the shuttles before we’re cut off.”
Bram whirled around to the three zoologists. “Get going. Put on your vacuum suits and tell everybody you see to do the same. We’re going to let the air out of this place.”
He turned to Jao again. “All right, let’s start deputizing people. How many of those shuttles are ready to be flown?”
“Enough—if we jam them full of people and dump everything else. In a couple of hours we can strap pallet rockets to some of them. It won’t take much of a boost to at least get them off the ground out of harm’s way. The pilots can finish their countdowns in space if they have to.”
“Good. Let’s get going.”
Jao was sweating. “There’s more,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Jun Davd’s been watching the ship through his telescopes. He radioed at almost the exact time our own lookouts saw the ground vehicles starting our way.”
A chill ran down Bram’s spine. “Go on,” he said.
“More of the environmental bubbles are detaching themselves from the stick-ship. They’re just boiling off it. Drifting down to the rim of the diskworld. And some of them are heading toward Yggdrasil.”
Part III
SECOND EXODUS
CHAPTER 10
“He went back for the Rembrandts,” a terrified assistant babbled. “He said he couldn’t bear to leave them behind.”
Bram shook the man into coherence. “How long ago?”
“About two hours ago. He took a walker.”
Bram released him. “The fool,” he said. “The idiotic fool.” He pushed his way across the crowded shuttle deck to the raised platform of the control section, where Jao stood conferring in low tones with the pilot.
The pilot turned a worried face toward him. She was a big-boned woman with brown curly hair, a member of Lydis’s comet-chasing squadron and, therefore, a crack flyer. “We’re ready to go,” she said. “We ought to lift off within the half hour or�
�”
She trailed off and glanced meaningfully out the arbitrary forward port across the pale ribbon of landscape.
“Is everyone else accounted for?” Bram asked Jao.
“Yar. The curator was accounted for, too, on our preliminary name check. He must have slipped away right afterward.”
“He ought to have been back by now. Unless something happened to him.”
Jao, without apology, reached past the pilot and punched a telescopic view of the plain into one of the screens. He adjusted the angle of incidence until he got what he was looking for, then refined the focus. Bram saw a thin haze of dust, its forward edge advancing, its rearward margin slowly settling.
“Less than fifty miles away,” he said. “They could be here in an hour.”
Bram checked the latches of his helmet before putting it on. “I’d better go look for him.”
“Are you crazy?” Jao exploded. “There isn’t time. If he doesn’t get back in time for lift-off, we’ll have to leave without him.”
Bram turned to the pilot. “Don’t wait for me,” he said. “I’ll keep in radio contact, but if I go off the air or if I’m late, lift off without me. Is that understood?”
“I’ll wait till the last possible moment, Year-Captain,” the pilot said.
“Don’t cut it too fine,” Bram said. He lifted the helmet to his shoulders.
Jao retrieved his own helmet. “I’m going with you. No argument.”
They squeezed into the air lock together. “Leave the outside door open.” The pilot’s voice rang in his radio. Jao nodded and deployed a rope ladder, but they didn’t waste time using the ladder to climb down; they let themselves drop, with a little shove to speed them on their way.
“This way,” Jao said.
He led the way across the field to where a helter-skelter collection of walkers and wheeled machinery had been abandoned. Boxes, bundles, and personal possessions were strewn at random where they had been dropped. Some of the walkers stirred nervously, giving the illusion of life. They had no consciousness, of course—they were just protein machines—but still Bram hated the thought of leaving them here on a dragonfly world. Though, he reflected, if a dragonfly tried to eat one, the walker would poison it.
“This one,” Jao said. “It’s Old Speedy, the one that won all the races last summer.” He checked the reselin tendons to make sure they were hard and taut, eyed the diameter of the central ball of muscle to see that it still retained sufficient running time, and climbed inside. Bram followed him through the flap, and Jao put the biomachine in motion with a slap of the reins.
The walker ran flat out toward the digs, Jao urging it on at a gallop. Bram twisted around for a look at the launching pad. The first shuttle was mounting the sky on a tail of fire. There were six more to go, with the approximately one hundred eighty remaining evacuees crowded into them. The life-support facilities would be strained, but they’d survive until they reached Yggdrasil.
A half hour later, the moon ladder came into view, with the stalled car dangling from it. The low, regular rubble mounds of the outskirts of the city lay only a few miles ahead of them.
“We’re running late,” Bram said. “Do you see any sign of him?”
“No.”
Behind them, another shuttle rose into the sky. It was the fourth. There were only three left to go.
“There’s his walker,” Jao said, slowing down.
The derelict walker stood spraddle-legged in a patch of loose gravel, its blunt prow facing the digs, not the landing field. There was no sign of the curator in the vicinity. Bram got out and examined the interior of the driver’s bubble.
“Ran out of power,” he announced to Jao. “He must have taken a walker that was already run down. I saw a few footprints. I guess he decided to walk the rest of the way in.”
“What was it that he was after, anyway?” Jao said.
“A collection of Rembrandt engravings.”
“You’d think they were germ plasm samples. Couldn’t he have holoed them or something?”
“He said they were originals from Earth.”
Jao looked nervously behind him. “There goes another shuttle.”
Their pilot heard him. “I think you’d better start back now,” she said. “Your time’s running out.”
“How close are they?”
“About thirty miles. They can probably see our shuttles by now. But they’re still sticking pretty closely to the inner rim route that their scouts took. So far they’ve shown no sign of veering inland for a look at us.”
“That’s because as far as they know, all of the goodies are still waiting for them at the digs,” Jao said gruffly. He turned to Bram. “Where would your Rembrandt lover have been headed?”
“Back to the sports arena, I suppose. That’s where he left the things he wasn’t able to carry.”
“Serve him right if he got left behind himself,” Jao growled, He made no move to start up the walker again.
“Bee butchers,” Bram said softly. “That was one of the names for dragonflies. Bees were another kind of insect. They lived in communal hives. Original Man raised them for a substance called honey that they produced. Some dragonflies learned to hang around bee yards and wait for the workers to return with their loads. They’d dismember the bees on the wing, Harld told me, until the ground was littered with bee fragments.”
“Like the way they massacred us in the arena,” Jao said harshly.
“Yes.”
Jao reached to the tiller. “You’re right, of course, chaos take it. We can’t leave the little fellow there.”
The walker unlimbered its long legs and in a moment was flying at top speed toward the oval of reflected moonlight that marked the central city.
They came upon the curator a couple of miles farther on. He staggered toward them out of the rubble, carrying a huge portfolio that he seemed unable to lift high enough to keep from dragging, even in the microgravity. Jao came jolting to a halt, and he and Bram climbed down. The curator stared dully at them through his helmet, his face gray. They hustled him into the walker and cracked his helmet, while Bram checked his tanks.
“His air’s, almost gone,” Bram said. “He never would have made it back on foot.”
Jao tossed the portfolio into the back of the inflated compartment. “I hope these were worth it,” he snarled at the curator. “You risked a shuttleful of lives for them.”
Through blue lips, the curator said defiantly, “They’re irreplaceable.”
“So are we,” Jao snapped.
The walker’s long strides ate up the miles. Through the radio, the pilot’s strained voice kept them informed. “Year-Captain, the main body of the dragonfly force just passed our position. But several vehicles have separated from it and are crossing the plain toward us. The other remaining shuttle is going to take off now.”
Ahead, flame boiled from the landscape and climbed the black sky. Bram looked across at the rim road and saw a line of tiny specks heading toward the city.
“I can see the vehicles,” Bram said. “We should reach your position in about ten minutes.”
“I’m warming the engines. Please hurry.”
“Oh, oh,” Jao said. “Take a look at that.”
The walker’s movement had attracted attention. On the rim road, four of the specks left the dragonfly cavalcade and headed inland.
“Trying to cut us off,” Jao said. “But a walker can outrun one of those rolling travel tubes without half trying.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Bram said. The tilted cylinders were picking up speed, streaking across the surface like gigantic writing pens guided by an invisible hand. Now their speed was too much for the low gravity. They began to jounce into the air, higher and higher, between the brief scrabbling of the wheels at the ground. One of them bounced a good thirty feet and came down upright, still moving. The passengers within must be shifting their weight around to keep it stable. Wingless the nymphs might be, but they still had the
instincts of fliers.
Bram could see the shuttle now, a minuscule dome on stilts. A haze of escaping gas covered its skirts. Beyond, a wave of the angled tube vehicles rolled toward it.
“It’s going to be close,” Jao said.
“Too close,” Bram said. “We’re drawing them toward you,” he told the pilot. “It’s no good. You’d better lift off now!”
“No,” the pilot said. “I can see you now. The outside air lock door is open, and everybody’s in a suit and helmet just in case. I’ll hold for you until the last minute. Jump for the door, hold on to the ladder or a strut—anything—if you have to. I’ll use the docking jets to get us space-borne, so you don’t have to worry about being cooked.”
In the rear of the walker, the curator hugged his portfolio to himself and moaned. Bram wondered about jumping for the air lock one-handed. Perhaps he could throw the curator at the door. No, Jao could jump first, catch the curator and fling him inside, then catch the portfolio.
It would be a shame to leave the etchings behind after they had risked their lives for them.
“We’re not going to make it,” Jao said.
Bram gave up the idea. The tube vehicles were fanning out to engulf the base of the lander—fanning out to engulf the walker when it arrived.
“Do as I say,” Bram ordered. “You’ve got thirty people there to think of.”
The pilot’s voice was filled with anguish. “We’ll wait. We’ve talked it over together.”
Bram’s eyes stung. Beside him on the narrow bench, Jao cursed and brought the walker to a rearing halt.
Off to the side, the four dragonfly vehicles that had moved to cut the walker off instantly made a slight course correction to adapt to the new vector.
“Listen,” Jao said roughly, “there’s still a pallet out there ready to go. I strapped the rockets to it myself. We’re going for it. So forget about waiting for us.”
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