Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

but there has to be a terminal velocity imposed by what we’ve got available to us, plus the slingshot effect of the core maneuver. But I figure that getting within one ten millionth of one percent of the speed of light ought to do the job.”
    He gave them a toothless grin. Bram could see the little white dots where a new generation of baby teeth was starting to show through the gums. Bram’s own teething, in just the few missing gaps, was still bothering him; he knew now what babies complained about.
    “Is this character still bragging about that shiny new toy of his out there?” Bram turned to see Trist hanging jauntily in midair. “That’ll give you a sample of what we’re in for during the next five hundred years. And does everybody realize that if he’s off by one decimal point in his calculations, it’ll be a lot longer than five hundred years? The time dilation factor will work out to a trip of one thousand seven hundred years.”
    The rangy physicist had weathered well over the years; he looked like a somewhat faded version of his youthful self. He was going to be in charge of the program to broadcast the Nar genetic code at all the suns that might be listening as the human expedition, in its queer hybrid craft of living tree and robot ramjet, plunged into the galaxy’s crowded heart.
    “Hello, Trist,” Bram said. “Before all the technical blather, Mim was saying that it’s a strange ship we’ll be traveling in—a world, really, and one that will nurture us between the galaxies.”
    “People used to name their ships long ago, didn’t they?” Mim asked. “We ought to have a name for this one.”
    Trist peered out the port. Only a few miles away now, the tree was no longer a geometrically perfect ball. The huge twisting green branches seemed to fill all space.
    “Yes,” he said. “They broke a jug of wine over it first.”
    Jao snorted. “Waste of good alcohol.”
    Bram furrowed his brow. “Trist, didn’t you once—”
    “Didn’t I once tell you the story of the tree that was the world—the all-spanning tree that nourished and sustained the entire race of humankind and protected them from the burning heavens while they made the transition from one universe to another? Yes, I did.”
    “The burning heavens,” Jao interposed. “That’d be the gamma rays and relativistic particles that we’re going to have to sail through.”
    Bram said, “What—”
    “Yggdrasil,” Trist said. “The world tree was called Yggdrasil.”
    “That settles it, then,” Mim said firmly. “That’s what we’ll name ours.”
    Bram’s mind drifted seventy years into the past, when a sleepy little boy had assured his ten-legged tutor, with all the certitude of childhood, that one day when he grew up he would find a way to return across the impassable void to the home of the first human race. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that it would be like this, in a giant space-dwelling tree towed by a device that shrank time. Now, it seemed, there would always be time to spare; his seventy years were only a prelude.
    Mim’s voice nudged him back to the present. “What are you thinking?” she said.
    He looked at the familiar faces and saw them as they would be again. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that we’re about to start a great adventure.”
    The boat settled gently into the gigantic branches. The tree’s rotation had been stopped for the probe-threading maneuver, so the swarming vehicles that contained the human race could land anywhere, not just at the docking facilities in the trunk. The immortal people filed through to the airlocks, not looking back.
     
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
     
    Donald Moffitt was born in Boston and now lives in rural Maine with his wife, Ann, a native of Connecticut. A former public relations executive, industrial filmmaker, and ghostwriter, he has been writing fiction on and off for some thirty years under an assortment of pen names, ranging from espionage novels to historical sagas. His first full-length science-fiction novel and the first book of any genre to be published under his own name was The Jupiter Theft (Del Rey, 1977). “One of the rewards of being a public relations man specializing in the technical end of large corporate accounts,” he says, “was being allowed to hang around on the fringes of research being done in such widely disparate fields as computer technology, high-energy physics, the manned space program, polymer chemistry, parasitology,