Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02 Read Free Page A

Smeth’s instruments were to show Yggdrasil heading straight toward a star emerging from a dust cloud, there would be minutes—perhaps hours—to change course. A lateral nudge of less than half a degree, projected over a minute or two of travel, would always give them margin to spare.
    He drank in the glittering spectacle again, wondering how much longer he would be able to enjoy it. As Yggdrasil’s speed increased, eventually the stellar rainbow would shrink into a thin gold rim framing the forward blind spot, and the vortex of hydrogen influx would make it invisible from any part of the tree. He had tried to get a time estimate from Jao, but Jao had been vague. They were slicing the remainder of the speed of light so thin at this point, Jao said, that measurements were meaningless.
    He looked up through the top of the pod and saw the trunk rushing toward him. A cluster of external housings was directly above: upside-down bubbles with suspended catwalks. Ten or twenty miles to his left, he saw a portion of the tremendous crystalline girdle that circled Yggdrasil’s waist and the secondary tether that would keep Yggdrasil from sliding forward along the shaft during deceleration mode. The tether was of woven viral monofilament a half mile thick, and the double bowline knot that fastened it had been tied, with much tricky maneuvering, by a pair of space tugs. Tension would only make it stronger; with the enormous forces involved, nobody wanted to take chances with extraneous fittings.
    Bram noticed that at the moment Yggdrasil was floating free within its circlet; its momentum was temporarily matched with that of the probe.
    The trunk filled his view, and then the taffy pull of the counterline slowed the travelpod to a bobbing stop about a half mile below the entry blister.
    Bram uttered a mild expletive as he found that the fist-size electric trolley that was supposed to wind him in the rest of the way was out of order.
    For a moment he was tempted to exercise a year-captain’s prerogatives and signal the hub to reel him in. But he was only a couple of hundred feet from his destination, and the pod’s weight was negligible added to his own, even under one-g acceleration. A half hour’s worth of muscle power would do it.
    With a sigh, he bent to the two-handed windlass and began cranking.
     
    “That ought to do it,” Bram agreed.
    He tore his gaze away from the massive helical housing of the high-capacity pump. There was a final gurgle that shook the floor as the last of a half million gallons of chemical solution was forced deep into Yggdrasil’s sapwood.
    The tree systems officer and her hovering assistant gave him bland stares. “I thought the best way to calm Yggdrasil down would be to smooth out the peaks and valleys in phytochrome balance,” the TSO said with professional briskness. “There was too extreme a swing between the two pigment forms, and it was driving Yggdrasil crazy.”
    She gauged his expression for signs of comprehension, apparently decided in his favor, and went on. “You see, the problem is the growing Doppler shift. Unfortunately, all the far-red light comes from the same direction as the fusion light, so that side of the tree’s overstimulated. The phytochrome keeps changing back and forth between the far-red-absorbing form and the sunlight-absorbing form, then back again.”
    Her assistant, even younger than she was, nodded agreement. They were both being patient with the old dodderer.
    “Yes, yes,” Bram said quickly. “I’m sure you took the right approach.”
    The assistant cleared his throat and glanced at his boss before speaking. “And at the same time, there’s the problem of blue light tropisms at the opposite side of the tree. Where the band of up-shifted light is. Yggie’s hormones are working overtime to cope. And you can imagine what that does to his biorhythms.”
    “I can understand why your department was so concerned,” Bram told them in his best sober