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?”