
Bram shuddered. As frightening as that umbrella of sparks was, at least it hid the nothingness
beyond—the blind spot where the crowded wavelengths of light pushed past the visible spectrum and
wiped the stars from the universe. The blind spot behind, eerily framing the artificial sun of the fusion
stage of the drive, was bad enough.
He let his eyes follow the long, mirror-bright shaft downward to where the fusion flames burned. The
waste light had enough red in it for Yggdrasil to carry on photosynthesis, enough ultraviolet for human
sunbathers to tan themselves by behind the lenticels of the recreation areas.
The long shaft threaded a dangerous course between Yggdrasil's twin domes. At its closest point it
passed within forty miles of the trunk, and Yggdrasil itself had provided extra protection there—growing
a shield of adventitious leaves with their silvery reflective sides facing out. The star tree could handle
anything up through x-rays.
The material part of the shaft was its least important aspect. In fact, its tremendous length could not have
held up under even moderate lateral stress. It was there to provide support for the winding coils that
deflected the roaring streams of ionized hydrogen in their constricted path from the collection area
forward to the ignition cage aft.
For a moment Bram tried to imagine what the whole crazy travel arrangement would look like to a
hypothetical observer outside the craft—provided that the observer could see by undopplered light. Or,
more to the point, provided that the observer was in the same relativistic frame, matching the spacecraft's
course in velocity and direction. Otherwise, the collection of shapes on their long skewer would be
foreshortened by a factor of twenty thousand, turning them into a stack of paper-thin disks pierced by a
thumbtack.
He decided it would look like a post horn straddled by a leafy dumbbell.
Bram had seen a post horn once, at one of Olan Byr's memorial concerts. The ancient instruments, from
lyres to sousaphones, had been part of Olan's legacy. He had been tireless in commissioning
reproductions from hints in man's digitally transmitted art masterpieces, dictionary sketches, and clues in
the musical notation itself. The post horn was based on one played by an angel in an Annunciation. It was
a long, straight tube of brass, tall as the man who played it, with a flaring bell at one end and the smaller
flare of a mouthpiece at the other.
Bram closed his eyes for a moment and savored the eccentric image.
The post horn that dragged Yggdrasil by the collar was twelve hundred miles long, with its slender tube
aligned along g forces to keep it straight. The bell was an insubstantial net of superfilament, several
hundred miles in diameter, that kept its shape by virtue of an independent spin at its rim. Around the bell
was a multicolored cascade of sparks, like trumpet notes made visible. A miniature sun burned blindingly
in a magnetic cage at the mouthpiece, like a divine breath. And from the flared mouthpiece issued a thin
pencil of inspired light as the hadronic photons, their work done, decayed and wreaked havoc with
whatever interstellar debris was still left behind in the wake of the probe's sweep.
Pleased with the image, he conjured up the other component of the queer hybrid vehicle.
Yggdrasil would make a compressed sort of dumbbell, he decided, with a short, thick handle and rather
flattened hemispheres. More like a pair of fat wheels lying athwart the long axis of the probe. One
hemisphere was silver with a green rim facing the fusion fire. The other was brown, laced through with the
crystal sparkle of cometary ice and showing an arc of green where Yggdrasil's root system had decided
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