Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

stretched across thousand-meter hoops out there where gravity can’t make them sag, but even so, they’re not as good in some ways as this one. And they never will be until somebody figures out a way to develop a big bioreflector that will live in vacuum.”
    It really looked like an eye, Bram thought, with the small black circle staring out of the middle like a pupil. He said so to Jun Davd, who laughed.
    “Oh, it’s not an eye like yours or mine, Bram. That round thing in the center isn’t a part of the living stuff. It’s a well to let light through. There’s a sheet of charge-coupled devices growing underneath in a nutrient solution. The eye itself is made of millions of tiny facets built up of alternating layers of cytoplasm and guanine crystals—on the same principle as the mirror optics of the Nar eye and the eyes of the other advanced life forms on this planet. In fact, Nar genetic material was the starting point. The layers have different refractive indexes. They’re built up in stacks, each a given fraction of a particular wavelength of light. The eye responds to external stimuli and looks at what we tell it to.”
    “Could you ask it to show us something now?”
    “Oh, no,” Jun Davd said hastily. “I’m not allowed to touch it. You have to have an apprenticeship of a century or more to reach that level.” He ran a hand ruefully through his white hair. “I’m not old enough to qualify. I’m afraid I never will be.” He gave Bram his nice smile again, white teeth in a dark face, “I can show you something through the small refractor, though.”
    “Can I see Ilf ?”
    “Ilf’s already set, I’m afraid. Along with its primary, the lesser sun.”
    “Oh.” Bram was disappointed.
    “You don’t need a telescope to see Ilf, you know. At least, I’m sure you don’t. My old eyes can’t quite manage it anymore. It’s the dimmer of the two stars near the lesser sun. The brighter star is the gas giant. They both shine brighter than they ordinarily would at that distance— almost as bright as some of the planets that belong properly to our own sun—because they reflect the lesser sun’s light. You know they’re planets, not stars, because sometimes they’re on one side of the lesser sun and sometimes on the other. You see, in a double star system like ours, even the smaller sun can hang on to its own planets if their orbits are close enough and the bigger star is far enough away.”
    Bram paid courteous attention. When Jun Davd finished, he said, “I look for Ilf all the time. Voth showed me where it was. But he says that pretty soon I won’t be able to see it anymore. Not till next winter, anyhow. I guess I was too little to remember about that from the year before.”
    “Why do you want to look at Ilf through a telescope, Bram?” Jun Davd asked.
    “I thought maybe I could see people on it.”
    Jun Davd didn’t laugh this time. “It’s too far away to see the people walking around. It would look sort of like a big fuzzy ball.”
    “Could I see the people on Jumb? Jumb’s closer.”
    “I see you know your subject, Bram,” Jun Davd said gravely. “You’re right, Jumb is closer. It’s one of our own gas giants. Actually, there are no people on Jumb itself. They live on its moons.”
    “ Could I?”
    “No, Bram, I’m afraid not. Jumb would look like a fuzzy ball, too. Why are you so interested in seeing the people?”
    Bram shuffled his feet. “I don’t know.”
    “Come on, let’s have a look anyway. Jumb’s in the sky tonight, at least.” He took Bram by the hand and led him to a small auxiliary structure growing out of the main ball.
    Bram was somewhat mollified after having a look through Jun Davd’s telescope. It was more like what he thought a telescope ought to be like, with a big long barrel and an eyepiece that you looked through squinty fashion, with one eye closed. Jun Davd showed him how to look through it after clearing away some equipment that, he said, had done enough work for now. “Don’t stare too long, Bram,” he said. “Take short looks. Here, I’ll set it up for you.”
    At first Bram didn’t see anything. Then there was Jumb, no longer the familiar brilliant point of light in the sky but the fuzzy ball that Jun Davd had promised, as plain as anything once he got used to its jumping around like that.
    “Do you see the moons, Bram?”
    Bram caught his breath as he spotted the cluster of bright dots swimming next to the mottled face of