Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

some kind of signal then, because Jun Davd raised his head and said, “They’re ready for us.”
    He brought Bram back to the balcony circling the big eye. The director and Voth were waiting there, along with a couple of young Nar assistants. The assistants must have just finished their lunch; one of them was bent over a piece of equipment, and Bram could see down along the insides of his tentacles, where successive waves of cilia marched systematically toward the central maw, brushing crumbs and food particles inward. No Nar would speak in the Great Language until he had finished grooming himself this way; it would be, Tha-tha had once explained, like a human person talking with his mouth full, very impolite. It was surprising, Bram thought, how dry and fluffy a Nar’s inner surfaces could be within a minute or two of eating.
    The director gave Bram a nod—actually a susurrated recognition signal in the Small Language—and said something to the assistant. With a last hasty sweep of food fragments, the assistant pressed a tentacle tip against a ciliated touch bar. There was a rumble of moving machinery overhead. Bram retreated to the shelter of Voth’s folding petals. He looked around for Jun Davd, but the white-haired apprentice had melted away.
    Down below, with shocking suddenness, the great bowl of blue jelly quivered once and turned a silvery white. It seemed to come alive like some kind of a creature trying to climb one side of the bowl to get at them. Bram wondered what would happen if someone fell into it. He shrank closer to Voth, and the soft mantle that wrapped him sent out waves of reassurance.
    “Get me a focus star,” the director said in the Small Language. “Let’s use the point star in the constellation of the Boat.”
    The huge sphere suspended across from Bram seemed to writhe and shimmer. Bram jumped. And then the night sky appeared realistically within a hoop on the balcony. The director touched tips absentmindedly with Voth, and Voth translated: “We’ve put a secondary focus up here for the moment and generated an amplified image on the screen for the lad. But it’s not really suitable for very faint objects. Once we zero in on our target, of course, the real work will go on below.”
    “What does he mean?” Bram whispered.
    “He means that we’ll see what the big eye sees,” Voth whispered back, “but it will be by secondhand light.”
    The assistant had one of his waistline eyes screwed up against a tube. The bright star in the middle of the hoop bobbed around, then settled down and began to drift offscreen. A collection of indistinct lights swam into view on the screen, and the director took over the controls from the assistant.
    “This was their local group of galaxies,” the director said. “It’s smaller than our own local group. Basically it consists only of two spiral galaxies bound gravitationally to one another, each with its attendant swarm of satelhte galaxies.”
    He made a fine adjustment, and the image sharpened. Bram could see the two spirals, like tiny glowing coiled springs, surrounded by hazy dots.
    “They had a name for our own local group, or rather the constellation it appeared in from their point of view,” the director went on. “They called it the Hunting Dogs.”
    Bram whispered to Voth again, and the director said, “That’s all right, youngster. What did you want to know?”
    “What’s a dog?” Bram said in a small voice.
    “It was another life form that the humans bred for companionship and various simple chores. We gather that it was intelligent but not as intelligent as Man.”
    “Did they make them?”
    “We don’t know,” the director said impatiently. “We think they may have been adapted from an existing life form.”
    “There are dogs mentioned in human literature, Bram,” Voth said. “You’ll read about them when you grow older.”
    “The human radio beacon was not aimed at us here in the Dogs,” the director continued. “It was aimed beyond us at a very large cluster of galaxies in a constellation they called Virgo.” He paused. “Virgo was their term for a being who has not yet attained the female reproductive stage.” There must have been some kind of a warning signal from Voth; Bram could feel its echo in the swish of cilia in the arm that enfolded him. The director hurried on. “The Virgo cluster of galaxies consists of well over a thousand galaxies, and we believe it to be the center of a supercluster of