Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

which our local group and the human local group are outriders. So the humans did a very intelligent thing. Can you guess what that is?”
    “They wanted to send their message to a whole lot of galaxies all at the same time,” Bram said promptly.
    “Exactly right, young Bram,” the director said with a pleased expression. “You were right about him, Voth-shr-voth.” The two mirror eyes aimed in Bram’s direction turned blue again. “That beam of radio waves will keep spreading outward for tens of millions of years, and they wanted it to encounter the greatest possible number of galaxies. Here, I think we can hold this image while I show you the Virgo cluster. It’s in our daytime sky now, on the opposite side of the world, but one of our orbiting telescopes will have it in view.”
    He spoke to his assistant. A moment later, to Bram’s consternation, the wriggly glowworms on the screen snapped out of existence, and the hoop was filled with a spectacular shower of sparks and flares.
    “The richest imaginable target,” the director said. “That one elliptical galaxy in the center alone contains three thousand billion suns, compared to our paltry two hundred billion, in addition to a halo of ten thousand globular clusters. The humans, long ago, would have had much the same view we’re seeing now, but from almost twice as far away. The human radio waves haven’t reached it yet. They won’t for another thirty million years.”
    To Bram’s relief he switched back to the other side of the sky. The human galaxy was still there, one of those bright midges.
    “The larger of the two is the one they called Andromeda,” the director said. “It’s the other one we want.”
    The image centered and grew in swoops, becoming alternately blurred and sharp as the director adjusted his focus. At last it filled the hoop, a jeweled whorl with an incandescent center. Bram remembered that the jewels would be foreground stars, but that did not detract from the splendor of the vision. He drowned himself in it, lost in wonder.
    “We’re seeing their galaxy almost head on, as they must have seen us.” The director’s voice seemed to buzz from a distance. “That was a piece of luck for us. They were very sensibly transmitting in a direction at right angles to the plane of their galaxy, and for our part, we didn’t have to look through our own spiral arms. We were in the early stages of our own project to search for life in the universe. We’d already tried hundreds of individual stars in our own galaxy, without success. The giant radio array on our fourth moon was newly in place. And then the project astronomer suggested that we try listening to whole galaxies instead of eavesdropping on stars one at a time. His reasoning was that an entire galaxy would be within the field of view of the array and could be considered as a single source. If an artificial radio signal was on the right wavelength and powerful enough, it would outshine all other radio energy on that particular frequency. We would be listening, in effect, to two hundred billion stars at once.”
    The director touched Bram, remembered that he was a human child, and withdrew the tentacle. “The human signal was detected almost at once, in the middle of what proved to be a fifty-year cycle,” he went on in a Small Language patois that was heavily laced with Inglex. “Ironically, it was not the human galaxy that the radio telescope was aimed at. It was Andromeda. Andromeda was a more attractive target. It has more stars. But Andromeda proved to be close enough. At thirty-seven million light-years, even the tightest of beams spreads out quite a bit. The energy that would have been required to transmit such a signal was enormous. We think they must have enclosed a star and turned it into a modulated radio emitter. We can’t imagine how they were able to do such a thing, or what motives inspired them to allocate such a wealth of energy to their testament.”
    Voth’s grip tightened on Bram. The director’s voice had pity in it. Bram tore his eyes away from the coiled blob of light on the screen and looked at the director, who stood tiptoe in a quintuple arch, the petals of his upper structure radiating tact.
    “For testament it proved to be,” the director said. “Over the next century, a complete cycle was heard and then half of another repeat with new data added, and then it stopped. Stopped in midsentence, as it were. And in the centuries since, the