Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

the galactic center,” Bram said. “No—” He remembered that the project had started long before the Nar had picked up the signals that were the evidence of life. Smeth had told him about it years ago, saying that it had something to do with some grand racial purpose of the Nar. “—you’ve all been working on the project all along.”
    Trist nodded. “But now it isn’t a blind gamble—a leap into the dark. The project’s going to have a lot more impetus now.”
    Smeth’s shaggy head bobbed up and down. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Jao, old son. You picked the wrong time to leave the project. We’re going to get more funding, more recognition. And you’ll be stirring up vats of yeast on Juxt One.”
    Jao ignored him. “You see, Bram, Mim,—the probe couldn’t reach the vicinity of those radio signals for another thirty or forty thousand years even if it started out in the next century. And then it could miss them by tens or hundreds of light-years. We don’t know exacly where they are. So there’s not much point in sending back telemetry that wouldn’t get here for sixty or eighty thousand years. Or trying to have a dialog with them at that exchange rate.”
    “They might not even be there anymore,” Trist added. “Maybe their civilization destroyed itself long ago. That kind of radio leakage is the signature of an early stage of a radio age. Temporary. We don’t—the Nar, I mean—put out that much stray radio energy anymore. Or maybe they’re getting more advanced. A few more centuries of listening on their wavelength will tell us more—long before the probe could let us know anything.”
    Jao’s face was flushed. “Or maybe they’ve been spreading toward us for the last thirty or forty thousand years—just behind the speed of light—and they’re about to burst into our volume of space, somewhere out there beyond Juxt One, any day now!”
    Bram was caught up in the vision. He could see that Mim was, too. “Or maybe,” he said, “they’re spreading at the same slow rate as the Nar, in their version of a sailship at fourteen percent of the speed of light, or on a boron fusion-fission drive at twenty percent, and some tens of thousands of years from now the two expanding spheres will intersect.”
    Trist nodded. “But it’s the fact of their existence—or their former existence—that’s given the probe project more urgency. That’s the real significance of those radio noises. Until now, the Nar had only two cases to go on. There was a theory that maybe only one civilization could develop per galaxy—that it might be a kind of natural law. That life was a rare event and that when once it arose anywhere in a galaxy, it would eventually take total possession. One calculation was that a starfaring race can colonize an entire galaxy in about thirty million years. That’s extrapolated from the Nar’s rate of expansion. So that if there are hundreds of millions, or billions, of years between these events we call life, the number two race becomes clients—”
    “Or victims,” Jao put in.
    “—of the first. But here we have a case of two intelligent races occupying the same time slot in the same galaxy. Even if the Nar were bloody-minded, which they aren’t, they can’t even reach these creatures, whoever they are, before they have time to do a lot of expanding on their own.”
    “And vice versa,” Jao said. “These inner-galaxy types may be way ahead of the Nar by now. Thirty or forty thousand years ago, the Nar didn’t have radio.”
    “Same difference,” Trist said. “Then, on the other hand, we have the example of Original Man. He disappeared before he totally populated his own galaxy, it looks like, in spite of the fact that he was technologically superior at an early stage of his expansion. So maybe there’s some imperative that leads to the extinction of intelligent races at that point on the timetable. Maybe that’s why other galaxies are mute.”
    “And maybe,” Jao mused, “life isn’t rare. Maybe it’s late. Somebody had to be first. Why not Original Man? And this galaxy is second. And in the next billion years, life will be popping up all over the universe.”
    “The point is, nobody knows,” Trist said. “The data are too few. The Nar aren’t willing to risk species extinction. And maybe that’s a universal imperative. The drive for species immortality. Original Man tried it with the proclamation of his genetic code to the