Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

factor of twenty thousand, we’re still intelligible, pulse by pulse. The microwaves focused sternward lengthen into radio waves, and the long waves we send ahead of us compress into microwaves for anyone who happens to be listening on the radar frequencies. With the frequency continually adjusted for Doppler shift, of course. No, the trouble is the pulses are too far apart now because of time dilation. We’ve got a problem of information density.”
    “How long is your abbreviated cycle?”
    “Twenty days.” Trist grimaced. “We’re down to the genetic code for the Nar themselves, plus a minimum number of simple organisms from which a biologically sophisticated civilization might cobble together a supporting mini-ecology. Plus a Great Language module, of course. And a Small Language dictionary with human loan words. And a capsule history. And a highly abridged cultural package.” He peered at Bram. “We’ve got a touch symphony by your touch brother Tha-tha in the cultural package, by the way.”
    Bram found himself looking past Trist, through the window of the control booth, at what he could see of the library. Miles of shelves, containing everything the Nar knew about themselves and their world. The old touch sagas were there, unintelligible to any race but the Nar. The message of Original Man was there in its entirety.
    Not all of it could be broadcast, of course. But the Nar had wanted the departing humans to have it all. In the fullness of time, it might come in handy.
    Out of it all, a Nar committee had prepared their Message. Or rather a series of Messages, progressively edited. The first took a year to broadcast. Now the Message was down to twenty days.
    But if a touch symphony by Tha-tha was still included, then there must also be plans for a touch reader. A future generation of reincarnated Nar, here in the inner galaxy, might yet have access to a smattering of their heritage.
    Jao was already figuring in his head. “Twenty days,” he said. “That works out to almost a thousand years for receiving it—with no repeats. The Message of Original Man had only a fifty-year cycle, and it was received by a very patient folk.” He shook his shaggy head. “I can see why you think the program’s finished, Trist.”
    “And on our way out of the galaxy,” Trist said, “if our gamma’s up to what you say it’s going to be, we’ll have a Message cycle of close to four thousand years. With the tail out of range of the head.”
    “It’s probably moot at this point, anyway,” Jao said. “If there’s other life in the galaxy, we wouldn’t find it this close to the center. Too much radiation in these skies. If we have managed to seed the galaxy with secondhand Nar, we must have done it farther out, with the unabridged Message.”
    He cocked his head as a happy thought occurred to him. “That might have been forty or fifty thousand years ago, as the galaxy ticks. They might already have spread like crazy from thousand of foci. They wouldn’t have been too far behind the Father World—hell, they started with a technological civilization! And they’d know their progenitors were only a galactic blink away, waiting to embrace them with all five arms—not like us poor spawn of a vanished species! What an incentive! By now they’d have met, merged. And when we burrow out of this nest of stars, we’ll be traveling through a solid pavement of Nar.”
    “Don’t get carried away,” Trist said dryly. “Our lateral transmissions cut a swath that’s only a few thousand light-years wide. The message has probably swept about two percent of the stars in this galaxy. That’s a lot of stars, but it’s hardly at the saturation point.”
    Jao waved his arms impatiently. “What are you talking about? With the effective diameter of the phased array in the crown and all the power we’ve got to play with, we can beam to the opposite edge of the galaxy.”
    “If we could cut through the dust clouds,” Trist said patiently. “But that’s not the point. For each cycle of the Message, I try to aim the lateral beams at some thick cluster of stars a couple of thousand light-years away and hold them there while I compensate for the changing Doppler. By the time the beam spreads much beyond that, any civilization that’s searching for intelligent signals starts getting smaller and smaller cross sections of the Message. You reach the point where you get a thin slice that doesn’t look like an intelligent