Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

running up against the problems of nonorient-ability and self-intersection no matter how many dimensions you cared to postulate.”
    “We only ran it up to thirteen dimensions,” Jao protested. “We never solved it for a general case.”
    Bram intervened to squelch the familiar squabble before it could get started.
    “Whatever’s happening out there in the galaxy— whether the Nar really needed us or not, or whether other intelligent life forms exist and the Message got through to one of them, or eighty million of them by now—it doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve done our part of the job. We can go home now.”
     
    CHAPTER 2
     
    Home.
    Bram leaned back in his chairpuff and savored the idea of it, as he had done for most of his life. When he had been a small child, it had been bright, real, and immediate. Later it had become an abstraction, an impossibility. The adult Bram had known too much to believe in it. Now it was tangible again.
    From the wooden corridor outside his apartment came the sounds of revelry: Bobbing Day celebrants on their way to the All-Level Eve festivities in the Forum—some of them already tipsy, by the sound of it. Mim was in the next room, getting dressed. Shortly she would join him, and they would go down together to be a part of the merrymaking. A year-captain could not afford to be absent.
    But for these few moments of solitude he could think about home. For that, after all, was what the annual tree-turning celebration was all about—though it had grown lately into a tradition of its own.
    Home.
    Thirty-seven million years ago there had been an intelligent species that called itself the human race—Original Man. They had dwelt, by all the evidence, on a planet of a yellow sun in a rather isolated galaxy that they called the “Milky Way,” part of a sparse cluster consisting basically of two big spirals and their attendant swarms of small satellite galaxies.
    Whether or not human beings still existed there was impossible to know, of course, when the very light that arrived from the Milky Way was thirty-seven million years old. But it was unlikely in the extreme. It was to be presumed that those humans were long extinct—gone the way of other species before them. Or that in the immensity of time they had evolved out of all recognition, into some new species that could no longer be considered human.
    But before they had vanished or changed, they had left their mark on the universe.
    The heights they must have reached had been dazzling, for they had learned how to tame whole stars and squander their energy. The energy, in unimaginable quantities, had been spent on the ultimate purpose of every species— to perpetuate itself.
    Only this species had defeated the final enemy—the witless yawn of time.
    Transformed into radio waves, the energy had been sprayed in the direction of the local universe that contained the richest clusters of galaxies—galaxies by the thousands, each containing hundreds of billions of suns.
    It had taken all of that thirty-seven million years for the radio waves, expanding at the speed of light, to reach the galaxy where the Father World resided—a sprung spiral that those faraway, long-ago humans had known as the Whirlpool. There, a race of intelligent decapods who called themselves the Nar had intercepted the radio waves and deciphered them.
    And a treasure trove had spilled out.
    The lessons in genetic engineering alone had transformed the Nar civilization and given it abundance. Terrestrial starches and sugars had provided cheap energy and construction materials in the form of cellulose and exotic plastics. The bioengineering techniques, adapted to the Father World’s life forms, had boosted the food supply and led to a host of biological devices that had taken the place of inefficient machinery. The genetic blueprint for a fast-growing tree called a poplar, included in the kit, had paved the way for the great living spaceships like Yggdrasil which plied the spaceway at up to one-seventh the speed of light and, with their world-size environments, made interstellar exploration at last practical and inexpensive.
    But the centerpiece of the great Message was the genetic blueprint for humankind itself.
    A mere millennium later—a drop in the bucket of cosmic time—the Nar bioengineers had created the second human race and nurtured several generations of it. A modest cultural package included in the Message had even given the new humans the sketch of