Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

further advanced than us he was.”
    Ame and Jorv looked puzzled, and Jun Davd added gently, “The time wasn’t there for him, you see.”
    As it sank in, the tension began to go out of the room. A few tentative smiles made their appearance. Ame brought her chin up and said to Bram, “You’ve brought us this far, Bram-tsu. Nothing can frighten us now. This galaxy is humankind’s heritage, and we’re here to claim it.”
    Smeth edged forward, trying to reestablish contact with Ame. “That’s right,” he said. “The whole thing may be nothing more than a statistical fluke, anyway.”
    “There’s just one thing.” Jao’s voice brought their heads around again. “If the eight-arm model is correct, our sector of the galaxy is due for another brush soon.”
    His hand swept the board, and the rotating orange lines snapped out of existence. The universe came terrifyingly back into sight, a raw torrent of light that slammed them across the eyes and turned the human figures into stark silhouettes. Yggdrasil’s plunge toward periastron had carried it past the black hole’s equator, and the accretion disk had risen out of the floor.
     
    CHAPTER 5
     
    “There’s a star in there somewhere,” Jun Davd said through his suit radio. “Its light may be blocked, but it’s shining its heart out in the ten-micron infrared range.”
    Bram clung to a cleat with one gloved hand to keep the trunk’s slow rotation from shedding him into space and turned up the magnification of his helmet visor. “A body-temperature star,” he said. “That fits the picture, all right.”
    He peered past the leafy horizon at a void that was frosty with stars again. After more than two decades of braking, the starbow had separated and strewn its baubles across the sky. The drive was off, and Yggdrasil was towing the probe now, not the other way around.
    But despite the magnificence of the sprinkled stars, it was the sight in the center of his image compensator that occupied Bram’s full attention.
    There was a scratch across the sky—a perfectly straight line, as if a cosmic thumbnail had scraped away the black. Next to the long scratch was a collection of bright squiggles, like cursive writing in an unknown language.
    “The straight line’s about ninety million miles long,” Jun Davd said. Within the crystal bowl of the new space suit, his dark profile was intent on the distant object. “That’s about the same length as the radius of the infrared emission shell the instruments can detect. Does that suggest anything to you?”
    “The only astronomical phenomenon I can think of that’s that straight and that long is a Type I comet tail,” Bram said. “Except that there’s no coma at one end. In fact, the brightest part, if I read the instruments right, is in the middle.”
    “Yes,” Jun Davd agreed. “And it doesn’t extend outward from where the mass indicators say our shrouded star ought to be. It’s tangent to it.”
    “So that suggests very strongly that it has something to do with the structure that’s enclosing the star. And that those curved scratches—the arcs and hooks—are part of the same manifestation.”
    Jun Davd turned to face him. Somehow Jun Davd managed to be limber, even in the bulky envelope of the human-shaped space suit that had been developed during the last ten years of deceleration by a team under the direction of Lydis. He had the toe of one heavy boot hooked under the horn of a cleat to check his outward drift, and his long-limbed body swiveled halfway around at the hips with a natural grace. He was not one of those people you saw bobbing around at the end of their safety ropes and having to haul themselves in.
    “I agree. I have a computer working on an analysis of the curvatures to see what kind of a three-dimensional shape we can make them fit into. But clearly, we’re looking at an artifact.”
    Artifact. Bram tasted the word with disbelief. From the size of the infrared emission shell, the unseen sun ought to have been a red giant—a swallower of solar systems. An artifact of that radius at the center of the Father World’s system would have engulfed the two inner planets and the Father World itself.
    “A trap around a star,” Bram said slowly. “A trap for energy. When we first began searching for an enclosed star radiating in the ten-micron part of the spectrum, I somehow visualized something like a sphere. I think we all did.” He paused to stare again at the distant