Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

to a sphere a thousand light-years in diameter. The Nar, long ago, had pinpointed an approximate location for Original Man’s sun by analyzing wave fronts on a line stretched between the Father World and the new outpost on Juxt, and they had arrived at a value for the galactic year at that radius. Jun Davd, during the thirty-seven-million-year head-on approach to the Milky Way, had refined the figure still further. When the M supergiants and the small hot objects shining through dust had been eliminated, the number of candidates was small. Even so, it was surprising to have found it, apparently, on the first try.
    “I calculate a total energy output for our invisible sun of four times ten to the thirty-third power ergs per second,” Jun Davd had announced shortly after Yggdrasil had settled into a cometary orbit. “That’s based on the number of ergs per square inch falling on our collectors and applying the figure to an imaginary sphere at the radius of our own orbit. All in the deep infrared! It’s consistent with the normal output at all wavelengths of a G-type dwarf similar to both Original Man’s presumed sun and the Father World’s primary. An attractive sun for our type of life, and the Nar’s.”
    Jao had worked out approximate orbital periods for the first few comets Yggdrasil had chased. “Yah,” he’d said. “The comets are moving at the right speed for the postulated mass at the center. Maybe just a little bit high— but, like I said, the beacon builders might’ve dragged in an extra gas giant or two from another system.”
    It was going to be hard to pry Yggdrasil away from the comets after its long thirst. Bram—year-captain again for the fiftieth time—was under a lot of pressure to let the tree graze peaceably for a while in the outer reaches of the cometary halo. The human population of the living spaceship was now up to twenty-five thousand. It was getting a bit crowded along the axis of acceleration. The younger generation in particular had its eye on all the congenial real estate that would open up in the other branches if Yggdrasil went on permanent rotation mode.
    But Bram did not dare give in. He had the feeling that if the populace spread out this time, he’d never get them back to the axis.
    At Yggdrasil’s leisurely rate of travel, it would take decades to drift from star to star—centuries or even millennia to search out the G-type dwarfs in this sector of the galaxy for the traces of Original Man. The new people did not have the same sense of urgency—the idea of a goal. For them, Yggdrasil was a way of life. It was more than possible than the citizenry could vote to settle in the first system that had rocky bodies to mine, a cometary shell to seed with a crop of more Yggdrasils.
    Sometimes, on bad nights, Bram had a nightmare that he would never make planetfall again.
    No, he thought. The only solution was to get his little convoy under fusion acceleration as quickly as possible, investigate the mystery at the heart of this system, then boost out again at one g.
    Certain it was that Yggdrasil, left to its own devices, was not going to get much of an outward kick from the starlight to be found here !
    Beside him, Jun Davd said, “I saw something just then.”
    Bram looked, but saw nothing except the faint scratch in the darkness and its attendant squiggles.
    “Within the curve of the larger arc,” Jun Davd said.
    Large, at this distance, meant nothing much more than a fairy’s hangnail, even under full magnification, but Bram stared till his eyes watered.
    Then he could just make it out—the dimmest of patches, like a foggy speck in his faceplate.
    “It’s leaking light,” Jun Davd said. “There are holes in it. That’s diffuse reflection on a surface. Keep watching. And if I’m not mistaken …”
    As if someone had punctured the fabric of space with a pin, a star peeped forth.
    “It’s not the whole star, of course,” Jun Davd mused. “It’s probably the light from no more than ten or twenty percent of its surface to judge by the apparent magnitude. But we wouldn’t have seen a disk, anyway, at this distance, just a point of light.”
    Bram didn’t need a spectroscope to tell him what he was looking at. “It’s a G-type sun,” he said.
    “Yes, indeed,” Jun Davd said. “Well, we’d better uproot poor Yggdrasil again and go in for a closer look.”
     
    “It’s embarrassing,” Ame said. “I have as many children as my