Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

of presumed planets orbiting in a variety of presumed planes, shifts in limb brightness along the edges of the presumed planets as the planets themselves rotate around an infinite number of presumed axes … it’s all very complicated, particularly when we ourselves are moving.”
    “Yes, yes,” Jao said impatiently.
    “Some of the data goes back over a year—we’d already spotted the infrared emission of our invisible star and were decelerating toward it. But the computer never sounded the alarm. Neither did the technicians who conducted the occasional random sampling. But that’s not surprising. The data picture didn’t become really interesting till we came to rest.”
    Seeing Jao redden toward explosion, Bram said. “Take pity on the man, Jun Davd.”
    “Here it is translated into audio,” Jun Davd said. “With a little guesswork, of course.”
    He flipped a switch, and the room was suddenly filled with clicks and snaps, as if a million demented children were all breaking twigs at once.
    Bram felt ice down his spine. “What is it?” he said.
    “It has no information-bearing content that we can see. On the other hand we can’t make it correspond to any natural radio phenomenon that we can imagine.”
    Trist broke in. “So we decided it must be a by-product of some artificial process. Like back-lobe leakage from the space-based antennas of solar power satellites.”
    “Then an analysis of the wave forms suggested strongly that the clicks were acoustic in nature,” Jun Davd said. “So we discarded the idea that they were some kind of static, either natural or artificial.”
    Bram listened to the hard, dry snapping sounds for a moment. Regarded as actual physical noises, they were even more puzzling. “They’d have to be produced in a medium: solid, liquid, or gas,” he said.
    “Ridiculous,” Smeth said. “There must be a natural explanation. Remember how pulsars fooled the early radio astronomers? It’s some property of the stars in this arm of the galaxy.”
    Bram frowned. “Trist said that the signals come from everywhere. From the invisible star we’re orbiting too?”
    “No. Everywhere but, ” Trist volunteered.
    “Now we come to the interesting part,” Jun Davd said. “Bear with me a moment. This is still very crude. But it will give you an idea.”
    He fiddled with a console, and a holographic window lit up in the display board. It was a three-dimensional star map, reasonably realistic, with points of colored light scattered through the velvet darkness. A dull red bead began winking in a lower corner.
    “That’s our position,” Jun Davd said. “Or the position of our infrared star. We’re somewhere in the cometary belt—we won’t quibble about half a light-year or so. And now here’s the route we took from the center of the galaxy.”
    A yellow dotted line grew from the blinking bead, angling inward in the holographic illusion, and disappeared behind the windowframe on the opposite side.
    “Now, all of this space is filled with these odd radio emissions—they’ve all had different times of origin and the oldest of them are presumably spreading in spheres many hundreds of light-years in diameter. Far beyond the boundaries of my little map. But that’s not what we’re concerned with. We want to show the stars of origin.”
    He fiddled with the console again, and a whole swarm of stars in the center of the holo image began blinking. The swarm was in the shape of a lumpy sphere—as near to a perfect sphere as the actual distribution of stars in space could make it.
    With one exception. There was a curiously flat, squashed area on the part of the sphere directly opposite the bead representing the infrared star, which hung just outside the boundary of winking stars.
    “I don’t think that part of the sphere is actually flattened,” Jun Davd said. “That’s about forty light-years away—at the furthest distance from us. I think any emissions originating there have started fairly recently and simply haven’t reached us yet.”
    Trist nodded in agreement. “Yes, we intersected a small chord of this … spherical volume of space on our way here, and when we crank back the data we find that we’ve witnessed several discrete jumps in the size of the globe. It seems to be growing quite uniformly, at about one-tenth of the speed of light.”
    Jun Davd’s fingers flicked buttons, and a star at the surface of the shell sent a spray of three dotted lines toward the line