Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

embedded within the sphere that represented Yggdrasil’s route, making an equilateral triangle bisected at the vertex. He added three little green Yggdrasils where the dotted lines met the route.
    “No reception,” Jun Davd said, tapping the first Yggdrasil at the earliest position on the route. He went on to tap the second Yggdrasil, where the bisecting line showed the shortest distance to the star. “First reception,” he said. Then he pointed to the third little tree symbol. “And we’re still receiving at the same radial distance as the previous no-reception zone, so knowing our speed and the distance covered, and throwing in a little Doppler anaylsis of about a dozen similar cases, we get a pretty good value for the rate of growth of the shell.”
    “And virtually every single star within the shell is giving off radio clicks,” Trist said.
    The other three looked at one another. The thought was inescapable. “Original Man?” Bram said.
    “No, impossible!” Jao said.
    Smeth was getting excited. Too excited. “Why are we wasting time here? ” he said. “Whatever this phenomenon is, it’s growing from a center.” He squinted at the pinch of stars in the middle of the representation—a couple of yellow dwarfs, one with a smaller orange star and a red dwarf for companions; a solitary red dwarf; a blue-white giant attended by a burnt-out cinder. “Let’s investigate the center of the sphere and see if we can find out what’s causing it!”
    Jao bellowed in outrage. He could see his lovely enclosed star slipping away from him. “What? That’s twenty light-years away! You’re talking seven, eight years of ship time by the time we build up enough gamma at one g! We’re here now ! We can be at the center of this system in less than two years!”
    Jun Davd was no help. He stood there smiling. Bram turned to Trist. “How fast did you say that sphere of clicking stars is growing? At about one-tenth the speed of light?”
    “That’s right,” Trist said.
    Bram exercised his prerogatives as year-captain. “In that case we can stay here and wait for it. This star is due to give off clicks any time now.”
     
    CHAPTER 6
     
    The sky was full of disks.
    The nearest one, only a hundred million miles away, turned half the sky blind. It stood almost edge-on—seen only as a paper-thin rim faintly traced by light, sketching the partial outline of a tall ellipse whose shape could be inferred from the stars it blotted out.
    It was immense. Unbelievably so. A planet would have been imperceptible against it, a sun a mere pinprick. Its diameter was, in fact, that of a planetary orbit.
    Another disk, equally huge, bracketed the other side of the sky, showing as a somewhat fuller ellipse. But this one presented its inner face and was visible as a pale wash of refracted light.
    Between them hung a whole collection of similar shapes, like paper cutouts all dangling at the same level from invisible threads. Directly ahead was a great illuminated circle on what must have been the opposite side of the hidden sun. A smaller circle was a black silhouette trying unsuccessfully to eclipse it. On either side of the smaller circle were attendant disks, canted inward to make narrow ovals. Their inner faces, closer to the unseen sun than the gigantic disk opposite, made brighter daubs against its inferior illumination. A bite had been taken out of the edge of one of them by the eclipsing circle.
    Through the spaces between them could be seen a whole swarm of still smaller disks—if objects that were millions of miles in diameter could be called small. The glimpsed shapes were in a different plane than the outer disks; the ellipses they presented were horizontal, not vertical.
    The tiny dot of a sun in the center of that bewildering arrangement had never peeped forth again in all the two years they had been traveling toward it. In view of the complicated schedule of eclipses, its brief emergence must have been an exceedingly rare event.
    Bram stared over the heads of the crowd at the flat, queer shapes floating in the darkness. He swallowed hard. Reason said they could not exist. But they did.
    “There can be no stranger sight in the universe,” Jun Davd said to no one in particular.
    People jostled and crowded around him at the safety rail in front of the long, curving observation wall. This was a real view, not a holo. Naked space was on the other side of the transparent polycarbonate sheet, and people had been