Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

navigation.
    “Hold on,” Lydis’s voice said. “I’m going to give you some weight now.”
    There was a gentle shove on Bram’s chest, pressing him into the couch. A rain of small objects came from above; someone had forgotten to secure some minor gear. Zef turned to glare at the culprit, and Jao grinned sheepishly within his helmet.
    The burn was a leisurely one, lasting a half hour at what Bram estimated to be about a quarter of a gravity. There was plenty of hydrogen and oxygen to be profligate with since Yggdrasil had drunk its fill of comets.
    Lydis saw her passengers fidgeting. “I know it’s hard to lie still when there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it,” she said, “but I don’t want any mass moving around while I’m doing this.”
    At last they went weightless again. “All right,” Lydis said. “You can get up now. Take off your vacuum suits if you like. I’m not going to fire the jets again for about two days.”
    Everybody gratefully desuited. Jao scratched mightily.
    “I don’t think you were worried about leaks at all,” he said. “I think you just wanted to keep us quiet.”
    “Where’d you ever get an idea like that?” Zef said.
    They all crowded to an observation blister to have a look at their destination; Lydis had rolled the ship over after the main burn so that people wouldn’t have to crane their necks to look through the overhead dome.
    Enry, pale, said, “How wide is the rim? It still looks like a one-dimensional line from here.”
    “About fifty miles,” Jao said. “Talk about thin! We wouldn’t see it at all from this angle if it wasn’t for scattered light from over the edge.”
    Ame said, with a trace of awe, “The former human race was efficient. “Just about all the working surface is on the flat sides.”
    Jao nodded. “But don’t forget, even a fifty-mile width gives a surface area on the rim alone of thirteen and a half billion square miles. That’s equivalent to the surface areas of seventy of your normal, terrestroid-style planets like the Father World. That’s a lot of elbow room, even if it is all east and west.”
    “I’m glad we don’t have to dig it all up,” Ame said, with a glance at Enry to see how he was taking her presence.
    Enry rose to the occasion. He was stuffy but nice. “I could use a little help,” he said.
    A perfunctory laugh went around. Bram asked Lydis for a magnified view through the ship’s telescope and got nothing more than a fuzzier line topped by a blurred speck that might have been construed as a crescent.
    “It’s going to be a very strange place,” he said.
     

Part II
    TESTAMENT

CHAPTER 7
     
    The diskworld was a very strange place indeed.
    Bram, weighing no more than an ounce or two, stood at the front of the landing ladder and looked out across the red twilight at a thin slice of landscape that stretched away into darkness.
    Its edges were sharply defined against the starry night. Strictly speaking, there was no horizon at the end of it; the bleak, uniform vista dwindled to a vanishing point long before the eye could reach that hypothetical sykline some millions of miles beyond.
    It gave Bram the illusion of standing on a very high, infinitely long ridge. Ahead was a flat, narrow plain of rubble that turned into a needle point piercing the black sky. On either side of him, not many miles away, was a sheer cliff that dropped down ninety million miles to a chasm filled with stars.
    His weightlessness contributed to the dreamlike feeling of the place. The next person down the ladder jostled him unintentionally, and they both drifted a foot into the air before settling to the ground again.
    Bram glanced into the other’s faceplate and saw by the blue glow of the helmet telltales that it was Jao. For once the red-bearded physicist was speechless. Both of them turned by common consent to look at the inner rim of their thin-sliced world.
    The universe of stars gave way to a sky erased by stray luminescence, over what appeared to be a geometrically straight edge with no hint of curvature.
    The brink of the world.
    The great disks rose like goblin faces peering over the precipice, glowing a dull red of dying embers. As this queer world turned, they would rise in unison until they filled the sky. Even now, the big one ahead of them in orbit showed an angular diameter of fifty degrees, a hundred times wider than the sun would have been had it been visible.
    From the present angle of view, almost forty