Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

million miles above the plane of the sun, one looked down on the inner disks. The three in the next orbit inward faced each other in a circle, like a conference of goblin children. Only one of these showed its glowing face; the other two were circular blots of darkness. Still farther inward hung more disks, getting smaller and smaller.
    “I think I figured it out,” Jao said.
    “Figured what out?”
    “How to manufacture a diskworld.”
    “How?”
    Jao affected jauntiness, but his voice shook a little. “Oh, spin-up, foamed materials, superfilament, anchoring masses. I’ll tell you more when the geologist’s report is in.”
    Bram looked across to where a squarish space-suited figure on its hands and knees was chipping away at rock with a little hammer. Each blow tended to lift him into the air, and then there would be a wait until he was sufficiently anchored to strike again; it must have been a maddeningly frustrating way to work. Enry had wasted no time. He had started collecting his samples only a few yards from the ship.
    “What do you say, Enry?” Bram said.
    His radio crackled. “Looks like ordinary rock so far,” Enry’s voice said. “Under a layer of dust.”
    “Yar, from the spin-up,” Jao countered. “Plus seventy million years’ worth of micrometeorites. You’re going to have to dig a lot deeper before you get to what this planet’s made of.”
    “Which is?”
    “Mostly nothing. Wrapped around gases—oxygen, mostly, I’d guess. Combined with aluminum and probably carbon. You’ll have to get a chemist. But I’ll tell you this, Enry -peng-yu, when you get to it, it’s going to be a job taking the sample.”
    Enry grunted and continued his chipping. He was gradually working out a low-gravity technique—striking his little outcropping from one side, then quickly reaching around to strike it from the other, and staying more or less in orbit around it.
    “The rest of the answer’s there,” Jao went on, pointing at the moon overhead.
    Bram raised his eyes to the zenith and instinctively wanted to duck his head. Everybody did. The ellipsoidal moon was so close—only a few diameters away—that it seemed in danger of falling.
    You didn’t have to look up to be conscious of it. You could almost feel it hanging there with its pointed end aimed at your head. Feel it literally, perhaps. Its gravitational pull would not be insignificant compared with the diskworld’s feeble tug at the rim. Perhaps the fluids of the cells sent a message to the brain.
    The pockmarked body measured scarcely a hundred fifty miles through the long axis. It might once have been an asteroid towed here by Original Man, Jun Davd had suggested, or a smaller moon of one of the dismantled gas giants.
    There were artificial structures on the underside of the moon, visible even to the naked eye—a distinctly geometric jumble at the lower tip, with four enigmatic hairlines converging on it from the satellite’s waistline. The airless clarity brought it tantalizingly near.
    “It makes you feel that you could almost jump up and touch it,” Bram said.
    Jao chewed a hairy lip. “You know… I bet a space-suited man could reach the moon by jumping,” he said in a serious tone. “Assuming he could jump with an initial velocity of, oh, sixteen feet per second. Escape velocity ought to be somewhere around there. The surface gravity here’s about like a small asteroid. Like that comet head we visited.” His eyes almost clicked as he started doing calculations in his head. “Suit jets would help,” he conceded. “The trick would be landing safely on the moon, with only a pair of legs to come down on.”
    “It might be quite a crash,” Bram said. “How far would he have to fall after capture—about a thousand miles?”
    “Less than that.”
    “We’ll visit the moon after we get organized here, I promise you. But I think we’ll do it in workpods.”
    “There might be an alternative.”
    “Huh?”
    “We might be able to get there in climbers. We’ll know after we get to the ruins.”
    The ruins—or their apparent focus—lay directly underneath the lower tip of the ellipsoidal moon. Lydis had wanted to land closer to them, but Jao had insisted that she land at least fifty miles away. “It might be dangerous,” he had said, but he had refused to say why. Bram had taken him seriously enough to order Lydis to comply. The distance would be inconvenient, but they had brought along a pair of walkers adapted