Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

figure out the thickness of the crust, based on too many variables—the size of the original core, rate of spin-up, disk gravity gradients, surface friction affecting the dispersion of material… I think we’ll have to rely on Enry’s empirical methods. Theory fails in a case like this. It can’t be much, though.”
    “Those bare paw prints,” Ame said. “Do you suppose …”
    “Forget it, Ame. Any atmosphere belched out from the interior would instantly disperse. You’ll have to find another explanation.”
    “There was life here within the last few million years— I’m certain of that,” she said stubbornly. “It’s …”
    “What’s the matter, Ame?” Bram said.
    She flashed her light around the base of the moonrope. “Look,” she said.
    The tracks had been easy to miss in the permanent red twilight, especially when there was the awesome sight of that crystalline pillar drawing your eyes up instead of down. And the reflected light from directly above had tended to wash out the long, diffuse shadows cast by the horizon-filling sliver of the companion diskworld that rose above the brink.
    But once you had noticed them, it was hard to see how the eye had skipped over them. Shallow as they were, they were perfectly plain, like inked thumbprints, a little smudged where the tiny paws had scrabbled in the dust. The myriad trails meandered a bit. But in the end pointed toward the soaring cable.
    “They climbed it,” Ame said. “That’s where they went. They climbed to the moon.”
     
    They had six hours to explore the central complex, Lydis told them. After that, they would begin to tax the walker’s ability to replenish their air supply. “I don’t want you to use your reserve bottles at all,” Lydis said. “That’s cutting it too close. I want you to come in with your reserve bottles intact. Understood?”
    “Understood,” Bram told his daughter. He sighed. It had been five hundred years since she had been a little girl, but every once in a while it felt strange to be taking orders from her.
    Ame was scrambling happily all over the mounds of rubble, leaving little electronic markers that would give off coded transponder signals when asked.
    “Site number twenty,” she dictated to one of them. “Probable auditorium or lecture hall.” She followed with a series of dimensionless coordinates that would be fitted later into a triangulation grid by a computer.
    “How can you tell it’s an auditorium?” Bram asked. “It’s just another dust pile, as far as I can see.”
    “It’s fan-shaped,” she said, tossing him a grin over her shoulder. “We tend to think that public halls are supposed to be circular, with a stage in the center, because of the Nar influence. But this is a much more natural shape for human beings. And see, the focal point—abutting what might be classrooms or administrative offices—is at about the limit of distance from which a live lecturer or performer could be seen to any effect.”
    Bram followed her around as best he could, climbing in and out of the walker, helping with the measurements, and operating the little portable thumper that located cavities beneath the surface.
    “Libraries,” Ame exulted. “I’m sure of it. And museum warehouses and storehouses and depots and vaults for frozen samples. And all the support and recreational facilities you’d need for the population of millions that it would have taken to run this outpost—hydroponic farms, maybe even zoos! This will be a treasure trove for the archaeologists, Bram -tsu ! And there’ll be middens—we’ll find seeds and organic refuse and bones …”
    He didn’t like leaving her alone while he went off on his own side forays, and at one point he coaxed her into the walker for an excursion to the rim’s edge.
    “Don’t go out any farther,” he warned. “I don’t know how secure this thing is.”
    They were standing on the great skeleton arm of a gantry that extended out over the abyss—part of some sort of transport system that traveled an unknown distance down the face. Bram could see the stanchions that once might have supported an elevator or funicular dwindling with distance till they disappeared.
    Hundreds—possibly thousands—of miles down the sheer face began a glittering fairy forest of tiny filaments that swept in a great arc until they could no longer be distinguished against the knife edge that cut the black night ninety million miles below.
    “The feed array for