Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

an ordinary manual bow, not motorized disks or powered friction wands. And the instruments themselves are beautiful, curved, complex shapes sculpted of wood. We’ll have to learn how to copy them! We’ll hear music we never heard before! But learning to play such devices well will take a lot of practice!”
    “Your mother will be pleased.” Bram could not help thinking of Olan Byr, who had devoted his life to reinventing the old instruments.
    “I’ve already given her one of the cellos,” Edard said. “On my last trip a few days ago. She was practicing on it when I left.”
    “We’re filling in all the blank places in human culture,” Ame said. “Books of art reproductions—shelves of them. And thousands of actual paintings and pieces of sculpture from the later centuries. And holos of opera, dance, and dramatic performances. And in my field, a complete survey of terrestrial paleontology going back four and a half billion years.”
    “Biology, too,” Bram said. “We have a complete DNA library of thousands and thousands of plant and animal species.” Those had been among the first treasures to be moved; they now were in storage aboard Yggdrasil.
    Edard hardly listened; he was carried away by his own enthusiasms. “And musical scores! More than nine hundred compositions by someone named Schubert— songs, symphonies, quartets! He must have lived after the discovery of immortality to have written so much! And thirty-two piano sonatas by Beethoven, all of them strikingly different. I never knew he’d written so many! And operas by Mozart! Oratorios by Handel! They all belong to us again!”
    “We’ll look forward to your next concerts,” Jun Davd murmured.
    The super made a few last notations on a tablet with a vacuum stylus, scribbled his initials, and tacked the sheet to the pallet frame. “All set,” he said.
    Edard climbed to a perch atop his possessions, got a firm grip on the cargo net, and waved. A Cuddly rode his shoulder. Bram, Ame, and Jun Davd stood well back with the caravan master and line of walkers. Flame bloomed behind the splash skirt, and the heavily laden platform lifted ponderously, seemed to hang poised for several seconds, then rose with increasing speed into the black sky.
    Around Bram the tethered walkers pawed the ground in response to the vibrations. Their attendants calmed them by stroking the affected pseudoganglions. Bram followed the yellow square of flame with his eyes as it climbed toward the hovering tree.
    Bram’s eyes were still turned upward when Jun Davd grabbed his sleeve and said, “Look!”
    Somewhere past Yggdrasil a new star bloomed. It was a bright blue spark, moving rapidly across the field of stars. It lost its proper motion and turned brighter.
    “I believe it’s a fusion flame,” Jun Davd said calmly.
    The caravan master and drovers, following their gaze, gaped skyward. On the surrounding plain, activity slowed and stopped as other people noticed.
    The blue spark was the brightest star in the sky. It moved not at all against the constellations now.
    “They made their course correction,” Jun Davd said. “It appears that this is the disk they’ve chosen.”
    “Where…” began a stunned Ame.
    Jun Davd squinted at the strange new constellations that had taken shape after seventy-four million years. By now he knew them by heart. “They seem to have come from the general direction of Sol,” he said. “Of course, it was inevitable that they’d get around to Delta Pavonis sooner or later.”
    “All those clicking stars …” Bram said.
    Jun Davd nodded. “They had to be some manifestation of their message traffic, whether we could extract a pattern out of it or not. And they spread like a tide—not by exercising choice. Inhospitable places like red giants and the burnt-out cinders of white dwarfs, whose planets have no future. You’d think they would have skipped to a few of the more congenial stars first. And now their wave front’s arriving here, like clockwork.”
    Bram drew a sharp breath. “But why now?” he said. “Why not sooner? Or later? No one’s visited the diskworlds for over fifty million years. And just as we get here …”
    Ame’s face was flushed behind the sparkling curve of her helmet. “Because it’s their turn, don’t you see, Bram-tsu !”
    “Your extinction timetable?”
    She nodded vigorously. “The figures work out about right, don’t they, Jun Davd?”
    Jun Davd spoke without removing his eyes from