Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

of the boron fusion-fission reaction the Nar used in their early starships.”
    He glanced at the bubble-and-stick image that was being transmitted from Yggdrasil’s telescopes. “So this is a very early model starship. They’re in the first stages of exploration.”
    “It isn’t an exploration ship. It’s a colony ship. They don’t have enough reaction mass for a return trip.”
    “But the bubbles …”
    “If they ever were fuel tanks, they’re empty now. Our radar shows they’re hollow. And they haven’t collapsed, as a sensible membrane envelope would, nor have they been cast off. I suspect that they’ve been converted into environmental pods for a very rapidly expanding population.”
    “They could have planned to set up reactors here to manufacture tritium,” Bram suggested. “Or mine a gas giant for helium three.”
    “Except that there are no gas giants in this system. Nor oceans to extract deuterium from. All they could have known about this system is that there was mass here. And energy.”
    Jao was agape, and Bram didn’t blame him. “You mean they sent a shipload of colonists out—to travel for generations and breed aboard ship—without knowing for sure what they’d find here? They must hold their lives cheap!”
    “And it must follow that they hold other lives cheap, as well,” Jun Davd said hollowly.
    “Jun David, what are you driving at?” Bram demanded.
    “They’re closing with the disk very rapidly, and they Still haven’t turned off their fusion drive. They must have seen Yggdrasil. And felt our radar probing them. They know there’s life here.”
    Trist’s voice cut in, sounding harsh. “They’re going to overshoot, Bram. They’ll have to cut right across the rim of the diskworld.”
    Bram was aghast. “They’d have to assume there must be intelligent life on the surface even if they didn’t care about the artifacts they’d be destroying. And they have no way of knowing exactly where on the rim we might be.”
    “We’re sending them radio messages,” Trist said. “Just intelligent noises on every wavelength—number patterns and so forth. They don’t respond. It’s as if we don’t exist for them.”
    “I can evacuate,” Bram said, thinking frantically. “No, that would take too long, wouldn’t it, with everybody spread out? It wouldn’t matter, anyway. Yggdrasil’s less than twenty thousand miles away, right in the path of destruction if the drive exhaust comes anywhere near here.”
    “Yggdrasil’s safe, and so are you, we think,” Jun Davd said. “These careless strangers will intersect the rim between moons—at least five or ten million miles from your position.”
    “You think,” Jao growled.
     
    A scattered crowd had gathered on the plain, facing the point where the long straight ribbon of land vanished into infinity. About three hundred people were left on the diskworld, and virtually all of them were here in their space suits. They stood in small, chatting groups or lounged against the landing legs of the waiting shuttles. A few enterprising souls had even climbed to perches atop the spaces vehicles for a better view.
    Bram was still uneasy about everybody being out in the open. His first instinct had been to keep people as far underground as possible. But Jun Davd had assured him that the alien ship was holding its course. For all practical purposes, the enormous curvature of the rim was a straight line, and even if that dreadful inferno of fusing deuterium and hydrogen three passed only marginally below the theoretical horizon, millions of miles of diskworld would be interposed between Brain’s people and death.
    Not so for the Cuddlies inhabiting that distant latitude. Bram’s mouth tightened into a grim line as he thought of the slaughter that would take place in a few minutes.
    The Cuddlies here certainly had no premonition of what was about to happen to their faraway cousins. Attracted by the festive atmosphere, they hung around the people, popping in and out of crevices and sometimes pulling at space-suit legs to be picked up.
    “You could see it now if you were hanging in a bosun’s chair over the outside rim,” Jun Davd’s voice sounded in his ear. “It’s cutting upward from below a chord drawn between you and its point of intersection. It will rise above your sunward horizon after transit.”
    “How soon?” Bram asked.
    “Four minutes. If you sight along the outer edge, you ought to be able to see some