The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  Trist nodded. “But it’s the fact of their existence — or their former existence — that’s given the probe project more urgency. That’s the real significance of those radio noises. Until now, the Nar had only two cases to go on. There was a theory that maybe only one civilization could develop per galaxy — that it might be a kind of natural law. That life was a rare event and that when once it arose anywhere in a galaxy, it would eventually take total possession. One calculation was that a starfaring race can colonize an entire galaxy in about thirty million years. That’s extrapolated from the Nar’s rate of expansion. So that if there are hundreds of millions, or billions, of years between these events we call life, the number two race becomes clients —”

  “Or victims,” Jao put in.

  “— of the first. But here we have a case of two intelligent races occupying the same time slot in the same galaxy. Even if the Nar were bloody-minded, which they aren’t, they can’t even reach these creatures, whoever they are, before they have time to do a lot of expanding on their own.”

  “And vice versa,” Jao said. “These inner-galaxy types may be way ahead of the Nar by now. Thirty or forty thousand years ago, the Nar didn’t have radio.”

  “Same difference,” Trist said. “Then, on the other hand, we have the example of Original Man. He disappeared before he totally populated his own galaxy, it looks like, in spite of the fact that he was technologically superior at an early stage of his expansion. So maybe there’s some imperative that leads to the extinction of intelligent races at that point on the timetable. Maybe that’s why other galaxies are mute.”

  “And maybe,” Jao mused, “life isn’t rare. Maybe it’s late. Somebody had to be first. Why not Original Man? And this galaxy is second. And in the next billion years, life will be popping up all over the universe.”

  “The point is, nobody knows,” Trist said. “The data are too few. The Nar aren’t willing to risk species extinction. And maybe that’s a universal imperative. The drive for species immortality. Original Man tried it with the proclamation of his genetic code to the Virgo cluster. And now the Nar are about to do it on a smaller scale within their own galaxy. It’s probably a stage that all intelligent species go through when it begins to dawn on them that the means is at their disposal.”

  “And your hydrogen-gulping probe is that means?” Bram said.

  “Yah,” Jao said. “They’re going to attempt to seed the galaxy with replicas of themselves — using other intelligent races the way Original Man used them.”

  “Broadcast their genetic code?”

  “And a cultural package,” Trist said. “A race isn’t only its genes. It’s the sum of its memories, too.”

  Jao was bursting to continue. “The probe’ll zip through the galactic center, broadcasting all the way. The power available to it will be enormous — more than this whole planet could generate. The signals ought to have a range of hundreds of light-years along the flight path. Then it’ll zip out the other side, using the core as a gravitational slingshot. It’ll be going too fast to be captured. By the end of its mission, it’ll be crowding the speed of light practically to the limit, and time dilation will have lengthened its radio waves to undetectability. But by that time it will have encountered one percent of the stars in the galaxy. Upwards of two billion stars!”

  “And if the Nar species survives,” Trist said solemnly, “and if their slow expansion someday takes them to the opposite ends of the galaxy, they won’t find an indifferent or inimical universe, but their own children waiting to greet them.”

  Mim had been frowning. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s a … a staggering idea. But why would they decide to stake it on another race or races that might not even exist? Why wouldn’t they send automated biological packages instead?”

  “A biological package wouldn’t survive the radiation aboard the probe,” Jao said promptly. “That baby’s going to be hot!”

  “Besides, Mim,” Trist added, “the Nar want to cast their seed on fertile ground. If their children are called to life in the far reaches of the galaxy, it will be because a supporting culture is there, ready to nurture them. A culture that’s already made a decision to nurture them, as the Nar did with us. And they’ll grow up as a part of that culture, a bridge between the races. Homegrown ambassadors for that ultimate day when two alien civilizations meet.”

  “Even if it weren’t for the radiation,” Jao said, “there’s the time factor. Time dilation would help to keep biological samples fresh, sure, but even so we’re talking about them having to survive maybe up to half a century of subjective time.”

  “Yes,” Trist said. “And that’s with our hadronic photon drive, which wasn’t even a glimmer in Smeth’s eye when the Nar conceived their project. Without the drive, the ramjet might reach the other side of the galaxy almost as fast — add a couple of thousand years to the hundred thousand years or more it’s going to take — but with a gamma factor of only about five for the time dilation effect, it would mean an extra ten thousand years aboard the probe.”

  “Why do you need to crowd the speed of light so closely?” Bram asked. “What difference does it make how fast you slow down time aboard your robot probe when the net effect on actual travel time is so small?”

  “Operating systems,” Jao said. “Human beings are the best engineers in the universe, but it’s better to have operating systems that age only fifty years instead of ten thousand.”

  “Translate that as human vainglory,” Trist said. “We want the Nar to know how good we are.”

  Jao gave a wink. “Get them to subsidize our particle research, he means.”

  Mim had been following the discussion with widening eyes. Now she said brightly: “This time-stretching thing, the …”

  “Gamma factor.”

  “Gamma factor. How high can it go?”

  “With our imaginary drive? Theoretically there’s no limit.”

  She turned to Bram with an alarming smile. “You see? Your dream isn’t as impractical as you think it is.”

  “What dream, Mim?” Jao said.

  “Mim,” Bram warned.

  There was no stopping her. “About going back to the place Original Man came from.” She gave Smeth a reproving glance. “Now, won’t you admit you were wrong?”

  Smeth drew himself up to something approaching good posture. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he huffed. “What I said still goes. All that’s changed is the necessity for accelerating fuel. The ramjet idea ought to work fine within a galaxy, of course. There’s plenty of ionized hydrogen around. And the H-II regions get thicker and thicker as you steer for the heart of the galaxy, where the stars are packed closer together. Traveling between galaxies is a different story. Hydrogen pickings would be slim. No matter how much of a gamma factor you managed to pick up in your home galaxy, you’d still have to spend hundreds of years coasting. And how are you going to stop when you get there? You’ve still got to shed all that energy you’ve picked up! Besides, didn’t you hear what Jao said? The ramjet probe’s designed for electronics, not living things. You’d fry long before you got up even to gamma five.”

  “Oh, you’re just trying to be difficult,” Mim said.

  “I rest my case,” Smeth said. “Right, fellows?”

  Trist said thoughtfully, “What you really want to do, Bram, is travel faster than light.”

  “Hey, how about that?” Jao said with a wide grin. “Forget about imaginary photons and all that stuff. Give yourself an imaginary proper mass instead. Still better, forget about relativity altogether. What do you say, Smeth?”

  Smeth started to sputter. “Stop talking nonsense!”

  “Let’s not dismiss it out of hand,” Trist said soberly. “We may be on to something.”

  “Right,” Jao said. “Tachyons. In fact, wasn’t that a pet idea of Smeth’s a while back? They don’t even violate the equations. At zero energy they have infinite speed.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of playi
ng the buffoons?” Smeth said.

  Jao smiled hugely at Bram and Mim. “All we have to do is break through the skin of the universe. On the other side, we have the tachyon universe, where everything travels faster than light.”

  “Wait a minute,” Trist said. “You can’t break through the skin. All you can do is form a diverticulum. But the surface of the diverticulum is still in space-time.”

  “Oh, yah, I forgot. It’s just warped — like your sense of humor. How about this, then? You send a probe ahead of your ship, like a sacrificial pawn. It accelerates until its relativistic mass is enormous. It warps the geometry of space and sinks into a pit, like a neutron star, only more so. The process continues until it’s sunk so deep — all the way to the center of the plenum — that the pit closes over it. Pinches off, so to speak. And your ship, following close behind, simply skates over the surface of the dimple, thereby skipping a big chunk of its journey. All without leaving normal space-time. Hey, you could even maneuver in space without building up new vectors — just tilt space in the direction you want to go. You could even reverse direction in two or three maneuvers without having to go to the inconvenience of decelerating and building up near-light velocity all over again!”

  “You’ve overlooked something.”

  “Yah, what’s that?”

  “You’re only skipping the part of space that the diverticulum took down to the center of the plenum with it. It may be stretched out to half the diameter of the universe, but you’ve only saved a few light-hours of travel.”

  Jao looked crestfallen. “How about this, then? The universe has a fancy geometry, see? It’s a Klein universe or a Möbius universe. Inside and outside are the same. Or there’s no skin you have to break through to get to your tachyon universe. It’s all the same eleven-dimensional space-time, with a twist. You make your double circuit, and everything comes out backward, like a left-hand glove coming out a right-hand glove. Only we don’t call it antimatter, the way small minds like Smeth do. We don’t turn electrons into positrons, or neutrinos into anti-neutrinos, or anything like that. Shut up a minute, Smeth. No, we do a much cleverer flip-flop. We turn tardyons into tachyons. And vice versa. And there’s no transition point at which the inversion takes place — it’s one continuous circuit. Because tachyons and tardyons are the same thing. It all depends on your point of view. Like a sort of superrelativity. No, let me finish! In other words, tachyons and tardyons must coexist everywhere and are merely different expressions of identical phenomena.” He paused to gloat. “Thus, one may simultaneously travel more slowly than light and faster than light, depending on the position of the observer.”

  “And where does that leave faster-than-light travel, you idiot?” Smeth shouted. “You’re right back where you started!”

  Bram and Mim smiled at each other and left the three physicists arguing among themselves. Their departure went unnoticed.

  “It was good to see you again, Bram,” Mim said.

  “It was good to see you too, Mim.”

  “Are you … with anyone now?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “I don’t know if you ever met her. Kerthin Quo-willers Hwite. She only goes by her own praenomen now, though; she doesn’t believe in bynames.” He cast about awkwardly. “It’s against her … her political convictions. She was a sculptress when I met her. We … we’ve seen a gene broker. Just to discuss it.”

  “That’s wonderful, Bram. I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d like very much to meet her sometime. Olan’s very interested in sculpture. Particularly touch sculpture. He says it’s the one art form where we share perceptions with the Nar to some degree — other sculpture is meant to be seen from a viewpoint or viewpoints, and the Nar don’t perceive it the way we do, with their full-circle perspective. Maybe we can all get together one of these evenings.”

  “Yes, that sounds fine,” Bram said without conviction. He found it hard to imagine Mim and Kerthin together.

  “I’ll tell Olan I saw you. He was very impressed by you, you know. He always said you’d go far.” She laughed. “Even though he’s prejudiced against science.”

  Bram laughed too. “I remember.”

  She twisted her head. “There’s Kesper and Ang making signals to me — they’re from the quartet. I’m supposed to go over some of the material with them. They’re beginning to look impatient.”

  She stood on tiptoe, kissed him swiftly, and was gone.

  Bram went over to the buffet and got himself another drink. Marg’s hors d’oeuvres were fast disappearing, and relays of the tree dwellers had put out trays of less inspired finger food. The alcohol was lubricating the crowd by now, despite Marg’s fears, and the vast bare reaches of the vacuole had taken on a friendlier aspect — more like the stage for any outdoor party. A female colonist in a scanty costume made out of two fresh-picked leaves worn fore and aft, tied at the shoulders and belted at the waist, bumped hips at the buffet with Bram and said, “All by yourself? I’m Tasi. Would you like me to show you around the tree? The xylem passages in our part of the branch go on for miles and miles, and they haven’t finished putting in the trail marks yet. You could get lost without a guide.”

  “Uh, thanks, I’m with someone,” he said.

  “Pity,” she said, looking up at him through her eyelashes. “I know phloem chambers that no one else has discovered yet.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  She moved away. When Bram saw her again, she was leaning up against another male excursionist from planetside, who was showing his sense of humor by tearing off small pieces from the edges of her leaves and nibbling on them. After a while they departed hand in hand.

  Bram looked around for Kerthin, but he still was unable to find her. She’d been gone for over an hour. Drink in hand, he started down one of the side passages, the one that seemed to have attracted the greatest share of the desultory foot traffic. He thought he remembered having seen Kerthin heading in that general direction.

  The passageway was roughly octagonal in cross section and huge, its flattened sides as smooth as if they had been sandpapered. Once it had been alive, a conduit for water and dissolved nutrients, but now the tree didn’t need it anymore. Side tunnels branched off in all directions at varying angles, a reminder of the complicated changes of up and down that the space-dwelling tree had undergone at various stages of its life cycle; Bram detoured around a tunnel that opened straight down and had a safety fence erected around it.

  The light was dim enough to leach the color out of one’s vision; the only illumination came from transparent bladders swimming with biolights, which somebody had strung overhead at widely separated intervals. But he could see that this was going to be a main thoroughfare: Bundles of cables, tubes, and optical fibers were loosely strung along the walls, waiting for final installation, and there was a control station, partially assembled. Of course, there would have to be some way of tapping the electrical potential of the tree. And there was a ventilator elbow; the tree was its own atmosphere plant, but it was inevitable that a few adjustments would have to be made for the comfort of the human and Nar parasites who would inhabit it during its long migration to the next star.

  Yes, Bram thought, it was no wonder that the Juxt One colonists were so keen on exploring the tree. This planetoid-size organism was going to be their life-support system for the next several years, and they had better become familiar with it quickly.

  A tourist party came down the tunnel toward him, chattering and giggling. A barefoot colonist in shorts and a leaf cloak was explaining the sights. As they passed Bram on the opposite side of the passage, the guide called to him, “Don’t get lost! Stick to the marked routes!”

  “I will,” Bram called back.

  Not everybody was taking that advice. From the next side tunnel came a sound of heavy breathing and moans from a couple who hadn’t taken themselves very far out of sight past a bend. Bram discreetly pass
ed the corridor by and determined to have a look in the next promising tunnel.

  He found one going up a slope toward a dim milky light a quarter mile’s distance away. This would be one of the lenticels that Orris had mentioned — a round chamber toward the surface made by a raised pore covered by a translucent blister. The treefitters didn’t even have to seal it off from space; the tree did it for them. On planetary trees, lenticels communicated with the atmosphere and served for gaseous exchange, but the vacuum-grown poplars conserved every precious gas molecule.

  As he climbed toward starlight, Bram saw two dim figures emerge from a branching artery halfway up. A man and a woman. With the light behind them, he couldn’t make out their faces with any clarity, but of course they must have had a better look at him.

  He read a brief instant of confusion in their silhouettes, and then the man darted back down the tunnel he had emerged from. The woman looked as if she were about to follow him, then changed her mind and continued on down toward Bram.

  Bram kept on climbing, and as he drew close, he saw who it was. “Kerthin!” he exclaimed.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Are you spying on me?”

  He was dumbfounded. “N-no,” he said. “I was looking for you, and then I thought I’d explore some of these branching corridors.”

  “Well, there’s nothing to see up there,” she said. “Just some machinery that they haven’t installed yet and some chambers they’re hollowing out for air locks or something. Come on, let’s go.”

  He took another step upward. “Who was that with you?”

  “What do you mean?” she responded angrily. “I don’t like this!”

  “I don’t mean anything,” he said, more puzzled than ever. “I just asked who it was.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. There had been something about the silhouette — the set of the shoulders, the shape of the beard.

  “Let’s get back to the hall,” she said. She tried to brush by him.

  He grabbed her by the wrist. “It was Pite, wasn’t it?”