Second Genesis gq-2

by Donald Moffitt

  The turning of the craft continued, and now an enormous knife edge cleaved the sky: the disk that was their destination.

  Lydis applied a touch of her lateral jets once more, and the turning stopped until the knife edge was suspended directly overhead, Bram studied it through the bubble dome. At the tip where the line ended was an illuminated dot, like a tiny flower on a stem.

  “You can see the moon from here,” Lydis’s voice came through the suit radio. “It looks as if it’s resting on the rim from here, but of course it’s not. The structures we sighted through the big telescope are beneath it. We should begin to make them out at about a quarter million miles. They’re huge.”

  The diskworld had proved to have moons—eleven of them, equally spaced, in synchronous orbit around the rim. Where the twelfth should have been, the narrow ribbon of landscape slumped suggestively across a span of twenty million miles.

  The orbits of the moons were impossible—too close and too slow. “They have no right to hover like that,” Jun Davd had said.

  For once, Jao had had no theories, except for a halfhearted, “Antigrav, maybe?”

  “What I’m interested in is, what are they hovering over?” Jun Davd had mused. He had kept his instruments trained on the moons during Yggdrasil’s long inward sweep from the outer limits of the plundered system, and had done much juggling with computer enhancement and other techniques. Some two billion miles out, he had been rewarded. “It’s some kind of support complex,” he had announced, showing dubious pictures of a patchy grid, which might have been nothing more than the computer’s desire to please. “Roadways, maybe. Ditches or canals or the remnants of a buried transport system. Street layouts with the rubble showing differently in the infrared … casting low shadows…”

  He had set a course for the largest of the complexes on the disk whose orbit they could most conveniently intercept. It struck Bram as finicky and bizarre, and Jun Davd agreed with him. But it was a planetary body with interplanetary distances; the next largest complex was a third of the way around the rim—ninety million miles away. Too far to walk. It was definitely a problem in space navigation.

  “Hold on,” Lydis’s voice said. “I’m going to give you some weight now.”

  There was a gentle shove on Bram’s chest, pressing him into the couch. A rain of small objects came from above; someone had forgotten to secure some minor gear. Zef turned to glare at the culprit, and Jao grinned sheepishly within his helmet.

  The burn was a leisurely one, lasting a half hour at what Bram estimated to be about a quarter of a gravity. There was plenty of hydrogen and oxygen to be profligate with since Yggdrasil had drunk its fill of comets.

  Lydis saw her passengers fidgeting. “I know it’s hard to lie still when there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it,” she said, “but I don’t want any mass moving around while I’m doing this.”

  At last they went weightless again. “All right,” Lydis said. “You can get up now. Take off your vacuum suits if you like. I’m not going to fire the jets again for about two days.”

  Everybody gratefully desuited. Jao scratched mightily. “I don’t think you were worried about leaks at all,” he said. “I think you just wanted to keep us quiet.”

  “Where’d you ever get an idea like that?” Zef said.

  They all crowded to an observation blister to have a look at their destination; Lydis had rolled the ship over after the main burn so that people wouldn’t have to crane their necks to look through the overhead dome.

  Enry, pale, said, “How wide is the rim? It still looks like a one-dimensional line from here.”

  “About fifty miles,” Jao said. “Talk about thin! We wouldn’t see it at all from this angle if it wasn’t for scattered light from over the edge.”

  Ame said, with a trace of awe, “The former human race was efficient. “Just about all the working surface is on the fiat sides.”

  Jao nodded. “But don’t forget, even a fifty-mile width gives a surface area on the rim alone of thirteen and a half billion square miles. That’s equivalent to the surface areas of seventy of your normal, terrestroid-style planets like the Father World. That’s a lot of elbow room, even if it is all east and west.”

  “I’m glad we don’t have to dig it all up,” Ame said, with a glance at Enry to see how he was taking her presence.

  Enry rose to the occasion. He was stuffy but nice. “I could use a little help,” he said.

  A perfunctory laugh went around. Bram asked Lydis for a magnified view through the ship’s telescope and got nothing more than a fuzzier line topped by a blurred speck that might have been construed as a crescent.

  “It’s going to be a very strange place,” he said.

  Part II

  TESTAMENT

  CHAPTER 7

  The diskworld was a very strange place indeed.

  Bram, weighing no more than an ounce or two, stood at the front of the landing ladder and looked out across the red twilight at a thin slice of landscape that stretched away into darkness.

  Its edges were sharply defined against the starry night. Strictly speaking, there was no horizon at the end of it; the bleak, uniform vista dwindled to a vanishing point long before the eye could reach that hypothetical sykline some millions of miles beyond.

  It gave Bram the illusion of standing on a very high, infinitely long ridge. Ahead was a flat, narrow plain of rubble that turned into a needle point piercing the black sky. On either side of him, not many miles away, was a sheer cliff that dropped down ninety million miles to a chasm filled with stars.

  His weightlessness contributed to the dreamlike feeling of the place. The next person down the ladder jostled him unintentionally, and they both drifted a foot into the air before settling to the ground again.

  Bram glanced into the other’s faceplate and saw by the blue glow of the helmet telltales that it was Jao. For once the red-bearded physicist was speechless. Both of them turned by common consent to look at the inner rim of their thin-sliced world.

  The universe of stars gave way to a sky erased by stray luminescence, over what appeared to be a geometrically straight edge with no hint of curvature.

  The brink of the world.

  The great disks rose like goblin faces peering over the precipice, glowing a dull red of dying embers. As this queer world turned, they would rise in unison until they filled the sky. Even now, the big one ahead of them in orbit showed an angular diameter of fifty degrees, a hundred times wider than the sun would have been had it been visible.

  From the present angle of view, almost forty 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 to airlessness and low gravity.

  “What are you talking about?” Bram asked.

  “See anything over there? Use your top magnification.”

  Obediently, Bram searched the distant ruins with his helmet telescope. The liquid crystal display emerged from its clear plastic sandwich and formed a circular image in front of his right eye. He squinted and adjusted the focus.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Turn up the contrast.”

  “I think I see some kind of streak or scratch. It’s hard to be sure. I think it’s in my helmet … no, it stays put when I move. It may be a beam of light or a reflection. It’s pointing straight up in the direction of the moon.”

  “That’s it,” Jao said.

  “That’s what?”

  “Oh, no. I’m not saying. I’m not sticking my neck out till we get there.”

  “Watch out!” Bram’s suit radio said.

  He stepped to one side and saw Lydis and Zef wrestling one of the walkers out of the hatch. They let go, and it floated down to the ground, where it unfolded, shook itself off, and inflated its passenger bubble. The biodevice was a tried and true version of the basic model the Nar had used for airless planetoids and nonrotating space structures. Its fragile, elongated frame would not have stood up under any semblance of real gravity, but it was strong enough for places like this. It had a submetabolism that worked on hydrogen and oxygen, and besides supplying energy, the auxilliary system had water and oxygen to spare for passengers.

  “Well, let’s not waste time,” Jao said, with a hop and a dive toward the vehicle. “Did anybody pack a lunch?”

  Enry was engrossed in his work. Now he was putting dust samples into little vials. Ame came bounding over from a fissure she had been studying. “That’s more like it,” she said. “Wait till I get my kit.”

  Lydis drifted down the ladder and stationed herself in front of the spidery biovehicle. “Hold on,” she said. “We go out two at a time, at least till we know more about this place, and we keep the voice and homing circuits on at all times.”

  “What d’ya mean?” Jao said. “The walker’ll carry three.”

  “Sorry,” Lydis said. “That’s the way it’s going to be.”

  Jao assumed an expression of great regret. “Sorry, Ame. You can take the next trip. Do you want me to bring back any rubble samples for you?”

  Ame sputtered. “We’re going to have a first look at the ruins, and it needs someone with some archaeological and paleontological training.” She appealed to Lydis. “Isn’t that so?”

  “I’d say so,” Lydis replied.

  “Well,” Jao said. “Your daughter has spoken. I guess it’s Ame and me. Sorry, Bram. I’ll give you a running report over the radio.”

  “Not a chance,” Lydis said firmly. “Neither your nor Ame is qualified on a walker. Bram’s the driver.”

  It was Jao’s turn to sputter. “There’s nothing to steering one of those things.”

  “There’s too much trouble an inexperienced driver can get into low gravity,” Lydis said. “You could turn over. Bounce it too high and come down the wrong way. Misjudge a ravine.”

  “Sorry, Jao,” Bram said. “You can have the second ride. I’ll find out what that thing is. And give you a report over the radio.”

  The walker loped across the jagged landscape, bouncing upward in great buoyant swoops that ate up the miles. Bram, with an occasional corrective jerk of the reins, kept a watchful eye through the inflated bubble on the route ahead. The tumbled lines of rubble they had to cross were not really dangerous to the walker, which was nimble enough to compensate for its stiff-legged gait when it came down wrong-footed on a boulder or crack. But of course it had no long-distance judgment.

  “It’s shivery,” Ame said, glancing toward the great glowing hump of a disk that rose out of the ground to their left. As dull and rusty as the light was, it cast long gloomy striations of shadow across the stark plain.

  “Shivery?” he teased her. “Is that some sort of technical term you paleontologists use?”

  She nestled for comfort against him on the narrow bench. “It’s been dead and broken for millions of years. But I feel that it’s been waiting for us.”

  “It has.”

  “And that it’s watching us right now.”

  “Nothing could live here.”

  “We do. And this thing we’re riding in sort of lives.”

  “You’re letting your imagination run away with you. But that’s not surprising. This place is haunted. By the entire human race.”

  “Yes.” She shuddered. “It’s like our own graveyard. We’re supposed to be immortal. But so were they.”

  “That’s why it’s important to find answers here, Ame. And that’s your job.”

  She shook off the mood with an effort. “A job for more than me and Enry. We’re going to have to develop a real science of archaeology very quickly. We’ve never had the subject matter before. We don’t want to blunder about, destroying knowl
edge.”

  “How do we go about it?”

  “We’ll need a large labor force from the tree,” she said briskly. “We’ll have to establish a grid first, and a cataloging system. The librarians can help there, and everybody else will have to pitch in. Chemists, cultural scholars, everybody.” She challenged him with a direct gaze. “I can hardly wait to get a real team here and start the dig. How soon do you think that will be, Bram-tsu?”

  “Right away, if everything looks all right. We’ll spend a few days here first—find a good place to set up a base camp, get an idea of the layout. Lydis ought to be able to move the ship a bit closer. That thing up ahead isn’t a danger now that we know where it is.”

  The walker was at the top of a leap, and as it drifted slowly down, both passengers looked ahead through the bubble. The elusive streak at the center of the compound still could not be seen with the naked eye, even from a few miles away. But a couple of stops during the approach and a look through the helmet telescopes had confirmed that it was still there.

  Bram had tried bouncing light off it from a hand laser, while Ame made photometer readings. Slashing back and forth with the beam, he had still obtained readings at what a rough triangulation told him was a height of over twenty miles.

  Whatever it was, it was indubitably solid matter, and it reached straight up.

  “Stop here,” Ame said. “I want to look at something.”

  Bram reined the walker in. It reared up in the low gravity, then its front legs settled into the dust. Bram made it kneel, then followed Ame out through the lips of the bubble.

  It made a primitive air lock, but it was the best that could be done within the limitations of the scrawny bio-machine. Very little atmosphere was lost if you managed the egress properly. You learned the technique quickly—arms stretched out with your head tucked between them, as if you were diving, then squirm the rest of yourself through sidewise, while the fat inflated edges sealed themselves around you, and a quick pop as you drew your foot through. He and Ame had stayed in their suits with their helmets on even though the bubble was fully pressurized with a breathable atmosphere of fifty percent oxygen. Lydis had insisted on that for safety’s sake.