Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02 Read Free

crazy travel arrangement would look like to a hypothetical observer outside the craft—provided that the observer could see by undopplered light. Or, more to the point, provided that the observer was in the same relativistic frame, matching the spacecraft’s course in velocity and direction. Otherwise, the collection of shapes on their long skewer would be foreshortened by a factor of twenty thousand, turning them into a stack of paper-thin disks pierced by a thumbtack.
    He decided it would look like a post horn straddled by a leafy dumbbell.
    Bram had seen a post horn once, at one of Olan Byr’s memorial concerts. The ancient instruments, from lyres to sousaphones, had been part of Olan’s legacy. He had been tireless in commissioning reproductions from hints in man’s digitally transmitted art masterpieces, dictionary sketches, and clues in the musical notation itself. The post horn was based on one played by an angel in an Annunciation. It was a long, straight tube of brass, tall as the man who played it, with a flaring bell at one end and the smaller flare of a mouthpiece at the other.
    Bram closed his eyes for a moment and savored the eccentric image.
    The post horn that dragged Yggdrasil by the collar was twelve hundred miles long, with its slender tube aligned along g forces to keep it straight. The bell was an insubstantial net of superfilament, several hundred miles in diameter, that kept its shape by virtue of an independent spin at its rim. Around the bell was a multicolored cascade of sparks, like trumpet notes made visible. A miniature sun burned blindingly in a magnetic cage at the mouthpiece, like a divine breath. And from the flared mouthpiece issued a thin pencil of inspired light as the hadronic photons, their work done, decayed and wreaked havoc with whatever interstellar debris was still left behind in the wake of the probe’s sweep.
    Pleased with the image, he conjured up the other component of the queer hybrid vehicle.
    Yggdrasil would make a compressed sort of dumbbell, he decided, with a short, thick handle and rather flattened hemispheres. More like a pair of fat wheels lying athwart the long axis of the probe. One hemisphere was silver with a green rim facing the fusion fire. The other was brown, laced through with the crystal sparkle of cometary ice and showing an arc of green where Yggdrasil’s root system had decided to help out with the photosynthesis.
    The looming reality of a wall of foliage rushing past him only a few miles away dissipated the image, and Bram turned his eyes to the view he loved best.
    Between the rushing walls of Yggdrasil’s twin hemispheres, a spectacular slice of sky was visible. A rainbow of stars made a dazzling arch across the void. Optical effects had crowded the bands of color so close together that the effect was like strands of matched jewels, jumbled together in overlapping profusion.
    It was so beautiful that it hurt.
    Bram studied the ribbon of stars. Was it narrower than the last time he had looked? It was hard to tell. But the yellow band seemed to have moved a degree forward, and the dull, ominous blanket of reds that faded into the blind spot seemed to have been dragged along by the rainbow hem.
    A star whizzed by, changing from purple to blue to green, then to yellow, orange, and red before it was swallowed by the blind spot.
    The star must have been very close—only a few light-days away. At the present gamma, Yggdrasil swept across a light-year in about thirty minutes. That was fast enough to make the nearer stars move at a crawl, changing their colors as they lined up against the background rainbow.
    A second violet star popped out of nothingness, riffled through the spectrum, and vanished to the rear.
    The first star’s companion! Yggdrasil was skirting a double star system.
    Bram tried not to worry. Even here in the depths of the galaxy the stars were light-months apart. A collision would be most improbable, Jao had assured him. Even if