Read Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01 for Free Online Page A

the splendor of the vision. He drowned himself in it, lost in wonder.
    “We’re seeing their galaxy almost head on, as they must have seen us.” The director’s voice seemed to buzz from a distance. “That was a piece of luck for us. They were very sensibly transmitting in a direction at right angles to the plane of their galaxy, and for our part, we didn’t have to look through our own spiral arms. We were in the early stages of our own project to search for life in the universe. We’d already tried hundreds of individual stars in our own galaxy, without success. The giant radio array on our fourth moon was newly in place. And then the project astronomer suggested that we try listening to whole galaxies instead of eavesdropping on stars one at a time. His reasoning was that an entire galaxy would be within the field of view of the array and could be considered as a single source. If an artificial radio signal was on the right wavelength and powerful enough, it would outshine all other radio energy on that particular frequency. We would be listening, in effect, to two hundred billion stars at once.”
    The director touched Bram, remembered that he was a human child, and withdrew the tentacle. “The human signal was detected almost at once, in the middle of what proved to be a fifty-year cycle,” he went on in a Small Language patois that was heavily laced with Inglex. “Ironically, it was not the human galaxy that the radio telescope was aimed at. It was Andromeda. Andromeda was a more attractive target. It has more stars. But Andromeda proved to be close enough. At thirty-seven million light-years, even the tightest of beams spreads out quite a bit. The energy that would have been required to transmit such a signal was enormous. We think they must have enclosed a star and turned it into a modulated radio emitter. We can’t imagine how they were able to do such a thing, or what motives inspired them to allocate such a wealth of energy to their testament.”
    Voth’s grip tightened on Bram. The director’s voice had pity in it. Bram tore his eyes away from the coiled blob of light on the screen and looked at the director, who stood tiptoe in a quintuple arch, the petals of his upper structure radiating tact.
    “For testament it proved to be,” the director said. “Over the next century, a complete cycle was heard and then half of another repeat with new data added, and then it stopped. Stopped in midsentence, as it were. And in the centuries since, the signal never has resumed.”
    He sighed. “We never found evidence of intelligent life in the universe again. Perhaps it’s an extremely rare event. There’s us and there were the humans, so far away, and now they’re gone.”
    Bram could tell the precise moment when he was seeing the human galaxy by secondhand light. There was a brief winkout and an almost imperceptible change in image brightness, and then the picture of that vortex of stars stood motionless and lifeless within the hoop as some computer downstairs compensated for the bobbing image and held the cheating replica steady in its frame. The director said something to one of the assistants with a brief clasp of tentacles, and the assistant went pinwheel-ing down the steps.
    “No,” Bram burst out. “We’re not gone, and someday we’re going to go back!”
    “Bram!” Voth said, shocked. “Don’t contradict Pfaf-tlk-pfaf.”
    “It’s all right, Voth-shr-voth,” the director said. “I understand.” To Bram he said kindly, “Didn’t Jun Davd explain about steller distances? In time, in millions of years if we last that long as a species, we might conceivably explore our galaxy. But we can never cross the gulf between galaxies.”
    “We can,” Bram said, starting to cry. “Yes, we can.”
    “He’s cranky,” Voth apologized. “It’s past his bedtime.” The warm petals caressed Bram. “You must give up these thoughts, little one,” came the soft whisper. “Be happy in your life