Read Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02 for Free Online

look for the patterns of touch-reader transmissions. That way we know they’re Nar. You know, even if there’s no other intelligent life in the galaxy and this whole errand was a flop, the Nar must’ve spread over a sphere of a couple of thousand light-years by now, anyway. Hey, in the last fifty thousand years, maybe they sent more message probes after us. Maybe one with a second human crew. If they’ve developed a better drive and were willing to boost at slightly over one gravity, maybe they’re ahead of us. Maybe we’ll find them waiting for us in the Milky Way with a million years of civilization behind them. Or maybe the Nar have been spreading themselves at the edge of lightspeed! Why not? A few thousand years of developing the hadronic photon drive and it might be cheap enough for colony ships. Who needs probes? Who needs errandpersons? At one and a tenth g’s, they could already have settled an arc of space with its leading edge ahead of us.” He looked around wildly. “They could be all around us right now!”
    “Don’t get carried away,” Trist said. “Next you’ll have them traveling faster than light.”
    “Faster than light? Why not? Einstein is as Einstein does. The Nar arrived at their relativity by a different route. Maybe we humans missed something. You know, for the Nar, mathematics is a sensory experience. They count with the surface of their bodies. Whole digital operations, faster than you can whistle. They can plug as many Nar into a problem as they want—subunits, everything—and feel their way to a solution. Who’s to say they haven’t tackled the faster-than-light problem?”
    “Here’s where he drags out the tachyons,” Trist said with a tolerant smile at Bram.
    “Go ahead, laugh, but they could’ve reached the other side of the galaxy by now,” Jao insisted.
    “If you’re still beating the dead carcass of your Klein universe with its inside-out tachyons, I thought we settled that thirty years ago when we ran it through the computer and kept running up against the problems of nonorient-ability and self-intersection no matter how many dimensions you cared to postulate.”
    “We only ran it up to thirteen dimensions,” Jao protested. “We never solved it for a general case.”
    Bram intervened to squelch the familiar squabble before it could get started.
    “Whatever’s happening out there in the galaxy— whether the Nar really needed us or not, or whether other intelligent life forms exist and the Message got through to one of them, or eighty million of them by now—it doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve done our part of the job. We can go home now.”
     
    CHAPTER 2
     
    Home.
    Bram leaned back in his chairpuff and savored the idea of it, as he had done for most of his life. When he had been a small child, it had been bright, real, and immediate. Later it had become an abstraction, an impossibility. The adult Bram had known too much to believe in it. Now it was tangible again.
    From the wooden corridor outside his apartment came the sounds of revelry: Bobbing Day celebrants on their way to the All-Level Eve festivities in the Forum—some of them already tipsy, by the sound of it. Mim was in the next room, getting dressed. Shortly she would join him, and they would go down together to be a part of the merrymaking. A year-captain could not afford to be absent.
    But for these few moments of solitude he could think about home. For that, after all, was what the annual tree-turning celebration was all about—though it had grown lately into a tradition of its own.
    Home.
    Thirty-seven million years ago there had been an intelligent species that called itself the human race—Original Man. They had dwelt, by all the evidence, on a planet of a yellow sun in a rather isolated galaxy that they called the “Milky Way,” part of a sparse cluster consisting basically of two big spirals and their attendant swarms of small satellite galaxies.
    Whether or not human beings still