Donald Moffitt: Second Genesis

“Ferocious, isn’t he?” Bram said.

“He’s just frightened,” Mim said. “We all are.”

“He’s one of the post-Milky Way generation,” Nen said, leaning across Trist. “Have you noticed how all of the really bloodcurdling comments tonight came from the new people?”

Mim nodded agreement. “It’s hard for those of us who were raised among the Nar to think of a life form— any life form—as being a threat.”

“We’re learning,” Bram said grimly.

“Oh, my dear, yes,” Mim said, reaching blindly for Bram’s hand. She seemed on the verge of bursting into tears; she might have been remembering the long vigil when Bram had failed to return to the tree with the evacuees. But it took her only a moment to recover her usual spunk. “That was another time, another universe.”

Perc’s outside holo image was waving its mammoth arms around. “Just one quick pass over each planet,” Perc said earnestly and reasonably. “We needn’t go into a polar orbit that would cover the entire surface—and we couldn’t, anyway, with the kinetic energy of relativistic speeds. Our exhaust would boil away the crust—melt a channel of slag from pole to pole. Split the planet like a rotten fruit. Turn the oceans to steam and strip away the atmosphere. Nothing could survive—not anywhere. And think of Yggdrasil’s mass at seventy—or seven hundred—gamma. We’d rip them apart! I move that we start back at once. Burn them out. Descend on them like an avenging angel. Bring them their time of fire.”

The holo lurched off the stage, and the little man who had cast it seated himself again. Smeth thanked Perc for his views as if it hurt his teeth, then gaveled down the uproar that started.

“Jun Davd, I think you wanted to make a comment, he said.

Jun Davd’s holo rose, courteous and grave, and looked down at the audience. “There’s no doubt that we could wipe out planets if we had a mind to do so,” he said. “But I’m afraid that for us to exterminate the entire dragonfly race is a mathematical impossibility. You can’t make U-turns in space, and by the time we backed up far enough for a second run—decelerated and built up gamma again—years would have passed. We’d have to do that for every single planetary body … divided, perhaps, by a factor of three or four for those we could align, of course. In Sol system, there are thirty-five inhabited bodies of fair size, plus an unknown number of asteroids, cometary nuclei, and possibly space habitats. We could not be sure of … sterilizing … them all. And if we could, there still would be numbers of dragonfly vehicles in transit within the system, ready to settle on some of the cooling cinders after we passed.”

A babble of voices broke out. Smeth pounded his gavel, and Jun Davd went on.

“And, of course, we’re not talking about only one system. There are approximately one thousand five hundred stars and multiple star systems within a sixty-five-light-year radius of Sol. Most of them, by the evidence of Trist’s radio survey, are inhabited. Even if we spent only five or ten objective years dealing with each, it would be millennia before we finished the task.”

He paused. The hall of the tree had gone silent.

“And by then, the dragonfly sphere of habitation would have grown to a diameter of at least fifteen thousand light-years.”

“Then you’re saying that we can’t keep up with their expansion?” shouted a man in the front row.

Smeth tried to gavel him out of order, but Jun Davd bent forward to reply. His holo loomed like a cloud over the first ten rows, but it was the man in front whom he addressed.

“We’d have to disinfect every star in the galaxy. And then we’d have to start all over again.”

There was a clamor of competing voices, and Smeth granted the stage to a woman who wanted to be assured that flight was not entirely hopeless. “Can’t we find just one little star they won’t want—where they’ll leave us alone? Somewhere between the galaxies where they wouldn’t find us?”

“Where’s Jao?” Bram whispered to Trist. “I don’t see him up there. I thought he had something he wanted to contribute to this.”

“The last I heard, he was still working on some calculations. He has a computer model he wants to stir some more figures into.”

“What good will that do?” Nen said angrily. “Words, numbers—what difference will any of it make?”

“It’s something he’s been cooking up with Jun Davd,” Trist said. “All I know is that they think it has some bearing on the present situation.”

On the platform, Smeth was trying to stem further discussion and bring the proceedings to some kind of conclusion. The company had been at this for hours now, everything had been said at least twice, and people were getting cranky and tired.

“The time’s come for us to make a decision,” Smeth said harshly. “We have a problem that can’t be solved. But we’ve got to choose a course of action, nonetheless. Put quite simply, do we fight, run, or hide? Or pretend it isn’t so? I don’t believe I’ve heard any other suggestions tonight. So if anybody wants to start making motions, I’ll put them on the board and we can—”

The ushers were already starting to move down the aisles to get into position with their long-handled ballot boxes, when a burly figure dragging a bulky piece of electronic equipment shouldered his way past them.

“Hold it, Smeth!”

Smeth’s face showed annoyance. “The discussion just closed, Jao. There’s nothing more left to say. Take a seat with the others.”

Jun Davd leaned over to whisper something in Smeth’s ear. A slice of his face appeared in the holo projection, but the words weren’t audible.

“All right,” Smeth said. “Have your say. But try not to hold things up.”

Jao climbed to the stage with his gear and started plugging light fibers into the exposed holo panel while the projectionist hovered nearby. He said something to the projectionist, who nodded and took over the task while Jao strode to the lectern. A gigantic red-bearded face, disembodied, hovered over the auditorium; he hadn’t bothered with the niceties when he made his rough-and ready connections.

“When we dropped into the nucleus of the Milky Way from above the galactic plane about fifty of our years ago,” Jao began without preamble, “we saw a peculiar sight. It was a sort of arc of hot gas rising up out of the core at right angles to where you’d expect it to be for a galactic magnetic field.”

The audience stirred restively at what seemed to be an astronomy lecture coming when everybody was wound up with tension and ready to release it in the form of group action.

Jao appeared not to notice. The suspended face cocked a gigantic red eyebrow and went blithely on. “We postulated that something at the center of the galaxy was acting like a stupendous dynamo. The obvious candidate was a rotating black hole—the one we later used as a brake when we dived through the core.”

The blank part of the holo was suddenly filled with the Milky Way, making the disembodied head appear to be cloaked in the magnificence of stars. Jao had improved on the crude animated holo of finger-painted orange lines that he had first sketched so many years ago to illustrate his theory. Now a realistic image was there, drawn from the observatory’s photographic files and turned on its side to show an edge-on representation of the galaxy, with the central bulge glowing yellow.

The lines of force were still orange, though now they were an elegant computer sketch that made them flow in magnetic loops. The Milky Way tilted slightly, and now one could see the loops spinning faster around their common axis and flattening out to lie more within the galactic plane. Not all the lines of force were trapped, however. A small arclike spray still rose at the pole.