Starplex

Chapter VI

Keith ran a hand over his pate, and leaned back in his chair, looking out at the starscape hologram enveloping the bridge. There wasn’t much else to do, until Jag reported back. Rissa was still off working with Boxcar, and alpha shift was coming to an end. Keith exhaled—probably too noisily. Rhombus had rolled up to the director’s workstation to discuss something or other. Lights flashed across the Ib’s mantle. “Irritated?” said his translated voice.

Keith nodded.

“Jag?” asked the Ib.

Keith nodded again.

“In politeness, I observe that he’s not that bad,” said Rhombus. “As Waldahudin go, he’s positively genteel.”

Keith gestured toward the part of the starfield that hid the door Jag had gone through. “He’s so… competitive. Combative.”

“They’re all like that,” said Rhombus. “All the males, anyway. Have you spent much time on Rehbollo?”

“No. Although I was in on the first contact between humans and Waldahudin, I always thought that it was best for me to stay away from Rehbollo. I—I’ve still got a lot of anger over the death of Saul Ben-Abraham, I guess.”

Rhombus was quiet for a few moments, perhaps digesting this. Then his web rippled with light again. “Our shift is over, friend Keith. Will you grant me nine minutes of your time?”

Keith shrugged and got to his feet. He addressed the room. “Good work, everyone. Thank you.”

Lianne turned around, her platinum hair bouncing as she did so, and smiled at Keith. Rhombus and Keith headed out into the chilly corridor, the Ib rolling beside the human.

A couple of slim robots were moving down the corridor as well. One was carrying a lunch tray for someone; another was running a vacuum cleaner along the floor. Keith still privately thought of such robots as PHARTs—PHANTOM ambulatory remote toilers—but the Waldahudin had started throwing things when it was suggested that Starplex terminology contained acronyms nested within acronyms.

Through a window in the corridor wall, Keith could see one of the vertical dolphin-access tubes, consisting of meter-thick disks of water separated by ten centimeters of air held in place by force fields. The air gaps prevented the water pressure from increasing over the tube’s height. As he watched, a bottle-nosed dolphin passed by, swimming up.

Keith looked at Rhombus. Lights were flashing in unison on his web. “What’s so funny?” Keith asked.

“Nothing,” said the Ib.

“No, come on. What is it?”

“I was just thinking of a joke Thor told today. How many Waldahudin does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: five—and each one has to get credit.”

Keith frowned. “Lianne told you that same joke weeks ago.”

“I know,” said Rhombus. “I laughed then, too.”

Keith shook his head. “I’ll never understand how you Ibs can find the same thing funny over and over again.”

“I’d shrug if I could,” said Rhombus. “The same painting is pretty each time you look at it. The same dish is tasty each time you eat it. Why shouldn’t the same joke be funny each time you hear it?”

“I don’t know,” said Keith. “I’m just glad I got you to stop telling me that stupid ‘that’s not my axle—it’s my feeding tube’ joke every time we met. That was irritating as hell.”

“Sorry.”

They continued down the corridor in silence for a while, then: “You know, good Keith, it’s a lot easier to understand the Waldahudin if you’ve spent time on their world.”

“Oh?”

“You and Clarissa have always been happy together, if you’ll permit me to say so. We Ibs don’t have such intimacy with other individuals; we shuffle our own genetic material amongst our component parts, rather than bonding with a mate. Oh, I take comfort from my other components—my wheels, for instance, are not sentient, but they have intelligence comparable to that of a terrestrial dog. I have a relationship with them that gives me great joy. But I perceive that the relationship you enjoy with Clarissa is something much, much more. I only dimly understand it, but I’m sure Jag appreciates it. Waldahudin, like humans, have two sexes, after all.”

Keith couldn’t see where this was going, and, on the whole, thought Rhombus was presuming on their friendship. “Yes?”

“Waldahudin have two sexes, but they do not have equal numbers of each sex,” said the Ib. “There are, in fact, five males for every female. Yet, despite this, they are a monogamous race, forming lifetime pairbonds.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“But have you contemplated the ramifications of that?” asked the Ib. “It means that four out of every five males end up without a mate—end up being excluded from the gene pool. Perhaps you had to fend off some other suitors in your pursuit of Clarissa—or maybe she had to fend off others who were pursuing you; forgive me, but I’ve no idea how these things work. But I imagine in such contests it was a comfort to all the participants to know that for each male there was a female, and vice versa. Oh, the pairings might not end up as one might wish, but the chances were good that each man would find a woman, and vice versa—or a mate of their own gender, if that was their preference.”

Keith moved his shoulders. “I suppose.”

“But for Jag’s people, that is not the case. Females have absolute power in their society. Every single one of them is… courted, I believe is the word… by five males, and the female, when she reaches estrus at thirty years of age, will pick her one mate from the five who have spent the last twenty-five years vying for her attentions. You know Jag’s full name?”

Keith thought for a moment. “Jag Kandaro em-Pelsh, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Do you know its derivation?”

He shook his head.

“Kandaro is a regional designation,” said Rhombus. “It refers to the province Jag traces lineage to. And Pelsh is the name of the female of whose entourage he is a member. She’s quite a significant power on Rehbollo, actually. Not only is she a famous mathematician, she’s also a niece of Queen Trath. I met Pelsh once, while attending a conference. She’s charming, intelligent—and about twice Jag’s size, as are all adult Waldahud females.”

Keith contemplated a mental picture, but said nothing.

“Do you see?” asked Rhombus. “Jag has to make his mark. He has to distinguish himself from the other four males in her entourage if he is to be chosen. Everything a premating Waldahud male does is geared toward making him stand out. Jag came aboard Starplex looking for glory enough to earn him Pelsh’s affection… and he’s going to find that glory, no matter how hard he has to push.”

That night, lying in bed, Keith rolled onto his back.

All his life, he’d had trouble sleeping—despite the advice people had given him over the years. He never drank caffeinated beverages after 18:00. He had PHANTOM play white noise through the bedroom speakers, drowning out the sound of Rissa’s occasional snoring. And although there was a digital-clock display built into his night table, he’d covered its readout with a little square of plastic card slipped into a join between the pieces of wood composing the table. Staring at a clock, worrying about how late it was, about how little sleep he was going to get before morning came, was counterproductive. Oh, he could see the clock face when standing in the bedroom, and he could always reach over and bend down the plastic card to look at it in bed if he was really curious, but it helped.

Sometimes, that is.

But not tonight.

Tonight, he tossed and turned.

Tonight, he relived the encounter in the corridor with Jag.

Jag. Perfect name for the bastard.

Keith rolled onto his left side.

Jag was currently running a series of professional-development seminars for those Starplex staff members who wanted to know more physics; Rissa was running a similar series for those who wanted to learn some more biology.

Keith had always been fascinated by physics. Indeed, while taking a range of sciences in his first year at university, he’d thought seriously about becoming a physicist. So much neat stuff—like the anthropic principle, which said that the universe had to give rise to intelligent life. And Schredinger’s cat, a thought experiment that demonstrated that it was the act of observing that actually shaped reality. And all the wonderful twists and turns to Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity.

Keith loved Einstein—loved him for his fusion of humanity and intellect, for his wild hair, for his own knight-errant quest to try to put the nuclear genie he’d made possible back into the bottle. Even after choosing sociology as his major, Keith had still kept a poster of the grand old man of physics on his dorm wall. He would enjoy taking some physics seminars… but not with Jag. Life was too short for that.

He thought about what Rhombus had said about Waldahud family life—and that turned his mind to his older sister Rosalind and younger brother Brian.

In a way, Roz and Brian had shaped him as much as his genetic makeup had. Because they existed, he was a middle child. Middle children were the bridge-builders, always trying to make connections, to bring groups together. It had always fallen to Keith to organize family events, such as parties for their parents’ milestone anniversaries and birthdays, or Christmas gatherings of the clan. And he’d organized his high-school class’s twentieth reunion, thrown receptions in his home for colleagues visiting from out of town, supported multicultural and ecumenical groups. Hell, he had spent most of his professional life working to get the Commonwealth off the ground, the ultimate exercise in bridge-building.

Roz and Brian didn’t worry about who liked them and who didn’t, about whether there was peace between all parties, about networking, about whether people were getting along.

Roz and Brian probably slept well at nights.

Keith switched back to lying on his spine, an arm behind his head.

Maybe it was impossible. Maybe humans and Waldahudin could never get along. Maybe they were too different. Or too similar. Or…

Christ, thought Keith. Let it go. Let it go.

He reached over, bent down the piece of plastic card, and looked at the glowing, mocking red digits.

Damn.

Now that they had collected samples of the strange material, it fell to Jag and Rissa, as the two science-division heads, to come up with a research plan. Of course, the next step depended on the nature of the samples. If it turned out to be nothing special, then Starplex would continue its quest for whoever activated this shortcut—a life-sciences priority mission. But if the strange material was out of the ordinary, Jag would argue that Starplex should stay here to study it, and Rissa’s team should take one of Starplex’s two diplomatic vessels—either the Nelson Mandela or the Kof Dagrelo em-Stalsh—to continue the search.

The next morning Jag used the intercom to contact Rissa, who was up in her lab, saying he wanted to see her. That could mean only one thing: Jag was intending a preemptive strike to set mission priorities. She took a deep breath, preparing for a fight, and headed for the elevator.

Jag’s office had the same floor plan as Rissa’s, but he’d decorated it—if that was the word—in Waldahud mud-art. He had three different models of polychairs in front of the desk. Waldahudin disliked anything that was mass-produced; by having different models he could at least give the appearance that each was one of a kind. Rissa sat in the polychair in the middle and looked across Jag’s wide, painfully neat desk at him. “So,” she said. “You’ve presumably analyzed the samples we collected yesterday. What are the spheres made of?”

The Waldahud shrugged all four shoulders. “I don’t know. A small percentage of the sample material is just the regular flotsam of space-carbon grains, hydrogen atoms, and so on. But the principal material is eluding all standard tests. It doesn’t combust in oxygen or any other gas, for instance, and as far as I can tell it has no electrical charge at all. Regardless of what I try, I can’t knock electrons off it to get positively charged nuclei. Delacorte up in the chemistry lab is having a look at a sample now.”

“And what about the gravel from between the spheres?” Rissa asked.

Jag’s bark had an unusual quality. “I’ll show you,” he said. They left his office, went down a corridor, and entered an isolation room. “Those are the samples,” he said, gesturing with a medial arm at a glass-fronted cubic chamber measuring a meter on a side.

Rissa looked through the window and frowned. “That big one—does it have a flat bottom?”

Jag peered through the window. “Gods—”

The large egg-shaped piece of material had sunk about halfway into the bottom of the chamber, so that only a domelike part stuck up. Peering more closely, Jag could see that some of the smaller gravel pieces were sinking, too. He pointed with his upper-left first finger as he counted the fragments. Six were gone, presumably sunk beneath the surface of the chamber’s bottom. But no holes had been left in their wake.

“It’s dropping right through the floor,” said Jag. He looked at the ceiling. “Central Computer!”

“Yes?” said PHANTOM.

“I want zero-g inside that sample chamber now!”

“Doing so.”

“Good—no, wait. Change that! I want five standard gees in there, but—I want them coming from the chamber’s ceiling, not its floor. Got that? I want gravity in there to pull objects up toward the roof.”

“Doing so,” said PHANTOM.

Rissa and Jag watched, fascinated, as the egg-shaped piece of material started to rise out of the bottom of the chamber. Before it was all the way out, pieces of gravel welled up from beneath the solid floor and fell up toward the ceiling, hitting it not with the ricochet bounce one would expect but more like pebbles falling into tar and beginning to sink.

“Computer, oscillate the gravity until all the objects are free from the floor and ceiling, then shift to zero-g, with the objects floating in the chamber.”

“Doing so.”

“My word, that’s incredible,” said Rissa. “The stuff can pass right through other matter.”

Jag grunted. “The original samples we tried to collect must have leaked through the probes’ walls, pushed out by the force of their acceleration toward Starplex.”

By bouncing the apparent source of gravity inside the chamber between the top and the bottom, PHANTOM eventually got all the gravel pieces to float freely. But Jag’s fur danced when he saw the results of two pieces moving together. He’d expected to see them hit, then bounce off. Instead, when they got to just a few millimeters apart they deflected away from each other.

“Magnetic,” said Rissa.

Jag moved his lower shoulders. “No, there’s no magnetism at work here—there are no charges present.”

There were four articulated arms ending in tractor-beam emitters inside the chamber, and Jag operated all of them in unison, controlling one with each hand. He used one beam to lock onto a piece of translucent gravel a centimeter in diameter, and used a second beam to grab another piece of equal size. He then operated the controls to move the two pieces together. Everything went fine until the chunks were within a very short distance of each other, but then no matter how much power he fed into the tractor beams, he was unable to bring them any closer. “Amazing,” said Jag. “There’s some sort of force repelling them—a nonmagnetic repulsive force. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“That must be what keeps the haze of gravel from coalescing,” said Rissa.

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “I suppose. The net effect is that the material in the haze between the spheres is bound together gravitationally, but it won’t ever coalesce more than it already has.”

“But then what keeps these pebbles together? Why doesn’t that repulsive force blast them apart?”

“They must be locked chemically. I suspect they were originally formed under great pressure—pressure that defeated the repulsion we’re observing. Now that their constituent atoms are bonded, they stay together, but it would take great effort to combine the pebbles into bigger groupings.”

“Oh, hell,” said Rissa. “You know what I’m thinking…”

Jag’s four eyes went wide. “The Slammers! We’ve only ever seen what their weapon did to one of our probes. Perhaps if they turned it on a world, this might be the result. Quite the doomsday device: not only does it destroy the planet, but it also imparts a force to the rubble to prevent it from ever collecting back together to form another world.”

“And now there’s an open shortcut leading from here to the Commonwealth worlds. If they were to come through—”

At that moment, Jag’s wall beeped, and the elderly face of Cynthia Delacorte appeared on it. “Jag, it’s—oh, hi, Rissa… Listen, thanks for sending up those samples. Do you know that this stuff sinks into normal matter?”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Incredible, isn’t it?”

Delacorte nodded. “I’ll say. It’s not normal baryonic matter. It’s not antimatter, of course. We’d have been blown out of the skies if it were. But where normal protons and neutrons consist of combinations of down quarks and up quarks, this stuff is made of matte quarks and glossy quarks.”

Jag’s fur danced excitedly. “Really?”

“I’ve never heard of those kinds of quarks,” said Rissa.

Jag made a sound like she was a fool, but Delacorte nodded. “Since the twentieth century, humans have known of six flavors of quarks—up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charmed. In fact, six was the maximum number allowed for under the old Standard Model of physics, so we’d pretty much given up looking for more, which turned out to be a big mistake.” She looked pointedly at Jag. “The Waldahudin had only found the same six flavors, too. But when we met the Ibs, they were aware of two more, which we refer to by opposing lusters, glossy and matte. There’s no way you can get them by breaking down normal matter, but the Ibs had done unique work pulling matter out of quantum fluctuations. In their experiments, luster quarks were sometimes produced, but only at very, very high temperatures. What we’ve got here are the first-known naturally occurring luster quarks.”

“Incredible,” said Jag. “You’ve noticed the fardint things carry no charge? What explains that?”

Delacorte nodded, then looked at Rissa. “Electrons have a charge of negative one unit, up quarks have a positive two-thirds charge, and down quarks have a negative one-third charge. Each neutron is made of two downs quarks and an up, which means the net charge is zip. Meanwhile, each proton consists of one down and two ups, which gives a charge of positive one. Since atoms have equal numbers of protons and electrons, they have an overall neutral charge.”

Rissa understood that the explanation had been for her benefit. She nodded at the wall monitor for Delacorte to go on.

“Well, this luster-quark matter consists of what I’m calling para-neutrons and para-protons. Para-neutrons consist of two glossy quarks and one matte, and para-protons consist of a pair of mattes plus a glossy. But neither glossies nor mattes carry any charge whatsoever—so regardless of how you combine them, there’s no charge on the nucleus. And without a positive nucleus, there’s nothing to attract negatively charged electrons, so a luster-quark atom is solely a nucleus; it has no electron orbital shells. The bottom line is that luster matter isn’t just electrically neutral. Rather, it’s nonelectrical; it’s immune to electromagnetic interactions.”

“Gods,” said Jag. “What would explain why it can sink into solid objects. It would probably pass through completely unhindered if it weren’t for drag caused by the regular-matter carbon grains and hydrogen polluting it, and—of course! That explains why we can see it, too. If it were purely luster quarks, it would be invisible, since the reflection and absorption of light depend on vibrating charges. We’re just seeing the interstellar dust that’s caught gravitationally inside the luster matter, like sand in jelly.” He looked at the wall screen. “All right—it doesn’t interact electromagnetically. What about the nuclear forces?”

“It is affected by both the strong and the weak nuclear force,” said Delacorte. “But those forces are so short-range, I doubt we’d get any interaction through them with regular matter except at incredibly high pressures and temperatures.”

Jag was quiet for a moment, considering. When he next spoke, his barking was subdued. “It’s incredible,” he said. “We knew the Slammer weapon could break chemical bonds, but changing regular matter into luster matter is—”

“Slammer weapon?” said Delacorte? her gray eyebrows arching. “Is that what you think produced this stuff? No, I doubt that. It’d take thousands of years for that much dust to be swept up by the spheres. My guess is that we’re seeing a natural phenomenon.”

“Natural,…” said Jag, repeating the bark his translation implant had provided. “Fascinating. What about gravitational effects?”

“Well, luster quarks each mass about seven hundred and sixteen times what an electron does; that’s about eighteen percent more than an up or a down quark. So a luster atom has a little more mass, and therefore produces a little more gravity, than does a normal atom with a comparable number of nucleons. Damned if I know how these luster quarks interact chemically with each other, though.”

Jag was pacing back and forth. “All right,” he said. “All right—how about this? Let’s propose two more fundamental forces on top of the traditional four. Ever since the old Standard Model broke down, we’ve been looking for additional forces anyway. Say one force is long-range and repulsive—Cervantes and I already observed that one at work while trying to push pieces of the gravel together with tractor beams. The other force would be medium-range and attractive.

“What does that do for us?“ asked Delacorte.

“Well,” said Jag, “normal chemistry is the result of orbital overlap of electrons surrounding charged nuclei; there’s none of that going on here. But if the medium-range attractive force was stronger than the weak nuclear force, then it could act almost as ‘meta-charge,’ making possible a kind of ‘meta-chemistry.’ It could bind atoms without relying on electromagnetism to do so. Meanwhile, the long-range repulsive force would repel luster quarks from each other. It would only be overwhelmed by the quarks’ own gravity when enough mass density was present to force them together. It’s similar to gravity forcing electrons and protons together to make a neutron star despite the degeneracy pressure wanting to keep electrons out of each other’s orbitals.” He looked at Rissa. “This means we’ve got ‘meta-chemistry’ that can conduct possibly quite complex reactions at the molecular level, but at the macro levelluster matter can only clump together in world-sized masses whose own gravity is enough to overpower the repulsive force.”

Delacorte looked impressed. “If you can work out the mechanism of all that, you’ll win the Nobel or Kayf-Dukt for sure. It really is incredible—a whole different kind of matter that only interacts slightly with baryonic—”

“Pastark!” barked Jag. “By all the gods, do you know what this is?” His fur was whipping about like wheat in a high wind.

“Tell us,” said Rissa at last, irritated.

“We shouldn’t be calling it ‘luster matter,’ ” Jag said. “The stuff already has a perfectly good common name.” His two right eyes looked at Delacorte’s image and his two left at Rissa. “Dark matter!”

“Good God!” said Delacorte. “Good God, I think you’re right.” She shook her head in wonder. “Dark matter.”

“That it is,” said Jag. “It makes up the vast bulk of our universe, and until now we’ve never known what it was. This is the find of the century!” His four eyes closed, picturing the glory.