Starplex

Chapter VIII

It had taken a long time for humans to decipher dolphin speech. When they finally did so, delphinese names turned out to be sonargrams of individual dolphins, with their most unusual physical characteristics exaggerated. It was no surprise, then, that the only form of human art dolphins really enjoyed was political cartooning.

One of Starplexs’ best probeship pilots was a dolphin whose English name was Longbottle—a poor substitute for the song of trills and clicks that painted a caricature of him for his kinfolk, emphasizing his mighty snout.

Longbottle’s favorite probeship was the Rumrunner, a bronze wedge twenty meters long and ten wide. A water tank ran down the ship’s axis. To the left and right were separate air-filled habitats that joined at the rear in a U-shape with an airlock between them. The port side was normally kept to human standards; the starboard was set to cooler Waldahud conditions.

To pilot the vessel, Longbottle let small free-floating sensor drones clamp onto his flukes and pectoral fins. The ship had hundreds of attitude-control jets that allowed it to move in direct approximation of the dolphin’s own movements in his tank. Such a technique was extraordinarily wasteful of fuel—so much so that the Waldahudin had refused to bid on the contract to build these vessels—but it provided incredible maneuverability and, according to Longbottle, was an absolute joy to fly.

Although the Rumrunner could operate away from Starplex for weeks at a time, on this mission it would be gone for less than a day, and the crew would consist of just Longbottle and Jag.

The Rumrunner was normally stored in docking bay seven, one of five that had locks leading through the engineering torus to the ocean deck. The ship was clamped to the deck’s wall, and three access tubes at shallow angles entered its rooftop hatches.

Once Longbottle and Jag were aboard, the segmented docking-bay door moved up into the roof. Longbottle was famous for his theatrical launches. He zoomed the ship out of the bay, then rolled and arched in his tank, taking the Rumrunner on a breathtaking warm-up flight past all the docking-bay doors, swinging in a great circle around the central disk. He then rolled to one side in his tank, and the ship made a wide arc—looking for all the world as though it were banking in the vacuum of space.

Jag was getting impatient, but Longbottle, like all dolphins, was oblivious to that. He did a series of turns and flips in his tank, and the ship responded in kind. The gravity plates under Jag’s compartment compensated completely for the movements, but in his water-filled tube, Longbottle could feel the ship as if it were an extension of his own body.

Finally, when he’d had enough fun, Longbottle set off on a wildly curving path—again, wasteful of energy, but so much more interesting than the straight lines and precise arcs of normal celestial mechanics. The green star dominated the sky, even though its surface was now thirty million kilometers distant. The Rumrunner had much better force screens and physical shielding than did Starplex itself; it could make a very close passage. Under Longbottle’s fanciful guidance, the ship dived in, skimming the vast orb from just 100,000 kilometers above its photosphere. Scoops on the ship’s leading edge sucked in samples of stellar atmosphere.

“Greenness of this star a bafflement to me,” said Longbottle, through the hydrophone in his tank. Like most dolphins, Longbottle could approximate the sounds of both English and Waldahudar (although with mangled syntax—there was no such thing as appropriate word order in cetacean grammar). The computer simply processed those sounds to make them intelligible; it would only switch over to translation mode if a dolphin was actually speaking in delphinese.

Jag grunted. “I’m puzzled, too. Its surface temperature is twelve thousand degrees. The fardint thing should be blue or white, not green. The spectral analysis doesn’t make any sense either. I’ve never seen such high concentrations of heavy elements in a star.”

“Damaged perhaps by passage through shortcut?” asked Longbottle, twisting in his tank so that the ship would roll slowly around its axis. Even with extra shielding, it wasn’t safe to keep the same side facing the star.

Jag grunted again. “I suppose that’s possible. Most of the star’s chromosphere and corona were probably scraped off during passage through the shortcut. The shortcut’s lips clamped down on the photosphere, stripping away the rarefied gas above. Still, all previous tests have shown zero structural change in objects passing through a shortcut. Of course, nothing this big has ever gone through one before.”

The Rumrunner’s viewscreens were filled to the edges with flaming green; the physical windows had all turned opaque. “Take us in once around the star’s equator,” said Jag, “then do a polar loop. It’s possible that the star’s structure isn’t uniform. Before I get too worked up over these absorption lines, I want to be sure the spectra are the same all over.”

It took almost five hours at one one-thousandth of lightspeed to complete the five-million-kilometer sweep around the equator, and another five to do the loop from pole to pole. Longbottle kept the Rumrunner corkscrewing all the while. Jag’s eyes were glued to his scanning equipment, watching the dark vertical absorption lines. He kept muttering to himself, “Silt in the water, silt in the water”—the truth remained hidden.

Jag had no trouble measuring the star’s mass from its footprint in hyperspace; it was somewhat heavier than he’d expected. Except for the color, the star’s surface was fairly typical, consisting of tightly packed beads of light and dark caused by convection cells in the photosphere. It even had sunspots, but unlike those of other stars, these were’all connected in dumbbell shapes. It was, without doubt, a star—but it was also unlike any star Jag had ever seen before.

Finally, the flybys were complete. “Ready home to go?” asked Longbottle.

Jag lifted all four arms in a gesture of resignation. “Yes.”

“Mystery solved?”

“No. A star like this should simply not exist.”

The Rumrunner swept back toward Starplex, Jag muttering over his data for the entire journey.

Keith lay in bed next to his wife, unable to sleep. He looked over at Rissa’s form in the darkness, watched the thin sheet covering her rise and fall in time with her breathing.

She deserved better, he thought. He exhaled, trying to force the worries out of himself with the escaping breath, and conjured up images of happier times.

Rissa had dark eyes that turned into upward-arching crescents when she smiled. Her mouth was small, but her lips were full—half as tall as they were wide. Her mother had been Italian; her father, Spanish. She had inherited her lustrous dark hair and his fiery eyes. In his forty-six years of life, Keith Lansing had never met anyone who looked more appealing by candlelight than Rissa.

When they’d first met, in 2070, he’d been twenty-two and she’d been twenty, with a wonderfully curvy figure. Of course, her body shape was changing in natural ways as she aged; she was still in fine condition, but the proportions had shifted. Back then, Keith couldn’t have imagined finding a woman of forty-four attractive, but to his infinite surprise, his tastes had altered as the years passed, and although two decades of marriage had doubtless dulled his immediate reaction to her, when he saw Rissa in an unusual way—in a new suit, or stretching to reach something on a top shelf, or with her hair swept in a different manner—she could still take his breath away.

And yet…

And yet, Keith was aware that time was taking its toll on him. His hair was departing. Oh, there were “cures” for that—imagine suggesting that something as natural as male-pattern baldness required a cure!—but to employ them seemed vain and foolish. Besides, middle-aged scientists were supposed to be bald. It was in the rule book somewhere.

Keith’s father had had a full head of dark hair up until he’d been killed at age fifty-five; Keith wondered now whether he’d used a hair restorer. But for Keith to do something like that would be silly.

He remembered Mandy Lee, a holovid star he’d been infatuated with as a twelve-year-old boy. Back then, nothing had been more exciting to him than large breasts on a woman, probably because none of the girls in his class yet had them; they were a symbol of the forbidden, alien world of adult sexuality. Well, Mandy—dubbed “the binary star system” by some wag at HV Guide—was famous for her physique. But Keith had lost all interest in her when he’d found out that her breasts were fake; he couldn’t look at her without imagining the implants beneath the swelling alabaster skin and the surgical scars (even though he knew, of course, the anabolizing laser scalpels would have left no marks at all). Well, he’d be damned if he’d turn his head into a fake; he’d be damned if he’d let people looking at him think, hey, the guy’s really bald, you know…

And so there they were, Rissa Cervantes and Keith Lansing: still in love, if not in the passionate way of their youth, in what was ultimately a more satisfying, more relaxing fashion.

And yet—

And yet, dammit, he’d just turned forty-six. He was aging, balding, graying, and hadn’t been with another woman since his three—such a small number!—awkward encounters in high school and at university. Three, plus Rissa—a total of four. An average of less than one a decade. Christ, he thought, even a Waldahud could count my partners on the fingers of one hand.

Keith knew he shouldn’t think about such things, knew that what he and Clarissa had was something most people never really achieved: a love affair that grew and evolved as they aged, a relationship that was solid and secure and warm.

And yet—

And yet there was Lianne Karendaughter. Like Mandy Lee, the very symbol of beauty in his youth, Lianne had exquisite Asian features; something about Asian women had always appealed to Keith. He didn’t know how old Lianne was, but there was no doubt that she was younger than Rissa. Of course, as ship’s director, Keith could easily access Lianne’s personnel records, but he was afraid to do so. For God’s sake, she might be as young as thirty. Lianne had come aboard the last time Starplex had passed by Tau Ceti, and now, as Internal Operations manager, she and Keith often spent hours together on the bridge. And yet, to his surprise, no matter how much time he spent with her, he always wished it were more.

He hadn’t done anything foolish yet. Indeed, he thought he had everything under control. Still, he’d always been an introspective sort; he wasn’t blind to what was going on. Midlife crisis, the fear that he was no longer virile. And what better way to dispel that notion than by bedding a beautiful, young woman?

Idle fantasies. Of course, of course.

He rolled onto his side, facing away from Rissa, tucking himself into a semifetal position. He didn’t want to do anything that would hurt Rissa. But if she never learned about it—

Christ, man, get a grip. She’d find out for sure. How would he face her after that? And their son Saul? How would he face him? He’d seen his son beam at him with pride, yell at him in fury, but he’d never seen him look at him with disgust.

If only he could get some sleep. If only he could stop tormenting himself.

He stared into the darkness, eyes wide open.

Once the Rumrunner had docked, Longbottle went off to eat, and Jag returned to the bridge. The Waldahud was now keeping erect by use of an intricately carved cane—still better than reverting to four legs. Keith, Rissa, Thor, and Lianne had all had a night’s sleep, and Rhombus—well, Ibs didn’t sleep, a fact that made their long lifespans seem doubly unfair. Jag usually stood in front of the six workstations to give reports, but this time he walked back to the seating gallery and collapsed into the center chair, letting the others rotate their stations to face him.

Keith looked at the Waldahud expectantly. “Well?”

Jag marshaled his thoughts a moment, then began to bark. “As some of you know, stars are divided into three broad age categories. First-generation stars are the oldest in the universe, and consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the two original elements. Less than 0.02 percent of their composition is heavier atoms, and those, of course, were produced internally through the stars’ own fusion processes. When first-gens go nova or supernova, the interstellar dust clouds are enriched with these heavier elements. Since second-generation stars coalesced from such clouds, a full percent or a bit more of a second-gen’s mass comes from metals—‘metals’ in this context meaning elements heavier than helium. Third-generation stars are even more recent; the suns of all the Commonwealth homeworlds are third-gens, as are all stars being born today, although, of course, some first-gens and a lot of second-gens are still around, too. Third-gens consist of about two percent metals.”

Jag paused for a moment, and looked from face to face in the room. “Well,” he said, “that star”—he gestured with one of his medial arms at the green orb in the holo sphere “has about eight percent of its mass as metals, four times as much as even a typical third-gen. The thing has enough iron in it that you could actually mine it.”

“What about the green color?” asked Keith.

“It’s not really green, of course, any more than a so-called red star is actually red. Almost all stars are white, with just a hint of color.” He gestured with his medial limbs at the starfield around them. “PHANTOM routinely colorizes the stars in our holo bubble, assigning them colors based on their Hertzsprung-Russell categories. The star out there just has a greenish tinge. The absorption-line blanketing due to its metal content is stronger than the backwarming, and that weakens the star’s output in the blue and ultraviolet. The result is more of the star’s light coming out in the green region of the spectrum.” His fur danced. “I would have said a star with so much metal content would be impossible in our universe at its present age if I hadn’t seen one with my own four eyes. It must have formed under very peculiar local conditions, and—”

“Forgive the interruption, good Jag,” said Rhombus, “but I’m detecting a tachyon pulse.”

Keith swiveled in his chair, facing the shortcut.

“Gods,” said Jag, rising to his feet. “Most stars are part of multiple star systems—”

“We can’t take another close passage,” said Lianne. “We’ll—”

But the shortcut had already stopped expanding. A small object had popped through. The gateway had grown to only seventy centimeters in diameter before collapsing down to an invisible point.

“It’s a watson,” announced Rhombus. An automated communications buoy. “Its transponder says it’s from Grand Central Station.”

“Trigger playback,” Keith said.

“The message is in Russian,” said Rhombus.

“PHANTOM, translate.”

The central computer’s voice filled the room. “Valentina Ilianov, Provost, New Beijing Colony, to Keith Lansing, commander, Starplex. An M-class red-dwarf star has erupted from the Tau Ceil shortcut. Fortunately, it emerged heading away from Tau Ceil, rather than toward it. So far, no real damage has been done, although we had trouble piloting this watson past the star and into the portal. This is our third attempt to reach you. We did manage to contact the astrophysics center on Rehbollo for advice, and they had the incredible news that a star has popped out of the shortcut near them as well—a blue B-class star, in their case. I am now contacting all other active shortcuts to find out just how widespread this phenomenon is. End of message.”

Keith looked around the bridge, bathed in green starlight. “Christ Jesus,” he said.