Starplex

Chapter IX

“I say we’re under attack,” announced Thorald Magnor, getting up from the helm position, and walking over to the seating gallery to sit a few chairs to the right of Jag. “We’ve apparently been lucky so far, but dropping a star into a system could destroy all life there.”

Jag moved his lower two arms in a Waldahud gesture of negation. “Most shortcuts are in interstellar space,” he said. “Even the one you call ‘the Tau Ceti shortcut’ is still thirty-seven billion kilometers from that star, more than six times as far as Pluto is from Sol. I would say that in fifteen out of sixteen cases, the arrival of additional stars would have minor effects on the closest systems, and, since inhabited worlds are few and far between, the chances of actually doing short-term damage to a planet with life on it are quite small.”

“But could these stars be, well, bombs?” asked Lianne. “You said that the green star is very unusual. Could it be about to explode?”

“My studies of it have only begun,” said Jag, “but I would say that our new arrival has at least a two billion years of life left. And singleton M-class dwarfs, like the one that popped out near Tan Ceti, don’t go nova.”

“Still,” said Rissa, “couldn’t they disturb the Oort clouds of star systems they pass close to, sending showers of comets in toward the inner planets? I remember an old theory that a brown dwarf dubbed—Nemesis, I think it was—might have passed close to Sol, causing an onslaught of comets at the end of the Cretaceous.”

“Well, Nemesis turned out not to exist,” said Jag, “but even if it did, today each of the Commonwealth races has the technology to deal with any reasonable number of cometary bodies—which, after all, would take decades or even centuries to fall into the inner part of a system. It is not an immediate concern.”

“But why, then?” asked Thor. “Why are stars being moved around? And should we try to stop it?”

“Stop it?” Keith laughed. “How?”

“By destroying the shortcuts,” said Thor, simply.

Keith blinked. “I’m not sure they can be destroyed,” he said. “Jag?”

The Waldahud’s fur danced pensively for a moment, and when he spoke, his bark was subdued. “Yes, theoretically, there is a way.” He looked up, but neither of his eye pairs met Keith’s gaze. “When first contact with humans was not going well, our astrophysicists were charged with finding a way to close the Tau Ceti shortcut, if need be.”

“That’s outrageous!” said Lianne.

Jag looked at the human. “No, that is good government. One must prepare for contingencies.”

“But to destroy our shortcut!” said Lianne, anger bringing unfamiliar lines to her face.

“We did not do it,” said Jag.

“To contemplate it, though! If you didn’t want us to have access to Rehbollo, you should have destroyed your own shortcut, not ours.”

Keith turned around to look at the young woman. “Lianne,” he said softly. She faced him, and he mouthed the words “cool it” at her. He turned back to Jag. “Did you find a way to do it? To destroy a shortcut?”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders in assent. “Gaf Kandaro em-Weel, my sire, was head of the project. The shortcuts are hyperspatial constructs that extrude a nexus point into normal space. An absolute coordinate system exists in hyperspace. That’s why Einsteinian speed restrictions don’t apply there; it is not a relativistic medium. But normal space is relativistic, and the exit—the thing we call the shortcut portal—has to be anchored relative to something in normal space. If one could disorient the anchor point, so that it no longer could extrude through from hyperspace, the point should evaporate in a puff of Cerenkov radiation.”

“And how would you disorient the anchor?” Keith asked, his tone betraying his skepticism.

“Well, the key is that the shortcut is indeed a point, until it swells up to accommodate something passing through it. A spherical array of artificial-gravity generators assembled around the dormant shortcut could be designed to compensate for the local curvature of spacetime. Even though most shortcuts are in interstellar space, they are still within the dent made by our galaxy. But if you remove that dent, the anchor would have nothing to hold on to, and—poof!—it should disappear. Since the shortcut is so small when dormant, an array only a meter or two across should be able to do the trick, so long as it is fed enough power.”

“Could Starplex provide the power required?” asked Rhombus.

“Easily.”

“That’s incredible,” Keith said.

“It isn’t, really,” said Jag. “Gravity is the force that dents spacetime; artificial gravity is all about modifying those dents. In my home system, we have used gravitation buoys in emergency situations to flatten spacetime locally so that hyperdrives could be engaged while still close to our sun.”

“How come none of this has ever appeared on the Commonwealth Astrophysics Network?” asked Lianne, her tone sharp.

“Um, because no one ever asked us?” said Jag weakly.

“Why didn’t you suggest we do that, then, to enable us to go to hyperdrive when the green star first appeared?” demanded Keith.

“You can’t do it to yourself; it has to be done to you, by an external power source. Believe me, we’ve tried to develop ways for ships to do it on their own, but it doesn’t work. To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can’t be done.”

“But if we were to do this right here and now—cause this shortcut to evaporate—we wouldn’t be able to get back home,” Keith said.

“True,” said Jag. “But we could set up the antigrav buoys to converge on the shortcut after we had gone through it.”

“But stars are apparently popping out of lots of shortcuts,” said Rissa. “If we were to evaporate the Tau Ceti and Rehbollo and Flatland shortcuts, we’d be destroying the Commonwealth, cutting each of our worlds off from the other.”

“To protect the individual worlds of the Commonwealth, yes,” said Thor.

“Christ,” said Keith. “Surely we don’t want to end the Commonwealth.”

“There is one other possibility,” said Thor.

“Oh?”

“Transplant the Commonwealth races to adjacent star systems far distant from any shortcut. We could find three or four systems close together, with the right sorts of worlds, terraform them into habitable conditions, and move everyone there. We would still be able to have an interstellar community via normal-hyperdrive.”

Keith’s eyes were wide. “You’re talking about moving—what?—thirty billion individuals?”

“Give or take,” said Thor.

“The Ibs will not leave Flatland,” said Rhombus, with uncharacteristic bluntness.

“This is crazy,” Keith said. “We can’t shut down the shortcuts.”

“If our homeworlds are in jeopardy,” said Thor, “we can—and we should.”

“There’s no proof that the arriving stars represent any threat,” Keith said. “I can’t believe that beings advanced enough to move stars around are malevolent.”

“They may not be,” said Thor, “any more than construction workers who destroy anthills are malevolent. We might simply be in their way.”

There was nothing Keith could do about the arriving stars until more information was available, and so, at 1200 hours, he and Rissa went off to find something to eat.

There were eight restaurants aboard Starplex. The terminology was deliberate. Humans kept wanting to refer to Starplex’s components in naval terms: mess halls, sickbays, and quarters, instead of restaurants, hospitals, and apartments. But of the four Commonwealth species, only humans and Waldahudin had martial traditions, and the other two races were nervous enough about that without being reminded of it in casual conversation.

Each of the restaurants was unique, both in ambience and fare. Starplex’s designers had taken great pains to make sure that shipboard life was not monotonous. Keith and Rissa decided to have lunch in Keg Tahn, the Waldahud restaurant on deck twenty-six. Through the restaurant’s fake windows, holograms of Rehbollo’s surface were visible: wide, flat flood plains of purple-gray mud, crisscrossed by rivers and streams. Clumps of stargin were scattered about—Rehbollo’s counterpart of trees, looking like three- or four-meter-tall blue tumbleweeds. The moist mud didn’t offer any firm purchase, but it was rich with dissolved minerals and decaying organic material. Each starg had thousands of tangled shoots that could serve either as roots, or, unfurling themselves, as photosynthesis organs, depending on whether they ended up on top or on the bottom. The giant plants blew across the plains, rotating end over end, or floated down the streams, until they found fertile mud. When they did so, they settled in, sinking until about a third of their height was embedded in the ooze.

The holographic sky was greenish gray, and the star overhead was fat and red. Keith found the color scheme dreary, but there was no denying that the food here was excellent. Waldahudin were mainly vegetarians, and the plants they enjoyed were succulent and delicious. Keith found himself craving starg shoots three or four times a month.

Of course, all eight restaurants were open to every species, and that meant offering a range of meal items that met the various races’ metabolic requirements. Keith ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a couple of pickled gherkins to go with his starg salad. Waldahudin, whose females, like terrestrial mammals, secreted a nutritive liquid for their offspring, found it disgusting that humans drank the milk of other animals, but they pretended not to know what cheese was made of.

Rissa was sitting opposite Keith. Actually, the table was shaped in the Waldahud standard, like a human kidney, and made of a polished plant material that wasn’t wood, but did have lovely bands of light and dark in it. Rissa was in the indentation in the table. The Waldahud custom was that a female always sat in this honored position; on their home-world a dame would be positioned here, with her male entourage seated around the curving form.

Rissa’s tastes were more adventurous than Keith’s. She was eating gaz torad—“blood mussels,” Waldahud bivalves that lived in the slurry layer at the bottom of many lakes. Keith found the bright purple-red color disgusting as did most Waldahudin, for that matter, since it was a precise match for the hue of their own blood. But Rissa had mastered the trick of bringing the shell to her mouth, popping it open, and slurping out the morsel within, all without letting the soft mass be seen either by herself or anyone sitting across from her.

Keith and Rissa ate in silence, and Keith wondered if that was good or bad. They’d run out of idle chitchat ages ago. Oh, if there was something on either of their minds, they’d talk at length, but it seemed that they just enjoyed being in each other’s company, even if they said barely a word. At least that’s the way Keith felt, and he hoped Rissa shared that feeling.

Keith was using a katook (Waldahud cutlery, like duck-billed pliers) to bring some starg to his mouth when a comm panel popped up from the table’s surface, showing the face of Hek, the Waldahud alien-communications specialist.

“Rissa,” he barked in a voice somewhat more Brooklynish than Jag’s; from the way the comm panel was angled, the Waldahud couldn’t see Keith. “I have been analyzing the radio noise we’ve been detecting near the twenty-one-centimeter band. You won’t believe what I’ve found. Come to my office at once.”

Keith put down his eating utensil, and looked across the table at his wife. “I’ll join you,” he said, and stood up to leave. As they made their way across the room, he realized it was the only thing he’d said to her during the entire meal.

Keith and Rissa got into an elevator. As always, a monitor on the cab’s wall showed the current deck number and floor plan: “26,” and a cross shape with long arms. As they rode up, and the deck numbers counted down, the arms of the cross grew shorter and shorter. By the time they reached deck one, the arms had almost completely retracted. The two humans got out and entered the radio-astronomy listening room. Hek, a small Waldahud with a hide much redder in color than Jag’s, was leaning against a desk. “Rissa, your presence is welcome”—the standard deference shown females. A tilt of the head: “Lansing.” The rude indifference reserved for males, even if they were your boss.

“Hek,” said Keith, nodding in greeting.

The Waldahud looked at Rissa. “You know the radio noise we’ve been picking up?” His barking echoed in the tiny room.

Rissa nodded.

“Well, my initial analysis showed no repetition in it.” He swiveled a pair of eyes to look at Keith. “When a signal is a deliberate beacon, it usually has a repeating pattern over a course of several minutes or hours. There’s nothing like that at work here. Indeed, I’ve found no evidence of any overall pattern. But when I started analyzing the noise more minutely, patterns of one-second duration or less kept cropping up. So far, I’ve cataloged six thousand and seventeen sequences. Some have only been repeated once or twice, but others have been repeated many times. Over ten thousand times, for a few of them.”

“My God,” said Rissa.

“What?” said Keith.

She turned to him. “It means that there might be information in the noise—it might be radio communications.”

Hek lifted his upper shoulders. “Exactly. Each of the patterns could be a separate word. Those that occur most frequently could be common terms, maybe the equivalent of pronouns or prepositions.”

“And where are these transmissions coming from?” asked Keith.

“Somewhere in or just behind the dark-matter field,” said Hek.

“And you’re sure they’re intelligent signals?” asked Keith, his heart pounding.

Hek’s lower shoulders moved this time. “No, I’m not sure. For one thing, the transmissions are very weak. They wouldn’t be discernible from background noise over any great distance. But if I’m right that they’re words, then there does appear to be some discernible syntax. No word is ever doubled. Certain words only appear at the beginning or end of transmissions. Some words only appear after certain other words. The former are possibly adjectives and adverbs, and the latter the nouns or verbs they are modifying, or vice versa.” Hek paused. “Of course, I haven’t analyzed all the signals, although I am recording them for future study. It’s a constant bombardment, on over two hundred frequencies that are very close to each other.” He paused, letting this sink in. “I’d say there’s a good possibility that there’s a fleet of craft hiding inside or just past the dark-matter field.”

Keith was about to speak again when Hek’s desk intercom bleeped. “Keith, Lianne here.”

“Open. Yes?”

“I think you’ll want to come to the bridge. A watson has arrived with word that the boomerang has returned from shortcut Rehbollo 376A.”

“On my way. Summon Jag, too, please. Close.” He looked at Hek. “Good work. See if you can narrow down the source of the signals further. I’ll have Thor take Starplex in a circular path around the dark-matter field, scanning for tachyon emissions, radiation, thruster glow, or any other signs of alien ships.”

Keith strode onto the bridge, Rissa right behind him. They moved to their workstations. “Trigger watson playback,” said Keith.

Lianne pushed a button, and a full-motion video message appeared in a framed-off section of the holographic bubble. The image was of a Waldahud male with a silvery-gray hide. PHANTOM replaced the sound of the creature’s barking with English words for the playback into Keith’s ear implant, although, of course, they didn’t fit the movements of the Waldahud’s mouth. “Greetings, Starplex.” The status line at the bottom of the screen identified the speaker as Kayd Pelendo em-Hooth of the Rehbollo Center for Astrophysics. “The boomerang sent to the shortcut designated Rehbollo 376A has returned. I suspect you’ll want to stay where you are, investigating the shortcut you’re at now, since its appearance on the network is unexplained. However, we thought Jag and others would be interested in seeing the recordings made by the boomerang just before returning home. They are appended to this message. I think you will find them… interesting.”

“Okay, Rhombus,” said Keith. “Use the data from the boomerang to create a spherical holo display around us. Show us what it saw.”

“A pleasure to serve,” said Rhombus. “Downloading now; the display will be ready in two minutes, forty seconds.”

Lianne rubbed her hands together. “It never rains but it pours,” she said, turning around and grinning at Keith. “Yet another new sector of space opened up for exploration!”

Keith nodded. “It never ceases to amaze me.” He got up from his chair, and paced a little, waiting for the hologram to be prepared. “You know,” he said absently, “my great-great-grandfather kept a diary. Just before he died, he wrote about all the great advancements he’d seen in his lifetime: radio, the automobile, powered flight, spaceflight, lasers, computers, the discovery of DNA, and on and on.” Lianne seemed rapt, although Keith was aware that he might be boring everyone else. To hell with them; rank had its privileges, chief among them the right to ramble on. “When I read that as a teenager, I figured I’d have nothing to write about for my own descendant when my life came to a close. But then we invented hyperdrive and AI, and discovered the shortcut network, and extraterrestrial life, and learned to talk to dolphins, and I realized that—”

“Excuse me,” said Rhombus, his lights flashing in the strobing pattern high species used to signal an interruption, “the hologram is ready.”

“Proceed,” Keith said.

The bridge darkened as the image of Starplex’s current surroundings was shut off, shrouding the room in featureless black. Then a new picture built up from left to right, scan line by scan line, washing over the bridge, until it seemed once again to be floating in space—the space of the newest sector to become accessible to the Commonwealth races.

Thor let out a long, low whistle.

Jag clicked his dental plates in disbelief.

Dominating the view, receding slowly, was another fiery green star, perhaps ten million kilometers from the shortcut point.

“I thought you said our green star was a freak,” said Keith to Jag.

“That’s the least of our worries,” said Thor. He swung his feet off his console and turned to face Keith. “Our boomerang didn’t activate that shortcut until it dived into it.”

Keith looked at him blankly.

“And these pictures were taken before it did that.”

Jag rose to his feet. “Ka-dargt. That means—”

“It means,” said Keith, suddenly getting it, too, “that stars can emerge from dormant shortcuts. Christ, they could be popping out of all four billion portals throughout the Milky Way!”