Starplex

Chapter XII

Rissa came to the bridge, wanting to talk to Keith about Boxcar’s announcement. But just as she was striding toward his workstation, Rhombus spoke up. “Keith, Jag, Rissa,” he said, in his crisp, cool translated voice, “innumerable apologies for the interruption, but I think you should see this.”

“What is it?” said Keith.

Rissa took a seat as Rhombus’s ropes tickled his console. A section of the holo bubble became framed off in blue. “I wasn’t paying enough attention to the real-time scans, I’m afraid,” said the Ib, “but I’ve been reviewing the data we’ve been recording, and—well, watch this. This is a playback speeded up one thousand times. What you’re going to see in the next six minutes took almost all of the time we’ve been here to occur.”

In the framed-off area was a dark-matter sphere, seen from almost directly above its equator. Actually, it wasn’t anywhere near a perfect sphere: this one was flattened at the poles. Light and dark latitudinal cloud bands crossed its face. According to the scale bars, this was one of the largest spheres they’d found, measuring 172,000 kilometers in diameter.

“Wait a minute,” said Keith. “It’s got cloud bands, yet it doesn’t seem to be spinning at all.”

Rhombus’s web twinkled. “I hope the truth does not prove embarrassing, good Keith, but in fact, it’s spinning faster than any other sphere we’ve yet observed. At this point, it’s rotating on its axis once every two hours and sixteen minutes—almost five times as fast as Jupiter revolves. The speed is so great that any normal turbulence in the clouds has been smoothed out. And in this speeded-up playback, the image you’re seeing is rotating every eight seconds.” Rhombus snaked out a rope and flicked a control. “Here, let me have the computer put a reference mark on the equator. See that orange dot? It’s at an arbitrary zero degrees of longitude.”

The orange spot whipped across the equator, disappeared around back, reappeared four seconds later, and traversed the visible face again. After a few cycles, Jag barked out, “Are you increasing the playback speed?”

“No, good Jag,” said Rhombus. “Speed is constant.”

Jag gestured at the digital clocks. “But that dot of yours took only seven seconds to go around that time.”

“Indeed,” said Rhombus. “The sphere’s actual rate of rotation is increasing.”

“How can that be?” asked Keith. “Are other bodies interacting with it?”

“Well, yes, the other spheres are all having an effect on it—but that’s not the cause of what we’re seeing,” said Rhombus. “The increased rotation is internally generated.”

Jag’s head was bent down to his console, running quickie computer models. “You can’t get increased spin unless you pump energy into the system. There must be some complex reactions going on inside the sphere, ultimately fueled by some outside source, and—” He looked up, and let out a high-pitched bark, which PHANTOM translated as “Expression of astonishment.”

In the blue framed-off area, the dark-matter object had started to pinch in at its equator. The northern and southern halves were no longer perfect hemispheres, but rather they curved in a little before they joined each other. The orange reference dot was now whipping around the smaller waist even faster than before.

As the sphere continued to rotate with increasing speed, the pinching-off became more and more pronounced. Soon the profile of the object had taken on a figure-eight shape.

Rissa rose to her feet, and stood staring, mouth agape. The equator was now so narrow that the orange dot covered almost a quarter of its width. Rhombus touched some keys and the dot disappeared, replaced by separate orange dots on the equators of each of the two joined spheres.

The view in the frame went dark. “Please forgive this,” said Rhombus. “Another dark-matter sphere moved into our line of sight, obscuring the view. At this playback speed, we lose the picture for about fourteen seconds. Let me jump past that.”

Ropes touched the ExOps console. When the image reappeared, the two spheres were joined by only about a tenth of the original globe’s diameter. Everyone watched, rapt, silence broken only by the gentle whir of the air-conditioning equipment, as the process reached its inevitable conclusion. The two spheres broke free from each other. One immediately started curving toward the bottom of the frame; the other, toward the top. As they distanced themselves from each other, the orange reference dots on each of their equators began to take longer and longer to complete their paths—the rotation was slowing down.

Rissa turned to face Keith, her eyes wide. “It’s like a cell,” she, said. “A cell undergoing mitosis.”

“Exactly,” said Rhombus. “Except that in this case, the mother cell is some hundred and seventy thousand kilometers in diameter. Or, at least it was before this started happening.”

Keith cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me that those things out there are alive? That they’re living cells?”

“I finally saw the recordings Jag’s atmospheric probe had made,” said Rissa. “Remember that blimplike object it saw as it went into the atmosphere? I’d idly thought that it might be an individual life-form—a gasbag creature, floating in the clouds. Earth scientists in the 1960s proposed just such life-forms for Jupiter. But such blimps could just as easily be organelles—discrete components within a larger cell.”

“Living beings,” said Keith, incredulous. “Living beings almost two hundred thousand kilometers in size?”

Rissa’s voice was still full of awe. “Perhaps. In which case, we’ve just seen one of them reproduce.”

“Incredible,” said Keith, shaking his head. “I mean, we aren’t just talking about giant creatures. And we aren’t just talking about life-forms living freely in open space. We’re talking about living beings made of dark matter.” He turned to his left. “Jag, is that even possible?”

“Possible that dark matter—or some portion of it—is alive?” The Waldahud shrugged all four shoulders. “Much of our science and philosophy tell us that the universe should be teeming with life. And yet, so far, we’ve only found three worlds on which life has arisen. Perhaps we’ve just been looking in the wrong places. Neither Dr. Delacorte nor I has yet figured out much about dark-matter meta-chemistry, but there are lots of complex compounds in those spheres.”

Keith spread his arms in an appeal for basic common sense, and looked around the bridge, trying to find someone else as lost by all this as he was.

And then an even bigger thought hit him, and he leaned back in his chair for a moment. Then he touched his comm control panel, selecting a general channel. “Lansing to Hek,” he said.

A hologram of Hek’s head appeared in a second framed-off part of the starscape. “Hek here.”

“Any luck pinpointing the sources of those radio transmissions?”

Keith imagined the Waldahud’s lower shoulders moving outside the camera’s field of view. “Not yet.”

“You said there were over two hundred separate frequencies upon which you were finding apparently intelligent signals.”

“That’s right.”

“How many? Exactly how many?”

Hek’s face turned to a profile view, showing his projecting snout, as he consulted a monitor. “Two hundred and seventeen,” he said. “Although some are much more active than others.”

Keith heard Jag, on his left, repeat the same bark of astonishment he’d made earlier.

“There are,” said Keith slowly, “precisely two hundred and seventeen separate Jupiter-sized objects out there.” He paused, backtracking away from his own conclusion. “Of course, gas-giant worlds like Jupiter are often sources of radio emissions.”

“But these are spheres of dark matter,” said Lianne. “They’re electrically neutral.”

“They are not pure dark matter,” said Jag. “They’re permeated with bits of regular matter. The dark matter could interact with protons in the regular matter through the strong nuclear force, thereby generating EM signals.”

Hek lifted his upper shoulders. “That might work,” he said. “But each sphere is broadcasting on its own separate frequency, almost like…” The Brooklyn-accented voice trailed off.

Keith looked at Rissa, and could see that she was thinking the same thing. He lifted his eyebrows. “Almost like separate voices,” he said at last, finishing the thought.

“But there aren’t two hundred and seventeen objects anymore,” said Thor, turning around. “There are two hundred and eighteen now.”

Keith nodded. “Hek, do another inventory of signals. See if there’s new activity at a frequency just above or just below the block of frequencies you’ve identified as being active.”

Hek tilted his head as he worked his controls up on deck one. “Just a second,” he said. “Just a second.” Then: “Gods of the mud and the moons, yes! Yes, there is!”

Keith turned to Rissa, grinning. “I wonder what baby’s first words were?”