Starplex

Chapter XV

Keith rarely entered any of the ship’s Ibese areas. Gravity was kept at 1.41 times Earth normal there (and 1.72 times ship’s standard); Keith felt as though he weighed 115 kilograms, instead of his usual 82. He could stand it for short periods of time, but it wasn’t pleasant.

The corridors here were much wider than elsewhere aboard Starplex, and the interdeck areas were thicker, making for lower ceilings. Keith didn’t have to stoop, but he found himself doing so anyway. The air was warm and dry.

Keith came to the room he was looking for, its door marked with a matrix of yellow lights forming a rectangular shape with a small circle just below the rectangle’s base at each end. Keith had never seen a train with wheels, except in a museum, but the pictogram did indeed look like a boxcar.

Keith spoke into the air. “Let her know I’m here, please, PHANTOM.”

PHANTOM chirped acknowledgment, and a moment later, presumably having received Boxcar’s permission, the door slid aside.

Ib living quarters were unusual by human standards. At first, they seemed luxuriously big—the room Keith had entered measured eight by ten meters. But then one realized that they were actually the same size as every other apartment aboard ship, but weren’t divided into separate sleeping, living, and bathing areas. There were no chairs or couches, of course. Nor was there any carpeting; the floor was covered with a hard rubber material. On their home-world, in preindustrial times, Ibs built mounds of earth just wide enough so that they would fit between their wheels—so that the frame and the other components could be supported when the wheels temporarily separated from the body. Boxcar had the manufactured equivalent of such a mound in one corner of her room, but that was its only furnishing.

Keith found the art on the walls strange and disconcerting: peanut-shaped images consisting of multiple, often distorted, views of the same object from different angles superimposed one atop the other. He couldn’t make out what the ones on the far wall showed, but he was startled to realize that the series of them nearest to him were studies of severely premature human and Waldahud babies, with stubby limbs, and strange, translucent heads. Boxcar was a biologist, after all, and alien life was probably fascinating to her, but the choice of subject matter was unsettling to say the least.

Boxcar rolled toward Keith from the far side of the room. It was nerve-racking to have an Ib approach from a good distance. They liked to accelerate to high speed and then stop with a jerk only a meter or two away. Keith had never heard of a human getting steamrollered by one, but he was always afraid he’d be the first.

The Ib’s lights flashed. “Dr. Lansing,” she said. “An unexpected pleasure. Please, please—I have no seat to offer you, but I know the gravity is too high. Feel free to rest on my comfort mound.” A rope flicked in the direction of the wedge-shaped construct at the side of the room.

Keith’s first thought was to reject the offer, but, dammit, it was unpleasant standing under this gravity. He walked over to the mound and rested his rear on it. “Thank you,” he said. He didn’t know how to begin, but he knew he would offend the Ib if he wasted time coming to the point. “Rissa asked me to come to see you. She says you are going to discorporate soon.”

“Dear, sweet Rissa,” said Boxcar. “Her concern is touching.”

Keith looked around the room, thinking. “I want you to know,” he said at last, “that you don’t have to go through with the discorporation—at least so long as you are aboard Starplex. All staff aboard this ship are considered de facto embassy personnel; I can try to arrange immunity for you.”

He looked at the being; he wished it had a face—wished it had normal eyes, eyes that he could try to read. “Your service has been exemplary; there’s no reason why you couldn’t continue to serve aboard Starplex for the rest of your natural life.”

“You are kind, Dr. Lansing. Very kind. But I must be true to myself. Understand that though I have not mentioned my impending discorporation to anyone, I have been preparing mentally and physically for it for centuries now. I have timed the events of my life to conclude now; I wouldn’t know what to do with the extra fifty years.”

“You could continue your research. Who knows? With another half century of work on the senescence problem, you might lick it. You might never have to die.”

“An eternity of shame, Dr. Lansing? An eternity of guilt? No, thank you. I am unalterably committed to my stated course of action.”

Keith was quiet for a moment, thinking. Arguments and counterarguments ran through his head; new tacks, new approaches. But he dismissed them all. It wasn’t his business, wasn’t his place. Finally, he nodded. “Is there anything I can do to make it easier for you? Any special facilities or equipment you need?”

“There is a ceremony. Normally, most Ibs would not attend; to do so would be to have the guilty party end up wasting even more of their time. I imagine that only my closest Ib friends will come. So, on that basis, I have no need for a large venue. But, since you have offered, I would request, if possible, that I be allowed to use one of the docking bays for the ceremony—and that once the ceremony is completed, my component parts be ejected into space.”

“If that is what you’d like, then of course you have my permission.”

“Thank you, Dr. Lansing. Thank you very much.”

Keith nodded, and headed for the door. He made his way down the warm corridor, back into the CAGE conditions of the central shaft. Normally, when he exited an Ibese area into the lower gravity of the rest of the ship, he felt buoyant, light as a feather.

But not this time.

“Tachyon pulse!” announced Rhombus from the ExOps station. “Something coming through the shortcut. Small object, only about a meter in diameter.”

Most likely a watson, Keith thought. “Let’s have a look at it, Rhombus.” Part of the spherical hologram was set off by a blue border, and inside the border was a telescopic view of the object that had popped out of the shortcut.

“Welcome home!” said Thor Magnor, grinning broadly.

“Somebody better get Hek and Shanu Azmi down here,” said Keith.

“Will do,” said Lianne, then a moment later, “They’re on their way.”

The port starfield split and the Waldahud alien-communications specialist waddled onto the bridge. Almost simultaneously, the door behind the seating gallery opened up, and Shahinshah Azmi came in. He was wearing tennis shorts and holding a racket. Keith gestured at the magnified image. “Look what’s come back,” he said.

All four of Hek’s eyes went wide. “That’s… that’s wonderful!”

“Rhombus,” Keith said, “scan it for anything untoward. If it’s clean, use a tractor beam to haul it into docking bay six.”

“Scanning… no obvious problems. Locking on tractor beam.”

“Keep it isolated inside a forcefield once you get it aboard.”

“Will do, with respect.”

“I wish it had arrived last week,” said Azmi.

“Why?” Rissa asked.

“It would have saved us all the work of building it.”

Rissa laughed.

“Shanu, Hek, shall we repair to bay six?” Keith said.

“I’d like to have a look, too,” said Rissa.

Keith smiled. “By all means.”

The four made their way to the docking bay. There, they stood behind a forcefield curtain, Hek about two meters to Keith’s right, Azmi just behind him, and Rissa so close to her husband’s left side that their elbows lightly touched. The cube was maneuvered into the bay by a series of invisible beams. Once it was set down, a force bubble was erected around it, and the space door slid down from the ceiling. They waited until the bay was pressurized, then went out to look at the cube.

It had weathered the eons well. Its surface looked like it had been scoured with steel wool, but all the incised markings showing the sample questions on top were quite legible. It turned out that Rhombus had maneuvered the cube in so that the face with the answer was the one the cube was sitting on.

“PHANTOM,” Keith said, “flip the cube a quarter turn so that the bottom face is visible.”

Tractor beams manipulated the time capsule. In the space that had been left for the answer, black symbols stood out against a white background that had somehow been fused to the cube’s surface.

“Gods,” said Hek.

Rissa’s jaw dropped.

Keith stood immobile.

At the top of the answer space was a string of Arabic numerals:

And beneath it, in English, was:

Underneath all that, in somewhat smaller type, it said:

“I don’t believe this,” Keith said.

“Hey, look at this,” barked Hek, leaning closer. “That isn’t how one makes that character, is it?”

Keith peered at it. The serif on each lowercase u was on the left side of the letter instead of the right. “And the apostrophe in ‘don’t’ is backward, too,” said Keith.

“And what’s that series of numbers at the top?” asked Pdssa.

“It looks like a citizenship number,” Keith said.

“No—a mathematical expression,” said Hek. “It is—it is—Central Computer?”

“Negative one thousand three hundred and fourteen,” said PHANTOM’s voice.

“No, it’s not that,” said Rissa, shaking her head slowly. “When humans write a letter, that’s where they put the date.”

“So what’s the format?” asked Hek. “Hour, then day, then month, then year? That doesn’t work. How about the other way around? The tenth year, the six hundred and forty-sixth day. That makes no sense either, since they’re only four hundred or so days in a Terran year.”

“No,” said Rissa. “No, it’s not that. It’s the year—the whole thing is the year. Ten billion, six hundred and forty-six million, three hundred and ninety-seven thousand, two hundred and eighty-one.”

“The year?” said Hek.

“The year,” said Rissa. “The Earth year. Anno Domini—after the birth of Christ, a prophet.”

“But I’ve seen lots of human numbering before,” said Hek. “Yes, you separate big numbers into thousands groups—my people do it into ten thousands. But I thought you used—what do you call them?—those subscripted curlicues?”

“Commas,” said Rissa. “We do use commas, or spaces.” She seemed to be having trouble keeping her balance; she moved over to the docking-bay wall and leaned against it. “But… but imagine a time so far in the future that English isn’t used anymore… a time in which it’s been millions or billions of years since—” she pointed at Keith “—since anyone has used English. They might indeed misremember the convention for writing big numbers, or how to make an apostrophe, or where the little extra doodad on a u went.”

“It’s got to be a fake,” Keith said, shaking his head.

“If it is, it’s a perfect one,” said Azmi, waving a hand scanner. “We built some very long half-life radioactives into the cube’s construction. The cube is now ten billion Earth years old plus or minus nine hundred million. The only way to fake that kind of dating would be to manufacture a counterfeit cube using the correct ratio of isotopes to give that apparent age. But even to the smallest detail this one matches our original—except for the radioactive decay and the surface scouring.”

“But to have it signed with my name,” said Keith. “Surely that’s a mistake?”

“Perhaps somehow your name has come to be associated with Starplex,” said Hek. “You are its first director, after all, and, frankly, we Waldahudin always thought you took too much of the credit. Maybe that was not a signature. Maybe it was the address, or the salutation, or—”

“No,” said Rissa, eyes growing wide. Her voice was shaking with excitement. “No—it’s from you.”

“But… but that’s crazy,” Keith said. “There’s no way I’m going to be alive ten billion years from now.”

“Unless it’s a relativistic effect,” said Hek, “or perhaps suspended animation.”

“Or…” said Rissa, her voice still shaking.

Keith looked at her. “Yes?”

She started jogging out of the bay.

“Where are you going?” barked Hek.

“To find Boxcar,” she shouted. “I want to tell her that our life-prolongation experiments are going to succeed beyond our wildest dreams.”