Starplex

Chapter XIX

“Lianne, damage report!” snapped Keith.

“I’m still tabulating everything from the battle, but there were no new problems caused by the high-speed shortcut passage.”

“What about casualties?”

Lianne tilted her head, listening to reports over her audio implant. “No deaths. Lots of bone fractures, though. Couple of concussions. Nothing too serious. And Jessica Fong got out of docking bay sixteen all right, although she has a broken hip and arm, and a lot of bruising.”

Keith nodded and breathed a sigh of relief. He looked around the holo bubble, trying to make out detail in the faint smudges of white against black infinity. “God,” he said under his breath.

“All the gods,” replied Jag, softly, “are a very, very long way from here.”

Thor turned around and looked at Jag. “It is intergalactic space, isn’t it.”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders in agreement.

“But—but I’ve never heard of any shortcut exit this far out,” said Lianne.

“Shortcuts have only existed for a finite time,” said Jag. “Even hyperspace signals from one in intergalactic space might not have reached any of the Commonwealth worlds yet.”

“But how can there be a shortcut in intergalactic space?” asked Thor. “What’s it anchored to?”

“That’s a very good question,” said Jag, bending his head down to look at his instruments. “Ah—there it is. Check your hyperspace scanner, Magnor. There’s a large black hole about six light-hours from here.”

Thor let out a low whistle. “Adjusting course. Let’s give it a wide berth.”

“Are we in any danger from it?” asked Keith.

“Not much, boss—unless I fall asleep at the wheel.”

Jag touched some controls, and a framed-off area appeared in the holo bubble. But the space inside the frame was just as empty and black as the space outside it.

“Normally you can see the accretion disk around a black hole,” said Jag, “but there’s nothing out here to be pulled into it.” He paused. “My guess is that it’s an ancient black hole—it would have needed billions of years to get out here. I suspect it’s the remains of a binary star system. When the larger component went supernova, it could have caused an asymmetric kick which propelled the resulting black hole out of its home galaxy.”

“But what would have activated this shortcut?” asked Lianne.

Jag lifted all four shoulders. “The hole would pull in any matter that wanders by. Something that was being sucked in by it probably fell through the shortcut instead.” Jag tried to sound jaunty, but it was clear even he was staggered by it all. “We’re actually pretty lucky—shortcuts in intergalactic space are probably as rare as mud without footprints.”

Keith turned to Thor. He made an effort to keep his voice calm, controlled. He was the director; no matter how much Starplex usually behaved like a research lab rather than a sailing vessel, he knew all eyes would be on him, looking for strength. “How soon can we go back through the shortcut” he asked. “How soon can we go get the Rumrunner?”

“We’ve still got major electrical problems,” said Lianne. “I wouldn’t want to move the ship until those are stabilized—and I’ll need at least three hours for that.”

“Three hours!” said Keith. “But—”

“I try to cut it down,” said Lianne.

“What about sending a probeship through to help Rissa and Longbottle?” asked Keith.

The room was silent for a moment. Rhombus rolled over to the command workstation, and touched Keith’s forearm lightly with one of his manipulator ropes. “My friend,” he said, PHANTOM translating the low intensity of his lights as whispering, “you can’t do that. You can’t put another ship in danger.”

I’m the director, thought Keith. I can do what I damn well please. He shook his head, trying to get control. If anything had happened to Rissa…

“You’re right,” he said at last. “Thanks.” He turned to Jag, and felt his heart rate increasing. “I should put you back under house arrest, you…”

“ ‘Pig,’ ” said Jag, his underlying bark an excellent mimicking of the English word. “Go ahead and say it.”

“My wife is out there somewhere—possibly dying. Longbottle, too. What the hell were you trying to accomplish?”

“I admit nothing.”

“The damage to this ship will cost billions to repair. The Commonwealth will bring charges against you, you can be sure of that—”

“You will never be able to prove that my request to move Starplex had anything to do with the subsequent events. You can revile me all you wish, human, but even your unenlightened courts require proof to substantiate a charge. The dark-matter being I wanted to examine did indeed have an unusual hyperspace footprint; any astronomer will verify that. And it was indeed invisible from Starplex’s vantage point before the move—”

“You said that darmat was about to reproduce. It hasn’t done a thing.”

“You are spoiled by being a sociologist, Lansing. In the hard sciences, we occasionally have to face the reality that some of our theories will actually be disproven.”

“It was a ruse—”

“It was an experiment. Suggesting anything else is conjecture; persist publicly in it, and I shall bring defamation charges against you.”

“You bastard. If Rissa dies—”

“If Dr. Cervantes dies, I will mourn. I wish her no ill. But for all we know, she and Longbottle have maneuvered through the shortcut to safety. It is my compatriots who have died today, not yours.”

Lianne spoke softly from her console. “He’s right, Keith. We’ve lost equipment, and we’ve got several people who are injured. But no one from Starplex is dead.”

“Except possibly Rissa and Longbottle,” snapped Keith. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “It’s all about money, isn’t it, Jag? Of all the Commonwealth homeworlds, Rehbollo’s economy took the biggest hit when interstellar commerce opened up. You guys never build two things the same—”

“To do so is an affront to the God of Artisans—”

“To do so is efficient, and your factories and workers were not. So you tried to goose the government coffers. Even disassembled for parts, Starplex would be worth trillions—lots of glory in that. And if war erupted over its seizure, well, nothing like a little war to give the economy a boost, eh?”

“No sane being wants war,” said Jag.

“PHANTOM,” snapped Keith, “Jag is again under house arrest.”

“Acknowledged.”

“It may please the punitive in you to do that,” barked Jag. “But this is still a science vessel, and we are the first Commonwealth beings ever to be in intergalactic space. We should determine our exact location—and I am the most qualified person to undertake that task. Rescind the arrest order, shut up and leave me alone, and I shall try to figure out where we are.”

“Boss,” said Thor gently, “he’s right, you know. Let him help.”

Keith fumed for a few moments longer, then nodded curtly. But when he did nothing further, Thor spoke into the air. “PHANTOM,” he said. “Cancel house arrest on Jag.”

“Cancellation requires authorization from Director Lansing.”

Keith exhaled noisily. “Do it—but, PHANTOM, monitor every command he issues. If any of them seem unrelated to determining our location, notify me at once.”

“Acknowledged. House arrest ended.”

Keith looked at Thor. “What’s our current heading?”

Thor consulted his instruments. “We’re still on a modified version of the parabolic course we used to slingshot around the green star. Obviously, the path changed when we ceased to be under that star’s gravitational influence, so—”

“Magnor,” said Jag, interrupting. “I need you to rotate the ship in a Gaf Wayfarer pattern; we are missing one hyperscope array, but I need a parallactic full-sky hyperspace scan.”

Thor tapped some keys. The holographic bubble around the bridge began a complex series of rotations, but because the bubble was empty save for a few indistinct smudges of white, the tilting and turning didn’t cause vertigo. The pilot looked at Keith again. “As for getting home, the shortcut exit behind us shows in hyperspace just like every other one I’ve ever seen, complete with zero meridian. Assuming the damned things still work the same way over millions of light-years, once Lianne gets our full electrical system back on-line, I should be able to put us back at any active shortcut you specify.”

“Good” said Keith. “Lianne, how badly damaged were we in the battle?”

“Decks fifty-four through seventy are flooded,” she said, into a hologram of Keith’s head, “and everything from deck forty-one down has some water damage. Also, all decks below the central disk took a heavy hit of radiation as we careened around the green star; I advise declaring the entire lower half uninhabitable.” She paused. “The Starplex 2 team is going to be pissed off with us—we’ve now fried both sets of lower-habitat modules.”

“What about our shields?”

“Our forcefield emitters were all overloaded, but I’ve already got my engineers working on repairs; we should have minimal screens within an hour. In a way, it’s good we came out in intergalactic space. The chances of running into a micrometeoroid out here are slim.”

“What about the damage done when Gawst carved out our number-two generator?”

“My teams have put temporary bulkheads in place around the hole where it was removed,” said Lianne. “That should hold until we get back to a spacedock.”

“And the other generators?”

“Number three has had all its electrical connections severed. I’ve got a crew working on hooking it back up again, but I don’t know if we’ve got enough wide-gauge fiber-optic cable in stock to do the job; we may have to manufacture some. Anyway, until we get it back on-line, we won’t be able to use the main engines. One of the other Waldahud ships had started carving out the number-one generator, as well. That’s the one that quit, causing the power failure. We should be able to repair that damage, though.”

“And what about the docking bays?”

“Bay sixteen is filled with frozen water,” said Lianne. “Also, three of the five probeships that were involved in the battle are in need of repairs.”

“But we’re still spaceworthy?” asked Keith.

“I want to schedule about three weeks in dock for repairs, but, yes, we’re in no immediate danger.”

Keith nodded. “In that case, Thor, as soon as Lianne says we’re ready for powered flight, I’ll want you to plot a course through the shortcut that will pop us out where we started, back near the green star.”

Thor’s orange eyebrows lifted. “I know you want to rescue the Rumrunner, Keith, but if they survived, Longbottle will have already taken them out of there through the shortcut.”

“Probably so, but that’s not why I want to go back.” He looked over at Rhombus. “You were right a few minutes ago, my rolling friend. I’ve got to keep my priorities straight. Contact with other life is why Starplex was built in the first place. I’m not going to let the Commonwealth become like the Slammers, cutting off all communication because of a misunderstanding. I want to talk to the darmats again.”

“They tried to kill us,” said Thor.

Keith raised a hand. “I’m not feel enough to give them a second chance to toss us into the green star. Can you plot a course that will bring us out of the shortcut, whip us around that star, then bring us back to the shortcut, diving through on a vector that will take us out at the Flatland 368A exit?”

Thor considered for a moment. “I can do that, yes. But F368A? Not New Beijing?”

“For all we know, the attack on Starplex was not an isolated event. New Beijing may be under siege. I want to go to a neutral location.” A pause. “Now, with the course I’ve described, will the darmats be able to grab us again?”

Thor shook his head. “Not at the speed we’ll be going, unless they’re all lying in wait for us just outside the exit.”

“Rhombus,” said Keith, “as soon as Lianne’s got the appropriate systems back on-line, send a probe through to the green-star exit. Include a hyperspace scanner on it so you can locate the darmats by the dents they make in spacetime. Also, have it do a wide-spectrum radio scan, in case Waldahud reinforcements have arrived. And”—Keith tried to keep his voice calm—“have it check for the Rumrunner’s transponder code.”

“It’ll be at least thirty minutes before we can do that,” said Lianne.

Keith pursed his lips, and thought about Rissa. If she were gone, it would take all the billions of years he had left to get over the loss. He looked at the smudges of galactic light against the abyss. He didn’t even know which direction to look in, which way to concentrate his thoughts. He felt incredibly small, insignificant, and lonely beyond belief. There was nothing to focus on in the holo bubble—nothing sharp, nothing well defined. Just an abyss—an ego-crashing emptiness.

Suddenly there was a strange sound like a dog’s cough from his left; PHANTOM translated it as an expression of “absolute astonishment.” Keith turned to face Jag, and his mouth hung open as he stared at the Waldahud. He’d never seen Jag’s fur do that before. “What’s wrong?”

“I—I know where we are,” said Jag.

Keith looked at him. “Yes?”

“You’re aware that the Milky Way and Andromeda have about forty smaller galaxies bound to them gravitationally, right?” said Jag.

“The Local Group,” said Keith, irritated.

“Exactly,” said Jag. “Well, I started off by trying to find some of the Local Group’s distinctive features, such as superbright S Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud. But that didn’t work. So I sorted the catalog of known extragalactic pulsars by distance—which corresponds to age, of course—and used their signature radio pulses to orient myself.”

“Yes, yes,” said Keith. “And?”

“And the closest galaxy to us right now is that one there.” Jag pointed beneath his feet to a fuzzy spot in the hologram. “It’s about five hundred thousand light-years from here. I have identified it as CGC 1008; it has several unique attributes.”

“All right,” said Keith, sharply. “We’re half a million light-years from CGC 1008. Now, for us nonastrophysics types, how far is CGC 1008 from the Milky Way?”

Jag’s barking was subdued, almost soft. “We are,” said the translated voice, “six billion light-years from home.”

“Six… billion?” asked Thor, turning to face Jag.

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “That is correct,” he said, his voice still soft.

“That’s… staggering,” said Keith.

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Six billion light-years. Sixty thousand times the Milky Way’s own diameter. Twenty-seven hundred times the distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda.” He looked at Keith. “In terms you nonastrophysics types might use, one hell of a long way.”

“Can we see the Milky Way from here?” asked Keith.

Jag made a gesture with his arms. “Oh, yes,” he said, his barking still subdued. “Yes, indeed. Central Computer, magnify sector 112.”

A border appeared around a portion of the holographic bubble. Jag left his workstation and walked toward it. He squinted for a moment, getting his bearings. “There,” he said, pointing. “That one there. And that’s Andromeda next to it. And this is M33, the third-largest member of the Local Group.”

Rhombus’s lights twinkled in confusion. “Boundless apologies, but that can’t be right, good Jag. Those aren’t spiral galaxies. They look more like disks.”

“I’m not mistaken,” said Jag. “That is the Milky Way. Since we are now six billion light-years from it, we are seeing it as it looked six billion years ago.”

“Are you sure?” said Keith.

“I am positive. Once the pulsars had told me approximately where to look, it was easy enough to identify which galaxy was the Milky Way, which was Andromeda, and so on. The Magellanic Clouds are too young for any light from them to have reached this far out, but globular clusters contain almost exclusively ancient first-generation stars, and I’ve identified several specific globulars associated with both the Milky Way and Andromeda. I am sure of it—that simple disk of star is our home galaxy.”

“But the Milky Way has spiral arms,” said Lianne.

Jag turned to her. “Yes, without question, the Milky Way today has spiral arms. And, just as surely, I can now say that when it was six billion years younger, it did not have spiral.

“How can that be?” asked Thor.

“That,” said Jag, “is a vexing question. I confess that I would have expected a Milky Way even half its present age to still have arms.”

“Okay,” said Keith. “So the Milky Way gains spiral arms sometime in the interim.”

“No, it is not okay,” said Jag, his bark returning to its usual sharpness. “In fact, it has never made any sense. We’ve never had a good model for galactic spiral-arm formation. Most models are based on differential rotation—the fact that stars near the galactic center make several orbits around the core in the time it takes for those farther out to complete just one. But any arms that resulted because of that should be temporary phenomena, enduring at most for a billion years. Oh, we should see some spiral galaxies, but there is no way that three out of every four large galaxies should be spirals—which is the ratio we actually observe. Ellipticals should far outnumber spirals, but they do not.”

“Obviously, then, there’s a flaw with the theory,” said Keith.

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Indeed. We astrophysics types have been limping by for centuries with something called ‘the density-wave model’ for explaining the abundance of spiral galaxies. It proposes a spiral-shaped disturbance that moves through the medium of a galactic disk, with stars getting caught up in it—or even being formed by it—as the wave rotates. But it has never been a satisfactory theory. First, it fails to account for all the different types of spiral forms, and, second, we don’t have a good answer as to what would cause these imagined density waves in the first place. Supernova explosions are sometimes cited, but it’s just as easy to model such explosions canceling each other out as it is to get them to build up long-duration waves.” He paused. “We’ve had other problems with our galaxy-formation models, too. Back in 1995, human astronomers discovered that distant galaxies, observed when they were only twenty percent of the current age of the universe, had rotational rates comparable to what the Milky Way has today—that’s twice as fast as they should have been rotating at that age, according to theory.”

Keith thought for a second. “But if what we’re seeing right now is correct, then spiral galaxies like ours must somehow form from simple disks, right?”

Another lift of the Waldahud’s upper shoulders. “Perhaps. Your Edwin Hubble proposed that galaxies each start as a simple sphere of stars, gradually spin out into a flat disk, then develop arms that open up more and more over time. But although we now have observational proof that that sort of evolution does indeed happen”—he gestured at the disk of stars in the glowing frame—“we still don’t have an explanation for why the evolution takes place, or why the spiral structures persist.”

“But you say three quarters of all large galaxies are spirals?” asked Lianne.

“Wellll,” said Jag, PHANTOM translating a hissing bark as a protracted word, “actually, we don’t know much directly about the ratio of elliptical to nonelliptical galaxies in the universe at large. It’s hard to make out structure in dim objects that are billions of light-years away. Locally, we see that there are many more spirals than there are ellipticals, and that spirals contain a preponderance of young blue stars, whereas our local ellipticals contain mostly old red stars. We’ve assumed, therefore, that any vastly distant galaxy that showed lots of blue light—after correcting for redshift, of course—was a spiral, and any that showed mostly red was an elliptical, but we really don’t know that for sure.”

“It’s incredible,” said Lianne, looking at the image. “So—so if that’s how it looked six billion years ago, then none of the Commonwealth homeworlds yet exists, right? Is there—do you suppose there’s any life in the galaxy now?”

“Well, ‘now’ is still ‘now,’ of course,” said Jag. “But if you’re asking if there was any life in the Milky Way hack when that light started its journey to us, I would say no. Galactic cores are very radioactive—even more so than we used to think. In a large elliptical galaxy, such as we’re seeing here, the whole galaxy is essentially the core. With stars that close together, there would be so much hard radiation everywhere that stable genetic molecules wouldn’t be able to form.” He paused. “I guess that means it’s only middle-aged galaxies that can give rise to life; young, armless ones will be sterile.”

There was silence on the bridge for a time, broken only by the gentle hiss from the air-circulating equipment and the occasional soft beep from a control panel. Each person contemplated the small fuzzy blot of light that one day would give rise to all of them, contemplated the fact that they were farther out in space than anyone had ever been before, contemplated the vastly empty darkness all around them.

Six billion light-years.

Keith remembered reading about Borman, Lovell, and Anders, the Apollo 8 astronauts who had circled the moon over Christmas of 1968, reading passages from Genesis back to the people on Earth. They had been the first human beings to get far enough from the homeworld so that they could cup it in an outstretched hand. Maybe more than any other single event, that view, that perspective, that image, had marked childhood’s end for humanity—the realization that all their world was one tiny ball floating against the night.

And now, thought Keith, maybe—just maybe—this image was the one that marked the beginning of middle age: a still frame that would become the frontispiece of volume two of humanity’s biography. It wasn’t just Earth that was tiny, insignificant, and fragile. Keith lifted his hand and reached out toward the hologram, cupping the island of stars in his fingers. He sat silently for a long moment, then lowered his hand, and allowed his eyes to wander over the overwhelming dark emptiness that spread out in all directions. His gaze happened to pass over Jag—who was doing exactly what Keith had done a moment ago, using one of his hands to cup the Milky Way.

“Excuse me, Keith,” said Lianne, the first words spoken by anyone on the bridge for several minutes. Her voice was soft, subdued, the way one would talk in a cathedral. “The electrical system is repaired. We can launch that probe anytime you like.”

Keith nodded slowly. “Thank you,” be said, his voice wistful. He looked once more at the young Milky Way floating in the darkness, and then said softly, “Rhombus, let’s have a look at what’s going on back home.”