Starplex

Chapter XXII

Keith was in his office, going over proposals for finding the darmat baby. It was the first of the month; the holo on his desk of Rissa had automatically changed to a pose of her in shorts and tank top, taken during a hike through the Grand Canyon. The Emily Carr painting had switched to an A. Y. Jackson view of Lake Superior.

“Jag Kandaro em-Pelsh is here,” announced PHANTOM.

Keith spoke without looking up from the datapad he was reading. “Let him in.”

Jag entered and helped himself to a chair. He had all four arms crossed in front of his massive chest. “I want to go get the darmat child,” he barked.

Keith leaned back in his chair and looked at the Waldahud. “You?”

Jag’s dental plates clicked together defiantly. “I.”

Keith breathed out slowly, using the time it took to complete the exhalation to gather his thoughts. “This is a delicate mission.”

“And you do not trust me anymore,” said Jag. He moved his upper shoulders. “I realize that. But the attack on Starplex was not authorized by Queen Trath. And the attack on Tau Ceti that Rissa has told us about was repulsed. Matters are at an end right now—unless you humans wish to prolong them. Where do we go from here, Lansing? Is it over? Or do we go on fighting? I am prepared to act as if—”

“As if nothing had happened?”

“The alternative is war. I do not want that, and I had believed you did not want it, either.”

“But—”

Jag’s barks were sharp. “The choice is yours. I have volunteered a peaceful coexistence. If you want your—what is the human metaphor?—your pound of flesh, I refuse to grant it. But finding the child and getting it home will require the utmost skill in shortcut mechanics. Magnor is good at such matters, but I am better. Indeed, there is no one better in all the Commonwealth. You know this to be true; if it were not, I would not be assigned to this ship.”

“Thor is trustworthy,” said Keith simply.

The Waldahud’s two right eyes were already locked on Lansing, and a moment later the two left ones converged on him as well. “The choice is yours. You have my report.” He gestured at the datapad Keith was still holding. “I have suggested we send a probeship to find the child. I should be on that ship.”

“All you want,” said Keith, “is access to the darmats for your people. Bringing home their child would earn you much gratitude.”

Jag moved his lower shoulders. “You do me a disservice, Lansing. Indeed, the darmats do not yet know that there are a thousand entities aboard this ship, let alone that they represent a quarter-sixteen of races.”

Keith thought for a moment. Damn, he hated being pushed. But the bloody pi—but Jag was right. “Okay,” he said. “Okay—you and Longbottle, if he’s up to it. Is the Rumrunner in any condition for another mission?”

“Dr. Cervantes and Longbottle had it serviced at Grand Central,” said the Waldahud. “Rhombus has confirmed that it is spaceworthy.”

Keith looked up. “Intercom: Keith to Thor.”

A hologram of Thorald Magnor’s head appeared floating above Keith’s desk. “Yes, boss?”

“How are we for travel through the shortcut?”

“No probs,” said Thor. “The green star is far enough from it now to allow just about any entrance angle. You want me to program a run?”

Keith shook his head. “Not for the whole ship. Just for the Rumrunner and a one-person travel pod. I’m going to have to return to Grand Central for a meeting with Premier Kenyatta.” He looked back at the Waldahud. “Despite what you just said, Jag, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

It was the ultimate grand tour: around the galaxy in twenty shortcuts—a quick survey of all the active exit points. The Rumrunner, with Jag and Longbottle aboard, zoomed away from Starplex’s docks and, after Longbottle’s requisite joyride, headed for the shortcut.

As always, the exit point expanded as the ship touched it. The purple discontinuity moved from bow to stern, and then the ship was zooming through a different sector of space. There were no spectacular sights to be seen at this first exit: just stars, somewhat less densely packed than they had been on the other side.

Jag was intent on his instruments. He was doing a hyperspace scan, looking for any large mass within a light-day of the exit. Finding the darmat child would be hard. Dark matter, by its very nature, was very difficult to detect—all but invisible, and the radio signals it put out were very weak indeed. But even a baby darmat was going to mass 10³⁷ kilograms. It would make a dent in local spacetime that should be detectable in hyperspace.

“Anything?” asked Longbottle.

Jag moved his lower shoulders.

Longbottle arched in his tank, and the Rumrunner curved back toward the shortcut.

“Again we go,” said the dolphin. The ship dived toward the point—

—and popped out near a beautiful binary star system, streamers of gas flowing from a bloated, oblate red giant toward a tiny blue companion.

Jag consulted his instruments. Nothing. The Rumrunner did a loop-the-loop and came down upon the shortcut from above, diving through, a burst of Soderstrom radiation washing over the ship, the spectacle of the binary pair being replaced by a new starscape, with a great yellow-and-pink nebula covering half the sky, a pulsar at its heart cycling dim and bright over a period of a few seconds.

“Nothing,” said Jag.

Longbottle arched again, and plunged toward the shortcut.

An expanding point.

A ring of purple.

Mismatched starfields.

Another sector of space.

A sector dominated by another green star pulling away from the shortcut.

Longbottle maneuvered furiously to avoid it.

Jag’s scan took longer; the nearby star overwhelmed the hyperspace scanner. But, finally, he determined the darmat child was not there.

Longbottle rotated in his tank, and the Rumrunner did a corkscrew flight back into the shortcut. When they popped out this time, it was through Shortcut Prime, near the galactic core, the initial shortcut that had presumably been activated by the shortcut makers themselves. The sky blazed with the light of countless tightly packed red suns. Longbottle nosed a control, and the ship’s shields increased to maximum. They were close enough to the heart of the galaxy to see the coruscating edge of the violet accretion disk surrounding the central black hole.

“Not here,” said Jag.

Longbottle maneuvered the ship back to the shortcut in a simple straight line. They hadn’t been close enough to be caught by the singularity’s ravenous gravity, but he was taking no chances.

They next exited into another seemingly empty region of space, but Jag’s hyperspace scanners indicated the presence of substantial concealed mass.

“Suppose not do you?” asked Longbottle.

Jag shrugged all four shoulders. “It couldn’t hurt to check,” he said, adjusting the shipboard radio to search near the twenty-one-centimeter band.

“Ninety-three separate frequencies currently in use,” said Jag. “Another community of darmats.”

They were tens of thousands of light-years from the first darmats they had encountered, but, then again, the darmat race was billions of years old. It was possible that they all spoke the same language. Jag scanned the cacophony, found the topmost frequency group, and, since there were no vacancies, transmitted just above it. “We are looking for one called Junior”—the ship’s computer substituted the baby’s real name.

There was silence for a lot longer than round-trip message time would require, but then, finally, a reply did come through.

“No one here by that name. Who are you?”

“No time to chat—but we’ll be back,” said Jag, and Longbottle turned the ship back toward the shortcut.

“Bet surprised them that did,” said the dolphin as they passed through the gateway.

This time they emerged near a planet about the size of Mars, and just as dry, but yellow rather than red. Its sun, a blue-white star, was visible in the distance, about twice the apparent diameter of Sol as seen from Earth. “Nothing here,” said Jag.

Longbottle allowed himself the luxury of moving the Rumrunner in such a way that the bulk of the yellow planet precisely eclipsed the star. The corona—mixing purple and navy and white—was gorgeous, and covered much more of the sky than the dolphin had expected. He and Jag basked in the sight for a moment, then they dived back through the shortcut.

This exit point had also recently had a star emerge from it, but it wasn’t green. Rather, as at Tau Ceti, this one was a red dwarf, small and cool.

Jag consulted his scanners. “Nothing.”

They dived through again, the shortcut opening like a purple-lipsticked mouth to accommodate them.

Pure blackness—no stars at all.

“A dust cloud,” said Jag, his fur dancing in surprise.

“Interesting—it wasn’t here the last time anyone went through to this exit. Carbon grains mostly, although there are some complex molecules, too, including formaldehyde and even some amino acids, and—Cervantes will want to return here, I think. I’m picking up DNA.”

“In the cloud?” asked Longbottle, incredulous.

“In the cloud,” said Jag. “Self-replicating molecules floating free in space.”

“But no darmat, correct?”

“Correct,” said Jag.

“A wonder for another time,” said Longbottle, and he spun the ship around, fired retros, and headed back through the shortcut.

A new sector of space—another one that had recently had a star erupt from it. This time the intruder was a blue type-O, with more purple sunspots than a fair-haired human had freckles in summer. The Rumrunner had emerged right on the edge of one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. To one side, the sky was thick with bright young stars; to the other, they were sparse. Overhead, a globular cluster was visible, a million ancient red suns packed together into a ball. And—

“Bingo,” said Jag—or, at least, he barked something that would be translated as that in English. “There it is!”

“See do I,” agreed Longbottle. “But…”

“Parched land!” swore Jag. “It’s trapped.”

“Agree—caught in the net.”

And indeed it was. The baby darmat had obviously stumbled out of the shortcut only a few days before this blue star had arrived, and the star had been expelled from the exit in approximately the same direction as the darmat. As they’d all discovered to their shock, a darmat could move with surprising agility for a free-floating world, but the gravity of a star was enormous. The baby was only forty million kilometers from its surface—less than Mercury’s distance from Sol.

“There is no way it can manage escape velocity,” said Jag. “I’m not even sure it’s managed to settle into orbit; it may be spiraling in. Either way, though, that darmat is not going anywhere.”

“Will signal,” said Longbottle—and he set the ship’s transmitter to broadcast the prerecorded message on all the frequencies that the members of the darmat community had used. They were about three hundred million kilometers from the star; the signals took over fifteen minutes to reach the darmat, and the quickest any reply could be received would be another fifteen minutes after that. They waited, Jag fidgeting, Longbottle amusing himself by painting a sonar caricature of Jag as he fidgeted. But no reply was received.

“Well,” said the Waldahud, “there’s so much radio noise coming from the star, we might not be able to pick up the darmat’s transmission. Or it might not be able to hear us.”

“Or,” said Longbottle, “darmat may be dead.”

Jag made a noise like bubble wrap being burst, his snout vibrating as he did so. That was the one possibility he didn’t want to consider. But the heat that close to the star would be incredible. The side of the darmat facing it might be over 350 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead. Neither Jag nor Delacorte had yet worked out all the particulars of luster-quark meta-chemistry, but many normal complex molecules broke down when heated that high.

Another thought occurred to Jag. What, if any, funereal customs would the darmats have? Would they want this world-sized corpse brought home? He glanced at Longbottle. Dolphins just let the body float away when one of their own died. Jag hoped the darmats would be equally sensible.

“Let’s head back,” said Jag. “There’s nothing we can do on our own.”

The Rumrunner zoomed toward the shortcut in one of Longbottle’s patented sweeping curves, hitting the point at the precise angle required to exit where they’d started all those jumps ago. Starplex was there, floating against the night, tinged green by the light of the fourth-generation star. Beyond it were the dark-matter beings, tendrils of gas stretching between them. The question now was what to do next. For one brief moment, Jag sympathized with Lansing. He wouldn’t want to swim the choppy waters of the river that now spread out before the human.

Keith was in his apartment, preparing to leave for his upcoming meeting with Premier Kenyatta at Grand Central Station.

An electric bleep sounded. “Rhombus would like to see you,” announced PHANTOM. “He requests seven minutes of your time.”

Rhombus? Here? Keith really felt like being alone just now. He was marshaling his thoughts, trying to decide what to say in the meeting. Still, having an Ib disturb him at home was unusual enough to pique his curiosity. “The time is granted,” said Keith—the appropriate answer dictated by Ibese manners.

PHANTOM again: “Since you are going to have an Ib visitor, may I dim the lights?”

Keith nodded. The ceiling panels decreased their intensity, and the glaring white glacier in the wall hologram of Lake Louise turned a muted gray. The double-pocket door slid aside and Rhombus rolled in. Lights flashed on his web.

“Hello, Keith.”

“Hello, Rhombus. What can I do for you?”

“Forgive me for intruding,” said the pleasant British voice, “but you were quite angry on the bridge today.”

Keith frowned. “Sorry if I was harsh,” said Keith. “I’m furious with Jag—but I shouldn’t have taken it out on anyone else.”

“Oh, your anger seemed quite focused. I doubt you gave offense.”

Keith lifted his eyebrows. “Then what’s the problem?”

Rhombus was quiet for a moment, then: “Have you ever wondered about the apparent contradiction my race represents? We are obsessed, you humans say, with time. We hate to waste it. But we nonetheless spend time on being polite, and, as many humans have noted, we take pains not to hurt feelings.”

Keith nodded. “I’ve wondered about that. Seems that wasting time on social niceties would take away from more important tasks.”

“Precisely,” said Rhombus. “Precisely the way a human would see it. But we do not perceive it that way at all. We see getting along as going—well, our metaphor is ‘hub in wheel,’ but you’d say ‘hand in hand’—with a philosophy of not wasting time. A brief but unpleasant meeting ends up squandering more time than a longer but agreeable one.”

“Why?”

“Because after an unpleasant encounter, one spends much time going over the meeting in one’s mind, replaying it again and again, often seething over the things that were said or done.” He paused. “You’ve seen with Boxcar that under Ibese jurisprudence, we punish direct wastings of time. If an Ib wastes ten minutes of my time, the courts may order that Ib’s life shortened by ten minutes. But did you know that if an Ib upsets me through rudeness or ingratitude or deliberate maliciousness, the courts may impose a penalty of sixteen times the amount of time apparently wasted over the issue? We use a multiple of sixteen simply because, like the Waldahudin, that number is the base for our system of counting; there really is no way to quantify the time actually wasted mulling over an unpleasant experience. Years later, painful memories can—again, metaphors fail me. I would say ‘roll up beside you’; you’d probably say ‘rear their ugly head.’ It is always better to leave a situation on pleasant terms, without rancor.”

“You’re saying we should really put the screws to the Waldahudin? Get back sixteen times what they did to us in damages?” Keith nodded. “That certainly makes sense.”

“No, you miss my meaning—doubtless due to my lack of clarity in expressing it. I’m saying forget about what has transpired between you and Jag, and between Earth and Rehbollo. I despair over how much of your mental resources—how much of your time—you humans will waste over these issues. No matter how bumpy the terrain, smooth it in your mind.” Rhombus paused for a moment, letting this sink in, then: “Well, I’ve used the seven minutes you granted me; I should leave now.” The Ib began to roll away.

“People have died,” said Keith, raising his voice. “It’s not that easy to smooth it all out.”

Rhombus stopped. “If it is difficult, it is only because you choose for it to be that way,” he said. “Can you foresee any solution that will bring the dead back to life? Any reprisals that won’t result in more people dead?” Lights played across his web. “Let it go.”