Starplex

Chapter XXIII

Keith had always thought Grand Central Station looked like four dinner plates arranged in a square, but today, for some reason, it reminded him of a four-leaf clover floating against the stars. Each of the leaves or plates was a kilometer in diameter and eighty meters thick, making the station the largest manufactured structure in Commonwealth space. Like Starplex’s own much-smaller central disk, the outward facing edges of the plates were studded with docking-bay doors, many of them bearing the logos of Earth-based trading corporations. The computer aboard Keith’s travel pod received docking instructions from Grand Central’s traffic controller, and flew him in toward a docking ring adjacent to a large corrugated space door bearing the yellow-script symbol of the Hudson’s Bay Company, now in its fifth century of operation.

Keith looked around through the travel pod’s transparent hull. Dead ships were floating across the sky. Tugs were arriving at the docking bays hauling wreckage. One of the station’s four plates was completely dark, as if it had taken a major hit during the battle.

Once his pod was secured, Keith exited into the station. Unlike Starplex, which was a Commonwealth facility, Grand Central belong entirely to the peoples of Earth, and its common environment was kept precisely at terrestrial standard.

A governmental aide was waiting to greet Keith. He had a broken arm. It likely occurred during the battle with the Waldahudin, since the bone-knitting web he had on would normally only be worn for seventy-two hours after the injury. The aide took him to the opulent office of Petra Kenyatta, Human Government Premier of Tau Ceti province.

Kenyatta, an African woman of about fifty, rose to great Keith. “Hello, Dr. Lansing,” she said, extending her right hand.

Keith shook it. Her grip was firm, almost painfully so. “Ma’am.”

“Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you.” No sooner had Keith sat down in the chair—a regular, nonmorphing human chair—than the door slid open again and another woman came in, this one Nordic in appearance and a little younger than Kenyatta.

“Do you know Commissioner Amundsen?” said the premier. “She’s in charge of the United Nations police forces here at Tau Ceti.”

Keith half rose from his chair. “Commissioner.”

“Of course,” said Amundsen, taking a seat herself, “ ‘police forces’ is a euphemism. We call it that for alien ears.”

Keith felt his stomach knotting.

“Reinforcements are already on their way from Sol and Epsilon Indi,” said Amundsen. “We’ll be ready to move on Rehbollo as soon as they arrive.”

“Move on Rehbollo?” said Keith, shocked.

“That’s right,” said the commissioner. “We’re going to kick those bloody pigs halfway to Andromeda.”

Keith shook his head. “But surely it’s over. A sneak attack only works once. They’re not going to be coming back.”

“This way we make sure of that,” said Kenyatta.

“The United Nations can’t have agreed to this,” said Keith.

“Not the United Nations, of course,” said Amundsen. “Dolphins don’t have the spine for something like this. But we’re sure the HuGo will vote for it.”

Keith turned to Kenyatta. “It would be a mistake to let this escalate, Premier. The Waldahudin know how to destroy a shortcut.”

Amundsen’s sapphire eyes went wide. “Say that again.”

“They could cut us off from the rest of the galaxy—and they only need to get one ship through to Tau Ceti to do that.”

“What’s the technique?

“I—I have no idea. But I’m assured it works.”

“All the more reason to destroy them,” said Kenyatta.

“How did they sneak up on you?” asked Commissioner Amundsen. “Here at Tau Ceti, they sent one large mother-ship through, and it disgorged fighters as soon as it arrived. I understand from what Dr. Cervantes said while she was here that they sent individual craft after Starplex. How was it that you didn’t notice when the first one arrived?”

“The newly emerged star was between us and the shortcut.”

“Who ordered the ship to take that position?” asked Amundsen.

Keith paused. “I did. I give all the orders aboard Starplex. We were engaged in astronomical research, and had to move the ship away from the shortcut to facilitate that. I take full responsibility.”

“No need to worry,” said Amundsen, grinning like a skull. “We’ll make the pigs pay.”

“Don’t call them that,” said Keith, surprising himself.

“What?”

“Don’t call them that name. They are Waldahudin.” He managed to say the word as a bark, with perfect accent and asperity.

Amundsen was taken aback. “Do you know what they call us?” she asked.

Keith shook his head slightly.

“Gargtelkin,” she said. “ ‘Ones who copulate out of season.’ ”

Keith suppressed a grin. But then he sobered. “We can’t go to war with them.”

“They started it.”

He thought of his older sister and younger brother. He thought of an old black-and-white movie with dueling anthems, the Marseillaise drowning out Wacht am Rhein. And he thought most of all of the sight of the young Milky Way, cupped in his outstretched hand.

“No,” said Keith simply.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” snapped Amundsen. “They did start it.”

“I mean it doesn’t make any difference. None of it does. There are beings out there made of dark matter. There are shortcuts in intergalactic space. There are stars coming back from the future. And you’re worried about who started it? It doesn’t matter. Let’s end it. Let’s end it here and now.”

“That’s exactly what we’re talking about,” said Premier Kenyatta: “Ending it once and for all. Knocking the pigs on their hairy asses.”

Keith shook his head. Midlife crisis—for all of them, humans and Waldahudin. “Let me go to Rehbollo. Let me talk to Queen Trath. I’m supposed to be a diplomat. Let me go and talk peace. Let me build a bridge.”

“People have died,” said Amundsen. “Here at Tau Ceti, humans beings have died.”

Keith thought of Saul Ben-Abraham. Not the horrid picture that usually came to mind, Saul’s skull opening like a red flower in front of his eyes, but rather Saul alive, great wide grin splitting his dark beard, a home-brewed beer in hand. Saul Ben-Abraham had never wanted war. He’d gone to the alien ship looking for peace, for friendship.

And what about the other Saul? Saul Lansing-Cervantes—unable to carry a tune, sporting a silly goatee, shortstop on one of Harvard’s campus baseball teams, a chocoholic—and a physics major, the kind they would draft to be a hyperdrive pilot if it came to war.

“Humans have died before, and we have not sought vengeance,” said Keith. Rhombus had been right. Let it go, he’d said. Let it all go. Keith felt it leaving him, the unpleasant thing he’d carried around for: eighteen years. He looked at the two women. “For the sake of those who have died—and for all those who would die in a war—we have to put out the fire before it’s too late.”

Keith reboarded his travel pod, left Grand Central, and headed back toward the shortcut.

He had spent hours arguing with Commissioner Amundsen and Premier Kenyatta. But he wouldn’t give up. This was the windmill he’d been looking for. This was the battle worth fighting—the battle for peace.

An impossible dream?

He thought of his great-great-grandfather’s wonder-filled life. Cars and airplanes, lasers and moon landings.

And his own wonder-filled life.

And all the wonders yet to come.

Nothing was impossible—not even peace. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Sufficiently advanced. Races did grow up, did enter a state of maturity…He was ready for that. At last, he was ready.

Others must be, too.

Borman, Lovell, and Anders had cupped the Earth in their hands. Just a quarter of a century later, that same world had begun disarming itself. Einstein hadn’t lived to see it, but his impossible dream of putting his nuclear genie back in the bottle had come to pass.

And now humans and Waldahudin had both cupped the galaxy in their hands. A galaxy that Keith, and surely others, would live to see rotate around its axis time and again.

There would be peace between the races. He would make sure of that. After all, what better job was there for a middle child with billions of years to spend?

Keith’s travel pod touched the shortcut, the purple halo passed over the spherical hull, and he emerged back near the green star.

Starplex was up ahead, a giant silver-and-copper diamond against the starry backdrop. Keith could see that docking bay seven’s space door was open, and the bronze wedge of the Rumrunner was in the process of landing—meaning Jag and Longbottle must be returning with news of their search for the darmat baby. Heart pounding, Keith activated his pod’s preprogrammed docking sequence.

Keith hurried to the bridge. Although he’d only been gone a short time, he felt a need to hug Rissa, who happened to be there using her console even though it was delta shift. He held her tight for several seconds, feeling the warmth of her. Wineglass politely rolled away from the director’s workstation in case Keith wished to use it, but Keith motioned for the Ib to return to it, and Keith took a chair in the seating gallery at the back of the room.

No sooner had he done so than the forward bridge door opened and Jag waddled in. “The baby is trapped,” he barked as he made his way over to the physics station, which was currently unoccupied. “It’s stuck in close orbit around a star that emerged from the same shortcut the baby did.”

“Did you call out to by radio?” asked Rissa. “Any response?”

“None,” said Jag, “but the star is a real noisemaker. Our message might have been lost going in, or the reply might have been lost coming out.”

“It would be like trying to hear a whisper during a hurricane,” said Keith, shaking his head. “All but impossible.”

“Especially,” said Longbottle, popping up in the starboard pool on the bridge, “if the darmat is dead.”

Keith looked at the dolphin’s face, then nodded. “That’s a good point. How do we tell if something like that is still alive?

Rissa frowned. “None of us would survive five seconds close to a star without a lot of shielding or heavy-duty force screens. The baby is naked.”

“It’s worse than that,” said Jag. “The thing is black. Although the luster-quark matter is transparent to electromagnetic radiation, the regular-matter dust that permeates it is not reflecting any appreciable amount of the star’s light and heat. The child may be cooking itself.”

“So what do we do?” asked Keith.

“First,” said Jag, “we should get it into the shade—build a reflective foil parasol that could be jockeyed in between the darmat and the star.”

“Can our nanotech lab do that here?” asked Keith. “Ordinarily, I’d have New Beijing build such a thing and shunt it through the Tau Ceti shortcut to us, but I saw the mess they were in when I popped back for my meeting.”

There was a young Native American sitting at InOps. “I’d have to check with Lianne to be sure,” he said, “but I suspect we can pull it off. It won’t be easy, though. The parasol will have to be over a hundred thousand klicks wide. Even at just one molecule of thickness, that’s still a lot of material.”

“Get to work on it,” said Keith. “How long?”

“Six hours if we’re lucky,” said the man. “Twelve if we’re not.”

“But even if we shield the baby, then what?” asked Rissa. “It’s still trapped.”

Keith looked at Jag. “Could we use the parasol as a solar sail, and let the solar wind blow it away from the star?”

Jag snorted. “Ten to the thirty-seventh kilos? Not a chance.”

“Okay, okay—what about this?” said Keith. “What if we protect the baby with some sort of force shield, and then detonate the star, so that it goes nova, and—”

Jag was barking in a staccato pattern—Waldahud laughter. “Your imagination is unbridled, Lansing. Oh, there has been some theoretical work on controlled nova reactions—I’ve been exploring that area a bit myself—but there’s no shield we could build that would protect the baby from a star going nova only forty million kilometers away.”

Keith was not to be deterred. “Okay, try this: Suppose we force the new star back through the shortcut. When it passes through the shortcut, its gravitational pull will disappear, and the baby goes free.”

“The star is moving away from the shortcut, not toward it,” said Jag. “We cannot move the shortcut at all, and if we had the power to turn a star around, we would also have the power to skim a Jupiter-sized object out of a close orbit around the star. But we don’t.” Jag looked around the room. “Any more bright ideas?”

“Yes,” said Keith, after a moment. He looked directly at Jag. “Yes, indeed!”

When Keith had finished talking, Jag’s mouth hung open for a few moments, showing the two curving blue-white translucent dental plates within. Finally, he barked in a subdued fashion. “I—I know I said such things were possible, but it has never been tried on anything approaching this scale.”

Keith nodded. “Understood. But unless you have a better suggestion—”

“Well,” said Jag’s Brooklynite voice, “we could leave the darmat baby in orbit around the star. Assuming it is still alive, once we put the parasol sun-shield in place, it could, in theory, live out the rest of its natural life—however long that is—in close orbit around that star. But if your plan does not work, the darmat child will be killed.” Jag’s voice became quieter. “I know, Lansing, that I am the one always looking for glory—and, since my role in what you propose is pivotal, I have no doubt that considerable glory would accrue to me were we able to pull this off. But it really is not our decision to make. Ordinarily, I’d say ask the—the patient—for permission before attempting something as risky as this, but that is not possible in this case, because of the radio noise. And so I suggest we do what both your race and mine would do in such circumstances: we should ask the next of kin.”

Keith thought about that, then began to nod slowly. “You’re right, of course. I keep seeing the macro-issue, that if we pull this off, it’ll be great for our relationships with the darmats. Damn, sometimes I’m pretty pigheaded.”

“That is all right,” said Jag lightly, choosing not to take offense at Keith’s unfortunate choice of words. “Rumor has it that you are going to have a very long time to acquire more wisdom.”

Keith spoke into the mike. “Starplex to Cat’s Eye. Starplex to Cat’s Eye.”

The incongruous French accent; Keith half expected the thing to say Bonjour. “Hello, Starplex. It is wrong to ask, but…”

Keith smiled. “Yes, we have news of your child. We have located it. But it is in close orbit around a blue star. It is unable to get away under its own power.”

“Bad,” said Cat’s Eye. “Bad.”

Keith nodded. “But we have a plan that may—I repeat, may—allow us to rescue the child.”

“Good,” said Cat’s Eye.

“The plan involves much risk.”

“Quantify.”

Keith looked at Jag, who lifted all four shoulders. “I can’t,” said the human. “We’ve never done anything like this on this scale before. Indeed, I only recently learned that it was theoretically possible. It may work, or it may not—and I have no way of knowing the likelihood of either outcome.”

“Better idea available?”

“No. No, in fact, this is our only idea.”

“Describe plan.”

Keith did so, at least as much as the limited vocabulary they had established allowed.

“Difficult,” said Cat’s Eye.

“Yes.”

There was a long period of silence on the frequency used by Cat’s Eye, but lots of traffic on the other channels—the darmat community discussing its options.

At last, Cat’s Eye spoke again. “Try, but… but… two hundred and eighteen minus one is much less than two hundred and seventeen.”

Keith swallowed. “I know.”

The PDQ (containing the cetacean physicist Melondent) and the Rumrunner (with Jag and Longbottle aboard) headed through the shortcut to the sector containing the darmat baby. Working in tandem, the two ships deployed the molecule-thick parasol. Reaction motors were mounted on the parasol’s frame, firing away from the blue star to keep the solar wind from blowing it away. Once the baby was in the shade, its nearside surface temperature began to drop rapidly.

Next, 112 hastily constructed buoys, each consisting of a hollowed-out watson casing with special equipment mounted inside, were popped through the shortcut from Starplex. The two probeships used their tractor beams to array them in interlocking orbits around the baby.

On one of his tall, thin monitor screens aboard the Rumrunner, Jag displayed a hyperspatial map showing the steep local gravity well with the star at the bottom. The sides of the well were almost perpendicular this close to the star; they only began to flare out just before the orbiting darmat was encountered. The baby made a second, smaller well of its own.

Once the buoys were in place, the PDQ headed off, moving past the shortcut without going through it, and continuing on for half a day. Finally, they were all lined up in a neat row. At one end was the Rumrunner. Next to it was the darmat baby. Forty million kilometers beyond the baby was the fiery blue star. Three hundred million kilometers farther on was the shortcut, and a billion kilometers beyond that was the PDQ—Melondent was now a total of seventy-two light-minutes from the star, far enough away that her local space was now reasonably flat.

“Ready?” barked Jag to Longbottle, in the Rumrunner’s piloting tank.

“Ready,” the dolphin barked back in Waldahudar.

Jag touched a control, and the lattice of buoys surrounding the darmat baby sprang to life. Each buoy contained an artificial-gravity generator, powered by solar energy stolen from the very star they were trying to fight. Slowly, in unison, the buoys increased their output, and just as slowly, a flattening pocket began to develop in one wall of the star’s steep gravity well.

“Gently,” said Jag, under his breath, watching his hyperspace map. “Gently.”

The pocket continued to grow more and more flat. Great care had to be taken not to flatten out the darmat’s own gravity well: if the effects of the baby’s own mass were suppressed—which, after all, was what was holding it together—it would lose cohesion, and expand like a balloon.

The buoys’ output continued to grow and the curvature of spacetime continued to diminish, until, until—

Flatness, like a plateau jutting from the side of the well. It was as if the darmat were in interstellar space, not spitting distance from a star.

“Isolation complete,” said Jag. “Now let’s get it out of there.”

“Activating hyperdrives,” said Longbottle.

The antigrav buoys made up points on a sphere around the baby, but now, as their individual hyperspace field generators came on, that whole sphere seemed to mirror over, as if it were a glob of mercury floating freely in space. In a matter of seconds, the glob shrank to nothingness and disappeared.

The buoys were preprogrammed to move the darmat baby away from the blue star as fast as possible. The PDQ was waiting near the point at which the darmat should emerge from hyperspace, far enough from the star that the hyperdrive field should collapse without difficulty.

The Rumrunner set out for the same location, traveling under thruster power. As they passed near the shortcut point, a radio message from Melondent came through, blueshifted because of the Rumrunner’s acceleration toward her ship.

“PDQ to Longbottle and Jag. Arrived has darmat baby; popped into normal space it did right in front of my eyes. Hyperdrive field collapse uneventful was. But baby shows still no signs of life, and responds does not to my hails.”

Jag’s fur moved pensively. No one had known for sure whether the baby would survive unprotected during its brief journey through hyperspace. Even if it had been alive beforehand, that might have killed it. Maddeningly, there was no way to tell.

The space-flattening technique was risky. Rather than use it themselves so that Longbottle could engage the Rumrunner’s hyperdrive, they flew out to their rendezvous with the PDQ under thruster power. To fill the time, and to get his mind off of the fate of the baby, Jag spoke with Longbottle, who, to his credit, was piloting the ship in an absolutely straight line.

“You dolphins,” said Jag, “like the humans.”

“Mostly,” said Longbottle in high-pitched Waldahudar. He let the piloting drones disengage from his fins, and put the ship on automatic.

“Why?” barked Jag sharply. “I have read Earth history. They polluted the oceans you swam in, captured you and put you in tanks, caught you in fishing nets.”

“No one of them has done any of that to me,” said Longbottle.

“No, but—”

“It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one.”

“But surely once they discovered you were intelligent, they should have treated you better.”

“Humans discovered intelligent we were before we discovered that they were.”

“What?” said Jag. “But surely it was obvious. They had built cities and roads, and—”

“Saw none of that.”

“No, I suppose not. But they sailed in boats, they built nets, they wore clothes.”

“None of those were meaningful to us. We had of such things no concept; nothing to compare them to. Mollusk grows a shell; humans have clothes of fabric. The mollusk’s covering is stronger. Should judged we have the mollusk more intelligent? You say humans built things. We had no concept of building. We knew not they made the boats. We thought perhaps boats alive were, or had once been alive. Some tasted like driftwood, others ejected chemicals into the water, just as living things do. An achievement, to ride on the back of boats? We thought humans were like remoras to the shark.”

“But—”

“They our intelligence did not see. They looked right at us and see it did not. And we looked at them and did not see theirs.”

“But after you discovered their intelligence, and they yours, you must have realized they had been mistreating you.”

“Yes, some in the past mistreated us. Humans do generalize, they blamed themselves. Learned have I since that concept of ancestral guilt—original sin—is to many of their beliefs central. There were cases in human court to determine compensation due to dolphins. This made to us no sense.”

“But you get along with humans now, which is something my people are having trouble managing. How do you do it?”

Longbottle barked, “Accept their weaknesses, welcome their strengths.”

Jag was silent.

Finally, the Rumrunner reached its destination, 1.3 billion kilometers from the star, and a billion kilometers past the shortcut. Jag and Melondent consulted by radio about the exact trajectory they wanted to launch the darmat child on, then the gravitational buoys were activated again, pushing and pulling the world-sized being, which, as planned, started to fall in toward the star, sliding back down the gravity well it had earlier been whisked out of. But this time, the shortcut point was in between the darmat and the star; this time, if all went well, the child would touch the shortcut, its approach to it speeded somewhat by the attraction of the star’s gravity beyond.

Even at full thrusters, it took more than a day for the buoys to bring the darmat back in to the vicinity of the shortcut. Melondent popped a watson through to Starplex, warning them that, if all went well, the baby was about to reemerge on their side.

When they did get close to the shortcut, the buoys fought to slow down the baby’s speed so that it would pass slowly through the portal. The whole-rescue effort would be for naught if the darmat ended up whipping in toward the green star near Starplex. Once it had been braked to a reasonable speed, they adjusted the baby’s trajectory so that it would pass through the tachyon sphere on the precise course required.

First to pass through the shortcut were some of the gravity buoys, then, at last, the baby itself touched it. The point began to swell, widening, enveloping the darmat, lips of purple lightning surrounding, then engulfing, the giant black sphere. Jag wondered what was going through the darmat’s mind during the passage, assuming it was still alive.

And if it was alive, and did at some point regain whatever passed for consciousness, then, Jag wondered, what if it panicked? What if it was unable to make sense out of being partly in one sector of space and partly in another? It might grind its own passage to a halt. If the beast were to expire there, halfway through the shortcut, there might be no way to dislodge it. The shortcut opening formed a tight seal around the passing body, so no coordination of the use of gravity generators on both sides would be possible. And that would mean that the Rumrunner and the PDQ might be trapped forever here, out on the edge of the Perseus arm, tens of thousands of light-years from any of the home-worlds.

The darmat was deforming a bit as it moved through the opening, the shortcut’s periphery clamping down on it. Such clamping was normal, and the effect on rigid spaceships was negligible, but the darmat was mostly gas—exotic, luster-quark gas to be sure, but still gas. Jag feared the baby would be cleaved in two—similar to the normal birthing process, but possibly fatal when done unexpectedly. But it seemed the creature’s core was sufficiently solid to prevent the shortcut from pinching all the way through.

At last, the darmat completed its passage. The shortcut collapsed down to its normal dimensionless existence. Jag wanted Longbottle to immediately dive through the shortcut so that they could see the result of all their efforts. But they, and Melondent aboard the PDQ, had to wait for hours to be sure the darmat had moved far enough from the shortcut so that a collision—or just tidal stress from its enormous gravity—wouldn’t destroy their ships when they popped through to the other side.

At last, after a probe had indicated it was safe to go through, Longbottle programmed the computer to take them home. The Rumrunner moved forward. The shortcut swelled, and they passed through to the other side.

It took Jag a few moments to take in all that he was seeing. The baby was there, all right. And so was Starplex. But Starplex was surrounded on all sides by darmats, and the ship itself looked dead, all the lights in its windows dark.