Starplex

Chapter XXIV

The shortcut point began to expand, starting as a violet pinprick of Soderstrom radiation, and growing as an ever-expanding purple ring. First to pop through was one of Starplex’s hastily constructed antigravity buoys, and then another and another. They zoomed across the sky like bullets. They’d been tugging the darmat baby, but since they came through the portal before it did, they were severed from its mass and so shot ahead. Soon, though, the bulk of the darmat baby began its passage, bulging out through the ring of purple in the sky.

On Starplex’s bridge Thorald Magnor let loose a great cheer, and it was echoed by hundreds of others from all over the ship, as everyone watched the spectacle either through a window or on a viewscreen.

Cat’s Eye and a dozen other adult darmats moved closer to the shortcut, calling out to the baby. Over the bridge speakers, PHANTOM played a translation of what Cat’s Eye was saying, but many of the words were missing; the leader of the darmats was not limiting his vocabulary to the few hundred words Rissa and Hek had learned. “Come forward… forward… toward… you are… we… come… hurry… do not… forward… forward.”

Rhombus was using the deck-one array to monitor the emerging baby, but so far it hadn’t transmitted a word of its own, at least not on any frequency even close to the twenty-one-centimeter band.

Lianne Karendaughter was shaking her head. “It’s not moving at all under its own volition,” she said. “It must be dead.”

Keith ground his teeth together. If it was dead, all this was for nothing. “It’s possible,” he said, at last, trying as much to convince himself as Lianne, “that a single darmat can’t move on its own. They may need to play off each other’s gravity and repulsion. The baby may not yet be far enough out for that.”

“Forward,” said Cat’s Eye. “Forward… come you… forward.”

Keith had never heard of anyone trying so slow a passage through a shortcut before—there was an unspoken sense that one should hurry through, that to tarry would be tempting fate, lest the magic of the thing fail.

At last the baby completed its passage. The shortcut collapsed, although, moments later, it opened slightly several times as additional antigrav buoys popped through from the other side.

The darmat child was moving away from the shortcut, but only under momentum. It had not yet—

“Where… where…”

Still a French-accented voice, but, in a stroke of rare creativity, PHANTOM had chosen a child’s tones for this translation.

“Home… back…”

Thor let loose another thunderous cheer. “It’s alive!”

Keith found his eyes misting over. Lianne was openly crying.

“It’s alive!” Thor shouted again.

The darmat baby did, finally, begin to move, heading toward Cat’s Eye and the others.

The speakers changed back to the voice PHANTOM had assigned to Cat’s Eye. “Cat’s Eye to Starplex,” it said.

Keith keyed his mike. “Starplex responding,” he said.

Cat’s Eye was quiet longer than the round-trip signal time would have required, as if he was searching for a way to express what he wanted to say using the limited vocabulary available. Finally, simply, he said, “We are friends.”

Keith felt himself grinning from ear to ear. “Yes,” he said. “We are friends.”

“The child’s vision is damaged,” said Cat’s Eye. “It will… become equal to one again, but time is required. Time, and absence of light. Green star is bright; not here when child left.”

Keith nodded. “We can build another shield, to protect the baby from the green star’s light.”

“More,” said Cat’s Eye. “You.”

Keith was momentarily puzzled. “Oh—of course. Lianne, kill all our running lights, and, after warning people, douse the lights in all rooms with windows. If people want to put their lights back on, tell them to draw the shades first.”

Lianne’s beautiful face was split by a wide smile. “Doing so.”

Starplex went dark, and the darmat community moved toward the great ship and their newly returned child.

The Rumrunner popped through the shortcut, followed moments later by the PDQ. Radio communication soon assured their crews that Starplex was all right, and the ships curved in toward the docking bays. As soon as the Rumrunner was safely aboard, Jag headed for the bridge.

Keith was still talking to Cat’s Eye when Jag entered the bridge. The director turned to the Waldahud. Thank you, Jag. Thank you very much.”

Jag nodded his head, accepting the comment.

The voice of Cat’s Eye came over the speakers. “We to you an incorrect,” he said.

A wrong, thought Keith. They did us wrong.

“You into point that is not a point had to move with high speed.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” said Keith, ever the diplomat, into the mike. “Because of that we got to see our group of hundreds of millions of stars.”

“We call such a group a”—PHANTOM translated the new signal—“galaxy.”

“You have a word for galaxy?” said Keith, surprised.

“Correct. Many stars, isolated.”

“Right,” said Keith. “Well, the shortcut put us six billion light-years from here. That meant we were seeing our galaxy as it looked six billion years ago.”

“Understand looking back.”

“You do?”

“Do.”

Keith was impressed. “Well, it was fascinating. Six billion years ago, the Milky Way didn’t have its current shape. Um, I guess you don’t know this, but it’s currently shaped like a spiral.” A light flashed on Keith’s console, PHANTOM notifying him that he’d just used a word for which there was as yet no darmat equivalent in the translation database. Keith nodded at PHANTOM’s cameras. “A spiral,” he said into the mike, “is… is…” He sought a metaphor that would be meaningful; terms such as “pinwheels” would convey no information m the darmat. “A spiral is…”

PHANTOM provided a definition on one of Keith’s monitor screens. He read it into the mike. “A spiral is the path made by an object rotating around a central point while also receding from that point at a constant speed.”

“Understand spiral.”

“Well, the Milky Way is a spiral, with four major”—he wanted to say “arms,” but again that was a useless word—“parts.”

“Know this.”

“You do?”

“Made.”

Keith looked at Jag, who moved his lower shoulders up and down in a shrug. What did the darmat mean? That he’d been made to learn this fact in some dark-matter equivalent of grammar school?

“Made?” repeated Keith.

“Once plain, now… now… no word,” said the darmat.

Lianne spoke up. “Now pretty,” she said. “That’s the word he’s looking for, I bet.”

“To look at it, one plus one greater than two?” asked Keith into the mike.

“Greater than. More than sum of its parts. Spiral is…”

“Is pretty,” said Keith. “More than the sum of its parts, visually.”

“Yes,” said Cat’s Eye. “Pretty. Spiral. Pretty.”

Keith nodded. There was no doubt that spiral galaxies were more interesting to look at than elliptical ones. Keith was pleased that humans and darmats apparently shared some notion of aesthetics, too. Not too surprising, though, given that many artistic principles were based on mathematics.

“Yes,” said Keith. “Spirals are very pretty.”

“That why we make them,” said the synthesized voice from the speaker.

Keith felt his heart jump, and he saw Jag do a reflexive splaying of all sixteen of his fingers, the Waldahud equivalent of a double take.

“You make them?” said Keith.

“Affirm. Move stars—small tugs, takes long time. Move stars into new patterns, work to hold them there.”

“You turned our galaxy into a spiral?”

“Who else?”

Who else indeed…

“That’s incredible,” said Keith softly.

Jag was rising from his chair. “No, that makes sense,” the Waldahud said. “By all the gods, that makes sense. I said there was no good theory for explaining why galaxies acquired or maintained spiral shapes. Being deliberately held in place by conscious dark matter—it’s mind-boggling, but it does make sense.”

Keith keyed off the mike. “But—but what about all the other galaxies? You said three quarters of all galaxies are spirals.”

Jag did a four-armed Waldahud shrug. “Ask it.”

“Did you make many galaxies into spirals?”

“Not us. Others.”

“I mean, did others of your kind make many galaxies into spirals?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“Have to look at them. Make pretty. Make—make—a thing for expressions not mathematic.”

“Art,” said Keith.

“Art, yes,” said Cat’s Eye.

Having left his chair, Jag now dropped down to all fours, the first time Keith had ever seen him do that. “Gods,” he barked, his voice subdued. “Gods.”

“Well, it certainly fills that theoretical hole you were talking about,” said Keith. “It even explains that bit you mentioned about ancient galaxies seeming to rotate faster than theory suggests they should. They were being made to rotate, in order to spin out spiral arms.”

“No, no, no,” barked Jag. “No, don’t you understand? Don’t you see? It’s not just an esoteric point of galaxy formation that’s been explained. We owe them everything—everything!” The Waldahud took hold of one of the metal legs supporting Keith’s console and hauled himself back onto two feet again. “I told you earlier: Stable genetic molecules would have an almost impossible time existing in a densely packed mass of stars, because of the radiation levels. It’s only because our homeworlds exist far from the core, out in the spiral arms, that life was able to arise on them at all. We exist—all the life made out of what we arrogantly refer to as ‘regular matter’—all of it exists simply because the dark-matter creatures were playing with stars, swirling them into pretty patterns.”

Thor had turned around to face Jag. “But—but the biggest galaxies in the universe are ellipticals, not spirals.”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “True. But maybe shaping them is too much work, or too time-consuming. Even with faster-than-light communications—with ‘radio-two’ it would still take tens of thousands of years for signals to pass from one side of a truly giant elliptical to the other. Maybe that’s too much for a group effort. But for mid-sized galaxies like ours and Andromeda—well, every artist has a preferred scale, no? A favorite canvas size, or an affinity for either short stories or novels. Mid-sized galaxies are the medium… and… and we are the message.”

Thor was nodding. “Jesus, he’s right.” He looked at Keith. “Remember what Cat’s Eye said when you asked it why it tried to kill us? ‘Make you. Not make you.’ My father used to say that, too, when he was angry: ‘I brought you into this world, boy, and I can take you out of it.’ They know—the darmats know that their activity is what has made our kind of life possible.”

Jag was losing his balance again. He finally gave up, and dropped back to his four hind legs, making him look like a chubby centaur. “Talk about an ego blow,” he said. “This one is the biggest of them all. Early on, each of the Commonwealth races had thought its homeworld was the center of the universe. But, of course, they weren’t. Then we reasoned that dark matter must exist—and, in a way, that was even more humbling. It meant that not only were we not the center of the universe, we’re not even made out of what most of the universe is made from! We are like the scum on a pond’s surface daring to think that we are more important than all the vast bulk of water that makes up the pond.

“And now this!” His fur was dancing. “Remember what Cat’s Eye said when you asked it how long ago dark-matter life had first arisen? ‘Since the beginning of all the stars combined,’ he said. ‘Since the beginning of the universe.’ ”

Keith nodded.

“He said they had to exist that far back—had to!” Jag’s fur was rippling. “I thought it was just a philosophical position, but he’s right, of course—life had to exist from the beginning of this universe, or as near to the beginning as physically possible.”

Keith stared at Jag. “I don’t understand.”

“What arrogant fools we are!” said Jag. “Don’t you see? To this day, despite all the humbling lessons the universe has already taught us, we still try to retain a central role in creation. We devise theories of cosmology that say the universe was destined to give rise to us, that it had to evolve life like us. Humans call it the anthropic principle, my people called it the aj-Waldahudigralt principle, but it’s all the same thing: the desperate, deep-rooted need to believe that we are significant, that we’re important.

“We talk in quantum physics about Schredinger’s cat or Teg’s kestoor—the idea that everything is just potentialities, just wavefronts, unresolved, until one of us all-important qualified observers lumbers by, has a peek, and, by the process of looking, causes the wavefront to collapse. We actually allowed ourselves to believe that that is how the universe worked—even though we know full well that the universe is many billions of years old, and not one of our races is more than a million.

“Yes,” barked Jag, “quantum physics demands qualified observers. Yes, intelligence is necessary to determine which possibility becomes reality. But in our arrogance we thought that the universe could work for fifteen billion years without us, and yet that it somehow was geared to give rise to us. Such hubris! The intelligent observers are not us—tiny beings, isolated on a handful of worlds in all the vastness of space. The intelligent observers are the dark-matter creatures. They have been spinning galaxies into spirals for billions upon billions of years. It is their intellect, their observations, their sentience that drives the universe, that gives quantum potentialities concrete reality. We are nothing—nothing!—but a recent, localized phenomenon—a spot of mold on a universe that doesn’t need us, or care that we exist. Cat’s Eye was absolutely right when he said we were insignificant. This is their universe—the darmats’ universe. They made it, and they made us, too!”