Starplex

Chapter XXV

Keith sat in his office on deck fourteen, looking over the latest news from Tau Ceti. Reports were sketchy, but on Rehbollo, forces loyal to Queen Trath had put down the insurrection against her, and twenty-seven conspirators had been summarily executed in the traditional method of being drowned in boiling mud.

Keith set down the datapad. The report strained credulity—it was the first he’d heard of any political unrest on Rehbollo. Still, maybe it was true—although more likely it was just a government desperately trying to distance itself from a disastrous initiative.

A chime sounded, and PHANTOM’s voice said, “Jag Kandaro em-Pelsh is here.”

Keith exhaled. “Let him in.”

Jag entered and found a polychair. His left eyes were on Keith, but the right pair were scanning the room in the instinctive fight-or-flight pattern. “I suppose at this juncture,” he said, “I must fill out some of those forms you humans are so fond of.”

“What forms?” said Keith.

“Forms for resigning my position aboard Starplex, of course. I can no longer serve here.”

Keith rose to his feet, and permitted himself a stretch.

It had to begin somewhere—maturity, the stage after the midlife crisis, peace. It had to begin somewhere.

“Children play with toy soldiers,” said Keith, looking now at Jag. “Child races play with real ones. Maybe it’s time all of us grew up a bit.”

The Waldahud was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe.”

“We all have loyalties hardwired into our genes,” said Keith. “I won’t push for your resignation.”

“Your comments assume that I am guilty of something. I reject that. But were it true, you still misunderstand. Perhaps… perhaps your people will always misunderstand mine.” Jag paused. “And the converse, too, of course.” Another pause. “No, it is time for me to return to Rehbollo.”

“There’s a lot of work left to be done here,” said Keith.

“Doubtless so. But the job I set for myself has been completed.”

“Oh,” said Keith, understanding dawning. “You mean you’ve accrued sufficient glory to win Pelsh.”

“Exactly. The discoveries I have been a part of involving the darmats will make me the most celebrated scientist on Rehbollo.” A pause. “Pelsh will make her decision soon. I can tarry here no longer.”

Keith thought for a moment. “No female Waldahud has ever worked aboard Starplex. When my term of office ends, it will be an Ib’s turn to be director; I suspect Wineglass will get the job. But after the Ib, the position will then fall to a Waldahud—and I know the Waldahudin will demand a female leader. What if—what if you and Pelsh came to Starplex together? From what I’ve heard, she’d be a natural for the director’s job.”

Jag’s fur rippled in surprise. “We can’t do that. We will both still be part of a larger grouping. She will retain her entourage until she dies.”

Keith’s eyes widened a bit. “You mean the males that don’t succeed with her don’t get to try their luck elsewhere?”

“Of course not. We will remain a family. We have all been pledged to Pelsh since childhood.”

“Perhaps you could all come to serve aboard Starplex—all six of you.”

Jag moved his lower shoulders. “Starplex is for the best and brightest. I would never speak to a Waldahud in disparaging terms about other members of my lady’s entourage, but I will tell you the truth. It was never a contest between me and four others. Never. It was between me and one individual. That was clear from the beginning. The others… lack distinction.”

“But I thought Pelsh was related to the royal family. Forgive me, but why would she have less than the most qualified suitors?”

“An entourage must continue to function even after a mate is chosen. A skillfully selected entourage will contain several members who will be content with lesser stations. Indeed, an entourage composed entirely of what you humans call alpha males would be doomed.”

Keith thought about this. “Well, if the only way we can get you is to take your whole family, then I will see to it that we do so.”

“I—I do not think you will follow through on that.”

Keith blinked. “I’m a man of my word.”

“The real contest for Pelsh was between me and one other. That other, of course, has a name.” Jag’s four eyes locked on Keith’s two. “That name is Gawst Dalayo em-Pelsh.”

“Gawst!” said Keith. “Who led the attack on Starplex?”

“Yes. He escaped the darmats and is now back on Rehbollo.”

Keith was still for ten seconds, then began to nod. “You had to help him, didn’t you?”

“I have admitted nothing,” said Jag.

“If you didn’t help him, all the glory in bringing Starplex home to Rehbollo would have been his; he would have been chosen by Pelsh. By assisting him, you assured that the glory would be shared.”

“There are two hundred and sixty Waldahudin aboard Starplex,” said Jag.

The sentence floated between them for several moments. Keith nodded, understanding. “So if you hadn’t helped him, doubtless he would have found someone else who would have,” said Keith.

“Again,” said Jag, “I admit nothing.” He was quiet for a time. “Of course, Queen Trath’s government may bring criminal charges against Gawst. He soon may not have his liberty—or even his life.”

“My offer still stands,” said Keith.

Jag bowed his head. “I—we—shall consider it.” And then Jag did something Keith had never seen any Waldahud do before. He added the words, “Thank you.”

It was evening; the corridor lighting was dimmed. As he always did just prior to dinner, Keith dropped by the bridge, and had a word with the gamma-shift director, a Waldahud named Stelt. Everything was running smoothly, Stelt said. Not a surprise; Keith would have been called at once had something been amiss. Keith wished everyone a pleasant night and left the bridge, heading toward the central shaft.

Lianne Karendaughter was there, sitting on a bench in the widened part of the corridor just before the elevators. She looked lithe and sexy in a skintight black jumpsuit.

Surely a coincidence, thought Keith. Surely she didn’t know his routine—know that he passed this way every evening at this time. She must be waiting for somebody else.

Lianne had her hair down; Keith had never realized that it went halfway down her back. “Hello, Keith,” she said, smiling warmly.

“Hello, Lianne. Did—did you have a good day?”

“Oh, yes. I mean, you saw alpha shift today—a breeze. And I got to do some swimming and fencing during beta shift. How about you?”

“Fine. Just fine.”

“That’s good,” said Lianne. She paused for a moment, and looked down at the rubberized flooring. When she lifted her head again, she didn’t quite meet Keith’s eyes. “I, ah, understand Rissa is away today.”

“That’s right. She’s taken a pod back to Grand Central. I think she’s trying to find a way not to have to accept a medal, or have a parade in her honor.”

Lianne nodded. “So I was thinking,” she said, after a moment, “that perhaps you’d be all alone for dinner.”

Keith felt his pulse quickening. “I—I suppose I am,” he said.

Lianne smiled at him. She had perfect white teeth, perfect alabaster skin, and the most beautiful dark, haunting, almond-shaped eyes. “I wondered if you’d like to join me. I’ve got a wok in my apartment; I could make that stir-fry I promised you.”

Keith looked at… at the girl, he thought. Twenty-seven. Two decades younger than himself. He felt a slight shifting in his shorts. It was probably just an innocent invitation. She felt sorry for the old guy, or maybe was trying to ingratiate herself with the boss. Just some stir-fry, maybe some wine, maybe…

“You know, Lianne,” said Keith, “you are a very beautiful woman.” He held up a hand. “I know, I’m not supposed to say things like that, but we’re both off duty. You’re a very beautiful woman.” She lowered her eyes. He paused and chewed on his bottom lip. And a thought welled up in his brain.

Don’t hurt Rissa.

You’ll only hurt yourself.

“But,” he said at last, “I think it’s better if I just admire you from afar.”

She met his eyes for a moment, then dropped hers again. “Rissa is a very lucky woman,” Lianne said.

“No,” said Keith, “I’m a very lucky man. See you tomorrow, Lianne.”

She nodded. “Good night, Keith.”

He went home, made himself a sandwich, read a few chapters in an old Robertson Davies novel, then went to bed early.

And slept like a log, absolutely at peace with himself.

Alpha shift the next day started uneventfully. Rhombus had arrived precisely on time, of course; Thor came in, put his feet up on the helm console, and started dictating instructions into the navigational computer; Lianne was hard at work briefing little holographic heads of her engineers on the day’s proposed work. In the back row, Keith was talking quietly to Rissa, who had just returned from Grand Central.

But then the starscape split, and Jag came in, moving with more of a run than a waddle.

“I’ve got it!” he said—although from the excited waving of his fur, perhaps “Eureka!” would have been a more appropriate translation.

Keith and Rissa turned to look at Jag. He didn’t go to his workstation; instead, he moved to the front of the room, standing about two meters ahead of Thor’s console.

“What have you got?” asked Keith, resisting the potential straight line.

“The answer!” barked Jag excitedly. “The answer!” He caught his breath. “Bear with me for a moment; this will take some explaining. But I’ll tell you one thing up front—we do matter! We do make a difference. Gods of the mountains, rivers, valleys, and plains—we make all the difference!” His eyes diverged, one falling on Lianne, a second on Rhombus, a third on Rissa, and the fourth on Thor and Keith, who were lined up one behind the other from Jag’s point of view.

“We know now that time travel from the future into the past is possible,” he said. “We’ve seen it happen with the fourth-generation stars, and with the time capsule Hek and Azmi built. But consider the implications of that. Suppose that at noon tomorrow, I used a time machine to send myself back in time to today. What would we have then?”

Keith said, “Well, there’d be two of you, right? The Jag from today, and the Jag from tomorrow.”

“That’s right. Now think about that: if you have two of me, you’ve doubled the mass. I mass one hundred and twenty-three kilograms, but if there were two of me here, then there’d be two hundred and forty-six kilos of Jag-mass aboard this ship.”

“But I thought that was impossible,” said Rissa, “because of the law of conservation of mass and energy. Where did the extra hundred and twenty-three kilos come from?”

Jag looked triumphant. “From the future! Don’t you see? Time travel is the only conceivable way to overcome that law. It’s the only way to increase the total mass in the system.” His fur continued to dance. “And what about the stars from the future? As each arrives, the mass of the present-day universe is increased. After all, even fourth-generation stars are made up of preexisting recycled subatomic particles. Pushing them back in time means that those particles have essentially been duplicated, doubling their total mass.”

“An interesting side effect no doubt,” said Rhombus. “But it still doesn’t explain why the stars are being sent back.”

“Oh, yes it does. The doubling of mass is not just a side effect—not at all! Rather, it’s the whole point of the operation.”

“Operation?” said Keith.

“Yes! The operation to save the universe! These stars are being pushed back in time to increase the mass of the entire universe.”

Keith felt his jaw dropping. “Good God.”

All four of the Waldahud’s eyes converged on Keith. “Exactly!” barked Jag. “We’ve known for over a century that the visible matter in the universe accounts for less than ten percent of the total that must be present. The rest is neutrinos and dark matter, like our giant friends outside the ship. We now know what all the matter in the universe is, but we don’t know how much there is in total. And the fate of the universe depends on how much mass it has, on whether the total is above, below, or precisely at the so-called critical density.”

“Critical density?” asked Rissa.

“That’s right. The universe is expanding—and has been ever since the big bang. But will that expansion go on forever? That depends on gravity. And how much gravity there is, of course, depends on how much mass there is. If there isn’t enough—if the mass of the universe is less than the critical density—gravity will never overpower the original explosion, and the universe will continue to expand forever, all the matter in it spreading out farther and farther. Everything will grow cold and empty, with light-years separating individual atoms.”

Rissa shuddered.

“And if the opposite is true—if the mass of the universe exceeds the critical density—then gravity will overcome the force of the big bang, slowing down and eventually reversing the universe’s expansion. Everything will fall in on itself, collapsing in a big crunch into a single block of matter. If conditions are right, that block might eventually expand again in another big bang, creating a new, and probably radically different, universe—but everything that had been part of this universe would be destroyed.”

“That hardly sounds much better?” said Rissa.

“True?” said Jag. “But if—if!—the universe has precisely the critical density of matter then, and only then, can our universe go on in a viable state forever. The expansion caused by the big bang will be slowed to a virtual halt by gravitation—the expansion will asymptotically approach a zero rate. The universe will not die cold, empty death, and it will not collapse back in on itself. Instead, it will exist in a stable configuration for trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years. For all practical purposes, this universe will be immortal.

“And which is it?” asked Rissa. “Is the universe above or below the critical density?”

“Our best current estimates are that the mass in the entire universe of all we can see, plus the mass of all that we cannot, including all dark matter, alls five percent short of the critical density.”

“Meaning the universe will expand forever, right?” said Lianne.

“Exactly. Everything will continue to fling away from everything else. The cosmos will die with all of creation ending up the merest fraction of a degree above absolute zero.”

Rissa shook her head.

“But it doesn’t have to happen,” said Jag. “Not if they can pull it off.”

“Not if who can pull it off?” asked Keith.

“The beings in the future—the descendants of the Commonwealth races. You said it yourself, Lansing, you are going to become vastly old, live for billions of years. In other words, immortal. Well, truly immortal beings would eventually have to deal with the death of the universe; it’s the one thing that could indeed end their lives.”

“But what about entropy?” asked Lianne.

“Well, yes, the second law of thermodynamics does predict an eventual heat-death for any closed system. But the universe may not be entirely closed; there are, after all, good theoretical reasons to believe our universe is only one of an infinite number. It may be possible to pull in energy from another continuum, or to simply conserve energy here, producing minimal entropy, so that this continuum will be viable virtually forever. In any event, they would have untold trillions of years before that issue would have to be faced—trillions of years to come up with an answer.”

“But—but—it’s and inconceivable project,“ said Keith. “I mean, if we’re currently five percent below the critical density, how many stars would have to be pumped back? Even one from every shortcut wouldn’t be enough, would it?”

“No,” said Jag. “Our best estimate is that there are four billion shortcuts in our galaxy. Let’s assume that that’s typical—that they’ve built one shortcut for every hundred stars not just in the Milky Way, but in every galaxy in the universe. Stars account for roughly ten percent of the mass of the universe; the other ninety percent is dark matter. So, if you pumped one average star through each shortcut, you’d increase the mass of the universe by one one-thousandth of its current total. To increase the mass by one twentieth—which is five percent—you’d need to pump fifty stars through each shortcut.”

“But—but surely if you have time travel, you don’t need to save the universe,” said Keith. “You could live for ten billion years, then time travel back to the beginning, live another ten billion, travel back again and so on, forever.”

“Oh, indeed—and who knows how many cycles might go through before they work up the nerve and technology to undertake the project? The endless time-jumping method gives a pseudo-immortality—it’s clearly inferior to actually making the universe that last forever. Not only does it mean no building or other structure can have a lifespan longer than ten billion years, but it limits immortality to those beings who actually have time travel.”

“I suppose,” said Keith. “But what a project!”

“Indeed,” said Jag. “And it might be even greater in scope than it first seems. Tell me: How old is this universe right now?”

“Fifteen billion years,” Keith said. “Earth years, that is.”

Jag moved his lower shoulders. “Actually, although that is the most commonly cited figure, no astrophysicist believes it. Fifteen is a compromise, halfway between the ages of the universe suggested by two different lines of reasoning. The universe is either as young as ten billion years, or as old as twenty. Since the mid-1990s, the accepted value of the Hubble constant—which measures the rate of expansion of the universe—has been about eighty-five kilometers per second per megaparsec. That means the universe is still flinging apart at a great rate from the original big bang—that gravity has done little to slow the expansion so far—and therefore it can’t be much more than about ten billion years old.

“But spectral studies of extreme first-generation stars, especially those in globular clusters, suggest that such stars have been undergoing fusion for almost twice that length of time. We’ve long assumed that one calculation or the other must be wrong. But perhaps neither is. Perhaps what we’re seeing now is merely the most recent phase of a multistage project. Perhaps I was premature in rejecting Magnor’s suggestion earlier about pushing globular clusters through shortcuts. Perhaps such clusters, each containing tens of thousands of stars, have already been shoved back from the future. It’s possible that originally this universe contained far, far less than ninety-five percent of the critical density of matter, and that the current phase of the project is just some fine-tuning.”

“But—but surely the mass doubling is only temporary,” said Lianne, “To go back to your original example, if you traveled back from tomorrow to today, there’d be two of you today—but tomorrow, one of them would presumably disappear back into the past.”

“Perhaps so,” said Jag. “But for the entire span between the departure point in the future and the arrival point in the present, you have doubled the mass. And if those two points were separated by ten billion years, then you’ve doubled the mass for a very long time indeed—long enough for its effects to put the brakes on the universe’s expansion. If you calculate with great care, you don’t need to permanently increase the mass of the universe. You only need to do it long enough for gravitational attraction to halt the rate of expansion of the original explosion. If you do it just right, even without a permanent increase in mass, you could end up with a universe in the far future that is indeed precisely balanced—a universe that will live forever.”

Jag paused for breath. “It’s the most massive engineering project ever undertaken,” he said. “But it sure beats the alternative—which was to let the universe die.” He beamed at the members of the bridge staff.

“We did it. Regular-matter creatures—creatures with hands! In the end—correction, to prevent the end—the universe needed us!”

The ceremony, held in their favorite Waldahud restaurant, was short. The audience was much bigger than their original family-only wedding in Madrid; any sort of celebration was welcomed aboard Starplex.

Thorald Magnor had been promoted to acting director for the day so that he could perform the service. “Do you, Gilbert Keith,” he said, “again take Clarissa Maria, to love, honor, and cherish, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer?”

Keith turned to face his wife. He remembered the day twenty years ago, the day they had first gone through this ritual, a wonderful, happy day. It had been a good marriage—stimulating intellectually, emotionally, and physically. And she was, if anything, more beautiful, more challenging today than then. He looked into her large brown eyes, and said, “I do.” Thor turned to face her, but before he could speak, Keith squeezed his wife’s hand and added, loudly, for all to hear, “For as long as we both shall live.”

Rissa smiled at him radiantly.

Hell, thought Keith, twenty years was just scratching the surface…