Starplex (12 page)

He hadn't done anything foolish yet. Indeed, he thought he had everything under control. Still, he'd always been an introspective sort; he wasn't blind to what was going on.

Midlife crisis, the fear that he was no longer virile. And what better way to dispel that notion than by bedding a beautiful, young woman?

Idle fantasies. Of course, of course.

He rolled onto his side, facing away from Rissa, tucking himself into a semifetal position. He didn't want to do anything that would hurt Rissa. But if she never learned about it-- Christ, man, get a grip.

She'd find out for sure. How would he face her after that? And their son Saul? How would he face him? He'd seen his son beam at him with pride, yell at him in fury, but he'd never seen him look at him with disgust.

If only he could get some sleep. If only he could stop tormenting himself.

He stared into the darkness, eyes wide open.

Once the Rum Runner had docked, Longbottle went off to eat, and Jag returned to the bridge. The Waldahud was now keeping erect by use of an intricately carved cane--still better than reverting to four legs.

Keith, Rissa, Thor, and Lianne had all had a night's sleep, and Rhombus--well, Ibs didn't sleep, a fact that made their long lifespans seem doubly unfair. Jag usually stood in front of the six workstations to give reports, but this time he walked back to the seating gallery and collapsed into the center chair, letting the others rotate their stations to face him.

Keith looked at the Waldahud expectantly. "Well?"

Jag marshaled his thoughts a moment, then began to bark.

"As some of you know, stars are divided into three broad age categories.

First-generation stars are the oldest in the universe, and consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the two original elements.

Less than 0.02 percent of their composition is heavier atoms, and those, of course, were produced internally through the stars' own fusion processes. When first-gens go nova or supernova, the interstellar dust clouds are enriched with these heavier elements.

Since second-generation stars coalesced from such clouds, a full percent or a bit more of a second-gen's mass comes from metals--'metals' in this context meaning elements heavier than helium.

Third-generation stars are even more recent; the suns of all the Commonwealth homeworlds are third-gens, as are all stars being born today, although, of course, some first-gens and a lot of second- gens are still around, too. Third-gens consist of about two percent metals."

Jag paused for a moment, and looked from face to face in the room.

"Well," he said, "that star"--he gestured with one of his medial arms at the green orb in the holo sphere--"has about eight percent of its mass as metals, four times as much as even a typical third-gen. The thing has enough iron in it that you could actually mine it."

"What about the green color?" asked Keith.

"It's not really green, of course, any more than a so-called red star is actually red. Almost all stars are white, with just a hint of color."

He gestured with his medial limbs at the starfield around them.

"PHANTOM routinely colorizes the stars in our holo bubble, assigning them colors based On their Hertzsprung-Russell categories.

The star out there just has a greenish tinge. The absorption-line blanketing due to its metal content is stronger than the backwarming, and that weakens the star's output in the blue and ultraviolet. The result is more of the star's light coming out in the green region of the spectrum." His fur danced. "I would have said a star with so much metal content would be impossible in our universe at its present age if I hadn't seen one with my own four eyes. It must have formed under very peculiar local conditions, and--"

"Forgive the interruption, good Jag," said Rhombus, "but I'm detecting a tachyon pulse."

Keith swiveled in his chair, facing the shortcut.

"Gods," said Jag, rising to his feet. "Most stars are part of multiple star systems--"

"We can't take another close passage," said Lianne.

"We'll--"

But the shortcut had already stopped expanding. A small object had popped through. The gateway had grown to only seventy centimeters in diameter before collapsing down to an invisible point.

"It's a watson," announced Rhombus. An automated communications buoy.

"Its transponder says it's from Grand Central Station."

"Trigger playback," Keith said.

"The message is in Russian," said Rhombus.

"PHANTOM, translate."

The central computer's voice filled the room. "Valentina Ilianov, Provost, New Beijing Colony, to Keith Lansing, commander, Starplex. An M-class red-dwarf star has erupted from the Tau Ceil shortcut.

Fortunately, it emerged heading away from Tau Ceil, rather than toward it. So far, no real damage has been done, although we had trouble piloting this watson past the star and into the portal. This is our third attempt to reach you. We did manage to contact the astrophysics center on Rehbollo for advice, and they had the incredible news that a star has popped out of the shortcut near them as well--a blue B-class star, in their case. I am now contacting all other active shortcuts to find out just how widespread this phenomenon is. End of message."

Keith looked around the bridge, bathed in green starlight.

"Christ Jesus," he said.

"I say we're under attack," announced Thoraid Magnor, getting up from the helm position, and walking over to the seating gallery to sit a few chairs to the right of Jag. "We've apparently been lucky so far, but dropping a star into a system could destroy all life there."

Jag moved his lower two arms in a Waldahud gesture of negation. "Most shortcuts are in interstellar space," he said.

"Even the one you call "the Tau Ceti shortcut' is still thirty-seven billion kilometers from that star, more than six times as far as Pluto is from Sol. I would say that in fifteen out of sixteen cases, the arrival of additional stars would have minor effects on the closest systems, and, since inhabited worlds are few and far between, the chances of actually doing short-term damage to a planet with life on it are quite small."

"But could these stars be, well, bombs?" asked Lianne.

"You said that the green star is very unusual. Could it be about to explode?"

"My studies of it have only begun," said Jag, "but ! would say that our new arrival has at least a two billion years of life left. And singleton M-class dwarfs, like the one that popped out near Tan Ceti, don't go nova."

"Still," said Rissa, "couldn't they disturb the Oort clouds of star systems they pass close to, sending showers of comets in toward the inner planets? I remember an old theory that a brown dwarf dubbed--Nemesis, I think it was--might have passed close to Sol, causing an onslaught of comets at the end of the Cretaceous."

"Well, Nemesis turned out not to exist," said Jag, "but even if it did, today each of the Commonwealth races has the technology to deal with any reasonable number of cometary bodies--which, after all, would take decades or even centuries to fall into the inner part of a system. It is not an immediate concern."

"But why, then?" asked Thor. "Why are stars being moved around? And should we try to stop it?"

"Stop it?" Keith laughed. "How?"

"By destroying the shortcuts," said Thor, simply.

Keith blinked. "I'm not sure they can be destroyed," he said.

The Waldahud's fur danced pensively for a moment, and when he spoke, his bark was subdued. "Yes, theoretically, there is a way." He looked up, but neither of his eye pairs met Keith's gaze. "When first contact with humans was not going well, our astrophysicists were charged with finding a way to close the Tau Ceti shortcut, if need be."

"That's outrageous!" said Lianne.

Jag looked at the human. "No, that is good government.

One must prepare for contingencies."

"But to destroy our shortcut!" said Lianne, anger bringing unfamiliar lines to her face.

"We did not do dit," said Jag.

"To contemplate it, though! If you didn't want us to have access to Rehbollo, you should have destroyed your own shortcut, not ours."

Keith turned around to look at the young woman.

"Lianne," he said softly. She faced him, and he mouthed the words "cool it" at her. He turned back to Jag. "Did you find a way to do it? To destroy a shortcut?"

Jag lifted his upper shoulders in assent. "Gaf Kandaro em-Weel, my sire, was head of the project. The shortcuts are hyperspatial constructs that extrude a nexus point into normal space. An absolute coordinate system exists in hyperspace. That's why Einsteinian speed restrictions don't apply there; it is not a relativistic medium. But normal space is relativistic, and the exit--the thing we call the shortcut portal--has to be anchored relative to something in normal space. If one could disorient the anchor point, so that it no longer could extrude through from hyperspace, the point should evaporate in a puff of Cerenkov radiation."

"And how would you disorient the anchor?" Keith asked, his tone betraying his skepticism.

"Well, the key is that the shortcut is indeed a point, until it swells up to accommodate something passing through it.

A spherical array of artificial-gravity generators assembled around the dormant shortcut could be designed to compensate for the local curvature of spacetime. Even though most shortcuts are in interstellar space, they are still within the dent made by our galaxy. But if you remove that dent, the anchor would have nothing to hold on to, and--poof!--it should disappear. Since the shortcut is so small when dormant, an array only a meter or two across should be able to do the trick, so long as it is fed enough power."

"Could Starplex provide the power required?" asked Rhombus.

"Easily."

"That's incredible," Keith said.

"It isn't, really," said Jag. "Gravity is the force that dents spacetime; artificial gravity is all about modifying those dents. In my home system, we have used gravitation buoys in emergency situations to flatten spacetime locally so that hyperdrives could be engaged while still close to our sun."

"How come none of this has ever appeared on the Commonwealth Astrophysics Network?" asked Lianne, her tone sharp.

"Um, because no one ever asked us?" said Jag weakly.

"Why didn't you suggest we do that, then, to enable us to go to hyperdrive when the Teen star first appeared?"

demanded Keith.

"You can't do it to yourself; it has to be done to you, by an external power source. Believe me, we've tried to develop ways for ships to do it on their own, but it doesn't work. To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can't be done."

"But if we were to do this right here and now--cause this shortcut to evaporate--we wouldn't be able to get back home," Keith said.

"True," said Jag. "But we could set up the antigrav buoys to converge on the shortcut after we had gone through it."

"But stars are apparently popping out of lots of shortcuts," said Rissa.

"If we were to evaporate the Tau Ceti and Rehbollo and Flatland shortcuts, we'd be destroying the Commonwealth, cutting each of our worlds off from the other."

"To protect the individual worlds of the Commonwealth, yes," said Thor.

"Christ," said Keith. "Surely we don't want to end the Commonwealth."

"There is one other possibility," said Thor.

"Oh?"

"Transplant the COmmonwealth races to adjacent star systems far distant from any shortcut. We could find three or four systems close together, with the right sorts of worlds, terraform them into habitable conditions, and move everyone there. We would still be able to have an interstellar community via normal-hyperdrive."

Keith's eyes were wide. "You're talking about moving-- what?--thirty billion individuals?"

"Give or take," said Thor.

"The Ibs will not leave Flatland," said Rhombus, with uncharacteristic bluntness.

"This is crazy," Keith said. "We can't shut down the shortcuts."

"If our homeworlds are in jeopardy," said Thor, "we can--and we should."

"There's no proof that the arriving stars represent any threat," Keith said. "I can't believe that beings advanced enough to move stars around are malevolent."

"They may not be," said Thor, "any more than construction workers who destroy anthills are malevolent. We might simply be in their way."

There was nothing Keith could do about the arriving stars until more information was available, and so, at 1200 hours, he and Rissa went off to find something to eat.

There were eight restaurants aboard Starplex. The terminology was deliberate. Humans kept wanting to refer to Starplex's components in naval terms: mess halls, sickbays, and quarters, instead of restaurants, hospitals, and apartments.

But of the four Commonwealth species, only humans and Waldahudin had martial traditions, and the other two races were nervous enough about that without being reminded of it in casual conversation.

Each of the restaurants was unique, both in ambience and fare.

Starplex's designers had taken great pains to make sure that shipboard life was not monotonous. Keith and Rissa decided to have lunch in Keg Tahn, the Waldahud restaurant on deck twenty-six. Through the restaurant's fake windows, holograms of Rehbollo's surface were visible: wide, flat flood plains of purple-gray mud, crisscrossed by rivers and streams. Clumps of stargin were scattered about--Rehbollo's counterpart of trees, looking like three- or four-meter-tall blue tumbleweeds. The moist mud didn't offer any firm pumhase, but it was rich with dissolved minerals and decaying organic material. Each starg had thousands of tangled shoots that could serve either as roots, or, unfurling themselves, as photosynthesis organs, depending on whether they ended up on top or on the bottom. The giant plants blew across the plains, rotating end over end, or floated down the streams, until they found fertile mud.

When they did so, they settled in, sinking until about a third of their height was embedded in the ooze.

The holographic sky was greenish gray, and the star overhead was fat and red. Keith found the color scheme dreary, but there was no denying that the food here was excellent. Waldahudin were mainly vegetarians, and the plants they enjoyed were succulent and delicious. Keith found himself craving starg shoots three or four times a month.