Starplex

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Hek tilted his head as he worked his controls up on deck one. "Just a second," he said. "Just a second." Then: "Gods of the mud and the moons, yes! Yes, there is!"

  Keith turned to Rissa, grinning. "I wonder what baby's first words were?"

  **EPSILON DRACONIS**

  Keith hadn't seen Glass reenter the docking bay, but when he looked up, there he was, coming closer, transparent legs carrying him over the fields of grass and four-leaf clover.

  His walking was fluid, beautiful, giving the appearance of being in slow motion even though he was moving at normal speed. The hint of aquamarine--the only color in his clear body--was eye-catching.

  Keith thought about rising to his feet but instead simply looked up at the transparent man, sun glinting off the latter 's body and egg-shaped head.

  "Welcome back," said Keith.

  Glass nodded. "I know, I know. You're frightened. You hide it well, but you're wondering how much longer I will keep you here. It won't be long, I promise. But there is something else I want to explore with you before you go."

  Keith lifted his eyebrows, and Glass sat down, leaning his back against a nearby tree. Whatever his body was made of wasn't glass. His tubular torso didn't magnify the patterns of the bark on the other side of it.

  Rather, they were seen with only slight distortion.

  "You are angry," said Glass, simply.

  Keith shook his head. "No, I'm not. You've treated me well so far."

  The wind-chime laughter. "No, no. I don't mean you're angry with me.

  Rather, you're angry in general. There's something inside you, something down deep, that has hardened your heart."

  Keith looked away.

  "I'm right, aren't I?" said Glass. "Something that has upset you greatly."

  Silence.

  "Please," said Glass. "Share it with me."

  "It was a long time ago," said Keith. "I--I should be over it, I know, but . . ."

  "But it festers still, doesn't it? What is it? What changed you so?"

  Keith sighed, and looked around. Everything was so beautiful, so peaceful. He couldn't remember the last time he'd sat outside among the grass and trees, and just enjoyed the surroundings, just--just relaxed.

  "It has to do with Saul Ben-Abraham's death," said Keith.

  "Death," repeated Glass, as if Keith had used another unknown word like

  "quixotic." He shook his see-through head. "How old was he when he died?"

  "It was eighteen years ago now. He would have been twenty-seven."

  "A heartbeat," sam Glass.

  There was silence between them for a moment, Keith recalling his reaction when Glass had dismissed his two decades of marriage in a similar fashion. But Glass was right this time. Keith nodded.

  "How did Saul die?" asked Glass.

  "It--it was an accident. At least, that's what the HuGo decided. But, well, I always thought it was swept under the rug. You know: deliberately suppressed. Saul and I were living on Tau Ceti IE. He was an astronomer; I was a sociologist, doing a postdoctoral fellowship studying the colonists there. He and I had been friends since our undergrad days; we'd been roommates at UBC. And we had d lot in common--both liked to play handball and go, both acted in StUdent theater, both had the same tastes in music.

  Anyway, Saul discovered the Tau Ceti shortcut, and we sent a smallprobe through it to Shortcut Prime. New Beijing was a mostly agricultural colony back then, not the thriving place it is now. Of course, it hadn't yet acquired the New Beijing nickname. It was just "the Silvanus colony' then; Silvanus is the name of Tau Ceti's fourth planet. Anyway, they didn't have many sociologists there, so I ended up in charge of trying to figure out what effect the discovery of the shortcut network would have on human culture. And then the Waldahud starship popped through. A first-contact team had to be hastily assembled; even under hyperdrive, it would take six months for people to arrive from Earth.

  Saul and I ended up being part of the party that went up to meet the ship, and . . ." Keith trailed off, closed his eyes, shook his head ever so slightly.

  "Yes?" said Glass.

  "They said it was an accident. Said they'd misinterpreted. When we cameface-to-face with the Waldahudinfor the first time, Saul was carrying a holographic camera unit.

  He didn't aim it at the pigs, of course--no one could be that stupid.

  He was just holding it at his side, and then, with a flick of his thumb, he turned it on." Keith sighed, long and loud. "They said it looked like a traditional Waldahud hand weapon--same basic shape. They thought Saul was readying a weapon to fire on them. One of the pigs was carrying a sidearm, and he shot Saul. Right in the face. His head exploded next to me. I--I got splattered with...

  with . . ." Keith looked away, and was quiet for a long moment.

  "They killed him. The best friend I ever had, they killed him." He stared at the ground, plucked a few four-leaf clovers, looked at them for a moment, then threw them away.

  hey were quiet for several moments. Crickets chirped, and birds sang.

  Finally, Glass said, "That must be difficult to carry around with you."

  Keith said nothing.

  Does Rissa know?"

  "She does, yes. We were already married at that point; she'd come to Silvanus to try to fathom why it didn't have any native life, despite apparently having conditions that should have given rise to it, according to our evolutionary models. But I rarely talk about what happened with Saul--not with her, or with anyone else. I don't believe in burdening those around me with my suffering. Everyone has their own stuff to deal with."

  "So you keep it inside."

  Keith shrugged. "I try for a certain stoicism--a certain emotional restraint."

  "Commendable," said Glass.

  Keith was surprised. "You think so?"

  "It's the way I feel, too. I know it's unusual, though. Most people live, if you'll pardon me my humor, transparent lives." Glass gestured at his own see-through body. "Their private self is their public self Why are you different?"

  Keith shrugged. "I don't know. I've always been this way." He paused again, thinking for a long time. Then: "When I was about nine or so, there was a bully in my neighborhood. Some big oaf, probably thirteen or fourteen.

  He used to pick up kids and drop them into this thombush in the park.

  Well, everyone would kick and scream and cry while he was doing this, and he seemed to feed off that. One day, he came after me--grabbed me when I was playing catch, or something like that. He picked me up, carried me over to the bush, and dumped me in. I didn't struggle.

  There was no point; he was twice as big as me, and there was no way I could get away. And I didn't scream or cry, either. He dumped me in, and I simply got myself out. I had a few scrapes and cuts from it, but I didn't say anything. He just looked at me for about ten seconds, then said, 'Lansing, you've got balls. 'And he never touched me again."

  "So this internalizing is a survival mechanism?" asked Glass.

  Keith shrugged. "It's enduring what you have to endure."

  "But you don't know where it came from?"

  "No," said Keith. Then, a moment later, "Well, actually, yes. I suppose I do. My parents were both quite argumentative, and had short fuses. You'd never know when one of them was going to blow up over something. Publicly, privately, it didn't make any difference. You couldn't even make polite conversation without risking an explosion from one of them. We'd have family dinners together every night, but I always was silent, hoping we could just get through it, just once, without it being unpleasant, without one of them storming away from the table, or yelling, or saying something nasty."

  Keith paused again. "In fairness, there were other issues in my parents' relationship that I didn't understand when I was a child.

  They'd started as a two-career family, but automation kept eliminating more and more jobs as the years went by--this was back before they outlawed true artificial intelligence. The Canadian government changed the tax laws so that seco
nd income earners in a family were taxed at a hundred-and-ten-percent rate. It was a move designed to spread out what work there was amongst the most families. Dad had been making less than mom, so he was the one who stopped working. I'm sure that had a lot to do with his anger. But all I knew was that my parents were taking out their anger and frustration on everyone around them, and even as a kid, I vowed never to do that."

  Glass was rapt. "Amazing," he said. "It all makes sense."

  "What does?" asked Keith.

  "You."

  Chapter XIII

  Keith's mind was reeling. So many discoveries, so much happening. He drummed his fingers on his bridge workstation for a moment, thinking.

  And then: "Okay, people, what now?"

  The front row of workstations all rotated around on their individual pedestals so that they faced the back row: Lianne was facing Jag, Thor was facing Keith, and Rhombus was facing Rissa. Keith looked at each member of his bridge staff in turn. "We've got almost an embarrassment of riches here," he said. "First, there's the mystery of the stars'

  erupting from the shortcuts--stars that Jag thinks come from the future.

  As if that's not a big enough puzzle to try to figure out, we've also stumbled upon life--life!--made out of dark matter." Keith looked from face to face. "Given the complexity of the radio signals Hek's been picking up, there's a chance--a small one, I grant you--that we're even looking at first contact with intelligent life. Rissa, it would have been crazy to say this yesterday, but let's make the dark-matter investigations the province of the life- sciences division."

  She nodded.

  Keith turned to Jag. "The stars coming out of the shortcuts, on the other hand, may pose a threat to the Commonwealth. If you're right, Jag, and they are coming from the future, then we've got to find out why they're coming back. Is it by deliberate design? If so, is it for a malevolent purpose? Or is it just an accident? A globular cluster, say, colliding with a shortcut billions of years from now, and overloading it somehow so that its constituent stars are spewed back to here?"

  "Well," barked Jag, "a globular cluster wouldn't pass through a shortcut. Only one of its member stars would."

  "Unless," said Thor, sounding a bit feisty, "that globular cluster was enclosed in a sort of super Dyson sphere--a shell around the entire assembly of stars. Imagine something like that touching a shortcut billions of years from now. The shell could break apart while traversing the gate, and send the component stars scattering out of different exit points."

  "Ridiculous," said Jag. "You humans always reinforce each other in even your wildest fantasies. Take your religions, for instance--"

  "Enough!" snapped Keith, bringing his open palm down loudly on the edge of his workstation. "Enough. We're not going to get anywhere squabbling." He looked at the Waldahud. "If you don't like Thor's suggestion, then make one of your own. Why are the stars coming back here from the future?"

  Jag was facing the director, but only his right eyes were looking at Keith; the left pair was scanning the surroundings, an instinctual precursor to a fight. "I don't know," he said at last.

  "We need an answer," said Keith, his voice still edged.

  "Interrupting in all politeness," said Rhombus. "Offense not intended and hopefully not taken."

  Keith turned to face the Ib. "What is it?"

  "Perhaps you are asking the wrong person. No slight is intended of good Jag, of course. But if you want to know why the stars are being sent back in time, then the person to ask is the person who is sending them back."

  "You mean ask some person in the future?" Keith said.

  "How can we possibly do that?"

  The Ib's mantle twinkled. "Now that is a question for good Jag," he said. "If material from the future can exit the shortcut in the past, can we then send something from the past into the future?"

  Jag was quiet for a second, thinking. But then he moved his lower shoulders. "Not as far as I can tell. Every computer simulation I've done shows that any object entering the shortcut in the present gets shunted to another present-day shortcut. Assuming the rogue stars are being sent back by conscious design, I don't know how whoever is controlling the shortcuts is doing it, and I have no idea how to send something forward."

  "Ah, good Jag," said Rhombus, "forgive me, but there is of course one way to send something forward."

  "And what's that?" Keith asked.

  "A time capsule," said the Ib. "You know: just make something that will last. Eventually, without our doing anything special, it will end up in the future through the natural passage of time."

  Jag and Keith looked at each other. "But--but Jag says the stars are coming from billions of years in the future," Keith said.

  "In fact," said the Waldahud, "if I had to guess, I would say they come from something like ten billion years from now."

  Keith nodded, turning back to face Rhombus. "That's double the current age of any of the Commonwealth homeworlds."

  "True," said the Ib. "But, forgive me, despite what you Humans think, neither Earth nor the other homeworlds were created by deliberate design. Our time capsule would be."

  "A time capsule that would last ten billion years . . ."

  said Jag, clearly intrigued. "Perhaps . . . perhaps if it were made out of extremely hard material, like . . . like diamond, but without the cleavage planes. But even if we made such a thing, there is no guarantee that anyone would ever find it. And, besides, this part of the galaxy will rotate around the core forty-odd times before then.

  How do we possibly keep the object from drifting away from during all that time?"

  Lights danced on Rhombus's sensor web. "Well, assume that this particular shortcut will continue to exist for the next ten billion years; that's a fair assumption, since it's here now, and must also still exist at the time the star was pushed through it. So, make our time capsule self-repairing--the nanotech lab should be able to come up with something--and have it hold position near this shortcut."

  "And then just hope that someone will notice it when they come by here in the future to use the shortcut?" asked Keith.

  "It may be more than that, good Keith," said Rhombus.

  "It may be that they come by here to build the shortcut. The shortcuts may have been created in the future, and had their exit points extruded into the past. If their real purpose is to shunt stars back here, then that's a likely scenario."

  Keith turned to Jag. "Objections?"

  The Waldahud lifted all four shoulders. "None."

  He turned back to Rhombus. "And you think this will work?"

  A tiny flash of light on the Ib's sensor web. "Why not?"

  Keith thought about it. "I suppose it's worth a try. But ten billion years--all of the Commonwealth races might be extinct by then. Hell, they'll probably be extinct by then."

  Lights moved up Rhombus's web; a nod of assent. "So we'll have to contrive our message in symbolic or mathematical language. Ask our good friend Hek to devise something. As a radio astronomer involved with searching for alien intelligence, he's an expert in designing symbolic communication. To use an expression that both your people and mine share, this project will be right up his alley."

  The bridge was bustling with activity, and there was plenty of work to be done. But Jag and Hek were visibly flagging.

  Although they didn't do the theatrical yawns humans were famous for, their nostrils were dilating rhythmically, a physiological response that amounted to the same thing.

  Keith thought for a moment that he could pull an allnighter. Hell, he'd done that often enough at university.

  But university had been a quarter century ago, and he had to admit that he, too, was exhausted.

  "Let's call it a night," he said, rising from his workstation.

  The indicators on it went dark as he did so.

  Rissa nodded and rose as well. The two of them headed toward one of the bridge's hologram-shrouded walls. The door opened, exposing the corridor beyond. They headed down toward the elev
ator station. A car was waiting for them--PHANTOM had routed one there as soon as they had started down the corridor. Keith got in, followed by Rissa. "Deck eleven," he said, and PHANTOM chirped an acknowledgement. They turned around, just in time to catch sight of Lianne Karendaughter jogging down the corridor toward them. PHANTOM saw her, too, of course, and held the elevator door open until she arrived. Lianne smiled at Keith as she got in, then called out her floor number. Rissa affixed her gaze on the wall monitor that showed the current level's deck plan.

  Keith had been married to Rissa too long not to be sensitive to her body language. She didn't like Lianne--didn't like her standing this close to Keith, didn't like being in a confined space with her.

  The elevator began to move. On the monitor, the arms of the floor plan began to contract. Keith breathed deeply--and realized, perhaps for the first time, that he missed the subtle smell of perfume. Another concession to the damn pigs, and their hypersensitive noses. Perfume, cologne, scented aftershave--all were banned aboard Starplex.

  Keith could see the reflection of Rissa's face in the monitor screen, see the tight lines at the corners of her mouth, see the tension, the hurt.

  And Keith could also see Lianne. She was shorter than he was, and her lustrous blond hair half shielded her exotic, young face. If they'd been alone, Keith might have chatted with her, told her a joke, smiled, laughed, maybe even touched her arm lightly as he made a comment. She was so--so alive; talking to her was invigorating.

  Instead, he said nothing. The deck-number indicator continued to count down. Finally, the car hummed to a stop on the floor containing Lianne's apartment.

  "Good night, Keith," said Lianne, smiling up at him.

  "Good night, Rissa."

  "Good night," replied Keith. Rissa nodded curtly.

  Keith was able to watch her walk down the corridor for a few seconds before the door closed behind her. He'd never been to her apartment.

  He wondered how she had it decorated.

  The elevator continued to ascend briefly and then it stopped again.

  The door opened, and Keith and Rissa walked the short distance to their apartment.