Starplex

  This restaurant, though, offered a wide range of human fare--including a chicken stir-fry, which was exactly what Keith had been craving.

  The restaurant was inordinately crowded; the four eating establishments in the lower-habitat modules were still uninhabitable. But one of the other privileges of rank was always getting a table without a wait. A sleek, silver robot showed Keith to a booth in the back. A large gestalt plant arched over it, orange octagonal leaves roaming its body freely.

  Keith told the server what he wanted, and then he spoke to the desktop viewer, asking for the latest issue of the New Yorker to be displayed.

  The server returned with a glass of white wine, then rolled away.

  Keith was settling into the lead fiction piece in the magazine when-Bleep. "Karendaughter to Lansing."

  "Open. Yes, Lianne?"

  "I've finished the engineering study on what to do about the irradiated lower decks. Can we get together so that I can give you my report?"

  Keith swalloed once. Of course the report had to be dealt with right away; they needed to solve the overcrowding problem quickly. But where to meet Lianne? Gamma shift would be on the bridge now; no need to disturb them.

  Keith's office would be the natural place, but . . . but . . .

  did he really trust himself to be alone with her?

  Christ, this is stupid. "I'm in the Drive-Through, having dinner. Can you bring the report here?"

  "Sure thing. On my way. Close."

  Keith had a sip of wine. Maybe this was a mistake.

  Maybe people would misconstrue, tell Rissa that he'd had a rendezvous in a booth with Lianne. Maybe-- Lianne came in, escorted to his table by a robot. She sat down opposite him and smiled. Geez, she'd arrived quickly--almost as if she'd known where he was before calling, almost as if she'd planned to catch him alone at dinner . . .

  Keith shook his head. Get real. "Hi, Lianne," he said.

  "You've got a report for me?"

  "That's right." She was dressed in a cyan suit, crisp and professional.

  But on her head, crowing her lustrous platinum hair, she was wearing a smart replica of an old-style railway engineer's cap.

  Keith had seen her wearing it before, whimsical and stylish and sexy all at once. '"There are techniques," she said, "for cleaning up radiation damage.

  But they're all time-consuming, and--"

  The server arrived, bringing Keith's dinner.

  "Stir-fry," said Lianne, smiling. "I make a mean one of those. You should let me do it for you sometime."

  Keith reached for his wine, thought better of it, picked up his napkin, and, in so doing, sent his fork tumbling onto the rubberized floor. He bent down to retrieve it--and saw Lianne's shapely legs beneath the table.

  "Um, thank you," he said, straightening back up. "That'd be nice."

  He indicated the steaming platter between them.

  "Did you--did you want some?"

  "Oh, no," she said, patting her flat stomach, causing the fabric of her suit to pull tight across her breasts as she did so. "I'll have a salad later. I've got to watch my figure."

  No need for that, thought Keith. I'll be glad to watch it for you.

  "About the radiation?" he said.

  She nodded. "Right. Well, as I said, we can clean it up--but not quickly, and not without putting into drydock for several weeks."

  "Weeks!" said Keith. "We can't afford that kind of time."

  "Exactly. Which brings me to my suggested solution."

  Keith waited for her to go on. "Which is?"

  "Starplex 2."

  Keith frowned. Starplex had been built at the Rehbollo orbital shipyards, and its sister ship--currently carrying the.

  prosaic name of Starplex 2, although something else would likely end up being the official name--had been under construction now for close to a year. It was being built at Flatland; two such prime contracts couldn't go to the same homeworld, naturally. "What about her?"

  "Well, she's not yet ready for launch, or I'd say simply commandeer the whole thing. But she's being built from identical blueprints to Starplex /--and five of her eight habitat modules are already completed, according to the last report I received. We could pop through the shortcut to the Flatland shipyards, dump our lower-four habitat modules there, and replace them with four of the completed ones for Starplex 2.

  The modules that we leave off could then be cleaned up at leisure.

  Starplex 2's central disk won't be ready for another five months; the four hyperdrive generators have to be extensively tested before the engineering torus can be built around them. That should give plenty of time for the cleanup. When the time comes, our four old modules could be incorporated into the new ship. Of course, all the individual furnishings and equipment we had in our lower four will need to be cleaned up, too, but at least we'll have quarters and lab space for everyone right away."

  Keith nodded, impressed. "That's brilliant. How long would that take?"

  "The specs for habitat-module power-grid deconnection and reconnection call for three days, but I've devised an improved method that doesn't require powering down the couplings. I could do it in fifteen hours if we didn't need to wear radiation suits in the lower modules; in this case, eighteen hours should do the trick."

  "Excellent. What about the lower part of our main shaft and our central disk?"

  "Well, the shaft is three quarters fixed up already. We can't clean it easily, but I've had nanotechs laying down extra shielding on its inner surface. As for the central disk, we'll have to completely replace the water in the ocean deck, of course. And not just with plain water, either. It has to be a full seawater formulation, with dissolved salt and other minerals, plus, if possible, plankton and fish stocks.

  Also, I'd like to replace all the shipboard air, just to be on the safe side. The docking bays are no problem--they're heavily shielded. Same thing for the engineering torus; its shielding kept it from getting too much of a hit of radiation, as well."

  Keith nodded. "How long till we can safely maneuver through the shortcut?"

  "Tomorrow afternoon, maybe earlier. The gap between the shortcut and the green star is opening rapidly. And as long as you're willing to risk losing half a dozen watsons in trying, we should be able to get word of our intentions through to the Flatland shipyards right away so that the Ibs can start preparing for our arrival."

  "Good work, Lianne." He looked at her, and she smiled again, a beautiful, warm, intelligent smile. Keith mentally kicked himself for sometimes forgetting that there was a reason she was aboard Starplex.

  Lianne Karendaughter was the best starship engineer in the business.

  Thor piloted Starplex through the shortcut, and it popped out at the periphery of the Flatland system. From here, the Magellanic Clouds dominated the sky. Flatland's sun, Hotspot, was a white F-class star, and Flatland itself was a featureless ball, shrouded in white clouds.

  Ibs were incapable of working in zero-g. Keith watched from a window as thousands of them swarmed around Starplex in hockey-puck-shaped solo travel units, transparent except for the opaque artificial-gravity plates that made up their bottoms. Since the work was being done by Ibs, not a second was being wasted. The new habitat modules were locked into place, giving Starplex all-new decks forty-one through seventy.

  Keith could just make out the bubble-shaped travel pod from which Lianne was orchestrating the entire operation. The only problem during the whole refit occurred when the hose draining off the ocean deck ruptured, and salt water sprayed into space, freezing into tiny ice particles that sparkled like diamonds in the white glare from Hotspot.

  When it was all done, Starplex--now a hybrid of Starplexes and 2--headed back through the shortcut. '

  Keith was delighted with the repairs--and even more delighted that everyone would no longer have to crowd into the upper half of the ship.

  Arguments had been breaking out among members of all the races.

  Perhaps now that they had plenty of r
oom again, peace .would once more reign aboard Starplex.

  While at the Rehbollo shipyards, five new researchers were brought aboard--one Ib and two Waldahud dark-matter specialists, and a dolphin and a human who were experts in stellar evolution. All of them had dropped everything at receipt of Starplex's reports, and immediately headed through the shortcut network to rendezvous with the ship at Flatland.

  As she had promised, Lianne finished the refit in less than eighteen hours. Thor piloted the ship back through the shortcut, and they teemerged in the vicinity of the dark-matter field and the enigmatic green star.

  Chapter XI

  Starplex's designers had planned to put the director's office adjacent to the bridge, but Keith had insisted that be changed. The director, he felt, should be seen all over his ship, not just in one isolated area.

  He had ended up with a large square room, almost four meters on a side, located on deck fourteen, halfway along one of the triangular faces of habitat module two. Through the window that covered one wall, he could see module three, perpendicular to the one he was in, as well as a ninety-degree slice of the copper-colored circular roof of Starplex's central disk sixteen floors below. That particular part of the roof was marked with Starplex's name in wedge-shaped Waldahudar lettering.

  Keith sat behind a long rectangular desk, made of real mahogany. On it were framed holos of his wife Rissa, looking exotic in an old-fashioned Spanish dancing dress, and their son Saul, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and sporting that strange goatee that was the current fashion among young men. Next to the holos was a 1/600 scale mode!

  of Starplex. Behind his desk was a credenza with globes of Earth, Rehbollo, and Flatland on it, as well as a traditional go board with playing pieces of polished white shell and slate.

  Above the credenza was a framed print of an Emily Cart painting, depicting a Haida totem pole in a forest on one of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Flanking the credenza on either side were large potted plants.

  A long couch, three polychairs, and a coffee table were also in the room.

  Keith had his shoes off, and had swung his feet up on his desk. He never emulated Thor while on the bridge, but when alone he often adopted this posture. He was leaning back in his black chair, reading a report on the signals Hek had been detecting, when the door buzzer sounded.

  "Jag Kandaro em-Pelsh is here," announced PHANTOM.

  Keith sighed, sat up straight, and made a let-him-in motion with his hand. The door slid aside, and Jag walked in. After a moment, the Waldahud's nostrils started flaring, and Keith thought perhaps Jag could smell his feet. "What can I do for you, Jag?"

  The Waldahud touched the back of one of the polychairs, which configured itself to accommodate his frame. He sat down and began to bark. The translated voice said, "Few of your Earth literary characters appeal to me, but one who does is Sherlock Holmes."

  Keith lifted an eyebrow. Rude, arrogant--yes, he could see why Jag might like the guy.

  "In particular," continued Jag, "I like his ability to encapsulate mental processes into maxims. One of my favorite sayings of his is,

  "The truth is the residue, lacking in likelihood though it may be, that is left behind when those things that cannot be are omitted from consideration.""

  That, at least, brought a smile to Keith's face. What Connan Doyle had actually written was, "Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth," but considering that the words had been translated into Waldahudar then back into English, Jag's version wasn't half-bad.

  "Yes?" said Keith.

  "Well, my original analysis, that the fourth-generation star that appeared here was a one-of-a-kind anomaly, must now be amended, since we've seen a second such star at Rehbollo 376A. By applying Holmes's dictum, I believe I now know where these two green stars, and presumably the other rogue stars as well, have come .from." Jag fell silent, waiting for Keith to prod him further.

  "And that is?" Keith said, irritated.

  "The future."

  Keith laughed--but then, he had a barking laugh; perhaps it didn't sound derisive to Waldahud ears. "The future?"

  "It is the best explanation. Green stars could not have evolved in a universe that is as young as ours is. A single such star could have been a freak, but multiple ones 'are highly unlikely."

  Keith shook his head. "But perhaps they come from--I don't know--some unusual region of space. Maybe they had been companions of a black hole, and the gravitational stresses had caused fusion reactions to proceed more quickly."

  "I thought of such things," said Jag. "That is, I thought of probable alternative scenarios, of which that is not one. But none of them fits the facts. I have now done radiometric dating, based on isotope proportionalities, of the material Longbottle and I scooped from the atmosphere of the green star near us. The heavy-metal atoms in that star are twenty-two billion years old. The star itself is not that old, of course, but many of the atoms it is composed of are."

  "I thought all matter was the same age," said Keith.

  Jag lifted his lower shoulders. "It's true that, excepting the small amount of matter constantly being created out of energy, and excepting that in certain reactions neutrons can essentially turn into.

  proton-electron pairs, and vice versa, all fundamental particles in the universe were created shortly after the big bang. But the atoms made up of those particles can be formed or destroyed at any time, through fission or fusion."

  "Right," said Keith, embarrassed. "Sorry. So you're saying the heavy-metal atoms in the star formed longer ago than the universe is old."

  "That's correct. And the only way that could happen is if the star came to us from the future."

  "But--but you said the green stars are billions of years older than any current star could be. You're trying to tell me that these stars have traveled back in time billions of years?

  That seems incredible."

  Jag preceded his barking reply with a snort. "The intellectual leap should be in the acceptance of time travel, not the length of time an object is cast back. If time travel can exist at all, then the distance traveled back surely is only a function of appropriate technology and sufficient energy. I submit that any race that has the power to move stars around has both in abundance."

  "But I thought time travel was impossible."

  Jag lifted all four shoulders. "Until the shortcuts were discovered, instantaneous transportation was impossible.

  Until the hyperdrive was discovered, faster-than-light travel was impossible. I cannot begin to suggest how time travel might be made to happen, but apparently it is happening."

  "There are no other explanations?" asked Keith.

  "Well, as I said, I have considered other possibilities--such as that the shortcuts are now acting as gateways to parallel universes, and that the green stars come from there rather than from our future. But except for their age, they are what one would expect of matter formed in this specific universe, from our specific big bang, under the very specific physical laws that operate here."

  "Very well," said Keith, holding up a hand. "But why send stars from the future back to the past?"

  "That," said Jag, "is the first good question you have asked."

  Keith spoke through clenched teeth. "And the answer is?"

  Jag lifted all four shoulders again. "I have no idea."

  As he moved down the dim, cold corridor, Keith accepted that each of the races aboard Starplex managed to piss the others off in different ways.

  One of the things humans did that he knew bugged the hell out of everyone else was spending endless time trying to come up with cute words made from the initial letters of phrases. All the races called such things "acronyms" now, since only the Terran languages had a word for them. Early on in planning Starplex, some human came up with the term CAGE for "Common Access General Environment," referring to the shipboard conditions in those areas that had to be shared by all four races.

  Well, it felt like a goddamned c
age, thought Keith. Like a dungeon.

  All the races could exist in nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres, although Ibs required a much higher concentration of carbon dioxide to trigger their breathing reflex than humans did. Common-area gravity ended up being set at .82 of Earth's--normal for a Waldahud, light for a human or dolphin, and only half of what an Ib was used to. Humidity was kept high, too: Waldahud sinuses seized if the air was too dry. Common-area lighting was redder than humans liked--similar to a bright terrestrial sunset. Further, all lighting had to be indirect. The Ib homeworld was perpetually shrouded in cloud, and the thousands of photosensors in their webs could be damaged by bright lighting.

  Even so, there were still problems. Keith moved to one side of the corridor to let an Ib roll by, and as it passed, one of the two dangling blue tubes coming off the creature's pump pushed out a hard gray pellet, which fell to the corridor floor. The pod's brain had no conscious control over this function; for Ibs, toilet training was a biological impossibility. On Flatland, the pellets were scooped up by scavengers that reprocessed them for the nutrients the Ib had been unable to use.

  Aboard Starplex, little PHARTs the size of human shoes served the same function. One such came zipping along the corridor as Keith watched.

  It sucked up the dropping and rolled upon its way.

  Keith had finally gotten used to the Ibs defecating everywhere; thank God their feces had no discernible odor.

  But he didn't think he'd ever get used to the cold, or the damp, or any of the other things forced upon them by the Waldahudin-- Keith stopped dead in his tracks. He was coming to a T-intersection in the corridor, and could hear raised voices up ahead: a human male shouting in--Japanese, it sounded like--and the angry barking of a Waldahud.

  "PHANTOM," Keith said softly, "translate those voices for me."

  A New York accent: "You are weak, Teshima. Very weak.

  You don't deserve a mate."

  "Have sex with yourself!" Keith frowned, suspecting the computer wasn't doing justice to the original Japanese.