Starplex (13 page)

Of course, all eight restaurants were open to every species, and that meant offering a range of meal items that met the various races'

metabolic requirements. Keith ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a couple of pickled gherkins to go with his starg salad. Waldahudin, whose females, like terrestrial mammals, secreted a nutritive liquid for their offspring, found it disgusting that humans drank the milk of other animals, but they pretended not to know what cheese was made of.

Rissa was sitting opposite Keith. Actually, the table was shaped in the Waldahud standard, like a human kidneY, and made of a polished plant material that wasn't wood, but did have lovely bands of light and dark in it. Rissa was in the indentation in the table. The Waldahud custom was that a female always sat in this honored position; on their home-world a dame would be positioned here, with her male entourage seated around the curving form.

Rissa's tastes were more adventurous than Keith's. She was eating az torad--"blood mussels," Waldahud bivalves that lived in the slurry layer at the bottom of many lakes. Keith found the bright purple-red color disgusting as did most Waldahudin, for that matter, since it was a precise match for the hue of their own blood. But Rissa had mastered the trick of bringing the shell to her mouth, popping it open, and slurping out the morsel within, all without letting the soft mass be seen either by herself or anyone sitting across from her.

Keith and Rissa ate in silence, and Keith wondered if that was good or bad. They'd mn out of idle chitchat ages ago. Oh, if there was something on either of their minds, they'd talk at length, but it seemed that they just enjoyed being in each other's company, even if they said barely a word. At least that's the way Keith felt, and he hoped Rissa shared that feeling.

Keith was using a katook (Waldahud cutlery, like duck-billed pliers) to bring some starg to his mouth when a comm panel popped up from the table's surface, showing the face of Hek, the Waldahud alien-communications specialist.

"Rissa," he barked in a voice somewhat more Brook-lynish than Jag's; from the way the comm panel was angled, the Waldahud couldn't see Keith.

"I have been analyzing the radio noise we've been detecting near the twenty-one-centimeter band. You won't believe what I've found. Come to my office at once."

Keith put down his eating utensil, and looked across the table at his wife. "I'll join you," he said, and stood up to leave. As they made their way across the room, he realized it was the only thing he'd said to her during the entire meal.

Keith and Rissa got into an elevator. As always, a monitor on the cab's wall showed the current deck number and floor plan: "26," and a cross shape with long arms. As they rode up, and the deck numbers counted down, the arms of the cross grew shorter and shorter. By the time they reached deck one, the arms had almost completely retracted.

The two humans got out and entered the radio-astronomy listening room.

Hek, a small Waldahud with a hide much redder in color than Jag's, was leaning against a desk.

"Rissa, your presence is welcome"--the standard deference shown females.

A tilt of the head: "Lansing." The rude indifference reserved for males, even if they were your boss.

"Hek," said Keith, nodding in greeting.

The Waldahud looked at Rissa. "You know the radio noise we've been picking up?" His barking echoed in the tiny room.

Rissa nodded.

"Well, my initial analysis showed no repetition in it." He swiveled a pair of eyes to look at Keith. "When a signal is a deliberate beacon, it usually has a repeating pattern over a course of several minutes or hours. There's nothing like that at work here. Indeed, I've found no evidence of any overall pattern. But when I started analyzing the noise more minutely, patterns of one-second duration or less kept cropping up.

So far, I've cataloged six thousand and seventeen sequences. Some have only been repeated once or twice, but others have been repeated many times. Over ten thousand times, for a few of them."

"My God," said Rissa.

"What?" said Keith.

She turned to him. "It means that there might be information in the noise--it might be radio communications."

Hek lifted his upper shoulders. "Exactly. Each of the patterns could be a separate word. Those that occur most frequently could be common terms, maybe the equivalent of pronouns or prepositions."

"And where are these transmissions coming from?" asked Keith.

"Somewhere in or just behind the dark-matter field," said Hek.

"And you're sure they're intelligent signals?" asked Keith, his heart pounding.

Hek's lower shoulders moved this time. "No, I'm not sure.

For one thing, the transmissions are very weak. They wouldn't be discernible from background noise over any great distance.

But if I'm right that they're words, then there does appear to be some discernible syntax. No word is ever doubled. Certain words only appear at the beginning or end. of transmissions.

Some words only appear after certain other words. The former are possibly adjectives and adverbs, and the latter the nouns or verbs they are modifying, or vice versa." Hek paused. "Of course, I haven't analyzed all the signals, although I am recording them for future study.

It's a constant bombardment, on over two hundred frequencies that are very close to each other." He paused, letting this sink in.

"i'd say there's a good possibility that there's a fleet of craft hiding inside or just past the dark-matter field."

Keith was about to speak again when Hek's desk intercom bleeped.

"Keith, Lianne here."

"Open. Yes?"

"I think you'll want to come to the bridge. A watson has arrived with word that the boomerang has returned from shortcut Rehbollo 376A."

"On my way. Summon Jag, too, please. Close." He looked at Hek.

"Good work. See if you can narrow down the source of the signals further. I'll have Thor take Starplex in a circular path around the dark-matter field, scanning for tachyon emissions, radiation, thruster glow, or any other signs of alien ships."

Keith strode onto the bridge, Rissa right behind him. They moved to their workstations. "Trigger watson playback," said Keith.

Lianne pushed a button, and a full-motion video message appeared in a framed-off section of the holographic bubble.

The image was of a Waldahud male with a silvery-gray hide. PHANTOM

replaced the sound of the creature's barking with English words for the playback into Keith's ear implant, although, of course, they didn't fit the movements of the Waldahud's mouth.

"Greetings, Starplex." The status line at- the bottom of the screen identified the speaker as Kayd Pelendo em-Hooth of the Rehbollo Center for Astrophysics. "The boomerang sent to the shortcut designated Rehbollo 376A has returned. I suspect you'll want to stay where you are, investigating the shortcut you're at now, since its appearance on the network is unexplained. However, we thought Jag and others would be interested in seeing the recordings made by the boomerang just before returning home. They are appended to this message. I think you will find them . . . interesting."

"Okay, Rhombus," said Keith. "Use the data from the boomerang to create a spherical holo display around us.

Show us what it saw."

"A pleasure to serve," said Rhombus. "Downloading now; the display will be ready in two minutes, forty seconds."

Lianne rubbed her hands together. "It never rains but it pours," she said, turning' around and grinning at Keith. "Yet another new sector of space opened up for exploration!"

Keith nodded. "It never ceases to amaze me." He got up from his chair, and paced a little, waiting for the hologram to be prepared.

"You know," he said absently, "my great-great-grandfather kept a diary.

Just before he died, he wrote about all the great advancements he'd seen in his lifetime:

radio, the automobile, powered flight, spaceflight, lasers, computers, the discovery of DNA, and on and on." Lianne seemed rapt, although Keith was aware that he might be boring everyone else. To hell with them; rank hath its privileges, chief among them the right to ramble on.

"When I read that as a teenager, I figured I'd have nothing to write about for my own descendant when my life came to a close.

But then we invented hyperdrive and AI, and discovered the shortcut network, and extraterrestrial life, and learned to talk to dolphins, and I realized that--"

"Excuse me," said Rhombus, his lights flashing in the strobing pattern high species used to signal an interruption.

"the hologram is ready."

"Proceed," Keith said.

The bridge darkened as the image of Starplex's current surroundings was shut off, shrouding the room in featureless black. Then a new picture built up from left to right, scan line by scan line, washing over the bridge, until it seemed once again to be floating in space--the space of the newest sector to become accessible to the Commonwealth races.

Thor let out a long, low whistle.

Jag clicked his dental plates in disbelief.

Dominating the view, receding slowly, was another fiery green star, perhaps ten million kilometers from the shortcut point.

"I thought you said our green star was a freak," said Keith to Jag.

"That's the least of our worries," said Thor. He swung his feet off his console and turned to face Keith. "Our boomerang didn't activate that shortcut until it dived into it."

Keith looked at him blankly.

"And these pictures were taken before it did that."

Jag rose to his feet. "Ka-darg.t That means--"

"It means," said Keith, suddenly getting it, too, "that stars can emerge from dormant shortcuts. Christ, they could be popping out of all four billion portals throughout the Milky Way!"

That night, Keith was eating dinner alone. He loved to cook, but he also loved to have someone to cook for--and Rissa was working late this evening. She and Boxcar had finally had a breakthrough in their Hayflick-limit studies, or, at least, so it appeared. But they were having trouble replicating the results, and so she'd just had sandwiches sent up to her lab.

Keith sometimes wondered how he'd gotten the job as Starplex's head honcho. Oh, it made sense, of course. A sociologist was assumed to be good both at managing the miniature society aboard the ship and at dealing with any new civilizations they might encounter.

But right now, despite all that was going on, there was little for him to do beyond the administrative. Jag would continue his dark-matter studies, as well as trying to make sense of the onslaught of stars; Hek would try to further decode the potentially alien radio signals; Rissa would pursue her life-prolongation project. And Keith? Keith kept hoping a windmill somewhere would start tilting at him--kept hoping for something important to do.

He'd decided to dine in one of the Ib restaurants. Not for-the atmosphere, of course. With its almost billiard-ball-smooth surface, Flatland's landscapes, as depicted in the restaurant's holographic windows, were even less visually interesting than Rehbollo's; there was no doubt that when it came to interesting geography, Earth was the most beautiful of the homeworlds. But Ibese food was based on right-handed ammo acids; it was completely indigestible by the other three races.

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."