Starplex (34 page)

"Gently," said Jag, under his breath, watching his hyperspace map.

"Gently."

The pocket continued to grow more and more flat. Great care had to be taken not to flatten out the darmat's own gravity well: if the effects of the baby's own mass were suppressed--which, after all, was what was holding it together--it would lose cohesion, and expand like a balloon.

The buoys' output continued to grow and the curvature of spacetime continued to diminish, until, until-- Flatness, like a plateau jutting from the side of the well.

It was as if the darmat were in interstellar space, not spitting distance from a star.

"Isolation complete," said Jag. "Now let's get it out of there."

"Activating hyperdrives," said Longbottle.

The antigrav buoys made up points on a sphere around the baby, but now, as their individual hyperspace field generators came on, that whole sphere seemed to mirror over, as if it were a glob of mercury floating freely in space.

In a matter of seconds, the glob shrank to nothingness and disappeared.

The buoys were preprogrammed to move the darmat baby away from the blue star as fast as possible. The PDQ was waiting near the point at which the darmat should emerge from hyperspace, far enough from the star that the hyper-drive field should collapse without difficulty.

The Rum Runner set out for the same location, traveling under thruster power. As they passed near the shortcut point, a radio message from Melondent came through, blueshifted because of the Rum Runner's acceleration toward her ship.

"PDQ to Longbottle and Jag. Arrived has darmat baby; popped into normal space it did right in front of my eyes.

Hyperdrive field collapse uneventful was. But baby shows still no signs of life, and responds does not to my hails."

Jag's fur moved pensively. No one had known for sure whether the baby would survive unprotected during its brief journey through hyperspace.

Even if it had been alive beforehand, that might have killed it.

Maddeningly, there was no way to tell.

The space-flattening technique Was risky. Rather than use it themselves so that Longbottle could engage the Rum Runner's hyperdrive, they flew out to their rendezvous with the PDQ under thruster power.

To fill the time, and to get his mind off of the fate of the baby, Jag spoke with Longbottle, who, to his credit, was piloting the ship in an absolutely straight line.

"You dolphins," said Jag, "like the humans."

"Mostly," said Longbottle in high-pitched Waldahudar.

He let the piloting drones disengage from his fins, and put the ship on automatic.

"Why?" barked Jag sharply. "I have read Earth history.

They polluted the oceans you swam in, captured you and put you in tanks, caught you in fishing nets."

"No one of them has done any of that to me," said Longbottle.

"No, but--"

"It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one."

"But surely once they discovered you were intelligent, they should have treated you better."

"Humans discovered intelligent we were before we discovered that they-were."

"What?" said Jag. "But surely it was obvious. They had built cities and roads, and--"

"Saw none of that."

"No, I suppose not. But they sailed in boats, they built nets, they wore clothes."

"None of those were meaningful to us. We had of such things no concept; nothing to compare them to. Mollusk grows a shell; humans have clothes of fabric. The mollusk's covering is stronger. Should judged we have the mollusk more intelligent? You say humans built things. We had no concept of building. We knew not they made the boats. We thought perhaps boats alive were, or had once been alive.

Some tasted like driftwood, others ejected chemicals. into the water, just as living things do. An achievement, to ride on the back of boats?

We thought humans were like remoras to the shark."

"But--"

They our intelligence did not see. They looked right at us and see it did not. And we looked at them and did not see theirs."

"But after you discovered their intelligence, and they yours, you must have realized they had been mistreating you."

"Yes, some in the past mistreated us. Humans do generalize, they blamed themselves. Learned have I since that concept of ancestral guilt--original sin--is to many of their beliefs central. There were cases in human court to determine compensation due to dolphins. This made to us no sense."

"But you get along with humans now, which is something my people are having trouble managing. How do you do it?"

Longbottle barked, "Accept their weaknesses, welcome their strengths."

Jag was silent.

Finally, the Rum Runner reached its destination, 1.3 billion kilometers from the star, and a billion kilometers past the shortcut. Jag and Melondent consulted by radio about the exact trajectory they wanted to launch the darmat child on, then the gravitational buoys were activated again, pushing and pulling the world-sized being, which, as planned, started to fall in toward the star, sliding back down the gravity well it had earlier been whisked out of. But this time, the shortcut point was in between the darmat and the star; this time, if all went well, the Child would touch the shortcut, its approach to it speeded somewhat by the attraction of the star's gravity beyond.

Even at full thrusters, it took more than a day for the buoys to bring the darmat back in to the vicinity of the shortcut. Melondent popped a watson through to Starplex, warning them that, if all went well, the baby was about to reemerge on their side.

When they did get close to the shortcut, the buoys fought to slow down the baby's speed so that it would pass slowly through the portal. The whole-rescue effort would be for naught if the darmat ended up whipping in toward the green star near Starplex. Once it had been braked to a reasonable speed, they adjusted the baby's trajectory so that it would pass through the tachyon sphere on the precise course required.

First to pass through the shortcut were some Of the gravity buoys, then, at last, the baby itself touched it. The point began to swell, widening, enveloping the darmat, lips of purple lightning surrounding, then engulfing, the giant black sphere. Jag wondered what was going through the darmat's mind during the passage, assuming it was still alive.

And if it was alive, and did at some point regain whatever passed for consciousness, then, Jag wondered, what if it panicked? What if it was unable to make sense out of being partly in one sector of space and partly in another? It might grind its own passage to a halt. If the beast were to expire there, halfway through the shortcut, there might be no way to dislodge it. The shortcut opening formed a tight seal around the passing body, so no coordination of the use of gravity generators on both sides would be possible. And that would mean that the Rum Runner and the PDQ might be trapped forever here, out on the edge of the Perseus arm, tens of thousands of light-years from any of the home-worlds.

The darmat was deforming a bit as it moved through the opening, the shortcut's periphery clamping down on it. Such clamping was normal, and the effect on rigid spaceships was negligible, but the darmat was mostly gas--exotic, luster-quark gas to be sure, but still gas. Jag feared the baby would be cleaved in two--similar to the normal birthing process, but possibly fatal when done unexpectedly. But it seemed the creamre's core was sufficiently solid to prevent the shortcut from pinching all the way through.

At .last, the darmat completed its passage. The shortcut collapsed down to its normal dimensionless existence. Jag wanted Longbottle to immediately dive through the shortcut so that they could see the result of all their efforts. But they, and Melondent aboard the PDQ; had to wait for hours to be sure the darmat had moved far enough from the shortcut so that a collision--or just tidal stress from its enormous gravity--wouldn't destroy their ships when they popped through to the other side.

At last, after a probe had indicated it was safe to go through, Longbottle programmed the computer to take them home. The Rum Runner moved forward. The shortcut swelled, and they passed through to the other side.

It took Jag a few moments to take in all that he was seeing. The baby was there, all right. And so was Starplex.

But Starplex was surrounded on all sides by darmats, and the ship itself looked dead, all the lights in its windows dark.

The shortcut point began to expand, starting as a violet pinprick of Soderstrom radiation, and growing as an ever-expanding purple ring.

First to pop through was one of Starplex's hastily constructed antigravity buoys, and then another and another. They zoomed across the sky like bullets. They'd been tugging the darmat baby, but since they came through the portal before it did, they were severed from its mass and so shot ahead. Soon, though, the bulk of the darmat baby began its passage, bulging out through the ring of purple in the sky.

On Starplex's bridge Thoraid Magnor let loose a great cheer, and it was echoed by hundreds of others from all over the ship, as everyone watched the spectacle either through a window or on a viewscreen.

Cat's Eye and a dozen other adult darmats moved closer to the shortcut, calling out to the baby. Over the bridge speakers, PHANTOM played a translation of what Cat's

Eye was saying, but many of the words were missing; the leader of the darmats was not limiting his vocabulary to the few hundred words Rissa and Hek had learned. "Come forward... forward... toward.. you are...

we...

come... hurry... do not... forward... forward "

Rhombus was using the deck-one array to monitor the emerging baby, but so far it hadn't transmitted a word of its own, at least not on any frequency even close to the twenty-one-centimeter band.

Lianne Karendaughter was shaking her head. "It's not moving at all under its own volition," she said. "It must be dead."

Keith ground his teeth together. If it was dead, all this was for nothing-- "It's possible," he said, at last, trying as much to convince himself as Lianne, "that a single darmat can't move on its own. They may need to play off each other's gravity and repulsion. The baby may not yet be far enough out for that."

"Forward," said Cat's Eye. "Forward . . come . . you . . .

forward."

Keith had never heard of anyone trying so slow a passage through a shortcut before--there was an unspoken sense that one should hurry through, that to tarry would be tempting fate, lest the magic of the thing fail.

At last the baby completed its passage. The shortcut collapsed, although, moments later, it opened slightly several times as additional antigrav buoys popped through from the other side.

The darmat child was moving away from the shortcut, but only under momentum. It had not yet-"Where...

where..."

Still a French-accented voice, but, in a stroke of rare creativity, PHANTOM had chosen a child's tones for this translation.

"Home . . back . . ."

Thor let loose another thunderous cheer. "It's alive!"

Keith found his eyes misting over. Lianne was openly crying.

"It's alive!" Thor shouted again.

The darmat baby did, finally, begin to move, heading toward Cat's Eye and the others.

The speakers changed back to the voice PHANTOM had assigned to Cat's Eye. "Cat's Eye to Starplex," it said.

Keith keyed his mike. "Starplex responding," he said.

Cat's Eye was quiet longer than the round-trip signal time would have required, as if he was searching for a way to express what he wanted to say using the limited vocabulary available. Finally, simply, he said,

"We are friends."

Keith felt himself grinning from ear to ear. "Yes," he said.

"We are friends."

"The child's vision is damaged," said Cat's Eye. "It will . . .

become equal to one again, but time is required.

Time, and absence of light. Green star is bright; not here when child left."

Keith nodded. "We can build another shield, to protect the baby from the green star's light."

"More," said Cat's Eye. "You."

Keith was momentarily puzzled. "Oh--of course. Li-anne, kill all our running lights, and, after warning people, douse the lights in all rooms with windows. If people want to put their lights back on, tell them to draw the shades first."

Lianne's beautiful face was split by a wide smile. "Doing SO."

Starplex went dark, and the darmat community moved toward the great ship and their newly returned child.

The Rum Runner popped through the shortcut, followed moments later by the PDQ. Radio communication soon assured their crews that Starplex was all right, and the ships curved in toward the docking bays. As soon as the Rum Runner was safely aboard, Jag headed for the bridge.

Keith was still talking to Cat's Eye when Jag entered the bridge. The director turned to the Waldahud. 'qhank you, Jag. Thank you very much."

Jag nodded his head, accepting the comment.

The voice of Cat's Eye came over the speakers. "We to you an incorrect," he said.

A wrong, thought Keith. They did us wrong.

"You into point that is not a point had to move with high speed."

"Oh, it wasn't so bad," said Keith, ever the diplomat, into the mike.

"Because of that we got to see our group of hundreds of millions of stars."

"We call such a group a"--PHANTOM translated the new signal--" galaxy."

"You have a word for galaxy?" said Keith, surprised.

"Correct. Many stars, isolated."

"Right," said Keith. "Well, the shortcut put us six billion light-years from here. That meant we were seeing our galaxy as it looked six billion years ago."

"Understand looking back."

"You do?"

"Do."

Keith was impressed. "Well, it was fascinating. Six billion years ago, the Milky Way didn't have its current shape. Um, I guess you don't know this, but it's currently shaped like a spiral." A light flashed on Keith's console, PHANTOM notifying him that he'd just used a word for which there was as yet no darmat equivalent in the translation database.