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  The New York accent again: "On my world, you would be the least significant member of the entourage of the ugliest, puniest female--"

  "Identify the speakers," Keith whispered.

  "The human is Hiroyuki Teshima, a biochemist," said PHANTOM through Keith's implant "The Waldahud is Gatt Daygaro em-Holf, a member of the engineering staff."

  Keith stood there, wondering what to do. They were both adults, and although they reported to him, they could hardly be said to be under his command. And yet-- Middle child. Keith stepped around the corridor.

  "Guys," he said evenly, "you want to cool it?"

  All four of the Waldahud's fists were clenched. Teshima's round face was flushed with anger. "Stay out of this, Lansing," said the human, in English.

  Keith looked at them. What could he do? There was no brig to throw them into, no particular reason why they had to listen to his orders about their personal affairs.

  "Maybe I could buy you a drink, Hiroyuki," said Keith.

  "And, Gart, perhaps you'd enjoy an extra leisure period this cycle?"

  "What I would enjoy," barked the Waldahud, "is seeing Teshima f'ued through a mass driver into a black hole."

  "Come on, guys," said Keith, stepping closer. "We've all got to live and work together."

  "I said stay out of this, Lansing," snapped Teshima. "It's none of your damned business."

  Keith felt his cheeks flushing. He couldn't order them apart, and yet he couldn't have people brawling in the corridors of his ship, either.

  He looked at the two of them--a short, middle-aged human, with hair the color of lead, and a fat, wide Waldahud, with fur the shade of oak wood.

  Keith didn't know either of them well, didn't know what it would take to placate them. Hell, he didn't even know what they were fighting about.

  He opened his mouth to say--to say something, anything--when a door slid open a few meters away, and a young woman--Cheryl Rosenberg, it was--appeared, wearing pajamas. "For Pete's sake, will you keep it down out here?" she said. "It's nighttime for some of us."

  Teshima looked at the woman, bowed his head slightly, and began to walk away. And Gatt, who likewise by nature was deferential to females, nodded curtly and moved in the other direction. Cheryl yawned, stepped back inside, and the door slid shut behind her.

  Keith was left standing there, watching the Waldahud's back recede down the corridor, angry with himself for not being able to deal with the situation. He rubbed his temples.

  We're all prisoners of biology, he thought. Teshima unable to turn down the request of a pretty woman; Gatt unable to disobey a female's orders.

  Once Gart had disappeared from sight, Keith headed down the cold, damp hallway. Sometimes, Keith thought, he'd give anything to be an alpha male.

  Rissa was sitting at her desk, doing the part of her job she hated--the administrative duties, the burden still called paperwork even though almost none of it was ever printed out.

  The door buzzer sounded, and PHANTOM said, "Boxcar is here."

  Rissa put down her input stylus and straightened her hair.

  Funny that, she thought--worrying about whether her hair was messy when the only one going to see it isn't even human. "Let her in."

  The Ib rolled in; PHANTOM slid the polychairs to one side to make room for her. "Please forgive my disturbing you, good Rissa," said the beautiful British voice.

  Rissa laughed. "Oh, you're not disturbing me, believe me. Any break is

  welcome."

  Boxcar's sensor web arched up like a ship's sail so that she could see onto Rissa's desktop. "Paperwork," she said.

  "It does look boring."

  Rissa smiled. "That it is. So, what can I do for you?"

  There was a long pause--unusual from an Ib. Then, finally, "i've come to give notice."

  Rissa looked at her blankly. "Notice?"

  Lights danced on her web. "Profound apologies, if that. is not the correct phrase. I mean to say that, with regret, I will no longer be able to work here, effective five days from now."

  Rissa felt her eyebrows lifting. "You're quitting? Resigning?"

  Lights played up the web. "Yes."

  "Why? I thought you were enjoying the senescence research. If you wish to be assigned to something else--"

  "It is not that, good Rissa. The research is fascinating and valuable, and you have honored me by letting me be a part of it. But in five days other priorities must take precedence."

  "What other priorities?"

  "Repaying a debt."

  "To whom?"

  "To other integrated bioentities. In five days, I must go."

  "Go where?"

  "No, not go. Go."

  Rissa exhaled, and looked at the ceiling. "PHANTOM, are you sure you're translating Boxcar's words correctly?"

  "I believe so, ma'am," said PHANTOM into her implant.

  "Boxcar, I don't understand the distinction you're making between 'go'

  and 'go,'" said Rissa.

  "I am not going someplace in the physical sense," said Boxcar. "I am going in the sense of exiting. I am going to die."

  "My God!" said Rissa. "Are you ill?"

  "No."

  "But you're not old enough to die. You've told me enough times that Ibs live to be exactly six hundred and forty-one. You're only a little over six hundred."

  Boxcat's sensor web changed to a salmon color, but whatever emotion that conveyed apparently had no terrestrial analog, since PHANTOM didn't preface the translation of her next words with a parenthetical comment.

  "I am six hundred and five, measured in Earth years. My span is about to be fifteen-sixteenths completed."

  Rissa looked at her. "Yes?"

  "For offenses committed in my youth, I have been assessed a penalty of one-sixteenth of my lifespan. I am to be ended next week."

  Rissa looked at her, unsure what to say. Finally, she settled for simply repeating the word "ended," as if perhaps it, too, had been mistranslated.

  "That is correct, good Rissa."

  She was quiet again for a moment. "What crime did you commit?"

  "It shames me to discuss it," said Boxcar.

  Rissa said nothing, waiting to see if the Ib would go on.

  She did not.

  "I've shared a lot of intimate information about myself and my marriage with you," said Rissa lightly. "i'm your friend, Boxcar."

  More silence; perhaps the Ib was wrestling with her own feelings. And then: "When I was a tertiary novice--a position somewhat similar to what you call a graduate student--I reported incorrectly the results of an experiment I was conducting."

  Rissa's eyebrows rose again. "We all make mistakes, Boxcar. I can't believe they'd punish you this severely for that."

  Boxcar's lights rippled in random patterns. Apparently, they were just signs of consternation; again, PHANTOM provided no verbal translation.

  Then: "The results were not accidentally misreported." The Ib's mantle was dark for several seconds. "I deliberately falsified the data."

  Rissa tried to keep her expression neutral. "Oh."

  "I did not think the experiment was of great significance, and I knew--thought I knew, anyway--what the results should be. In retrospect, I realize I only knew what I wanted them to be." Darkness; a pause. "In any event, other researchers relied upon my results.

  Much time was wasted."

  "And for this they're going to execute you?"

  All the lights on Boxcar's web came on at once--an expression of absolute shock. "It is not a summary execution, Rissa. There are only two capital crimes on Flatland:

  pod murder and forming a gestalt with more than seven components. My lifespan has simply been shortened."

  "But--but if you're six hundred and five now, how long ago did you commit this crime?"

  "I did it when I was twenty-four."

  "PHANTOM, what Earth year would that have been?"

  "^.). 1513, ma'am."

  "Good God!" said Rissa. "Boxcar, surely they can't pun
ish you for a minor offense committed that long ago."

  "The passage of time has not changed the impact of what I did."

  "But so long as you're aboard Starplex, you're protected by the Commonwealth Charter. You could claim asylum here. We could get you a lawyer."

  "Rissa, your concern touches me. But I am prepared to pay my debt."

  "But it was so long ago. Maybe they've forgotten."

  "Ibs cannot forget; you know that. Because matrices form in our pod brains at a constant rate, we all have eidetic memories. But even if my compatriots could forget, it would not matter. I am honor bound in this."

  "Why didn't you say anything about this earlier?"

  "My punishment did not require public acknowledgment; I was allowed to live without constant shame. But the terms under which I work here require me to give you five days' notice if I intend to leave. And so now, for the first time in five hundred and eighty-one years, I am telling someone of my crime." The Ib paused. "If it is acceptable, I will use the remaining days of my life putting our research in order so that you and others may continue it without difficulty."

  Rissa's head was swimming. "Um, yes," she said at last.

  "Yes, that would be fine."

  "Thank you," said Boxcar. She turned and started to roll toward the door, but then her web flashed once more. "You have been a good friend, Rissa."

  And then the door slid open, Boxcar rolled away, and Rissa slumped back in her chair, dumbfounded.

  Chapter XII

  Rissa came to the bridge, wanting to talk to Keith about Boxcar's announcement. But just as she was striding toward his workstation, Rhombus spoke up. "Keith, Jag, Rissa," he said, in his crisp, cool translated voice, "innumerable apologies for the interruption, but I think you should see this."

  "What is it?" said Keith.

  Rissa took a seat as Rhombus's ropes tickled his console.

  A section of the holo bubble became framed off in blue. "I wasn't paying enough attention to the real-time scans, I'm afraid," said the Ib, "but I've been reviewing the data we've been recording, and--well, watch this. This is a playback speeded up one thousand times. What you're going to see in the next six minutes took almost all of the time we've been here to occur."

  In the framed-off area was a dark-matter sphere, seen from almost directly above its equator. Actually, it wasn't anywhere near a perfect sphere: this one was flattened at the poles. Light and dark latitudinal cloud bands crossed its face.

  According to the scale bars, this was one of the largest spheres they'd found, measuring 172,000 kilometers in diameter.

  "Wait a minute," said Keith. "It's got cloud bands, yet it doesn't seem to be spinning at all."

  Rhombus's web twinkled. "I hope the truth does not prove embarrassing, good Keith, but in fact, it's spinning faster than any other sphere we've yet observed. At this point, it's rotating on its axis once every two hours and sixteen minutes--almost five times as fast as Jupiter revolves. The speed is so great that any normal turbulence in the clOUds has been smoothed out.

  And in this speeded-up playback, the image you're seeing is rotating every eight seconds." Rhombus snaked out a rope and flicked a control.

  "Here, let me have the computer put a reference mark on the equator.

  See that orange dot? It's at an arbitrary zero degrees of longitude."

  The orange spot whipped across the equator, disappeared around back, reappeared four seconds later, and traversed the visible face again.

  After a few cycles, Jag barked out, "Are you increasing the playback speed?"

  "No, good Jag," said Rhombus. "Speed is constant."

  Jag gestured at the digital clocks. "But that dot of yours took only seven seconds to go around that time."

  "Indeed," said Rhombus. "The sphere's actual rate of rotation is increasing."

  "How can that be?" asked Keith. "Are other bodies interacting with it?"

  "Well, yes, the other spheres are all having an effect on it--but that's not the cause of what we're seeing," said Rhombus. "The increased rotation is internally generated."

  Jag's head was bent down to his console, running quickie computer models. "You can't get increased spin unless you pump energy into the system. There must be some complex reactions going on inside the sphere, ultimately fueled by some outside source, and--" He looked up, and let out a high-pitched bark, which PHANTOM translated as "Expression of astonishment."

  In the blue framed-off area, the dark-matter object had started-to pinch in at its equator. The northern and southern halves were no longer perfect hemispheres, but rather they curved in a little before they joined each other. The orange reference dot was now whipping around the smaller waist even faster than before.

  As the sphere continued to rotate with increasing speed, the pinching-off became more and more pronounced. Soon the profile of the object had taken on a figure-eight shape.

  Rissa rose to her feet, and stood staring, mouth agape.

  The equator was now so narrow that the orange dot covered almost a quarter of its width. Rhombus touched some keys and the dot disappeared, replaced by separate orange dots on the equators of each of the two joined spheres.

  The view in the frame went dark. "Please forgive this," said Rhombus.

  "Another dark-matter sphere moved into our line of sight, obscuring the view. At this playback speed, we lose the picture for about fourteen seconds. Let me jump past that,"

  Ropes touched the ExOps console. When the image reappeared, the two spheres were joined by only about a tenth of the original globe's diameter. Everyone watched, rapt, silence broken only by the gentle whir of the air-conditioning equipment, as the process reached its inevitable conclusion. The two spheres broke free from each other.

  One immediately started curving toward the bottom of the frame; the other, toward the top. As they distanced themselves from each other, the orange reference dots on each of their equators began to take longer and longer to complete their paths--the rotation was slowing down.

  Rissa turned to face Keith, her eyes wide. "It's like a cell," she, said. "A cell undergoing mitosis."

  "Exactly," said Rhombus. "Except that in this case, the mother cell is some hundred and seventy thousand kilometers in diameter. Or, at least it was before this started happening."

  Keith cleared his throat. "Excuse me," he said. "Are you trying to tell me that those things out there are alive? That they're living cells?"

  "I finally saw the recordings Jag's atmospheric probe had made," said Rissa. "Remember that blimplike object it saw as it went into the atmosphere? I'd idly thought that it might be an individual life-form--a gasbag creature, floating in the clouds. Earth scientists in the 1960s proposed just such life-forms for Jupiter. But such blimps could just as easily be organelles--discrete components within a larger cell."

  "Living beings," said Keith, incredulous. "Living beings almost two hundred thousand kilometers in size?"

  Rissa's voice was still full of awe. "Perhaps. In which case, we've just seen one of them reproduce."

  "Incredible," said Keith, shaking his head. "I mean, we aren't just talking about giant creatures. And we aren't just talking about life-forms living freely in open space. We're talking about living beings made of dark matter." He turned to his left. "Jag, is that even possible?"

  "Possible that dark matter--or some portion of it--is alive?" The Waldahud shrugged all four shoulders. "Much of our science and philosophy tell us that the universe should be teeming with life. And yet, so far, we've only found three worlds on which life has arisen.

  Perhaps we've just been looking in the wrong places. Neither Dr.

  Delacorte nor I has yet figured out much about dark-matter meta-chemistry, but there are lots of complex compounds in those spheres."

  Keith spread his arms in an appeal for basic common sense, and looked around the bridge, trying to find someone else as lost by all this as he was.

  And then an even bigger thought hit him, and he leaned back in his ch
air for a moment. Then he touched his comm control panel, selecting a general channel. "Lansing to Hek," he said.

  A hologram of Hek's head appeared in a second framed-off part of the starscape. "Hek here."

  "Any luck pinpointing the sources of those radio transmissions?"

  Keith imagined the Waldahud's lower shoulders moving outside the camera's field of view. "Not yet."

  "You said there were over two hundred separate frequencies upon which you were finding apparently intelligent signals."

  "That's right."

  "HOW many? Exactly how many?"

  Hek's face turned to a profile view, showing his projecting snout, as he consulted a monitor. "Two hundred and seventeen," he said.

  "Although some are much more active than others."

  Keith heard Jag, on his left, repeat the same bark of astonishment he'd made earlier.

  "There are," said Keith slowly, "precisely two hundred and seventeen separate Jupiter-sized objects out there." He paused, backtracking away from his own conclusion. "Of course, gas-giant worlds like Jupiter are often sources of radio emissions."

  "But these are spheres of dark matter," said Lianne.

  "They're electrically neutral."

  "They are not pure dark matter," said Jag. "They're permeated with bits of regular matter. The dark matter Could interact with protons in the regular matter through the strong nuclear force, thereby generating EM

  signals."

  Hek lifted his upper shoulders. "That might work," he said. "But each sphere is broadcasting on its own separate frequency, almost like .

  .

  ." The Brooklyn-accented voice trailed off.

  Keith looked at Rissa, and could see that she was thinking the same thing. He lifted his eyebrows. "Almost like separate voices," he said at last, finishing the thought.

  "But there aren't two hundred and seventeen objects anymore," said Thor, turning around. "There are two hundred and eighteen now."

  Keith nodded. "Hek, do another inventory of signals. See if there's new activity at a frequency just above or just below the block of frequencies you've identified as being active."