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  Once they were inside, Rissa spoke--and Keith could hear in her voice that said she was speaking against her better judgment. "You're quite fond of her, aren't you?"

  Keith weighed all the possible answers. He had too much respect for Rissa's intelligence to try to get away with saying, "Who?" After a moment's hesitation, he decided simple honesty was the best policy.

  "She's bright, charming, beautiful, and good at her job. What's not to like?"

  "She's twenty-seven," said Rissa, as if that were an indictable offense.

  wenty-seven! thought Keith. Well, there it was. A concrete number.

  But--twenty-seven. Jesus Christ . . He took off his shoes and socks, and lay down on the couch, letting his feet air out.

  Rissa sat down opposite him. Her face was a study in thought, as if she were deciding whether to pursue the topic further. Evidently she chose not to, and instead changed the subject. "Boxcar came to see me today."

  Keith wriggled his toes. "Oh?"

  "She's quitting."

  "Really? Got a better offer somewhere else?"

  Rissa shook her head. "She's going to discorporate next week. She was assessed a penalty of one sixteenth of her lifespan because she wasted some people's time almost six hundred years ago."

  Keith was quiet for a few moments. "Oh."

  "You don't sound surprised," said Rissa.

  "Well, I've heard of the procedure. Never quite made sense to me, the way Ibs are so obsessive about wasted time.

  I mean, they live for centuries."

  "To them, it's just a normal lifespan. They don't think of it as inordinately long, of course." A pause. "You can't let her go through with it."

  Keith spread his arms. "I don't know that I have any choice."

  "Dammit, Keith. The execution is to take place here, aboard Starplex.

  Surely you have jurisdiction."

  "Over ship's business, sure. Over this, well . . ." He looked up at the ceiling. "PHANTOM, what powers do I have in this area?"

  "Under the Articles of Commonwealth Jurisprudence, you are obliged to recognize all sentences imposed by the individual member governments,"

  said PHANTOM. "The Ib practice of exacting penalties equal to a portion of the standard lifespan is specifically excluded from the section of the articles that deals with cruel and unusual punishment.

  Given that, you have no power to interfere."

  Keith spread his arms, and looked at Rissa. "Sorry."

  "But what she did was so minor, so insignificant."

  "You said she fudged some data?"

  "That's right, when she was a student. A stupid thing to do, granted, but--"

  "You know how the Ibs feel about wasted time, Rissa. I imagine others relied on her results, right?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "Look, the Ibs come from a planet that's perpetually shrouded in cloud.

  You can't see the stars or their moons from the surface, and their sun is only a bright smudge behind the clouds. Despite that, by studying tides in those shallow puddles that pass for oceans there, they managed to work out the existence of their moons. They even managed to deduce the existence of other stars and planets, all before any of them had ever traveled above their atmosphere. The things they've figured out would have been impossible for humans, I bet. It's only because they live for such a long time that they were able to puzzle them through; a shorter-lived race on such a world would probably never have realized that there was a universe out there. But to accomplish what they have, they have to be able to trust each other's observations and results.

  It all falls apart if someone is monkeying with the data."

  "But no one could possibly still care about what she did after all this time. And--and I need her. She's an important part of my staff. And she's my friend."

  Keith spread his arms. "What would you have me do?"

  "Talk to her. Tell her she doesn't have to go through with this."

  Keith scratched his left ear. "All right," he said, at last.

  "All right."

  Rissa smiled at him. "Thank you. I'm sure she'll--" The intercom chimed. "Coloresso to Lansing," said a woman's voice. Franca Coloresso was the delta-shift InOps officer.

  Keith tipped his head up. "Open. Keith here. What is it, Franca?"

  "A watson has come through from Tau Ceti, with a news report I think you should see. It's old news, in a way--sent from Sol to Tau Ceti by hyperspace radio sixteen days ago.

  As soon as Grand Central received it, they relayed it to us."

  "Thanks. Pipe it down to my wall monitor, please."

  "Doing so. Close."

  Keith and Rissa both turned to face the wall. It was the BBC World Service, being read by an East Indian man with steel-gray hair.

  "Tensions," he said, "continue between two of the Commonwealth governments. On one side: the United Nations of Sol, Epsilon Indi, and Tau Ceti. On the other, the Royal Government of Rehbollo. Rumors of further deterioration in the situation were fueled today by the terse announcement that Rehbollo is closing three more embassies--New York, Paris, and Tokyo. Coupled with the four other closings a week ago, this leaves only the Ottawa and Brussels embassies open in all of Sol system.

  The consular staffs from the embassies closed today have already departed on Waldahud starships for the Tau Ceti shortcut."

  The view cut to a beefy Waldahud face. The super at the bottom of the screen identified him as Plenipotentiary Daht Lasko em-Wooth. He spoke in English, without aid of a translator--a rare feat for a member of his race. "It's with great regret that economic necessity has forced us into this move. As you know, the economies of all the Commonwealth races have been thrown into disarray by the unexpected development of interstellar commerce. Reducing the number of our embassies on Earth simply represents .an adjustment to the times."

  The screen changed to show a middle-aged African woman, identified as Rita Negesh, Earth-Wald Political Scientist, Leeds University. "I don't buy that--not for a minute," she said. "If you ask me, Rehbollo is recalling its ambassadors."

  "As a prelude to what?" asked an off-camera male voice.

  Negesh spread her arms. "Look, when humanity first moved out into space, all the pundits said the universe is so big and so bountiful, there was no possibility of material conflict between .separate worlds.

  But the shortcut network changed all that; it forced us up close with other races, perhaps before we or they were ready."

  "And so?" said the unseen questioner again.

  "And so," said Negesh, "if we are moving toward an . . . an incident, it may not just be over economic issues. It may be something more basic--the simple fact that humans and Waldahudin get on each others'

  nerves."

  The wall monitor changed back to the holegram of Lake Louise. Keith looked at Rissa, and let out a long sigh. "An 'incident,'" he said, repeating the word. "Well, at least we're both too old to be drafted."

  Rissa looked at him for a long moment. "I think that makes no difference," she said, at last. "I think we're already at the front lines."

  Chapter XIV

  Keith always enjoyed taking an elevator to the docking bays. The car dropped down to deck thirty-one, the uppermost of the ten decks that made up the central disk. It then began a horizontal journey along one of the four spokes that radiated out from there to the outer edge of the disk. But the spokes were transparent, as were the elevator cab's walls and floors, and so the passengers were treated to a view looking down on the vast circular ocean. Keith could see the dorsal fins of three dolphins swimming along just below the surface. Agitators in the ocean walls and central shaft produced respectable half-meter waves; dolphins preferred that to a calm sea. The radius of the ocean deck was ninety-five meters; Keith was always staggered by the amount of water contained there. The roof was a real-time hologram of Earth's sky, with towering white clouds moving against a background of that special shade of blue that always tugged at Keith's heart.

  The elevator final
ly reached the edge of the ocean and passed through into the prosaic tunnels of the engineering torus. Once it came to the outer edge of the torus, it descended the nine levels to the floor of the docking bays.

  Keith disembarked, and walked the short distance to the entrance to bay nine. As soon as he entered, he saw Hek, the symbolic-communications specialist, and a slim human named Shahinshah Azmi, the head of the material-sciences department. Between them was a black cube measuring a meter on a side. The cube was resting on a pedestal that brought it up to eye level. Keith walked over to them.

  "Good day, sir," said the ever-polite Azmi, in a flat voice.

  Keith knew from old movies how musical Indian accents used to be; he missed the rich variety that human voices had had before instantaneous communications had smoothed out all the differences. Azmi gestured at the cube. "We've built the time capsule out of graphite composite with a few radioactives added. It's solid except for the self-repairing hyperspatial sensor, which will lock onto the shortcut, and the starlight-powered ACS system for helping the cube hold position relative to it."

  "And what about the message for the future?" asked Keith.

  Hek pointed to one of the cube's sides. "We've incised it into the cube's faces," he said, his barking echoing in the bay. "It begins on this side. As you can see, it consists of a series of boxed examples.

  Two dots plus two dots equals four dots; a question with its answer.

  The second box, here, has two dots plus two dots, and a symbol. Since any arbitrary symbol would do, we just used the English question mark, but without the separate dot underneath; that might confuse one into thinking it was two symbols rather than one. Anyway, that gives us a question and a symbolic representation of the fact that the answer is missing. The third box shows the question symbol, the symbol I've established for 'equals,' and four dots, the answer. So that box says,

  "The answer to the question is four. Do you see?"

  Keith nodded.

  "Now," continued Hek, "having established a vocabulary for our dialogue, we can ask our real question." He waddled around to the opposite side of the cube, which was also incised with markings.

  "As you can see," said Hek, "we have two similar boxes here. The first one has a graphic representation of the shortcut, with a star emerging Ifrom it. See that scale mark showing the width of the star, and the series of horizontal and vertical lines beneath? That's a binary representation of the star's diameter in units of the box's width, in case there's any confusion about what the image represents. And then there's the equals symbol, and the question symbol. So it says,

  'shortcut with star emerging from it equals what?' And beneath it is the question symbol, the equals symbol, and a large blank space: "The answer to the above question is . . ." and a space implying that we want a reply."

  Keith nodded slowly. "Clever. Good work, gentlemen."

  Azmi pointed to one of the cube's other faces. "On this face, we've incised information about the periods and relative positions of fourteen different pulsars. If the shortcut makers in the future--or whoever it is who finds this--have records going back this far in time, they'll be able to identify the specific year in which the cube was created from that information."

  "Beyond that," said Hek, "they might also assume, quite reasonably, that the cube had been created shortly after the green star emerged from this shortcut--and presumably they'll know what date they sent that star back to, as well.

  In other words, they've got two independent ways of determining when to send any reply back to."

  "And this will work?" Keith asked.

  "Oh, probably not," said Azmi, smiling. "It's just a bottle in the ocean. I don't seriously expect any results, but I suppose it's worth a try. Still, as Dr. Magnor has told me, if we don't get a good explanation, and if we decided the stars are a threat, we can use the Waldahud space-flattening technique to evaporate the shortcuts.

  Granted, stars may be popping out of thousands of exit points, so we probably can't do much to stop them. But if they know we have the capability to interfere to some degree, perhaps they'll provide an explanation rather than have us do that."

  "Very good," said Keith. "But what will make the cube conspicuous?

  How can you be sure someone will find it?"

  "That's the hardest part of all," barked Hek. "There are only a few ways to get something to stand out. One is to make it reflective. But no matter what we make this box out of, it will have to endure perhaps ten billion years of scouring by interstellar dust. Granted, that's only a few microscopic impacts per century, but the net effect over that much time would be to dull any reflective surface.

  "The second possibility we'd considered was to make the time capsule big--so that it's eye-catching; or heavy--so.

  that it warps spacetime. But the bigger you make it, the more likely it is to be destroyed by a meteor collision.

  "The final possibility was to make it loud--you know, by broadcasting a radio signal. But that requires a power source. Of course, right now the green star is close by, and we can use simple solar cells to generate electricity from it, but the star has a respectable proper motion relative to the shortcut. In just a few thousand years, it'll be a full light-year from here, much too far away to provide significant power. And any internal power source we use would exhaust its fuel, or have most of its radioactives decay to lead, long before the target date."

  Keith nodded. "But you said you were using starlight converted to electricity to power the attitude-control system?"

  "Yes. But there's almost no spare power for a beacon of any sort.

  We're just going to have to assume that whoever built the shortcuts will have detectors that will find the cube regardless."

  "And if they don't?"

  Hek moved all four shoulders up and down in a shrug. "If they don't--well, we've hardly lost much by trying."

  "All right," said Keith. "It looks good to me. Is this a prototype, or the actual time capsule?"

  "We'd intended it as just a prototype, but everything came together perfectly," said Azmi. "! say we might as well go ahead and use this one."

  Keith turned to Hek. "What about you?"

  The Waldahud barked once. "I concur."

  "Very well," said Keith. "How do you propose to launch it?"

  "Well, it has nothing but ACS jets," said Azmi. "And I don't dare put it out there on its own with those dark-matter creatures swarming around; it would probably get sucked into their gravity. But we've already seen that the dark-matter beings have some mobility, so I'm assuming they won't be in this exact spot forever. I've programmed a standard payload carrier to take the cube away from here, but come back in a hundred years and dump it about twenty klicks from the shortcut.

  After that, the time capsule's own ACS jets should be able to hold it in place relative to the exit point."

  "Excellent," said Keith. "Is the launcher ready, too?"

  Azmi nodded.

  "Can you launch it from down here?"

  "Of course."

  "Let's do so, then."

  The three of them exited the bay, and took a lift up to the docking control room, which had angled windows that overlooked the interior of the cavernous hangar. Azmi took a seat in front of a console and began operating controls.

  Under his command, a motorized flatbed rolled into the bay, carrying a cylindrical payload carrier. Mechanical arms mated the cube to the clamps on the front of the Carrier.

  "Depressurizing the bay," said Azmi.

  Shimmering forcefield sheets started to close in from three of the four walls and the floor and ceiling, forcing the air in the bay out through vents in the rear wall. When all the air had been swept up and compressed into tanks, the forcefield sheets collapsed, leaving an interior vacuum.

  "Opening space door," Azmi said, operating another control. The segmented curving outer wall began to slide up into the ceiling.

  Blackness became visible, but the glare of the bay's internal lighting wash
ed out the stars.

  Azmi touched some more buttons. "Activating time-capsule electronics."

  He then tapped a key, initiating a preprogrammed sequence for the tractor-beam emitter mounted on the rear bay wall. The payload carrier lifted off the flatbed, flew over the floor plates, passed the spindly form of a repair skiff that was parked inside the bay, and headed out into space.

  "Powering up carrier," said Azmi. The cylinder's end lit up with the glow of thrusters, and the contraption rapidly receded from view.

  "And that," said Azmi, "is that."

  "Now what?" asked Keith.

  Azmi shrugged. "Now just forget about it. Either this will work, or it won't--probably won't."

  Keith nodded. "Excellent work, guys. Thank you. It's--"

  "Rissa to Lansing," said a voice over the speakers.

  Keith looked up. "Open. Hi, Rissa."

  "Hi, hon. We're ready to take our first whack at communicating with the dark-matter creatures."

  "I'm on my way. Close." He smiled at Azmi and Hek.

  "Sometimes, you know, my staff is almost too efficient."

  Keith rode up to the bridge and took his seat in the center of the back row. The holographic bubble was filled not with the normal space view but rather with red circles against a pale white background, a plot of the locations of the dark-matter spheres.

  "Okay," said Rissa. "We're going to try communicating with the dark-matter beings using radio and visual signals.

  We've deployed a special probe that will do the actual signaling. It's located about eight light-seconds off the starboard side of the ship; I'm going to operate it by comm laser. Of course, the dark-matter beings may already have detected our presence, but, then again, they may not have.

  And just in case the dark-matter beings turn out to be the Slammers, or something equally nasty, it seems prudent to have their attention drawn to an expendable probe rather than Starplex itself."

  "'Dark-matter beings,'" repeated Keith. "That's a bit of a mouthful, no? Surely we can come up with a better name for them."