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  The whole thing--spheres and surrounding fog--looked like assorted steel ball bearings rolling around in a pile of black silk stockings.

  How do they-- barked Jag, and Keith immediately knew what he was going to say. How could world-sized objects be packed so closely together?

  There were perhaps ten diameters between the closest of the objects, and fifteen or so between the ones that were least tightly packed.

  Keith couldn't imagine any pattern of stable orbits that would keep them from collapsing together under their own gravitational attraction.

  If this was a natural grouping, it seemed unlikely that it could be an old one. Throwing some light on the subject had only made the mystery deeper.

  Chapter IV

  On Earth, cells contain mitochondria for converting food to energy, undulopodia (thrashing tails including those that propel sperm), and, in plants, plastids for storing chlorophyll.

  The ancestors of these organelles were originally independent free-swimming creatures. They came together in symbiosis with a host being whose DNA is now walled off in the nucleus; to this day, some organelles still contain vestigial DNA of their own.

  On Flatland, diverse ancestors also learned to work together, but on a much grander scale. An Ib was actually a combination of seven large life-forms--indeed, "Ib" is short for "integrated bioentity."

  The seven parts are the pod, the watermelon-shaped creature containing the supersaturated solution in which the crystals of the principal brain grow; the pump, the digestive/respiratory structure that surrounds the pod like a blue sweatshirt tied around a green pot belly, with tubular arms hanging down for feeding and excreting; the twin wheels, fleshy hoops coated with quartz; the frame, a saddle-shaped gray construct that provides axles for the wheels and anchor points for the other elements; the bundle, sixteen copper-colored ropes that normally form a heap in front of the pump but can snake out as needed; and the web, a sensor net that covers the pump, pod, and upper frame.

  The web has an eye and a bioluminescent dot wherever two or more of its strands intersect. Although they have no speech organs, Ibs hear as well as terrestrial dogs do, and they accept with good humor spoken names bestowed by members of other races. Starplex's ExOps manager was Rhombus; Snowflake was senior geologist; Vendi (short for Venn Diagram) was a hyperdrive engineer; and Boxcar--well, Boxcar was the biochemist with whom Rissa was collaborating on the most important project in history.

  In 1972, Earth's Club of Rome began preaching the limits of growth.

  But with all of space now at humanity's fingertips, there were no more constraints. To hell with the textbook 2.3 children. If you wanted 2*10^3 kids, there was room enough for all of them--and for you, too.

  The argument that individuals had to die in order to allow the race to advance no longer applied.

  Boxcar and Rissa were trying to increase the lifespans of the Commonwealth races. The problem was daunting; so much of how life worked still remained mysterious. Rissa doubted that the riddle of aging would be solved in her lifetime, although within a century someone would likely find the key. The irony was not lost on her: Clarissa Cervantes, senescence researcher, probably belonged to the final human generation that would know death.

  The average human lifespan was a hundred Earth years; Waldahudin lived to be about forty-five (the fact that they were self-sufficient after only six years didn't quite compensate for the shortness of their span; some humans thought the knowledge that they were the shortest-lived of the Commonwealth sentients was what made them so disagreeable); dolphins were good for eighty years with proper health care; and, barring accidents, an Ib would live for precisely 641 Earth years.

  Rissa and Boxcar thought they knew why Ibs lived so much longer than the other races. Human, dolphin, and Waldahud cells all have a Hayflick limit: they proper!y reproduce only a finite number of times.

  Ironically, Waldahud cells had the highest limit--about ninety-three'

  times--but their cells, like the creatures composed of them, had the shortest life cycle. Human and dolphin cells could divide about fifty times: But the organelle clusters--there was no overall membrane to mike them a single cell--that made up the body of an Ib could reproduce indefinitely. What eventually kills most Ibs is a mental short circuit: when the crystals of the central brain, which form matrices at a constant rate, reach their maximum information capacity, the overflow causes the basic routines governing respiration and digestion to become garbled.

  Since she didn't seem to be needed on the bridge, Rissa had gone down to her lab to join Boxcar. She was sitting in a chair; Boxcar was positioned next to her. They watched the data scrolling up the monitor plate rising from the desk in front of them. The Hayflick limit had to be governed by cellular timers of some sort. Since it was observed in cells from both Earth and Rehbollo, they'd hoped comparison genome mapping would help. Attempts to correlate across genetic platforms the mechanisms for timing body growth, puberty, and sexual functions had all been successful. But, maddeningly, the cause of the Hayflick limit remained elusive.

  Maybe this latest test--maybe this statistical analysis of inverted telomerase RNA codohs--maybe-- Lights winked on Boxcar's sensor web.

  "It saddens me to note that the answer is not there," said the translated voice, British, as all Ib voices were, and female, as half of them were arbitrarily assigned.

  Rissa let out a heavy sigh. Boxcar was right; another dead end.

  "I intend no offense with this comment," said Boxcar, "but I'm sure you know that my race has never believed in gods. And yet when I encounter a problem like this--/

  problem that seems, well, designed to thwart solution--it does make one think that the information is being deliberately withheld from us, that our creator does not want us to live forever."

  Rissa made a small laugh. "You may be right. A common theme among human religions is the belief that gods jealously guard their powers.

  And yet why build an infinite universe, but put life on only a handful of orlds.

  "Begging your generous pardon for pointing out the obvious," said Boxcar, "but the universe is only infinite in that it has no borders.

  It does however contain a finite amount of matter. Still, what is it that your god is said to have commanded? Be frui tful and multiply?"

  Rissa laughed. "Filling the universe would take an awful lot of multiplying."

  "I thought that was an activity you humans enjoyed."

  She grunted, thinking of her husband. "Some more than others."

  "Forgive me if I'm being ' ' ,, intrusive, said Boxcar, "but PHANTOM

  prefaced the translation of your last sentence with a glyph indicating that you spoke it ironically. It is doubtless me who is to blame, but I seem to be missing a layer of your meaning."

  Rissa looked at the Ib--a faceless, six-hundred-kilogram wheelchair.

  Pointless to discuss such matters with her--with it, a sexless gestalt that knew nothing of love or marriage, a creature to whom an entire human lifespan was a brief interlude. How could it understand the stages a marriage went through--the stages a man went through.

  And yet-- ' She could not talk about it with her female friends aboard ship. Her husband was Starplex's director--the . . . the captain they would have called it in the old days. She couldn't chance gossip getting around, couldn't risk diminishing him in the eyes of the staff.

  Rissa's friend Sabrina had a husband named Gary. Gary was going through the same thing--but Gary was just a meteorologist. Not someone to whom everyone looked up, not someone who had to endure the gaze of a thousand people.

  I'm a biologist, thought Rissa, and Keith's a sociologist.

  How did I ever end up a politician's wife, with him, me, and our marriage under the microscope?

  She opened her mouth, about to tell Boxcar that it was nothing, nothing at all, that PHANTOM had mistaken fatigue or perhaps disappointment in the latest experiment's results for irony.

  But then she thought, why the hell not?
Why not discuss it with the Ib?

  Gossiping was a failing of individual life-forms, not of gestalt beings.

  And it would feel good--oh so very good--to get it off her chest, to be able to share it with someone.

  "Well," she said--an articulated pause, giving herself one last chance to rein in her words. But then she pressed on: "Keith is getting old."

  A slight ripple of lights on Boxcar's web.

  "Oh, I know," said Rissa, lifting a hand. "He's young by Ibese standards, but, well, he is becoming middle-aged for a human. When that happens to a human female, we undergo chemical changes associated with the end of our childbearing years. Menopause, it's called."

  Lights playing up the web; an Ibese nod.

  "But for male humans, it isn't so cut-and-dried. As they feel their youth slipping away, they begin to question themselves, their accomplishments, their status in life, their career choices, and . . .

  well, whether they are still attractive to the opposite sex."

  "And is Keith still attractive to you?"

  Rissa was surprised by the question. "Well, I didn't marry him for his looks." That hadn't come out the way she'd intended. "Yes, yes, he's still attractive to me."

  "It is doubtless wrong for me to remark upon this, and for that I apologize, but he is losing his hair."

  Rissa laughed. "I'm surprised you would notice something like that."

  "Without intending offense, please know that telling one human from another is difficult for us, especially when they are standing close by and so are visible to only part of our webs. We're attentive to individual details. We know how upsetting it is to humans to not be recognized by someone they think should know them. I have noticed both his loss of hair and its change of color. I have learned that such changes can signal a reduction in attractiveness."

  "I suppose they can, for some women," said Rissa. But then she thought, this is silly. Dissembling to an alien. "Yes, I liked his looks better when he had a full head of hair. But it's such a minor point, really."

  "But if Keith is still attractive to you, then--forgive my boundless ignorance--I don't see what the problem is."

  "The problem is that he doesn't care if he's still attractive to me.

  Appealing to one's mate is taken as a given. I suppose that's why men in the past often put on weight after they'd gotten married. No, the question running through Keith's mind these days, I'm sure, is whether he's attractive to other women."

  "And is he?"

  Rissa was about to respond with a reflex "of course," but then paused to really consider the question--something she hadn't done before.

  "Yes, I suppose he is. Power, they say, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and Keith is the most powerful man in--in our space-going community."

  "Then, begging forgiveness, what is the difficulty? It sounds as though he should have the answer to his question."

  "The difficulty is that he may have to prove it to himself--prove that he's still attractive."

  "He could conduct a poll. I know how much you humans rely on such information."

  Rissa laughed. "Keith is more of... more of an empiricist," she said.

  Her tone sobered. "He may wish to conduct experiments."

  Two lights winking. "Oh?"

  Rissa looked at a point high up on the wall. "Whenever we're in a social situation with other humans, he spends too much time with the other women present."

  "How much is too much?"

  Rissa frowned, then said, "More than he spends with me.

  And often, he's off talking to women who are half his age- half my age."

  "And this bothers you."

  "I guess so."

  Boxcar considered for a moment, then: "But is this not all'

  natural? Something all men go through?"

  "I suppose."

  "One cannot fight nature, Rissa."

  She gestured at the monitor, with the negative results of the last Hayflick-limit study still displayed on it. "So I'm beginning to find out."

  Chapter V

  "Get me a sample of the material those spheres are made of," barked Jag, standing up at his bridge station and.

  looking at the director. Keith gritted his teeth, and thought, as he often did, of asking PHANTOM to translate Jag's words less directly, inserting the human niceties of "please" and "thank you."

  "Should we send a probe?" Keith asked, looking at the Waldahud's four-eyed face. "Or do you want to go out yourself?." If the latter, thought Keith, I'd be glad to show you the airlock door.

  "A standard atmospheric-sampling probe," said Jag. "The gravitational interplay between that many large bodies so close together must be complex. Whatever we send out might end up crashing into one of them."

  All the more reason to send Jag, thought Keith. But what he said was,

  "A probe it is." He turned and looked at the workstation positioned at two o'clock to his own. "Rhombus, please take care of that."

  The Ib's web rippled assent.

  "A delta-class probe would be most appropriate," said Jag, slipping back into his chair and speaking now into a little hologram of Rhombus above the rim of his console.

  Keith tapped a key and joined the conference as well; a miniature Waldahud head popped up in front of him next to the full body shot of the Ib. "How many spheres are there in total?" asked Keith.

  Rhombus's ropes operated controls. "Two hundred and seventeen," he said. "But they all look pretty much the same, except for some variation in size."

  "Well, then, for an initial test, it doesn't make any difference which sphere we sample," said Jag. "Choose the one that presents the fewest navigational difficulties. First, scoop up some of that material that's between the spheres.

  Then buzz into one of the spheres and get me a sample of the gas, or whatever it is that they're made of. Take some from the top of the clouds, and another sample from about two hundred meters down into the clouds, if the probe can stand the pressure. As you fill them, heat and pressurize the sample compartments to match the ambient at the collection points; I want to minimize chemical changes in the mateLights moved up Rhombus's sensor web, and a few moments later he was launching the probe. He switched the control-room spherical display to the view from the probe's cameras. The stars that were behind the haze between the spheres still seemed to be twinkling; the spheres themselves were just circles of black against a backdrop that consisted of a starfield and some faint blue nebulosity beyond.

  "What do you think the spheres are?" asked Rhombus, while the probe closed toward its target.

  Jag moved all four of his shoulders in a Waldahud shrug.

  "Might be the remnants of a brown dwarf star that recently blew apart.

  Any fluid will take on a spherical shape in zero-g, of course. The material in between will presumably eventually be swept up by the larger bodies."

  The probe was getting close to the material between the spheres. "The fog seems to consist of gas studded with solid particles averaging about seven millimeters in diameter," said Rhombus, whose sensor web had partially crawled onto the console in front of him so that he could read the instruments more easily.

  "What kind of gas?" Keith asked.

  "Its apparent molecular weight suggests a reasonably heavy or complex compound," replied Jag, now looking at one of his monitors. "However, the absorption spectrum is that of normal space dust--carbon grains, and so on." A pause. "There's no discernible magnetic field around the spheres. That's surprising; I had supposed the gas particles might have been held in place by such fields."

  "Will the probe be damaged by impact with the particles?"

  asked Keith.

  "It pleases me to respond in the negative," said Rhombus.

  "I'm slowing the probe down to avoid that."

  Part of the hologram was obscured as the hatch that covered the atmospheric scoop opened up--bad design, that. "Now collecting samples of the material between the spheres," said Rhombus. A few moments later the view cleared as t
he hatch closed. "Sample bay one full," the Ib reported. "Changing course for atmospheric skim."

  The starfield wheeled around as the probe altered its trajectory. One of the circles of blackness was soon in the center of its view. The ebony sphere grew larger and larger until it dominated everything. The probe had headlights, which Rhombus had turned on. They made two murky shafts that penetrated a few meters into the dark, swirling material.

  A different part of the view was obscured as another sample hatch opened.

  "Taking upper-atmosphere samples," reported the Ib, and then, a moment later, "Sample container full."

  "Adequate," said Jag. "Now dive down two hundred meters--or however far you can go safely--and get some more sphere material."

  "Doing so, in harmonious peace," said Rhombus's clipped tones.

  Everything was pitch-black, except for the twin pools of light from the headlight beams. They were now only penetrating a meter or so. For one brief moment, something solid seemed to be in the probe's path--an ovoid shape the size of a dirigible--but it was gone from view almost at once.

  "Depth now ninety-one meters," said Rhombus. "Surprising.

  External pressure is very light--far less than I'd have expected."

  "Keep going down, then," said Jag.

  The probe continued to descend. Rhombus's web flashed in consternation.

  "The pressure sensor must have been damaged--maybe an impact with a piece of gravel. I'm still reading almost no atmospheric pressure."

  Jag lifted his upper shoulders. "All right. Fill a compartment here, then bring it all home."

  The third hatch did not obscure the camera at all, although its opening probably shook the craft enough that had they been able to see anything the view would have jiggled a bit.

  "The internal-pressure gauge inside the sample compartment shows the same almost-zero pressure the external gauge is indicating," said Rhombus. "Of course, they run through the same microprocessor.