Starplex

As they walked out of the bay, Keith thought about his own future. He was going to live a long, long time, apparently. He wondered whether billions of years from now he'd be able to escape the mistakes of his own past.

They couldn't sleep that night, of course. Boxcar's death had upset Rissa, and Keith was wrestling with his own demons. They lay side by side in their bed, wide-awake, Rissa staring at the dark ceiling, Keith looking at the faint red spot on the wall made by the light seeping around the plastic card he used to cover his clock face.

Rissa spoke — just one word. "If…"

Keith rolled onto his back. "Pardon?"

She was quiet for a time. Keith was about to prod her again, when she said, very softly, "If you don't remember how to make a u or an apostrophe, will you remember me — remember us?" She rolled over, looked at him. "You're going to live another ten billion years. I can't begin to comprehend that."

"It's… mind-numbing," said Keith, shaking his head against the pillow. He, too, was quiet for a time. Then: "People always fantasize about living forever. Somehow, 'forever' seems less daunting than putting a specific date on it. I could deal with immortality, but contemplating the specific notion of being alive ten billion years from now…

I just can't make sense of it."

"Ten billion years," said Rissa again, shaking her head.

"Earth's sun will long be dead, Earth will be dead." A beat.

"I will be dead."

"Maybe. Maybe not. If it is life prolongation, then surely it's because of your studies here on Starplex. After all, why else would I have ended up as one of the recipients of the process? Maybe we're both alive ten billion years from now."

More silence.

"And together?" said Rissa, at last.

Keith exhaled noisily. "I don't know. I can't imagine any of it." He sensed he was saying the wrong thing. "But… but if I'm to face that much of a future, I would want it to be with you."

"Would you?" said Rissa, at once. "Would we have anything left to explore, to learn about each other, after all that time?"

"Maybe… maybe it's not corporeal existence," said Keith. "Maybe my consciousness is transferred into a machine. Wasn't there a cult on New New York .that wanted to do that — copy human brains into computers?

Or maybe… maybe all of humanity becomes one giant mind, but the individual psyches can still be tapped. That would be-"

"Would be less frightening that the concept of personally living another ten billion years. In case you haven't done the math yet, that would mean that so far, you've only lived one two-hundred-millionth of the age you're going to become."

She paused and sighed.

"What?" asked Keith.

"Nothing."

"No, you're upset about something."

Rissa was quiet for about ten seconds. "Well, it's just that your current midlife crisis has been hard enough to live with. I'd hate to see what kind of stunts you're going to pull when you turn five billion."

Keith didn't know what to say. Finally, he settled on a laugh. It sounded hollow to him, forced.

Quiet again — long enough that he thought perhaps she'd . at last fallen asleep. But he couldn't sleep himself. Not yet, not with these thoughts going through his head.

"Dulcinea?" he whispered softly — so softly that if she were already asleep he hopefully wouldn't wake her.

Keith swallowed. Maybe he should leave the issue alone, but…

"Our a

"Next week," said the voice in the darkness.

"Yes," said Keith. "It'll be twenty years, and-"

"Twenty wonderful years, honey. You're always supposed to include the adjective."

Another forced laugh. "Sorry, you're right. Twenty wonderful years."

He paused. "I know that we're pla

A small edge to Rissa's voice. "Yes?"

"Nothing. No, forget I said anything. It has been a wonderful twenty years, hasn't it?"

Keith could just make out her face in the darkness. She nodded, then looked at him, meeting his eyes, trying to see beyond them, see the truth, see what was bothering him.

And then it came to her, and she rolled onto her side, facing away from him. "It's okay," she said at last.

"What is?"

And she spoke the final words that passed between them that night.

"It's okay," she said, "if you don't want to say, 'for as long as we both shall live.""

Keith sat at his workstation on the bridge. Holograms of three humans and a dolphin hovered above the station's rim.

In his peripheral vision, he was aware of one of the bridge doors opening and Jag waddling in. The Waldahud didn't go to his own workstation, though. Instead he stood in front of Keith's and waited, in what seemed a state of some agitation, while Keith finished the conference he was conducting with the holographic heads. When they'd logged off, Keith looked up at Jag.

"As you know, the darmats have been moving," said Jag.

"I'm frankly surprised at their agility. They seem to work together, each sphere playing off its own gravitational and repulsive forces against the others to move the whole community cooperatively. Anyway, in doing so, they've completely reconfigured themselves, so that individual darmats that we couldn't clearly observe before are now at the periphery of the assemblage. I've made some predictions about which darmat might next reproduce, and I'd like to test my theory. For that, I want you to move Starplex to the far side of the dark-matter field."

"PHANTOM, schematic local space," said Keith.

A holographic representation appeared in midair between Keith and Jag.

The darmats had moved around to the opposite side of the green star, so that Starplex, the shortcut, the star, and the darmat community were pretty much arranged in a straight line.

"If we move to the far side of the darmat field, we'll be out Of view of the shortcut," said Keith. "We might miss seeing a watson come through.

Can't you just put a probe there?"

"My prediction is based on very minute mass concentrations.

I need to use either our deck-one or deck-seventy hyperscope to make my observations."

Keith considered. "All right." He tapped a key on his console and the usual holograms of Thor and Rhombus popped into being. "Rhombus, please check with everyone who is currently doing external sca

Find out when the soonest we can move the ship without interrupting their work will be. Thor, at that time take us to the opposite side of the dark-matter field, positioning us at coordinates Jag will supply you with." "Serving is the greatest pleasure," said Rhombus.

"Bob's your uncle," said Thor.

Jag moved his head up and down, imitating the human gesture.

Waldahudin never said thank you, but Keith thought the pig looked inordinately pleased.