Starplex

As always, the exit point expanded as the ship touched it.

The purple discontinuity moved from bow to stern, and then the ship was zooming through a different sector of space.

There were no spectacular sights to be seen at this first exit: just stars, somewhat less densely packed than they had been on the other side.

Jag was intent on his instruments. He was doing a hyperspace scan, looking for any large mass within a light-day of the exit. Finding the darmat child would be hard. Dark matter, by its very nature, was very difficult to detect — all but invisible, and the radio signals it put out were very weak indeed. But even a baby darmat was going to mass 1037 kilograms. It would make a dent in local spacetime that should be detectable in hyperspace.

"Anything?" asked Longbottle.

Jag moved his lower shoulders.

Longbottle arched in his tank, and the Rum Ru

"Again we go," said the dolphin. The ship dived toward the point — and popped out near a beautiful binary star system, streamers of gas flowing from a bloated, oblate red giant toward a tiny blue companion.

Jag consulted his instruments. Nothing. The Rum Ru

"Nothing," said Jag.

Longbottle arched again, and plunged toward the shortcut.

An expanding point.

A ring of purple.

Mismatched starfields.

Another sector of space. A sector dominated by another green star pulling away from the shortcut.

Longbottle maneuvered furiously to avoid it.

Jag's scan took longer; the nearby star overwhelmed the hyperspace sca

Longbottle rotated in his tank, and the Rum Ru

The sky blazed with the light of countless tightly packed red suns.

Longbottle nosed a control, and the ship's shields increased to maximum.

They were close enough to the heart of the galaxy to see the comscating edge of the violet accretion disk surrounding the central black hole.

"Not here," said Jag.

Longbottle maneuvered the ship back to the shortcut in a simple straight line. They hadn't been close enough to be caught by the singularity's ravenous gravity, but he was taking no chances.

They next exited into another seemingly empty region of space, but Jag's hyperspace sca

"Suppose not do you?" asked Longbottle.

Jag shrugged all four shoulders. "It couldn't hurt to check," he said, adjusting the shipboard radio to search near the twenty-one-centimeter band.

"Ninety-three separate frequencies currently in use," said Jag.

"Another community of darmats."

They were tens of thousands of light-years from the first darmats they had encountered, but, then again, the darmat race was billions of years old. It was possible that they all spoke the same language. Jag sca

There was silence for a lot longer than round-trip message time would require, but then, finally, a reply did come through.

"No one here by that name. Who are you?"

"No time to chat — but we'll be back," said Jag, and Longbottle turned the ship back toward the shortcut.

"Bet surprised them that did," said the dolphin as they passed through the gateway.

This time they emerged near a planet about the size of Mars, and just as dry, but yellow rather than red. Its sun, a blue-white star, was visible in the distance, about twice the apparent diameter of Sol as seen from Earth. "Nothing here," said Jag.

Longbottle allowed himself the luxury of moving the Rum Ru

The corona — mixing purple and navy and white — was gorgeous, and covered much more of the sky than the dolphin had expected. He and Jag basked in the sight for a moment, then they dived back through the shortcut.

This exit point had also recently had a star emerge from it, but it wasn't green. Rather, as at Tau Ceti, this one was a red dwarf, small and cool.

Jag consulted his sca

They dived through again, the shortcut opening like a purple-lipsticked mouth to accommodate them.

Pure blackness — no stars at all

"A dust cloud," said Jag, his fur dancing in surprise.

"Interesting — it wasn't here the last time anyone went through to this exit. Carbon grains mostly, although there are some complex molecules, too, including formaldehyde and even some ammo acids, and — Cervantes will want to return here, I think. I'm picking up DNA."

"In the cloud?" asked Longbottle, incredulous.

"In the cloud," said Jag. "Self-replicating molecules floating free in space."

"But no darmat, correct?"

"Correct," said Jag.

"A wonder for another time," said Longbottle, and he spun the ship around, fired retros, and headed back through the shortcut.

A new sector of space — another one that had recently had a star erupt from it. This time the intruder was a blue type-O, with more purple sunspots than a fair-haired human had freckles in summer. The Rum Ru

"See do I," agreed Longbottle. "But…"

"Parched land!" swore Jag. "It's trapped."

"Agree — caught in the net."

And indeed it was. The baby darmat had obviously stumbled out of the shortcut only a few days before this blue star had arrived, and the star had been expelled from the exit in approximately the same direction as the darmat. As they'd all discovered to their shock, a darmat could move with surprising agility for a free-floating world, but the gravity of a star was enormous. The baby was only forty million kilometers from its surface — less than Mercury's distance from Sol.

"There is no way it can manage escape velocity," said Jag. "I'm not even sure it's managed to settle into orbit; it may be spiraling in.

Either way, though, that darmat is not going anywhere."

"Will signal," said Longbottle — and he set the ship's transmitter to broadcast the prerecorded message on all the frequencies that the members of the darmat community had used.

They were about three hundred million kilometers from the star; the signals took over fifteen minutes to reach the darmat, and the quickest any reply could be received would be another fifteen minutes after that.

They waited, Jag fidgeting, Longbottle amusing himself by painting a sonar caricature of Jag as he fidgeted. But no reply was received.

"Well," said the Waldahud, "there's so much radio noise coming from the star, we might not be able to pick up the darmat's transmission. Or it might not be able to hear us."

"Or," said Longbottle, "darmat may be dead."

Jag made a noise like bubble wrap being burst, his snout vibrating as he did so. That was the one possibility he didn't want to consider.