Starplex

Rhombus had been right. Let it go, he'd said. Let it all go.

Keith felt it leaving him, the unpleasant thing he'd carried around for: eighteen years. He looked at the two women. "For the sake of those who have died — and for all those who would die in a war — we have to put out the fire before it's too late."

Keith reboarded his travel pod, left Grand Central, and headed back toward the shortcut.

He had spent hours arguing with Commissioner Amundsen and Premier Kenyatta. But he wouldn't give up. This was the windmill he'd been looking for. This was the battle worth fighting — the battle for peace.

An impossible dream?

He thought of his great-great-grandfather's wonder-filled life. Cars and airplanes, lasers and moon landings.

And his own wonder-filled life.

And all the wonders yet to come.

Nothing was impossible — not even peace. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Sufficiently advanced. Races did grow up, did enter a state of maturity…He was ready for that. At last, he was ready.

Others must be, too.

Borman, Lovell, and Anders had cupped the Earth in their hands. Just a quarter of a century later, that same world had begun disarming itself.

Einstein hadn't lived to see it, but his impossible dream of putting his nuclear genie back in the bottle had come to pass.

And now humans and Waldahudin had both cupped the galaxy in their hands.

A galaxy that Keith, and surely others, would live to see rotate around its axis time and again.

There would be peace between the races. He would make sure of that.

After all, what better job was there for a middle child with billions of years to spend?

Keith's travel pod touched the shortcut, the purple halo passed over the spherical hull, and he emerged back near the green star.

Starplex was up ahead, a giant silver-and-copper diamond against the starry backdrop. Keith could see that docking bay seven's space door was open, and the bronze wedge of the Rum Ru

Keith hurried to the bridge. Although he'd only been gone a short time, he felt a need to hug Rissa, who happened to be there using her console even though it was delta shift. He held her tight for several seconds, feeling the warmth of her.

Wineglass politely rolled away from the director's workstation in case Keith wished to use it, but Keith motioned for the Ib to return to it, and Keith took a chair in the seating gallery at the back of the room.

No sooner had he done so than the forward bridge door opened and Jag waddled in. "The baby is trapped," he barked as he made his way over to the physics station, which was currently unoccupied. "It's stuck in close orbit around a star that emerged from the same shortcut the baby did."

"Did you call out to by radio?" asked Rissa. "Any response?"

"None," said Jag, "but the star is a real noisemaker. Our message might have been lost going in, or the reply might have been lost coming out."

"It would be like trying to hear a whisper during a hurricane," said Keith, shaking his head. "All but impossible."

"Especially," said Longbottle, popping up in the starboard pool on the bridge, "if the darmat is dead."

Keith looked at the dolphin's face, then nodded. "That's a good point.

How do we tell if something like that is still alive?

Rissa frowned. "None of us would survive five seconds close to a star without a lot of shielding or heavy-duty force screens. The baby is naked."

"it's worse than that," said Jag. "The thing is black.

Although the luster-quark matter is transparent to electromagnetic radiation, the regular-matter dust that permeates it is not reflecting any appreciable amount of the star's light and heat. The child may be cooking itself."

"So what do we do?" asked Keith.

"First," said Jag, "we should get it into the shade — build a reflective foil parasol that could be jockeyed in between the darmat and the star."

"Can our nanotech tab do that here?" asked Keith.

"Ordinarily, I'd have New Beijing build such a thing and shunt it through the Tau Ceti shortcut to us, .but I saw the mess they were in when I popped back for my meeting."

There was a young Native American sitting at InOps. "I'd have to check with Lia

It won't be easy, though. The parasol will have to be over a hundred thousand klicks wide.

Even at just one molecule of thickness, that's still a lot of material."' "Get to work on it," said Keith. "How long?"

"Six hours if we're lucky," said the man. "Twelve if we're not."

"But even if we shield the baby, then what?" asked Rissa.

"It's still trapped."

Keith looked at Jag. "Could we use the parasol as a solar sail, and let the solar wind blow it away from the star?"

Jag snorted. "Ten to the thirty-seventh kilos? Not a chance,"

"Okay, okay — what about this?" said Keith. "What if we protect the baby with some sort of force shield, and then detonate the star, so that it goes nova, and-"

Jag was barking in a staccato pattern — Waldahud laughter.

"Your imagination is unbridled, Lansing. Oh, there has been some theoretical work on controlled nova reactions — I've been exploring that area a bit myself — but there's no shield we could build that would prOtect the baby from a star going nova only forty million kilometers away."

Keith was not to be deterred. "Okay, try this: Suppose we force the new star back through the shortcut. When it passes through the shortcut, its gravitational pull will disappear, and the baby goes free."

"The star is moving away from the shortcut, not toward it," said Jag.

"We ca

"Any more bright ideas?"

"Yes," said Keith, after a moment. He looked directly at Jag. "Yes, indeed!"

When Keith had finished talking, Jag's mouth hung open for a few moments, showing the two curving blue-white translucent dental plates within. Finally, he barked in a subdued fashion. "I — I know I said such things were possible, but it has never been tried on anything approaching this scale."

Keith nodded. "Understood. But unless you have a better suggestion-"

"Well," said Jag's Brooklynite voice, "we could leave the darmat baby in orbit around the star. Assuming it is still alive, once we put the parasol sun-shield in place, it could, in theory, live out the rest of its natural life — however long that isin close orbit around that star.

But if your plan does not work, the darmatchild will be killed."

Jag's voice became quieter. "I know, Lansing, that I am the one always looking for glory — and, since my role in what you propose is pivotal, I have no doubt that considerable glory would accrue to me were we able to pull this off. But it really is not our decision to make. Ordinarily, I'd say ask the — the patient — for permission before attempting something as risky as this, but that is not possible in this case, because of the radio noise. And so I suggest we do what both your race and mine would do in such circumstances: we should ask the next of kin."

Keith thought about that, then began to nod slowly.

"You're right, of course. I keep seeing the macro-issue, that if we pull this off, it'll be great for our relationships with the darmats.

Damn, sometimes I'm pretty pigheaded."

"That is all right," said Jag lightly, choosing not to take offense at Keith's unfortunate choice of words. "Rumor has it that you are going to have a very long time to acquire more wisdom."