Starplex

Keith spoke into the mike. "Starplex to Cat's Eye. Starplex to Cat's Eye."

The incongruous French accent; Keith half expected the thing to say bonjour. "Hello, Starplex. It is wrong to ask, but…"

Keith smiled. "Yes, we have news of your child. We have located it.

But it is in close orbit around a blue star. It is unable to get away under its own power."

"Bad," said Cat's Eye. "Bad."

Keith nodded. "But we have a plan that may — I repeat, may — allow us to rescue the child."

"Good," said Cat's eye.

"The plan involves much risk."

"Quantify."

Keith looked at Jag, who lifted all four shoulders. "I can't," said the human. "We've never done anything like this on this scale before.

Indeed, I only recently learned that it was theoretically possible. It may work, or it may not — and I have no way of knowing the likelihood of either outcome."

"Better idea available?"

"No. No, in fact, this is our only idea."

"Describe plan."

Keith did so, at least as much as the limited vocabulary they had established allowed.

"Difficult," said Cat's Eye.

"Yes." There was a long period of silence on the frequency used by Cat's Eye, but lots of traffic on the other cha

At last, Cat's Eye spoke again. "Try, but… but… two hundred and eighteen minus one is much less than two hundred and seventeen."

Keith swallowed. "I know."

The PDQ (containing the cetacean physicist Melondent) and the Rum Ru

Next, 112 hastily constructed buoys, each consisting of a hollowed-out watson casing with special equipment mounted inside, were popped through the shortcut from Starplex. The two probeships used their tractor beams to array them in interlocking orbits around the baby.

On one of his tall, thin monitor screens aboard the Rum Ru

Once the buoys were in place, the PDQ headed off, moving past the shortcut without going through it, and continuing on for half a day.

Finally, they were all lined up in a neat row. At one end was the Rum Ru

"Ready?" barked Jag to Longbottle, in the Rum Ru

"Ready," the dolphin barked back in Waldahudar.

Jag touched a control, and the lattice of buoys surrounding the darmat baby sprang to life. Each buoy contained an artificial-gravity generator, powered by solar energy stolen from the very star they were trying to fight. Slowly, in unison, the buoys increased their output, and just as slowly, a flattening pocket began to develop in one wall of the star's steep gravity well.

"Gently," said Jag, under his breath, watching his hyperspace map.

"Gently."

The pocket continued to grow more and more flat. Great care had to be taken not to flatten out the darmat's own gravity well: if the effects of the baby's own mass were suppressed — which, after all, was what was holding it together — it would lose cohesion, and expand like a balloon.

The buoys' output continued to grow and the curvature of spacetime continued to diminish, until, until — Flatness, like a plateau jutting from the side of the well.

It was as if the darmat were in interstellar space, not spitting distance from a star.

"Isolation complete," said Jag. "Now let's get it out of there."

"Activating hyperdrives," said Longbottle.

The antigrav buoys made up points on a sphere around the baby, but now, as their individual hyperspace field generators came on, that whole sphere seemed to mirror over, as if it were a glob of mercury floating freely in space.

In a matter of seconds, the glob shrank to nothingness and disappeared.

The buoys were preprogrammed to move the darmat baby away from the blue star as fast as possible. The PDQ was waiting near the point at which the darmat should emerge from hyperspace, far enough from the star that the hyperdrive field should collapse without difficulty.

The Rum Ru

"PDQ to Longbottle and Jag. Arrived has darmat baby; popped into normal space it did right in front of my eyes.

Hyperdrive field collapse uneventful was. But baby shows still no signs of life, and responds does not to my hails."

Jag's fur moved pensively. No one had known for sure whether the baby would survive unprotected during its brief journey through hyperspace.

Even if it had been alive beforehand, that might have killed it.

Maddeningly, there was no way to tell.

The space-flattening technique Was risky. Rather than use it themselves so that Longbottle could engage the Rum Ru

To fill the time, and to get his mind off of the fate of the baby, Jag spoke with Longbottle, who, to his credit, was piloting the ship in an absolutely straight line.

"You dolphins," said Jag, "like the humans."

"Mostly," said Longbottle in high-pitched Waldahudar.

He let the piloting drones disengage from his fins, and put the ship on automatic.

"Why?" barked Jag sharply. "I have read Earth history. They polluted the oceans you swam in, captured you and put you in tanks, caught you in fishing nets."

"No one of them has done any of that to me," said Longbottle.

"No, but-"

"It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one."

"But surely once they discovered you were intelligent, they should have treated you better."

"Humans discovered intelligent we were before we discovered that they-were."

"What?" said Jag. "But surely it was obvious. They had built cities and roads, and-"

"Saw none of that."

"No, I suppose not. But they sailed in boats, they built nets, they wore clothes."

"None of those were meaningful to us. We had of such things no concept; nothing to compare them to. Mollusk grows a shell; humans have clothes of fabric. The mollusk's covering is stronger. Should judged we have the mollusk more intelligent? You say humans built things. We had no concept of building. We knew not they made the boats. We thought perhaps boats alive were, or had once been alive.

Some tasted like driftwood, others ejected chemicals. into the water, just as living things do. An achievement, to ride on the back of boats?

We thought humans were like remoras to the shark."

"But-"

They our intelligence did not see. They looked right at us and see it did not. And we looked at them and did not see theirs."

"But after you discovered their intelligence, and they yours, you must have realized they had been mistreating you."