“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“And you have been married for twenty years?” asked Glass.
“Just about. Our anniversary is next week.”
“Twenty years,” said Glass. “A blink of an eye.”
Keith frowned. “Actually, it’s considered quite an achievement to make it work that long.”
“Apologies for my comment,” said Glass. “Congratulations.” A pause. “What do you like most about Rissa?”
Keith shrugged. “I don’t know. Several things. I like that she is content with who she is. Me, I’ve got to put on airs—to sometimes pretend I’ve accomplished more, or am more sophisticated, than I really am. In fact, it’s common among humans who have attained a significant position to suffer from what’s called ‘the impostor syndrome’—the fear that others are going to discover that they don’t deserve what they’ve got. I admit to having a touch of that, but Rissa is immune to it. She never pretends to be anything she’s not.”
Glass nodded.
“And I like her equanimity, her evenness of temper. If something goes wrong, I tend to swear and get upset by it. She just smiles and does whatever needs to be done to set things right. Or if they can’t be set right, she accepts it.” Keith paused. “In many ways, she’s a better person than I.”
Glass seemed to consider this for a moment. “She sounds like someone you should hold on to, Keith.”
Keith looked at the transparent man, perplexed.
Chapter III
A child’s blocks. That’s the image that had come to Keith Lansing’s mind two years ago, while watching Starplex’s components being assembled at the Rehbollo orbital shipyards. The giant ship was made up of just nine pieces, eight of which looked identical.
The largest piece was the central disk/shaft combination. The disk was 290 meters in diameter and 30 meters thick. The square shaft extended up and down from the center of the disk 90 meters in each direction, making Starplex a total of 210 meters tall. A parabolic radio/hyperspace-telescope dish was set into each of the shaft’s end caps.
The central disk actually consisted of three wide rings surrounding the shaft. First, stretching out to a radius of 95 meters was the vast space that would be filled with 686,000 cubic meters of salt water, forming the ocean deck. Second, twenty meters wide and ten decks thick, was the engineering torus. The final ring consisted of Starplex’s eight mammoth cargo holds and twenty docking bays, their space doors arrayed along the disk’s curving edge.
The other building blocks were the eight habitat modules. Each was a right-triangular prism, ninety meters tall, ninety meters wide at its base, and thirty meters thick. One module was attached to each of the four sides of the shaft that stuck out above the disk. These were mirrored by four more mated to the portion that protruded below. In profile the assembled ship resembled a diamond with a bar through it; seen from above, it was a circle with the interlocking habitats forming a cross in its center.
Each habitat module was divided into thirty decks. Any of the modules could be replaced to accommodate a new race or special equipment, or one could be left behind as a separate base for long-term explorations in a new sector.
In the year since the ship had been launched, Starplex’s missions had been uneventful. But now, at last, a real first-contact situation was at hand. Now, at last, all that the great ship had to offer would be put to the test.
A second, more sophisticated probe was sent through to the newly opened sector. It, too, detected the twinkling stars, and its hyperspace telescopes indicated a solar system’s worth of mass was present in the vicinity; to get more resolution of exactly how the mass was deployed would require much larger ’scopes, such as those that were set into either end of Starplex’s central shaft.
Keith next ordered a probeship with a human and an Ib from Jag’s staff to fly through to the other side and do a more complete reconnaissance. They didn’t actually travel into the source of the twinkling stars. There was no way to communicate in real time through a shortcut, so if they got in trouble it might be too late to help before Starplex realized it. But they did do full-spectrum EM scans, a complete-sky search for artificial radio signals, and so on. They returned to Starplex, reporting that there was no apparent danger on the other side, although the cause of the twinkling starscape remained as elusive as ever.
Keith waited until all data from the two probes and the crewed reconnaissance had been reviewed by each department. Finally, satisfied that it would represent a low risk, he ordered Thor to take Starplex itself through the shortcut into the newly opened sector of space.
People occasionally used the terms “wormhole” or “tunnel” as synonyms for shortcut, but that wasn’t correct. There was no intervening space between the shortcut entrance and the exit. They were like doors between rooms in a house with paper-thin walls: as you walked through, you were partly in one room and partly in another. As simple as that—except that the rooms were separated by many light-years.
The Commonwealth had slowly worked out how to navigate the shortcut network. In normal space, a dormant shortcut is a point. But in hyperspace, that point is surrounded by a rotating sphere of tachyons. The tachyons move along millions of polar orbital lines, all of which are equally spaced, except that one is missing on one side, its tachyon looping back in a hemispherical path. That narrow tachyon-free gap is known as “the zero meridian,” and it means you can treat the sphere of tachyons just like a planetary globe, with a coordinate system of longitude and latitude.
To travel through a shortcut, you set a straight-line path toward the point at the center of the sphere. As you approach that point, you pass through the sphere at a specific latitude and longitude. Those coordinates determine which other shortcut you will exit from: where in the galaxy you come out depends on the direction from which you approached the local shortcut.
Of course, to get the ball rolling, there had to be one shortcut on-line at the outset that was not associated with any race—otherwise there’d be no location for the first emerging civilization to travel to with their shortcut. The initial shortcut—Shortcut Prime—was clearly a freebie, given by the shortcut makers. It was located in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, within sight of the central black hole. Earth’s initial explorations of that sector had found no native life there, of course; the galactic core was far too radioactive for that.
At the beginning of the Commonwealth, there were only four active shortcuts—Tau Ceti, Rehbollo, Flatland, and Shortcut Prime. As more shortcuts were activated, the acceptable approach angles for each possible exit became smaller. After a dozen shortcuts were on-line, it became clear that to return to the Tau Ceti shortcut, one had to pierce the tachyon sphere surrounding another shortcut at about 115 degrees east longitude and 40 degrees north latitude. On Earth, that’s close to Beijing, which gave rise to the “New Beijing” nickname for the colony on Silvanus, Tau Ceti’s fourth planet.
When a ship touches the shortcut, the shortcut point expands—but only in two dimensions. It forms a hole in space perpendicular to the direction of the ship’s travel. The hole’s shape is the same as the cross-sectional profile of whatever part of the ship is passing through it. The opening is outlined in a violet ring of Soderstrom radiation, caused by tachyons spilling out around the edges and spontaneously translating into slower-than-light particles.