"Give or take," said Thor.
"The Ibs will not leave Flatland," said Rhombus, with uncharacteristic bluntness.
"This is crazy," Keith said. "We can't shut down the shortcuts."
"If our homeworlds are in jeopardy," said Thor, "we can — and we should."
"There's no proof that the arriving stars represent any threat," Keith said. "I can't believe that beings advanced enough to move stars around are malevolent." "They may not be," said Thor, "any more than construction workers who destroy anthills are malevolent. We might simply be in their way."
There was nothing Keith could do about the arriving stars until more information was available, and so, at 1200 hours, he and Rissa went off to find something to eat.
There were eight restaurants aboard Starplex. The terminology was deliberate. Humans kept wanting to refer to Starplex's components in naval terms: mess halls, sickbays, and quarters, instead of restaurants, hospitals, and apartments.
But of the four Commonwealth species, only humans and Waldahudin had martial traditions, and the other two races were nervous enough about that without being reminded of it in casual conversation.
Each of the restaurants was unique, both in ambience and fare.
Starplex's designers had taken great pains to make sure that shipboard life was not monotonous. Keith and Rissa decided to have lunch in Keg Tahn, the Waldahud restaurant on deck twenty-six. Through the restaurant's fake windows, holograms of Rehbollo's surface were visible: wide, flat flood plains of purple-gray mud, crisscrossed by rivers and streams. Clumps of stargin were scattered about — Rehbollo's counterpart of trees, looking like three- or four-meter-tall blue tumbleweeds. The moist mud didn't offer any firm pumhase, but it was rich with dissolved minerals and decaying organic material. Each starg had thousands of tangled shoots that could serve either as roots, or, unfurling themselves, as photosynthesis organs, depending on whether they ended up on top or on the bottom. The giant plants blew across the plains, rotating end over end, or floated down the streams, until they found fertile mud.
When they did so, they settled in, sinking until about a third of their height was embedded in the ooze.
The holographic sky was greenish gray, and the star overhead was fat and red. Keith found the color scheme dreary, but there was no denying that the food here was excellent. Waldahudin were mainly vegetarians, and the plants they enjoyed were succulent and delicious. Keith found himself craving starg shoots three or four times a month.
Of course, all eight restaurants were open to every species, and that meant offering a range of meal items that met the various races' metabolic requirements. Keith ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a couple of pickled gherkins to go with his starg salad. Waldahudin, whose females, like terrestrial mammals, secreted a nutritive liquid for their offspring, found it disgusting that humans drank the milk of other animals, but they pretended not to know what cheese was made of.
Rissa was sitting opposite Keith. Actually, the table was shaped in the Waldahud standard, like a human kidneY, and made of a polished plant material that wasn't wood, but did have lovely bands of light and dark in it. Rissa was in the indentation in the table. The Waldahud custom was that a female always sat in this honored position; on their home-world a dame would be positioned here, with her male entourage seated around the curving form.
Rissa's tastes were more adventurous than Keith's. She was eating az torad — "blood mussels," Waldahud bivalves that lived in the slurry layer at the bottom of many lakes. Keith found the bright purple-red color disgusting as did most Waldahudin, for that matter, since it was a precise match for the hue of their own blood. But Rissa had mastered the trick of bringing the shell to her mouth, popping it open, and slurping out the morsel within, all without letting the soft mass be seen either by herself or anyone sitting across from her.
Keith and Rissa ate in silence, and Keith wondered if that was good or bad. They'd mn out of idle chitchat ages ago. Oh, if there was something on either of their minds, they'd talk at length, but it seemed that they just enjoyed being in each other's company, even if they said barely a word. At least that's the way Keith felt, and he hoped Rissa shared that feeling.
Keith was using a katook (Waldahud cutlery, like duck-billed pliers) to bring some starg to his mouth when a comm panel popped up from the table's surface, showing the face of Hek, the Waldahud alien-communications specialist.
"Rissa," he barked in a voice somewhat more Brook-lynish than Jag's; from the way the comm panel was angled, the Waldahud couldn't see Keith.
"I have been analyzing the radio noise we've been detecting near the twenty-one-centimeter band. You won't believe what I've found. Come to my office at once."
Keith put down his eating utensil, and looked across the table at his wife. "I'll join you," he said, and stood up to leave. As they made their way across the room, he realized it was the only thing he'd said to her during the entire meal.
Keith and Rissa got into an elevator. As always, a monitor on the cab's wall showed the current deck number and floor plan: "26," and a cross shape with long arms. As they rode up, and the deck numbers counted down, the arms of the cross grew shorter and shorter. By the time they reached deck one, the arms had almost completely retracted.
The two humans got out and entered the radio-astronomy listening room.
Hek, a small Waldahud with a hide much redder in color than Jag's, was leaning against a desk.
"Rissa, your presence is welcome" — the standard deference shown females.
A tilt of the head: "Lansing." The rude indifference reserved for males, even if they were your boss.
"Hek," said Keith, nodding in greeting.
The Waldahud looked at Rissa. "You know the radio noise we've been picking up?" His barking echoed in the tiny room.
Rissa nodded.
"Well, my initial analysis showed no repetition in it." He swiveled a pair of eyes to look at Keith. "When a signal is a deliberate beacon, it usually has a repeating pattern over a course of several minutes or hours. There's nothing like that at work here. Indeed, I've found no evidence of any overall pattern. But when I started analyzing the noise more minutely, patterns of one-second duration or less kept cropping up. So far, I've cataloged six thousand and seventeen sequences. Some have only been repeated once or twice, but others have been repeated many times. Over ten thousand times, for a few of them."
"My God," said Rissa.
"What?" said Keith.
She turned to him. "It means that there might be information in the noise — it might be radio communications."
Hek lifted his upper shoulders. "Exactly. Each of the patterns could be a separate word. Those that occur most frequently could be common terms, maybe the equivalent of pronouns or prepositions."
"And where are these transmissions coming from?" asked Keith.
"Somewhere in or just behind the dark-matter field," said Hek.
"And you're sure they're intelligent signals?" asked Keith, his heart pounding.
Hek's lower shoulders moved this time. "No, I'm not sure.
For one thing, the transmissions are very weak. They wouldn't be discernible from background noise over any great distance.
But if I'm right that they're words, then there does appear to be some discernible syntax. No word is ever doubled. Certain words only appear at the beginning or end. of transmissions.
Some words only appear after certain other words. The former are possibly adjectives and adverbs, and the latter the nouns or verbs they are modifying, or vice versa." Hek paused. "Of course, I haven't analyzed all the signals, although I am recording them for future study.
It's a constant bombardment, on over two hundred frequencies that are very close to each other." He paused, letting this sink in.