Starplex Robert J Sawyer

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the shortcut. The shortcut's lips clamped down on the photosphere,
stripping away the rarefied gas above. Still, all previous tests have
shown zero structural change in objects passing through a shortcut. Of
course, nothing this big has ever gone through one before."
The Rum Runner's viewscreens were filled to the edges with flaming
green; the physical windows had all turned opaque. "Take us in once
around the star's equator," said Jag, "then do a polar loop. It's
possible that the star's structure isn't uniform. Before I get too
worked up over these absorption lines, I want to be sure the spectra are
the same all over."
It took almost five hours at one one-thousandth of lightspeed to
complete the five-million-kilometer sweep around the equator, and
another five to do the loop from pole to pole. Longbottle kept the Rum
Runner corkscrewing all the while. Jag's eyes were glued to his
scanning equipment, watching the dark vertical absorption lines. He
kept muttering to himself, "Silt in the water, silt in the water"--the
truth remained hidden.
Jag had no trouble measuring the star's mass from its footprint in
hyperspace; it was somewhat heavier than he'd expected. Except for the
color, the star's surface was fairly typical, consisting of tightly
packed beads of light and dark caused by convection cells in the
photosphere. It even had sunspots, but unlike those of other stars,
these were'all connected in dumbbell shapes. It was, without doubt, a
star--but it was also unlike any star Jag had ever seen before.
Finally, the flybys were complete. "Ready home to go?"
asked Longbottle.
Jag lifted all four arms in a gesture of resignation. "Yes."
"Mystery solved?"
"No. A star like this should simply not exist."
The Rum Runner swept back toward Starplex, Jag muttering over his data
for the entire journey.
Keith lay in bed next to his wife, unable to sleep. He looked over at
Rissa's form in the darkness, watched the thin sheet covering her rise
and fall in time with her breathing.
She deserved better, he thought. He exhaled, trying to force the
worries out of himself with the escaping breath, and conjured up images
of happier times.
Rissa had dark eyes that turned into upward-arching crescents when she
smiled. Her mouth was small, but her lips were full--half as tall as
they were wide. Her mother had been Italian; her father, Spanish. She
had inherited her lustrous dark hair and his fiery eyes. In his
forty-six years of life, Keith Lansing had never met anyone who looked
more appealing by candlelight than Rissa.
When they'd first met, in 2070, he'd been twenty-two and she'd been
twenty, with a wonderfully curvy figure. Of course, her body shape was
changing in natural ways as she aged; she was still in fine condition,
but the proportions had shifted. Back then, Keith couldn't have
imagined finding a woman of forty-four attractive, but to his infinite
surprise, his tastes had altered as the years passed, and although two
decades of marriage had doubtless dulled his immediate reaction to her,
when he saw Rissa in an unusual way--in a new suit, or stretching to
reach something on a top shelf, or with her hair swept in a different
manner--she could still take his breath away.
And yet . . .
And yet, Keith was aware that time was taking its toll on him. His hair
was departing. Oh, there were "cures" for that--imagine suggesting that
something as natural as male-pattern baldness required a cure!--but to
employ them seemed vain and foolish. Besides, middle-aged scientists
were supposed to be bald. It was in the rule book somewhere.
Keith's father had had a full head of dark hair up until he'd been
killed at age fifty-five; Keith wondered now whether he'd used a hair
restorer. But for Keith to do something like that would be silly.
He remembered Mandy Lee, a holovid star he'd been infatuated with as a
twelve-year-old boy. Back then, nothing had been more exciting to him
than large breasts on a woman, probably because none of the girls in his
class yet had them; they were a symbol of the forbidden, alien world of
adult sexuality. Well, Mandy--dubbed "the binary star system" by some
wag at HV Guide--was famous for her physique. But Keith had lost all
interest in her when he'd found out that her breasts were fake; he
couldn't look at her without imagining the implants beneath the swelling
alabaster skin and the surgical scars (even though he knew, of course,
the anabolizing laser scalpels would have left no marks at all). Well,
he'd be damned if he'd turn his head into a fake; he'd be damned if he'd
let people looking at him think, hey, the guy's really bald, you know .
. .
And so there they were, Rissa Cervantes and Keith
Lansing: still in love, if not in the passionate way of their youth, in
what was ultimately a more satisfying, more relaxing fashion.
And yet-- And yet, dammit, he'd just turned forty-six. He was aging,
balding, graying, and hadn't been with another woman since his
three--such a small number!--awkward encounters in high school and at
university. Three, plus Rissa--a total of four. An average of less
than one a decade.
Christ, he thought, even a Waldahud could count my partners on the
fingers of one hand.
Keith knew he shouldn't think about such things, knew that what he and
Clarissa had was something most people never really achieved: a love
affair that grew and evolved as they aged, a relationship that was solid
and secure and warIll.
And yet-- And yet there was Lianne Karendaughter. Like Mandy Lee, the
very symbol of beauty in his youth, Lianne had exquisite Asian features;
something about Asian women had always appealed to Keith. He didn't [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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