Starplex

“Move along, move along. Another topic.”

“Do you feel guilty, Keith ?”

“What are you—my bloody conscience?”

“I am just someone who is interested, that’s all.”

“Become interested in something else.”

“I’m sorry,” said Glass. “Where did you and Rissa first meet?”

“La Belle Aurore. The Germans wore gray; she wore blue.”

“Pardon ?”

“Sorry. Another knight-errant hero of mine said that. We met at a party on New Beijing—that’s the Earth colony on Tau Ceti IV. She was working in the same lab there as someone I had gone to school with.”

“Was it—what is the saying? Was it love at first sight?”

“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.