Starplex

Jag’s four eyes went wide. “The Slammers! We’ve only ever seen what their weapon did to one of our probes. Perhaps if they turned it on a world, this might be the result. Quite the doomsday device: not only does it destroy the planet, but it also imparts a force to the rubble to prevent it from ever collecting back together to form another world.”

“And now there’s an open shortcut leading from here to the Commonwealth worlds. If they were to come through—”

At that moment, Jag’s wall beeped, and the elderly face of Cynthia Delacorte appeared on it. “Jag, it’s— oh, hi, Rissa… Listen, thanks for sending up those samples. Do you know that this stuff sinks into normal matter?”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Incredible, isn’t it?”

Delacorte nodded. “I’ll say. It’s not normal baryonic matter. It’s not antimatter, of course. We’d have been blown out of the skies if it were. But where normal protons and neutrons consist of combinations of down quarks and up quarks, this stuff is made of matte quarks and glossy quarks.”

Jag’s fur danced excitedly. “Really?”

“I’ve never heard of those kinds of quarks,” said Rissa.

Jag made a sound like she was a fool, but Delacorte nodded. “Since the twentieth century, humans have known of six flavors of quarks—up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charmed. In fact, six was the maximum number allowed for under the old Standard Model of physics, so we’d pretty much given up looking for more, which turned out to be a big mistake.” She looked pointedly at Jag. “The Waldahudin had only found the same six flavors, too. But when we met the Ibs, they were aware of two more, which we refer to by opposing lusters, glossy and matte. There’s no way you can get them by breaking down normal matter, but the Ibs had done unique work pulling matter out of quantum fluctuations. In their experiments, luster quarks were sometimes produced, but only at very, very high temperatures. What we’ve got here are the first-known naturally occurring luster quarks.”

“Incredible,” said Jag. “You’ve noticed the fardint things carry no charge? What explains that?”

Delacorte nodded, then looked at Rissa. “Electrons have a charge of negative one unit, up quarks have a positive two-thirds charge, and down quarks have a negative one-third charge. Each neutron is made of two downs quarks and an up, which means the net charge is zip. Meanwhile, each proton consists of one down and two ups, which gives a charge of positive one. Since atoms have equal numbers of protons and electrons, they have an overall neutral charge.”

Rissa understood that the explanation had been for her benefit. She nodded at the wall monitor for Delacorte to go on.

“Well, this luster-quark matter consists of what I’m calling para-neutrons and para-protons. Para-neutrons consist of two glossy quarks and one matte, and para-protons consist of a pair of mattes plus a glossy. But neither glossies nor mattes carry any charge whatsoever—so regardless of how you combine them, there’s no charge on the nucleus. And without a positive nucleus, there’s nothing to attract negatively charged electrons, so a luster-quark atom is solely a nucleus; it has no electron orbital shells. The bottom line is that luster matter isn’t just electrically neutral. Rather, it’s nonelectrical; it’s immune to electromagnetic interactions.”

“Gods,” said Jag. “What would explain why it can sink into solid objects. It would probably pass through completely unhindered if it weren’t for drag caused by the regular-matter carbon grains and hydrogen polluting it, and—of course! That explains why we can see it, too. If it were purely luster quarks, it would be invisible, since the reflection and absorption of light depend on vibrating charges. We’re just seeing the interstellar dust that’s caught gravitationally inside the luster matter, like sand in jelly.” He looked at the wall screen. “All right—it doesn’t interact electromagnetically. What about the nuclear forces?”

“It is affected by both the strong and the weak nuclear force,” said Delacorte. “But those forces are so short-range, I doubt we’d get any interaction through them with regular matter except at incredibly high pressures and temperatures.”

Jag was quiet for a moment, considering. When he next spoke, his barking was subdued. “It’s incredible,” he said. “We knew the Slammer weapon could break chemical bonds, but changing regular matter into luster matter is—”

“Slammer weapon?” said Delacorte? her gray eyebrows arching. “Is that what you think produced this stuff? No, I doubt that. It’d take thousands of years for that much dust to be swept up by the spheres. My guess is that we’re seeing a natural phenomenon.’

“Natural,…” said Jag, repeating the bark his translation implant had provided. “Fascinating. What about gravitational effects?”