Starplex

Rhombus’s web twinkled. “I hope the truth does not prove embarrassing, good Keith, but in fact, it’s spinning faster than any other sphere we’ve yet observed. At this point, it’s rotating on its axis once every two hours and sixteen minutes—almost five times as fast as Jupiter revolves. The speed is so great that any normal turbulence in the clouds has been smoothed out. And in this speeded-up playback, the image you’re seeing is rotating every eight seconds.” Rhombus snaked out a rope and flicked a control. “Here, let me have the computer put a reference mark on the equator. See that orange dot? It’s at an arbitrary zero degrees of longitude.”

The orange spot whipped across the equator, disappeared around back, reappeared four seconds later, and traversed the visible face again. After a few cycles, Jag barked out, “Are you increasing the playback speed?”

“No, good Jag,” said Rhombus. “Speed is constant.”

Jag gestured at the digital clocks. “But that dot of yours took only seven seconds to go around that time.”

“Indeed,” said Rhombus. “The sphere’s actual rate of rotation is increasing.”

“How can that be?” asked Keith. “Are other bodies interacting with it?”

“Well, yes, the other spheres are all having an effect on it—but that’s not the cause of what we’re seeing,” said Rhombus. “The increased rotation is internally generated.”

Jag’s head was bent down to his console, running quickie computer models. “You can’t get increased spin unless you pump energy into the system. There must be some complex reactions going on inside the sphere, ultimately fueled by some outside source, and—” He looked up, and let out a high-pitched bark, which PHANTOM translated as “Expression of astonishment.”

In the blue framed-off area, the dark-matter object had started-to pinch in at its equator. The northern and southern halves were no longer perfect hemispheres, but rather they curved in a little before they joined each other. The orange reference dot was now whipping around the smaller waist even faster than before.

As the sphere continued to rotate with increasing speed, the pinching-off became more and more pronounced. Soon the profile of the object had taken on a figure-eight shape.

Rissa rose to her feet, and stood staring, mouth agape. The equator was now so narrow that the orange dot covered almost a quarter of its width. Rhombus touched some keys and the dot disappeared, replaced by separate orange dots on the equators of each of the two joined spheres.

The view in the frame went dark. “Please forgive this,” said Rhombus. “Another dark-matter sphere moved into our line of sight, obscuring the view. At this playback speed, we lose the picture for about fourteen seconds. Let me jump past that.”

Ropes touched the ExOps console. When the image reappeared, the two spheres were joined by only about a tenth of the original globe’s diameter. Everyone watched, rapt, silence broken only by the gentle whir of the air-conditioning equipment, as the process reached its inevitable conclusion. The two spheres broke free from each other. One immediately started curving toward the bottom of the frame; the other, toward the top. As they distanced themselves from each other, the orange reference dots on each of their equators began to take longer and longer to complete their paths—the rotation was slowing down.

Rissa turned to face Keith, her eyes wide. “It’s like a cell,” she, said. “A cell undergoing mitosis.”

“Exactly,” said Rhombus. “Except that in this case, the mother cell is some hundred and seventy thousand kilometers in diameter. Or, at least it was before this started happening.”

Keith cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me that those things out there are alive? That they’re living cells?”

“I finally saw the recordings Jag’s atmospheric probe had made,” said Rissa. “Remember that blimplike object it saw as it went into the atmosphere? I’d idly thought that it might be an individual life-form—a gasbag creature, floating in the clouds. Earth scientists in the 1960s proposed just such life-forms for Jupiter. But such blimps could just as easily be organelles—discrete components within a larger cell.”

“Living beings,” said Keith, incredulous. “Living beings almost two hundred thousand kilometers in size?”

Rissa’s voice was still full of awe. “Perhaps. In which case, we’ve just seen one of them reproduce.”

“Incredible,” said Keith, shaking his head. “I mean, we aren’t just talking about giant creatures. And we aren’t just talking about life-forms living freely in open space. We’re talking about living beings made of dark matter.” He turned to his left. “Jag, is that even possible?”