Starplex

“How do they—” barked Jag, and Keith immediately knew what he was going to say. How could world-sized objects be packed so closely together? There were perhaps ten diameters between the closest of the objects, and fifteen or so between the ones that were least tightly packed. Keith couldn’t imagine any pattern of stable orbits that would keep them from collapsing together under their own gravitational attraction. If this was a natural grouping, it seemed unlikely that it could be an old one. Throwing some light on the subject had only made the mystery deeper.

Chapter IV

On Earth, cells contain mitochondria for converting food to energy, undulopodia (thrashing tails including those that propel sperm), and, in plants, plastids for storing chlorophyll. The ancestors of these organelles were originally independent free-swimming creatures. They came together in symbiosis with a host being whose DNA is now walled off in the nucleus; to this day, some organelles still contain vestigial DNA of their own.

On Flatland, diverse ancestors also learned to work together, but on a much grander scale. An Ib was actually a combination of seven large life-forms—indeed, “Ib” is short for “integrated bioentity.”

The seven parts are the pod, the watermelon-shaped creature containing the supersaturated solution in which the crystals of the principal brain grow; the pump, the digestive/respiratory structure that surrounds the pod like a blue sweatshirt tied around a green pot belly, with tubular arms hanging down for feeding and excreting; the twin wheels, fleshy hoops coated with quartz; the frame, a saddle-shaped gray construct that provides axles for the wheels and anchor points for the other elements; the bundle, sixteen copper-colored ropes that normally form a heap in front of the pump but can snake out as needed; and the web, a sensor net that covers the pump, pod, and upper frame.

The web has an eye and a bioluminescent dot wherever two or more of its strands intersect. Although they have no speech organs, Ibs hear as well as terrestrial dogs do, and they accept with good humor spoken names bestowed by members of other races. Starplex’s ExOps manager was Rhombus; Snowflake was senior geologist; Vendi (short for Venn Diagram) was a hyperdrive engineer; and Boxcar—well, Boxcar was the biochemist with whom Rissa was collaborating on the most important project in history.

In 1972, Earth’s Club of Rome began preaching the limits of growth. But with all of space now at humanity’s fingertips, there were no more constraints. To hell with the textbook 2.3 children. If you wanted 2x10³ kids, there was room enough for all of them—and for you, too. The argument that individuals had to die in order to allow the race to advance no longer applied.

Boxcar and Rissa were trying to increase the lifespans of the Commonwealth races. The problem was daunting; so much of how life worked still remained mysterious. Rissa doubted that the riddle of aging would be solved in her lifetime, although within a century someone would likely find the key. The irony was not lost on her: Clarissa Cervantes, senescence researcher, probably belonged to the final human generation that would know death.

The average human lifespan was a hundred Earth years; Waldahudin lived to be about forty-five (the fact that they were self-sufficient after only six years didn’t quite compensate for the shortness of their span; some humans thought the knowledge that they were the shortest-lived of the Commonwealth sentients was what made them so disagreeable); dolphins were good for eighty years with proper health care; and, barring accidents, an Ib would live for precisely 641 Earth years.

Rissa and Boxcar thought they knew why Ibs lived so much longer than the other races. Human, dolphin, and Waldahud cells all have a Hayflick limit: they properly reproduce only a finite number of times. Ironically, Waldahud cells had the highest limit—about ninety-three’ times—but their cells, like the creatures composed of them, had the shortest life cycle. Human and dolphin cells could divide about fifty times. But the organelle clusters—there was no overall membrane to make them a single cell—that made up the body of an Ib could reproduce indefinitely. What eventually kills most Ibs is a mental short circuit: when the crystals of the central brain, which form matrices at a constant rate, reach their maximum information capacity, the overflow causes the basic routines governing respiration and digestion to become garbled.