Starplex

"The Ibs will not leave Flatland," said Rhombus, with uncharacteristic bluntness.

"This is crazy," Keith said. "We can't shut down the shortcuts."

"If our homeworlds are in jeopardy," said Thor, "we can — and we should."

"There's no proof that the arriving stars represent any threat," Keith said. "I can't believe that beings advanced enough to move stars around are malevolent."

"They may not be," said Thor, "any more than construction workers who destroy anthills are malevolent. We might simply be in their way."

There was nothing Keith could do about the arriving stars until more information was available, and so, at 1200 hours, he and Rissa went off to find something to eat.

There were eight restaurants aboard Starplex. The terminology was deliberate. Humans kept wanting to refer to Starplex's components in naval terms: mess halls, sickbays, and quarters, instead of restaurants, hospitals, and apartments.

But of the four Commonwealth species, only humans and Waldahudin had martial traditions, and the other two races were nervous enough about that without being reminded of it in casual conversation.

Each of the restaurants was unique, both in ambience and fare.

Starplex's designers had taken great pains to make sure that shipboard life was not monotonous. Keith and Rissa decided to have lunch in Keg Tahn, the Waldahud restaurant on deck twenty-six. Through the restaurant's fake windows, holograms of Rehbollo's surface were visible: wide, flat flood plains of purple-gray mud, crisscrossed by rivers and streams. Clumps of stargin were scattered about — Rehbollo's counterpart of trees, looking like three- or four-meter-tall blue tumbleweeds. The moist mud didn't offer any firm pumhase, but it was rich with dissolved minerals and decaying organic material. Each starg had thousands of tangled shoots that could serve either as roots, or, unfurling themselves, as photosynthesis organs, depending on whether they ended up on top or on the bottom. The giant plants blew across the plains, rotating end over end, or floated down the streams, until they found fertile mud.

When they did so, they settled in, sinking until about a third of their height was embedded in the ooze.

The holographic sky was greenish gray, and the star overhead was fat and red. Keith found the color scheme dreary, but there was no denying that the food here was excellent. Waldahudin were mainly vegetarians, and the plants they enjoyed were succulent and delicious. Keith found himself craving starg shoots three or four times a month.

Of course, all eight restaurants were open to every species, and that meant offering a range of meal items that met the various races' metabolic requirements. Keith ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a couple of pickled gherkins to go with his starg salad. Waldahudin, whose females, like terrestrial mammals, secreted a nutritive liquid for their offspring, found it disgusting that humans drank the milk of other animals, but they pretended not to know what cheese was made of.

Rissa was sitting opposite Keith. Actually, the table was shaped in the Waldahud standard, like a human kidney, and made of a polished plant material that wasn't wood, but did have lovely bands of light and dark in it. Rissa was in the indentation in the table. The Waldahud custom was that a female always sat in this honored position; on their home-world a dame would be positioned here, with her male entourage seated around the curving form.

Rissa's tastes were more adventurous than Keith's. She was eating az torad — "blood mussels," Waldahud bivalves that lived in the slurry layer at the bottom of many lakes. Keith found the bright purple-red color disgusting as did most Waldahudin, for that matter, since it was a precise match for the hue of their own blood. But Rissa had mastered the trick of bringing the shell to her mouth, popping it open, and slurping out the morsel within, all without letting the soft mass be seen either by herself or anyone sitting across from her.

Keith and Rissa ate in silence, and Keith wondered if that was good or bad. They'd run out of idle chitchat ages ago. Oh, if there was something on either of their minds, they'd talk at length, but it seemed that they just enjoyed being in each other's company, even if they said barely a word. At least that's the way Keith felt, and he hoped Rissa shared that feeling.

Keith was using a katook (Waldahud cutlery, like duck-billed pliers) to bring some starg to his mouth when a comm panel popped up from the table's surface, showing the face of Hek, the Waldahud alien-communications specialist.

"Rissa," he barked in a voice somewhat more Brooklynish than Jag's; from the way the comm panel was angled, the Waldahud couldn't see Keith. "I have been analyzing the radio noise we've been detecting near the twenty-one-centimeter band. You won't believe what I've found. Come to my office at once."