Starplex

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?"

"Possible that dark matter — or some portion of it — is alive?" The Waldahud shrugged all four shoulders. "Much of our science and philosophy tell us that the universe should be teeming with life. And yet, so far, we've only found three worlds on which life has arisen.

Perhaps we've just been looking in the wrong places. Neither Dr. Delacorte nor I has yet figured out much about dark-matter meta-chemistry, but there are lots of complex compounds in those spheres."

Keith spread his arms in an appeal for basic common sense, and looked around the bridge, trying to find someone else as lost by all this as he was.

And then an even bigger thought hit him, and he leaned back in his chair for a moment. Then he touched his comm control panel, selecting a general channel. "Lansing to Hek," he said.

A hologram of Hek's head appeared in a second framed-off part of the starscape. "Hek here."

"Any luck pinpointing the sources of those radio transmissions?"

Keith imagined the Waldahud's lower shoulders moving outside the camera's field of view. "Not yet."

"You said there were over two hundred separate frequencies upon which you were finding apparently intelligent signals."

"That's right."

"HOW many? Exactly how many?"

Hek's face turned to a profile view, showing his projecting snout, as he consulted a monitor. "Two hundred and seventeen," he said. "Although some are much more active than others."

Keith heard Jag, on his left, repeat the same bark of astonishment he'd made earlier.

"There are," said Keith slowly, "precisely two hundred and seventeen separate Jupiter-sized objects out there." He paused, backtracking away from his own conclusion. "Of course, gas-giant worlds like Jupiter are often sources of radio emissions."

"But these are spheres of dark matter," said Lianne. "They're electrically neutral."

"They are not pure dark matter," said Jag. "They're permeated with bits of regular matter. The dark matter could interact with protons in the regular matter through the strong nuclear force, thereby generating EM signals."

Hek lifted his upper shoulders. "That might work," he said. "But each sphere is broadcasting on its own separate frequency, almost like…" The Brooklyn-accented voice trailed off.