Starplex

The view cut to a beefy Waldahud face. The super at the bottom of the screen identified him as Plenipotentiary Daht Lasko em-Wooth. He spoke in English, without aid of a translator — a rare feat for a member of his race. "It's with great regret that economic necessity has forced us into this move. As you know, the economies of all the Commonwealth races have been thrown into disarray by the unexpected development of interstellar commerce. Reducing the number of our embassies on Earth simply represents an adjustment to the times."

The screen changed to show a middle-aged African woman, identified as Rita Negesh, Earth-Wald Political Scientist, Leeds University. "I don't buy that — not for a minute," she said. "If you ask me, Rehbollo is recalling its ambassadors."

"As a prelude to what?" asked an off-camera male voice.

Negesh spread her arms. "Look, when humanity first moved out into space, all the pundits said the universe is so big and so bountiful, there was no possibility of material conflict between separate worlds.

But the shortcut network changed all that; it forced us up close with other races, perhaps before we or they were ready."

"And so?" said the unseen questioner again.

"And so," said Negesh, "if we are moving toward an… an incident, it may not just be over economic issues. It may be something more basic — the simple fact that humans and Waldahudin get on each others' nerves."

The wall monitor changed back to the hologram of Lake Louise. Keith looked at Rissa, and let out a long sigh. "An 'incident,'" he said, repeating the word. "Well, at least we're both too old to be drafted."

Rissa looked at him for a long moment. "I think that makes no difference," she said, at last. "I think we're already at the front lines."

Chapter XIV

Keith always enjoyed taking an elevator to the docking bays. The car dropped down to deck thirty-one, the uppermost of the ten decks that made up the central disk. It then began a horizontal journey along one of the four spokes that radiated out from there to the outer edge of the disk. But the spokes were transparent, as were the elevator cab's walls and floors, and so the passengers were treated to a view looking down on the vast circular ocean. Keith could see the dorsal fins of three dolphins swimming along just below the surface. Agitators in the ocean walls and central shaft produced respectable half-meter waves; dolphins preferred that to a calm sea. The radius of the ocean deck was ninety-five meters; Keith was always staggered by the amount of water contained there. The roof was a real-time hologram of Earth's sky, with towering white clouds moving against a background of that special shade of blue that always tugged at Keith's heart.

The elevator finally reached the edge of the ocean and passed through into the prosaic tunnels of the engineering torus. Once it came to the outer edge of the torus, it descended the nine levels to the floor of the docking bays.

Keith disembarked, and walked the short distance to the entrance to bay nine. As soon as he entered, he saw Hek, the symbolic-communications specialist, and a slim human named Shahinshah Azmi, the head of the material-sciences department. Between them was a black cube measuring a meter on a side. The cube was resting on a pedestal that brought it up to eye level. Keith walked over to them. "Good day, sir," said the ever-polite Azmi, in a flat voice.

Keith knew from old movies how musical Indian accents used to be; he missed the rich variety that human voices had had before instantaneous communications had smoothed out all the differences. Azmi gestured at the cube. "We've built the time capsule out of graphite composite with a few radioactives added. It's solid except for the self-repairing hyperspatial sensor, which will lock onto the shortcut, and the starlight-powered ACS system for helping the cube hold position relative to it."

"And what about the message for the future?" asked Keith.

Hek pointed to one of the cube's sides. "We've incised it into the cube's faces," he said, his barking echoing in the bay. "It begins on this side. As you can see, it consists of a series of boxed examples.

Two dots plus two dots equals four dots; a question with its answer.

The second box, here, has two dots plus two dots, and a symbol. Since any arbitrary symbol would do, we just used the English question mark, but without the separate dot underneath; that might confuse one into thinking it was two symbols rather than one. Anyway, that gives us a question and a symbolic representation of the fact that the answer is missing. The third box shows the question symbol, the symbol I've established for 'equals,' and four dots, the answer. So that box says, "The answer to the question is four. Do you see?"

Keith nodded.

"Now," continued Hek, "having established a vocabulary for our dialogue, we can ask our real question." He waddled around to the opposite side of the cube, which was also incised with markings.