Starplex

“It’s not that I hate Jag—not really. I hate… hate myself. Hate feeling like a bigot.” He ran the towel up and down his back. “I mean, I know the Waldahudin have different ways. I know that, and I try to accept it. But—Christ, I hate myself for even thinking this—they’re all the same. Obnoxious, argumentative, pushy. I’ve never met one who wasn’t.” He sprayed deodorant under each arm. “The whole idea of thinking I know all about somebody just because I know what race they belong to is abhorrent—it’s everything I was brought up to understand. And now I find myself doing it day in and day out.” He sighed. “Waldahud. Pig. The terms are interchangeable in my mind.”

Rissa had finished drying herself. She pulled on a beige long-sleeve shirt and fresh panties. “They think the same way about us, you know. All humans are weak, indecisive. They don’t have any korbaydin.”

Keith managed a small laugh at the use of the Waldahudar word. “I do too,” he said pointing down. “Of course, I only have two instead of four, but they do the job.” He got a fresh pair of boxer shorts and a pair of brown denim pants out of the closet, and put them on. The pants constricted to fit around his waist. “Still,” he said, “the fact that they also generalize doesn’t make it any better.” He sighed. “It wasn’t like this with the dolphins.”

“Dolphins are different,” said Rissa, pulling on a pair of red pants. “In fact, maybe that’s the key. They’re so different from us that we can bask in those differences. The biggest problem with the Waldahudin is that we have too much in common with them.”

She moved over to her dresser. She didn’t put on any makeup; the natural look was the current style for both men and women. But she did insert two diamond earrings, each the size of a small grape. Cheap diamond imports from Rehbollo had destroyed any remaining value natural gemstones had, but their innate beauty was unsurpassed.

Keith had finished dressing, too. He’d put on a synthetic shirt with a dark brown herringbone pattern, and a beige cardigan sweater. Thankfully, as humanity moved out into the universe, one of the first bits of needless mass to be ejected had been the jacket and tie for men; even formal wear did not demand them anymore. With the advent of the four-day, and then the three-day, workweek on Earth, the distinction between office clothes and leisure clothes had disappeared.

He looked over at Rissa. She was beautiful—at forty-four, she was still beautiful. Maybe they should make love. So what if they just got dressed? Besides, these crazy thoughts about…

Bleep. “Karendaughter to Lansing.”

Speak of the devil. Keith lifted his head, spoke into the air. “Open.Yes?”

Lianne Karendaugliter’s rich voice came out of the wall speaker. “Keith—fantastic news! A watson just came through from CHAT with word that a new shortcut has come on-line!”

Keith raised his eyebrows. “Did the boomerang reach Rehbollo 376A ahead of schedule?” That sometimes happened; judging interstellar distances was a tricky game.

“No. This is a different shortcut, and it came on-line because something—or, if we’re lucky, someone—moved through it locally.”

“Has anything unexpected come through any of the homeworld shortcuts?”

“Not yet,” said Lianne, her voice still bubbling with excitement. “We only discovered this one was now on-line because a cargo module accidentally got misdirected to it.”

Keith was on his feet at once. “Recall all probeships,” he said. “Summon Jag to the bridge, and alert all stations for a possible first-contact situation.” He hurried out the apartment door, Rissa right behind him.

BETA DRACONIS

Keith Lansing looked around the docking bay aboard the strange alien craft. Like the ship’s exterior, this part, too, was featureless. No seams, no equipment, nothing marring the six glowing cube faces.

When the shortcuts were discovered, the press had delighted in bandying around a century-old saying, attributed to the Sri Lankan writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The shortcuts were magic.

And so was this strange, beautiful starship, this starship that moved in apparent defiance of Newton’s laws…

Keith took a deep breath. He knew what was about to happen, knew it in his bones. He was about to meet the makers of the shortcuts.

The pod’s course across the bay curved gently downward and soon it came to rest on the flat lower face of the bay. Keith felt weight returning. It continued to grow slowly, and he settled to the floor. The gravity kept increasing, more and more, until it had reached Starplex’s shipboard standard. But still it grew, and Keith fought a wave of panic, fearing he would be crushed to jelly.

Finally, though, it stopped—and Keith realized that it was at just about the level he kept it at in his cabin aboard ship, nine percent higher than the Commonwealth standard but equal to Earth’s sea-level surface gravity.

And then, suddenly—