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it--think we're launching an attack."
"They are almost certainly not ships," said Jag, curtly.
"They are planetssized bodies."
Keith looked at Rissa, at the holographic Thor. and Rhombus, and at the
back of Lianne's head, to see if any of them had any objections.
"All right," he said. "Let's do it."
Jag got up and walked over to stand beside Rhombus at the
external-operations station. Keith found it funny watching them talk:
Jag barking like an angry dog, and Rhombus replying in shimmering
lights. Since they were just conversing among themselves, PHANTOM
didn't bother to translate their words for Keith, but Keith tried to
listen in, just for the practice. Waldahudar was a difficult language
for English speakers to follow, and it required a different grammatical
mood depending on the gender of the speaker and the person being spoken
to (males could only address females in a conditional/subjunctive way,
for instance). On the other hand, specific nouns were avoided as much
as possible in polite Waldahudar, lest disagreements over terminology
ensue. Throughout the conversation, Jag leaned on Rhombus's workstation
for support; his roedial limbs could be used for locomotion or
manipulation, but Waldahu-din didn't like dropping down onto their rear
four in the company of humans.
Finally, Jag and Rhombus had agreed on what characteristics the flare
should have. Lianne at InOps issued an order that all windows on decks
one through thirty be covered or turned opaque. She also drew the
protective covers over sensitive external cameras and sensors.
When that was done, Rhombus launched the flare--a ball about two meters
in diameter--out through a horizontal mass-driver tube that exited on
the outer rim of the central disk. He let the flare get about twenty
thousand klicks above the ship and then ignited it. The flare burned
with the light of a miniature sun for eight seconds.
Of course, it took the light from that flare almost twenty seconds to
reach the beginning of the phenomenon that was obscuring the background
stars. It turned out that the phenomenon was roughly spherical,
measuring some seven million kilometers in diameter, so it took
twenty-four seconds--or three times the length of the light pulse--for
the illumination to pass through it in a circular band. When it was
done, Rhombus summed the various illuminated parts of the image to give
a view of the whole thing as if it had been lit up simultaneously. In
the all-encompassing hologram, the bridge crew could finally see what
was out there.
There were dozens of gray-and-black spheres, each one so dark that the
illuminated side was hardly much brighter than the unilluminated one.
"Each of the spheres is roughly the size of the planet Jupiter," said
Thor, his head bent down, consulting a readout. "The smallest is
110,000 klicks wide; the largest, about 170,000. They're clustered into
a spherical volume seven million klicks wide, or about five times the
diameter of Sol."
The individual orbs looked a lot like black-and-white photographs of
Jupiter, except that they didn't have neat latitudinal bands of cloud.
Rather, the clouds--or whatever it was that formed the visible surface
markings--seemed to swirl in simple convection cells from equator to
pole, the kind of pattern one might expect if the spheres had next to no
rotation. In the intervening space between the world-sized spheres was
a diaphanous fog of gas or particles that formed a translucent haze;
doubtless this fog had been responsible for most of the twinkling effect
they'd observed.
The whole thing--spheres and surrounding fog--looked like assorted steel
ball bearings rolling around in a pile of black silk stockings.
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
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