'What?'
'Don't call them that name. They are Waldahudin.' He managed to say the word as a bark, with perfect accent and asperity.
Amundsen was taken aback. 'Do you know what they call us?' she asked.
Keith shook his head slightly.
'Gargtelkin,' she said. ' 'Ones who copulate out of season.' '
Keith suppressed a grin. But then he sobered. 'We can't go to war with them.'
'They started it.'
He thought of his older sister and younger brother. He thought of an old black-and-white movie with dueling anthems, the Marseillaise drowning out Wacht am Rhein.
And he thought most of all of the sight of the young Milky Way, cupped in his outstretched hand.
'No,' said Keith simply.
'What do you mean, 'no'?' snapped Amundsen. 'They did start it.'
'I mean it doesn't make any difference. None of it does. There are beings out there made of dark matter. There are shortcuts in intergalactic space. There are stars coming back from the future. And you're worried about who started it? It doesn't matter. Let's end it. Let's end it here and now.'
'That's exactly what we're talking about,' said Premier Kenyatta: 'Ending it once and for all. Knocking the pigs on their hairy asses.'
Keith shook his head. Midlife crisis — for all of them, humans and Waldahudin. 'Let me go to Rehbollo. Let me talk to Queen Pelsh. I'm supposed to be a diplomat. Let me go and talk peace. Let me build a bridge.'
'People have died,' said Amundsen. 'Here at Tau Ceti, humans beings have died.'
Keith thought of Saul Ben-Abraham. Not the horrid picture that usually came to mind, Saul's skull opening like a red flower in front of his eyes, but rather Saul alive, great wide grin splitting his dark beard, a home-brewed beer in hand. Saul Ben-Abraham had never wanted war.
He'd gone to the alien ship looking for peace, for friendship.
And what about the other Saul? Saul Lansing-Cervantes — unable to carry a tune, sporting a silly goatee, shortstop on one of Harvard's campus baseball teams, a chocoholic — and a physics major, the kind they would draft to be a hyperdrive pilot if it came to war. 'Humans have died before, and we have not sought vengeance,' said Keith.
Rhombus had been right. Let it go, he'd said. Let it all go.
Keith felt it leaving him, the unpleasant thing he'd carried around for: eighteen years. He looked at the two women. 'For the sake of those who have died — and for all those who would die in a war — we have to put out the fire before it's too late.'
Keith reboarded his travel pod, left Grand Central, and headed back toward the shortcut.
He had spent hours arguing with Commissioner Amundsen and Premier Kenyatta. But he wouldn't give up. This was the windmill he'd been looking for. This was the battle worth fighting — the battle for peace.
An impossible dream?
He thought of his great-great-grandfather's wonder-filled life. Cars and airplanes, lasers and moon landings.
And his own wonder-filled life.
And all the wonders yet to come.
Nothing was impossible — not even peace. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Sufficiently advanced. Races did grow up, did enter a state of maturity…He was ready for that. At last, he was ready.
Others must be, too.
Borman, Lovell, and Anders had cupped the Earth in their hands. Just a quarter of a century later, that same world had begun disarming itself.
Einstein hadn't lived to see it, but his impossible dream of putting his nuclear genie back in the bottle had come to pass.
And now humans and Waldahudin had both cupped the galaxy in their hands.
A galaxy that Keith, and surely others, would live to see rotate around its axis time and again.
There would be peace between the races. He would make sure of that.
After all, what better job was there for a middle child with billions of years to spend?
Keith's travel pod touched the shortcut, the purple halo passed over the spherical hull, and he emerged back near the green star.
Starplex was up ahead, a giant silver-and-copper diamond against the starry backdrop. Keith could see that docking bay seven's space door was open, and the bronze wedge of the Rum Runner was in the process of landing — meaning Jag and Longbottle must be returning with news of their search for the darmat baby. Heart pounding, Keith activated his pod's preprogrammed docking sequence.
Keith hurried to the bridge. Although he'd only been gone a short time, he felt a need to hug Rissa, who happened to be there using her console even though it was delta shift. He held her tight for several seconds, feeling the warmth of her.
Wineglass politely rolled away from the director's workstation in case Keith wished to use it, but Keith motioned for the Ib to return to it, and Keith took a chair in the seating gallery at the back of the room.
No sooner had he done so than the forward bridge door opened and Jag waddled in. 'The baby is trapped,' he barked as he made his way over to the physics station, which was currently unoccupied. 'It's stuck in close orbit around a star that emerged from the same shortcut the baby did.'
'Did you call out to by radio?' asked Rissa. 'Any response?'
'None,' said Jag, 'but the star is a real noisemaker. Our message might have been lost going in, or the reply might have been lost coming out.'
'It would be like trying to hear a whisper during a hurricane,' said Keith, shaking his head. 'All but impossible.'
'Especially,' said Longbottle, popping up in the starboard pool on the bridge, 'if the darmat is dead.'
Keith looked at the dolphin's face, then nodded. 'That's a good point. How do we tell if something like that is still alive?
Rissa frowned. 'None of us would survive five seconds close to a star without a lot of shielding or heavy-duty force screens. The baby is naked.'
'It's worse than that,' said Jag. 'The thing is black. Although the luster-quark matter is transparent to electromagnetic radiation, the regular-matter dust that permeates it is not reflecting any appreciable amount of the star's light and heat. The child may be cooking itself.'
'So what do we do?' asked Keith.
'First,' said Jag, 'we should get it into the shade — build a reflective foil parasol that could be jockeyed in between the darmat and the star.'
'Can our nanotech tab do that here?' asked Keith.
'Ordinarily, I'd have New Beijing build such a thing and shunt it through the Tau Ceti shortcut to us, but I saw the mess they were in when I popped back for my meeting.'
There was a young Native American sitting at InOps. 'I'd have to check with Lianne to be sure,' he said, 'but I suspect we can pull it off. It won't be easy, though. The parasol will have to be over a hundred thousand klicks wide. Even at just one molecule of thickness, that's still a lot of material.'
'Get to work on it,' said Keith. 'How long?'
'Six hours if we're lucky,' said the man. 'Twelve if we're not.'
'But even if we shield the baby, then what?' asked Rissa. 'It's still trapped.'
Keith looked at Jag. 'Could we use the parasol as a solar sail, and let the solar wind blow it away from the star?'
Jag snorted. 'Ten to the thirty-seventh kilos? Not a chance.'
'Okay, okay — what about this?' said Keith. 'What if we protect the baby with some sort of force shield, and then detonate the star, so that it goes nova, and—'
