Starplex

By Robert J. Sawyer

Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that threatens to start an intergalactic war.

ROBERT J. SAWYER has won the Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell Memorial, Seiun, and Aurora Awards, all for best science fiction novel of the year. His novels include Hominids, Rollback, Wake, and FlashForward (basis for the TV series).

• Language: English
• Publisher: SFWRITER.COM Inc.
• Release date: Mar 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994793324

Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J. Sawyer is the author of Flashforward, winner of the Aurora Award and the basis for the hit ABC television series. He is also the author of the WWW series—Wake, Watch and Wonder—Hominids, Calculating God, Mindscan, and many other books. He has won the Hugo, Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial awards—making him one of only seven writers in history to win all three of science-fiction’s top awards for best novel. He was born in Ottawa and lives in Mississauga, Ontario.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title page

Contents

Praise for Starplex

Praise for Robert J. Sawyr

Dedication

Illustration Starplex External Configuration

Illustration Starplex Bridge Workstations

Introduction

Epigraph

Alpha Draconis

Chapter 1

Beta Draconis

Chapter 2

Gamma Draconis

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Delta Draconis

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epsilon Draconis

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Zeta Draconis

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Eta Draconis

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

More Information

Keep on Reading…

Copyright Notice

Landmarks

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

Cover

STARPLEX

Robert J. Sawyer

SFWRITER.COM Inc.

Contents

Introduction

Alpha Draconis

Chapter 1

Beta Draconis

Chapter 2

Gamma Draconis

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Delta Draconis

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epsilon Draconis

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Zeta Draconis

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Eta Draconis

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

More Information

Keep on Reading…

Praise for Starplex

Science Fiction Chronicle: "Excellent hard SF, with Sawyer tossing stars, people and time travel around with reckless abandon. One of the best SF novels of the year."

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Starplex appears to be traditional science fiction—it takes place aboard a spaceship, and several characters are extraterrestrial—but it’s actually a rumination on several very deep questions, including: Where did we come from? Where are we going? And the deepest of the deep, Is there a God?"

Sci-Fi Weekly: "An audacious engineering effort that makes Larry Niven’s Ringworld look like a high-school science project."

About Books: "Very, very cool. This is a book not to be missed."

Andrew Weiner, author of Getting Near the End: "Mind-blowing! Who says there are no more big ideas?"

Asimov’s Science Fiction: "Starplex should gladden the hearts of readers who complain that nobody’s writing real science fiction anymore, the kind of story that has faster-than-light spaceships and far-off planets and interstellar combat and all the neat things they gobbled up so greedily when ‘Doc’ Smith was dealing them out. Here’s a story with plenty of slam-bang action but no shortage of material to attract thinking readers, either. Sawyer deftly juggles half a dozen sweeping questions of cosmology (not to mention everyday ethics and morality) while keeping the story moving ahead full speed. His scientific ideas are nicely integrated into the plot, yet they also hint at larger metaphorical levels. Enjoy."

Gregory Benford, author of Timescape: "Complex but swift, inventive but real-feeling, with ideas coming thick and fast. For big-time interstellar adventure, look no farther."

Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi, co-author of Voyages Through the Universe: "Complex hard-science novel by a Canadian amateur astronomer with intriguing ideas about the nature of dark matter and even dark matter life forms. Includes more cosmological concepts than any novel we have seen."

Library Journal: "An epic hard-science adventure tempered by human concerns. Highly recommended."

Jack McDevitt, author of Time Travelers Never Die: "Starplex takes us on the ultimate grand tour: an elegant intergalactic ride with Sawyer’s signature mix of cosmic concepts and solid characterization. This one is a treat for the mind; I enjoyed it thoroughly."

The New York Review of Science Fiction: "An enormous grab bag of ideas—and a whole lot of fun."

Analog Science Fiction and Fact: "Mind-boggling. A complaint often heard these days is that there’s not enough ‘sense of wonder’ in today’s science fiction. Robert J. Sawyer’s Starplex ought to lay that complaint to rest for quite a while."

Quill & Quire: "A swift, inventive, enjoyable book. Unexpected twists keep the plot moving briskly, but Sawyer is able to do this while raising intriguing philosophical issues."

James Schellenberg in Crystalline Sphere: "Starplex is an astonishing novel, hard science fiction with heart, with a grand overarching vision. This book contains many of Sawyer’s trademarks—addictive readability, a frank engagement with ethical questions, and a fondness for Canadiana. The grand sweep of the story and Sawyer’s graceful manipulation of the reader’s sympathies combine to make this a fine book; Starplex outdoes any book in Sawyer’s oeuvre, and the majority in the field of science fiction. Sawyer uses a heady mix of big ideas and crafty storytelling, and he challenges the reader intellectually while grabbing their emotional sympathy. Quite the accomplishment."

The Toronto Star: "Here, at last, is an ambitious attempt to exploit the possibilities that the genre is capable of."

Praise for Robert J. Sawyer

The Washington Post: "No reader seeking well-written stories that respect, emphasize and depend on modern science should be disappointed by the works of Rob Sawyer."

The New York Times: "Sawyer is a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation."

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald: Robert J. Sawyer’s novels—intelligent, literate, and immensely readable explorations of the biggest ideas there are—prove that science fiction is now literature.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact: "Robert J. Sawyer has a way of taking familiar ideas, looking at them from new angles and in greater depth than almost anybody before him, and tying them together to create extraordinarily fresh and thought-provoking stories."

Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game: "Can Sawyer write? Yes—with near-Asimovian clarity, with energy and drive, with such grace that his writing becomes invisible as the story comes to life in your mind."

LabLit.com: Sawyer’s novels are thought-provoking, literate, erudite and often thrilling. They manage to appeal to both the heart and the mind.

Interzone: "Robert J. Sawyer has good things to say about the world, about people; he deals in a currency of goodwill, where the trust that we hand him at the start of the book is repaid, with interest, in the thoughtful and frequently emotional denouements."

John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War: "Cracking open a new Robert J. Sawyer book is like getting a gift from a friend who visits all the strange and undiscovered places in the world. You can’t wait to see what he's going to amaze you with this time."

Books in Canada: "Sawyer writes with a sense of wonder that hasn’t prevailed in American SF since the days of Heinlein."

Mystery News: "Sawyer is on a par with giants like Asimov and Heinlein—and, perhaps more than any other science-fiction writer working today, he understands that it’s a genre about ideas."

National Post: "Sawyer is one of the most successful Canadian writers ever. He has won himself an international readership by reinvigorating the traditions of hard science fiction, following the path of such writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein in his bold speculations from pure science. Almost alone among Canadian writers, he tackles the most fundamental questions of who we are and where we might be going—while illuminating where we are now."

Spider Robinson, author of Telempath: "If Robert J. Sawyer were a corporation, I would buy stock in him. He’s on my (extremely short) Buy-On-Sight list, and belongs on yours."

SF Site: Sawyer has undoubtedly cemented his reputation as one of the foremost science fiction writers of our generation.

The Denver Rocky Mountain News: "Robert J. Sawyer is just about the best science fiction writer out there these days."

Books by Robert J. Sawyer

NOVELS

Golden Fleece

End of an Era

The Terminal Experiment

Starplex

Frameshift

Illegal Alien

Factoring Humanity

FlashForward

Calculating God

Mindscan

Rollback

Triggers

Red Planet Blues

The Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy

Far-Seer

Fossil Hunter

Foreigner

The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy

Hominids

Humans

Hybrids

The WWW Trilogy

Wake

Watch

Wonder

COLLECTIONS

Iterations (introduction by James Alan Gardner)

Relativity (introduction by Mike Resnick)

Identity Theft (introduction by Robert Charles Wilson)

Dedication

For Ariel Reich

Every SF writer should be lucky enough to have a good friend who is both a Ph.D. in physics and a lawyer specializing in intellectual property. Thanks, Ari, for helping me launch the Argo on its relativistic flight, work out the Lagrange points for the Quintaglio system, design a chemical structure for a new form of matter, and prosecute an extraterrestrial defendant.

Starplex External Configuration

High-resolution online version of this image

Starplex Bridge Workstations

High-resolution online version of this image

Introduction

Starplex was first published in 1996, and it was the only novel from that year to be nominated for both of science fiction’s top awards, the Hugo and the Nebula—and, to my delight, it won Canada’s Aurora Award.

A lot of things have changed in the many years since I wrote this book. First, of course, some new astronomical and cosmological discoveries have been made—I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to whether any of those invalidate any of the science in this book.

Second, I’ve changed since this book was written, and so has my writing. Those who know my more recent novels—such as FlashForward, Calculating God, Hominids, Mindscan, Rollback, Wake, and Triggers—probably think of me as the author of present-day or near-future books set right here on Earth. In fact, Starplex was my swan song for writing far-future spaceships-and-aliens science fiction—but I wanted to leave that subgenre behind with the biggest bang I could muster.

Still, in some ways, Starplex was indeed a bridge between my earlier, more-traditional science fiction, and my later more-mainstream books. See, my Quintaglio Ascension trilogy of Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner, which I’d written quite early in my career, had only alien characters in them. And just before writing Starplex, I’d won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for The Terminal Experiment, which had nothing but all-too-human characters. But I wanted to see if real aliens could mix with real humans without the whole thing getting confused, and with both sides coming off believably.

When Larry Niven wrote Ringworld (which has always been one of my favorite novels), he sidestepped this issue: the humans in that book—the two-hundred-year-old Louis Wu, and the psi-powered ultra-lucky Teela Brown—were larger than life. I wanted to see if ordinary humans, going through such quotidian problems as midlife crises and workplace politics, could exist side-by-side with truly alien aliens.

Another goal for Starplex was to tackle just about every major conundrum in modern cosmology and see if I could tie them all together into one neat package. It took a plot that covers eleven billion years and six billion light-years to do it, but I think I managed.

Finally, like most science-fiction writers of my generation—who grew up watching the original Star Trek—I had a desire to do at least one "Star Trek done right" book: the story of a huge exploration starship on first-contact missions. I didn’t want to use a military background, though—I always found that the dullest and least-believable part of Star Trek. Rather, I wanted to create an essentially pacifist novel that nonetheless included epic, believable, exciting space battles and credible first-contact situations. I hope you enjoy the result.

—Robert J. Sawyer

Even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Alpha Draconis

There would be hell to pay.

The gravity had already been bled off, and Keith Lansing was now floating in zero-g. Normally he found that experience calming, but not today. Today, he exhaled wearily and shook his head. The damage to Starplex would cost billions to repair. And how many Commonwealth citizens were dead? Well, that would come out in the eventual inquest—something he wasn’t looking forward to one bit.

All the amazing things they had discovered, including first contact with the darmats, could still end up being overshadowed by politics—or even interstellar war.

Keith touched the green GO button on the console in front of him. There was a banging sound, conducted through the glassteel of the hull, as his travel pod disengaged from the access ring on the rear wall of the docking bay. The entire run was preprogrammed into the pod’s computer: exiting Starplex’s docks, flying over to the shortcut, entering it, exiting at the periphery of the Tau Ceti system, and moving into one of the docking bays on Grand Central, the United Nations space station that controlled traffic through the shortcut closest to Earth.

And, because it was all preprogrammed, Keith had nothing to do during the journey but reflect on everything that had happened.

He didn’t appreciate it at the time, but that, in itself, was a miracle. Traveling halfway across the galaxy in the blink of an eye had become routine. It was a far cry from the excitement of eighteen years ago, when Keith had been on hand for the discovery of the shortcut network—a vast array of apparently artificial gateways that permeated the galaxy, allowing instantaneous point-to-point transfer. Back then, Keith had called the whole thing magic. After all, it had taken all of Earth’s resources twenty years earlier to establish the New Beijing colony on Tau Ceti IV, just 11.8 light-years from Sol, and New New York on Epsilon Indi III, only 11.2 light-years away. But now humans routinely popped from one side of the galaxy to the other.

And not just humans. Although the shortcut builders had never been found, there were other forms of intelligent life in the Milky Way, including the Waldahudin and the Ibs, who, together with Earth’s humans and dolphins, had established the Commonwealth of Planets eleven years ago.

Keith’s pod reached the edge of docking bay twelve and moved out into space. The pod was a transparent bubble, designed to keep one person alive for a couple of hours. Around its equator was a thick white band containing life-support equipment and maneuvering thrusters. Keith turned and looked back at the mothership he was leaving behind.

The docking bay was on the rim of Starplex’s great central disk. As the pod pulled farther away, Keith could see the interlocking triangular habitat modules, four on top and four more on the bottom.

Christ, thought Keith as he looked at his ship. Jesus Christ.

The windows in the four lower habitat modules were all dark. The central disk was crisscrossed with hairline laser scorches. As his pod moved downward, he saw stars through the gaping circular hole in the disk where a cylinder ten decks thick had been carved out of it—

Hell to pay, thought Keith again. Bloody hell to pay.

He turned around and looked forward, out the curving bubble. He’d long ago given up scanning the heavens for any sign of a shortcut. They were invisible, infinitesimal points until something touched them, as—he glanced at his console—his pod was going to do in forty seconds. Then they swelled up to swallow whatever was coming through.

He’d be on Grand Central for perhaps eight hours, long enough to be report to Premier Petra Kenyatta about the attack on Starplex. Then he’d pop back here. Hopefully by that time, Jag and Longbottle would have news about the other big problem they were facing.

The pod’s maneuvering thrusters fired in a complex pattern. To exit the network back at Tau Ceti, he’d have to enter the local shortcut from above and behind. The stars moved as the pod modified its course to the proper angle, and then—

—and then it touched the point. Through the transparent hull, Keith saw the fiery purple discontinuity between the two sectors of space pass over the pod, mismatched starfields fore and aft. To the rear, the eerie green light of the region he was leaving, and up ahead, pink nebulosity—

Nebulosity? That can’t be right. Not at Tau Ceti.

But as the pod completed its passage, there could be no doubt: he’d come out at the wrong place. A beautiful rose-colored nebula, like a splayed six-fingered hand, covered four degrees of sky. Keith wheeled around, looking out in all directions. He knew well the constellations visible from Tau Ceti—slightly skewed versions of the same ones seen from Earth, including Boötes, which contained bright Arcturus and Sol itself. But these were unfamiliar stars.

Keith felt adrenaline pumping. New sectors of space were being opened at a great rate, as new exits became valid choices on the shortcut network. Clearly, this was a shortcut that had only just come on-line, making more narrow the acceptable angles of approach to reach Tau Ceti.

No need to panic, thought Keith. He could get to his intended destination easily enough. He’d just have to re-enter the shortcut on a slightly different path, making sure he didn’t vary at all from the mathematical center of the cone of acceptable angles for Grand Central Station.

Still—another new sector! That made five in the last year. God, he thought, it was too bad they’d had to cannibalize half of Starplex’s planned sister ship for parts; they could use another exploration mothership immediately if things kept on like this.

Keith checked his flight recorder, making sure he’d be able to return to this place. The instruments seemed to be operating perfectly. His first instinct was to explore, discovering whatever this new sector had to offer, but a travel pod was designed only for quick journeys through shortcuts. Besides, Keith had a meeting to get to and—he glanced at his watch implant—only forty-five minutes before it would begin. He looked down at his control panel and keyed in instructions for another pass through the shortcut network. He then checked the settings that had brought him here—and frowned. Why, he had come through at precisely the right angle for Tau Ceti. He’d never heard of a shortcut transfer going wrong before, but …

When he looked up, the starship was there.

It was shaped like a dragon, with a long, serpentine central hull and vast swept-back extensions that looked like wings. The entire thing consisted of curves and smooth edges, and there was no detailing on its robin’s-egg-blue surface, no sign of seams or windows or vents, no obvious engines. The whole thing must have been glowing, since there were no stars nearby to illuminate it, and no shadows fell across any part of its surface. Keith had thought Starplex beautiful before its recent battle scars, but it had still always seemed manufactured and functional. This alien ship, though, was art.

The dragon ship was moving directly toward Keith’s pod. The readout on his console said it was almost a kilometer long. Keith grabbed the pod’s joystick, wanting to get out of the approaching ship’s path, but suddenly the dragon came to a dead stop relative to the pod, fifty meters ahead.

Keith’s heart was pounding. Whenever a new shortcut came on-line, Starplex’s first job was to look for any signs of whatever intelligence had activated the shortcut by passing through it for the first time. But here, in a one-person travel pod, he lacked the signaling equipment and computing power needed to even attempt communications.

Besides, there had been no sign of the ship when he’d surveyed the sky moments ago. Any vessel that could move that quickly then stop dead in space had to be the product of very advanced technology. Keith was in over his head. He needed if not all of Starplex, at least one of the diplomatic craft it carried in its docking bays. He tapped the key that should have started his pod back toward the shortcut.

But nothing happened. No—that wasn’t quite right. Craning his neck, Keith could see his pod’s maneuvering thrusters firing on the outside of the ring around the habitat bubble. And yet the pod wasn’t moving at all; the background stars were rock steady. Something had to be holding him in place, but if it was a tractor beam, it was the gentlest one he’d ever encountered. A travel pod was fragile; a conventional tractor would have made its glassteel hull groan at the seams.

Keith looked again at the beautiful ship, and as he watched a—a docking bay, it must have been—appeared in its side, beneath one of the curving wings. There had been no sign of a space door moving away to reveal it. The opening simply wasn’t there one instant, and the next instant, it was—a cube-shaped hollow in the belly of the dragon. Keith found his pod moving now in the opposite direction he was telling it to go, moving toward the alien vessel.

Despite himself, he was starting to panic. He was all in favor of first contact, but preferred it on more equal terms. Besides, he had a wife to get back to, a son away at university, a life he very much wanted to continue living.

The pod floated into the bay, and Keith saw a wall wink into existence behind him, closing the cube off from space. The interior was lit from all six sides. The pod was presumably still being held by the tractor beam—no one would pull an object inside just to let it crash into the far wall under its own inertia. But nowhere could Keith see a beam emitter.

As the pod continued its journey, Keith tried to think rationally. He had entered the shortcut at the right angle to come out at Tau Ceti; no mistake had been made. And yet, somehow, he had been—been diverted here …

Which meant that whoever controlled this interstellar dragon knew more about the shortcuts than the Commonwealth races did.

And then it hit him.

The realization.

The horrible realization.

Time to pay the toll.

Chapter 1

It had been like a gift from the gods: the discovery that the Milky Way galaxy was permeated by a vast network of artificial shortcuts that allowed for instantaneous journeys between star systems. No one knew who had built the shortcuts, or what their exact purpose was. Whatever hugely advanced race created them had left no other trace of its existence.

Scans made by hyperspace telescopes suggested that there were four billion separate shortcut exits in our galaxy, or roughly one for every hundred stars. The shortcuts were easy to spot in hyperspace: each one was surrounded by a distinctive sphere of orbiting tachyons. But of all those shortcuts, only two dozen appeared to be active. The others clearly existed, but there seemed to be no way to move to them.

The closest shortcut to Earth was in the Oort cloud of Tau Ceti. Through it, ships could jump seventy thousand light-years to Rehbollo, the Waldahud homeworld. Or they could jump fifty-three thousand light-years to Flatland, home of the bizarre Ib race. But the shortcut exit that existed near Polaris, for instance, just eight hundred light-years away, was inaccessible. It, like almost all the others, was dormant.

A particular shortcut would not work as an exit for ships arriving from other shortcuts until it had first been used locally as an entrance. Thus, the Tau Ceti shortcut had not been a valid exit choice for other races until the UN sent a probe through it, eighteen years ago, back in 2076. Three weeks later, a Waldahud starship popped out of that same shortcut—and suddenly humans and dolphins were not alone.

Many speculated that this was how the shortcut network had been designed to work: sectors of the galaxy were quarantined until at least one race within them had reached technological maturity. Given how few shortcuts were active, some argued that Earth’s two sentient species, Homo sapiens and Tursiops truncatus, were therefore among the first races in the galaxy to reach that level.

The next year, ships from the Ib homeworld popped through at Tau Ceti and near Rehbollo—and soon the four races agreed to an experimental alliance, dubbed the Commonwealth of Planets.

In order to expand the usable shortcut network, seventeen years ago each homeworld launched thirty boomerangs. Each of these probes flew at their maximum hyperdrive velocity—twenty-two times the speed of light—toward dormant shortcuts that had been detected by their tachyon coronas. Upon arrival, each boomerang would dive through and return home, thus activating the shortcut as a valid exit.

So far, boomerangs had reached twenty-one additional shortcuts within a radius of 375 light-years from one or another of the three homeworlds. Originally, these sectors were explored by small ships. But the Commonwealth had realized a more comprehensive solution was needed: a giant mothership from which exploration surveys could be launched, a ship that could serve not only as a research base during the crucial initial exploration of a new sector, but also could function as embassy for the Commonwealth, if need be. A vast starship capable of not just astronomical research, but of undertaking first-contact missions as well.

And so, a year ago, in 2093, Starplex was launched. Funded by all three homeworlds and constructed at the Rehbollo orbital shipyards, it was the largest vessel ever built by any of the Commonwealth races: 290 meters at its widest point, seventy decks thick, a total enclosed volume of 3.1 million cubic meters, outfitted with a crew of a thousand beings and fifty-four small auxiliary ships of various designs.

Starplex was currently 368 light-years due galactic south of Flatland, exploring the vicinity of a recently activated shortcut. The closest star was an F-class subgiant a quarter-light-year away. It was surrounded by four asteroid belts, but no planets. An uneventful mission so far—nothing remarkable astronomically, and no alien radio signals detected. Starplex’s staff was busy winding down its explorations. In seven days, another boomerang was due to reach its designated shortcut target, this one 376 light-years away from Rehbollo. Starplex’s next scheduled assignment was to investigate that sector.

Everything seemed so peaceful, until—

#

Lansing, you will hear me out.

Keith Lansing stopped walking down the cold corridor, sighed, and rubbed his temples. Jag’s untranslated voice sounded like a dog barking, with occasional hisses and snarls thrown in for good measure. His translated voice—rendered in an old-fashioned Brooklyn accent—wasn’t much better: harsh, sharp, nasty.

What is it, Jag?

"The apportioning of resources aboard Starplex, barked the being, is all wrong—and you are to blame for that. Before we move to the next shortcut, I demand you rectify this. You consistently shortchange the physics division and give preferential treatment to life sciences."

Jag was a Waldahud, a shaggy piglike creature with six limbs. After the last ice age ended on Rehbollo, the polar caps had melted, flooding much of the land and crisscrossing what remained with rivers. The Waldahudin’s ancestors adapted to a semiaquatic lifestyle, their bodies becoming well insulated with fat overlain by brown fur to keep out