Starplex by Robert J. Sawyer Read Free Book Online Page A

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