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

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 strands intersect. Although they have no speech organs, Ibs hear as well as terrestrial dogs do, and they accept with good humor spoken names bestowed by members of other races. Starplex's ExOps manager was Rhombus; Snowflake was senior geologist; Vendi (short for Venn Diagram) was a hyperdrive engineer; and Boxcar--well, Boxcar was the biochemist with whom Rissa was collaborating on the most important project in history.
    In 1972, Earth's Club of Rome began preaching the limits of growth.
    But with all of space now at humanity's fingertips, there were no more constraints. To hell with the textbook 2.3 children. If you wanted 2*10^3 kids, there was room enough for all of them--and for you, too.
    The argument that individuals had to die in order to allow the race to advance no longer applied.
    Boxcar and Rissa were trying to increase the lifespans of the Commonwealth races. The problem was daunting; so much of how life worked still remained mysterious. Rissa doubted that the riddle of aging would be solved in her lifetime, although within a century someone would likely find the key. The irony was not lost on her: Clarissa Cervantes, senescence researcher, probably belonged to the final human generation that would know death.
    The average human lifespan was a hundred Earth years; Waldahudin lived to be about forty-five (the fact that they were self-sufficient after only six years didn't quite compensate for the shortness of their span; some humans thought the knowledge that they were the shortest-lived of the Commonwealth sentients was what made them so disagreeable); dolphins were good for eighty years with proper health care; and, barring accidents, an Ib would live for precisely 641 Earth years.
    Rissa and Boxcar thought they knew why Ibs lived so much longer than the other races. Human, dolphin, and Waldahud cells all have a Hayflick limit: they proper!y reproduce only a finite number of times.
    Ironically, Waldahud cells had the highest limit--about ninety-three'
    times--but their cells, like the creatures composed of them, had the shortest life cycle. Human and dolphin cells could divide about fifty times: But the organelle clusters--there was no overall membrane to mike them a single cell--that made up the body of an Ib could reproduce indefinitely. What eventually kills most Ibs is a mental short circuit: when the crystals of the central brain, which form matrices at a constant rate, reach their maximum information capacity, the overflow causes the basic routines governing respiration and digestion to become garbled.
    Since she didn't seem to be needed on the bridge, Rissa had gone down to her lab to join Boxcar. She was sitting in a chair; Boxcar was positioned next to her. They watched the data scrolling up the monitor plate rising from the desk in front of them. The Hayflick limit had to be governed by cellular timers of some sort. Since it was observed in cells from both Earth and Rehbollo, they'd hoped comparison genome mapping would help. Attempts to correlate across genetic platforms the mechanisms for timing body growth, puberty, and sexual functions had all been successful. But, maddeningly, the cause of the Hayflick limit remained elusive.
    Maybe this latest test--maybe this statistical analysis of inverted telomerase RNA codohs--maybe-- Lights winked on Boxcar's sensor web.
    "It saddens me to note that the answer is not there," said the translated voice, British, as all Ib voices were, and female, as half of them were arbitrarily assigned.
    Rissa let out a heavy sigh. Boxcar was right; another dead end.
    "I intend no offense with this comment," said Boxcar, "but I'm sure you know that my race has never believed in gods. And yet when I encounter a problem like this--/
    problem that seems, well, designed to thwart solution--it does make