Saul and I ended up being part of the party that went up to meet the ship, and…" Keith trailed off, closed his eyes, shook his head ever so slightly.

"Yes?" said Glass.

"They said it was an accident. Said they'd misinterpreted. When we cameface-to-face with the Waldahudinfor the first time, Saul was carrying a holographic camera unit.

He didn't aim it at the pigs, of course — no one could be that stupid.

He was just holding it at his side, and then, with a flick of his thumb, he turned it on." Keith sighed, long and loud. "They said it looked like a traditional Waldahud hand weapon — same basic shape. They thought Saul was readying a weapon to fire on them. One of the pigs was carrying a sidearm, and he shot Saul. Right in the face. His head exploded next to me. I — I got splattered with… with…" Keith looked away, and was quiet for a long moment.

"They killed him. The best friend I ever had, they killed him." He stared at the ground, plucked a few four-leaf clovers, looked at them for a moment, then threw them away.

They were quiet for several moments. Crickets chirped, and birds sang. Finally, Glass said, "That must be difficult to carry around with you."

Keith said nothing.

"Does Rissa know?"

"She does, yes. We were already married at that point; she'd come to Silvanus to try to fathom why it didn't have any native life, despite apparently having conditions that should have given rise to it, according to our evolutionary models. But I rarely talk about what happened with Saul — not with her, or with anyone else. I don't believe in burdening those around me with my suffering. Everyone has their own stuff to deal with."

"So you keep it inside."

Keith shrugged. "I try for a certain stoicism — a certain emotional restraint."

"Commendable," said Glass.

Keith was surprised. "You think so?"

"It's the way I feel, too. I know it's unusual, though. Most people live, if you'll pardon me my humor, transparent lives." Glass gestured at his own see-through body. "Their private self is their public self Why are you different?"

Keith shrugged. "I don't know. I've always been this way." He paused again, thinking for a long time. Then: "When I was about nine or so, there was a bully in my neighborhood. Some big oaf, probably thirteen or fourteen.

He used to pick up kids and drop them into this thombush in the park.

Well, everyone would kick and scream and cry while he was doing this, and he seemed to feed off that. One day, he came after me — grabbed me when I was playing catch, or something like that. He picked me up, carried me over to the bush, and dumped me in. I didn't struggle.

There was no point; he was twice as big as me, and there was no way I could get away. And I didn't scream or cry, either. He dumped me in, and I simply got myself out. I had a few scrapes and cuts from it, but I didn't say anything. He just looked at me for about ten seconds, then said, 'Lansing, you've got balls. 'And he never touched me again."

"So this internalizing is a survival mechanism?" asked Glass.

Keith shrugged. "It's enduring what you have to endure."

"But you don't know where it came from?"

"No," said Keith. Then, a moment later, "Well, actually, yes. I suppose I do. My parents were both quite argumentative, and had short fuses. You'd never know when one of them was going to blow up over something. Publicly, privately, it didn't make any difference. You couldn't even make polite conversation without risking an explosion from one of them. We'd have family dinners together every night, but I always was silent, hoping we could just get through it, just once, without it being unpleasant, without one of them storming away from the table, or yelling, or saying something nasty."

Keith paused again. "In fairness, there were other issues in my parents' relationship that I didn't understand when I was a child.

They'd started as a two-career family, but automation kept eliminating more and more jobs as the years went by — this was back before they outlawed true artificial intelligence. The Canadian government changed the tax laws so that second income earners in a family were taxed at a hundred-and-ten-percent rate. It was a move designed to spread out what work there was amongst the most families. Dad had been making less than mom, so he was the one who stopped working. I'm sure that had a lot to do with his anger. But all I knew was that my parents were taking out their anger and frustration on everyone around them, and even as a kid, I vowed never to do that."

Glass was rapt. "Amazing," he said. "It all makes sense."

"What does?" asked Keith.

"You."

Keith's mind was reeling. So many discoveries, so much happening. He drummed his fingers on his bridge workstation for a moment, thinking.

And then: "Okay, people, what now?"

The front row of workstations all rotated around on their individual pedestals so that they faced the back row: Lianne was facing Jag, Thor was facing Keith, and Rhombus was facing Rissa. Keith looked at each member of his bridge staff in turn. "We've got almost an embarrassment of riches here," he said. "First, there's the mystery of the stars' erupting from the shortcuts — stars that Jag thinks come from the future.

As if that's not a big enough puzzle to try to figure out, we've also stumbled upon life — life! — made out of dark matter." Keith looked from face to face. "Given the complexity of the radio signals Hek's been picking up, there's a chance — a small one, I grant you — that we're even looking at first contact with intelligent life. Rissa, it would have been crazy to say this yesterday, but let's make the dark-matter investigations the province of the life-sciences division."

She nodded.

Keith turned to Jag. "The stars coming out of the shortcuts, on the other hand, may pose a threat to the Commonwealth. If you're right, Jag, and they are coming from the future, then we've got to find out why they're coming back. Is it by deliberate design? If so, is it for a malevolent purpose? Or is it just an accident? A globular cluster, say, colliding with a shortcut billions of years from now, and overloading it somehow so that its constituent stars are spewed back to here?"

"Well," barked Jag, "a globular cluster wouldn't pass through a shortcut. Only one of its member stars would."

"Unless," said Thor, sounding a bit feisty, "that globular cluster was enclosed in a sort of super Dyson sphere — a shell around the entire assembly of stars. Imagine something like that touching a shortcut billions of years from now. The shell could break apart while traversing the gate, and send the component stars scattering out of different exit points."

"Ridiculous," said Jag. "You humans always reinforce each other in even your wildest fantasies. Take your religions, for instance-"

"Enough!" snapped Keith, bringing his open palm down loudly on the edge of his workstation. "Enough. We're not going to get anywhere squabbling." He looked at the Waldahud. "If you don't like Thor's suggestion, then make one of your own. Why are the stars coming back here from the future?"

Jag was facing the director, but only his right eyes were looking at Keith; the left pair was scanning the surroundings, an instinctual precursor to a fight. "I don't know," he said at last.

"We need an answer," said Keith, his voice still edged.

"Interrupting in all politeness," said Rhombus. "Offense not intended and hopefully not taken."

Keith turned to face the Ib. "What is it?" "Perhaps you are asking the wrong person. No slight is intended of good Jag, of course. But if you want to know why the stars are being sent back in time, then the person to ask is the person who is sending them back."