by Larry Niven
Of course, it might still be up to something. Protectors were like that.
The Protector sent power through a radio receiver, and the Outsider said, "Greetings. What did you wish to purchase?"
"I have information to sell first, to establish a credit balance."
"We do not normally purchase information. We sell it, and use the proceeds to pay for supplies."
"I doubt you possess this information, and you'd be able to sell it to customers you trusted for amazing sums."
Interesting. "What price do you set on it?"
"I'll trust you to be fair."
"We may not be able to afford a fair price."
"I'll stipulate that my credit balance will not be drawn on if you show me that the matter and/or circumstances of a request would work a hardship on you."
More interesting. "How would a hardship be defined?"
"Inability to meet your other bills, or worse."
"Agreed. What is the item?"
"Direct conversion of mass to photons, via suppression of the spin on the neutron."
Peace waited.
It was almost half a minute before the Outsider replied. "Is there a working model?"
"Yes. Not nearby; it was too obviously usable as a weapon. About a light-hour away, in stasis. If you examine my ship, you'll see there's a vacant space near the fusion tube. The converter fits in there." Peace waited a couple of minutes for a response—a huge interval for an Outsider—and finally said, "Are you okay?"
"There is some difficulty in calculating your credit balance," the Outsider said. Its voice, which had been pleasantly sociable, was now a clearly-synthetic monotone.
"Enact an upper limit of the total value of information available, excluding personal questions," Peace said at once.
"Thank you," said the Outsider in its usual tones. "What do you wish to know?"
"I need my math checked," Peace replied. "I'm trying to design a ship that can travel at the second quantum of hyperdrive, but the parts interactions are too complex for me to be sure I've worked them out right, and whenever I build a computer big enough to do the work it promptly goes into a state of solipsistic bliss."
"Transmit the converter design and the equations."
"Right.... I had to invent 3-D matrices for the equations; I hope the notation is implicit enough." Peace sent the data.
"It is," the Outsider said. "Interesting approach," it added.
Peace waited, and watched the Outsiders.
They were linking their tendrils together, as she expected.
It was a difficult problem, requiring network processing. Technically, doing this before a customer qualified as giving away personal information; but the Protector wouldn't have come here if it hadn't figured out that Outsider families linked up mentally sometimes.
The technique of cubic matrices would have paid for that knowledge anyway. It simplified problems that normally required vast computations. However, it in turn was being unavoidably given away. Information exchange of this value normally occurred only during prenuptial adoptions—Peace Corben was sparing no pains to ingratiate itself. The possibility that a Protector would not have worked these concepts out in advance was considered only in order to dismiss it, for the sake of thoroughness.
The motor design was unusually compact for what it was meant to do—it would fit into a prolate spheroid 150 feet wide by 200 long. This was accomplished by using hyperwave pulses instead of electronic ones to regulate it, so there was a failsafe of sorts: if it was switched on in a region where space was excessively curved, it wouldn't make the ship disappear into a tangent continuum—it would simply blow all its circuits and destroy the motor. The really tricky part of the design was the throttle: an interrupter that flickered the field state between the first and second hyperdrive levels, allowing speed to vary from 120 to 414,720 times the speed of light. There was a risk of affecting the hyperwave control pulses with the changes in field state, so the signal generators were fed power in inverted rhythm, to exactly counter this. The question was whether the transition waveforms could be precisely matched and simultaneous. The whole concept of simultaneity was an uncomfortable one to Outsiders, which was another reason for preferring travel at sublight speeds; but other races seemed to like it a lot.
After long minutes of work, the network disassembled, and the Outsider told Peace Corben, "Your reckoning is correct. However, the mechanism will need retuning at regular intervals, as natural radioactive decay will alter compositions unpredictably."
"Thanks, I was planning on using isotopically pure materials."
"The incidence of quantum miracles in such is anomalously high," the Outsider warned.
"Is it. That's interesting. Any idea why?"
"Many theories, none capable of accurate prediction. There is considerable documentation of the effect in all isotopes, however. Do you want it?"
"I do, but I'd better not take it. It sounds like something that would occupy all my unused attention. Thanks for the warning. What's the charge?"
"None. It is not personal, and therefore you are entitled to it. Neutron conversion offers a means of rejuvenating stars and thus extending the life of the Universe, and potentially that of all species living here. Volunteering information you might find useful merely simplifies the process of paying a fair price, within the ceiling you set."
There was a pause as the Protector absorbed this. "I see.... In a similar spirit of courtesy I suggest that any information you provide me that you hope to sell within, say, sixty light-years from here, be tagged as such, so I don't spread it around and screw up your market."
"Many thanks. Do you need any other information?"
"Undoubtedly," the Protector replied, "but I don't know what yet. I can find this starseed again when I do know. You can keep the relay, in case you have to leave the starseed's vicinity—you can mark it with an encrypted message saying where you've gone."
"Why would we have to leave?" the Outsider said, unable to think of a compelling reason.
"If I knew that, I wouldn't have to leave you the relay."
That was reasonable. "Very well. Are you aware that your converter could be adapted to suppress the spin on the proton?"
"Certainly, but I don't need yet another kind of large bomb. It'd annihilate the generator. Unless I beamed two partial fields and had them intersect—which seems like a lot of trouble, for not much more result. Here are the coordinates for the working model."
"Thank you."
Neither of them saw any necessity for formal goodbyes.
* * *
Peace hadn't even thought of rejuvenating stars. The converter beam was a statistical effect, and beyond a certain dispersion of the cone it simply didn't work; but partial fields intersecting in a star's core would do a decent enough job of cleaning it out, as slowly as you liked. Warming the core would expand it, and since it would be ridiculously difficult to do so symmetrically there would be massive convection, extracting trapped fossil heat and delaying helium ignition. Sol could be restored to full luminosity in time to keep it from turning red giant. The star was plainly older than current theory supposed; but then, so was the Universe.
She moved off a ways in hyperspace, dropped out and put her arsenal back together, then continued to her primary base at 70 Ophiuchi. The old homestead.
It was a binary star, and her birthworld, Pleasance, was at one of the system's Trojan points. By rights it should have been a frozen ball of rock, but evidently some 25,000 centuries or so back a Pak Protector had added most of the system's asteroidal thorium and uranium, and they'd been soaking in and giving off heat and helium ever since.
Her base was in the dustcloud at the other Trojan point. At 36 A.U. from Pleasance, it was never visited after the first colonists' survey—nothing there worth the trip. Peace found it especially handy because it was easy to reach from hyperspace—it was outside the system's deflection curvature. It was also handy for spotting arriving Outsiders, as it was th
e human system closest to the galaxy's center.
There was a human intruder when she got there. A kzin would have used a gravity planer, which would have roiled up the dust. Other species wouldn't have come here. The ship was hidden in one of the shelters, but the heat of its exhaust was all through the dust. Not a roomy ship; the heat patterns indicated sluggish maneuvering.
Peace had a look inside the main habitat before docking. Buckminster—a cyborg kzin once known as Technology Officer, who had enjoyed her unending stream of gadgets so much he'd stuck with her when she relocated his companions—was in his suite, whose visible entrance was sealed from the outside. He had evidently been coming out to raid the kitchen while his putative captor was asleep, as he had put on some weight. At the moment he was reading a spool and having a good scratch. The intruder was at a control console in the observatory, monitoring her arrival. He had a largely mundane but decent arsenal, including a pretty good bomb.
Peace took over the monitor system, told it lies, suited up, had her ship dock on its own, and used the softener to step through the hull. She jumped to the observatory, came through the wall, reached over his shoulder to pluck the dead-man detonator out of his hand, and stunned him. It was a good detonator: it took her a couple of seconds of real thought to figure out the disarm.
When she opened her suit, the man's smell was severe. She'd been away for a couple of weeks, and that wasn't long enough for him to get into this condition, so he'd arrived filthy. He must be deranged.
She restored the console, then called her associate. "Hi, Buckminster, I'm home. You leave me any butter?"
His reply began with a chuckle. With the telepathic region removed from the brain, a kzin was remarkably easygoing. "I only had a few pounds. Is our guest still alive?"
"By the smell he could be a zombie, but I'll take a chance and say yes. How come you didn't disarm him?" she asked, though she knew; she also knew Buckminster would want to say it, though.
"I didn't want to touch him," Buckminster confirmed. "Besides, I didn't think it would make him stop fighting, and I didn't want to have to explain bite marks on a human corpse."
"Difficult to do when you're swollen up with ptomaine, too. Come to the observatory and sort through his stuff. I'll be cleaning him up."
"You humans show the most unexpected reserves of courage," Buckminster remarked.
As she stripped, washed, and depilated the man, the remark seemed progressively less likely to have been a joke. There was a significant layer of dead skin, and the smell of him underneath it was actually somewhat worse. He must not have bathed in months, if not years.
Getting the hair off his face confirmed an impression: she'd seen him before. He'd been one of the psychists at her mother's prison. Peace hadn't actually met him, and Jan Corben hadn't given his name—she'd called him Corky. He was evidently a survivor of the kzinti occupation of Pleasance, and had probably witnessed some awful things. Peace didn't spend much pity on him—she'd been her mother's clone, created to be the recipient in a brain transplant like many before her, and she had yet to hear a worse story.
Once he was clean, he was also pretty raw in spots, so Peace had to spray some skinfilm on, to hold him while she programmed the autodoc. This took her almost half an hour, as she'd never expected to have a human breeder here, and she had to start from scratch. When she was done she stuck him in, then washed herself and went to see how Buckminster was doing.
He was having a great time. He'd taken Corky's arms to the small firing range (the big one was necessarily outside), where he had laid them out in a long row and was methodically using them to perforate targets of various compositions. "Interesting viewpoint he has," Buckminster told her. "No nonlethal weapons, but not many random-effect ones. This man wants to kill in a very personal way."
"He talk to you much?"
"Nothing informative. 'Go there, do that, you baby-eater.' Made eye contact and grinned a lot. Seemed to bother him that I didn't get hostile."
"I expect so. Did you explain?" Peace said, amused.
"No, the baby-eater remark offended me, so I just let him pant."
"Sweat."
"Sweat? Yes, that would mean the same thing, wouldn't it?"
"Not quite. A human letting someone else work off his foul mood on his own doesn't need as much self-control," Peace pointed out. "So there's less satisfaction involved for us. Well, I'd better check his ship. Want to come along?"
"If it's as big a mess as he was I'll need my suit."
"I'll put mine back on too," Peace agreed.
There was only one boobytrap; it was in the airlock, and Buckminster spotted it too. The ship only had deck gravity in the exercise room, and that was turned off. There wasn't any debris floating about, but surfaces were dirty and smeared, and the air plant was in extremis. The ship's arms looked like he'd tried for the greatest lethality for the money: there was a turret with two disintegrators, plus and minus, to slice targets open with bars of lightning; and torpedo tubes that fired Silver Bullets, a weapon the Wunderlanders had devised at the end of the Third War but never got to use. These were all-but-invisible pellets of stasis-held antihydrogen, stasis shutting down on impact—the blast would punch through thick hullmetal, and the surplus neutrons from the destroyed atoms would flood a ship's interior. "What a stupid concept," Buckminster said. "That'd ruin everything but the hull. You'd have to rebuild the ship almost completely for any sort of prize."
"Though it is an excellent killing device," Peace said.
"If that's all you want."
"It's all he wants, and it's his ship."
"It's still stupid. What if he had a chance at a better ship?"
Peace shrugged—which, given the swollen joints of a Protector's shoulders, was a very emphatic gesture—and said, "I doubt he intends to live long enough for it to matter."
"Urr," Buckminster growled, which from a kzin qualified as tactful acknowledgment.
"I agree it's unusually stupid," Peace added, aware that he might not have understood that.
They searched the ship without finding further portable weapons, which made some sense if he was on a suicide mission—he'd hardly go back for more. The only question was, what was he doing here? "Did he say what he was doing here?" she said, realizing Buckminster wouldn't mention it unless it came up—small talk was "monkey chatter" to kzinti, and Peace judged this was not an unfair assessment. It probably did derive from primate chattering.
"No, he wanted to know what I was doing here."
"What did you tell him?"
"That I was a deserter."
Peace, who had never thought of it in exactly that phrasing, blinked once. Then she said, "What did he say to that?"
"Eventually, 'Oh.' Then he locked me away in my dank and lonely prison."
"Uh huh," said Peace, who judged that if a delay in her trip had extended Buckminster's durance vile to six months he'd have gotten too fat to sneak back into his cell. "Okay, let's see what's behind the fake bulkhead."
Buckminster did a good job of hiding his surprise when she opened the wall, though it took him a while to realize that that partition had had no fixtures, fittings, or access panels on either side, and therefore had no reason for existing in a one-man ship.
The interior was a shrine. Correction: a monument. There were pictures of three women, two men, and several children at progressing ages, but there were also single pictures of 51 other humans, almost all male, each with a neat black X inked onto the forehead. Peace recognized 22 of them as officials during the kzinti occupation, and had seen news stories about two of those and four of the other 29, reporting their accidental deaths. All six had struck her as being well-concealed homicides. It seemed probable that the entire 51 were dead collaborators, who had all contributed in some way to the deaths of the psychist's spouses and children.
Buckminster got it almost as soon as she did. "I'm impressed," he said. "It's hard to kill one human being without being found out. I still can't underst
and how you can tolerate the constant monitoring."
He didn't mind her monitoring him, so she said, "With humans it's actually less unpleasant if it's a stranger doing it."
"Oh, thanks, now it makes perfect sense."
"Glad I could help."
They blinked at each other—a grin was inappropriate for him, and impossible for her, though the broad gash of her beak partook of a certain cheerful senile vacuity—and closed the place back up before leaving. "Cleaning robot?" Buckminster said as they passed through the airlock.
"Sure. Have to tweak the programming."
"I'll do that. You can get to work on your new ship."
Peace nodded, pleased with his intelligence. Obviously, things had gone well with the Outsider: she'd come back. "Have you decided what to do after I leave?"
"Go to Home and make a fortune as a consulting ecologist with what you've taught me, then start a family somewhere else. Sårng would be good."
"Don't know it," she was startled to realize.
"No reason to, it's at the far end of kzinti space. Atmosphere's a couple of tons per square inch, they've been trying to kzinform it from floating habitats for about a thousand years, I think it was. I thought I could move things along."
Peace shook her head. "That'll mostly be carbon dioxide. Even without the impact and combustion of hydrogen for oceans, there's millennia of red heat latent in carbonate formation."
Removing his suit, Buckminster was nodding. "I had an idea from Earth news. Transfer booths are getting cheap enough for something besides emergencies, so I thought: refrigeration." He looked at her quizzically. "I don't think I've ever mentioned this, but are you aware that you hop up and down when you hear a new idea you really like?"
"Yes. Were you thinking convection, or Maxwell's Demon?"
"Both in one step. Transmitter in the atmosphere, receiver in orbit. Only the fast molecules get transmitted, the rest are pushed out and fresh let in. Dry ice comes out near true zero, slower than orbital speed, and falls in eccentric orbit to make a shiny ring. Less heat arriving, and the gas returns to the atmosphere very gradually for slow heat release. You're doing it again."