be old age. I'm not supplying age maintenance-and, with certain exceptions, I will not for at least a quarter century.'
Wil was a biological twenty. Once, he'd let it slide to thirty -and discovered that he was not a type that aged gracefully. He remembered the flab, the belly that swelled over his pants.
Yelen smiled at him coldly. 'Aren't you going to ask me about the exceptions?'
When he didn't reply, she continued. 'The trivial exception: those so foolish or unfortunate as to be over bio-forty right now. I'll set their clocks back once.
'The important exception: any woman, for as long as she stays pregnant.' Yelen sat back, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. '
Wil stared at her wonderingly. Just a few minutes before, Yelen had been acting as a civilized person might, all amused by the Peacer/NM plans for central control. Now she was talking about running the low-techs' personal lives.
There was a long silence. Yelen understood the point. He could tell by the way she tried to stare him down. Finally her gaze broke. 'Damn it, Brierson, it has to be done. And it's moral, too. We high-techs each
They had argued the theory before. Yelen's logic was a thin thing, going a bit beyond what shipwreck law Wil knew. After all, the advanced travelers had brought the low-techs here, and would not allow them to bobble out of the era. More clearly than ever, he understood Yelen's reaction to Tammy. It would take so little to destroy the settlement. And over the next few years, disaffection was bound to grow.
Like it or not, Wil was working for a government.
EIGHTEEN
The mornings Wil devoted to research. He still had a lot of background to soak up. He wanted a basic understanding of the settlers, both low-tech and high. They all had pasts and skills; the more he knew, the less he might be surprised. At the same time, there were specific questions (suspicions) raised by his field trips and discussions with Yelen.
For instance: What corroboration was there for Tunc Blumenthal's story? Was he the victim of an accident-or a battle? Had it happened in 2210-or later, perhaps from within the Singularity itself?
It turned out there was physical evidence: Blumenthal's spacecraft. It was a small vehicle (Tunc called it a repair boat), massing just over three tonnes. The bow end was missing-not cut by the smooth curve of a bobble, but flash-evaporated. That hull had a million times the opacity of lead; some monstrous burst of gamma had vaporized a good hunk of it just as the boat bobbled out.
The boat's drive was 'ordinary' antigravity-but in this case, it was a built-in characteristic of the hull material. The comm and life-support systems bore familiar trademarks; their mechanism was virtually unintelligible. The recycler was thirty centimeters across; there were no moving parts. It appeared to be as efficient as a planetary ecology.
Tun could explain most of this in general terms. But the detailed explanations-the theory and the specs-had been in e he boat's database. And that had been in Tunc's jacket, in the forward compartment. The volatilized forward compartment. The processors that remained were compatible with the Korolevs', and Yelen had played with them quite a bit.
At one extreme was the lattice of monoprocessors and bobblers embedded in the hull. The monos were no smarter than a twentieth-century home computer, but each was less than one angstrom unit across. Each ran a simple program loop, IE17 times a second. That program watched its processor's brothers for signs of catastrophe-and triggered an attached bobbler accordingly. Yelen's fighter fleet had nothing like it.
At the other extreme was the computer in Tunc's headband. I t was massively parallel, and as powerful as a corporate mainframe of Yelen's time. Marta thought that, even without its database, Tun's headband made him as important to the plan as any of the other high-techs. They had given him a good part of their advanced equipment in exchange for its use.
Brierson smiled as he read the report. There were occasional comments by Marta, but Yelen was the engineer and this was mainly her work. Where he could follow it at all, the tone was a mix of awe and frustration. It read as he imagined Benjamin Franklin's analysis of a jet aircraft might read. Yelen could study the equipment, but without Tun's explanations its purpose would have been a mystery. And even knowing the purpose and the underlying principles of operation, she couldn't see how such devices could be built or why they worked so perfectly.
Wil's grin faded. Almost two centuries separated Ben Franklin from jet planes. Less than a decade stood between Yelen's expertise and this 'repair boat.' Wil knew about the acceleration of progress. It had been a fact of his life. But even in his time, there had been limits on how fast the marketplace could absorb new developments. Even if all these inventions could be made in just nine years-what about the installed base of older equipment? What about compatibility with devices not yet upgraded? How could the world of real products be turned inside out in such a short time?
Wil looked away from the display. So there was physical evidence, but it didn't prove much except that Tunc had been as far beyond the high-techs as they were beyond Wil. It really was surprising that Chanson had not accused Tunc-rescued from the sun with inexplicable equipment and a story no one could check-of being another alien. Perhaps Juan's paranoia was not as all-encompassing as it seemed.
