a close-bound Focused pair often invents.”
Nau straightened in his chair. “If they can only talk to each other, we have no access. Did you lose them?”
“No. At least not in the usual way. Dr. Wen became so frustrated that he began to consider random externalities. In a normal person that might lead to creativity but—”
Brughel laughed, genuinely amused. “So your astronomer laddie lost sight of the ball, eh, Reynolt?”
Reynolt didn’t even look at Brughel. “Be silent,” she said. Nau noticed the Peddlers’ startlement at her words. Ritser was second-in-command, the obvious sadist among the rulers—and here she had abruptly put him down.I wonder when the Peddlers will figure it out. A scowl passed briefly across Brughel’s features. Then his grin broadened. He settled back in his chair and flicked an amused glance in Nau’s direction. Anne continued without missing a beat: “Wen backed off from the problem, setting it in a wider and wider context. At first, there was some relevance.”
Wen’s voice resumed, the same rushed monotone as before. “OnOff’s galactic orbit. A clue.” The presumptive graph of OnOff’s galactic orbit—assuming no close stellar encounters—flashed in a window. Anne was dredging from the fellow’s notebooks. The plot extended back over half a billion years. It was the typical flower- petal figure of a halo-population star: Once every two hundred million years, OnOff penetrated the hidden heart of the galaxy. From there, it swung out and out till the stars spread thin and the intergalactic dark began. Tomas Nau was no astronomer, but he knew that halo-pop stars don’t have usable planetary systems, and as a result aren’t often visited. But surely that was the least of the strangeness of OnOff.
Somehow the Qeng Ho ziphead had become totally fixated on the star’s galactic orbit. “This thing—it can’t be a star—has seen the Heart of All. Again and again and again—” Reynolt skipped through what must have been a long, trapped loop in poor Wen’s thinking. The ziphead’s voice was momentarily calmer: “Clues. There are lots of clues, really. Forget the physics; just consider the light curve. For two hundred and fifteen years out of two hundred and fifty, it radiates less perceptible energy than a brown dwarf.” The windows accompanying Wen’s thoughts flickered from idea to idea, pictures of brown dwarfs, the much more rapid oscillations that the physicists had extrapolated for OnOff’s distant past. “Things are happening that we can’t see. Relight, a light curve vaguely like a periodic Q-nova, settling over a few Msecs to a spectrum that might almost be an explainable star riding a fusion core. And then the light slowly fades back to zero… or changes into something else we cannot see. It’s not a star at all! It’s magic. A magic machine that now is broken. I’ll bet it was a fast squarewave generator once. That’s it! Magic from the heart of the galaxy, broken now so that we can’t understand it.”
The audio abruptly ended, and Wen’s kaleidoscope of windows was fixed in mid-frenzy. “Dr. Wen has been thoroughly trapped in this cycle of ideas for ten Msec,” said Reynolt.
Nau already knew where this was going, but he put on a concerned look anyway. “What are we left with?”
“Dr. Li is doing okay. He was slipping into his own contrarian cycle till we separated him from Wen. But now—well, he’s fixated on the Qeng Ho system identification software. He has an enormously complex model that matches all the observations.” More pictures, Li’s theory of a new family of subatomic particles. “Dr. Li is spreading into the cognitive territory that Hunte Wen monopolized, but he’s getting very different results.”
Li’s voice: “Yes. Yes! My model predicts stars like this must be common very near the galaxy’s hole. Very very rarely, they interact, a strongly coupled explosion. The result gets kicked high out of the core.” Of course, Li’s trajectory was identical to Wen’s after the presumed explosion. “I can fit all the parameters. We can’t see blinking stars in the dust of the core; they’re not bright and they’re very high-rate. But once in a billion years we get this asymmetrical destruction, and an ejection.” Pictures of the hypothetical explosion of OnOff’s hypothetical destroyer. Pictures of OnOff’s original solar system blown away—all except a tiny protected shadow on the far side of OnOff from the destroyer.
Ezr Vinh leaned forward. “Lord, he’s explained just about everything.”
“Yes,” said Nau. “Even the singleton nature of the planetary system.” He turned away from the jumble of windows, and looked at Anne. “So what do you think?”
Reynolt shrugged. “Who knows? That’s why we need an unFocused specialist, Podmaster. Dr. Li is spreading his net wider and wider. That can be a symptom of a classic, explain-everything trap. And his particle theory is large; it may be a Shannon tautology.” She paused. Anne Reynolt was totally incapable of showmanship. Nau had arranged his questions so her bombshell came out last: “That particle theory is in his central specialty, however. And it has consequences, perhaps a faster ramscoop drive.”
No one said anything for several seconds. The Qeng Ho had been diddling their drives for thousands of years, since before Pham Nuwen even. They had stolen insights from hundreds of civilizations. In the last thousand years, they’d made less than a one-percent improvement. “Well, well, well.” Tomas Nau knew how good it felt to gamble big… and win. Even the Peddlers were grinning like idiots. He let the good feeling pass back and forth around the room. It was veryvery good news, even if the payoff was at the end of the Exile. “This does make our astrophysicists a precious commodity. Can you do anything about Wen?”
“Hunte Wen is not recoverable, I’m afraid.” She opened a window on medical imagery. To a Qeng Ho physician it might have looked like a simple brain diagnostic. To Anne Reynolt, it was a strategy map. “See, the connectivity here and here is associated with his work on OnOff; I’ve demonstrated that by detuning some of it. If we try to back him out of his fixation, we’ll wipe his work of the last five years—as well as cross connections into much of his general expertise. Remember. Focus surgery is mainly grope and peek, with resolution not much better than a millimeter.”
“So we’d end up with a vegetable?”
“No. If we back out and undo the Focus, he’ll have the personality and most of the memories of before. He just won’t be much of a physicist anymore.”
“Hmm,” said Nau, considering. So they couldn’t just deFocus the Peddler and have the outside expert Reynolt needed.And I’ll be damned if I’ll risk deFocusing the third fellow. Yet there was a very tidy solution, that still made good use of all three men. “Okay, Anne. Here is what I propose. Bring the other physicist online, but on a low duty cycle. Keep Dr. Li in the freezer while the new fellow reviews Li’s results. This won’t be as good as an unFocused review, but if you do it cleverly the results should be pretty unbiased.”
Another shrug. Reynolt had no false modesty, but she also didn’t realize how very good she was.
“As for Hunte Wen,” Nau continued. “He’s done his best for us, and we can’t ask for more.” Literally so, according to Anne. “I want you to deFocus him.”
Ezr Vinh was staring, openmouthed. The other Peddlers looked almost as shocked. There was a small risk here; Hunte Wen would not be the best proof that Focus could be reversed. On the other hand, he was obviously a hardship case.Show your concern: “We’ve run Dr. Wen for more than five years straight, and I see he is already middle-aged. Use whatever medical consumables it takes to give him the best health possible.”
It was the final agenda item, and the meeting didn’t continue for long after that. Nau watched as everyone floated out, jabbering to one another their enthusiasm about Li’s discovery and Wen’s manumission. Ezr Vinh left last, but he wasn’t talking to anyone. The boy had a glassy look about him.Yes, Mr. Vinh. Be good, and maybe someday I’ll free the one you careabout.
SIXTEEN
Things got very quiet during the Tween Watch. Most Watches were multiples of an Msec, with overlap so people could brief the new Watch on current problems. The Tween was no secret, but Nau officially treated it as a glitch in the scheduling program, a four-day gap that appeared between Watches every so often. In fact, it was like the missing seventh floor, or that mythical magic day that comes between Oneday and Twoday.
“Say, wouldn’t it be great to have Tween Watches back home?” Brughel joked as he led Nau and Kal Omo into the corpsicle stacks. “I did security at Frenk for five years—it sure would have been easier if I could have declared time out every so often, and rearranged the game to suit my needs.” His voice sounded loud in the hold, the echoes coming back from several directions. In fact, they were the only ones awake aboard the
