'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 the 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.
