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.
Yelén smiled at him coldly. "Aren't you going to ask me about the exceptions?"
Damn you, thought Wil.
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." Yelén sat back, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. "That should supply any backbone that is missing."
Wil stared at her wonderingly. Just a few minutes before, Yelén 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. Yelén 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 own our medical equipment. We've agreed on this action. Just how we invest our charity is surely our business."
They had argued the theory before. Yelén'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 Yelén'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. Sieg Heil.
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 Yelén.
For instance: What corroboration was there for Tunç 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 (Tunç 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 Tunç's jacket, in the forward compartment. The volatilized forward compartment. The processors that remained were compatible with the Korolevs', and Yelén 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. Yelén's fighter fleet had nothing like it.
At the other extreme was the computer in Tunç's headband. I t was massively parallel, and as powerful as a corporate mainframe of Yelén'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 Yelén 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. Yelén 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 Yelén'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 Tunç had been as far beyond the high-techs as they were beyond Wil. It really was surprising that Chanson had not accused Tunç-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.
He really should have another chat with Blumenthal.
Wil used a comm channel that Yelén said was private. Blumenthal was as calm and reasonable as before. "Sure, I can talk. The work I do for Yelén is mainly programming; very flexible hours."
"Thanks. I wanted to talk more about how you got bobbled. You said it was possible you were shanghaied...."
Blumenthal shrugged. "It is possible. Yet most likely an accident it was. You've read about my company's project?"
"Just Yelén's summaries."
Tun hesitated, swapped out. "Ah, yes. What she says is fair. We were running a matter/antimatter distillery. But look at the numbers. Yelén's stations can distill perhaps a kilo per day -enough to power a small business. We were in a different class entirely. My partners and I specialized in close solar work, less than five radii out. We had easements on most of the sun's southern hemisphere. When I... left, we were distilling one hundred thousand tonnes of matter and antimatter every second. That's enough to dim the sun, though we arranged things so the effect wasn't perceptible from the ecliptic. Even so, there were complaints. An absolute condition of our insurance was that we move it out promptly and without leakage. A few days' production would be enough to damage an unprotected solar system."
"Yelén's summary said you were shipping to the Dark Companion?" Like a lot of Yelén's commentary, the rest of that report had been technical, unintelligible without a headband.
"True!" Tunç's face came alight. "Such a fine idea it was. Our parent company liked big construction projects. Originally, they wanted to stellate Jupiter, but they couldn't buy the necessary options. Then we came along with a much bigger project. We were going to implode the Dark Companion, fashion of it a small Tipler cylinder." He noticed Wil's blank expression. "A naked black hole, Wil! A space warp! A gate for faster-than-light travel! Of course the Dark Companion is so small that the aperture would be only a few meters wide, and have tidal strains above 1 E 13 g's per meter-but with bobbles it might be usable. If not, there were plans to probe through it to the galactic core, and siphon back the power to widen it."