Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

have to work with great care, to avoid rousing suspicion. It would be unwise to take the Name of a great leader or philosopher; he needed something innocuous, even ridiculous. Who was that Hero who'd come back from the First War, driven to madness and advocating an end to warfare? Ah, yes.

Kdapt.

WAR AND PEACE

Matthew Joseph Harrington

Attention Outsider vessel. Please hold your fire. I have been able to override my genetic programming. 

My name is Peace Corben, and I am a Protector of human origin. I wish to engage in commerce. 

* * *

It came to her, as she awaited a reply through the relay, that for the first time in almost thirty years she was afraid. It would have been interesting, if it hadn't been so unpleasant. She found herself constantly formulating contingency plans whenever her mind wandered, and it was designed to wander, and none of the plans were worth a thing.

Her plan to lie dead in space and use passive instruments to monitor the relay's fate was no good either. A maypole of metal ribbons, seemingly billowing around its central shaft, suddenly manifested nearby, appallingly huge, having decelerated at what instruments said was a couple of hundred thousand gees. As this was over 170 times what Peace could get out of a gravity planer before it became unable to compensate for anything outside its housing, she was at least reassured that she wasn't wasting her time.

Whether she was wasting her life remained to be seen.

* * *

The being that would eventually be known as Outsider Ship Twelve had been carrying its children exposed to space, as was usual, its maturity limbs arranged to maximize shadow borders in the illumination it provided for them. At .9c, with Doppler effects bringing gamma bursters into their spectral range aft, and the microwave background just visible forward with a starseed silhouetted against it, life was pleasant. The youngest and oldest enjoyed watching things change color as they went by, too, though the ones in between preferred to watch the starseed.

They had been moving into a region of considerable modulated radio noise, its largest source about eighteen light-years away. Trade was good in such areas. It took time to be noticed, though, so things were quiet—until a hyperwave message came in, using a chord that should have been known only to Outsiders. The content of the message explained why it wasn't, but raised other issues of interest. The Outsider saw that the transmission came from a relay, looked around, and spotted an inactive hyperdrive motor. The Outsider ability to do this was not advertised. Some species tried to erase debts by erasing creditors. It moved over there for a better look.

There was a well-made ship, and its sole occupant was indeed a Protector. If it had made the ship, it was much smarter than a Pak. Not attacking the Outsider was also evidence of this. The ship had lots of mountings for weaponry, as was to be expected, but the equipment that fitted them had been not merely dismantled, but distributed, so that it would take at least half a minute to assemble the easiest items—plenty of time for an Outsider to do practically anything. This Peace Corben was displaying what must have been, to a Protector, near-suicidal good faith.

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