Allotropes Page 8

  Keenar snorted derisively, “You want me to learn his language before I can ask him any questions?”

  “No!” Querlak said vehemently, “I want you to acknowledge Osnak’s precedence. I discovered him. I’ve been working for days to learn just a little of his language.”

  Keenar turned his gaze back to Sigwald contemplatively. A moment passed. “Would Osnak clade like to join Delnitch clade?” he asked musingly.

  A shiver burst over Querlak’s wings, her mouthparts suddenly dry. This was an offer that perhaps couldn’t be refused. She could feel excitement ringing through her TS and out into the clade. “Osnak doesn’t have a current mating permit,” she said slowly, trying not to pant from the emotions resonating around her clade. Some members were horrified at the thought of submerging themselves in Delnitch, others ecstatic over the opportunity. Their powerful emotions resounded in Querlak like thunder.

  “That can be arranged,” Keenar said beginning to walk around Sigwald.

  Querlak felt disgust at this open admission that mating permits could be obtained outside the regulations by the more powerful clades. Still, if Osnak joined such a mighty clade… Querlak shook herself, “It could not be you and I. We are here on the ringworld,” she said referring to their currently infertile state.

  “Of course not. Delnitch has sent Ezan with a permit to the home of your Nonas. Nonas will breed her and we will be joined.”

  Feeling as if she were in turbulent air Querlak said, “When will she be fertile?”

  “She is fertile now.”

  With a tremulous sigh Querlak said, “When they have mated, I will answer your questions.” It would only be days until a connection formed between Delnitch and Osnak through the fetus of Ezan and Nonas. At that point there would be no secrets between them anyway.

  Having finished a circuit of Sigwald, Keenar said, “Tell it that I will examine it now.”

  Querlak stepped between Keenar and Sigwald. “I will ask if you may examine it. I have worked for days to establish a friendly relationship. Your first act will not be to destroy that relationship.”

  Keenar snorted, “If it doesn’t want to tell us what we want to know, we’ll make it tell us.”

  “Spoken like a sigma from an overlarge clade. Your kind always thinks they can demand whatever they want. Then take it by force if refused! I remind you, this being traveled from another star to come here. You have no idea what power it may wield!”

  Keenar stared at Sigwald as if considering the possibility. He swayed his lower manipulators in a shrug, “I know that it’s covered itself in magnesium… which seems stupid.”

  “It’s strong and light.”

  “Magnesium doesn’t hold a candle to carbon in either area. I think this alien is completely ignorant of carbon manufacturing processes. Now you’ve been giving that secret away for free.”

  “I haven’t shown him how to make things. Only that it’s possible. We can trade the ‘how’ for information.” Querlak turned to Sigwald and pointed to Keenar, “Keenar,” she said meaningfully. Then she pointed to Sigwald, “Want look you.”

  Sigwald said, “Want look Keenar.”

  Time passed as Keenar and Sigwald took turns looking each other over carefully. Keenar turned to Querlak, “Why do you call it ‘him’?”

  “He says he does not bear young from his body.”

  “Is his clade back at his home star or here in Sigma system?”

  “I haven’t been able to ask that question. We don’t have words for such a question yet. She swung her lower manipulators, “Maybe they don’t have clades?”

  Keenar snorted a blast of air out his spiracles, “Come on! He’s here, across the stars from his home. How did he do that without a clade?”

  Querlak swung her lower manipulators in another shrug. “He’s looking at the constructor again. I’m going to continue explaining the types of carbon that are being laid down.” She stepped over to Sigwald and lifted the training disk. The constructor was building a small servo motor for the little transporter. It had begun magnetizing thin layers of carbon by proton bombardment. Querlak scrolled through the microfilm to the pages showing graphene being bombarded with protons. She pointed to the protons and said, “Element, one.”

  Sigwald’s head bobbed up and down. Querlak had observed this motion many times when Sigwald seemed to agree with something, so probably he understood.

  Emma said, “Why would they be shooting hydrogen atoms at graphene?”

  “I think when she drew hydrogen for us before it was that little box with a circle around it, not just the box. Is that right Allan?”

  “Correct.”

  “Maybe the circle represents the electron and the box the nucleus so these are only protons?”

  “OK,” Emma said, “Why would they be shooting protons at graphene?”

  Ell mused, “Proton bombardment makes some carbon allotropes magnetic.”

  “Holy crap!” Shan hissed, “That structure’s round! I thought they’d at least have to drop a motor in this thing when they were done. Hell no! They’re going to make an electric motor out of carbon too! In-freaking-credible!”

  Ell said, “Um, I think that bundle of coils being laid down back there was a much bigger motor. That motor isn’t using permanently magnetized carbon, instead it has coils for electromagnets on both the rotor and the stator.”

  Emma’s eyes tracked over to the area with the coils of wires, “Damn! I think you’re right.”

  ***

  Ell stepped into her security team’s gym at one in the morning. She’d dropped in on the ready team in their little lounge and told them she was going to use the gym and didn’t want to be disturbed. She had Allan take over the cameras in the gym so that no one could get a record of her practicing.

  Over the next hour she drilled with the ports that she’d installed in her fingers. She practiced communicating sub-vocally with Allan so he could set the distance and load the correct items to be fired through her two-one ports without anyone hearing her. She squirted various practice liquids into rolled up towels from the ports in both fingers, unrolling the towels to check for wet spots indicating successful administration.

  Then she tested the larger 15mm port she’d put in the subcutaneous fat just below her belly button. With that port she also could deliver some devices such as plastic cable ties, 12mm rope and graphene strands that were much stronger than the rope, even though their diameter was tiny. That port could also deliver a knife automatically. Of course if she contacted Amy she could ask her to put anything she wanted through the port, as long as it was less than 15mm in diameter. She could even have Amy roll a larger port up into a tube and put it through.

  Once she was sure that all three ports and their delivery mechanisms were working correctly she practiced judging distances using an infrared laser rangefinder shot through the port. With the rangefinder data Allan could set the distance and she could squirt drugs into something at a distance. Of course, if the distance was large relative to the thickness of the person she was injecting, there would be an excellent chance she’d miss because of the plus or minus 10% distance accuracy. A one foot thick human, twenty feet away had a moderate chance of having the drug miss a few inches too short or too long.

  Once she’d become comfortable with the injection mechanism, she had fun shooting inactive Taser darts into the various targets in the room. A ruby laser rangefinder through the port confirmed her aim and the distance. Then Allan could extend the port to a little short of the target so Ell could hardly miss. However, she quickly became proficient enough that she could reliably shoot darts or inject drugs into targets without having to check her aim with the laser. The tiny flashes that appeared where the port opened seemed barely noticeable.

  It was fun, point a finger and bang, a dart was on its way.

  By 2:30AM she felt comfortable with all three of the ports she’d installed in her body. She cleaned up the wet towels and dummy darts. Before she went to sleep, she
dropped by her lab to restock the Taser guns with real darts and place active agents back in the injectors.

  ***

  Carter said, “AJ, just relinquish control of your waldo to your AI. Ask the AI to return the waldo to its starting location. That’s something AIs are good at. The more you struggle to get it back in control yourself, the worse it’s going to get.” He waited a moment while AJ released control and the AI stopped the waldo’s tumble. “Now, do you know what happened?”

  “Yeah,” AJ said, thankfully without the sullen tone that Carter had been afraid he might hear. “I forgot to take the attitude jets off line once I was in place. Then when my butt got tired and I shifted in my seat, the movement fired my jets and blew me out of place.” He snorted, “Then I made it worse by trying to control it myself instead of just asking my AI to fix it.”

  “Someday you’ll be able to fly yourself back into place, but give yourself time. You probably feel like you’re terrible at this?”

  “Yeah.” AJ mumbled.

  “That’s ‘cause you are.” Carter laughed. “Very few people are naturals at this, but you actually aren’t doing any worse than most people in their first few days of it.”

  “Are there any people who’re ‘naturals?’?”

  “Oh Jeez, you should see Donsaii fly one. It’s like watching a ballet!”

  “Really? I wouldn’t think she’d have the time to practice.”

  “She doesn’t. Believe me she doesn’t need it.” Carter cleared his throat, “Back to you. They didn’t hire you to fly waldoes, though I think you need to do some of it so you understand the issues. They hired you to look at the harvesting processes out here on this asteroid through your engineering skillset. Then see what you can do to improve our harvesting.”

  “I’m afraid you guys may be overestimating my ‘engineering skillset,’ remember I just graduated and have no experience to speak of. I stopped at an ore processing facility in Minnesota on my way out here and got a friend to take me on some tours. What impressed me was how every step of the processing depended on gravity. From the ore falling into the crusher, to crushed ore falling through screens to separate sizes, to ‘gravity concentration according to specific gravity. I know we’re really only trying to crush it into sizes we can send it through without using huge ports but there isn’t much out there in the engineering books on how to do this without gravity.”

  Carter laughed, “I know, believe me, I know. This magnetic system we’re using is working pretty well but I keep feeling like there’s got to be a simpler way. I think I’m just too focused to see it. Your job is to think about it… outside the box if possible.” He pointed his waldo’s finger at AJ’s waldo, “Meantime, keep working a couple shifts a week in a waldo and getting a feel for what the problems and what the tools are. Donsaii’s a believer in everyone getting their hand dirty.”

  ***

  Vanessa’s AI spoke in her ear. “Ms. Ell Donsaii is returning your call.”

  Vanessa put up her hand to halt the gymnast that she had been about to spot on vault. She turned to the side, “Yes. Ms. Donsaii?”

  “Hi. How can I help Team USA?”

  Wanting some privacy, Vanessa headed for the door to the coaches’ offices just off the gym. “Um, we’re hoping we can talk you into entering the Olympics again this summer.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just not willing to make the time commitment that it would require.”

  “Natya Kolmenya told me that you’ve repeatedly refused her offers to join the team. But she suggested that perhaps if I offered to let you just show up to compete in Delhi, you might be willing.”

  “Just show up at the Olympic venue and compete? No practices?”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “No other time commitments?”

  “Well, we would like you to show up at least one day before the competition to work out on the actual venue equipment. We would want to be sure you can actually still do your routines before we bumped one of the other team members to let you perform.” She cleared her throat, “Of course we’ve seen the vids of you dancing in which you’ve included some of your astonishing floor exercise elements, so we know you can do those. We just don’t know if you’ve kept up on the bars, beam or vault?”

  “I’ll give it some thought,” Donsaii said, without responding to the implied question about her other skills. Vanessa tried to ask more questions but Donsaii had already disconnected.

  Vanessa slammed into Natya’s office. “You’re not going to believe this!” she exclaimed excitedly.

  ***

  Querlak found herself excited but frustrated. She had been working hard to trade knowledge with Sigwald. Sigwald’s fascination with carbon allotrope construction became more and more obvious. He made no bones about his tremendous desire to know what conditions had to be induced in the constructor’s chamber to cause formation of graphene in one location, graphend in another, diamond in a third and lonsdaleite in a fourth. The methods used to dope some allotropes with other elements or bombard them with protons to induce magnetism fascinated him. Querlak had trickled out a few tantalizing specifics and tried to make it obvious that more were available—if only Sigwald would explain how he passed between the stars.

  Sigwald’s responses to her entreaties ranged from indicating that he didn’t understand the question, to suggesting that he came through a port. To questions about how the local end of a port pair would have been transported to this star she got nothing but a blank stare.

  Sigwald, however, did teach them about a new technology. He described making “transistors” which his people apparently made with semiconductors of silicone and germanium rather than doped graphene semiconductors. Why they used silicone wasn’t very clear. At first it wasn’t clear why he was describing them. They certainly weren’t new or exciting, the sigmas frequently used transistors to amplify signals. But then Sigwald diagrammed combining many transistors on something he called a “chip.” It wasn’t clear why he would want to put many of transistors on a chip but then the image kept drawing back until it became obvious that there were thousands or millions of the transistors on a tiny object. Like microfilm could put thousands of pictures on a tiny piece of film Sigwald’s people evidently could put thousands of transistors on one small chip.

  Then Sigwald showed how a group of transistors could work a math problem. And how a larger group could work a larger math problem.

  Querlak wondered why one wouldn’t just connect up a large enough TS to do such a calculation in one’s head. Keenar however became excited when Sigwald showed an image of a small machine that could do very large calculations very quickly. Turning to Querlak he said, “The engineers that designed the ringworld repeatedly had to form enormous transcendental states to compute the stresses for their designs. Sometimes they even had to use one of the math clades just to perform those tremendous calculations for them! Imagine if you had a simple machine like this that could do large calculations for a small engineering TS! Engineering could be done with far fewer people and by smaller clades!”

  Querlak swung her lower manipulators, “We don’t have a shortage of people.”

  Keenar seemed to consider this a moment. Then he slowly and contemplatively said, “I think if we had machines that could do such calculations… that we would find more and more uses for them. From one of the things Sigwald showed me I think they send messages consisting of large numbers within which they use calculation to encode data. Then they use reverse calculation to decode the data at the other end.”

  “But we can send information from one location to another using a wire passed through a port.”

  “Audio and video.”

  “We can send that over the same wire.”

  Keenar’s eye swung to fix on Querlak, “I think they can send much more information, much faster with this ‘digital encoding.’”

  Querlak tilted her eye curiously, still not sure that fast encoding would provide that much benefit, but glad that Keena
r seemed mollified.

  Keenar said, “You know how everything Sigwald says in our language sounds like he’s exactly copying something you’ve said to him? He sounds exactly like you, though the words are chopped up wrong?”

  Querlak bobbed her eye in agreement.

  “I think he’s just recorded your words with that ‘digital encoding.’ Then I think he brings your words back from where he’s recorded them by de-coding them.”

  Querlak swung her manipulators, “We can record words.”

  “But, we can’t bring them back one at a time in a different order like Sigwald does. Well, we could, but it would take a long time.” Keenar had a somewhat distant look as he mused on this but then he returned to his primary focus. He snarled, “This ‘digital technology’ is interesting, but it’s just distracting us from the fact that what we really need to know is how Sigwald got here and where he came from!” He got another distant look as his TS considered, then said, “What our race needs is a place to expand, not a better way to do calculations or communicate.” He turned, “We’ll be able to form a TS soon and I’ll be able to speak to Sigwald directly, then we’ll see what’s what.”

  Querlak felt apprehensive about the TS that would merge Osnak into Delnitch. Occasionally a smaller clade dominated a larger clade when they merged… but Delnitch was huge. Obviously Keenar expected to be the senior partner once the fetus of Ezan and Nonas matured enough that its 5th dimensional connections to its mother and father joined the two clades. Keenar expected to use what Querlak had learned of Sigwald’s language without learning it himself. Since Querlak’s brain would be the main repository of that knowledge Querlak would likely find herself a minor but almost constant partner in that Delnitch TS.

  She didn’t think she was going to like it. She blew air through her spiracles and turned back to Sigwald. She tried to generate more good will by attempting to further clarify to Sigwald the pressure-temperature and charge conditions inside the constructor that were necessary when it rapidly formed diamond.