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206) [2/4/03 10:24:37 PM]
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possible?' Her voice contained the question. She looked at Jase.
'What?' it said.
'Doing . . . ' She scowled at not being immediately understood and waved one
hand impatiently.
' . . . Doing what it did. Going under something so big in hyperspace and then
bouncing over. I
was told even we couldn't do that.'
'So was the Mind in question, but it was desperate. The General War Council
itself decided that we should try to duplicate the feat, using a similar Mind
and a spare planet.'
'What happened?' Fal asked, grinning at the idea of a 'spare' planet.
'No Mind would even consider the idea; far too dangerous. Even the eligible
ones on the War
Council demurred.'
Fal laughed, gazing up at the red and white flowers curled round the
trelliswork overhead.
Jase, which deep down was a hopeless romantic, thought her laughter sounded
like the tinkling of mountain streams, and always recorded her laughs for
itself, even when they were snorts or guffaws, even when she was being rude
and it was a dirty laugh. Jase knew a machine, even a sentient one, could not
die of shame, but it also knew that it would do just that if Fal ever guessed
any of this. Fal stopped laughing. She said:
'What does this thing actually look like? I mean you never see them by
themselves, they're always in something . . . a ship or whatever. And how did
it - what did it use to warp with?'
'Externally,' Jase said in its usual, calm, measured tones, 'it is an
ellipsoid. Fields up, it looks like a very small ship. It's about ten metres
long and two and a half in diameter.
Internally it's made up of millions of components, but the most important ones
are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper; those are what make it
so heavy because they're so dense. It weighs nearly fifteen thousand tonnes.
It is fitted with its own power, of course, and several field generators, any
of which could be pressed into service as emergency motors, and indeed are
designed with this in mind. Only the outer envelope is constantly in real
space, the rest - all the thinking parts, anyway - stay in hyperspace.
'Assuming, as we must, that the Mind did what it said it was going to do,
there is only one possible way it could have accomplished the task, given that
it does not have a warp motor or
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Displacer.' Jase paused as Fal sat forward, her elbows on her knees, her hands
clenched under her chin. It saw her shifting her weight on her backside and a
tiny grimace appear fleetingly on her face. Jase decided she was getting
uncomfortable on the hard stone bench, and ordered one of the lodge drones to
bring some cushions. 'The Mind does have an internal warping unit, but it is
supposed to be used only to expand microscopic volumes of the memory so that
there is more space around the sections of information - in the form of
third-level elementary particle-spirals -
which it wants to change. The normal volume limit on that warping unit is less
than a cubic millimetre; somehow the ship Mind jury-rigged it so that it would
encompass its entire body and let it appear within the planet's surface. A
clear air space would be the logical place to go for, and the tunnels of the
Command System seem an obvious choice; that is where it said it would head
for.'
'Right,' Fal said, nodding. 'OK. Now, what are - oh . . . '
A small drone carrying two large cushions appeared at her side. 'Hmm, thanks,'
Fal said, levering herself up with one hand and placing one cushion beneath
her, the other at her back. The small drone floated off to the lodge again.
Fal settled herself. 'Did you ask for these, Jase?'
she asked.
'Not me,' Jase lied, secretly pleased. 'What were you going to ask?'
'These tunnels,' Fal said, leaning forward more comfortably this time. 'This
Command System.
What is it?'
'Briefly, it consists of a winding, paired loop of twenty-two-metre diameter
tunnels buried five kilometres deep. The whole system is several hundred
kilometres in length. The trains were designed to be the wartime mobile
command centres of a state which once existed on the planet, when it was at
the intermediate-sophisticated stage-three phase. State-of-the-art weaponry at
the time was the fusion bomb, delivered by transplanetary guided rocket. The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]