“Computer still can’t translate times,” Aybee said to Bey. “That’s what ‘no equivalent’ probably means. I’m wondering if the Rinis have times in our sense. If not, this next bit won’t mean much to them, either.” He said to the vocoder, “All angular momentum changes for identified kernels will cease in three more days. Query: Can you confirm we have complete list?”
LIST CONFIRMED. REQUEST INFORMATION ON ALL OTHER KERNELS. MASS, CHARGE, ANGULAR MOMENTUM, no equivalent LOCATION YOUR REFERENCE FRAME.
“We will provide. Request that the following message be sent to access point 073. Transfer message begins. ‘Cinnabar Baker leaving Ransome’s Hole in four hours. Expect arrival at Brouwer Harvester nine days from now.’ Transfer message ends.”
DESIRED TRANSMISSION PERFORMED. REQUEST: CONTINUED TRANSFER SHOULD PROCEED FROM GENERAL DATA BANKS.
“We will provide all the general data banks.” Aybee grimaced at Bey. “Want to say anything? No. All right, let’s cut it. Request: Session end.”
SESSION END.
“Off-line.” Aybee turned away from the vocoder, grinning with mad satisfaction.
“What the hell was that all about?” Bey was feeling angry, but he recognized it as one of the mood swings that accompanied emergence from the tanks. “I assume you’re willing to tell me.”
“Sure. Just a minute.” Aybee set up a control sequence. “Got to give them the data—they want the general system data bank sent through. It’s a hell of a job. Going to take months.” He leaned back. “You had it half-right, you see. The source of spurious information that was screwing up form-change and everything else is inside the kernel shields.”
“But not a changed form, the way I thought it had to be?”
“No. It’s something inside the kernels themselves. It—or they—sends out the standard radiation stream, but it’s modulated to carry messages. It’s your source of negative entropy.”
Aybee spoke casually, but he could not hide his excitement. From anyone else, Bey would not even have listened. With Aybee, he had to take it seriously. “You know that what you’re saying sounds impossible.”
“Sure does. That’s why it’s so interesting. Wolfman, I keep telling the coordinators, but they still can’t grasp the importance of this. Nor could Ransome. Even though he was using the Rinis for his own purposes, he missed the real point.”
“He was the one who discovered this.”
“Not proven. Somebody in the Kernel Ring stumbled across it, but I’ll bet it wasn’t Ransome himself. They were spinning up and spinning down kernels. Routine stuff, the usual energy storage and extraction. But the things inside one of the kernels could detect the change in angular momentum. They hated it—it affected their inertial reference frames. But they’re smart. They figured out the cause and modulated the radiation emission in reply—sent a signal, in effect. After that it was a straight programming job at this end, signal encode and decode. The trick was to spot first that it was a signal.”
“Inside the kernel.” Bey stared down at the floor. A billion-ton kernel had an event horizon only a few billionths of a nanometer across. The ultimate hidden signal source. “They call themselves Rinis?”
“No. They don’t call themselves anything at all, far as I can tell. That’s the code name I gave them. The computer answer to anything I asked at first seemed to be R.I.N.I.—’Received Information Not Interpretable’—so I stuck ’em with it. I’m getting better at questions now, though.”
“Who are they, Aybee?”
“Can’t give you one answer. Everybody asks me, but I say it’s too early for that sort of question. Intelligent, sure. Smarter than us, could be. A species, maybe. But it’s more like they’re a new universe. A whole cosmos. I’m not ready to worry that. I’m still getting my head around a bit of their science. They gave Ransome a bundle of things—new drives, new communications—but there’s a lot more than he realized. We’re going to get some wild theories out of this.”
“They’re more advanced than we are?”
“Yeah.” Aybee paused. “Or maybe I mean maybe. I don’t know how to compare. If I wanted to talk fancy like Leo, I’d say it’s like their science is orthogonal to ours. They move along a completely different axis of understanding. It’s easy to use their ideas, and hell to understand ’em. I’m still having trouble with the basics. Like, are the Rinis a single entity or a finite—or an infinite—number of entities? That sounds weird, but from what I can see of their counting it’s based on nondenumerable sets instead of integers.”
“They can’t be a single entity. There has to be at least three of them.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve seen that many kernels putting out false form-change information.”
“That would be true if each kernel were totally separate. We used to think that. Now I’m sure it’s wrong. The kernels—at least the kernels involving the Rinis—”
“Isn’t that all of them?”
“No. That’s why Ransome had to switch kernels on the space farm. He wanted to get one of his special kernels out when it had done its job. But the Rini kernels are connected somehow. What’s known by one is known by all of them. At once, no matter how far away. That’s what brought so many ships here. I sent a message saying I might have a system for instantaneous communication, across any distance.”
“But if they all connect, they’re only one object.”
“Not to us. We think they’re separate objects. But to them, their space could still be singly connected. It’s like Flatland. To a being living in two dimensions, on a flat floor, each leg of a chair meets the floor separately and must be a separate object. That’s the way the kernels seem to us. But in a higher-dimensional world—their world—they are all connected, all parts of one chair.”
“But then you shouldn’t be able to supply energy and angular momentum to each kernel separately.”
“Why not? You can paint one leg of a chair.” Aybee turned to Bey. “Hey, I’m glad you’re back in circulation. I’ve been wanting talks like this for weeks, but nobody seems to care. Cinnabar and Leo and the rest of ’em are all too busy running around talking politics and stopping wars, and there’s all this really good stuff needs looking at. Do you know how the drive the Rinis gave Ransome works?”
“No. But it can wait until tomorrow.” Bey stood up. “I’m tired now. Don’t bother to get up. I can make it out of here on my own.”
He was being sarcastic. Aybee had shown no sign of moving. In fact, as soon as Bey had said he was leaving, Aybee bad nodded and turned the computer on again.
Bey’s feelings were more complicated. Everything that Aybee had said was fascinating, but Bey was getting tired. More than that, he was restless, to the point where sleep was out of the question. Without any conscious plan he set out to follow a familiar path, drifting along the corridors that led from the communications center to Ransome’s private quarters.
When he opened the door, he thought that the outer chamber was unoccupied. Then he noticed Sylvia Fernald standing around by the side of the great water globe, staring in at the fish. Next to her was Cinnabar Baker, even thinner than when Bey had last seen her.
They had their backs turned, but Baker somehow sensed his approach and swung around. When she recognized him, she produced a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “At last. I’ve waited a month to be rude to you.”