Emwiller to Wurly: “We’ve brought along a communications technician to determine what data interface would be mutually compatible. How should we proceed?”
The jukebox glowed a pure yellow, then flickered through the spectrum. To its right, a section of what they had thought was a seamless wall slid aside. “Down that corridor, I have another avatar by the entrance to the storerooms. Your technician may converse with me there.”
The tech, Hal Emery, walked over and looked down the hall.
Crow muttered: “He’s going alone?”
Emwiller called, “Hey, Hal, you want company?”
He waved her off. “S’okay. Hall’s only five meters long and it’s mostly empty.”
Clover said to Wurly, “If we understand correctly, once our technician has set up the data link, you’ll be transmitting to us all the information on your antimatter technology?”
“That is not correct.”
Clover: “You said yesterday that you needed the high-speed data link to convey the information.”
“That is accurate, but the link itself will not be sufficient. My analysis suggests that your equipment does not have sufficient transmission bandwidth to accept all the relevant data in what would be a reasonable time here, given your life-support systems. I will provide all the requested data in a quantum storage unit. I will also provide a reader for the quantum storage unit, also called in English a QSU. The first portions of the I/O transfer will include specifications for construction of the reader, should you need backup readers. The quantum storage unit reader is capable of feeding seven hundred and forty of your high-bandwidth channels simultaneously, if equipped with appropriate outputs. The data reader, however, is itself a very sophisticated device. Its interfaces are not currently compatible with your computer technology. You will have to adapt.”
“Will the information be in English?”
“Partly in English, but largely in mathematics. Some new words will be introduced and defined.”
Emwiller: “Can you give us backup QSUs and readers, in case we run into technical problems?”
“Yes, I can provide eight quantum storage units and eight readers.”
Emwiller wasn’t ready to let go. “Our I/O links are pretty fast. Can you transmit the basics of the theory and technology to us on how to build the reader?”
“Yes, I can do that. With the bandwidth I expect you to provide, it will take approximately three weeks to provide all the information on the reader, itself. It is not a simple device, and a wide variety of other technologies must be explained in detail before you can build it. Many of the design specifications are on the atomic level. Some even require customized nucleon lattices. There are components whose functional configuration demands the precise placement of considerable quantities of individual atoms. It is a large amount of data.”
Hannegan said, “We shouldn’t have expected it to be easy, but precisely placing umpteen trillion atoms? Yeah, that’ll take us a while to figure out.”
He thought for a minute. “Let me ask you this: Do you have compilations of physics, chemistry, and biological processes that could be transmitted separately and more quickly over our limited bandwidth?”
“Yes. If you wish to prioritize those among the goods you trade for. Other species have done so. When shorn of false trails, error, discussion, and philosophy, much of this galactic arm’s research into those areas can be delivered in approximately six days, four hours, three minutes, and 7.4 seconds, if your technician’s description of your I/O processes and bandwidth is correct. If you choose this trade, the trade system can establish a parallel I/O link.”
Hannegan said to Stuyvesant, “The admiral’ll have to sign off on using our trade points for that, but I think that’s the way to go—get as much of basic science as we can, while we can, in the I/O stream. We can pass the science along to Earth as quickly as we get it. If the ship gets blown up on the way back, we’re gonna lose both the readers and the QSUs, anyway…. Better to have the science, than a little bit of random tech about the QSU readers.”
Stuyvesant nodded: “I agree. Let’s get that started.”
The jukebox spoke up, unprompted: “Your communications technician wishes to speak to you about placing a communications link on the surface of the station. He cannot reach you with your radio/video link.”
“Why not?” Hannegan asked.
“Unregistered electromagnetic radiation is suppressed between rooms in the station. Not all the trade items stored here are neutrally receptive to electromagnetic radiation.”
“I’ll get it,” Emwiller said. She walked toward the hallway where the tech had gone.
Crow said, “I’ll come with you.”
Sandy handed him the mini-Red that Fiorella had been using: “Take this. It’s running.”
When they were gone, Clover glanced at the other crew members, then asked, “Is there a God?”
Wurly: “Concepts of God are extremely varied but the consensus of the varied species put the probability of the existence of God at forty-two percent.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. I was programmed to answer in this way. Concepts of God are so varied that no computation is possible.”
Stuyvesant: “John, did you catch that? His maker had a sense of humor.”
Clover nodded: “Yes. Wonderful.”
Clover asked, “Your lack of information strikes us as a form of secrecy. Why so much secrecy?”
The answer-bot rippled mauve and puce for a second.
“This question is frequently asked, in various forms, by new arrivals. The purpose of depots like this one is to allow contact between alien species without direct contact. Early on, direct contacts were tried many times, by many different species, in many different ways. It almost always went badly. With few exceptions, alien species are too different from each other to allow constructive interaction. At best the efforts were extremely discomforting to one or both of the contactees. At worst, one or both found the other genuinely repugnant in some way.
“Contact invariably began with good intentions and no thoughts of hostility. Almost invariably those intentions failed. None of the failures were productive, and some of them were catastrophic. Eventually the surviving species still capable of interstellar travel devised this system of depots to safely provide some degree of cooperation and interaction.
“The depots provide two services. They are fuel production and storage facilities for antimatter-powered starships, and they are ‘trading posts’ of a sort. Arriving ships have automatic access to the antimatter storage vessels. In addition, they may offer trade goods, which are scored by a trade computer. They may take away items from the storeroom with similar scores, up to eight.”
Clover was intrigued: “There is no medium of exchange? Just a scored swap?”
“That is correct. It is very difficult to measure the relative value of alien goods to other alien species. Our trade computer is highly sophisticated, but even so, there are continuing efforts to upgrade it.”
Clover said to Stuyvesant, “Well, I’ll be sheep-dipped. The advanced interstellar culture operates on a barter system. Never saw that one coming.”
He turned back to Wurly: “You said with few exceptions there were problems. But there were exceptions? There were species that did get along well?”
“Yes. There are several pairings of cooperative species and even a sequence of similar species based on what Earth science would call convergent evolution. I have no information on those species.”
Clover said, “About this trade system… the trade items seem fairly trivial in value compared to the cost of actually retrieving them. The ship that just departed was several cubic kilometers in size. Why are these ships wandering around the galaxy? Trade can’t be the primary motive, can it?”