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" CHAPTER FOUR
"Why can't I get past the Wingdrake of Wisdom?"
Darnell griped. He had chosen Bonecrush again, but his mighty-thewed play icon
was backed into a corner where a winged serpent hissed menacingly at him every
time he tried to move.
"You should have bought some intelligence for
Bonecrush at the Little Shop of Spiritual Enlighten-
ment," Polyon commented. His fingers flicked carelessly at the screen as he
spoke, sending Thingber-
ry the Martian Mage to spin an apparently pointless web in the night sky above
Asteroid 66.
"I didn't know you could buy intelligence." DarneU's lower lip protruded in a
definite pout "That wasn't in the rule book."
"A lot of things aren't in the rule book," Polyon said, "including most of
what you need to survive. And in-
formation is always for sale... if you know the right price. Anything from the
secrets of Singularity to the origins of planet names."
"Oh. Encyclopedias. Libraries, Anybody can buy the
Galactic Datasource on fast-hedra," Darnell whined.
"But who has time to read all that crud?"
"The price of some kinds of information," Polyon said, "is more than the cost
of a book and the time to read it. I could print out the rules of Singularity
math for you, but you haven't paid the price of under-
standing it # the years of space transformation algebra and the intelligence
to move the theories into multiple dimensions."
"Oh, come on," Blaize challenged him. "It's not that
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compjjcated. Even I know Baykowski's Theorem."
"A continuum C is said to be locally shrinkable in M
if and only if, for each epsilon greater than zero and each open set D
containing C, there is a homeomor-
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phism h of M onto M which takes C onto a set of diameter less than epsilon and
which is the identity on
M ___ D," Polyon recited rapidly. "And it's not a theorem, it's a definition."
Nancia quietly followed the discussion with mild in-
terest. The mathematics of Singularity was nothing new to her, but at least
when her brat passengers were talking mathematics they weren't trying to drive
each other crazy. And she was impressed that Polyon had retained enough
Singularity theory to be able to recite
Baykowski's Definition from memory; common gossip among the brainships in
training was that no softperson could really understand multidimensional
decompositions.
"The real basis for decom theory," Polyon lectured his audience, "is what
follows that definition. Namely, Zerlion's Lemma: that our universe can be
considered as a collection of locally shrinkable continua each con-
taining at least one non-degenerating element."
Fassa del Parma pouted and jabbed her play icon across the display screen in a
series of short, jerky moves.
"Very useful information, I'm sure," she said in a sarcas-
tic voice, "but do the rest of us have to pay the price of listening to it?
All this theoretical mathematics makes my head hurt And it's not as if it were
good for anything, like stress analysis or materials testing."
"It's good for getting us to the Nyota system in two weeks instead of six
months, my dove," Polyon told her. "And it's really quite simple. In layman's
terms, Singularity theory just shows us how to decompose two widely separated
subspace areas into a sequence of compacted dimensionalities sharing one non-
degenerating element. When the subspaces become
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Anm McCaffrey & Margaret Ball
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singular they will appear to intersect at that element # .
and when we expand from the decomposition, pon|
out of Central subspace and into Vega space we go."
Nancia felt grateful that she'd resisted her impulse to join in the
conversation. Her Lab Schools classmates had been right about softpersons.
Polyon knew all the right words for Singularity mathematics, but he'd got-
ten the basic theory hopelessly scrambled. And clearly he didn't understand
the computational problems un-
derlying that theory. Pure topological theory might prove the existence of a
decomposition series, but ac-
tually forcing a ship through that series required massive linear programming
optimizations, all per-
formed in realtime with no second chances for mistakes. No wonder softpersons
weren't trusted to pilot a ship through Singularity!
"I agree with you," Alpha told Fassa. "Bo-ring. Even the history of Nyota is
better than studying mathematics."
"You'd think so, of course," Fassa said, "seeing that it was discovered and
named by your people." The small grin on her face told Nancia that this was a
jab of some sort at Alpha. Hastily she scanned her data notes on the
Nyota system, but nothing there explained why the
Hezra-Fong family should take a particular interest in it
"Swahili is a slave language," Alpha said haughtily.
"It has nothing to do with the Fong tribe. My people come from the other side
of the continent # and we were never enslaved!"
"Will somebody give me a map of this conversa-
tion?" Darnell said plaintively. "I'm more lost than I
was during Polyon's math lecture."
"This particular information," Alpha told him, "is free." She drew herself up
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to her full height, several inches taller than Fassa, and favored the top of
her sleek, dark head with a withering glare, "The system we're going to was
discovered by a Black descendant of the American slaves. In a burst of
misguided en-
thusiasm, he decided to give the star and all the planets names from an
African language. Unfortunately, he was so poorly educated that the only such
language he knew was Swahili, a trade language spread along the east coast of
Africa by Arab slavers. He called the sun
Nyota ya Jaha # Lucky Star. The planets' names are fairly accurate
descriptions, too. Bahati means For-
tune, and it's a reasonably decent place to live #
green, mild climate, lots of nice scenery that stays put.
Shemali means North Wind."
polyon groaned appreciatively. "I know. Unlike some of us, I did read up on my
destination. The place is called North Wind because that's what you get for
thirteen months out of the year."
"Thirteen months you have in the year? Oh # I get it! Longer rotation period,
right?" Darnell beamed with pride at his own cleverness.
"Shorter, as it happens," Polyon said. His voice sounded remarkably hollow.
"Shemali has a year of three hundred days, divided into ten months for con-
venience. I was being sarcastic about the feet that there is no good season."
"Never mind," Alpha told him almost kindly, "it's bet-
ter than Angalia. Actually the full name is Angalia! with an exclamation point
atthe end. Itmeans Watch out!"
"Dare I ask what that means?" Blaize inquired.
"It means," Alpha told him, "that the scenery # un-
like that of Bahati# doesn't stay put."
Blaize and Polyon stared at one another, briefly companions in misery.
Polyon was the first to recover himself. "Oh, well,"
he said, turning back to the game screen, "you see the value of information,
Darnell # and the fact that it isn't always in the Galactic Datasource. And
some of the information that isn't # ah # publicly available #
is the most valuable of all." With delicate gestures he
58
Anne McCaffrey &f Margaret Ball nudged the joyball while the fingers of his
left hand tapped out codes to enlarge and strengthen
Thingberry's magical net. "You need to think of ways to trade for that kind of
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