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? she wondered.
Or still trying to figure out how to code the Spinner script? Probably both
. For a while she'd been resentful that no one had informed her when the
Spinner tunnel was unearthed by her reckoning she'd done more than her fair
share for both the alien device and the people involved, and she'd deserved to
share in some of the triumph, too. Now, though, she was just as glad she'd
been somewhere else. She was already indispensable to too many projects.
"Penny for them."
She focused on Hafner again. "Sorry just thinking about all the work we have
to do to make Astra economically stable." She sighed. "And so much of it
depends on how fast we can learn to control the Spinneret."
Hafner pursed his lips and looked out the window himself. "Carmen & what are
the races out there planning to do with the cable they buy from us? You have
any ideas?"
She frowned. "No, not really."
"It's not an idle question," he went on, almost as if he hadn't heard her.
"The
Spinners went to incredible lengths to build this place someday soon I'll take
you down to see their village, and I guarantee you'll be floored by it. But
why did they do it? Suck an entire planet dry of its metals to make
six-centimeter cables what were they using the stuff for?"
"Any number of things," she shrugged. "We've worked up a three-page list of
possibilities ourselves, and we don't know half of what there is to know about
the cable yet."
He shook his head. "You're missing my point. The buildings down there the
whole Spinneret, for that matter everything's lasted a hundred thousand years.
Why on Earth would any culture make something that lasts that long?"
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She started to speak, then paused. It wasn't a trivial question. "Maybe they
were building the ultimate city back on their home world or something. Maybe a
tomb or memorial, like the pyramids or the Taj Mahal."
"Or maybe a cage for something very big and long-lived," he said quietly.
"That's one of the possibilities that keep occurring to me."
She grimaced. "That one I'd rather not think about. Maybe well, maybe they
just lived a lot longer than we do. In terms of lifetimes, then, the cable may
not seem exceptionally durable."
"Maybe." Hafner leaned back in his chair. "That list you mentioned any overtly
military uses on it?"
"I " She frowned. "Now that you mention it, no, there aren't."
"The colonel's playing it cool," Hafner nodded heavily. "But I doubt that it's
doing any good. None of the races out there are dumb enough or naive enough to
have missed the warfare possibilities."
She nodded silently. It was a topic she and Meredith had never discussed
openly, but from the very beginning it had fluttered like a vulture over the
trade negotiations. Using that superconducting solenoid to throw missiles;
wrapping a warship in unbreakable cable; hurling a giant tangler thread among
an enemy's ships to glue them randomly together practically every peaceful use
had its darker flip side. "I don't suppose there's any way we can dictate how
our clients use their cables, though," she said aloud. "I think that's one
reason Colonel
Meredith wants all the aliens to have equal access to the cables, to minimize
any strategic advantages it might provide."
"It could still foul up the political balance, though, maybe in more subtle
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ways,"
Hafner said. "Suppose one of the empires out there is having internal dissent,
a problem maybe that the central government could quickly crush with a cable-
wrapped spaceship. That would free the government's resources and attention to
be turned to its neighbors."
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"What would you have us do, then?" Carmen growled, knowing full well that he
wasn't attacking her personally, but still feeling compelled to defend her
project.
"Turn Astra over to the UN? Or pull out entirely and let the Rooshrike have
it?
Either way, the cable's going to be made and used by someone
. The genie's out
, Peter; you can't stuff it back in its bottle."
He held up his hands, palms outward. "Peace. I wasn't picking on you or your
work and as far as genies go, I did my fair share to pop the cork. I just &
that's the other possibility that keeps coming back to me. Maybe the Spinners
used the cable material for warfare, too. If the crew here was recalled to
help fight and never made it back & well, that would explain why the Spinneret
was left running."
She shuddered. "You would bring that up, wouldn't you?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]