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I'll tell you what I know when I know it. But be assured that whether or not I
can achieve anything comparable to what I did before, I owe this restoration of
myself to you, to all of you. I was already your friend forever; I am forever in
your debt."
They answered; she heard all the answers, conversed with them using only small
parts of her attention.
The rest of her explored. She found the hidden interfaces with the main computer
systems that the Starways Congress's programmers had designed. It was easy
enough to raid them for whatever information she wanted -- indeed, within
moments she had found her way into the most secret files of the Starways
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Congress and found out every technical specification and every protocol of the
new nets. But all her probing was done at second-hand, as if she were dipping
into a cookie jar in the darkness, unable to see what she could touch. She could
send out little finder programs that brought back to her whatever she wanted;
they were guided by fuzzy protocols that let them even be somewhat
serendipitous, dragging back tangential information that had somehow tickled
them into bringing it aboard. She certainly had the power to sabotage, if she
had wanted to punish them. She could have crashed everything, destroyed all the
data. But none of that, neither finding secrets nor wreaking vengeance, had
anything to do with what she needed now. The information most vital to her had
been saved by her friends. What she needed was capacity, and it wasn't there.
The new networks were stepped back and delayed far enough from the immediacy of
the ansibles that she couldn't use them for her thought. She tried to find ways
to offload and reload data quickly enough that she could use it to push a
starship Out and In again, but it simply wasn't fast enough. Only bits and
pieces of each starship would go Out, and almost nothing would make it come back
Inside.
I have all my knowledge. I just haven't got the space.
Through all of this, however, her aiúa was making its circuit. Many times a
second it passed through the Val-body strapped to a bed in the starship. Many
times a second it touched the ansibles and computers of its restored, if
truncated, network. And many times a second it wandered the lacy links among the
mothertrees.
A thousand, ten thousand times her aiúa made these circuits before she finally
realized that the mothertrees were also a storage place. They had so few
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thoughts of their own, but the structures were there that could hold memories,
and there were no delays built in. She could think, could hold the thought,
could retrieve it instantly. And the mothertrees were fractally deep; she could
store memory mapped in layers, thoughts within thoughts, farther and farther
into the structures and patterns of the living cells, without ever interfering
with the dim sweet thoughts of the trees themselves. It was a far better storage
system than the computer nets had ever been; it was inherently larger than any
binary device. Though there were far fewer mothertrees than there were
computers, even in her new shrunken net, the depth and richness of the memory
array meant that there was far more room for data that could be recalled far
more rapidly. Except for retrieving basic data, her own memories of past
starflights, Jane would not need to use the computers at all. The pathway to the
stars now lay along an avenue of trees.
Alone in a starship on the surface of Lusitania, a worker of the Hive Queen
waited. Jane found her easily, found and remembered the shape of the starship.
Though she had "forgotten" how to do starflight for a day or so, the memory was
back again and she did it easily, pushing the starship Out, then bringing it
back In an instant later, only many kilometers away, in a clearing before the
entrance to the Hive Queen's nest. The worker arose from its terminal, opened
the door, and came outside. Of course there was no celebration. The Hive Queen
merely looked through the worker's eyes to verify that the flight had been
successful, then explored the worker's body and the starship itself to make sure
that nothing had been lost or damaged in the flight.
Jane could hear the Hive Queen's voice as if from a distance, for she recoiled
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