"I'd like to," Martin said.

"They're not final but they're pretty compelling. I think you can follow most of it…"

"I'll try."

"The moms aren't telling us everything."

"That seems to be the popular wisdom," Martin said.

She blinked. "It's true. They haven't told us how they do certain things—convert matter to anti em, for example. Or how they compress ordinary matter into neutronium. Or how they transmit on the noach without possibility of interception."

"They don't seem to think we need to know."

"Well, curiosity is reason enough."

"Right," Martin said.

"I think I know how they do some things. Not how they actually doit, but the theory behind it." Her eyes widened, defying him to think her efforts were trivial. "It's good momer-ath. It's self-consistent, I mean. I've even translated some of it into formal maths."

"I'm listening," Martin said.

Martin knew his momerath ability was dwarfed by Jennifer's. She was probably the fastest and most innovative mathematician on the ship, followed only by Giacomo Sicilia.

"I've been putting some things together by looking at the moms'—I mean, the Benefactors' technologies. What they did on Earth and on the Ark. On Mars. They have ways of altering matter on a fundamental level—that's obvious, of course, since they can make matter into anti em. I don'tthink they have spacewarps or can rotate mass points through higher dimensions—that would imply faster-than-light travel, which they don't seemto have."

"Okay," Martin said.

"The way momerath is constructed—the formal side I mean, not the psychological—there are branches of the discipline that suggest human information theory. There's an argument that physics can be reduced to the laws governing transfer of information; but I haven't been working on that."

"What I havebeen doing is looking at how the moms treat basic physics in their drill instructions. We have to know certainthings, such as repair of maker delivery systems using remotes, in case they're severely damaged in a fight. It's funny, but the Dawn Treadercan repair itself, and the bombships can't… not without remotes, at any rate. I guess they don't want bombships going off on their own, mutating—"

"Yes," Martin said, in a tone that urged her to come back to the main subject.

"About the anti em conversion process. I think they've worked out ways to access a particle's bit structure, its self-information. To do that, they'd have to tamper with the so-called privileged channels. Channelsisn't the right word, of course. I'd call them bands—but—"

Martin looked at her blankly.

"Some more radical theorists on Earth thought spacetime might be a giant computational matrix, with information transferred along privileged bands or channels instantaneously, and bosons—photons, and so on—conveying other types of information at no more than the speed of light. Baryons don't expand when the universe expands. They're loosely tied to spacetime. But bosons—photons, and so on—are in some respects strongly tied to spacetime. Their wavelengths expand as the universe expands. The privileged bands are not tied to spacetime at all, and they convey certain kinds of special information between particles. Kind of cosmic bookkeeping. The Benefactors seem to know how to access these bands, and to control the information they carry."

"I'm still not following you."

Jennifer sighed, squatted in the air beside Martin, and lifted her hands to add gestures to her explanation. "Particles need to knowcertain things, if I can use that word in its most basic sense. They need to know what they are—charge, mass, spin, strangeness, and so on—and wherethey are. They have to react to information conveyed by other particles, information about their own character and position. Particles are the most basic processors of information. Bosons and the privileged bands are the fundamental carriers of information."

"All right," Martin said, although the full implications of this were far from clear, and he was far from agreeing with the theory.

"I think the Benefactors—and probably the planet killers—have found ways to control the privileged bands. Now that's remarkable by itself, because privileged bands aren't supposed to be accessed by anythingbut the particles and bosons they work for. They might as well be called forbiddenbands. They carry information about a particle's state that helps keep things running on a quantum level—bookkeeping and housecleaning, so to speak. They have to carry information instantly because… well, in some experiments, that kind of bookkeeping seems to happen instantly, across great distances. Most information can't travel faster than light. Well, that sort can, but it's very special, the exception to the rule.

"Bosons travel at the speed of light. They carry information about changes in position, mass, and so on, like I said. If you can change their states and information content, you can make them lie.If you control all the information carried by bosons and along the privileged bands, you can lieto other particles. If you tinker with a particle's internal information, you can changethat particle. I think that's what they do to make anti em."

"They just tell an atom it's anti em?"

Jennifer smiled brightly. "Nothing so simple, but that's the gist, I think. They mess with privileged bands, they tinker with the memory stores of huge numbers of particles within atoms, all at once, and they create anti em. I've got the momerath…"

"How long would it take me to absorb it?"

She pursed her lips. "You, maybe three tendays."

"I don't have time, Jennifer. But I'd like to have the record anyway…" Her theory seemed less than important to him now. "Sounds impossible, though."

Jennifer grinned. "It does, doesn't it? That's what's so neat. Given certain assumptions, and running them through the momerath, the impossibilities go away. It becomes a coherent system, and it has huge implications, most of which I haven't worked out. Like, what sort of coordinate system would a particle use? Relative, absolute? Cartesian? How many axes? I'm not really serious about it being Cartesian—it couldn't be—and remember, the coordinates or whatever you want to call them have to be self-sensing. The particle has to be what it knows it is, and to be whereit knows it is. Unless we start calling in observer-induced phenomena, which I do in my momerath… though that isn't finished, yet."

"How much information does a particle have to carry?" Martin asked.

"To differentiate itself from every other particle—a unique particle signature—and to know its state, its position, its motion, and so on… about two hundred bits."

Martin looked to one side for a moment, frowning, getting interested despite his weariness. "If the universe is a computer, what's the hardware like?"

"The momerath explicitly forbids positing a matrix for this system. None can be described. Only the rules exist, and the interactions."

"There's no programmer?"

"The momerath says nothing about that. Just, no hardware, no explicitly real matrix. The matrix is, but is not separate from what takes place. You areinterested, aren't you? "

He was, but there seemed so little time to think even the thoughts he needed to think, and make the necessary plans. "I'll look the work over when I can. You know I'm bogged."