An interrogation, a Bar-recommended stimulant, and some variously expensive transactions later, Linyabel has a scanner sitting on Bar's surface, whirring away, converting borrowed paper books at many pages a second into sensible electronic formats, and she is finishing up a plate of loaded savory waffles and a slab of goose and a pomegranate pudding for her snack-plus-added-stimulant-related-
An interrogation, a Bar-recommended stimulant, and some variously expensive transactions later, Linyabel has a scanner sitting on Bar's surface, whirring away, converting borrowed paper books at many pages a second into sensible electronic formats, and she is finishing up a plate of loaded savory waffles and a slab of goose and a pomegranate pudding for her snack-plus-added-stimulant-related-
"If you're asking if I can read minds, the answer is 'yes, but I don't on nonconsenting targets.' I haven't observed anything more of your mind than that it exists. If you're asking if I could do things to peoples' minds the answer is 'theoretically but I've never tried it,' because finding a consenting volunteer for that is neither trivial nor something I particularly care to pursue."
"Well, he is not fully apprised of all the considerations that go into deciding exactly what the Cetagandans will and will not engineer, but there are engineers nearly so clever and much less restrained. Tetrachromats, of course. Winged people, yes - Cetagandans have done that, even, although it hasn't been rolled out into general use, interferes with other desiderata. Plasma eye beams - no."
"Although I am a human, designed entirely by humans, I suspect I am hyper-advanced relative to your society - but still could not pull off plasma eye beams, not with a laboratory that was the stuff of dreams, not with anything short of 'copying it from somewhere'. Bar makes copying a more viable means of advancement than previously supposed, but still."
"Oh, I didn't realize you weren't keeping comprehensive statistics. I suppose it's possible that truly deleterious mutations of this magnitude will be almost invariably fatal by the time you notice them if you're waiting for them to reach some age past five or so."
"We would like to but we're a private institution, not the government, and...there is no way that asking the government to try to keep comprehensive statistics on mutants is going to go well. If it's happened it hasn't happened often, anyway, we would have found out if it happened often."
"Which is itself surprising. Most changes are not improvements. But if you can get wings or telepathy in one step, maybe all the changes are so dramatic that anything unsafe causes spontaneous abortion? If not outright killing the carrier - how did the plasma eye beam one develop to term in a living person?"
"That's a good choice. I'm importing some of the same. Bar says that when Ivan was here she could not find Miles useful anaesthetic without knowing more about his medical properties, but I always carry," she pats a small object, "a medical scanner which has a recent scan of him, and I have his complete genome on my pen, so between the two it's only a little worse than if she had him here to look at, and I think he'll be delighted. He has the oddest allergies."
"In the case of many technologies Bar knows to exist the problem isn't that there's anything wrong with the technology but that the information that counts to her as 'published' isn't sufficient to reconstruct it from scratch. I wonder if you could use holo-pens where you're from, as long as I'm here to consult on them anyway?"
"They're - computer technology has not advanced in the way that was promised in the nineteen hundreds and the two thousands," says Linyabel. "It's a cryptography and security problem, principally - I can't remember off the top of my head if you already have computers that are more portable than the average comconsole in my world, but you soon will, assuming a similar tech track. Our software is smarter, though, and I condensed the necessary cryptography and other equipment into this," she displays her pen, "which also does gesture recognition and three-dimensional holoprojection into the air. The simple model - low-security crypto that will still more than suffice against anything you're dealing with unless you have data mutants, cabochon-style nib, etcetera - you might be able to make yourself with a small handful of technological jumps I could help you get. But while the idea of using a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century portable computer fills me with dread I imagine it doesn't look like such a large jump coming from the other direction. So you might not consider it worth the trouble."
"Keeping up with the cryptanalysis is actually not the problem. The crytography keeps up. It just gets bigger. The real breakthrough was how I shrank it, and you'll have - Bar, an example of a relevant portable computer, late nineteen hundreds?" Bar shows them a laptop, presented open, and then vanishes it again. "You'll have those, which aren't as snazzy as my pens, but you also won't have the kinds of hacks that necessitated the arms race."
"Various. Some of them were single-task, more like the mutations from our world than the typical fantasy wizard, but some were more general. There was one who was some kind of dragon which came with several different kinds of species specific magic--like shapeshifting, which was how they could fit in the bar at all--and also a more generally practicable kind that only works in the world they're from."
"Bar makes it trivial - if she'd let me. She can change currency, she doesn't take a cut, and she can do it between any economy and purchase back non-currency objects in adequate condition. If I buy a case of maple butter in Barrayaran marks at Vorkosigan hill district prices, and then sell it back for Zoavian credits at Twilight City prices, and then change those back into Barrayaran marks, I will have literally sixteen times what I started with, and that's just one of the first examples I thought of because I tend to tote Barrayaran maple butter around the galaxy. Bar can invent prices for objects in currencies from worlds that have never seen those objects, and it's largely her discretion whether she prices it as its theoretical value in that culture or just as an approximate translation of the buying power required to buy the object in its native location. There are no transaction costs, no shipping costs, and no difficulty obtaining pricing information. She can't handle particularly large volumes all at once, but she can perform trades almost instantly, and if I worked in small objects - selling aluminum to 1885 Earth, for instance - it would hardly matter. And yet. She is not allowed."
"Yes. So arbitrage is a way to work around that, but the economic effect is still someone walking out of Milliways with more money that didn't strictly come from anywhere. But I wouldn't actually want to extract the fruits of my arbitrage in monetary form. From the perspective of the nexus economy that would just be uncontrolled inflation, albeit uncontrolled inflation more useful to me than most - and I'm still not sure what all this is going to look like on my First Galactic bank statement. I'd walk out with unsynthesizable elements or more gadgets of the sort I'm going to buy anyway."
"What I meant was more free value than free money per se, but I suppose I was unclear on that. But then in a way Bar gives out free value anyway, given the difference in cost between buying a gadget and taking it home and reverse-engineering it and funding the R&D work to develop it independently."
"I'm not sure they're arbitrary. They seem designed to prevent her from being too generous. A genuinely arbitrary rule would say she could sell anything but fudge and earmuffs and that she had to take half a subjective hour off if someone walked in from a place where it was Tuesday. Mysterious outside force, though, yes, I'm puzzled about that."
"As you like. Someone whose goal is to prevent Bar from being generous and can enforce that at all concerns me, and I'm only glad they aren't especially good at it. She confided in me that she will do small amounts of arbitrage for people who really need it; I simply don't qualify by any stretch of the imagination."