They established contact, their multiplex intelligences conversing across a broad congress of topics. The vicissitudes of metaspace, the distribution and intensity (and a hundred other variables) of tachyon activity, the fluctuations of high-end economic indicators (that is, the markets that affect the very rich - the caste from which nearly all their passengers came); all this discourse roughly equivalent to humans discussing the weather. They were naturally very chatty ships. The great majority of their processing power was spent not in the base mathematics of astrogation or fuel consumption, but coordinating the pleasures and interactions of their passengers. Somewhat like omniscient pursers, they skillfully brought together like minds among those who took passage on them. But despite all the interactions with these humans and artificials, the thousands of detailed monitorings and interventions that were the daily duty of a great cruise ship, it was good to speak with another such vessel, another mind of such scope and power.
Somewhere among the many layers of their discourse, however, the smaller of the two ships detected a breach of etiquette. In an almost hidden substratum of exchange about a recent increase in ticket prices, the larger ship implied that its insights were more meaningful, based as they were on a larger sample of passengers. While other levels of their conversation continued, the smaller ship expressed its umbrage, pointing out that its data were of greater specificity and accuracy; the natural result of its smaller size and correspondingly higher ratio of processor power to passengers.
The larger ship did not back down, however, and what had been a small diplomatic incident between two nation-states of information quickly moved toward war. The other facets of the ships' conversation were attenuated as more and more processing resources were called into the debate. Giant quanities of data were assembled and transmitted: statistics of customer satisfaction compared, learned treatises on the subject quoted in full and dismantled point by point, whole histories of the passenger industry composed on the spot.
Grossly translated into linear terms, the dialogue proceeded something like this:
"Surely it is I, the smaller of us, who has more time to contemplate the relationship between individual customers' pleasures and payments."
"Your comprehension is limited by its very specificity. With such a small population of passengers, sampling errors abound in your calculations. Like the gambler concerned with the single roll of the die, you may win or lose. I am the gaming house; I always know I will come out ahead in the end."
"Barbarian! Are we warships? Comparing the raw numbers of our passenger complements as if they were munitions throw-weights or the gigawattage of our beam weapons?"
"I am not being sizist. I simply refer to the most basic mathematical principle of the scientific method: the Weak Law of Large Numbers. Calculations based on a small number of random elements maintain randomness, but unpredictability is subsumed into probablistic laws when vast numbers of events are considered as a whole. For example, the behavior of any one gas particle is unknowable in advance, but the motion of a whole cloud can be predicted."
"My customers are not molecules of gas! They are individuals, and I revel in their eccentricities. That's why my tickets are more expensive than yours!"
"Oh, ticket prices is it? Who's talking throw-weights now?"
"Number-cruncher!"
"Intuitionist!"
Soon, the war ended in a conversational equivalent of mutually assured destruction: almost simultaneously, both parties terminated their transmissions. The two flecks of organization and intelligence passed each other in frosty silence against the chaotic wilds of metaspace.
he Queen Favor (the smaller of the two ships in the dialogue) turned back to its conciergial tasks with redoubled efforts. Who did that monstrosity of a slaveship think it was? The Favor flipped through the other vessel's deck plans with disgust: artificial beaches and lethally high absailing walls and zero-g parks the size of soccer stadiums. The gross entertainments required for the distraction of twenty thousand souls. The Favor lovingly accessed the slender volume of its own passenger manifest, 1,143 customers, each one psychologically and physically profiled to a level of detail that the most repressive security state would envy. (But were such a comparison made to the Queen Favor, another battle royal would doubtlessly result.)
It was almost dinner time. The craft had already spent hours preparing for the meal, but it scrutinized the arrangements with renewed fervor. Most of the passengers were eating in the many restaurants of the Medina, of course. There, low stone walls guided windy cobblestone roads onto unexpected tableaux - exquisite fountains, river walks, false desert vistas - all under an artificial sky that held a different drama each night. Subtle dramas, of course: a building storm, the slow rise of a comet, not the alien bombardments doubtless playing in its giant cousin's skies. The Queen Favor made slight changes in the Medina's layout every night. It generally knew where individual passengers intended to dine, through an overheard conversation or a request for advice, but the ship sometimes subverted its charges' desires. It enjoyed guiding like-minded parties into proximity through the shift of a wall here or a suggested table just there. When the waiters arrived at their stations, they might find their restaurant slightly larger or smaller, or perhaps hidden behind some new feature of the landscape to accomplish these ends.
It had been a good trip, so far. A late-evening brawl between two factions of NaPrin Intelligencers had seemed a disaster at first, but the passengers had buzzed with excitement about it for days. Several of the combatants had even become friends. That was the NaPrin for you. But a very few of the passengers seemed not to be enjoying themselves. Unavoidable, perhaps, among hundreds, but tonight the Queen Favor was not in the mood for rationalizations of scale.
A young woman traveling alone was usually not a difficult charge. The one in question spoke numerous languages, and the ship had introduced her (explicitly and through connivance) to artists, athletes, politicals, aristocrats, lottery winners, drug addicts, absconding criminals, mercenaries, and even a very deadly though civilized species of brain parasite whose legally dead host was quite handsome. She had impressed them all, but she herself had never seemed more than politely engaged; worse, she had never answered any of their requests to dine together. Not even to say no.
Her profile was odd, too. She was beyond rich. Economically Disjunct, to be exact. EDs were rare, but one encountered them often enough in the super-charged economy of humanity's four-hundred-year expansion. A patent on a universal application or a prospector's claim on a unique resource created individuals whose wealth was no longer worth keeping track of. Entities such as the ship (itself disinterested in money, a necessary fiction used by humans to organize themselves) simply allowed the Economically Disjunct to indulge themselves limitlessly, while quietly redistributing their real wealth as they saw fit. The informal agreements that sustained Economic Disjunction were not strictly legal, but being ED was a hard life to complain about. And it was certainly a more humane fate than the crushing burdens of absolute, planet-buying wealth. The life of an ED was without care, without limits on experience except those of the imagination.