diamonds

Jewel

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2016_J(No alternate words.)

“Violet diamond,” said the jeweller, peering at the gemstone through his optronic loupe. “A genuine rarity, if it is. Genuine, that is. Nearly three hundred grains, uncut. High clarity. And – ah, not flawless. One very slight inclusion. Excellent.”

“Ah, I — that’s a good thing?”

“It is for you, because what I do not see with this diamond is a provenance.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“No provenance – no authenticated record of everything that’s happened to the stone since it was first dug up – and how can you prove that this is a natural stone? For this to be worth anything above functional price, you have to be able to distinguish it from an artificial stone printed out on a nanofac.”

“That inclusion will help?”

“It might. I can take it back to my lab and profile its edges at the micro-level, then run a spectrometer on the contents. If the edges don’t show any statistical evidence of artificial randomness, and if the contents analyse as something likely to be found in diamond-forming cratons and not nanofac printing chambers, then I can give it a probabilistic certification.”

“And buy it at market price?”

“Not full market. All this will say is that it’s more probable than not that it’s a natural stone. I can’t prove it. A skilful enough forger could duplicate everything I’ll be checking for, so I can only offer you partial payment based on how likely it is to be genuine.” The jeweller looked at the seller, not unsympathetically. “If you’ve found a lode of these somewhere, young man, you should stop digging until you can get a whole authenticated provenance-recording system on site, because if you’re digging right now,.you’re bleeding money with every shovelful.”

 

Bloody Diamonds

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“I hate dip refueling.”  The grizzled spacer took a long pull on his beer, then looked around at his audience.

“I came in on Levikí, out of Meryn.  That’s her there – the fast courier you’ve been eyeing up in between your drinks. All set up for these long wilderness runs with the fanciest new scoop system and thermal shielding you ever saw so we can pick up fusion fuel anywhere and keep as much velocity as we can while we’re doing it. You ever heard of a Záïc Dip?”

“Well, that’s what Levikí was built to do.  Do a slingshot around a convenient gas giant in mid-voyage, making a high-speed pass through its upper atmosphere as you do it.  Thermal superconductor plating and the oversized heatsinks keep you from burning.  Open up those for’ard gratings, and the dynamic pressure, all the while, rams the hydrogen-helium mix through the mollysieves neat as neat, and strip out the deuterium and helium-3.  Come out the other side fully bunkered and ready to burn for the far gate.  The captain loves to use it, ‘specially as he’s a bit of a tight-wire and won’t spend a taltis if he can get something done himself.”

“Anyway, like I said, we came out of Meryn.  Any of you can tell me where we fuelled heading out of Meryn for a spinward run?”

“Helcáss is the nearest, but it’s not got the right atmosphere –”

“Not bad, kid. Here, have a drink on me.  But it’s close enough.  All the right components are there to fuel her.  They’re just mixed up with a bunch of methane ’cause Helcáss’s too hot to stratify, but that doesn’t stop the Dip from workin’.  Methane doesn’t take well to the dynamic pressure, though.  All that carbon doesn’t fit through the mollysieves, and it’s not going to go back out against the pressure, so it crystallizes right where it sits.”

“And then ship’s mechs, which would be me, gets to spend the next leg out from Meryn with his brain plugged into a dozen or so worker-bots, carefully scraping the kveth-lakh carbon-crystal off the ‘sieves.  Which is not, I may tell you, my favorite choice of in-flight entertainment.  And then we’ve got to store it somewhere.  Can’t just toss it out the lock, y’know.  That’d be littering.”

“So, know anyone who wants four-five tons of starshit-grade diamonds?”

A Diamond Is… Really A Very Simple Molecular Structure

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2

“The models you can see in this room,” said the guide, “represent some of the first models of carbon organizer.  Carbon organizers were the earliest and simplest form of dry nanotechnology, capable of building simple molecular structures from carbon and hydrogen atoms only.  While this may seem trivial, they formed the basis of the synthetic oil manufacturing industry that we’ll talk about later in our tour, and, of course, were responsible for the Diamond Crash.”

“Here, for scale,” he continued, crossing to one particular stand, “you can see the largest gem-quality diamond ever found in nature; the Heart of the Moon, which in its rough state weighed in at just under nineteen ounces.  In its cut state, as you see here, it still weighs twelve ounces, and in the pre-Crash days, was valued at over 124 million esteyn.  After the Diamond Crash, House Selequelios donated it to one of the Museum’s predecessors.”

“And now, gentlesophs, if you’d care to turn around…”

The curtain slid back.  Light blazed from the sixty-foot obelisk, and the tour group gasped as one.

“This is our very own Monument to the Crash, or looked at another way, to the start of the Prosperity.  What you are looking at is a single internally perfect diamond crystal, weighing a little over 5,800,000 pounds.  It is, a few cases of diamond plating on structures aside, the single largest pure diamond crystal ever grown, a record that is unlikely to be broken, since few of its industrial and commercial – mostly low-end ornamentation – applications call for crystals quite this large, and since pure diamond is both brittle and quite flammable, its potential structural niches are for the most part filled by various adamant-type diamondoids, sapphireglass, and more advanced nanocomposites.”

“Of course, it’s rather less valuable than the Heart of the Moon was pre-crash; the value of raw diamond on today’s market is a little under one taltis per pound, which makes the whole Monument worth approximately 45,000 esteyn in total.”

“If you’ll follow me into the next room, you can see a carbon organizer in action, a simple model that extrudes bar diamond from ambient atmospheric gases.  This particular model is still on the market, because while there’s little demand for the product per se, many worlds find it useful on a larger scale for pulling excess carbon out of their atmospheres in an easy-to-store and readily releasable – by simple incineration – form.”

“We slice up the bars into half-foot sections for souvenirs, which you’ll see on the table to your left.  Please, help yourself to one, or two, or as many as you like to take home.  No charge.”  He coughed.  “Although I should perhaps mention that most jewelers, even the ones who don’t insist on an authenticated provenance, will check to ensure that there are at least some natural-looking flaws in the stones they buy, these days.”