Mission to Minerva g-5 Read online

  "You… certainly never let up on the surprises, VISAR." Duncan was the first to speak.

  "We try to please." The phrase was by now familiar.

  "You didn't make this exotic celestial tour bus just for us?" Sonnebrandt queried.

  Eesyan, who was not actually present but coupled in via avco from Thurios, replied. "Actually, it's a pretty mundane, regular maintenance platform that we use for external work on vessels and structures. The shell can be molded to the surrounding contours, leaving the crew free and unencumbered. We thought it would be just right for the job. What do you think?"

  "Impressive," Sonnebrandt said.

  "Good. Well, I'm signing off now," Eesyan said. "Enjoy your visit. We'll see you back here at Thurien in due course."

  While they were taking in the spectacle and speaking, the platform had been moving closer to the MP2 construction they had come to see, which had now grown to dominate the view on one side. Chien was studying it silently. About the size of a city block in Hunt's estimation, it had the form of a roughly spherical core with external lines flowing to blend into shapes of perhaps a score of symmetrically arranged protuberances-no doubt the ends of a converging system of projectors comparable to the ones on the smaller-scale prototype at Quelsang. Two larger, pear-shaped lobes extended from opposite sides of the sphere, again consisting of curviforms blending into the general body, instead of the cylinders and boxy modules that made up a typical piece of Terran space engineering. Even with a purely scientific experimental endeavor, it seemed that the Thuriens were incapable of refraining from imparting some art and aesthetics into their creations. The region of the sphere forming its "equator" between the lobes was still incomplete, as were the extremes of the lobes themselves and some of the projectors.

  The vicinity around the construction was dotted with all manner of devices, objects, and machines, hanging in space to perform unidentifiable functions or moving on various errands. The majority were concentrated around a white, featureless hump, fifty or more feet across, sitting on a section of the structure's unfinished equatorial band. Chien glanced at Hunt. "It's an assembly processing zone in action, isn't it?" she said. This was something that Hunt had said he was particularly curious to see.

  "We picked a good time for you," VISAR interjected. "This phase is just completing now."

  The Thuriens didn't build things by bolting parts together the way Terrans did, in ways that had changed little since the times of Victorian factories. They grew them from the inside, by methods that were closer to the way Nature created organisms. The white hump was actually composed of fluid, constrained by a g-field shell similar to the one surrounding the maintenance platform. The fluid contained a supply of materials in various dissolved forms, and also a population of trillions of nano-assemblers programmed to extract the elements needed and incorporate them into the growing structure in precisely the way that was required at every point. In this respect, the process resembled that of organic cell differentiation, in which the cells of a developing embryo are able to activate just the correct parts of their common DNA program to turn into bone, blood, muscle, or whatever else a particular cell in the overall plan is destined to become. As they watched, the fluid inside the hump became cloudy and patchy, and seemed to go into some kind of agitation. It looked like a washing machine going into its rinse cycle.

  This was new to Sonnebrandt, and in response to his questions, Duncan outlined the idea. Sonnebrandt nodded as he listened, but then frowned. "Every assembler would have to know exactly where it is to do the correct job," he said. "You said it was like biological cells. But cells can sense their relative positions in a growing organism and know which functions to switch on and which to suppress."

  "They use things like chemical concentrations and electrical gradients," Chien put in.

  "Yes, that's what I mean. But nothing in what Duncan just described seemed to play the role of a physical cell matrix that positional information can relate to. So how do they do it?"

  Duncan looked to Hunt, who had studied the Thurien accounts more. "It's neat," Hunt said to Sonnebrandt. "The design is encoded into coordinate operators that define a high-density standing g-wave pattern throughout the construction volume. In effect, it translates it into a unique signal at every point. The assemblers decode the appropriate signal for whatever place they're at, and that tells them what to do."

  "That's amazing." Sonnebrandt shook his head wonderingly. "What must be involved in computing a function like that?"

  "Don't even think about trying. You'd need something like VISAR to do it."

  Out on the construction, the containing shell was suddenly turned off as the process terminated. The fluid dispersed to vanish away into space in a few seconds, revealing a gleaming new layer of walls, decks, and structural members ready to be fitted out.

  "Voilа," VISAR commented, sounding matter-of-fact.

  Chien was looking at Hunt with an amused, slightly wry expression. "You love this kind of thing, don't you?" she remarked. "It fascinates you. As you said, 'neat.'''

  Hunt didn't know quite how to reply. "Original, at least. You've got to hand it to them," he said finally.

  "Were you like that as a student? Is it what Americans call nerdy?"

  "Not Vic," Duncan chimed in. "He gets on with people too well. One of those popular types. Nerdy people have a problem in that area. That's why they turn to nerdy things."

  "I'm not so sure," Hunt said. "I'd say it's more the other way around. Being popular is nice enough, sure… if it happens. But it's not worth spending all your time working on. There are too many things that are more interesting to spend it on. Anyway, all this business about having to be popular with everyone all the time is an American student obsession." He shrugged and looked back toward Chien. "Wouldn't you say so? What are kids like in your part of the world?"

  But he saw then that Chien wasn't listening. She had turned her head and was staring at the construction in front of them again, the look in her eyes a million miles away. "Standing waves," she murmured after Hunt had waited several seconds.

  "Eh?" he returned.

  "Standing waves." She turned her head back and focused on him. "Defining a structure distributed through a volume of space. That's the way to halt a test object! It propagates as a longitudinal M-wave function. If we project an interference function to create a standing wave in resonance with the normal transverse solution, it will lock it into the target universe. It would force the object to materialize there."

  Chien didn't have to elaborate. The others understood immediately what she meant. It sounded plausible. Forgetting all about MP2 construction methods for the moment, they put the proposition to VISAR there and then. From a theoretical standpoint, the machine could find no flaws. But only experiment could give the final word. "Can you connect me to Eesyan again?" Hunt asked.

  "He is in conference right now," VISAR cautioned. Which was about as close as Thuriens were likely to come to refusing. Hunt knew it would be a violation of normal protocols to press the matter. But this was too exciting to sit on.

  "I'll risk it," he said. "Offer apologies, but tell him I insist."

  Eesyan appeared in a window in Hunt's visual field after a short delay. "Yes, Vic?" he acknowledged. While Eesyan's manner remained polite, VISAR injected an unmistakable undertone into its voice reconstruction that said this had better be good. Hunt summarized what had been said as briefly as he could and asked Eesyan's opinion. Eesyan was silent for what began to seem a long time. For a moment, Hunt feared that he really had offended Thurien sensibilities in a way he hadn't been prepared for. And then he read from the Thurien's face that he couldn't have been more wrong. This was good. Eesyan was going over the implications intently in his mind, far removed from whatever other business he had been attending to. Then VISAR came through for Hunt again.

  "And I've just got an incoming call from the link to Earth comnet."

  Earth? Probably Gregg Caldwell. It would have to be som
ething urgent. "Sure, put it through," Hunt said absently while he waited for Eesyan's reaction.

  But the face that appeared in VISAR's window was unfamiliar: fleshy and rounded, wearing an expression of implacable relentlessness. "Dr. Hunt?" it inquired.

  "Er… yes."

  "Dr. Victor Hunt, of the Advanced Sciences Division, UNSA at Goddard?"

  "Yes. Who's this?"

  "Lieutenant Polk, FBI, Investigations Branch, Finance and Fraud Division. I understand that you are acquainted with a Gerald Santello, Dr. Hunt."

  What in hell was this? It couldn't have come at a worse time. "Not now, VISAR," Hunt muttered. "Cut the link. Tell him there's a technical hitch or something."

  "I don't have technical hitches."

  "Well, get rid of him somehow. It's only some stupid piece of bureaucracy. We're on the verge of a major breakthrough in physics here."

  Polk vanished, and there was a short pause. "Okay, you're off the hook," VISAR said. "I faked a message into the comnet saying that the Terran end is having problems. Can I ask you not to make a habit of this? I have a reputation to consider."

  "I'll bear it in mind," Hunt promised. At the same time, he saw that Eesyan was waiting for his attention.

  "It makes a lot of sense," the Thurien said. "So much so, that I can't think why it wasn't obvious before. Yes, Vic, I think that Madam Xyen and the rest of you are onto something. This has to be the way."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Frenua Showm sat alone in the part of the house that she called the eyrie, staring out at the cliffs and ridges and the distant peaks. The falls at the far end of the gorge, dyed orange in the light of the setting sun, were being eaten up slowly by advancing shadows. The crescent of Doyaris, one of Thurien's two moons, hung brightly above, waiting to take charge of the night. It was one of those times when Showm withdrew from the world of duties and day-to-day affairs, and turned her focus inward to this being that her mind and her body served, exploring its thoughts and feelings. The ability was rare among Terrans, and the few who knew their true nature and inner souls were not understood by the others. Their impetuousness and the compulsive violence with which they attacked everything, or else were themselves attacked by others, drove them to lives where attention was permanently externalized. Perhaps it was another quality that developed in its own time as a race matured.

  She had thought much about Terrans and their nature as a result of her studies of Earth's history. Life had its seasons like the year, and when one came naturally to its close it was time not to dwell on false attachments to the past but to move on into harmony with the next. Showm's life was in its autumn now, the season for returning nourishment to the soil, when the wisdom and experience accrued along the way made it possible to give back what the earlier stages had necessitated borrowing. Spring had been the season for creating, and summer, that for nurturing and sending forth life. For the Thurien, the spiritual delight of experiencing life and growth, of creating and building, was the most precious reward that the universe had to offer. It was the reason for existing, and making it possible was the reason why the universe existed. The universe was a desert waiting to be brought to life. Although the aberration was not entirely unknown in the long history of their species, the notion of willfully killing a sapient being was about the most abhorrent that most Thuriens were capable of conceiving.

  They believed that in a way similar to that in which the observed universe was an infinitesimal grain of the totality making up the Multiverse, so the Multiverse itself was merely an aspect of something incomparably vaster. In this domain dwelled the true soul that the heart of a thinking, feeling being connected to. It continued to exist while the personas it created came and passed, each of a nature and formed in such circumstances as the soul needed to heal and to grow. Although the personas might be discarded, the things their experiences had revealed and taught were retained and absorbed, much as with the characters that were temporarily manufactured for some kinds of game. Although the death of a persona, when it came, was thus seen as merely the closing of another season, to cut short the soul's connection would be to starve its essential growth.

  Even more, the transient lives of the personas served as nurseries for developing such qualities conducive to the soul's higher life as understanding, creativity, gentleness, and compassion. But the act, or even the contemplation, of killing and destruction invoked all the emotions and insensibilities that were the precise opposite. The perpetrator was debased and deformed, violating the self's inner nature in a way far exceeding any outrage done to the victim. To the Thurien, it represented the ultimate denial, a rejection of all meaning to the universe, and any reason for it to exist. Small wonder then, Showm reflected, that in the world reduced to mindless matter that they had created, and themselves to purposeless accidents of it, that the majority of Terrans knew of no higher aspiration than the accumulation of money or a craving to control the minds and lives of others.

  She had known close love and the tenderness of motherhood, the ties of friendship, the privilege of being able to help others find happiness in their lives, the joys of creating and accomplishing, the feelings of admiration and gratitude toward those whose work made hers possible. The high moments of significance, when the splendor of existing and the meaning that the universe stood for were revealed, she saw in the bright eyes and enraptured faces when sages inspired the minds of the young; in colonizing ships lifting out of orbit to head for a new world; in the communion of elderly sharing dreams and reminiscences as they neared the end of their journey; in worlds clothed in forests, mountains, and oceans. These were the things that the universe existed for, in accord with its nature, that brought it to life. Life and the universe produced a music that was heard by the soul. Everything that grew was an expression of it.

  She still had disturbed nights and moments of cold, gnawing horror at some of the things she had learned in her researches of Earth: children forcibly regimented into cults of mass murder; industries dedicated to death, the annihilation of cities, eradication of whole cultures. She had read accounts of armies seized by blood lust, hunting defenseless innocents down like vermin and hacking them to pieces; of families burning and screaming under collapsing buildings; of people starving, people drowning, people driven from their homes into the snow to die. And all of it was planned, deliberate, celebrated by some side or other as heroic and glorious. Showm had watched the recordings of aircraft pouring bombs down upon the dazed and terrified survivors of towns already turned into smoldering rubble; ships and vehicles packed with human beings incinerated, cut to shreds, blown apart; people fleeing and falling like blades of arui grass in a hailstorm. She had stared numbly at pictures of the corpses, grotesque and stomach-wrenching: charred, mangled, dismembered, disemboweled; twisted in ditches, ensnared in wire, crushed in mud, rotting in heaps. She had watched the sorry processions bringing back the limbless, the blind, the maimed, the insane wreckage of what had been husbands and sons, brothers and lovers, youth with its dreams. At one point she had appealed to VISAR for guidance on how such things could be. VISAR was unable to offer any. And so she had wept. How could beings who were capable of thought and feeling do such things? How could they believe the lies?

  Even more incomprehensible, how could those who ruled and commanded promote such lies? Not just to advance petty ambitions or carry out their schemes of conquest, but in every sphere where humans struggled, plotted, allied, and betrayed to set each against all, everyone a threat or a rival, to gain some advantage one over another. The whole philosophy underlying their dealings with each other was not only predicated on but exalted and glorified self-seeking and exploitation, oppression, rapacity, cruelty, and the enslavement of the weak to serve the strong, all rationalized in the ruthless calculus of money that recognized efficacy of contributing to profit-making as the sole measure of an individual's meaning or worth.

  Mildred had described the leaders as the worst of thieves and scoundrels, and didn't listen to
them. But Mildred was the exception, resigned to the private life of a minority with no voice. Among Thuriens, the quality most looked to for leadership was benign maturity and the selfless compassion that it engendered. Government office or the power to make responsible decisions were looked upon as privileged opportunities to serve the people. To abuse such a position for personal gain or to coerce the unwilling beyond basic restraints essential for a community to live together would be the most heinous of offenses. To say such transgressions had never occurred would have been untrue… but it came close to being unthinkable.

  Only Terrans could have produced the myths that mindless, undirected matter could organize itself into living organisms able to communicate emotion and thought, or that the universe had begun in unimaginable violence out of nothing. They projected their inner natures into what they saw, and then convinced themselves that what they were seeing was external reality. The Thuriens knew that the programs that directed life did not originate on planets, although planetary systems were the assembly stations where the programs found expression in the bewildering number of ways that conditions across a galaxy made possible. The seeds were brought by the cosmic wind. Where they came from, how they were produced, by what agency, and for what purpose were the prime mysteries that had become the quest of Thurien science to answer, and one of the imperatives driving their expansion. There was evidence of strange conditions behind the obscuring clouds and increasing star concentration at the very center the Galaxy-and the core regions of other galaxies too. But the Thuriens had not penetrated far enough yet to learn more. Their period of apathy and stagnation, when they achieved immortality and as a consequence little else that was of any importance for aeons, had cost them much. To be inspired by dreams and embark on quests to make them come true required the constant reinvigoration of youth. That realization was what caused the Thuriens to revert to the old way and accept nature and its seasons.