Mission to Minerva g-5 Read online

  "Not significantly," Eesyan answered. "Multiporting propagation is fast." He made a tossing-away motion with his six-fingered hand. "But we're working toward sending larger configurations of matter. We will upgrade the detectors to look for the same kind of thing, too, anyway. You never know. We might glimpse something passing through."

  Hunt rested his elbows on the guard rail in front of them and snorted in a way that said this still took some effort to believe. By the strange reasoning that guided the planning, there would be little point in looking for objects from next door that they were not themselves yet in a position to send. He stared up at the resonator mountings, where the tubes emerged from overhead. That was where the energy was imparted and the matrix waves-"M-waves," by the terminology being formulated-generated to initiate the multiporting process. Thurien technicians assisted by maintenance robots were working on parts of the equipment. Josef was up there, too, with Chien, hovering in a Thurien gravitic bubble, to see what they could learn.

  "So what happens finally to the extended structures that you've been sending?" Hunt asked Eesyan. "The molecular configurations."

  "We've no way of knowing for sure. From what we can tell, they just keep going and disperse as an expanding wave function."

  Hunt nodded distantly. How, then, had the relay device that had appeared in Earth orbit been able to maintain itself there long enough to initiate and support a dialogue? Did it mean that only objects that were complex enough to contain some means of "stopping" themselves somehow could be multiported into another reality in the meaningful sense of being able to stay there?

  "There's a lot to be done yet," Eesyan said, as if reading his thoughts.

  At that moment, VISAR came though via avco in Hunt's head to say he had a call from Mildred. Since it was disconcerting-and certainly not the best of manners-for someone to suddenly start talking to thin air when they were with company, VISAR would have announced the event to Eesyan, too. Such courtesies were not possible on Earth, where most people didn't have avcos behind their ears, which was another reason why Hunt generally refrained from using his when back home. Those who did were not the kind who worried unduly about manners anyway. He accepted, and Mildred appeared as a framed head and shoulders superposed in his visual field.

  "Victor, hello. And how is the… what do you call it… multiporting… lab?" She had decided it would all be beyond her, and instead gone off with Danchekker somewhere in Thurios to meet some of the Thuriens that she wanted to get to know in connection with her book.

  "It makes our national labs back home look like alchemy shops," Hunt replied. "And they got it up and running in less time than we'd have had committees arguing about it. How's it with the sociologists?"

  "Oh, unbelievably useful! They're all so helpful! It's as if they have all the time in the world and nothing is so important that it can't be interrupted. Or is it just their way of being polite? I haven't really decided which yet. At first I thought it was a result of their ideas of what we'd call economics-or absence of them. You know what I mean-when anyone can have unlimited anything, you'd think that spending your life trying to get more would cease to mean anything, wouldn't you? But then, it isn't that way with us at all, is it? The more people get, it seems the meaner and nastier they become. I always found it was the poorest people who had nothing who were the most generous. So it must be something innately different in the Thurien nature."

  The frame widened to include an image of Danchekker. "Get to the point," he muttered, at the same time sending Hunt a toothy grimace of a smile. "Vic, good day to you."

  "So, what's up?" Hunt asked, taking the cue gratefully.

  "Oh, I was just calling to remind you that it's close to ten," Mildred said.

  "And?"

  "You're due to meet us at ten."

  "Where?"

  "Well, not really actually 'meet.'… You know, in one of those couplers, or whatever you call them."

  "What for?"

  Mildred looked puzzled. "We arranged to go on a tour of VISAR space. You and Christian said you'd show me some Thurien planets, and we were going to say hello to the Ganymean friends of yours in the ship that's on Jevlen."

  Hunt's brow furrowed. "There must be some confusion. I've no idea what you're talking about."

  Danchekker interjected, "We called you this morning, Vic. The h-space tour, with a visit to the Shapieron."

  Hunt searched back through his memory but could recall nothing. He shook his head helplessly. "Well, sure, I'll come along, no problem. It would be great to see Garuth and his people again. And I'm sure you mean it. But I honestly never said anything about this."

  "Well, we're about ready to depart," Danchekker said. "But we'll wait until you get yourself organized." He sounded a trifle irritable, as if he didn't believe Hunt's denial and saw it as a somewhat lame excuse for having forgotten.

  "I'll be right there," Hunt said, and cleared down. He looked back at Eesyan. "Would you excuse me? Chris and Mildred are asking if I could join them at short notice about something."

  "As you wish," Eesyan replied.

  "Where are the nearest couplers?"

  "There's one right here." Eesyan indicated a partitioned space next to the monitoring panels. "It's free now."

  Hunt took his leave and entered. He felt a little irked by Danchekker's attitude of uncompromising certainty, when it was obvious there was some kind of mixup. Could he really be getting that doddery? he asked himself. But the flicker of doubt passed. No, the downhill bike ride felt smooth and reassuring, without wobbles, he decided as he eased himself back into the recliner. He hadn't forgotten anything.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Vranix was an old Thurien city located on one of the northern continents, famous for its art centers and museums, and as a cultural repository. It was also noted for some of the most spectacular Thurien architecture, which in the years of the city's growth had flourished as perhaps the most extreme of Thurien art forms at the time. Hunt and Danchekker had "been there" before, in their first virtual visit to Thurien. It seemed a suitable place to include in the itinerary that she and Danchekker still insisted Hunt had helped draw up to give Mildred a preliminary overview of Thurien society-but by unspoken mutual assent they had stopped talking about it. In the evening they would rejoin the rest of the group physically for dinner.

  They were standing in a large, saucer-shaped space, inside which circles of tiered seating rose to an enclosing rim. Hunt and Danchekker watched as Mildred gazed up at the three slim spires of what looked like pink ivory, converging above their heads before blending into an inverted cascade of terraces and levels broadening and unfolding upward for an inestimable distance… And then she frowned in puzzlement. For beyond, where the sky should have been, the scene mushroomed out into a fusion of forms and structures of staggering dimensions extending as far as the eye could see in one direction, while forming the shore of a distant ocean in the other. They were looking over the entire city of Vranix. But it was all hanging over their heads, upside down. They waited, seeing how long it would take Mildred to figure it out.

  "My God!" she said after a lengthy pause. "All that topsy-turvy wonderland we came through inside. It turned us completely over somehow, and we didn't realize it… at least, I didn't. But you said you'd been here before. This has to be underneath. We've walked out like flies on a ceiling."

  "Right on," Hunt complimented. The three spires "rising" around them surmounted an enormous tower dominating the city, and supported a circular platform that contained the place they were in-actually a small amphitheater used for various events and social gatherings. But the amphitheater was on the underside of the platform, not on top.

  "Is it… I mean, is it real?" Mildred asked, looking down and from side to side as if checking her other senses. "Or something that VISAR is putting into our heads?"

  "Oh, it exists precisely as you perceive it," Danchekker assured her. "A whim exercised by the Thurien architects of long ago, probably to sho
w off their dexterity with the new science of integral gravitic structural engineering, which was developed at around that time. The Thuriens use it extensively, as you will already have gathered."

  "So is that why I feel normal?… No, wait a minute. VISAR can inject the right stimuli to make you feel normal, anyway, can't it? What I'm trying to say is, if we were really here physically… there, whatever… would we still feel normal, with everything just looking wrong? Not upside down. The local gravity is normal but inverted?"

  "Precisely so," Danchekker confirmed.

  A Thurien who had been pacing slowly out by the rim when they appeared from one of the ramps from the interior, and who was now only a short distance away, changed direction toward them. The Terrans turned to face him as he drew closer. His face was lined and seemed old, his furrowed crown a subdued mix of streaky browns and grays that gave the impression of being faded.

  "Forgive me if this is an intrusion," he said. "I am not familiar with the ways of Terrans. But it's the first opportunity I've had to speak with people from your world."

  "Not at all," Hunt said cheerfully. "It would be a long way to come and not want to talk to anyone." He introduced himself and the others and added, "All in Thurios." When meeting in a virtual recreation of a setting, it was customary to state where one was located physically. It was evident that the Thurien was actually somewhere else also; had he been physically at the tower in Vranix, and therefore not neurally coupled into the system, he wouldn't be interacting with them. "Mildred is writing a book on your society. We're giving her a quick introductory tour of Thurien."

  "My name is Kolno Wyarel. On Nessara, a planet of Callantares, a star you've probably never heard of." His manner became more relaxed. "But I was Thurien-born originally… a long time ago, now."

  "With a system like this, you're never really away," Mildred observed. "Has it changed much?"

  "Oh, Vranix never changes much."

  "Is Vranix the part of Thurien that you're from?" Danchekker inquired, making a heroic effort at being genial.

  "I studied music and philosophy here." Wyarel looked around. A faint smile touched his features. "It is where my wife, Asayi, and I met when we were young. Our favorite memories are of these places. So every once in a while we come back here to relive them a little."

  "Will she…" Hunt wasn't sure if Wyarel meant that they came here together, or that Wyarel came to be reminded. He broke of the question that he had begun to frame, realizing that it might be indelicate.

  The Thurien understood and gave a short laugh. "Yes, she's fine. She was supposed to be here by now, but no doubt she got distracted by something. VISAR says she isn't online yet. Don't worry about it. It happens all the time. She's somewhere in the same house as me."

  "A universal proclivity of the female, it would appear," Danchekker observed.

  "Oh, don't pontificate so, Christian," Mildred chided. "What do you do now on… where was it?… Nessara," she asked Wyarel.

  "It's what I suppose you would call a tropical planet, teeming with forests and life. Warm and humid by our standards, but you get used to it. We retired there to be among the life, and to contemplate. There is an inner awareness that learns to open out to these things."

  "There used to be teachings like that on Earth, but we seem to have turned away from them." Mildred glanced at the two scientists with her. "Such things seem to be considered as gone out of style." Danchekker humphed and rocked from one foot to the other, refusing to be goaded.

  "That's only natural. But it will be temporary," Wyarel said. "A culture must attend to its material needs before it can rise beyond them, just as we must eat before we can create the works that are to be found in Vranix. Thuriens have discovered and mastered the physical universe. Now we are discovering ourselves."

  "Christian, this is exactly what I wanted!" Mildred said. Then, to Wyarel, "Could I feel free to get in touch again sometime, and talk more about this?"

  "Of course. But there are times when we retreat from external affairs, you understand."

  "It wouldn't be an imposition?"

  "We would be honored… Excuse me for a moment." Wyarel stared distantly for a few seconds, then returned to the present. "That was VISAR with a message. Asayi had something to attend to concerning one of the klorgs-that's a domestic animal. We have several that come and go around the house. Now she's in the middle of a call from our daughter. Please, don't let me detain you any further. She would love to meet you, I'm sure, but it can always be another time. I am content enough here, alone with my thoughts."

  "Females and cats," Danchekker murmured to himself, but not quite below his breath.

  "Christian!" Mildred admonished.

  ***

  They added the planet Nessara to their tour list and visited it next out of curiosity. The part that VISAR brought them to looked like the green rain-forest hills of the upper Amazon with a snow-capped wall of the Himalayas behind, but with greater richness of color and on an even grander scale. The waterfalls tracing their way down from the heights looked like chains of sparkling necklaces draped over the hills. VISAR supplied sensory inputs that faithfully reproduced the heat and the sultriness of the air, the scents and the sounds, even a realistic touch of clothing sliding clammily over moist skin. Hunt was amused to note that Danchekker unconsciously removed his virtual spectacles to wipe the lenses with his virtual handkerchief-there was no reason why VISAR should cause them to fog up.

  "How careful do I have to be about what I'm thinking when we meet someone like Wyarel?" Mildred asked. "I mean, I can actually feel myself breathing more deeply up here, which I'm sure I'm really not doing. From what you've said, it must be VISAR doing things inside my head. How much else of what's inside there can it pull out?"

  "You don't have to worry," Hunt told her. "In principle, yes, it could. But it doesn't. The Thuriens have strict codes about things like privacy. Unless a user specifically instructs otherwise, VISAR is limited to supplying primary sensory data and monitoring motor and a few other terminal outputs only. It communicates only what you'd see, hear, feel, and so on if you were there. It doesn't read minds."

  "Well, that's good to know, anyway."

  They floated immaterially like cosmic gods above a world that Danchekker had discovered before and insisted on visiting again. It described a complex orbit about a double star to produce conditions so extreme that its surface alternated between being ocean and desert. Nevertheless, it supported a range of astonishing life forms that were able to adapt, including a part-time fish that dissolved its bone structure and morphed into a lizardlike sand dweller when the dry part of the cycle approached. They visited a newly born world that was still an incandescent cauldron of lava flows and outgassing-instantly lethal in reality, but with just enough of the flavor imparted by VISAR to give them an idea of it. They stared in awe at an immense Thurien space construction thousands of miles in extent that formed part of one of the mass-conversion systems consuming burnt-out stars, from where energy was beamed through h-space to create the interstellar transport ports. They saw a world of vapors and canyons, where the population lived on artificial islands floating in the sky; a fairyland city carved out under an ice crust; and an extraordinary football-shaped world that spun about its short axis with its ends protruding beyond the atmosphere, where it was possible-after an enormous climb that required life-support gear-to jump off and be in orbit.

  Finally, they found themselves inside what to Hunt and Danchekker were the familiar surroundings of the Command Deck of the ancient Ganymean starship, Shapieron. This was the vessel that had left the Solar System at the time of pre-Lunarian Minerva, before the Ganymeans migrated to Thurien, and returned only a few years ago, when Hunt and Danchekker were at Ganymede. The half-mile-high tower of once-gleaming metallic curves, pitted and discolored now as a result of its enforced exile, currently stood on the outskirts of a city called Shiban, on Jevlen. The exiles from the distant past had found adjusting to Thurien practically
as difficult an experience as it was for Terrans. But they had found themselves a niche supervising the rebuilding of Jevlenese society after its deterioration and final collapse under the previous regime. Since the Ganymeans were interacting via Thurien neurocouplers, too, the "meeting" could as easily have taken place anywhere. But for reasons of nostalgia and old time's sake, everyone concerned had preferred to make it their old ship.

  ***

  Garuth, who had been the commander of the Shapieron mission, greeted his two old friends and their guest warmly. With him were Shilohin, the female chief scientist, Rodgar Jassilane, the ship's engineering chief, and Monchar, Garuth's second-in-command. The Ganymeans from old-time Minerva were taller than Thuriens on average, not as dark in hue, and their crown coloring was less vivid. Also in attendance was ZORAC, the ship's controlling AI, an early precursor to VISAR, now coupled into the Shiban net to stand in for the decommissioned JEVEX.

  The first topic that the Ganymeans wanted to hear about, of course, was the latest on the Multiverse project. Thuriens had no concept of secrecy, and bulletins detailing progress were produced regularly, but Garuth and the others wanted to hear Hunt and Danchekker's personal account. Hunt was able to fill them in on the fine structure of Multiverse segments and consequent ethereal passage of objects propagating through them, which he had learned himself only hours previously from Eesyan. The question again arose of how anything could be halted and stabilized so as to remain in one reality that a coherent picture could be derived from.

  "Would it be feasible to create some kind of complementary M-wave that interferes destructively everywhere except at the target distance?" Shilohin wondered aloud. "Would that preserve the transmitted object as a standing resonance? It would probably still extend through many segments… but so what? Maybe you could fine tune your connection to any one of them." Nobody could argue with the thought, certainly; but just at the moment, it was purely abstract.