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Brodersen stirred. “My personal weakness is I ramble,” he said. “I’d better stop boring you and carry on in my proper job.”

“You weren’t boring me,” Joelle answered with effort. She felt the heat in her face and breasts. “You never did. Were always rather fascinating, in fact, I suppose because we’re so unlike.”

“Yeah, we are. Well, anyhow.” He rose.

She did too. “Why don’t you come by this evenwatch after we’re both off?” she suggested. “I could indent for some food and wine. Remember how you used to do the cooking? I’m still terrible at that, but… I’ll bet you’ve improved.”

“Not much.” He looks at his toes. “Besides, I—Happens I have a date. Sorry, but it’s not the kind a person breaks.”

“May I ask what?” she said through the hurt.

“Caitlín and I have an anniversary. Demetrian calendar; comes oftener that way.” He raised his eyes. “Didn’t you know? I thought it was obvious…. No, we’re not married, I’m still with Lis and have no plans to change, but Caitlín—well, she and I are awfully close.”

“I see.”

He caught her hands. “Joelle, uh, she’s not jealous. I mean—oh, hell it’s fine having you here, and Not propositioning you, but if you’d care to—later—”

She made herself smile, lean forward, touch lips to his. “I might. We needn’t be in a hurry, though. And don’t you feel obligated.”
Because I fear that is what you feel right now, obligated. Caitlín is like a fair-skinned Chris
.

Besides, I’ll soon he transhuman
. “All right, Dan. So long.”

Small, plain, humble, though never servile, Susanne Granville waited in the main computer room. She had turned on the viewscreen, scanner aimed at Sol, and sat watching. Dimmed but magnified, the disc was a turmoil of spots, flares, fountaining prominences, within coronal nacre. Music sparkled. Joelle recognized Nielsen’s
Fynsk Forar
. Music, like architecture, was one of the few formal human arts she thought she responded properly to. She and Susanne had talked about it
for an hour or more during the memorial party for the gunner.

“Hello,” she said. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

Susanne jumped up. “I knew you would be running a final check on the software, Dr. Ky, and wondered if I might be of assistance. Just in case, I excused me from ’elping the quartermaster
[Caitlín Mulryan]
make dinner.”

Oh, yes,
Joelle did not reply.
How often I’ve met this. You are the mere linker, I the supreme holothete. Your eagerness is to know you’ve been of use to me. Like Chris, like Chris
.

You’ll see me in my linkage, that you are not capable of, ascending to a heaven you can never reach but which you have glimpsed in fragments. I will touch the Absolute, I will be in the Noumenon, I will know Final Reality, not as a mathematical construct, but immediately, in my brain and bones
.

O Susanne!
she thought. I
wish I might kiss and comfort you, as I could not Chris, as I could not Eric
.

Her mind veered (and this irritated her, made her twice eager to get into circuit, where such undisciplined things did not occur) to ask how much she was originally attracted to Brodersen because his mother was a Stranathan and he had visited that family many times as a boy. Eric Stranathan was of it, Joelle’s first and most unforgotten lover, son of the Captain General of the Fraser Valley, himself a linker.

It was they together, Joelle and Eric, who were the earliest to learn that the gulf between linker and holothete was not one of degree but of kind, unbridgeably wide. For no clear reason, her recollection fled back to a dull lecturer in a stuffy hall, at a convention in Calgary… but the reason was clear; that evening she’d met him.

“T
HE HUMAN BRAIN
, and hence the entire nervous system, can be integrated with a computer of the proper design,” the speaker was droning. “We have long since progressed beyond the ‘wires in the head’ stage. Electromagnetic induction suffices to make a linkage. The computer then supplies its vast capacity for storing and processing data, its capability of carrying out mathematicological operations in microseconds or less. The brain, though far slower, supplies creativity and flexibility; in effect, it continuously rewrites the program. Computers which can do this for themselves do exist, of course, but for most purposes they do not function nearly as well as a computer-operator linkage does, and we may never be able to improve them significantly. After all, the brain packs trillions of cells into a mass of about a kilogram. Furthermore, linkage gives humans direct access to what they would otherwise know only indirectly.

“For present, practical purposes, its advantages are twofold. (a) As I remarked, programs can be altered on the spot, in the course of being carried out. Formerly it was necessary to run them through, painstakingly check their results, and then slowly rewrite them, with possibilities of error, and without any guarantee that the new versions would turn out to be what we most needed. Once linkers and their equipment come into everyday use, we will be free of that handicap, (b) By the very experience, as I have also suggested, the linker gains insights which he or she could have gotten in no other way, and hence becomes a more able scientist—including a better writer of programs—when working independently of the apparatus, too.”

Good Lord!
Joelle thought.
Do we really have to endure this?

True the conference was an important political as well as scientific event. The military secrecy in which she had been
raised was beginning to lift; here in Calgary, people could freely discuss developments which had been hidden for decades or worse; the public was entitled to information, in popular terms, during the opening ceremonies.

The trouble was, no words could describe being in linkage: creating n-dimensional spaces, and time-variant curvatures for them, and tensors within, and functions and operations that nobody had ever before imagined. You fashioned a conceptual cosmos, learned that it was wanting and annulled it, devised another and another, until at last you saw what you had made and, behold, it was very good. Each time the numbers rushed through you to verify, and you knew how much reality you had embraced, it was an outbursting of revelation. The Christian hopes to be eternally in the presence of God, the Buddhist hopes to become one with the all in Nirvana, the linker hopes to achieve more than genius—is there a vast difference between them? Yes: the linker, in this life, does it.

In days, hours, fractional seconds. Afterward he or she cannot entirely comprehend what happened. The high moment of love also lies outside of time; but we understand it better, when at peace, than the linker understands what the linker has known.

Joelle’s gaze roved. Hey, wasn’t that a handsome young man a dozen seats to her right! Why hadn’t she seen him earlier? Well, she wasn’t given to noticing people. War orphan, brought up from infancy in the pioneering holothetic program, lately released into academe as the Troubles faded out, a virgin who didn’t know what to do about the opposite sex and wasn’t sure she wanted to—

“—while linkage to macroscopic machinery has not proven cost-effective, the case has turned out to be otherwise for monitoring and controlling scientific instruments. For this it is inadequate to supply the operating brain with numbers such as voltmeter readings and nothing else. For example, a spectrum is best considered—rationally appreciated—when the operator sees it and, simultaneously, knows the exact wavelength and intensity of every line. Through appropriate hardware and software, this can now be done. Subjectively, it is like sensing the data directly, as if the nervous system had grown complete new input organs of unprecedented power and sensitivity.

“Workers elsewhere have experimented with that. The principal thing Project Ithaca [in which Joelle was raised, a part
of it] did was to take the next step. What is the
meaning
of those data, those sensations?

“In everyday life, we do not apprehend the world as a jumble of raw impressions, but as an orderly structure. Yonder we do not see a splash of green and brown; we see a tree, of such-and-such a kind, at such-and-such a distance. Although it is done unconsciously, yes, instinctively, since animals do it too, nevertheless we may be said to build theories, models, of the world, within which our direct perceptions are made to make sense. Naturally, we modify these models when that seems reasonable. For instance, we may decide that we are not really seeing a tree but a piece of camouflage. We may realize that we have misjudged its distance because the air is more clear or murky than we knew at first. Basically, however, through our models we comprehend and can act in an objective universe.

“Science has long been adding to our store of information and thus forcing us to change our model of the cosmos as a whole, until today it embraces billions of years and light-years, in which are galaxies, subatomic particles, the evolution of life, and everything else that our ancestors never suspected. To most of us, this part of the
Weltbild
has admittedly been rather abstract, no matter how immediate the impact of the technologies it makes possible.

“In order to enhance laboratory capability, Project Ithaca began work on means to supply a linkage operator directly with theory as well as data. This was more than learning a subject, permanently or temporarily. Any operator has to do that, in order to think about a given task. And indeed, outstanding accomplishments came out of the Turing Institute here, pioneering ways for the linked computer to give its human partner the necessary knowledge. Project Ithaca greatly improved such systems, and its civilian successors continue to progress. We call them holothetic.

“The work has had an unexpected result. Those operators whom Ithaca trained from childhood, linkers who today are adults advancing the art in their turn, are more and more getting into a mode that I must call intuitive. A baseball pitcher, an acrobat, or simply a person walking is constantly solving complex problems in physics with little or no conscious thought. The organism feels what is right to do. Analogously, we have for example reached the point of manipulating individual amino acids within protein molecules, using ions directed by
force-fields which are directed by a holothete, in a manner that perhaps only the Others could plan out step by step. Likewise for any number of undertakings. Direct perception through holothetics is leading to comprehension on a nonverbal level.

“This is doubly true because our theoretical knowledge is far from perfect. Quite frequently these days, a holothete senses that things are not going as intended, that something is wrong with the model—and intuits what changes to make, what the real situation is, as we so often do in our ordinary lives. Later systematic study generally confirms the intuition.

“My colleagues will be discussing various aspects of holothetic linkage. This introductory sketch of mine—”

When the dullness was outlived and the audience moving toward drinks, Eric came over and introduced himself. He had been noticing too.

In a canoe on Lake Louise, they shipped their paddles and idled. The water danced blue, green, diamond. Around it, above forest, mountains sheered aloft into silence. Ever so slightly, the boat rocked with each motion they made.

She dipped a finger over the side and watched how ripples spread. “Electron interferences make a moire too,” she mused. “It’s wonderful finding the same here. I never paid attention before.” She looked at him and savored. “Thank you for bringing me.” A little scared, she let her eyes drift elsewhere. “Electrons do it in three dimensions. No, four, but I haven’t perceived that… yet.”

She had made similar remarks to him after they’d attended the ballet in Calgary. Over coffee and brandy she had told him how sublimely Newtonian
Swan Lake
and
Ondine
were, when to him—he said—they were sublimely sexy. Still, he, a linker, found as much mathematics as melody in a Bach recital, or admired above everything else the subtle perspectives in Monet. (Looking at the same 3-faxes, she pointed out interactions of colors to which he said he believed critics of the past couple of centuries had been blind.) Today, for whatever reason, she saw unease stir in him.

“Look, Joelle, don’t get lost in abstractions—Wait. Please. Let me explain what I mean. Sure, you and I work with data, set up paradigms, compute resultants, sure. Fine. Fine job. But let’s not let that interfere with what we, well, find in places like this.
In our private lives especially. This—” he waved a hand around the horizon—“is what’s real. Everything else we infer. This is what we’re alive in.”

She regarded him for a long while, during which he glowed. That night they became lovers.

He Canadian, she American, in an era when military governments were paranoid after the Troubles, before their countries federated and joined the World Union… he and she were separated for more than a year. Meanwhile holothetics was evolving exponentially, from a mere improvement of linkage to a wholly new order of perceiving and existing.

She sensed her growth away from him, and it hurt, but she could no more resist what she was becoming than a fetus in the womb can. By the time he had finally arranged to come join her at the University of Kansas for R&D purposes, she knew what he must learn and had completed the necessary arrangements.

When he arrived at her office, they made love. Then they made a sandwich lunch and talked. At last she leaned over and kissed him, lingeringly but tenderly, almost as if she bade goodbye to a child. “Let’s go!” she said. As she led the way to her laboratory, her stride became triumphant.

Down there, she warned, “Words are no use here. You must experience for yourself. We’re about to become more intimate than ever in bed. Einormously more.”

Quasi-telepathic effects had been reported, when a passive linker in a holothetic circuit not only received the same data and theory in his brain as the active one did, but “felt” that latter’s ongoing evaluations. “You, uh, you’ll slave my unit to yours?” Eric inquired. “According to what I’ve seen in the literature, that doesn’t convey a particularly strong or clear impression.”