Hunt sighed. "visar, take the professor home and straighten him out, could you. I don't think I'm up to dealing with him right now."
"I'll handle it," visar replied, and Danchekker promptly vanished from the screen leaving an empty room in the frame.
"Amazing," Hunt murmured. There were times, he thought, when he would have liked to be able to pull that stunt with Danchekker himself.
A knock sounded lightly on the door. Hunt and Lyn's heads jerked around to look at it, turned back to meet each other's questioning looks, then stared at the door again. Lyn shrugged and moved across the room toward it. Hunt switched off the terminal and looked up to find the eight-foot-tall figure of a Ganymean straightening up after ducking through the doorway. Lyn stood speechless with surprise as she held the door open.
"Dr. Hunt and Miss Garland," the Ganymean said. "First, on behalf of all of us, I apologize for the somewhat bizarre welcome. It was necessary for some very important reasons, which will be explained when we all get together very shortly. I hope that our leaving you on your own like this hasn't seemed too bad-mannered, but we thought that perhaps a short period of adjustment might be beneficial. I am Porthik Eesyan—one of those you were expecting to meet."
Eesyan was subtly different in form from the Ganymeans of the
Shapieron,
Hunt noticed as they walked. He had the same massive torso lines beneath his loose-fitting yellow jerkin and elaborately woven shirt of red and amber metallic threads, and the same six-fingered hands, each with two thumbs, but his skin was darker than the grays that Hunt remembered—almost black—and seemed smoother in texture; his build was lighter and more slender, his height slightly less than would have been normal, and his lower face and skull, though still elongated significantly, had receded and broadened into a more rounded head that was closer to the human profile.
"We can move objects from place to place instantaneously by means of artificially generated spinning black holes," Eesyan told them. "As your own theories predict, a rapidly spinning black hole flattens out into a disk, and eventually becomes a toroid with the mass concentrated at the rim. In that situation the singularity exists across the central aperture and can be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects. The aperture affords an `entry port' into a hyperrealm described by laws not subject to the conventional restrictions of ordinary space-time. Creating such an entry port also gives rise to a hypersymmetric effect that appears as a projection elsewhere in normal space, and which functions as a coupled exit port. By controlling the dimensions, spin, orientation, and certain other parameters of the initial hole, we can select with considerable accuracy the location of the exit up to distances in the order of several tens of light-years."
With Eesyan between Vic and Lyn, they were walking along a broad, enclosed, brightly illuminated arcade of soaring lines, gleaming sculptures, and vast openings, which led into other spaces. There were more Escher-like distortions and inversions here and there in the scene, but nothing as overwhelming as the sight they had first seen from the perceptron. Apparently Ganymean gravitic engineering tricks came with the architecture on Thurien. For this was Thurien. They had emerged from the room and walked through a series of galleries and a huge domed space bustling with Ganymeans, eventually to this place, the illusory blending so smoothly into reality that Hunt had missed the point along the way at which the switch from one to the other had taken place. The meeting between the two worlds was about to take place, Eesyan had informed them, and he had been assigned to escort them there personally. No doubt visar could have transferred them there instantly, Hunt thought, but this seemed a more natural way while they were still "acclimatizing." And having an opportunity to get to know at least one of the aliens informally in advance helped the process further. Probably that was the idea.
"That must be how you got the perceptron to Earth," Hunt said.
"Almost to Earth," Eesyan told him. "A black hole large enough to take a sizable object creates a significant gravitational disturbance over a large distance. Therefore we don't project things like that into the middle of planetary systems; it would disrupt clocks and calendars and so on. We exited the perceptron outside the Solar System, and it had to make the last lap in a more conventional way."
"So a round trip needs four conventional stages," Lyn commented. "Two one way, and two the other?"
"Correct."
"Which explains why it took something like a day to make it from Thurien to Earth," Hunt said.
"Yes. Instant planet-to-planet hopping is out. But
communications
is another matter entirely. We can send messages by beaming a gamma frequency microlaser into a microscopic black-hole toroid that can be generated in equipment capable of operating on planetary surfaces without undesirable side effects. So instant planet-to-planet datalinks are practicable. What's more, generating the microscopic black holes needed for them doesn't require the enormous amount of energy that holes big enough to send ships through do. So we don't do a lot of instantaneous people-moving unless we have to; we prefer moving
information
instead."
It fitted in with what Hunt already knew: he and Lyn were really at McClusky, and all the information they were perceiving was being transmitted there through visar. "That explains how the information gets sent," he said. "But what's the input to the system? How is it originated in the first place?"
"Thurien is a fully `wired' planet," Eesyan explained. "So are most of the other planets in the portions of the Galaxy where we have spread. visar exists all over those worlds, and in other places between, as a dense network of sensors located inside the structures of buildings and cities, distributed invisibly across mountains, forests, and plains, and in orbit above planetary surfaces. By combining and interpolating between its data inputs, it is able to compute and synthesize the complete sensory input that would be experienced by a person located at any particular place.
"visar bypasses the normal input channels to the brain and stimulates symbolic neural patterns directly with focused arrays of high-resolution spatial stress-waves. Thus it can inject straight into the mind all the information that would be received by somebody physically present at whatever place is specified. Also it monitors the neural activity of the voluntary motor system and reproduces faithfully all the feedback sensations that would accompany muscular movements and so forth. The net result is to create an illusion of actually being at a remote location which is indistinguishable from the real thing. Physically transporting the body would add nothing."
"Star travel the easy way," Lyn murmured. She gazed around as they came to the end of the arcade and turned off to begin walking across a curved, sweeping surface that had looked like a wall a minute ago, but now seemed to be pivoting slowly as they moved onto it and lifting the whole of the arcade and the structures connected to it up at an increasing angle behind them. "This is all real and twenty light-years away?" she said, still sounding disbelieving. "I really haven't come here?"
"Can you tell the difference?" Eesyan asked her.
"How about you, Porthik?" Hunt asked as a new thought struck him. "Are you actually here . . . there . . . whatever, in Vranix, or what?"
"I'm on an artificial world twenty million miles from Thurien," Eesyan replied. "Calazar is on Thurien, but six thousand miles from Vranix at a place called Thurios—the principal city of Thurien. Vranix is an old city that we keep preserved for sentimental and traditional reasons. Frenua Showm, whom you were also expecting to meet and will very shortly, is on a planet called
Crayses
, which is in a star system about nine light-years from Gistar."
Lyn was looking puzzled. "I'm not quite sure I get this," she said. "How do we all manage to get consistent impressions when we're in different places? How do I see you there, Vic next to you, and all this around us when it's scattered all over the Galaxy?" Hunt was still too boggled by what Eesyan had said a moment earlier to be able to ask anything.
"visar manufactures composite impressions from data originated in different places and delivers them as a total package," Eesyan replied. "It can combine visual, tactile, audile, and other details of an environment with data synthesized from monitoring the neural activity of other persons linked into the system, and provide each individual with a complete, personalized impression of being in that environment and interacting physically and verbally with the others. Hence we can visit other worlds, travel among other cultures, convene for meetings in other star systems, and make visits to artificial worlds out in space . . . and be home in an instant. We do move around physically to some degree, of course, for example in recreation or for activities that require physical presence, but for the most part our long-range business and travel is conducted via electronics and gravitics."
The surface continued curving over and brought them out into a wide circular gallery that looked down over a railed parapet on a fairly busy plaza of some kind a level below. Between the flowing curves and surfaces enclosing the space from above, they could see part of the floor of the arcade that they had been walking along a few minutes earlier. At least, it had seemed like a floor at the time. But by now they were beginning to get used to that kind of thing.
"When we first sat down inside that planet at McClusky, all my senses went haywire for a while," Lyn said as she thought back. "What was that all about?"
"visar tuning in to your personal cerebral patterns and activity levels," Eesyan told her. "It was making adjustments until it obtained correct feedback responses. They vary somewhat from individual to individual. The process is a one-time thing. You could think of it as somewhat like fingerprinting."
"Porthik," Hunt said after they had continued for some distance in silence. "That stunt you pulled on me right at the beginning—you've been getting some mixed-up stories about Earth, and you needed to check them out. Right?"
"It was extremely important, as Calazar will explain," Eesyan answered.
"But was it necessary?" Hunt queried. "If visar can access neural patterns directly, why couldn't it have simply pulled whatever it wanted to know straight out of my memory? That way there wouldn't have been any risk of wrong answers."
"Technically that would be possible," Eesyan agreed. "However, for reasons of privacy such things are not permitted under our laws. visar is programmed in a way that restricts it to supplying primary sensory inputs to the brain and monitoring motor and certain other terminal outputs only. It communicates only what would be seen, heard, felt, and so on; it does not read minds."
"How about the others?" Hunt inquired. "Do you have any idea how they're getting along? I wouldn't exactly recommend your welcoming ceremonies as the best way of making friends."
Eesyan's mouth puckered in the way that Hunt had long ago recognized as the Ganymean equivalent of a smile. "You needn't worry. They haven't all been getting to the bottom of visar as quickly as you did, so some of them are still a little confused, but apart from that they're fine."
The confusion had been intentional, Hunt realized suddenly. It was a deliberate measure calculated to defuse any animosity left lingering as a result of the initial shock tactics. Eesyan's showing up to escort them to wherever they were going was no doubt part of the plan too. "It didn't seem quite like that when I talked to Chris Danchekker on the phone a few minutes before you arrived," he said, grinning to himself as he caught the expression on Lyn's face.
"As a matter of fact, you and Professor Danchekker did have comparatively hard rides," Eesyan admitted. "We're sorry about that, but the two of you were unique in that you both possessed firsthand knowledge of certain events connected with the
Shapieron
that we were particularly anxious to obtain. The experiences of your companions were more in the nature of discussions concerning their various specialized fields. Their accounts corroborated one another's perfectly. It was very illuminating."
"What happened with you and Chris?" Lyn asked, looking across at Hunt.
"I'll tell you about it later," he replied. What they did might have been unconventional, but it had certainly worked, he told himself. In those first few minutes the Ganymeans had obtained and verified more information than they could have in days of talking. If it was that important, he could hardly blame them after the way they had been messed around by the UN at Farside. He wondered if Caldwell and the others saw things the same way. It wouldn't be long before he found out, he saw as he looked ahead of them. They seemed to have arrived at their destination.
They were walking down a shallow, fan-shaped ramp that was taking them through a final arch out into the open. They emerged into a descending arrangement of interlocking geometric forms, terraces, and esplanades that formed one side of a large circular layout echoing the same theme. The lowermost, central part, directly ahead of them, consisted of a forum of seats set in tiers and facing one another from all four sides of a rectangular floor. The whole place was a vast composition of color and form set among pools of liquid fluorescence fed by slow-motion rivers and fountains of shimmering light. A number of figures were assembled on three sides of the floor, all Ganymean. They were standing and seemed to be waiting. At the front and in the center of a raised section of seats on one side was Calazar, recognizable by his dark green tunic and silvery cape.
And then Hunt saw Caldwell's stocky frame emerge from another entrance on the far side of an open area to his right, accompanied by a Ganymean . . . and beyond Caldwell, Heller and Packard appeared with another Ganymean, Heller walking calmly and with assurance, Packard staring from side to side and looking bewildered. Hunt turned his head the other way in time to see Danchekker walking through an archway, waving his arms and remonstrating to a Ganymean on either side; evidently it was taking two of them to handle him. The arrivals had been synchronized perfectly. It couldn't have been accidental.