Gina and Sandy left the room and headed toward the cabins. "Guys and alcohol," Gina said. "I didn't want to be left that outnumbered."
"I know the feeling," Sandy agreed.
"Are we turning into old maids, Sandy?" Gina asked jokingly. "Six men back there, and the two girls leave together. Perhaps we really are as bad as they tell us."
"You speak for yourself. I meant what I said: I'm exhausted."
"Duncan was giving you looks."
"I know."
"Not your type?"
"Oh, Duncan's okay. We've known each other since Houston. But you know what they say about keeping the complicated side of life separate from your work. I think it's good advice."
They reached the door of Sandy's cabin, which she opened with an unvoiced command to visar. Inside, she picked up a briefcase, set it on the bureau top, and took out a flat box of the kind used for carrying storage chips. "How about a coffee before you go?" she asked Gina.
"Why not? Make it black, no sugar."
"Anything else to go with it?"
"Uh-uh. Dinner just about filled me up."
Sandy asked visar for two coffees. "Ah, here's the one I was talking about," she said, handing Gina one of the capsules from inside the box. "I've got another with some of their classical stuff, but I don't think it's here. I must have left it at home. It's a bit weird, anyhow."
"Thanks. This'll be fine." Gina put the capsule into a pouch in her purse.
The door of the dispenser in the kitchen area opened, and a tray bearing two mugs slid out onto the countertop. While Sandy was replacing the briefcase, Gina picked up the mugs and carried them over to a table in the lounge, where she settled herself into one of the easy chairs. Sandy followed a few moments later.
"So, how about the romantic side of your life?" Sandy asked as she sat down in the other chair. "Or are writers always too busy to have one?"
"Oh, now and again, when it wants to happen. But nothing . . ."
"Entangling?"
"Right. I don't want complications getting mixed up with my work, either. But with me, work and life keep having this tendency to become the same thing."
Sandy tasted her coffee. "Not bad." She looked up. "Were you ever married?"
"Once, awhile ago now—for about four years. We lived in California. But it didn't work."
"What happened? Did you see yourself heading toward oblivion on Domesticity Street?" Sandy gave Gina a critical look over the top of her mug. "Somehow I can't picture you taking pies to garden parties or selling Tupperware."
Gina smiled distantly. "Actually it was more the opposite. Larry was the kind of guy who wanted to go everywhere, do everything. You know, always meeting new people, the life of every party . . . It was fine as long as I was content to tag along as an accessory in
his
life. The problem was, it didn't leave any room for me to have one of my own."
"You should have introduced him to me," Sandy said. She made a motion with her free hand to indicate herself. "It's nice in some ways to work surrounded by scientists and all kinds of other guys who are smart, but there's an incredible number of nerds among them. You know the kind—they think a hardon's some kind of quantum particle."
Gina had to stifle a scream of laughter. "Vic doesn't seem like that, though," she commented.
"He's an exception. Now him I could go for. Maybe it's the accent. But like I said, it's not the thing to do. Anyhow, he got tangled up with somebody when we were at Houston, before the division relocated to D.C., and nowadays he likes to keep his daytimes uncomplicated, too."
"You, er, don't exactly come across as the epitome of detached, intellectual science," Gina said.
"Give me a break. I spent a year and a half down a hole in the ice on Ganymede. That's a lot of time to make up for. Vic said something once about not wanting to get old with a lot of regrets about missing out. I agree with him."
Gina, watching the way Sandy's straight, dark brown hair fell about her face as she leaned forward to pick up her cup again, noticed the firmly defined features and the long lines of the jeans-clad legs. Sandy was the kind of girl that men had told her radiated sex appeal without being especially pretty, Gina decided. Intelligent, adventuresome, and uninhibited. Definitely Larry's type.
Sandy looked up. "Anyhow, scientists are supposed to be curious, aren't they? Like journalists. Isn't that what the job is all about?"
"I suppose so," Gina agreed.
Back in her own cabin, Gina found herself restless and not inclined toward sleep, despite the time she had been awake. Lurking just below the level of consciousness, something that she couldn't pinpoint was disturbing her, something tugging for attention, distilled from the day's flood of events and experiences. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth while she grappled with the problem.
It had something to do with visar. More specifically, it had something to do with the way visar was designed to function. Back in the bedroom, still fully dressed, she propped herself up with a couple of pillows and stared at the picture of a snowy mountain scene from some world or other, on the far wall of the room.
The part of the PAC complex on Jevlen that she had "visited" with Hunt earlier in the evening had contained such objects as ornaments and pictures on the walls of the cafeteria from where they had seen the
Shapieron
, and some tools standing against a wall in the gallery outside. What would have happened, she had asked Hunt, if she had tried to "move" one of those objects to a different place? He had said that visar would cause her to experience the action faithfully. In that case, she asked, where would she find it when they arrived physically at Jevlen tomorrow? Obviously, where it had been in the first place, Hunt replied—since the object would never have really been moved at all.
That bothered her. She remembered, too, the burr that she had felt on the edge of the door into the coupler cubicle, and the business with the cigarette ash on her sleeve. It all bothered her. She got up from the bed, went back into the lounge to get a cup of hot chocolate from the autochef, and tried to fathom why.
Judged by Terran notions of what constituted worthwhile return for cost and effort, the whole thing seemed a pointless exercise in elaborate absurdity. More than that: a deception that confused synthesis with reality, leaving the recipient to disentangle the resulting fusion that would be left impressed upon memory. But the Thuriens could handle it naturally, without conflict or contradiction. Indeed, to
them
, in a way that no human could really feel or comprehend, the capturing of the actuality was all-important, and the degree to which the system failed to do so constituted the deception. Hence their extraordinary obsession with levels of detail that to humans would have served no meaningful purpose and made no sense.
And now, she felt, she was getting closer to what was troubling her.
Yes, the Thuriens were benign, nonaggressive, and rational, and that was all very nice; but it was also beside the point. What was less reassuring, she realized, was the utter
alienness
that she had glimpsed of the inner workings of the Thurien mind. The professionals like Hunt and Danchekker had been too close for too long, and were too excited by the technology, to see it. Or perhaps they had forgotten.
What kind of havoc, then, might have been wreaked on the collective psyche of a whole race immersed in a form of mind manipulation essentially alien to its nature for thousands of years?
She turned and stared at the door, uncertain for several seconds of exactly what she intended to do. Then, resolving herself, she left the cabin again and returned to the cubicles containing the Thurien neural couplers.
The familiar feeling of warmth and relaxation closed around her as she eased back into the recliner and visar's intangible fingers took control of her senses.
"Tell me again how these Thurien protocols on privacy work," she said in her mind to the machine. "What's to stop you going deeper than just accessing sensory data, and extracting anything you want out of my head?"
"Programming rules built into the system," visar answered. "They confine my operations to processing and communicating only what users consciously direct."
"So you don't read minds?"
"No."
"But you could?"
"Technically, yes."
"I don't think I like that. Doesn't the thought of it bother the Thuriens?"
"I can't see why it should, any more than the thought of a surgeon seeing your insides organically."
"No? But then I guess you wouldn't. You were designed by them, so you think the way they do."
"Possibly so."
"Can the rules be broken?"
"It would require a specific authorization from the user for me to override the directive. So the user is always in control. Anyway, what would someone have to hide?"
Gina could not contain a laugh. "Don't the Thuriens ever have thoughts or a side of their nature deep down that they try to hide, even from themselves?"
"How could I know? If they do, then by definition they don't reveal it."
Really? Gina thought. Ganymean minds might be capable of such commendable self-discipline, but she doubted if a typical human one would. "Were the Jevlenese as sensible and restrained in the way they used jevex?" she asked.
"I suspect not," visar answered.
"So, what can you do, visar? I want to know what this system is capable of."
"I can take you anywhere you want to go. Anywhere among thousands of Thurien worlds, natural and artificial, scattered across tens of light-years."
"How about Thurien itself, then?"
This time there were no preliminary sensory disturbances. Gina found herself at the edge of a terraced water garden near the summit of an enormous tower. The view below was of a cascade of levels and ramparts, falling away and unfolding for what must have been miles to blend with a mind-defying fusion of structures stretching to the fringe of a distant ocean. There were numerous figures around her, all Ganymean, walking and talking, others sitting around and doing nothing. She felt a faint breeze, and she could smell the blossoms by the pools and waterfalls. There were flying machines in the sky.
"Vranix," visar informed her. "One of Thurien's older cities."
The sudden transition made Gina feel dwarfed by the scale of everything. It took her a few seconds to adjust. "This is the way it actually is, right now?" she said. "These people are really there?"
"They are," visar confirmed. "But since they're not neurally coupled into the system, you can't interact with them. You're simply perceiving what actually is. This is called Actual Mode."
"What else is there?"
"Interactive Mode. You're in the same setting, but superposed on your perception of it are visual representations of other users physically in couplers located elsewhere. The images are activated by voluntary signals picked up from the speech and motor centers of their brains, so they act as they would choose to. The converse is just as true, of course; i.e., they see you in the same way. Hence the illusion of actually being there and interacting is total. It's the usual way of setting up social and business meetings."
"Switch to that, then," Gina said.
The scenery stayed the same, but the distribution of figures changed. Most vanished, and others appeared where none had been before. The overall number seemed to be fewer.
"Those other people that I saw a moment ago, they're still there really?" Gina asked.
"They are. I've simply edited them out of the datastream into your visual cortex."
"So who are these people that I'm seeing now? Where are they?"
"Here, there, in different places. They're simply people who happen to have chosen this venue at the moment, for whatever their purpose is."
The flying machines were still there, Gina noticed. She wondered how visar decided the boundary between edited foreground and authentic background.
Then a Ganymean couple who had been sitting on a nearby seat got up and approached. "I hope we're not being presumptuous, but we've never seen a Terran this closely before," the male said.
Gina noticed that several of the other figures were looking across at them discreetly, and trying not to make it too obvious. "No . . . that's fine," Gina replied falteringly.
"Permit us to introduce ourselves. My name is Morgo Yishal. This is my daughter, Jasene. We like to meet here from time to time. Our family lived in Vranix when Jasene was young. This was one of her favorite places."
"Where are you now—if it's not a rude question?" Gina asked, still off-balance from the strangeness of it all.
"Oh, I'm teaching on the other side of Thurien now," the man replied.
"I'm on a vessel that's orbiting a world nearer to Earth than Thurien," Jasene said. "Maybe I could show you it sometime. It's quite an interesting place. And you?"
"Me? Oh, on one of your starships, traveling from Earth to Jevlen."
"What brings you to Vranix?" Morgo inquired. "Seeing a Terran alone like this is most unusual."
"Nothing special. I'm just experimenting with the system, really."
"Of course, I can superpose Actual and Interactive modes," visar's voice interjected. The figures that had been present initially reappeared, mixing the "real" ones with visar's virtual creations, and in moments Gina had lost track of which were which.
"Er, would you excuse me?" Gina stammered to the two Ganymeans. "I need time to absorb this. I'm still getting used to it."
"But of course," the man answered.
"visar, it's too crowded. Get me away from people." Gina glanced at Jasene. "I'll get back to you about that visit . . . And thanks. I assume visar has your number?" Jasene inclined her head in what Gina hoped was an understanding nod.
Then Gina was standing on a barren, rocky ridge, looking down into a huge crater of molten magma, dull red and turgid, bubbling sullenly below yellow vapor and oily smoke. She could feel the heat on her face, and a choking, sulfurous odor seared her throat. The far rim was invisible through the haze, and behind her a tortured landscape of jagged peaks and bottomless fissures vanished into banks of dark, stormy cloud.