"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 plane 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 symbolic 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, and 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 with grudging admiration. 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.
Suddenly Lyn gasped and stopped, her face raised to stare at something overhead. Hunt followed her gaze . . . and stopped then gasped.
From three sides beyond the raised rim of the place they were in, three slim spires of pink ivory converged upward above their heads for an inestimable distance before blending into an inverted cascade of terraces and ramparts that broadened and unfolded upward and away for what must have been miles. Above it-it didn’t make sense, but above it, where the sky should have been, the scene mushroomed out into a mind-defying fusion of structures of staggering dimensions that marched away as far as the eye could see in one direction, and fringed a distant ocean in the other. It had to be the city of Vranix. But it was all hanging miles over their heads, and upside down.