It was then that Mildred became conscious of something she had always known, but for some reason had never been able to articulate to herself before. This was their true nature: generosity; sympathy and empathy; helping others to succeed; finding security to face the world in companionship. It always had been. In themselves, they knew nothing of hatred or fear, mistrust and treachery. Such things had to be taught to them, by adults. Overcoming the selfishness and destructiveness of infancy to prepare for a fulfilling life was the proper business of youth. But on Earth, selfishness and destructiveness were idealized as virtues. Earth had things backward. It suppressed the spontaneous expression of life seeking to mature, and taught regression back to infancy instead. Then it twisted reality to fit by manufacturing cultural myths enshrined in what it believed was science. Like all organisms forced to live against their nature, nations, empires, or whole cultures that sought life by killing, wealth by destroying, security by preying upon each other, would rebel, sicken, and eventually die. The whole of Earth's history was a testimony to it.
"Where did you go to this morning?" Frenua Showm asked. They had arranged to "meet" on Borsekon, the ice world that Ithel had talked about at breakfast in the Waldorf. Mildred wanted to see it. She and Showm were standing on a cliff top below vast slopes of white broken by lonely crags, sweeping up to a rocky ridgeline standing sharp against a pale blue sky. Below, a maze of water channels weaving among islands and fantastic floating sculptures of ice extended away into mists. VISAR had injected just enough cold into the air to make the simulation feel authentic. Because anything else would have felt wrong, they were wearing padded coats with hoods.
"I went back to a time I had forgotten," Mildred said. "Most of the people on Earth have forgotten it." She waited for a response, but Showm let her elaborate. "I was interested in Thurien education, and I asked VISAR to arrange for me to see a school…" Mildred wasn't sure how she wanted to put it. She was still wrestling with a flurry of competing thoughts.
"Actually, I did hear about it," Showm said. "They were making a boat. Armu Egrigol was delighted. I hope they find a place in your book."
Mildred was silent for a long time. Absolute stillness hung on every side. "But that wasn't what I saw," she said finally.
"What did you see?"
"I saw… I'll tell you what I saw. I saw young people who were not sitting in rows and being lectured to know their place, when they could speak, and what they were allowed to believe. They weren't being taught to hate or to despise, or whom they were superior to and whom they must obey. They weren't learning to recognize and submit to authority, in preparation for accepting the authority that would exploit them for the rest of their lives, and command them into believing it was natural. I saw minds that were free to grow into everything they could become… Maybe for the first time."
This time it was Showm's turn to fall silent before answering. Eventually, she sighed. Her breath made white vapor in the air. "We've talked this way before. Those are not the values that rule Earth. Terrans like you are so few-who can feel and think the way you do."
Mildred shook her head. "No. They are the majority. But they are silent and invisible: the poor, the hungry, the defenseless, the oppressed. Perhaps these are things you can have no concept of, Frenua. How can people think of the stars when they labor morning to night day after day, and all they have to show at the end will barely put a meal on the table for their children? How do people who can't even imagine escaping from crushing debt or the fear of destitution discover their inner selves? How can they build boats when every morning they might be dragged out of their homes and thrown into prisons?"
"But why can't they see the things you see?" Showm asked.
"Because they are deceived by those that they trust. They believe the lies that turn them against each other." Mildred turned her head. There was hope in her eyes. "But that could be changing now. Much of the evil that dominated Earth has been rooted out with the exposure of the Jevlenese influence throughout history. And now that we've made contact with Thurien, Earth might open its eyes finally. Thurien can teach the people of Earth how to reject the lies."
Mildred had expected that Showm would welcome hearing such words. They were little more than a distillation of things that Showm herself had voiced on various occasions, after all.
But for some reason Showm turned away abruptly and seemed strangely disturbed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Duncan Watt christened it the "Conveyor Belt." The Thuriens launched a succession of probe devices off into the Multiverse from the MP2 station, each being projected as a component of a standing wave function, which in theory should cause it to materialize in another reality somewhere. Each of the probes possessed some variant of a communications transmitter set up to send back a recognition code as confirmation that it was at least continuing to exist "somewhere" as a coherent, identifiable object. This signal was sent from wherever the probe found itself in the aggregate of realities making up the Multiverse-the realm the scientists termed "M-space"-relayed back to Thurien as a signal through ordinary h-space by the remote-operated equipment at MP2. However, because of the time line lensing effect that this equipment produced in its vicinity, the parts of the incoming transmission being processed from instant to instant were from different versions of the probe, launched by different versions of MP2 existing in other realities. Since they were all designed to transmit their own unique identifying codes, nothing intelligible could be made of the resultant jumble from all of them.
The main object of the exercise was to provide VISAR with data to attempt construction of what Hunt had described to Mildred as a "quantum signature" unique to a given reality. If such a function could be defined, the hope was that MP2 might be able to "lock on" to one of the converging time lines, selecting only the universe associated with a given signature. This would be demonstrated when a coherent, decodable signal was received, instead of the scrambling of signals from different universes that was coming in at present.
The probes being sent out via the Conveyor were just that-simple signaling beacons. Unlike the instrument package that had been glimpsed briefly after coming the other way, they didn't at this stage carry detectors and sensors to find out something about where they had arrived at. One thing at a time. All the scientists were interested in at that point was being able to establish that a probe had arrived somewhere. The rest could come later.
Hunt's awareness of all this had tended toward a somewhat abstract immersion in trying to follow Thurien mathematics. Its more palpable meaning was brought home one afternoon, when VISAR came online suddenly while Hunt was using the neurocoupler in his room at the Waldorf, taking a break to get in some virtual sightseeing around Thurien.
"Josef asked me to interrupt. Something's just happened that he thinks you should be in on."
"What?"
"Another intruder has been detected. It's a long way out from Gistar, not anywhere near Thurien. There are just a few long-range readings at present. I'm shifting more detectors through h-space to get a closer look at it."
"Okay, take me there, too."
The tower city that Hunt had been staring up at from the sprawl of suburbs and parkland surrounding its base vanished, and he found himself sitting in a glass-enclosed observation room looking out into space. The room didn't really exist; VISAR knew that even the illusion of being out in the void unenclosed and unprotected made biological beings feel insecure and had decided that something more substantial than a maintenance platform would be in order.