VISAR came through. "I appreciate that this may not be the best time, Vic, but I've got Lieutenant Polk on the line again and-"
"I've never told a computer to perform impossible biological acts with itself before, VISAR, but…"
"Yes, sir! I'll take care of it."
Hunt turned and stared out again at the relay hanging in space, where the datastream that VISAR had referred to was coming from.
Incoherence…
Behind him, the confusion of voices cutting in and out blended into a meaningless hubbub. And then it was gone.
He was back in the recliner in the Waldorf, amid sudden quiet and stillness. For a few seconds he lay savoring the feeling. It was like waking up from an insane dream. But the thought that had started to form was still there.
The images of other persons that VISAR injected into the perceptions of a user coupled into the system were animated by activity monitored in the speech and motor centers in the brain of the individual that the image pertained to. Thus, a user saw and heard what the other users elsewhere thought they were doing and saying. The difference in this case was that a part of the perceptual experience that VISAR was creating for each of the users coupled in to the situation-Hunt, for example-was coming not from the regular Thurien virtual net in this universe, but through the relay device from another universe. Or "universes."
The relay device had to possess some kind of communications channel back to its universe of origin-achieving what the scientists in this universe were still struggling with. And that channel would terminate at some kind of multiporting projector: the other universe's MP2 or equivalent. But that Multiporter was mixing up the pasts represented by different time lines. So the scientists in the universe the relay was from hadn't solved the convergence problem yet.
So why had Hunt been suddenly cut off like this? As far as he could see, the job of generating the composite images would be no different from what VISAR normally did. it shouldn't make any difference where the inputs were coming from. Once the relay materialized, the link to it would function the same as to any other part of the Thurien h-net. Having clarified that much, he called up VISAR to check.
"I thought you didn't have technical hitches."
"I don't. But something was obviously wrong with the experiment that you bioforms were conducting at the other end. They pulled the plug."
"You mean that device didn't destabilize and break up?"
"No, they seemed to have that problem licked. It wasn't a dispersion pattern. The whole thing just wasn't there suddenly, as if it had been switched off. Since things were getting a bit out of hand and everyone was confused, it seemed better to terminate the show. There's nothing left to see out there now, anyway."
"You're probably right. But I hadn't even finished my drink."
"Couple back in. I can fix that."
Hunt sat up, swung his legs down, yawned, and stretched. "No, I think that after an episode like that I could use a shot of the real thing. Is anyone else heading that way downstairs?"
"Duncan, Josef, Sandy… it seems most of them have the same idea. Be warned, though. It's got Chris Danchekker going."
"Oh, I think I'm used to dealing with that."
Yes, convergence was the most important issue. Nothing else was going to matter much until they had that cracked. Hunt's other self had tried to pass on the right advice, all that way back at the beginning. In view of that, it seemed odd that whoever had sent the device responsible for the recent pandemonium should have fitted it for communications capability while the convergence problem still remained evidently unsolved. Hunt could only suppose that the inhabitants of different universes would find reasons for going about things differently. Or, of course, there was always the possibility that the particular team he was a part of would find out why in good time.
Others were already in the bar area, including a few Thuriens, with a vigorous debate already in progress. Hunt could hear Danchekker remonstrating above the rest as he approached. He wondered if there were other realities out there in the Multiverse in which the inhabitants had not been so prudent as to operate their MP2 remotely, confining timeline effects to streams of neurocoupler information, not the actual bodies. If there were, then the kind of chaos he'd just witnessed could be real, not just a virtual experience. How would anyone deal with four Danchekkers in their universe, three of them marooned and unable to get back? It didn't bear thinking about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Frenua Showm met with Calazar in "Feyarvon," his official retreat away from Thurios-his counterpart of Showm's "eyrie," where he withdrew from the world of Thurien and its affairs. Its rooms and galleries rose around a central dome from terraces of gardens and groves bounded on the outside by an enclosing arcade-the whole forming a floating island drifting among Thurien's cloud tops. Showm was present physically, clad in the full purple robe and headpiece that signified her formal role. Calazar, likewise, was wearing his gold tunic and green cloak. By long custom this meant that their dealings were between the two offices that they represented, not the persons. Thuriens were able to separate such functions when necessity called for it. Private interests and preferences had no place in administering for the general good.
They walked slowly along beside the parapet wall above the perimeter arcade, flower banks and miniature fruit trees below them on one side, bottomless canyons disappearing down among cloud on the other. "I must say, such second thoughts are about the last thing I would have expected from you of all people," Calazar said. "You have always been one of the most intransigent when it comes to distrusting humans. I'll credit you with being the least surprised of all of us when we finally discovered the deceptions of the Jevlenese. And you were always of the opinion that the Terrans were more than willing pupils of the agents the Jevlenese infiltrated to set them against each other. Doesn't everything you've studied for this history you're working on uphold it? At one point you were all for writing them off as beyond hope, and going ahead with the containment option immediately. It's strange to hear you sounding as if you might be going soft now."
Yes, it was true. Calazar's last remark referred to a measure the Thuriens had been preparing to defend against the insatiable Terran lust for conquest that the exaggerated Jevlenese accounts had painted. It was not the Thurien way, nor in the Thurien nature, to meet a threat of violence with counter-violence. In accord with the colossal schemes they had devised when the occasion demanded, such as building webs of engineering around burnt-out stars, or power distribution grids that spanned sizeable portions of the Galaxy, their response had been to begin the construction of immense g-warp engines that would be positioned in a configuration to create an impassable shell of deformed spacetime enclosing and isolating the entire Solar System. And the Thuriens would have done it. As some previous episodes in Ganymean history had demonstrated, the same faculty that enabled them to divorce professional life from personal factors made them perfectly capable of setting sentiment aside when higher considerations depended on it.
"I admit it," Showm replied. "I don't know how much of Terran history you've studied yourself, Calazar. There are magnificent and stirring chapters, but most of what's recorded, century after century for millennia, is…" she shook her head, looking for a word, "horrifying. Even allowing for the Jevlenese distortions, I came to the conclusion that there was simply something inherently wrong in the human condition-Terrans, Jevlenese, all of them. Something innate and incurable, going back to the genetics involved in that biological experiment on Minerva long ago. If that were the case, then we owed it to ourselves and the other races that depend on us to be protected from it. It couldn't be allowed to break out into the Galaxy. But they are sentient living beings nevertheless, and we couldn't destroy them. It was ironic: Although the Jevlenese had been deceiving us to advance an agenda of their own, the solution that it induced us to devise was correct. Except that it didn't go far enough. I would have contained Athena as well." Athena was the star of Jevlen and its companion planets.