Can this, he thought, be what Master Snoop feels, sucking the minds of all around, a constant flood of incoming knowledge, sights, sounds, facts, ideas?
Delia continued, noting Virgil’s facial reactions with professional excitement. Her gaze also drank in the rest of his form. She noted that his flesh responded to the rush of knowledge by pricking up the blond hairs on his arms, shoulders, and legs.
“Finally,” she said, “Brennen engineers built a small ship that could teleport by remote control. The most important aspect of the Valliardi Transfer is that it requires no receiving station.”
“It’s not teleportation, really.” Virgil frowned in amazement at the authoritative manner of his speech. “It’s a concept in many-dimensional theory. Every point in a lower-order dimension is in contact with a point in any higher-order dimension.” His frown transformed itself into a weak grin. “It’s all coming back to me.”
Delia sat up and smiled. “See if this jogs more memories: Every point on a one-dimensional line can be reached from a two-dimensional plane without crossing any other linear point. Any point on a plane can be touched from three-dimensional space without passing through any other
point on the plane. And so on up the dimensional ladder.”
“I know,” Virgil said. “I know it without knowing how I know it!”
Delia nodded with enthusiasm. “Jord understood the fundamentals of dimensional topology, though Valliardi’s Proof was too much for him. He could push the right buttons, though, and was the finest test pilot we had. After a dozen successful robot flights, he performed the first human test. He traveled from lunar orbit to Jupiter in an instant.”
Kinney rolled over on his side, his skin sliding over the sudahyde without adhesion. His own enthusiasm began to grow, unaided by the dead man’s memories.
“You mean,” he said, “that you’ve developed instantaneous teleportation?”
“Almost. The trip took only a subjective instant for him. For us, it was as if he’d disappeared for over half an hour. When he reached Jovian orbit, a laser beacon switched on automatically. It was another half an hour before we received that beam, so we know that he was literally outside the universe for that length of time.”
Virgil’s stare turned solid. “Where was he?” Half an hour away from Master Snoop? Away from Nightsheet? Time spent out from under the prying eyes of God?
Delia gently brushed her long fingernails against the coil of black hair wrapped around her neck. “Nowhere, apparently. The experiment turned out to be the vindication of Einstein. Even if we use the Valliardi Transfer to travel instantly from here to there, the traveler is still out of the universe for exactly the length of time it would take for light to travel that distance. It would take you an instant to transfer to Alpha Centauri, but when you arrived, the universe would be four years older. Or you could transfer to the center of the galaxy like that”— she snapped her fingers—“and the rest of the universe will have aged twenty-six thousand years.”
Virgil stared at her. “A one-way time machine,” he whispered in awe. Unconsciously, his thin, bony fingers reached down to touch below his waist.
Delia gazed in puzzlement at the swelling flesh Virgil grasped in his hand.
Chapter Two 30 March, 2107
She can’t expect me to do it. She can’t. What do I know about these things?
Virgil lifted his head to look around, then dropped it back to the cushions. He enjoyed the exercise, the fresh air, the bulk-building food. Four meals a day. Real food. Steak from the Saharan grasslands. Fresh fruit from the vast orchards of Paine, the rich farmland on the Potomac created from the ruins of the old imperial Capitol. Huge vegetables dropped from Cornucopia Orbital. Vitamins and brain-food drugs from the vast chemical labs just south of Iverson, Earthward Luna.
He exercised in the spacious seventh level sky lobby on the four hundredth floor of the Brennen Spike in downtown Houston. The equipment stood near the windows and, from the fifteen hundred meter vantage, Virgil regained his strength and stamina while observing the busy world below him. Every now and then he would pause to watch a thin trail of vapor rise from the south—another launch from Port Velasco.
The lessons and tests he had received over the last three weeks surprised him. He knew far more than the calculus of his youth. And every unlearned memory came to him at just the moment he needed it. What other bits of Jord Baker, he wondered, lurked inside his head, dormant for now?
The steady, machinelike rhythm of the equipment soothed Virgil by blanking out other sounds: the whisk of elevator doors, the rustle of clothing and scrape of shoes of the people who walked through the lobby, the subsonic rumble of the wind-compensating pendulum near the top floor.
As he built up his body, his mind grew in strange and unan
ticipated ways. Quietly. Unnoticed even by Virgil. His surface thoughts, though clearer, were as mad as ever.
Pilot a spaceship? I’d be a man in a can, really. Just put in the coordinates they give me and punch one button. And if I put in the wrong coordinates, I appear in something solid maybe, and kapow! Like an atom bomb. He smiled.
“It’s today, Virgil.”He turned. Delia Trine stood in the door of the access shaft.
Death Angel’s hair still tries to strangle her. Lovely Death Angel, I know you work for Nightsheet...
“The test?” he said. “I’m ready?”
“As ready as you’ll ever be.”
She’s right. The roar that clouds my mind fades with every moment. I crack all ciphers I hear. I’ve almost cracked Death Angel’s code, too.
“All right.” He wiped a handful of hair from his eyes. “Big question: why did you pick me? Out of all the billions in the solar system, why choose someone who’s been locked up for over a decade? You don’t do this every day. I know what you had to do to Baker’s body to get the RNA after he killed himself. The fall must have mashed him up a bit, but you had to mince him into strawberry jam to get that stuff.”
Delia looked at him, considering. “Let’s go.”
The lift descended. “Jord was mentally well-balanced,” she told him. “Cool, level-headed, not the sort to panic under any circumstance. When a man most people would call normal suddenly decides to kill himself after testing the Valliardi Transfer, something’s wrong—and not with Jord. We picked you because your psychological profile is the opposite of Jord’s.
You behave in an unstable manner, are prone to wild mood swings, and are violent in a narrowly specific way. You’ve tried to commit suicide several times but never succeeded for some reason. Our psychologists suggested that you may survive long enough to give us some idea of what’s wrong with the device.
Do you have any memory of what happened on Jord’s flight?”
Virgil leaned against the rear of the lift. “No. All I feel are snatches of images that are not part of my own memory. Aircraft and spacecraft, mostly. Views from on high.” He stared with an eerie fixedness at Delia. “And women.”
Her gaze broke away from his. She cleared her throat to say: “Our floor.” They stepped out into the ground level atrium. Port Velasco lay only a short flyer-hop south.
The Brennen Trust executive shuttle squatted like a tick on the personal spacecraft field a dozen kilometers away from the towering freightcraft. The stubby forty-meter rocket pointed straight up in liftoff position awaiting the pair’s arrival.
Kinney wore the Brennen trademark gray jumpsuit with maroon test-pilot’s piping. Trine wore gray with executive-white piping, her hair wrapped for freefall in a matching gray-and-white turban.
He hesitated at the entrance hatch.
“What’s wrong?” Delia asked.