It was disconcerting to be recognized by creatures she had never seen. Flushing faintly, Zara repeated her apologies for being a different version; it was soon apparent to her that nearly all the beings here were direct copies from individuals on the artificial planetoid called Sun One, where all the races of the Galaxy had representatives to mediate and interpret their differing interests and goals.
After so long a voyage—tens of thousands of light- years—Zara felt she should rest and freshen up. But of course tachyon transport was not tiring. The patterns of their bodies, carried by faster-than-light tachyon particles, had not "really" moved anywhere. When they were in transit they were only concepts, so to speak; they were patterns, and had no more sensation or thought than a schematic diagram. Nevertheless she was fatigued. It was culture shock, she thought: the impact of so much change in so short a time. She pleaded fatigue in any case and without demurrer—no two races of the Galaxy really understood each other's foibles—Valkyrie showed them their own quarters.
In the "morning" Zara woke to her first "day" on Cuckoo and incautiously got out of her cocoon as if she were still on Earth. Even edited, her muscles were disproportionate to Cuckoo's needs. She flew off the airbed as if it had exploded, catching her balance at the very last second necessary to keep from crashing into the wall.
The noise roused her husband, in the bunk over her own. He opened his eyes and said, "I dreamed we were on Cuckoo." He looked around and added, "I never had a dream turn out to be true before."
Zara was listening only politely; she had gone at once to their stereostage, to refresh her memory of the place to which they had exiled themselves for the rest of their lives.
Cuckoo was an enormous ball that hung in empty space, forty thousand light-years outside the fringing arms of the Galaxy.
It had been a puzzle for all the Galaxy's scientists since the cruising robot scoutships of the bat-winged T'Worlie first detected it. It was a perfect monad of polar opposites: huge and hard-crusted, yet with an average density not much above that of a total vacuum.
Alone in space in the emptiness between galaxies, heading toward the Milky Way at a velocity that was a substantial fraction of c.
There was no such thing as day or night on the surface of Cuckoo. There was no external object bright enough to light it up. What light there was to see by came from bright phosphorescing clouds that hung in its thick air.
It was as big as a solar system, nearly two A.U. in diameter. Did it rotate? Yes, in a manner of speaking— to Zara the question was confusing, coming down to rotation relative to what? Relative to the nearest globular cluster of the Milky Way Galaxy, Cuckoo turned on its axis once every eight hundred-odd Earth days. To natives of Cuckoo the rotation would have been difficult to understand and of no importance at all; there was hardly ever anything to see from the flatlands where they lived, and even from the high mountains it was only occasionally that one might catch a glimpse of the Milky Way. It would take many generations to realize that that tipped spiral puddle of light rose on one horizon and, over the course of an Earthly year and more, slowly climbed to its zenith and disappeared below the western sky. The Milky Way was not the only thing that could be seen in the sky—M-31 in Andromeda was quite visible from the mountains, with a little luck, as were the Magellanic Clouds. But the Milky Way was by far the biggest and brightest object, occupying nearly half the sky when fully risen.
None of these were of any use in telling time. Ground Station One was on galactic arbitrary standard time, a metrication that cycled at some thirty Earth hours. Zara found out quickly that it was close enough to a terrestrial day to be recognizable, different enough to be disconcerting. It made their first "day" very long.
Even so, there was hardly time enough to do all they had to do. The briefings on Earth had been intriguing and even useful; but here in the face of the massive reality of Cuckoo, swelling all around them, both of the Gentrys had everything to learn. It was exhausting. They spent hours just in learning to deal with the flimsy gravity of Cuckoo. Even in their down-muscled edited forms, every step sent them flying at first. ("I know I've been trying to lose a few pounds," Jon grinned, "but this is ridiculous.") They had to learn to deal with the representatives of the nine other races in Ground Station One. T'Worlie, Sheliaks, Scorpians, and all, each had its own purposes and needs, and all had as much right to be there as Zara and Jon. More, thought Zara fairly; the galactic culture exchange had been going on for thousands of years before humanity had become aware of it.
And above all they had to learn what was on Cuckoo itself.
There existed, in the central workroom, a three- dimensional stereostage program which, on command, conjured up a slowly spinning image of the body itself. Much of it was blank even yet; the tachyar mapping, scanning the surface of Cuckoo from the orbiting space station, had not completed even one full revolution, and some ninety percent of the surface of Cuckoo had been mapped only at extremely long range or not at all. This did not at first appear. The basic sphere was wholly featureless to the naked eye, except for some blurry dis- colorations. The program could on command magnify any desired portion. Where the scan was complete, such portions showed seas, mountain ranges, forests, deserts—a thousand different kinds of locales. This one littie area that they were now exploring Zara saw with dismay, was only an insignificant point on the globe— yet it stretched half the diameter of Europe! There was simply too much to map. Less detail showed on their globe than the maps of the Elizabethan admirals had showed of the interior of Africa.
Valkyrie was a patient teacher and even-tempered friend. Zara found herself relating to the silvery, winged creature as if she were another human. It was a shock to remind herself that this shape was probably nothing like Val's "real" body, in whatever hellishly inhospitable environment she had lived in on her home world. It had been edited into a more viable form, but Zara knew very well that the shape they saw was not her own.
Fortunately for mankind, most of the races of the Galaxy were close enough to oxygen-breathing, water- based mammals that the consensual common environment, when races met, was usually in an atmosphere human beings could endure. Even races like the Scorpi- ans and the Sheliaks could tolerate it; it was not what they were used to, but it did not matter, since one was robot and the other so protean that it could survive anywhere. For those races to whom oxygen and water were poison, there were two alternatives. They could borrow the bodies of oxygen-tolerating species— humans were very popular for this—by inserting tachyon-coupled transponders into their brains. The bodies were then wholly controlled by the creatures who had taken them over. Zara had seen enough of such men and women, incurable criminals called Purchased People; they were common enough on Earth. The other alternative was to edit the "pattern" transported by the tachyons into some form that could stand air, water, and the temperature limits of the consensual environment. Val's people had chosen that way to go.
To be sure, editing was not uncommon for all races. Zara and Jon themselves were edited. Their physical strength was an actual handicap on Cuckoo, so their new bodies were altered in the physics and chemistry of the musculature to a sort of compromise between what was appropriate to Earth, and what was desirable on Cuckoo, where each of them weighed only a few pounds. At the same time their proportions had been altered, making them taller and thinner, and thus less strange for the natives of Cuckoo.