Even with all the information funneled into me, her words made little sense beyond the fact that there was a mechanical and/or practical reason why nanite technology couldn't be applied.
'As a matter of fact, using quantum mechanics that way has been suggested as the basis for another doomsday weapon. We haven't done it because we have more than enough in the arsenal. The ancients were good enough at that to create destructive systems for a dozen races.'
'But exactly how does ... a needle jockey do this?'
'You'll be coupled into the ship, into the fields, and you'll feel and experience what all the ship's sensors register. By reacting and willing, you move the ship as if it were your own body. In a way it is - while you're in overspace. Being a needle jockey is like dodging three-dimensional blocks fired at you by a cannon, except that the blocks you try to weave the ship through are blocks of colored sound, sounds that run from ... say, the most beautiful and harmonic music you ever heard - do you know Beethoven?' Another name I'd never heard.
Andra's mouth smoothed into a neutral smile before she spoke. 'For a supposedly educated people ... Never mind. Cargo pilots go under the Web and into overspace - that's explained, too - and it feels like you're dodging blocks of harmonic or jagged sound. Those blocks have edges sharper than a laser scalpel. Add to that the complexity of high-speed, three-dimensional chess and you have an idea of the job. It sounds impossible, but it's not, not with reflex boost and the training. You've certainly got the raw ability, and we can provide the training, if you'll just stick with it. What can make it hard is that you can never relax, not when you're under the Web.'
I had the feeling that none of the demons ever relaxed anyway, but I mused, almost absently, about the emphasis on pilots when they obviously had both nanotechnology and computers that made the iconraisers' screens antique toys by comparison.
'Computers? Nanite implants? They can't feel their way above the now. They make it all possible by translating the inputs, but being a needle jockey is reflexes, perception, and feel. No machine can feel and sense the way a trained jockey can.'
In a way, her words told me little more than that the demons needed trained pilots because pilots couldn't be replaced by technology, but I couldn't verbalize any more comments, not at that moment.
'All right. Let's get started. You've got a great deal to assimilate.' She stood and walked through another door into a small room. On one wall was a rack of canisters, the kind the doctor had used to spray me with nanites to evaluate my physical condition. On the opposite wall, less than two meters away, was a large metalicized plastic screen - presumably for collecting the nanites. Andra closed the door, and we stood in the small room.
'This is basic technology.' The canister Andra lifted had a scoop - almost shaped to fit a human face. 'Not really even technology, but the theory behind the technology you'll need to be using.'
She eased the scoop almost against my skin and pressed the stud. A mist rose around me, then vanished. I thought I felt thousands of tiny needles penetrating my skin, but that had to have been my imagination.
What came next wasn't imaginary, but a rush of phrases, images, terms, and interrelated equations, information ...
... xenon discharge... elevates atoms... wave forms above the quark level ... releasing additional energy in photonic form, tuned to a specific frequency, which replicates the effect ... creating two phased photons and a cascade effect down a crystalline channel... parallel wave forms pass through openings the same size as their wavelengths ... diffraction occurs ... intensity drops inversely as the square of the distance ... color does not exist except as a perception of different wavelengths ... failure of initial fusactor technology lay in unstated assumption that no wavefield interference would occur from plasma and magfields, despite superconductivity ... deuterium and tritium resonance on the quantal level ... maximum span potential directly proportional to the strength to mass/weight ratio of materials ... disregarded superconductivity and gravfield variations ... galactic oscillations reverberate through overspace at frequencies inversely proportional to the age of the specific galactic center ... supercooling phenomena can create harmonic vibrations on the supraquark level with the superposition of two coherent-state wave packets, thus creating a dual presence of a specific single atom.. .from within overspace incorporates a complete embedded minimal surface of finite topology ... requiring subjective superposition navigation ...
I wanted to scream as the weight of all that information flooded through me. If I'd thought the information that Cerrelle had fed me was concentrated, I hadn't understood what intensive really was.
Although I swayed on my feet, I managed to stay erect.
Another image blasted through me, like a starburst that came and went - the golden fire fountains, but that faded almost as it streaked through my thoughts, somehow above and beyond all the images and words that sloshed through my information-soaked synapses.
Andra watched a small screen beside the plastic collector, then nodded. 'Good.'
Good? I wondered about that.
She opened the second door and gestured for me to follow her into another small room. This one had windows and was warm and bright. Andra's arm extended to a small console with a keyboard. 'Sit down there. The instructions are written on the panel. It's simple enough. A question will scroll onto the screen. You search through the information you received and press the key that represents the most nearly correct answer. This will help you integrate what you've just received.'
She looked at me, nodded, and left.
Except it wasn't that simple - not at all.
Take the first question: 'Light can most nearly be described as which of the following?'
I just thought about light, and the flood of information slammed through me. Drowning in phrases and ideas, I was trying to sort out old ideas and newly acquired information. What was light?
Visible radiant energy ranging from 3,900 to 7,700 angstroms? Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of between 400 to 800 nm? Quanta of photons following geodesies in four-dimensional space-time? Radiation in semicoherent wave form approximating chaos in five or more space-time dimensions?
I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. That was just the first question, and sections of supporting texts and background information flooded over me.
Never ... never had I felt I knew so little. I tried to think about what Foerga would have done, but trying to call up her memory just left me asking why I bothered.
With a slow exhalation, I opened my eyes and looked at the screen. I had to get on with the exercise. Hoping that every question didn't generate the same reaction, I finally punched out the key that indicated all of the answers were correct. They seemed to be, and that gave me a headache as well.
A second question appeared: 'What are the properties of a star?'
My head began to ache and split simultaneously, and I wondered how many questions the console held before I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. However many it happened to be, that number was far too many.
That much I did know.
20
Every individual's face is no more and no less than a mask.
The silver brume swirled around the hedge, thickening ... rising out of the very ground, out of the grass, out of the stones of the walk ... a silver as cold as Deep Lake in the depths of winter, as impersonal as a Dzin master, as unforgiving as a demon.