Bewildered, she accompanied him out of the cluttered hut. In the compound, she halted and stared about her as if this were her first sight of Medea.
Port Kato was indeed tiny. Not to disturb regional ecology with things like ultraviolet lamps above croplands and effluents off them, it drew its necessities from older and larger settlements on the Nearside mainland. Moreover, while close to the eastern edge of Hansonia, it stood a few kilometers inland, on high ground, as a precaution against Ring Ocean tides, which could get monstrous. Thus nature walled and roofed and weighed on the huddle of structures, wherever she looked—
—or listened, smelled, touched, tasted, moved. In slightly lesser gravity than Earth’s, she had a bound to her step. The extra oxygen seemed to lend energy likewise, though her mucous membranes had not yet quite stopped smarting. Despite a tropical location, the air was balmy and not overly humid, for the island lay close enough to Farside to be cooled. It was full of pungencies, only a few of which she could remotely liken to anything familiar, such as musk or iodine. Foreign too were sounds—rustlings, trills, croakings, mumbles—which the dense atmosphere made loud in her ears.
The station itself had an outlandish aspect. Buildings were made of local materials to local design; even a radiant energy converter resembled nothing at home. Multiple shadows carried peculiar tints; in fact, every color was changed in this ruddy light. The trees that reared above the roof were of odd shapes, their foliage in hues of orange, yellow, and brown. Small things flitted among them or scuttled along their branches. Occasional glittery drifts in the breeze did not appear to be dust.
The sky was deep-toned. A few clouds were washed with faint pink and gold. The double sun Colchis—Castor C was suddenly too dry a name—was declining westward, both members so dim that she could safely gaze at them for a short while, Phrixus at close to its maximum angular separation from Helle.
Opposite them, Argo dominated heaven, as always on the inward-facing hemisphere of Medea. Here the primary planet hung low; treetops hid part of the great flattened disc. Daylight paled the redness of its heat, which would be lurid after dark. Nonetheless it was a colossus, as broad to the eye as fifteen or sixteen Lunas above Earth. The subtly chromatic bands and spots upon its face, ever-changing, were clouds more huge than continents and hurricane vortices that could have swallowed whole this moon upon which she stood.
Chrisoula shivered. “It… strikes me,” she whispered, “more than anywhere around Enrique or—or approaching from space… I have come elsewhere in the universe.”
Hugh laid an arm around her waist. Not being a glib man otherwise, he merely said, “Well this is different. That’s why Port Kato exists, you know. To study in depth an area that’s been isolated a while; they tell me the isthmus between Hansonia and the mainland disappeared fifteen thousand years ago. The local dromids, at least, never heard of humans before we arrived. The ouranids did get rumors, which may have influenced them a little, but surely not much.”
“Dromids—ouranids—oh.” Being Greek, she caught his meanings at once. “Fuxes and balloons, correct?”
Hugh frowned. “Please. Those are pretty cheap jokes, aren’t they? I know you hear them a lot in town, but I think both races deserve more dignified names from us. They are intelligent, remember.”
“I am sorry.”
He squeezed a trifle. “No harm done, Chris. You’re new. With a century needed for question and answer, between here and Earth—”
“Yes. I have wondered if it is really worth the cost, planting colonies beyond the Solar System just to send back scientific knowledge that slowly.”
“You’ve got more recent information about that than I do.”
“Well… the planetology, biology, chemistry, they were still giving new insights when I left, and this was good for everything from medicine to volcano control.” The woman straightened. “Perhaps the next step is in your field, xenology? If we can come to understand a nonhuman mind—no, two, on this world—maybe three, if there really are two quite unlike sorts of ouranid as I have heard theorized—” She drew breath. “Well, then we might have a chance of understanding ourselves.” He thought she was genuinely interested, not merely trying to please him, when she went on: “What is it you and your wife do? They mentioned to me in Enrique it is quite special.”
“Experimental, anyway.” Not to overdo things, he released her. “A complicated story. Wouldn’t you rather take the grand tour of our metropolis?”
“Later I can by myself, if you must go back to work. But I am fascinated by what I have heard of your project. Reading the minds of aliens!”
“Hardly that.” Seeing his opportunity, he indicated a bench outside a machine shed. “If you really would like to hear, sit down.”
As they did, Piet Marais, botanist, emerged from his cabin. To Hugh’s relief, he simply greeted them before hurrying off. Certain Hansonian plants did odd things at this time of day. Everyone else was still indoors, the cook and bull cook making breakfast, the rest washing and dressing for their next wakeful period.
“I suppose you are surprised,” Hugh commenced. “Electronic neuranalysis techniques were in their infancy on Earth when your ship left. They took a spurt soon afterward, and of course the information reached us before you did. The use there had been on lower animals as well as humans, so it wasn’t too hard for us—given a couple of geniuses in the Center—to adapt the equipment for both dromids and ouranids. Both those species have nervous systems too, after all, and the signals are electrical. Actually, it’s been more difficult to develop the software, the programs, than the hardware. Jannika and I are working on that, collecting empirical data for the psychologists and semanticians and computer people to use.
“Uh, don’t misunderstand, please. To us, this is nearly incidental. Mindscan—bad word, but we seem to be stuck with it—mindscan should eventually be a valuable tool in our real job, which is to learn how local natives live, what they think and feel, everything about them. However, at present it’s very new, very limited, and very unpredictable.”
Chrisoula tugged her chin. “Let me tell you what I imagine I know,” she suggested, “then you tell me how wrong I am.”
“Sure.”
She grew downright pedantic: “Synapse patterns can be identified and recorded which correspond to motor impulses, sensory inputs, their processing—and at last, theoretically, to thoughts themselves. But the study is a matter of painfully accumulating data, interpreting them, and correlating the interpretations with verbal responses. Whatever results one gets, they can be stored in a computer program as an n-dimensional map off which readings can be made. More readings can be gotten by interpolation.”
“Whe-ew!” the man exclaimed. “Go on.”
“I am right this far? I did not expect to be.”
“Well, naturally, you’re trying to sketch in a few words what needs volumes of math and symbolic logic to describe halfway properly. Still, you’re doing better than I could myself.”
“I continue. Now recently there are systems which can make correspondences between different maps. They can transform the patterns that constitute thought in one mind into the thought-patterns of another. Also, direct transmission between nervous systems is possible. A pattern can be detected, passed through a computer for translation, and electromagnetically induced in a receiving brain. Does this not amount to telepathy?”
Hugh started to shake his head, but settled for: “M-m-m, of an extremely crude sort. Even two humans who think in the same language and know each other inside out, even they get only partial information—simple messages, burdened with distortion, low signal-to-noise ratio, and slow transmission. How much worse when you try with a different life form! The variations in speech alone, not to mention neurological structure, chemistry—”