Sonnebrandt joined the rest of the group at Goddard a day before the Ishtar's scheduled departure for an overview and briefing. They flew out early the next morning to be shuttled up to orbit from the UNSA launch terminal in Virginia. As fate would have it, the flight up turned out to be the same one that the travel agency had booked for Mildred, who was also traveling from the DC area. "What a wonderful surprise, Christian!" she declared when she came aboard, festooned with bags and purses, and found them there. "You were holding back on me. You had this planned all along!"
"What can I tell you?" Danchekker answered. Which was as good a way as any of saying something while saying nothing.
Thurien interstellar transportation worked on the same basis as their communications, which involved spinning artificially generated charged black holes up to speeds that drew them out into toroids. The singularity deformed to become aperture through the center, which could be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects and gave access to the hyperrealm known as h-space that connected the universe (or, more strictly now, "our" universe, out of the countless universes making up the Multiverse) by paths that bypassed the limitations of ordinary spacetime. The difference, however, was that while communications could be effected via microscopic-size ports located conveniently close to Earth in satellites or, at the cost of some heavy structural engineering, down on the surface, transportation required ports large enough to admit whatever was being transported. Projecting such ports where and when they were needed was one of the things that VISAR handled as part of its function as general manager of the infrastructure that the Thurien civilization rested on. The energy to create the toroids was also directed through h-space, produced by the consumption of matter from the cores of burnt-out stars at colossal generating systems constructed in older parts of the local galaxy. Projecting transportation-size ports into planetary systems would have produced gravitational disturbances sufficient to create havoc with clocks and calendars. Standard practice was therefore to project them far enough away outside for such effects to be negligible. Hence, vessels were needed to get to them. Thurien interstellar craft used regular gravitic drives-essentially the principle that the Shapieron had been built around-to travel to an entry port, and from the exit port to the final destination. This meant that a typical point-to point journey between star systems would take in the order of a few days.
The Thurien craft that took Hunt and the earlier group to Jevlen had been immense-more in the nature of a mini artificial world that Thuriens used for long stays in remote parts of the Galaxy, and in which some chose to reside permanently. The Ishtar, by contrast, was more in keeping with what most Terrans would have thought of as the dimensions of a "ship." It grew larger on the forward display screen inside the cabin as the shuttle from Virginia closed: bright yellow-gold in color, sleek and streamlined, flaring out into two crossed, curvy delta forms at the tail, designed like most Thurien craft for descent through planetary atmospheres without the rigmarole of intermediate transfers in orbit. At Earth, however, the several planned surface bases with facilities to service them were still under construction. In the meantime, there was no need for such clumsy provisions as fitting Thurien and Terran vessels with compatible docking hardware. The Ishtar simply projected a force shell from its docking-port side to enclose a zone between itself and the shuttle, and filled it with air. The passengers were conveyed across the intervening space, open to the void and the stars, by similar means, on an invisible conveyor-somewhat unnerving for first-timers, but fast and easy. With the larger Thurien craft things were even simpler: they contained internal docking bays that opened to admit the entire surface shuttle, capable of accommodating a dozen or more at a time.
A small reception committee of Thuriens was waiting to greet the arrivals inside the entry port. The first formality was to issue each of the Terrans with a flesh-colored disk about the size of a dime that attached behind the ear and coupled into the neural system to provide an audio-visual link to VISAR, which could then act as interpreter. The devices were known as "avcos"-for audio-visual coupler-and could be used down on Earth where equipment existed that could communicate with the orbiting Thurien h-space relays. This was true at Goddard, and Hunt still had one of the devices in his desk drawer from his last trip. But for little better reason than habit, he preferred to stick to a regular old-fashioned seefone when he was at home. A few people there wore their Thurien avco disks ostentatiously as a status symbol, making great shows of removing, reattaching, and pretending to clean them.
"Welcome back, Vic," the familiar voice of VISAR said, seemingly in his ear but actually activated inside his head. "I see you're getting restless again." The disk also projected images into the visual field when required. This wasn't the full Thurien total-neural experience, but it afforded universal voice communication to anywhere, with supplementary visuals that could be generated from the optical neuronics of senders using their eyes effectively as TV cameras. Once it caught on, it would be the end of the line for the Terran phone business, Hunt supposed.
"Hello, VISAR. Yes, we're back in your territory again." Hunt faced the waiting Thuriens. "So who have we here?"
The deputation was headed by the Ishtar's first officer, Bressin Nylek, who had come to pay compliments on behalf of the ship's commander. It seemed that Calazar had sent a note personally to make sure that Hunt's party was well taken care of. Madam Xyen Chien was aboard and would join them after they had settled in. As was normal Thurien practice by now with vessels sent to Earth, a section of the ship had been adapted for Terran tastes and proportions-the average Ganymean was around eight feet tall. After taking them there, the Thuriens would stop by the lounge area later.
"Who is this that I'm hearing from?" Mildred inquired, looking around after experimenting with her disk. "Are you the driver?"
"In a manner of speaking, I suppose you could say," VISAR answered, coming in on everyone's circuit since she had made the question general.
"Can you tell me about Lynx? Is she all right? She came up in her case with the baggage."
"Who's Lynx?" Hunt asked subvocally.
"Her cat," VISAR returned. Then, in a more public-sounding voice, "Never better. A steward will bring her to your cabin."
"Ah, splendid. I couldn't leave her in Washington. I know nobody there would have fed her correctly. She's very highly strung and diet-sensitive, you know."
"God help us all," Hunt heard Danchekker mutter, turning his head away.
As in their cities back home, the Thuriens also employed their gravitic technology to shape the environments inside their spacecraft. Since "up" and "down" could be defined locally and vary progressively from place to place, interiors didn't conform to the layers-of-boxes theme reflected in practically all Terran designs regardless of the attempts to disguise it. Everything merged in a confusion of corridors, shafts, and intersecting spaces, surfaces that served as floors in one place curving to become walls somewhere else with no sense of rotation as one passed from one to the other. Through it all, Thuriens were being conveyed unconcernedly this way and that on by currents of force similar to that which had brought the new arrivals across from the shuttle, traversing the ship in all directions like invisible elevators. But when they came to the Terran section of the ship, everything suddenly became rectilinear, verticality reasserted itself, and recognizable walls and floors emerged around corridors leading past lines of doors. Because that was what Terrans were used to, and how they liked things to be.