Hunt's bags had already arrived in his cabin when the party's Thurien escorts delivered him to the door. VISAR could have guided them, of course, but the personal touch was nice-presumably a part of the crew's response to Calazar's prompting. The interior was comfortable and showed the usual Thurien knack for thinking of everything, Hunt saw as he deposited the office case that he had carried with him and hung his overjacket in the closet. A coffeepot and ingredients stood on a side table, and a robe and slippers were laid out in the bathroom. He came back out to the main room of the cabin and checked the selection of drinks and snacks in the cold storage by the coffeemaker and cabinet above. "Aha, gotcha, VISAR," he murmured. "You're slipping. No Guinness."
"On tap at the bar in the lounge area," the computer replied. Hunt sighed and went back out from the cabin to find the lounge area, where he had arranged to meet Josef Sonnebrandt.
Sonnebrandt was already there, sitting in an armchair at a corner table with an Oriental woman that Hunt recognized from pictures accompanying various writings of hers that he had read as Xyen Chien. Danchekker and Mildred were a short distance away with two Thuriens who seemed to be the focus of Mildred's attentions. A number of other Terrans that Hunt hadn't met were also dispersed around the room, many of them again Asian. Apparently, a group was going back with the Ishtar to reciprocate the Thurien visit. The bar was appropriately stocked with Eastern beers, wines, other beverages, and foods too, Hunt noticed.
The German stood as Hunt joined them-a gesture one didn't see very often these days. He was medium in height and build, with a somewhat overgrown mane of dark, curly hair, dressed casually in a khaki bush shirt with chest pockets and epaulettes, and over it a Western style brown leather vest. "Dr. Hunt. We meet face to face at last," he greeted. "So this is a Thurien starship. You have been in them before, of course. At least, we will remain sane in this part of it, yes? Out there is like being carried through an Escher drawing."
Madam Xyen was perhaps around fifty, as far as Hunt could judge, allowing for the tendency he'd noticed for Orientals to look younger than Westerners thought they should. Her hair was tied high, secured by a jeweled silver clip, and she wore a plain lilac dress with a dark blue shoulder cape. She had a composed air about her, taking in Hunt with a long, penetrating look from dark, depthless eyes that seemed to read everything that external appearances could convey; but her face softened into an easy enough smile when he introduced himself. Hunt's first impression was of a person totally in control, who saw the world for precisely what it was, without pretensions or delusions, and revealed back to it in turn just as much of herself and her thoughts as she chose to.
A four-foot-high serving robot floating a few inches above the floor on some kind of Thurien g-cushion arrived at the table to ask Hunt what it could get for him. He settled for a pot of green Chinese tea and an Indonesian dish that sounded like a spicy meat-and-vegetable pita bread sandwich. "Do you have a name we should use?" he asked the table attendant.
"No, sir. Such has never been the custom." Uncannily, whatever was guiding it reproduced a perfect Jeeves intonation.
"Then from now on, you are…" Hunt eyed its silvery metallic curves, carrying tray, and manipulator appendages thoughtfully for a moment, "Vercingetorix… No, wait, Sir Vercingetorix. Aptly to be known as Sir Ver. What do you think?"
"As you wish, sir."
Chien chuckled delightedly. "Brilliant," Sonnebrandt, acknowledged, raising his glass toward Hunt. It looked as if it contained a lager beer.
"Is this one of your sidelines, VISAR?" Hunt inquired as the robot glided Jeevishly away.
"I suppose you could say, a distant cousin," VISAR replied in his head. "Mainly locally autonomous, but when it gets hit with something like that, it checks back with me."
After some initial socializing, the conversation got down to the business at hand. The first thing that Sonnebrandt and Chien wanted to hear was Hunt's account of the encounter with his alter ego in his own words. It was one of the few occasions when Hunt regretted not availing himself of the option to keep a recorded log of his phone exchanges in the way many people did. Maybe it had something to do with his English upbringing, but it always seemed to him to smack of lawsuit phobia, security paranoia, and other practices of the neurotic society now fading into history. It was persistently rumored that the communications companies still kept copies of everything that flowed through their channels anyway, but requests from the top levels of UNSA, stressing the importance of the matter, had produced only apologetic denials and assurance that the claim was an urban legend from way back that just wouldn't die. He went through what had been said during the exchange and all the analyses that had been repeated since, and gave his reasons for believing that the device had been an unmanned relay injected into orbit. His tea and snack arrived while he was talking.
"The analogy with the Dirac sea is interesting," Chien said when Hunt had finished. He had reiterated in his communications with Sonnebrandt the point he had made with Caldwell, and Sonnebrandt had passed it on to Chien. "Propagation in the manner of the Jevlenese processing matrix very well could explain pair production and annihilation." The same thought had occurred to Hunt and Sonnebrandt.
"What do we know about the actual propagation mechanics?" Chien asked. "Can we say anything yet about the kind of physics involved? What is it that actually switches 'states'?"
"I've got a hunch that it results from a longitudinal mode of what we observe as electromagnetic radiation," Sonnebrandt said. "I've been playing around with the possible implications. I think this might be it." Hunt and Chien were aware that the standard forms of Maxwell's equations only yielded a transverse vibration. They described electric and magnetic fields varying in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the wave's motion, like waves traveling along a jiggled rope, or a cork bobbing up and down as a water wave passes by. There was nothing comparable to waves of alternating compression and rarefaction in the direction of propagation, as occurs with sound, for example.
"Would that mean we're talking about a comparable velocity, too?" Hunt asked.
Sonnebrandt shook his head. "Not necessarily. The velocity constant c comes out of the differential equations that apply to the kind of changing universe that we perceive. Longitudinal propagation would involve a different set of magnitudes entirely. The same underlying matrix, but completely different physics-in the way that water can carry both sound waves and surface waves. But they're totally different phenomena." Hunt nodded. It was about what he'd told Caldwell.
"What about these 'convergences' that this other version of you mentioned?" Chien asked. "They sounded important. Have you been able to make anything more of what he meant?"
"Not really," Hunt confessed. "At first I wondered if it was a reference to this line of thinking that we're talking about here-matrix propagation-converging with the h-space approach that the Thuriens have been experimenting with, but that seems too vague. We pretty well know that much already. As you just said, it sounds like something more important."
"I thought it might have referred to some kind of mathematical convergence, but I've found nothing that it could apply to," Sonnebrandt said.
"VISAR went through the equations that Josef sent, too," Hunt told both of them. "It couldn't come up with anything either." Sonnebrandt shrugged in a way that said he could add nothing to that.
"Then let's hope more turns up when we get together with the Thuriens," Chien concluded.
Hunt finished his snack and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Tell me more about this project you've got going with them out in the desert in Xinjiang," he said to Chien. He knew that the object was to set up an experimental tap into the Thurien h-space power grid with a view to later extending its availability on Earth. Misgivings had been voiced in some quarters about the economic implications.