"Christian, this is exactly what I wanted!" Mildred said. Then, to Wyarel, "Could I feel free to get in touch again sometime, and talk more about this?"
"Of course. But there are times when we retreat from external affairs, you understand."
"It wouldn't be an imposition?"
"We would be honored… Excuse me for a moment." Wyarel stared distantly for a few seconds, then returned to the present. "That was VISAR with a message. Asayi had something to attend to concerning one of the klorgs-that's a domestic animal. We have several that come and go around the house. Now she's in the middle of a call from our daughter. Please, don't let me detain you any further. She would love to meet you, I'm sure, but it can always be another time. I am content enough here, alone with my thoughts."
"Females and cats," Danchekker murmured to himself, but not quite below his breath.
"Christian!" Mildred admonished.
They added the planet Nessara to their tour list and visited it next out of curiosity. The part that VISAR brought them to looked like the green rain-forest hills of the upper Amazon with a snow-capped wall of the Himalayas behind, but with greater richness of color and on an even grander scale. The waterfalls tracing their way down from the heights looked like chains of sparkling necklaces draped over the hills. VISAR supplied sensory inputs that faithfully reproduced the heat and the sultriness of the air, the scents and the sounds, even a realistic touch of clothing sliding clammily over moist skin. Hunt was amused to note that Danchekker unconsciously removed his virtual spectacles to wipe the lenses with his virtual handkerchief-there was no reason why VISAR should cause them to fog up.
"How careful do I have to be about what I'm thinking when we meet someone like Wyarel?" Mildred asked. "I mean, I can actually feel myself breathing more deeply up here, which I'm sure I'm really not doing. From what you've said, it must be VISAR doing things inside my head. How much else of what's inside there can it pull out?"
"You don't have to worry," Hunt told her. "In principle, yes, it could. But it doesn't. The Thuriens have strict codes about things like privacy. Unless a user specifically instructs otherwise, VISAR is limited to supplying primary sensory data and monitoring motor and a few other terminal outputs only. It communicates only what you'd see, hear, feel, and so on if you were there. It doesn't read minds."
"Well, that's good to know, anyway."
They floated immaterially like cosmic gods above a world that Danchekker had discovered before and insisted on visiting again. It described a complex orbit about a double star to produce conditions so extreme that its surface alternated between being ocean and desert. Nevertheless, it supported a range of astonishing life forms that were able to adapt, including a part-time fish that dissolved its bone structure and morphed into a lizardlike sand dweller when the dry part of the cycle approached. They visited a newly born world that was still an incandescent cauldron of lava flows and outgassing-instantly lethal in reality, but with just enough of the flavor imparted by VISAR to give them an idea of it. They stared in awe at an immense Thurien space construction thousands of miles in extent that formed part of one of the mass-conversion systems consuming burnt-out stars, from where energy was beamed through h-space to create the interstellar transport ports. They saw a world of vapors and canyons, where the population lived on artificial islands floating in the sky; a fairyland city carved out under an ice crust; and an extraordinary football-shaped world that spun about its short axis with its ends protruding beyond the atmosphere, where it was possible-after an enormous climb that required life-support gear-to jump off and be in orbit.
Finally, they found themselves inside what to Hunt and Danchekker were the familiar surroundings of the Command Deck of the ancient Ganymean starship, Shapieron. This was the vessel that had left the Solar System at the time of pre-Lunarian Minerva, before the Ganymeans migrated to Thurien, and returned only a few years ago, when Hunt and Danchekker were at Ganymede. The half-mile-high tower of once-gleaming metallic curves, pitted and discolored now as a result of its enforced exile, currently stood on the outskirts of a city called Shiban, on Jevlen. The exiles from the distant past had found adjusting to Thurien practically as difficult an experience as it was for Terrans. But they had found themselves a niche supervising the rebuilding of Jevlenese society after its deterioration and final collapse under the previous regime. Since the Ganymeans were interacting via Thurien neurocouplers, too, the "meeting" could as easily have taken place anywhere. But for reasons of nostalgia and old time's sake, everyone concerned had preferred to make it their old ship.
Garuth, who had been the commander of the Shapieron mission, greeted his two old friends and their guest warmly. With him were Shilohin, the female chief scientist, Rodgar Jassilane, the ship's engineering chief, and Monchar, Garuth's second-in-command. The Ganymeans from old-time Minerva were taller than Thuriens on average, not as dark in hue, and their crown coloring was less vivid. Also in attendance was ZORAC, the ship's controlling AI, an early precursor to VISAR, now coupled into the Shiban net to stand in for the decommissioned JEVEX.
The first topic that the Ganymeans wanted to hear about, of course, was the latest on the Multiverse project. Thuriens had no concept of secrecy, and bulletins detailing progress were produced regularly, but Garuth and the others wanted to hear Hunt and Danchekker's personal account. Hunt was able to fill them in on the fine structure of Multiverse segments and consequent ethereal passage of objects propagating through them, which he had learned himself only hours previously from Eesyan. The question again arose of how anything could be halted and stabilized so as to remain in one reality that a coherent picture could be derived from.
"Would it be feasible to create some kind of complementary M-wave that interferes destructively everywhere except at the target distance?" Shilohin wondered aloud. "Would that preserve the transmitted object as a standing resonance? It would probably still extend through many segments… but so what? Maybe you could fine tune your connection to any one of them." Nobody could argue with the thought, certainly; but just at the moment, it was purely abstract.
"It's an interesting idea. I'll bounce it off Eesyan," was all Hunt could offer in reply.
"You're still firing blind, though," Jassilane pointed out. "You called it a 'target.' But there's no form of feedback to identify one." He looked around. "You see what I mean? Suppose you wanted to send… oh…" he waved a hand, "the orbiting relay that this other universe sent to you. It seems to have appeared where and when it was supposed to. How did the senders know how to get it to where they wanted it?"
"I don't suppose we know enough about the Multiverse structure to preprogram the device to recognize features it's looking for?" Monchar ventured. "Like terrain-following flyers."
Hunt shook his head. "It depends too much on the way change occurs from one segment to the next-gradually or abruptly. And that varies with the MV dimension you move in. You could have practically stasis going one way, and total discontinuity if you choose another-a single quantum event being magnified, maybe, and triggering a transition to an entirely different reality. We have no idea how to model effects like that."
"To get where you want, you need a map. But you have to be there to draw one," ZORAC commented.
"Does this mean you're about to deliver one of your profound insights, ZORAC?" Hunt asked it.
"No. Just my take on the situation."
"Thanks."
There was not a lot more to be said on that for now. The talk shifted to the work of Garuth and his administration on Jevlen. The program was progressing well, with the Jevlenese getting over their total dependency on JEVEX and learning to mange their own affairs competently. Hunt had noticed from some of the outside views showing on the Command Deck's display screens that the city was looking cleaner and in better shape than the run-down, decaying condition it had been in when he last saw it. He wondered what Garuth and his people would do when their task here was complete. It seemed a question best not brought up at a time like this. But the Shapieron was not decommissioned or stood down from being launch capable in any way. It had played key roles in the ruse that had brought down Broghuilios's Jevlenese regime in the Pseudowar, and afterward, in defeating the mass mind-invasion of Jevlenese that the mental transplants from the Entoverse had intended. Hunt got the feeling that they would be hankering for an excuse to fly their ship again.