Hunt decided that it was time to talk with Danchekker. A call established that the professor was in a tower of the Quelsang complex adjacent to the block housing the Multiporter, which was where the space assigned for the Terrans was located. They had agreed that they would prefer to work alongside the Thurien scientists that Eesayan had brought together for the project, rather than be segregated on their own. That was fine by the Thuriens, of course. VISAR navigated him across to the other building and up through exotically styled spaces of curving architecture and ornate interiors that gave Hunt more the feeling of an Arabian palace or a Spanish cathedral than anything he was accustomed to thinking of as a scientific working environment. The robelike garb that seemed common among the occupants added to the effect. It could have been Plato's Academy adapted to hard engineering. The Thuriens made no hard and fast division between what Earth had come to views as arts and sciences. Everything they did, from carving a mural beside a path through an elevated park in Thurios to powering a spacecraft was an art, while every process that involved evaluating a matter of objective truth was "science."
Hunt found Duncan and Sandy familiarizing themselves with some of the Thurien equipment, guided by one of the Thurien students who had volunteered to help out. Sonnebrandt was elsewhere-very likely gone to make his peace with Chien, Hunt suspected. Danchekker was out on the balcony fronting the room, Duncan informed him. Hunt went on through and out the glass-panel doors. It was more a terrace garden than what Hunt would have thought of as a balcony. Danchekker was standing at the outer rail on the far side of some foliage and an artificial stream, admiring the surroundings. Hunt crossed the stream by a small footbridge and joined him. The edifices of marblelike surfaces and glass making up the rest of the institute bodied as much thought and expression as a sculpture, rising from landscaped rock and greenery amid gigantic Thurien trees.
"I thought the view from the top floor of Biosciences at Goddard was stimulating," Danchekker commented. "But after this, I fear it will never seem the same again. If I possess an artistic streak somewhere, I'm sure this is the kind of inspiration that would be required to express it. Did you ever read Oswald Spengler? He believed that human cultures are born, grow, flourish, and die to express a unique inner nature, just like any other living organism. The Thuriens are no different. Everything they do is a statement of what they are and how they view the world. It's probably impossible to change, anymore than you can make a sunflower seed grow into a rose. A ready answer, it would appear, to the futile attempts of one culture to impose itself upon another that make such a sorry story of so much of our history, don't you think?" Danchekker was in one of his expansive moods, which might make things easier, Hunt thought to himself. He was happy to remain out on the balcony, out of earshot from those inside.
"Where's Mildred today?" Hunt inquired.
"Off on travels of her own already. She's meeting with Frenua. A challenging encounter, possibly. But I have no doubt she will handle it well." Frenua Showm was the high-ranking Thurien female who would be Mildred's prime guide in organizing her researches. She had been among the few Thuriens to have suspected Jevlenese motives before the exposure of Broghuilio and his plans, and tended to generalize her reservations into a wary suspicion of humankind in general.
"Chris, about that minor disagreement at dinner last night…"
Danchekker turned from the rail, beaming magnanimously, and made a throwing-away gesture. "Oh, think nothing of it. We all have these lapses from time to time. This kind of travel is disorienting and stressful, even if it is measured in a mere day or two. And such abrupt switching to a totally different social and physical environment can only exacerbate it further."
"Yes, but I don't think it's anything like that. There's-"
Danchekker went on, "But I've been thinking about some of the other things that were talked about last night, that I wanted to bring up. The implications could be quite extraordinary. It goes back to something that Mildred said, again." Danchekker had already dismissed the former matter as a triviality, best forgotten, Hunt realized. He groaned inwardly to himself. It was almost impossible to effect course-change once Danchekker launched off into an idea that had seized him. The professor brought his thumbs up to his lapels in an unconscious mannerism signaling that he was in lecture mode. "You may recall that she refused to countenance the suggestion that literally every reality that's physically capable of existing does exist somewhere in the Multiverse. To be frank, Vic, I have long entertained reservations on that score myself, despite what you physics people tell us the formal mathematics might say. But I was never able to identify where, specifically, the model breaks down. I think Mildred may have put her finger on it."
This was the person who grumbled about how his cousin talked unstoppably, Hunt told himself.
Danchekker went on, "She said there isn't a universe anywhere in which her books are produced and sold with blank pages. And of course she has to be correct. What could be more preposterous? But what does your mathematics have to say about it, eh? How does a purely mechanical process distinguish a reality that's humanly plausible from one that unaided common sense says couldn't exist-ever, no matter how remote a probability is assigned to it? It can't. Therefore, your quantum formalism can't be an adequate description of reality, regardless of how successful it might be at predicting the outcomes, over a limited range, of certain kinds of experiments."
Hunt felt again the same confusion he had when Mildred brought this up. There had to be an answer, but he couldn't bring to mind what. It wasn't something he had been giving much thought to since.
"The implications could be profound indeed," Danchekker continued. "Consider this. Physics asks us to accept that the Multiverse in itself is timeless, yes? The sequence of change that we perceive is created by consciousness navigating a path through its succession of alternative branchings. Precisely how it does so is a mystery-and to dispel any rising hope that you might be entertaining at this juncture, not one that I am about to cast further light on now, I fear." Danchekker showed his teeth briefly at his concession to humor. "But the fact that it is able to do so at all perhaps furnishes us with the essential defining criterion for what consciousness is. In fact, I should go beyond that and say 'life.' For by what I'm proposing, it follows that all life is conscious to some degree. Let's not confuse it with self-awareness, which is a qualitatively different subset of the phenomenon I'm talking about."
"So what are you proposing?" Hunt asked, resigning himself. He was obviously going to have to hear it through in any case.
"This. An inanimate object is subject solely to the laws of chance. The future that it comes to experience-or the particular reality that a given version of it exists in, if one wishes to be pedantic about it-is determined by forces and probabilities external to itself. And that is the world that physics accurately describes. But a conscious entity-and by what I said a moment ago, I mean all living organisms-by altering its behavior, has the ability to change those probabilities. It can steer itself toward a future different from the one that it would otherwise have experienced-presumably one which by some means it evaluates as more desirable. The degree to which it is able to do this is, perhaps, a good indicator of how conscious it is. It's a criterion that could conceivably apply equally well within a sapient species, such as ourselves, as across all of life in general."
"Are you talking about plants as well? Bacteria? Fungi?"
Danchekker waved a hand dismissively. "Yes. They all react to environmental cues to improve their odds for living a better life."