Only Terrans could have produced the myths that mindless, undirected matter could organize itself into living organisms able to communicate emotion and thought, or that the universe had begun in unimaginable violence out of nothing. They projected their inner natures into what they saw, and then convinced themselves that what they were seeing was external reality. The Thuriens knew that the programs that directed life did not originate on planets, although planetary systems were the assembly stations where the programs found expression in the bewildering number of ways that conditions across a galaxy made possible. The seeds were brought by the cosmic wind. Where they came from, how they were produced, by what agency, and for what purpose were the prime mysteries that had become the quest of Thurien science to answer, and one of the imperatives driving their expansion. There was evidence of strange conditions behind the obscuring clouds and increasing star concentration at the very center the Galaxy-and the core regions of other galaxies too. But the Thuriens had not penetrated far enough yet to learn more. Their period of apathy and stagnation, when they achieved immortality and as a consequence little else that was of any importance for aeons, had cost them much. To be inspired by dreams and embark on quests to make them come true required the constant reinvigoration of youth. That realization was what caused the Thuriens to revert to the old way and accept nature and its seasons.
Was the violence of humans an inescapable flaw in their makeup? Or was it a perversion of something irrepressible that might be harnessed to direct at constructive ends the same furious energy with which it was able to destroy? Perhaps it was because of their unique origins in ancient Ganymean genetic manipulations, but the Thuriens had met nothing anywhere that compared with them. From what had seemed hopeless beginnings in the face of impossible odds to just before the tragedy that eventually befell Minerva, the speed at which the ancestral Lunarian civilization had emerged and advanced was astounding, mocking the Ganymean experience-which itself surpassed every other race they had encountered since. Eesyan had reported that despite their younger science and limited technical grounding, Hunt and his group were already having a significant impact on the project. What might the impact be of both cultures fully mature, working in combination?
Showm's thoughts went back again to her conversation here in this same place with Mildred. Exactly that situation might long ago have come to be, if the Lunarians hadn't been deflected from their path by the intrusion of Jevelenese fugitives. The Lunarians before then had worked cooperatively toward the goal of migrating to Earth. Could it be that the later pathological instability of the Terrans was not something innate to their humanness at all, but a product of traumas they had undergone? The catastrophic war that had dashed the hopes they had been building for generations, culminating in the destruction of their world; the experiences of the last, tiny band marooned on the lunar desert; the renewed hope of beginning again when they were transported to Earth, only to be devastated once more in the convulsions unleashed by the capture of the orphaned Moon. What else could they have become but creatures brutalized to self-preservation as the first instinct for survival? What other philosophy of life and the cosmos would they be capable of producing?
Such reflections assailed Showm insistently. Maybe she had been too harsh in her judgment of humans. And that was important, because the answer the Thuriens finally accepted as to why Terrans were the way they were would determine their eventual decision on how Earth would be dealt with. The debate had been continuing privately among the Thuriens ever since the Jevlenese plans and machinations were exposed.
Showm felt an excitement stirring deep inside her as the thought that had been forming for days finally crystallized. Maybe it was no longer necessary for such a crucial matter to depend on debates and speculation. Eesyan's scientists were talking about sending out packages of instruments to explore and sample the Multiverse from the facility they were building at MP2. Another universe had already transported the communications device that contacted Hunt back on Earth. Broghuilio's Jevlenese ships had actually gone back to Lunarian Minerva.
The technology to do it was all there. Why grow weary debating to exhaustion how much like Terrans the pretrauma Lunarians might or might not have been-with all the attendant risk of coming up with the wrong answer anyway-when the matter could be settled objectively by observation? They could send reconnaissance probes there and find out! Now that it appeared they had the ability, it would be an injustice to the human race not to make the effort. And Showm couldn't abide the thought of that. The humans had suffered enough injustice from Ganymeans already.
As a child, Showm had listened to stories of the world their race had come from long ago, and the barbarians who inherited it and destroyed it. It was the standard, simplified fare that Thurien parents told their children. Only now was she beginning to realize how much those images had shaped the attitudes she had been carrying all her life. Her way of interpreting the realization was that the soul whom her experiences served, in its realm that existed beyond the Multiverse, had learned something worthwhile and significant already.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
To the Terran mind, the extent to which Thuriens went in "wiring" their cities and other environments with sensors to provide authentic inputs for their reality simulations seemed bafflingly elaborate. Even regions that were sparsely populated, or in cases not inhabited at all, were subject to broad surveillance by satellite and other means to enable plausible reconstructions of local scenes and conditions by interpolation. It seemed that the dictate of balancing cost against benefit that was the first consideration of every designer, project planner, and program manager on Earth played no part in whatever process the Thuriens applied in deciding what was to be done, and how. Either that, or the concepts of "cost" and "benefit" meant very different things from what they did on Earth.
Even the voids of space around planets and other habitats, and the regular traffic lanes within planetary systems, were monitored to a degree that would have struck Terrans as pointless. It meant, however, that a network of imaging pickups and other detectors likely to spot any unusual events was already distributed through the volume affected by the MP2 experiment. VISAR estimated that the chances of at least one intruder from a different reality appearing somewhere in that region of space were about even. The surveillance system was primed to be on the lookout accordingly.
It happened when MP2 was being readied for the first attempts at transporting sizeable and more complex test objects. Hunt was in the tower at Quelsang, going over proposals that had been put forward for the kinds of objects that should be sent, when VISAR came through to announce that the sensor scanning processor covering a region about a hundred thousand miles out on the far side of Thurien had reported anomalies consistent with the sudden appearance of something that shouldn't be there. A replay of the image captured by analyzers directed at the location showed what appeared to be some kind of instrument package: an open framework containing antennas, and other bits of engineering, the whole about the size of a regular upright chair. It sustained itself for just over eleven seconds, and then broke up. But not in the sense of coming to pieces; it more, just faded away-growing indistinct and then dissolving into nothing. It was exactly what the scientists had been hoping for. Without even bothering to convene together, they excitedly suspended whatever else they were doing in the various places they happened to be, to go over the information the detectors had recorded and see what could be made of it.