"And that smells like real coffee."
"It is. The catering manager here ordered a list of things on the last ship that came from Earth."
"Much appreciated. Do pass it on," Danchekker said.
"We try to please."
"You've been talking to VISAR," Hunt quipped, and then even as he said it, remembered it was VISAR's translation that he was listening to. "What should we call you?" he asked to move away from the subject.
"Ithel. I live here in the city part of the time, and also on a world called Borsekon. The surface is all ice and snow, ocean and mountains. We make long journeys there alone-disconnected from VISAR for days at a time. You're really, totally 'there.' The solitude is very spiritual."
"What about school?" Danchekker asked. It seemed a fair question by what Mildred guessed to be Ithel's age. "Do you take care of that here, on Thurien, or is it divided between the two?" Ithel didn't seem to follow the question. "Where youngsters go to learn," Danchekker said. "To prepare them for life."
Ithel smiled uncertainly. "Life is its own preparation," she answered, but still without seeming really to have understood. However it was instilled, politeness seemed to come naturally to young Thuriens, Mildred had observed. Unlike the situation that had become depressingly the norm in some places on Earth, they didn't confuse courtesy with subservience or equate assertiveness with being obnoxious and rude. Thurien education system was another item on Mildred's long list to investigate. In fact, it was first on her agenda today.
"I'd like to talk with you if I may, Ithel," she said. "When you have some free time. There are a lot of questions I think you could help with in connection with the work that brings me here. How would you like to be in a book read all over Earth?"
"Really? Of course!"
"What do I do to get in touch? Just ask VISAR?"
"Yes."
"I'll do that, then. Thank you very much."
"My privilege."
Ithel went away. Danchekker poked curiously at preparation that looked like a cheese omelette with some kind of chopped, red vegetable mixed in, garnished with herbs and covered with a clear gravy. Hunt answered Mildred's earlier question.
"MP2's working, but so far with nothing very exciting to report. Yes, we're sending objects off into other universes that are bigger and more complex than the specks of molecules and crystal flakes that the machine over at Quelsang handles."
"My word," Mildred remarked. "That just goes to show how quickly your ideas of what's exciting deteriorate. A couple of months ago you'd have been leaping around the room and whooping if you'd been able to say that."
Hunt acknowledged with an upturned hand and went on, "But we've no idea where they end up-or even if they end up anywhere. They might just keep on going until the wave function disperses."
Whatever that meant. "I thought Chien had come up with a way of stopping them," Mildred said, at least managing to construe that much.
"We think so," Hunt agreed. "But so far there's no way to be sure. The Thuriens have done tests that involve moving things from here to there around Thurien, and even via h-space to other star systems. And in those cases, sure, it seems to work. But that's all still within this universe. It doesn't prove that it works when you're going transversely across the MV."
"Going horizontally, between universes," Mildred said.
"You are coming along," Danchekker told her.
Hunt continued, "The only way we'll be able to find out is by sending something that's able to communicate back. But we still haven't overcome the problem of time lines coming together around the projector and getting mixed up. It means that any message you get back out of it is a composite of different inputs all scrambled up. Totally incoherent. You can't get any sense out of it. It's clear now what that other version of myself was trying to tell us back at the beginning. Convergence is the big thing we have to solve."
Mildred thought about it while she stirred her coffee. "But they must have solved it-in the other universe that he was from. Because you were communicating."
"Exactly. That's the galling part. And I'm certain he was going to tell us how, but we lost the connection. If we'd had a battery of Thurien sensors and detectors in the area they way they have here, we'd probably have stood a good chance of figuring out how they did it."
"It sounds a bit like tuning a radio," Mildred said. "You know, you've got signals everywhere from all these stations at once, and somehow you have to pick out just the one you want. I've never really understood how that works. Well, yes, I know you 'tune a circuit.' But what does that mean?"
"Close," Hunt granted. "But in this case you're more jumping from one channel to another all the time instead of having them all there at once. If you could find some way of locking on to just one, that might work. But what is there about it, exactly, do you lock on to? As far as we can make out, It would involve identifying some kind of quantum signature that's unique to that particular universe. VISAR has been churning through permutations for a while now, but with no luck so far. The computations are horrendous, even by Thurien standards."
But it was a touchy matter with him, and on reflection she decided it would be more tactfully broached when they were alone. So they spent the rest of the meal talking about Thurien social customs and the latest stories about weird time line convergence effects instead. Then, Hunt and Danchekker left to collect the things they needed for the day. Mildred waited to have a few more words with Ithel, and then proceeded from the dining area to the space at the rear of the building where the cubicles containing the full-neural virtual travel couplers were located. She could have used the one in her room, but these were closer. The feeling of slipping out of reality as her mind opened into a vast internal void was by now familiar. She had asked VISAR to see if it could arrange for her to visit a Thurien "school."
Mildred found herself out of doors beside what could have been a river or an inlet of sea, surrounded by a small, rambling town. The houses were ornate and colorful, mixing all manner of styles, modest in scale, simple and functional compared to some of the things she had seen. She got the feeling this was an old town that hadn't changed much in a long time. Steep, tree-covered hills gouged by valleys rose behind the houses. The sky was sunny with a few clouds, the air warm, stirring enough to carry a hint of forest scents. Mildred was standing inside an area of yard by the water's edge, screened by a fence from a row of buildings. In the upper parts of one of them, some Thuriens were sitting out on a deck in front of a window opening through to the interior. The yard contained a few sheds by the water, another building behind, complicated-looking things with hoists and tackle, and a small dock. About a dozen Thurien children and two adults that Mildred could see were busy around the dock. They were building a boat.
"Oh…" Mildred looked around again, as if to check her bearings. She knew by now that if she was careless and stepped on a rope or something she would trip and feel the tumble-without actually bruising herself or breaking anything, of course. Her voice carried a note of doubt sufficient to cue VISAR.
"You rang?"
"Yes, er… this is all very nice, VISAR, but maybe I wasn't clear enough. What I wanted to see was a school-you know, where children learn the basic things they have to know for living in a community."
"Yes, I know. This is how they learn them. Or it might be laying out a garden and tending it to make things grow; renovating a theater and creating a play for it; building a machine with hands and tools the ancient way; exploring the arts of athletics or dance; learning to handle animals… It depends on what they're interested in or think they can do. This is where they find out."
"Isn't there any standardizing process that they all have to go through to conform?" She realized as she heard herself using the words that some part of her was already anticipating the response.