True, the transmissions from probes projected back in time were traveling across the Multiverse and into their future. But the MV equations talked about the projection energy of the defining wave function, not the subsequent flow of signal energy and information. In their case this had been supplied from the sending end.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
If Porthik Eesyan had been of an inclination to place bets, he would just have lost out spectacularly. Betting on outcomes of events was not a habit among Thuriens, and they had nothing comparable to organized gambling on sports; but it was catching on as part of the general Terran influence. Although he had wished his scientists well, his personal belief had been that it was too early yet to expect coherent communications with another part of the Multiverse. They had barely finished the tests after installing the bubble generator at MP2, and that was little more than the original lab prototype, patched and modified as experience was gained and then hastily rushed out as soon as the first consistent results were confirmed. But the instrumentation people, inspired by the glimpses they had caught of probes actually arriving from other realities, had already been pressing ahead with designs of sensor packages and communications relays of their own. When the bubble turned out to be the answer to convergence, there had been no restraining them. It wasn't like the old days of orderly, planned and controlled progress at all. Eesyan put it down to another example of Terran influence making itself felt-this time inside his own department!
Terrans!
Like most Thuriens, he still hadn't arrived at a final analysis concerning this race of emotional, opinionated, aggressive and squabblesome, pink-to-black dwarves. The aspect of them that troubled Frenua Showm was their violence-appalling enough, to be sure; and how it could be elevated to being admired as a virtue, with honors bestowed for proficiency in commanding it and whole industries devoted to optimizing its results, was a question that was surely the proper province only of psychiatrists. But Showm was a sociologist of exo-cultures and a political historian, and factors like that were central to her work. That side of Terran nature rarely affected Eesyan directly. The side of them that was more apparent from the standpoint of scientific advisor and research director, especially with regard to the conduct of this joint project he was now committed to, was their impulsiveness.
The traditional Thurien ways might seem slow and cautious by comparison, but they were solid and reliable. In the Great Age of expansion, when Minerva had been left to the Lunarians, who subsequently destroyed it, earlier generations of Thuriens had built the cores of the huge cities, created the foundations of the network that grew into VISAR, and engineered an energy conversion and distribution system that connected far-flung star systems. All of these creations did what they were designed to do, and they didn't fail. No Thurien engineer could have conceived how things could be otherwise. Would a chef be acceptable who only poisoned the odd guest or two occasionally? Eesyan had heard stories from Earth of equipment being installed with known flaws, vehicles going out of control, structures falling down-usually through overzealous pursuit of their upside-down value system that rewarded ownership of wealth more than the creation of it-but what went on there was their business.
When it started impacting programs that he was responsible for, however, it was another matter. To have come from the first successful experiments at Quelsang to launching a functioning communications probe from MP2 in six months was, to Eesyan's mind, unpardonably reckless. The greatest factor contributing to the success had been pure luck, and looking back, it had been thanks to nothing more that no irremediable consequence of convergence had been experienced at Quelsang before they realized what was happening-such as being stuck with a duplicate of somebody marooned from another universe. And even then, he had been so touched himself by the rush of enthusiasm that he had let himself be persuaded to order just that the power be reduced, when the correct thing would have been to shut everything down until they had some idea of what they were doing. He attributed it to the Terrans. They could exhibit failings and live with consequences that would condemn a Thurien to a lifetime of dejection and remorse. Most Thuriens deplored it, although some saw it as a strength that it would serve them to have more of themselves at times-for instance, over the ongoing hangups about some of the actions of their distant ancestors. Eesyan had no firm opinion either way. What he did know just at this point, however, was that he wasn't sure how to deal with it.
He was on his way to see Calazar, at Calazar's request, and was fairly certain it was in connection with Showm. He had followed Hunt's dialogue with the probe while in a g-line conveying him through Thurios to the Government Center. That the meeting with Calazar was to be face-to-face rather than conducted virtually meant it was more than just casual or routine business. More than likely, Eesyan suspected, it had something to do with the semiannual convening of the Grand Assembly, a formal affair involving delegates not only from the Provinces of Thurien but the various dependency worlds and major off-planet habitat groupings as well, due to commence in two days time. Having known Calazar for as long as he had, Eesyan had been forming the impression for some time that Calazar had been saving something important that he intended to announce at the occasion.
Eesyan's guess was that it had to do with the proposal Showm had put to Calazar a while ago now, and brought up again at intervals since, to send a series of sophisticated reconnaissance probes back to Minerva as it existed before the Lunarian schism that led to the final, fatal war. She wanted to find out if the usual depiction of the Lunarians as a cooperative and progressive race up until that time was accurate, or just a popular myth. Supposedly, it would answer the question of whether Terran paranoia and violence were inherent parts of their nature or aberrations caused by their experiences, and therefore, conceivably, redressable. If the latter, then the Thurien policy, she argued, should be one of total commitment to compassion and working positively toward establishing Earth as a member of the galactic community, with no room for talk of shutting them off from it. "Total" commitment meant dismantling the containment option. The first time he heard this, Eesyan had been astonished. Frenua had always been one of the staunchest hard-liners.
The stream of Thurien figures that Eesyan was flowing with entered a labyrinth of ports, tunnels, and multifarious interconnecting spaces extending in all directions in the lower levels of the Center. Local gravity at any place came with the architecture, and individuals detached and merged and sped away above, below, and all around. Terrans were invariably lost in seconds. Eesyan diverted toward a shaft leading up into the main body of the building.
He was against the idea. For one thing, Frenua and the advocates she had rallied were underestimating the technical problems wildly-although this might be a difficult point to convince them of in view of the successes that had recently been achieved. Sending simple instrument packages obviously wouldn't tell them the kinds of things that Showm wanted to know. It would require accessing libraries and archives in the way VISAR had just demonstrated, and that in turn presupposed connecting into the communications system. But achieving that with a closely related version of Earth that was only six months old-and Eesyan was surprised that even that had worked-was a very different matter from doing something comparable with a Minerva of fifty thousand years ago. At least the style of technology, codes, access procedures and a whole host of other factors relating to Earth were familiar, even if some of the details differed-and resolving even those had been far from a trivial matter, even for VISAR. What they would be up against in the case of Minerva, they had absolutely no idea. Nothing about the Lunarian practices or conventions at that time was known. Thuriens were reluctant to use the word "impossible"-they had managed quite a few things in the end, in their own plodding way, that left Terrans speechless-but in this instance, Eesyan thought it came close.