"Is it… I mean, is it real?" Mildred asked, looking down and from side to side as if checking her other senses. "Or something that VISAR is putting into our heads?"
"Oh, it exists precisely as you perceive it," Danchekker assured her. "A whim exercised by the Thurien architects of long ago, probably to show off their dexterity with the new science of integral gravitic structural engineering, which was developed at around that time. The Thuriens use it extensively, as you will already have gathered."
"So is that why I feel normal?… No, wait a minute. VISAR can inject the right stimuli to make you feel normal, anyway, can't it? What I'm trying to say is, if we were really here physically… there, whatever… would we still feel normal, with everything just looking wrong? Not upside down. The local gravity is normal but inverted?"
"Precisely so," Danchekker confirmed.
A Thurien who had been pacing slowly out by the rim when they appeared from one of the ramps from the interior, and who was now only a short distance away, changed direction toward them. The Terrans turned to face him as he drew closer. His face was lined and seemed old, his furrowed crown a subdued mix of streaky browns and grays that gave the impression of being faded.
"Forgive me if this is an intrusion," he said. "I am not familiar with the ways of Terrans. But it's the first opportunity I've had to speak with people from your world."
"Not at all," Hunt said cheerfully. "It would be a long way to come and not want to talk to anyone." He introduced himself and the others and added, "All in Thurios." When meeting in a virtual recreation of a setting, it was customary to state where one was located physically. It was evident that the Thurien was actually somewhere else also; had he been physically at the tower in Vranix, and therefore not neurally coupled into the system, he wouldn't be interacting with them. "Mildred is writing a book on your society. We're giving her a quick introductory tour of Thurien."
"My name is Kolno Wyarel. On Nessara, a planet of Callantares, a star you've probably never heard of." His manner became more relaxed. "But I was Thurien-born originally… a long time ago, now."
"With a system like this, you're never really away," Mildred observed. "Has it changed much?"
"Oh, Vranix never changes much."
"Is Vranix the part of Thurien that you're from?" Danchekker inquired, making a heroic effort at being genial.
"I studied music and philosophy here." Wyarel looked around. A faint smile touched his features. "It is where my wife, Asayi, and I met when we were young. Our favorite memories are of these places. So every once in a while we come back here to relive them a little."
"Will she…" Hunt wasn't sure if Wyarel meant that they came here together, or that Wyarel came to be reminded. He broke of the question that he had begun to frame, realizing that it might be indelicate.
The Thurien understood and gave a short laugh. "Yes, she's fine. She was supposed to be here by now, but no doubt she got distracted by something. VISAR says she isn't online yet. Don't worry about it. It happens all the time. She's somewhere in the same house as me."
"A universal proclivity of the female, it would appear," Danchekker observed.
"Oh, don't pontificate so, Christian," Mildred chided. "What do you do now on… where was it?… Nessara," she asked Wyarel.
"It's what I suppose you would call a tropical planet, teeming with forests and life. Warm and humid by our standards, but you get used to it. We retired there to be among the life, and to contemplate. There is an inner awareness that learns to open out to these things."
"There used to be teachings like that on Earth, but we seem to have turned away from them." Mildred glanced at the two scientists with her. "Such things seem to be considered as gone out of style." Danchekker humphed and rocked from one foot to the other, refusing to be goaded.
"That's only natural. But it will be temporary," Wyarel said. "A culture must attend to its material needs before it can rise beyond them, just as we must eat before we can create the works that are to be found in Vranix. Thuriens have discovered and mastered the physical universe. Now we are discovering ourselves."
"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.