Hunt propped his elbows on the rail of the balcony, sighed, and stared out at the scene. Some Thuriens who looked like students waved up at him from a terraced enclosure some distance below. Hunt acknowledged with the brief raising of a hand. Yes, he knew he'd been out of line. What was getting into him? A fine way to begin a research project, he told himself glumly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Christian was always telling Mildred tactfully-as closely as he was capable of getting to the meaning of the word, anyway-that she talked too much. If it was true-and she had to concede him something of a point at times, she supposed-then she must try to watch herself and control the trait when she was with Thuriens, she reminded herself. She was here to learn, after all. The trouble was that she always had so many thoughts boiling around inside her head, and she was afraid that if she didn't give vent to them while they were there, they'd sink back below the surface and never come up again. Very probably, it could be exasperating for others sometimes. But surely it was preferable to being like all those people she met everywhere who never seemed to have a worthwhile thought of any kind at all.
Poor Christian! She knew she'd been a pest back in Washington, and he had always been dedicated to his work, even without all the responsibilities of his new job at Goddard. But this project involving a whole, totally different alien culture was so exciting! He was simply too valuable an authority on it all to have just let pass. And he had been a dear to try and extricate himself in such a gracious way, instead of just telling her bluntly that he didn't have the time, in the boorish way that most of the pompous professors she had met over the years would have done. So she had resolved to do her best not to be a deadweight and to cultivate some interest in this Multiverse business that he and the others were getting so involved in with the Thuriens. Actually, it was turning out to be far more interesting than she had ever imagined, even if some of the things they talked about didn't make sense; and she would strive to be independent in pursuing her own work, staying out of their hair as much as possible.
The office the Thuriens had given her to work in couldn't have been better contrived to make her feel at home. It had shelves of reassuringly solid books; a desk and furnishings of polished mahogany and walnut that suited her tastes, along with drapes and a carpet that blended in; a clutter of homey bric-a-brac that included a china-laden mantlepiece, flower vases, and a cuckoo clock; and diamond-paned windows looking out over a valley of the Bavarian Alps. This was hardly surprising, for VISAR had contrived it all to achieve just that. None of it was real, of course, but it all came with a simulated filing cabinet and notepads that she understood, and a work terminal on the desk that used the formats and procedures that she was familiar with back home. The nice thing about it all was that everything she produced while she was on Thurien would find its way back via VISAR and the phone system somehow, and be waiting for her in her own files when she returned. She could even change the pictures on the walls anytime she got tired of them.
Mildred had made the point that if VISAR could create just about any sensory illusion that might be desired, it should be just as capable of putting together a reference system made up of things that she understood, as one incorporating all those annoying menus, options, icons, and incomprehensible boxes that computer people understood. The result was a set of bookshelves unlike any that she had even dreamed of. They were bookshelves because Mildred had insisted that a writer's office had to have books in. But the books arrayed along them changed to suit her particular needs of the moment. If she wanted to check some historical facts, a selection of volumes covering the period she was interested in presented themselves; if something geographical, a variety of atlases, physical, political, biological, and geological, along with travel guides and a picture library; and similarly for biographies, quotations, literature, arts, and every other form of reference that she had experimented with. And she could find her way to anything from indexes that made sense on pages she could turn in the way she had grown up with-except that the indexes rewrote themselves to point to whatever she happened to be researching. It was fantastic!
The other thing she had agitated for was a usable way of keeping track of all those notes, clippings, lists, letters, and so forth that you used to be able to rummage through in a folder, but which none of these desktops on screens ever seemed able to find unless you already knew where to look. In response, VISAR had come up with its single-drawer virtual filing cabinet, which Frenua Showm was just finishing explaining. The drawer looked normal enough, with a wood finish to go with the general decor of the room. It stood on a table at a comfortable height for access, no stooping or stretching to other drawers being necessary because that one could contain anything that was wanted.
"It works the same way as the bookshelves," Showm said. "The label on the front gives the topics the contents are organized under, and the folders inside follow." At the moment, the label was blank. Showm opened the drawer to reveal a set of familiar-looking hangers and tabs, but with all the inserts blank. "Let's try an example. What's a subject that you might be interested in?" she asked.
Mildred ran a virtual fingertip along the line of plastic tabs, feeling them flex slightly and causing a ripple of snapping sounds. It was uncanny. A faint scent of mountain meadows came with the breeze through the open window. She still had to work to remind herself that she was really in a recliner somewhere in the Government Center at Thurios. "One thing I wanted to cover was the Thurien political organization and how it functions," she replied. "How your leaders are appointed, and what guides their decision making. What would all that come under? 'Politics,' I suppose." She was still mildly astounded that somebody of the position that she had been told Frenua Showm held would be taking her through something like this personally and not delegating it to a junior clerk. Thuriens' ideas of priority seemed to be very different from the norms of Earth. Back there, every other value or consideration in modern life seemed subordinated to the great god of "efficiency." The Thuriens didn't seem even to have a concept of the word-at least, not in any economic sense.
Showm gestured. The word politics had appeared on the label above the drawer handle. "The inside will organize itself according to the structure you create as you use it. Suppose you wanted to collect material on, say, how various services across Thurien are managed…" In response to her vocal cue, a subhead Planetary Administration added itself to the label below politics. Inside the drawer, a group of folders acquired contents, along with suitable tabs to mark them. Showm lifted one of the folders out, riffled briefly through the papers inside, and handed it to Mildred. "And you can take it back to your desk and use it in the way you are used to, with no screens or confusing dialogs to worry about," she said.
"Splendid!" Mildred exclaimed. The folder was marked "Regional Congresses," and contained a selection of articles, maps, charts, and tables that VISAR had compiled together as a starting point on the subject.
"Everything is very local here," Showm commented. "Nothing as bureaucratic as the kind of thing you're used to. Much of Earth's ways of going about things results from the need to resolve conflicts. That's not a problem that we see a great deal of. Conflict arises from competitiveness, which isn't a big part of Ganymean nature."