The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  “For present, practical purposes, its advantages are twofold. (a) As I remarked, programs can be altered on the spot, in the course of being carried out. Formerly it was necessary to run them through, painstakingly check their results, and then slowly rewrite them, with possibilities of error, and without any guarantee that the new versions would turn out to be what we most needed. Once linkers and their equipment come into everyday use, we will be free of that handicap, (b) By the very experience, as I have also suggested, the linker gains insights which he or she could have gotten in no other way, and hence becomes a more able scientist—including a better writer of programs—when working independently of the apparatus, too.”

  Good Lord! Joelle thought. Do we really have to endure this?

  True the conference was an important political as well as scientific event. The military secrecy in which she had been raised was beginning to lift; here in Calgary, people could freely discuss developments which had been hidden for decades or worse; the public was entitled to information, in popular terms, during the opening ceremonies.

  The trouble was, no words could describe being in linkage: creating n-dimensional spaces, and time-variant curvatures for them, and tensors within, and functions and operations that nobody had ever before imagined. You fashioned a conceptual cosmos, learned that it was wanting and annulled it, devised another and another, until at last you saw what you had made and, behold, it was very good. Each time the numbers rushed through you to verify, and you knew how much reality you had embraced, it was an outbursting of revelation. The Christian hopes to be eternally in the presence of God, the Buddhist hopes to become one with the all in Nirvana, the linker hopes to achieve more than genius—is there a vast difference between them? Yes: the linker, in this life, does it.

  In days, hours, fractional seconds. Afterward he or she cannot entirely comprehend what happened. The high moment of love also lies outside of time; but we understand it better, when at peace, than the linker understands what the linker has known.

  Joelle’s gaze roved. Hey, wasn’t that a handsome young man a dozen seats to her right! Why hadn’t she seen him earlier? Well, she wasn’t given to noticing people. War orphan, brought up from infancy in the pioneering holothetic program, lately released into academe as the Troubles faded out, a virgin who didn’t know what to do about the opposite sex and wasn’t sure she wanted to—

  “—while linkage to macroscopic machinery has not proven cost-effective, the case has turned out to be otherwise for monitoring and controlling scientific instruments. For this it is inadequate to supply the operating brain with numbers such as voltmeter readings and nothing else. For example, a spectrum is best considered—rationally appreciated—when the operator sees it and, simultaneously, knows the exact wavelength and intensity of every line. Through appropriate hardware and software, this can now be done. Subjectively, it is like sensing the data directly, as if the nervous system had grown complete new input organs of unprecedented power and sensitivity.

  “Workers elsewhere have experimented with that. The principal thing Project Ithaca [in which Joelle was raised, a part of it] did was to take the next step. What is the meaning of those data, those sensations?

  “In everyday life, we do not apprehend the world as a jumble of raw impressions, but as an orderly structure. Yonder we do not see a splash of green and brown; we see a tree, of such-and-such a kind, at such-and-such a distance. Although it is done unconsciously, yes, instinctively, since animals do it too, nevertheless we may be said to build theories, models, of the world, within which our direct perceptions are made to make sense. Naturally, we modify these models when that seems reasonable. For instance, we may decide that we are not really seeing a tree but a piece of camouflage. We may realize that we have misjudged its distance because the air is more clear or murky than we knew at first. Basically, however, through our models we comprehend and can act in an objective universe.

  “Science has long been adding to our store of information and thus forcing us to change our model of the cosmos as a whole, until today it embraces billions of years and light-years, in which are galaxies, subatomic particles, the evolution of life, and everything else that our ancestors never suspected. To most of us, this part of the Weltbild has admittedly been rather abstract, no matter how immediate the impact of the technologies it makes possible.

  “In order to enhance laboratory capability, Project Ithaca began work on means to supply a linkage operator directly with theory as well as data. This was more than learning a subject, permanently or temporarily. Any operator has to do that, in order to think about a given task. And indeed, outstanding accomplishments came out of the Turing Institute here, pioneering ways for the linked computer to give its human partner the necessary knowledge. Project Ithaca greatly improved such systems, and its civilian successors continue to progress. We call them holothetic.

  “The work has had an unexpected result. Those operators whom Ithaca trained from childhood, linkers who today are adults advancing the art in their turn, are more and more getting into a mode that I must call intuitive. A baseball pitcher, an acrobat, or simply a person walking is constantly solving complex problems in physics with little or no conscious thought. The organism feels what is right to do. Analogously, we have for example reached the point of manipulating individual amino acids within protein molecules, using ions directed by force-fields which are directed by a holothete, in a manner that perhaps only the Others could plan out step by step. Likewise for any number of undertakings. Direct perception through holothetics is leading to comprehension on a nonverbal level.

  “This is doubly true because our theoretical knowledge is far from perfect. Quite frequently these days, a holothete senses that things are not going as intended, that something is wrong with the model—and intuits what changes to make, what the real situation is, as we so often do in our ordinary lives. Later systematic study generally confirms the intuition.

  “My colleagues will be discussing various aspects of holothetic linkage. This introductory sketch of mine—”

  When the dullness was outlived and the audience moving toward drinks, Eric came over and introduced himself. He had been noticing too.

  In a canoe on Lake Louise, they shipped their paddles and idled. The water danced blue, green, diamond. Around it, above forest, mountains sheered aloft into silence. Ever so slightly, the boat rocked with each motion they made.

  She dipped a finger over the side and watched how ripples spread. “Electron interferences make a moire too,” she mused. “It’s wonderful finding the same here. I never paid attention before.” She looked at him and savored. “Thank you for bringing me.” A little scared, she let her eyes drift elsewhere. “Electrons do it in three dimensions. No, four, but I haven’t perceived that… yet.”

  She had made similar remarks to him after they’d attended the ballet in Calgary. Over coffee and brandy she had told him how sublimely Newtonian Swan Lake and Ondine were, when to him—he said—they were sublimely sexy. Still, he, a linker, found as much mathematics as melody in a Bach recital, or admired above everything else the subtle perspectives in Monet. (Looking at the same 3-faxes, she pointed out interactions of colors to which he said he believed critics of the past couple of centuries had been blind.) Today, for whatever reason, she saw unease stir in him.

  “Look, Joelle, don’t get lost in abstractions—Wait. Please. Let me explain what I mean. Sure, you and I work with data, set up paradigms, compute resultants, sure. Fine. Fine job. But let’s not let that interfere with what we, well, find in places like this. In our private lives especially. This—” he waved a hand around the horizon—“is what’s real. Everything else we infer. This is what we’re alive in.”

  She regarded him for a long while, during which he glowed. That night they became lovers.

  He Canadian, she American, in an era when military governments were paranoid after the Troubles, before their countries federated and joined the World Union… he and she
were separated for more than a year. Meanwhile holothetics was evolving exponentially, from a mere improvement of linkage to a wholly new order of perceiving and existing.

  She sensed her growth away from him, and it hurt, but she could no more resist what she was becoming than a fetus in the womb can. By the time he had finally arranged to come join her at the University of Kansas for R&D purposes, she knew what he must learn and had completed the necessary arrangements.

  When he arrived at her office, they made love. Then they made a sandwich lunch and talked. At last she leaned over and kissed him, lingeringly but tenderly, almost as if she bade goodbye to a child. “Let’s go!” she said. As she led the way to her laboratory, her stride became triumphant.

  Down there, she warned, “Words are no use here. You must experience for yourself. We’re about to become more intimate than ever in bed. Einormously more.”

  Quasi-telepathic effects had been reported, when a passive linker in a holothetic circuit not only received the same data and theory in his brain as the active one did, but “felt” that latter’s ongoing evaluations. “You, uh, you’ll slave my unit to yours?” Eric inquired. “According to what I’ve seen in the literature, that doesn’t convey a particularly strong or clear impression.”

  “Everything isn’t in the current literature. I told you I—we—all right, I am making whirlwind progress. I’ve acquired a, I don’t know, an insight, a near-instinct, and the feedback between me and the system, the continuous reprogramming at each session—” She tugged his sleeve. “Come along. Get to know!”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  She frowned the least bit. “That’ll depend partly on you, how you’re taking what happens. We’ll begin with you and the 707. Just think in it for a while, get settled down. Then, through the cross-connections, I’ll phase you in with me and my computer. That will have to be strictly input to you, no access to effectors, or you might ruin some delicate experiments. I’m going to look in on them, you see. My help is called for often enough that we have constantly open channels between them and my system. Genetics at a lab right on this campus; nuclear physics at the big accelerator in Minnesota; cosmology in Sagan Orbital. I hope I can lead you to a hint of what I’m doing these days. I’ll know, because you will have an output of a kind to me. In effect, I’ll be scanning your mind. Yes,” she said into his stupefaction, “I’ve reached that stage.

  “Afterward—” She threw her arms around him and kissed him. “Let there be an afterward.”

  He responded, but she sensed he sensed that her tone had been kind rather than prayerful.

  He lowered himself into the proper lounger, set it at the reclining angle he liked, let muscle and bone go easy, before he pulled the helmet down over his head, adjusted and secured it, put his wrists through the contact loops, tapped fingers across a control plate and checked out the settings. While linking herself likewise, she saw the olden thrill shaking the fret out of him.

  “Activate?” he asked.

  “Proceed,” she answered.

  “I love you,” he said, and pressed the main switch.

  Thereafter she felt and thought what he did, with a minor part of her awareness.

  Momentarily, senses and intellect whirled, he imagined he heard a wild high piping, memories broke forth out of long burial as if he had fallen back through time to this boyhood swimming hole and moss cold and green upon a rock, that hawk at hover and the rough wool of a mackinaw around him. Then his nervous system steadied into mastery. Electromagnetic induction, amplification of the faintest impulses, a basic program which he had over the years refined to fit his unique self, meshed; human and computer became a whole.

  “Think,” she said, and Joelle knew his response: How could he not, when his was now a mightier genius than any which had been on Earth before his day?

  “Words are no use here,” she told me.

  They were fully cognizant of their environment. Had they wanted to, they could have examined its most micrometric details, a scratch and a reflection on polished metal, the shimmy of a needle across a meter, mumble and faint tang of oil in the ventilation, back-and-forth tides in the veins. But she sensed that even she no longer entirely mattered to him. He had a perceptual universe to conquer.

  In the next several milliseconds, while he cast about for a problem worth tackling, a fraction of him calculated the value of an elliptic integral to a thousand decimal places. It was a pleasant semi-automatic exercise. The numbers fell together most satisfyingly, like bricks beneath the hands of a mason. Ah, came to him, yes, the stability of Red Spot vortices on planets like Jupiter, yes, I did hear talk about that in Calgary. The sweep hand on a wall clock had barely stirred.

  He marshalled a list of the data he thought he would need and sent a command. To him it felt like searching his normal memory for a fact or two, except that this went meteorically faster and more assuredly, in spite of drawing on banks which were hundreds of kilometers away. The theory reached him, formulas, specific values of quantities, yes, that particular differential equation would be an absolute bitch to solve; no, wait, he saw a dodge; but was the equation actually plausible, couldn’t he devise a set of relationships which better described conditions on an aborted sun—?

  An ice-clean fire arose, he was losing himself in it, he was getting drunk on sanity.

  Eric, she called: no voice, no name, a touch.

  He must wrench his attention from Jupiter, with a vow, I’ll be back.

  Eric, are you ready to follow me?

  It was not truly a question, it was an intent which he felt. It was her. At dazzling speed, as neurone webs adapted to each other’s synapse patterns, she merged with him. The formless eddies that go behind shut eyelids were not shaping into her image; rather he got fleeting impressions of himself, before her presence flooded him. Was it her femaleness he knew as a secret current in the blood, a waiting to receive and afterward cherish and finally give, a bidding she chose not to heed but which would always be there? He couldn’t tell, he might never know, for the union was only partial. He had not learned how to accept and understand most of the signals that entered him, and there were many more which his body never would be able to receive. That became a pain in him as it was in her.

  Eric, in this too you are my first man, and I think my last.

  Forebrains, more alike than the rest of their organisms, meshed. Besides, Joelle had practiced cross-exchange on that level and developed the technique of it with fellow linkers, until she was expert. Communication between her and Eric strengthened and clarified, second by second. It was not direct, but through their computers, whose translations were inevitably imperfect. Impressions were often fragmentary and distorted, or outright gibberish—bursts of random numbers, shapes, light flashes, noises, less recognizable non-symbols, which would have frightened him were it not for the underlying constancy of her. What touched his mind as her thoughts were surely reconstructions, by his augmented logical powers, of what it supposed she might be thinking at a given instant. The real words that passed between them went in the common mortal fashion, from lips to ear.

  Nevertheless: he took her meanings with a fullness, a depth he had not dreamed could be, there on the threshold of her universe.

  “Genetics,” she said aloud. That was the sole clue he needed. She would guide him to the research at this school. Knowledge sprang forth. The work was on the submolecular level, the very bases of animate being. She was frequently called on to carry out the most exacting tasks, invent new ones, or interpret results. Today the setup was in part running automatically, in part on standby; but she had access to it anytime.

  Her brain ordered the right circuits closed, and she was joined to the complex of instruments, sensors, effectors, and to the entire comprehension man had of the chemistry of life. Receiving from her, Eric perceived.

  He got no presentation of quantities, readings on gauges whose significance became plain after long calculation. That is, the numbers were prese
nt, but in the experience he was hardly more conscious of them than he was of his skeleton. He was not looking from outside and making inferences, he was there.

  It was seeing, feeling, hearing, traveling, though not any of those things, for it went beyond what the poor limited human creature could ever sense or do, and beyond and beyond.

  The cell lived. Pulsations crossed its membrane, like colors, the cell was a globe of iridescence, throbbing to the intricate fluid flow that cradled it in deliciousness, avidly drinking energies which cataracted toward it down ever-changing gradients. Green distances reached to golden infinity. Beneath every ongoing fulfillment dwelt peace. The cosmos of the cell was a Nirvana that danced.

  Now inward, through the rainbows, to the interior ocean. Here went a maelstrom of… tastes… and here ruled a gigantic underlying purposefulness; within the cell, work forever went on, driven by a law so all-encompassing that it might have been God the Captain. Organelles drifted by, seeming to sing while they wove together chemical scraps to make stuff that came alive. As the scale of his cognition grew finer, Eric saw them spread out into Gothic soarings, full of mysteries and music. Ahead of him, the nucleus waxed from an island of molecular forests to a galaxy of constellated atoms whose force-fields shone like wind-blown star-clouds.

  He entered it, he swept up a double helix, tier after tier of awesome and wholly harmonious labyrinths, he was with Joelle when she evoked fire and reshaped a part of the temple, which was not less beautiful thereafter, he shared her pride and her humility, here at the heart of life.

  Her voice came far-off and enigmatic, heard through dream: “Follow me on.” He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at lightspeed across unseen prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator. He became one with them, possessed by their own headlong fervor, the same speed filled him and he lanced toward the goal as if to meet a lover.