The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  Intended for the unknown, Chinook bore a superb panoply of scientific instruments. But save for the two computermen, no specialist in any of their uses was aboard. Sufficient technical knowledge, including the knowledge of how to look things up, existed among the travelers that, largely under Weisenberg’s guidance, they could find ways to learn something about the realm wherein they were stranded. However, that might prove to be fatally little.

  Then Joelle made her announcement to captain and engineer: Fidelio had the skill. His race had explored many planetary systems, no two alike. Its professional spacefarers included a cadre trained in making and interpreting an enormous range of observations, against the day when the next robot probe would return with the news that it had found another gateway back. He had been one such, as well as a xenological officer who spoke for his ship when she visited aliens. The combination had gotten him picked for Emissary.

  “His technique involves holothetics, as you should expect,” she cautioned. “We’ll have to modify a unit for him to use. The way was developed on Beta, and between us we remember fairly well what it is. But you realize a certain amount of cut-and-try is necessary. Furthermore, our equipment is crude by his standards.”

  “Could we build him the right kind?” Weisenberg asked.

  “If you were thrown back in time to Galileo, could you build him a hundred-meter orbiting reflector?” she gibed. “Oh, I daresay a few minor improvements here and there will be possible for us in due course, especially in software. At present, though, we must get what data we can. You go do the obvious things, determine masses, take spectrograms, et cetera. You have to do them anyway. After Fidelio’s linkage is ready, he can tell you what kind of additional information he and I will need, particularly information fed into us directly and continuously.

  “Let us alone to consult. Go about your business. I’ll tell you what else to do and when.”

  Brodersen lifted a brow without saying anything. She recognized his “My, isn’t the air kind of thin on top of that high horse?” expression from of old. He never used it on me before! went through her like ice. He was always too respectful of my mind. What’s changed him? The stress of this expedition? That Caitlín adventuress?

  The question persisted in her through the days that followed. Not that she was obsessed: except by work, like everybody else. Nevertheless it came back into her awareness again and again, most sharply when she was trying to sleep.

  This was often difficult. She had never taken naturally to weightlessness. To her, the pleasure of floating and flying was slight compared to the tedium of long daily times at the exercise machines lest her blood go stale and her very bones dwindle. (The rest talked or sang or watched shows, that kind of thing. She cared for none of it. Theoretically she could have retreated into her head, where mathematics and the memory of the Noumenon dwelt, as she frequently did at leisure. But the dull, sweaty exertions were too nagging.) Worse, just as she was on the edge of dreams, more and more she would rouse with a gasp from a sense of falling into a fathomless pit. Then she must drift in the dark at the end of her leash and try for calm. Thoughts rolled forth which she did not want.

  Why do I care that Dan no longer cares? He was never more to me than an animal, smarter and stronger than most, excellent in bed, yet only an animal, to fill some of those hours when I was being only an animal. If my body wants use, he intimated he’d oblige—probably not now, he’s probably too harassed and uncertain, but eventually. Or I could turn to… Rueda, I suppose. A man of the word like him would see past my postmenopausal gray hair, and doubtless be quite an artist. Never mind dignity. Sex is a mere bodily need, like defecation.

  Is it? Eric, Eric!

  Hold. Wait. It isn’t even a need. I’ve gone close to nine years without and hankered little and seldom.

  Is the fear of death making me feel lonely? We are going to die out here. The odds against us finding our way back are… no, not incalculable… ridiculous…. But if we take reasonable care, given reasonable luck, we ought to have, oh, ten years until the food is gone. With no geriatrician aboard, I could be dead of bodily failure earlier than that.

  Besides, I learned long ago not to fear death. Having looked straight into Reality—There is no “I” to dread the loss of. There is a temporary association of mitochondria, eukaryotic cells, intestinal flora, and the like, the whole symbiosis shading off into the world around it that begot it, serving no end except the perpetuation of the genes within. Were the immortality of my “person” offered me, I would not want it. Too petty, amidst atoms, eons, and galaxies.

  Indeed, I should welcome this unparalleled chance to explore, experience, learn. That I cannot report my findings to my colleagues is regrettable. However, from my viewpoint it is the loss of a very trivial satisfaction compared to what awaits me in the next decade.

  Then why do I want somebody holding me? Why is it so long till mornwatch and my work?

  Work was absorbing despite every exasperation of zero gravity and Murphy’s Law. The aim was to adapt Chinook’s holothetic system for Fidelio. First came the mechanical part, a helmet to fit his skull and attachments for the rest of his frame. This was easy. Thereafter came the electronics, circuits built and adjusted to resonate with a nervous web that was the consequence of several billion years of separate evolution. This would have been a major research project if it had not already been one on Beta. As was, most of the requirements were known. Just the same, Su Granville and Joelle herself must spend hour upon hour writing programs and then in linkage, whenever Weisenberg had supplied a new fistful of data from his instruments. Leino helped somewhat, and the others did what jackleg jobs they could as occasion demanded. Else they were engaged in astronomy and space physics. Because they had to be kept fed and their clothes and bedding laundered, Caitlín put down her eagerness and did that for the cause of survival. Often at mess or during exercise periods she sang to them. That was almost the only recreation that anybody got.

  Hardware available, the true challenge came: to create the basic program by which Fidelio would integrate himself with the computer. Even among humans, each holothete was a unique case. Fidelio was not human. Furthermore, Betan computer technology had considerable differences from Terrestrial. (Yet oddly enough, insofar as comparisons were possible, it did not seem that holothetes of either species had a deeper or broader insight than those of the other. Betan machines possessed numerous superiorities, but, linked into them, Joelle had functioned more or less the same as at home. Did brains have equal limitations? Or did the Ultimate itself?)

  Again, and in a still higher degree, the task would have been hopeless had it not been accomplished beforehand on Beta, when mutual linkage of members of the two races was seen as desirable. Joelle and Fidelio were simply trying to duplicate something from Emissary which they remembered fairly well… except that there was nothing simple involved. Instead there was a whole new computer language—practically a new semantics—plus an elaborate program for translating to a language the Chinook machine could handle, plus a program of translating back, plus an open-ended set of special instructions. Joelle and Fidelio had the fundamentals in their heads and knew in a general way how to reconstruct the details, by brute-strength logic, calculation, and experiment.

  Not as an analogy but as a metaphor: The problem was like that which would face a Peruvian called upon to interpret between a Chinese and an Arab, when he is rusty in both their tongues, the former stutters, and the latter is a deaf-mute.

  Without linkage, the problem would have been insoluble. Susanne would hook herself up and check tentative programs for inconsistencies and inadequacies, when she wasn’t needed for the ongoing research elsewhere. Joelle and Fidelio would then try them out. This was hard on Joelle; she would perceive Reality distorted, bleached, fevered, and afterward have nightmares, in which she most commonly saw Eric’s rotted corpse. She would wake, tell herself Fidelio wasn’t complaining, though it must be worse for him, and go back to work. To enter
the pure Noumenon again was always healing.

  Chinook lay for a pair of weeks in orbit around the planet which humans had given no name.

  “Everything seems ready, female of intellect,” he said when he had given the assembly a careful examination. He used the speech, throaty and whistling, that his people did in air. It was much easier for him than Spanish. “Let us make a trial and, if we find we are on a strong tide, go straight ahead to sense the wholeness of this volume-where-we-swim.”

  She felt a smile at the idiom. It faded as she looked at him. Half a sea creature, he was beautiful in free fall. Long and richly brown, his body undulated from prowlike muzzle and lapis lazuli eyes to the end of the powerful, precisely controlled tail; each digit of the six limbs knew what it did, and its motion flowed. His tang as of iodine nigh overwhelmed her with memories of beaches on Earth, surf and wind, sunlight and gull wings. How wrong that he was caged in this narrowness between two computer stacks, that meters and switches were before him instead of living underwater fronds, that his sight was bounded by painted metal instead of moving green depths and, overhead, a splintered radiance.

  She pulled her attention away and, keeping a grip on a handhold, punched the intercom button. “Su,” she called. “This is Joelle. Come.” It might take the linker a few minutes to get shut of whatever she was doing.

  “To go back to the deeps below the deeps, that will be like returning to the shore after inland years,” Fidelio breathed.

  “I know,” Joelle said. The same ardor was in her. Holothesis shared with a Betan had dimensions no human partner could offer, among them the knowledge that her dissimilarities to him gave him an equal heightening. Together they had speculated whether the Others might not be several distinct races who formed groups that were permanently linked.

  “It has been dry…” Fidelio’s voice trailed off. He was not really capable of self-pity.

  Pain on his behalf clenched. Her free hand sought his nearest arm, the upper right. The claws on that paw could have shredded her, but she felt simply warmth and velvet. “Oh, Fidelio,” she whispered.

  Your food stores are good for less than a year. You will die among glabrous, tailless, four-limbed trolls who can’t unaided swim a single day; no wife will hold you that you may suckle her for the last time as you sink; we do not know how you ought to be mourned.

  His un-Earthly gaze captured hers. “I would ask this of you, Joelle,” he said calmly. She expected him to shift his glance at once, for a Betan stared hard only at someone who had angered him or at someone whom he loved and was offering his faith to. He kept looking. The blood beat in her ears. “Be warned, it is no ripple, it is a wave.”

  “Yes, if I’m able.”

  “Now that I can use this equipment, let me be the holothete whenever we need a single one, as long as I remain.”

  For you have nothing else left, do you, Fidelio? She let go the handhold in order to clasp his arm doubly. “Y-yes.”

  “You can carry out searches of your own when I float at rest. In a while, the system will again be yours entirely.”

  Her eyes stung. God damn it, she wasn’t about to cry, was she? Joelle shook her head; the drops flittered glittering.

  “Is this not acceptable?” Did he sound resigned? How could she tell? “G’ng-ng, I understand, female of intellect. My request ebbs.”

  “No, no!” The force of her reaction dismayed her. Overwrought, short on sleep, the forebrain functional but the rest going into oscillation. If I don’t take care, I’ll have hysterics. “You… misunderstood. I didn’t mean a negative. Of course you take over. Any time, any time.”

  “You let water flow, Joelle. You are sorrowful [wounded? without vital nourishment? cast on a sharp-shelled reef?]. Have I done that?”

  “No. You—no. Fidelio, we can link together!”

  “Often, I trust, beginning today. I scent a splendor before us. But Joelle, dear mind-mate, more often—” He was stammering, she thought, and she saw the tendons grow tense behind his claws. “Alone in the All, I can raise Beta from it, wife, co-husbands, children, grandchildren, friends, the living and the dead alike, not mere memories but perceived realities in space-time; I can feel that they exist. It will be nearly as good as embracing them.”

  He stopped. Blurrily though she saw him, she sensed his astonishment. “You did not know this, Joelle? You have never done it yourself? No words will serve to explain. Well, I think I can show you, teach you, before I go down. I must certainly try. It is very fine that I can make you a gift.”

  She cast her body against his, held tight, and wept.

  Susanne came through the door. “‘Ere I am,” she said; and: “Oh! Pardonnez-moi! Vous me pardonnerez!”

  Awkward in free fall, she tried to withdraw. Joelle, twisting her neck about (cheek brushing along the pelt of her mind-mate, who had gently laid his two lower arms around her while the talons of the upper left stroked her hair) saw the linker sprattle in the doorway like a large black spider. When Fidelio, with whom she begot new comprehensions, was soon to die, but before he died might lead her to Oneness with Eric and Chris and himself and—“Get out!” Joelle screamed. “You ugly little bitch! Go!”

  Susanne fled weeping.

  “What has come loose?” the Betan asked anxiously.

  Nobody, nobody should see me like this… except you, you’re not human, you’ve my fellow holothete…. I’m being irrational. I was unfair to that linker. I must apologize. No. How can I explain? Anger: Why should I explain? Why must I alone forever be rational? Bewilderment: Why have I kept remembering Eric, these past weeks? He’s no more than a linker either. Less than that, the last I heard—settled down, long married, become a not particularly important administrator in Calgary.

  Joelle gasped for air. “N-n-nothing, Fidelio. I’m tired and Hold me close, let me rest a while. Then I’ll get a sleeping pill,” from our medical officer, that Mulryan woman; well, she may have the grace not to try sympathizing, “and … afterward I’ll be in better shape to … oh, Fidelio!”

  Susanne sought her cabin, saying no word to anyone, apart from informing Caitlín that she wouldn’t be in the mess for dinner.

  Next mornwatch she entered the computer center expressionless. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Joelle greeted her perfunctorily, in English. “I was feeling distressed on Fidelio’s account. He’s an old friend.”

  “I understand, madame,” the linker replied with care; and they went about their mutual business.

  Actually Susanne had little to do beyond monitoring, to make certain the union of Joelle, Fidelio, computers, and instruments did not start going subtly agley. It did not; the bugs were finally out of the system. The two holothetes joined awarenesses as two lovers who know each other well join bodies, and became more than the sum of themselves, and let the universe pour through them.

  Much they already knew from observations and deductions made by their shipmates. The bearings of neighbor galaxies showed this region to be approximately five hundred light-years from Sol in the general direction of Hercules. That information made various bright stars like Deneb and objects like the Orion Nebula identifiable, which in turn defined the position more precisely. (As if it mattered. A single light-year is an abyss wherein imagination drowns.) The sun was a red dwarf of type M, mass 0.02 Sol, luminosity 0.004 Sol. It had five planets, none of them in the least Earthlike, all seemingly barren—except, perhaps, this largest, around which the T machine and Chinook were orbiting at a distance of some twenty-four million kilometers.

  That world was a giant, ninety-two percent the mass of Jupiter, attended by a dozen moons. Its mean distance from its primary was 1.64 a.u., a bit further out than Mars is from Sol. Like Jupiter, it had a vast atmosphere, chiefly hydrogen, secondarily helium; lesser components included ammonia, methane, and more elaborate organic compounds. Also like Jupiter, it was hot from contraction; the upper air was thin and space-cold, but lower down it thickened and warmed, until water became a vapor and storm
s raged that were the size of lesser planets. Most of its bulk was liquid, though sheer pressure, despite temperature, kept solid a metallic core equal to about five Earths.

  Spinning around once in ten hours and thirty-five minutes, it generated an immense magnetic field which trapped charged particles from the sun. However, the latter was so feeble a radiator that these Van Allen belts were nowhere near the Jovian intensity. No human could safely linger long in them; but, given her electrostatic defenses, Chinook could drop down through them and climb back up without those aboard getting a dosage to worry about.

  She would have a reason to.

  Joelle and Fidelio would have lost themselves in sun, moons, ambient magnificences and subtleties, every uniqueness. Hardly had they settled into the wonderful kaleidoscope, however, when a thing tugged at the fringes of their consciousness. They dismissed it a while, explored a vortex, found out why an inner globe rotated widdershins, established that this whole system was older than Sol’s; but the thing would not go away. Almost impatiently, they brought their double mind to confront it. Hertzian emission from the world they were circling, yes, surely, what else would you expect?

  The fact leaped forth.

  Lightning, synchrotron effects, a hundred separate sources were putting forth radio energy yonder. Each had its set of patterns, which the holothetes understood in the way that a ballet dancer understands how another is executing a pas seul. But one small element was like a flute, defiant and variable amidst the uproar of a gale at sea—

  Perhaps in a decade of concentrated effort, unaided humans would have made this discovery. The holothetes realized instantly that here was nothing which unliving nature could produce: therefore, that they were overhearing the discourse of beings which were alive and intelligent.

  Afloat in the common room before his crew, the planet splendid at his back, Brodersen said into a hush: “Yeah, I do believe we should go look.”