"Doing research for a book on the Thuriens," Mitzi put in.
"It must be very fortunate for her to have such an authority on the subject as her cousin," Maeve commented.
Danchekker looked flattered but sighed regretfully. "It appears, however, that our professional association is to be short lived," he informed the table. "Cousin Mildred is a woman of considerable resourcefulness. She has contrived to avail herself of a far more comprehensive repository of materials than anything I could hope to provide: Thurien itself, no less."
"You mean via a virtual travel hookup?" Owen said. Much of the Thuriens' business among worlds was effected by bringing information from the destination to the "travelers," rather than the other way around. Sensor data derived from the source was imparted into their neural systems in a way that made the experience indistinguishable from actually being at the remote location. Neurocouplers connecting into the Thurien system had been installed at several locations on Earth, including Goddard.
Danchekker shook his head as he took a spoonful of soup. "No, she's actually going."
"Really? To Thurien?" Rita exclaimed. "What an experience!"
"One of their vessels is leaving here to return, somewhere around a week from now, I understand," Danchekker confirmed. "She has a reservation on it."
"It's unbelievable," Leonard, one of the Europeans, said, taking in the table in general. "There isn't anything like having to pay a fare. You just ask them. If there's room, they'll take you."
"So we won't be seeing very much of Mildred after all, Professor," Maeve concluded.
"Tragically so, I fear." Danchekker returned a solemn nod. Hunt saw Caldwell look at him keenly for a second or two, as if about to take the subject further; but then he caught Hunt's eye and turned to say something to Sarah, the other European, instead.
Hunt looked across at Owen, cocking his head in a way that singled him out from the general talk. "Are you still happy for me to talk about it, Owen?" he asked. "It's still not too late to change if you've had second thoughts. We can make the news an official release tomorrow. It's your call."
"Well, yes I have thought some more about it," Owen replied. For a moment Hunt thought that he had changed his mind. But Owen went on, "What I'd like to do is make the broad announcement myself, in my acknowledgment speech. Then I can hand over to you to fill in the details. What do you think?"
"Even better," Hunt said. "This is your show. Go over with a bang, eh?"
"What's this?" Rita asked. She kept her voice low, picking up their tenor. "Are we in for some news tonight?"
"You'll see," Hunt answered. "I said you'd find it interesting." Rita raised her eyebrows and smiled resignedly in a way that said she could wait.
But Caldwell, who rarely missed anything, waved a hand for him to carry on. "It's okay, Vic," he said. "We're only talking about a few minutes from now. And it'll be public before tonight's out, anyway." Hunt looked inquiringly toward Owen. Owen shrugged, indicating that it was fine by him. Hunt looked back at Rita.
"I got an unusual phone call the other day," he told her.
"Oh?"
"Do you know much about quantum physics and alternate Multiverse realities?"
Rita regarded him reproachfully. "I thought you said it wouldn't get technical."
"Trust me. This will be worth it."
"Something about all possible universes… We only live in a tiny part of what's going on. Everything that could happen is happening somewhere."
"That puts it pretty well. And they contain other possible versions of ourselves. According to traditional theory, apart from interference at the microscopic level, information doesn't flow between them. They can't communicate. We thought… And then, when Broghuilio and his last hangers-on took off from Jevlen, their ships were somehow kicked back to a version of early Minerva." Rita would know about that, of course. At the time, it had been dissected in the news for weeks. Imares Broghuilio had been the leader of the attempted Jevlenese coup.
"So what are you…" Rita broke off as what he was implying sank in. Her eyes widened. The other talk around the table died as one by one the rest of the company tuned in. Rita was now speaking for all of them. "You're not saying this call was from some other… reality, universe… whatever?"
Hunt nodded, deadly serious now. "Precisely that."
Rita tried to absorb it, smiled incredulously, shook her head. "On the phone? A regular call on the phone? Surely that's crazy…" But at the same time her expression said she wasn't sure why.
"What better way to communicate?" Hunt replied, looking around now to address the whole company. "We think it came via a relay device that was projected into Earth orbit somehow-like the satellites that connect into the Thurien h-net."
Those present who hadn't known about it already returned disbelieving looks, almost as if expecting this to be a joke. Leonard waited for a moment to avoid sounding provocatively skeptical, then said, "How can you be sure it was from another reality, Doctor? Can you positively rule out the possibility that it was a hoax?"
Which was what Hunt had been expecting. "Oh, absolutely," he assured them. "The caller couldn't have fooled me. I know him too well." He glanced around to emphasize the point. "You see, it was me. The person I talked with was another version of myself."
And over the rest of the meal, the whole astonishing story came out. The conclusion that the call had originated from some alternative future brought up the question of time-travel contradictions, which Sarah confessed to having been unclear about ever since the business with the Jevlenese. Going back to the past changed it, she maintained, and that didn't make sense.
"Not with the old notion of a single reality and one time line," Hunt agreed. "But going back to an earlier point on a different time line avoids the contradictions. It could be arbitrarily close to the one that you came from, but nevertheless not the same one."
Owen came in. "You couldn't change your own, exact past-where no one from the future had ever shown up to bring about any changes. That's true."
"But you're changing the other one just as much," Sarah objected. Owen looked at Hunt.
"The Multiverse totality itself is timeless," Hunt said. "Nothing in it ever really changes anyway. "
"So what's this change that we all see? Where does it come from?" Leonard asked.
"Now you're getting into philosophers' and theologians' territory," Hunt answered. "I just deal in what the physics says."
"Some kind of construct of consciousness," Caldwell offered. "Consciousness navigates its way through the totality somehow." He shrugged. "Maybe that's what consciousness is."
This aspect intrigued Danchekker. His first reaction was usually to reject anything radical, but Hunt had been through this with him several times by now. It seemed that Chris had been doing some more thinking. "The ramifications are profound," he told Caldwell. "Perhaps one of the most significant developments in the history of science yet. The bringing together of physical and biological science at the quantum level. Generalizing 'consciousness' to mean any form of self-instigated behavior modification gives us a whole new way of looking at living systems."
"You sound as if you want to get more involved in it, Chris," Caldwell commented. His steely gray eyes had an odd twinkle.
"Well, absolutely," Danchekker agreed. "Who in my position wouldn't? I mean-" The clacking of the MC's gavel from the podium above the head table interrupted.
The clattering of dessert cutlery had died away by now, and the waiters were serving coffee, port wines, and liqueurs. The MC looked around while the last murmurs of conversation faded. "Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen. Now that everyone is wined, contented, and fed, it's my pleasure to bring us to the prime business of the evening…"
A buildup followed, outlining Owen's career and achievements. Several speakers followed, relating their personal anecdotes, and Hunt went up last to deliver the keynote address. It went over well. The MC called Owen up from the floor to respond, and at the end
the room rose to give him an ovation. But then Owen remained at the podium. Puzzled looks traveled this way and that around the room. Even the MC seemed thrown off balance.
"And now I have something further to tell you all," Owen said. "Something that will set tonight aside as a truly memorable occasion in all our lives. Several days ago, an event took place just a few miles from where we are sitting now, which I believe could signal one of the most startling developments in the entire history of our species, with incalculable implications for the future. It's fitting that I should be saying this as my last official duty on behalf of UNSA. For the era of discovery that I represented is over. A new one is about to begin…"
By the time Hunt got up again to complete the story, the thunder for the evening had truly been exercised where it belonged. All fears of stealing Owen's show were forgotten. The room was all but stunned into silence and immobility, except for one or two figures making inconspicuously for the exits, who Hunt guessed to be media people hurrying to send off their stories. Some questions followed, generally echoing those already heard at Caldwell's table, but not a great many-no doubt because most of the listeners would need time to fully grasp what they had heard. Hunt thought it just as well. This was a celebration dinner, not a technical conference.
But it seemed to have achieved its aim. Owen expressed satisfaction that the occasion had been immortalized. People were staying at their tables and talking in intense, animated groups instead of breaking up and starting to leave in the way that would have been typical. "That would be a tough one to follow," Rita said as Hunt came back over and sat down after exchanging contact details with a number of people wanting to know more who had stopped him on the way.
Caldwell waited until he had Danchekker's attention and looked at him fixedly for a moment as he sipped from his glass. "And now that it's all official, I have some more news-for you, Chris," he said.
"Me?" Danchekker frowned quizzically. "What kind of news?"
"I've been talking to Calazar about Vic's matrix propagation ideas." Calazar headed the planetary administration on Thurien. "He agrees that their scientists and our scientists need to get together on this. And before the speeches, you'd just started telling us about how bioscience and physics are all implicated together. So we've arranged for you and Vic to transfer to Thurien with a small team and work with them."
"Vic and me? To Thurien?… When?"
"A week from now-on the ship that you mentioned. It's called the Ishtar. Some Thuriens who have been visiting places in Asia are going home in it."
Maeve looked delighted. "Why, that's wonderful, Professor!" she exclaimed. "The same ship that your cousin will be going on. So you won't have to lose contact with her after all."
"That's what I was thinking, too," Caldwell said. "I've no doubt she can take care of herself, but an alien culture at another star needs a lot of adjusting to. I've had a taste of it myself. Even if she did make her own arrangements independently, we are still Earth's official space agency, and I feel we have a responsibility. So I'd like you to keep an eye on her, on UNSA's behalf, Chris, if you would." Danchekker appeared to have frozen. He sat, holding a grape that he had taken from a dish on the table suspended halfway to his mouth. Caldwell's brow furrowed. "Okay, Chris?"
"I'd be happy to, of course," Danchekker managed finally in a flat voice.
The sides of Danchekker's mouth moved upward mechanically to bare his teeth, but the rest of him remained immobile. Only then did Hunt see the look of stark horror in the eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. Then the pieces of what must have happened fell suddenly into place. Hunt grabbed his napkin from the table and clasped it to his mouth with a spluttering sound which he disguised as a cough. Rita, to one side, saw the expression that he was struggling to conceal.
"What is it?" she hissed in his ear. "What's so funny?"
"I'll tell you later," Hunt muttered, brushing away a tear.
CHAPTER FIVE
One of the things about working for Gregg Caldwell that suited Hunt was that Caldwell was able to function within a large bureaucracy without acquiring the mind-set of one. Through his career as a nucleonics scientist in England before joining UNSA, Hunt had found that small groups of capable and dedicated individuals were more effective than the armies assembled for large, managerially inaugurated research projects, where too much energy tended to be dissipated fruitlessly on communicating more and more about less and less. Caldwell expressed it succinctly by saying, "If a ship takes five days to cross the Atlantic, it doesn't mean that five ships will do it in one day." Danchekker was necessarily led to the same philosophy, since the number of people he was typically able to tolerate limited the effective horizons of his personal work space in any case.
The team hastily organized in the course of the following week comprised just four more people in addition to the two senior scientists, Hunt being nominally designated the head, since the subject was Multiverse physics, and physics was-literally-his department. Accompanying him would be Duncan Watt, his longstanding assistant from the Navcomms days, who had also moved to Goddard, while Danchekker in like fashion would be taking Sandy Holmes, one of the few individuals to have mastered his filing system, and who could decipher his notes. Duncan and Sandy had also accompanied Hunt and Danchekker to Jevlen on the investigation of mass psychoses that had led to the discovery of the Entoverse. Josef Sonnebrandt had been recruited without too much persuasion. And he in turn had urged for the inclusion of a Chinese theoretician that he had been working with, a Madam Xyen Chien, who had set up a laboratory in Xinjiang that was already duplicating some aspects of earlier Ganymean physics involving artificial spacetime deformation. Direct as always, Caldwell had contacted her personally, and she had as good as agreed before the end of his call. The rest had been pretty straightforward. Although China still retained some vestige of the authoritarianism of times gone by, nobody there was going to argue with an invitation to send one of their leading scientists to Thurien. In fact, Madam Xyen was on the list that the party of Thuriens currently in eastern Asian had arranged to visit, and she would be returning with them directly to the orbiting Ishtar to meet the rest of the Terran group there. UNSA administration needed a name for the project. Since the aim was to investigate TRAns Muliverse communication, Hunt settled on "Tramline."
Sonnebrandt joined the rest of the group at Goddard a day before the Ishtar's scheduled departure for an overview and briefing. They flew out early the next morning to be shuttled up to orbit from the UNSA launch terminal in Virginia. As fate would have it, the flight up turned out to be the same one that the travel agency had booked for Mildred, who was also traveling from the DC area. "What a wonderful surprise, Christian!" she declared when she came aboard, festooned with bags and purses, and found them there. "You were holding back on me. You had this planned all along!"
"What can I tell you?" Danchekker answered. Which was as good a way as any of saying something while saying nothing.
Thurien interstellar transportation worked on the same basis as their communications, which involved spinning artificially generated charged black holes up to speeds that drew them out into toroids. The singularity deformed to become aperture through the center, which could be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects and gave access to the hyperrealm known as h-space that connected the universe (or, more strictly now, "our" universe, out of the countless universes making up the Multiverse) by paths that bypassed the limitations of ordinary spacetime. The difference, however, was that while communications could be effected via microscopic-size ports located conveniently close to Earth in satellites or, at the cost of some heavy structural engineering, down on the surface, transportation required ports large enough to admit whatever was being transported. Projecting such ports where and when they were needed was one of the things that VISAR handled as part of its function as general manager of the infrastructure that the Thurien civilization rested on. The energy to create the toroids was also directed thro
ugh h-space, produced by the consumption of matter from the cores of burnt-out stars at colossal generating systems constructed in older parts of the local galaxy. Projecting transportation-size ports into planetary systems would have produced gravitational disturbances sufficient to create havoc with clocks and calendars. Standard practice was therefore to project them far enough away outside for such effects to be negligible. Hence, vessels were needed to get to them. Thurien interstellar craft used regular gravitic drives-essentially the principle that the Shapieron had been built around-to travel to an entry port, and from the exit port to the final destination. This meant that a typical point-to point journey between star systems would take in the order of a few days.
The Thurien craft that took Hunt and the earlier group to Jevlen had been immense-more in the nature of a mini artificial world that Thuriens used for long stays in remote parts of the Galaxy, and in which some chose to reside permanently. The Ishtar, by contrast, was more in keeping with what most Terrans would have thought of as the dimensions of a "ship." It grew larger on the forward display screen inside the cabin as the shuttle from Virginia closed: bright yellow-gold in color, sleek and streamlined, flaring out into two crossed, curvy delta forms at the tail, designed like most Thurien craft for descent through planetary atmospheres without the rigmarole of intermediate transfers in orbit. At Earth, however, the several planned surface bases with facilities to service them were still under construction. In the meantime, there was no need for such clumsy provisions as fitting Thurien and Terran vessels with compatible docking hardware. The Ishtar simply projected a force shell from its docking-port side to enclose a zone between itself and the shuttle, and filled it with air. The passengers were conveyed across the intervening space, open to the void and the stars, by similar means, on an invisible conveyor-somewhat unnerving for first-timers, but fast and easy. With the larger Thurien craft things were even simpler: they contained internal docking bays that opened to admit the entire surface shuttle, capable of accommodating a dozen or more at a time.
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