The Manager, a non-spoken-language user, had taken the Sanskrit name Gharvapinda. In this name he was greeted in Spoken Word by the humans, and responded (
There were two halves to the reconstruction of Peenemünde Buonarotti’s instantaneous travel device. The particle accelerator, or “Torus,” was being built out in space, safe from anti-Aleutian terrorists and future outbreaks of mass violence—a fine big one, the Aleutian artisans and technicians having been determined to make an impression, when they found out about the dimensions of these structures on Earth. No problem there. The other half of the equation, the means of turning a whole living person, live tissue and inert tissue; mind and body, into “particles” that could be sent flying around the ring, had been reserved for the locals’ home ground, by the terms of the Neubrandenburg Agreement. It had proved recalcitrant. Buonarotti’s notes were few; he had deliberately left his instructions incomplete. The actual “couch” used by Buonarotti had long ago been loved to death, hopelessly Aleutianized by investigating secretions; without having given up its mysteries. Kumbva the engineer and his generation had departed; Kumbva had not returned, and there was no other engineer of genius in the Brood. Research had slowed to a crawl.
There’d been a very natural reaction on the shipworld, after the first excitement of the discovery. Once people believed they could return Home, all urgency vanished. The Torus was interesting; the “translation” labs were far away on Earth. There’d been endless petty difficulties with the humans, a rapid (for Aleutians) series of lackluster appointments: everything had conspired to mask, for decades of local years, an entire lack of real progress. The change had come when another of the Landing Party veterans had unexpectedly taken over. This person was held to be that troublesome thing, a scientist of genius, but he certainly wasn’t an engineer. The appointment had been something of a face-saving exercise, for the “Buonarotti” faction in the shipworld corridors of power. It had proved climactic.
The new chief scientist had brought a different attitude, and made spectacular progress. He’d had to insist, due to the nature of this progress, on a rigorous quarantine between human and local staff. So now the reconstruction was divided into three halves, which had not gone down well with the locals; they seemed to have some conceptual difficulty obscure to any Aleutian: but opinion on the shipworld was in favor. The Aleutians had told the human politicians the division of labor was a positive thing. It meant the Device was seriously close to operational effectiveness, and the Departure was near.
They were leaving.
The announcement probably should have been delayed. But the Expedition to Earth was now managed by shipworld Aleutians, who had no comprehension of the human mindset. The promise of imminent Departure (no definite timescale, but imminent!) had not calmed things down. Far from it. The whole giant planet had become restive, the politicians were clamoring to know when the crucial technology (now being developed in complete secrecy) would be handed over. Hence the necessity for ritual visits of this kind.
The tour of the Aleutian lab began. It wouldn’t take long. Then the aliens would leave and walk around to the other side of the building, where the human telepresents would join them again to inspect the human lab. For safety reasons Aleutians and humans must worked separately; for political reasons they must share a roof. The group moved slowly, dutifully attentive, down the central reservation. On either side, visible but blurred by fine gel partitions, technicians went on with their work (as much as people ever do, with an official visitation peering over their shoulders).
said the newly-named Gharvapinda, with a chill to which Dr. Bright was congenitally oblivious.
The Busy Person was important enough to use the term “Silent,” at present rather socially dubious, without a qualm.
Dr. Bright grinned.
The scientist shrugged.
They could safely assume that none of the humans, telepresent or in the news audience, were adept enough to follow them in the Common Tongue, but the Manager made a mental note not to provoke the learned fool to further incontinence…. After the tour, the humans would demand a “transcript” of all informal exchanges. Aleutia would comply with this nonsensical request. No one would read the bland platitudes provided, and honor would be satisfied: but best not to risk embarrassment.
Happily Dr. Bright was now obliged to talk about his work, which kept him safely occupied. He expounded at speed, providing a running translation into English for the telepresents, on non-location travel, and the recalcitrant problem that had dogged this research. Buonarotti had discovered a means of translating a person into deadworld particles, shooting the particles around an accelerator and delivering that person, instantaneously, from any given 4-space situation, to any other specified situation in the cosmos. Nothing traveled, only a pattern made the transit. At the departure point the body of the traveler would vanish. At the destination a new, identical body would accrete to the entity-pattern, made up of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen, hydrogen and so on (to speak in local terms). Elements that were abundant throughout 4-space. Thus conforming to local-point phase conservation.
The Project Manager scratched his nasal for all concerned.
A traveler could cross the galaxy in less than no time, as long as they had some clearly defined destination in mind: and take on a body there that would be indistinguishable, would in fact be logically identical with the original. But for human subjects there was a serious obstacle. Humans perceived the destination as unreal. They processed sensory input from the new environment as if it were internally generated, and arranged it into self-referential “meaning”: the way the mind, human or Aleutian, behaves in dream-sleep. Or in forms of psychiatric illness. There was a dire risk of falling into psychosis and becoming trapped at the destination. In Buonarotti’s model “return” to the point of origin was achieved by a simple act of will. The psychotic dreamer would have forgotten that he’d set out, so he’d be unable to decide to come home.
He scowled. Kumbva was an engineer, at home with the occult mess of void force entities. Bright was a physicist, in Aleutian terms his phenomenal talent was for the science of life. He had a passionate affinity with the basic elements: their relations, their transformations, the immensely complex processes of those twisted chains. He detested th
e unreal world, beyond the veil, where dead particles too minute for life interacted in peculiar and senseless ways. Mystical nonsense. Bright had not taken this appointment for the thrill of an intellectual challenge. He found the paradoxical implications of non-location travel dull and exasperating. He simply hated to see a dangling thread, a job unfinished. Impatience tormented Bright, as strong as his genius. It had often led him into trouble, but it could not be denied.
He returned to his lecture.
The original Buonarotti device had incorporated a couch, known as a “Kirlian” couch (the meaning of the local word was lost) which scanned an embodied consciousness, built a model of the mind/body entity in code, and turned this code into esoteric deadworld particles, which were delivered to the accelerator. The accelerator divided the particle stream into two, and slammed the streams into each other, reaching speeds that broke the life barrier and projected the whole immaterial person into non-location. “From” that state the traveler was translated to the destination by what Buonarotti called an act of desire. According to Buonarotti desire, far from being an exclusively human emotion, was a law of being. Carbon desires, bacteria desire. Only self-aware consciousness can make use of that law to enter and exit a state of non-location.
Buonarotti had predicted that the Aleutians would non-locate without trauma, because their self-aware consciousness was diffuse: impregnating their tools, their artifacts, their whole environment. Kumbva had believed this: he envisaged an awareness-impregnated starship, built by Aleutians, that could be safely used by both species. They’d both been mistaken: there was never going to be a self-aware ship. But Dr. Bright had seen the light. What was needed was an engine, not a vessel. A kind of pump, drawing a whole area of 4-space from one “situation” to another, and carrying any embodied self-aware consciousness in that area along with it…. The scientist paused in his rapid fire, in front of a soft walled display cabinet: the procession halted obediently.
He touched the cabinet wall. Half the shell of the rough dark spheroid became transparent. Another touch: an exudation from the secretion glands in Bright’s wrists slid through palms and fingers to his fingertips and commanded magnification. The Busy Person and the nearest locals saw in cross section a tiny mass of networked chambers, cables, passages, parkland, crops, churches. Deep inside—somewhere, notionally, around the location of the shipworld’s main bluesun fusion reactor—there was a shining dot of movement. Was that the bluesun itself? No, it was a tiny twisting thread, entering and re-entering another, smaller, object filled with a coiled darkness.
The Busy Person exclaimed:
The shipworld was vanishing.
The visitor looked around warily.
Dr. Bright gave him a pitying glance.
The Busy Person conveyed, in a brief burst, his decision to skip the rest.
Bright turned to the locals.
“That’s the end of the demonstration. If the telepresents will relocate in the twin laboratory, we’ll join you shortly.”
Next moment the Aleutians were alone.
The Busy Person grimly ducked his chin against his throat, the Aleutian affirmative gesture: with overtones of stark necessity.
Aleutia had explained to the locals that co-operation on the ground would be restored when a vital stage, dangerous to humans, was completed. It was true that weapons technology would not be part of the final package. It was not true, of course not, that co-operation would be restored.
The local authorities had rolled over, once they tasted that word Departure, with indecent haste: like vote-greedy governments anywhere. But there were still anti-Aleutian fanatics around, who managed to find out where the top secret lab was located, and insisted on trying to prove they had a legal right to access. There’d been summary, secret executions—which no Aleutian had liked, especially not those who understood how deeply the superstition of permanent death was ingrained in the locals’ minds.
It would have been easy if they could have moved the lab off Earth: but that had proved politically impossible. Unpopular in the shipworld, and very bad press on Earth. The good people who framed the Neubrandenburg Agreement had been afraid (rightly, of course!) the aliens would just develop the device and run away with it, if they were allowed to do all the work out in space.
This model, enclosed in a different gel, was a hand-size piece of tissue, a section of Aleutian flesh as if sliced from someone’s forearm: complete with information-system nodes, skin layers, blood and muscle. It was living. Small cell-complexes crept on the surface of the skin, groping the gel; trying to escape.
The Busy Person was eyeing Bright’s second exhibit with distaste, and not attending. He didn’t understand this sort of stuff, and he was glad he didn’t.
Phoenix Café Page 15
