Vranix was an old Thurien city located on one of the northern continents, famous for its art centers and museums, and as a cultural repository. It was also noted for some of the most spectacular Thurien architecture, which in the years of the city's growth had flourished as perhaps the most extreme of Thurien art forms at the time. Hunt and Danchekker had "been there" before, in their first virtual visit to Thurien. It seemed a suitable place to include in the itinerary that she and Danchekker still insisted Hunt had helped draw up to give Mildred a preliminary overview of Thurien society—but by unspoken mutual assent they had stopped talking about it. In the evening they would rejoin the rest of the group physically for dinner.
They were standing in a large, saucer-shaped space, inside which circles of tiered seating rose to an enclosing rim. Hunt and Danchekker watched as Mildred gazed up at the three slim spires of what looked like pink ivory, converging above their heads before blending into an inverted cascade of terraces and levels broadening and unfolding upward for an inestimable distance. . . . And then she frowned in puzzlement. For beyond, where the sky should have been, the scene mushroomed out into a fusion of forms and structures of staggering dimensions extending as far as the eye could see in one direction, while forming the shore of a distant ocean in the other. They were looking over the entire city of Vranix. But it was all hanging over their heads, upside down. They waited, seeing how long it would take Mildred to figure it out.
"My God!" she said after a lengthy pause. "All that topsy-turvy wonderland we came through inside. It turned us completely over somehow, and we didn't realize it . . . at least, I didn't. But you said you'd been here before. This has to be underneath. We've walked out like flies on a ceiling."
"Right on," Hunt complimented. The three spires "rising" around them surmounted an enormous tower dominating the city, and supported a circular platform that contained the place they were in—actually a small amphitheater used for various events and social gatherings. But the amphitheater was on the underside of the platform, not on top.
"Is it . . . I mean, is it real?" Mildred asked, looking down and from side to side as if checking her other senses. "Or something that VISAR is putting into our heads?"
"Oh, it exists precisely as you perceive it," Danchekker assured her. "A whim exercised by the Thurien architects of long ago, probably to show off their dexterity with the new science of integral gravitic structural engineering, which was developed at around that time. The Thuriens use it extensively, as you will already have gathered."
"So is that why I feel normal? . . . No, wait a minute. VISAR can inject the right stimuli to make you feel normal, anyway, can't it? What I'm trying to say is, if we were really here physically . . . there, whatever . . . would we still feel normal, with everything just looking wrong? Not upside down. The local gravity is normal but inverted?"
"Precisely so," Danchekker confirmed.
A Thurien who had been pacing slowly out by the rim when they appeared from one of the ramps from the interior, and who was now only a short distance away, changed direction toward them. The Terrans turned to face him as he drew closer. His face was lined and seemed old, his furrowed crown a subdued mix of streaky browns and grays that gave the impression of being faded.
"Forgive me if this is an intrusion," he said. "I am not familiar with the ways of Terrans. But it's the first opportunity I've had to speak with people from your world."
"Not at all," Hunt said cheerfully. "It would be a long way to come and not want to talk to anyone." He introduced himself and the others and added, "All in Thurios." When meeting in a virtual recreation of a setting, it was customary to state where one was located physically. It was evident that the Thurien was actually somewhere else also; had he been physically at the tower in Vranix, and therefore not neurally coupled into the system, he wouldn't be interacting with them. "Mildred is writing a book on your society. We're giving her a quick introductory tour of Thurien."
"My name is Kolno Wyarel. On Nessara, a planet of Callantares, a star you've probably never heard of." His manner became more relaxed. "But I was Thurien-born originally . . . a long time ago, now."
"With a system like this, you're never really away," Mildred observed. "Has it changed much?"
"Oh, Vranix never changes much."
"Is Vranix the part of Thurien that you're from?" Danchekker inquired, making a heroic effort at being genial.
"I studied music and philosophy here." Wyarel looked around. A faint smile touched his features. "It is where my wife, Asayi, and I met when we were young. Our favorite memories are of these places. So every once in a while we come back here to relive them a little."
"Will she . . ." Hunt wasn't sure if Wyarel meant that they came here together, or that Wyarel came to be reminded. He broke of the question that he had begun to frame, realizing that it might be indelicate.
The Thurien understood and gave a short laugh. "Yes, she's fine. She was supposed to be here by now, but no doubt she got distracted by something. VISAR says she isn't online yet. Don't worry about it. It happens all the time. She's somewhere in the same house as me."
"A universal proclivity of the female, it would appear," Danchekker observed.
"Oh, don't pontificate so, Christian," Mildred chided. "What do you do now on . . . where was it? . . . Nessara," she asked Wyarel.
"It's what I suppose you would call a tropical planet, teeming with forests and life. Warm and humid by our standards, but you get used to it. We retired there to be among the life, and to contemplate. There is an inner awareness that learns to open out to these things."
"There used to be teachings like that on Earth, but we seem to have turned away from them." Mildred glanced at the two scientists with her. "Such things seem to be considered as gone out of style." Danchekker humphed and rocked from one foot to the other, refusing to be goaded.
"That's only natural. But it will be temporary," Wyarel said. "A culture must attend to its material needs before it can rise beyond them, just as we must eat before we can create the works that are to be found in Vranix. Thuriens have discovered and mastered the physical universe. Now we are discovering ourselves."
"Christian, this is exactly what I wanted!" Mildred said. Then, to Wyarel, "Could I feel free to get in touch again sometime, and talk more about this?"
"Of course. But there are times when we retreat from external affairs, you understand."
"It wouldn't be an imposition?"
"We would be honored. . . . Excuse me for a moment." Wyarel stared distantly for a few seconds, then returned to the present. "That was VISAR with a message. Asayi had something to attend to concerning one of the klorgs—that's a domestic animal. We have several that come and go around the house. Now she's in the middle of a call from our daughter. Please, don't let me detain you any further. She would love to meet you, I'm sure, but it can always be another time. I am content enough here, alone with my thoughts."
"Females and cats," Danchekker murmured to himself, but not quite below his breath.
"Christian!" Mildred admonished.
They added the planet Nessara to their tour list and visited it next out of curiosity. The part that VISAR brought them to looked like the green rain-forest hills of the upper Amazon with a snow-capped wall of the Himalayas behind, but with greater richness of color and on an even grander scale. The waterfalls tracing their way down from the heights looked like chains of sparkling necklaces draped over the hills. VISAR supplied sensory inputs that faithfully reproduced the heat and the sultriness of the air, the scents and the sounds, even a realistic touch of clothing sliding clammily over moist skin. Hunt was amused to note that Danchekker unconsciously removed his virtual spectacles to wipe the lenses with his virtual handkerchief—there was no reason why VISAR should cause them to fog up.
"How careful do I have to be about what I'm thinking when we meet someone like Wyarel?" Mildred asked. "I mean, I can actually feel myself breathing more deeply up here, which I'm sure I'm really not doing. From what you've said, it must be VISAR doing things inside my head. How much else of what's inside there can it pull out?"
"You don't have to worry," Hunt told her. "In principle, yes, it could. But it doesn't. The Thuriens have strict codes about things like privacy. Unless a user specifically instructs otherwise, VISAR is limited to supplying primary sensory data and monitoring motor and a few other terminal outputs only. It communicates only what you'd see, hear, feel, and so on if you were there. It doesn't read minds."
"Well, that's good to know, anyway."
They floated immaterially like cosmic gods above a world that Danchekker had discovered before and insisted on visiting again. It described a complex orbit about a double star to produce conditions so extreme that its surface alternated between being ocean and desert. Nevertheless, it supported a range of astonishing life forms that were able to adapt, including a part-time fish that dissolved its bone structure and morphed into a lizardlike sand dweller when the dry part of the cycle approached. They visited a newly born world that was still an incandescent cauldron of lava flows and outgassing—instantly lethal in reality, but with just enough of the flavor imparted by VISAR to give them an idea of it. They stared in awe at an immense Thurien space construction thousands of miles in extent that formed part of one of the mass-conversion systems consuming burnt-out stars, from where energy was beamed through h-space to create the interstellar transport ports. They saw a world of vapors and canyons, where the population lived on artificial islands floating in the sky; a fairyland city carved out under an ice crust; and an extraordinary football-shaped world that spun about its short axis with its ends protruding beyond the atmosphere, where it was possible—after an enormous climb that required life-support gear—to jump off and be in orbit.
Finally, they found themselves inside what to Hunt and Danchekker were the familiar surroundings of the Command Deck of the ancient Ganymean starship, Shapieron. This was the vessel that had left the Solar System at the time of pre-Lunarian Minerva, before the Ganymeans migrated to Thurien, and returned only a few years ago, when Hunt and Danchekker were at Ganymede. The half-mile-high tower of once-gleaming metallic curves but pitted and discolored now as a result of its enforced exile, currently stood on the outskirts of a city called Shiban, on Jevlen. The exiles from the distant past had found adjusting to Thurien practically as difficult an experience as it was for Terrans. But they had found themselves a niche supervising the rebuilding of Jevlenese society after its deterioration and final collapse under the previous regime. Since the Ganymeans were interacting via Thurien neurocouplers, too, the "meeting" could as easily have taken place anywhere. But for reasons of nostalgia and old time's sake, everyone concerned had preferred to make it their old ship.
Garuth, who had been the commander of the Shapieron mission, greeted his two old friends and their guest warmly. With him were Shilohin, the female chief scientist, Rodgar Jassilane, the ship's engineering chief, and Monchar, Garuth's second-in-command. The Ganymeans from old-time Minerva were taller than Thuriens on average, not as dark in hue, and their crown coloring was less vivid. Also in attendance was ZORAC, the ship's controlling AI, an early precursor to VISAR, now coupled into the Shiban net to stand in for the decommissioned JEVEX.
The first topic that the Ganymeans wanted to hear about, of course, was the latest on the Multiverse project. Thuriens had no concept of secrecy, and bulletins detailing progress were produced regularly, but Garuth and the others wanted to hear Hunt and Danchekker's personal account. Hunt was able to fill them in on the fine structure of Multiverse segments and consequent ethereal passage of objects propagating through them, which he had learned himself only hours previously from Eesyan. The question again arose of how anything could be halted and stabilized so as to remain in one reality that a coherent picture could be derived from.
"Would it be feasible to create some kind of complementary M-wave that interferes destructively everywhere except at the target distance?" Shilohin wondered aloud. "Would that preserve the transmitted object as a standing resonance? It would probably still extend through many segments . . . but so what? Maybe you could fine tune your connection to any one of them." Nobody could argue with the thought, certainly; but just at the moment, it was purely abstract.
"It's an interesting idea. I'll bounce it off Eesyan," was all Hunt could offer in reply.
"You're still firing blind, though," Jassilane pointed out. "You called it a 'target.' But there's no form of feedback to identify one." He looked around. "You see what I mean? Suppose you wanted to send . . . oh . . ." he waved a hand, "the orbiting relay that this other universe sent to you. It seems to have appeared where and when it was supposed to. How did the senders know how to get it to where they wanted it?"
"I don't suppose we know enough about the Multiverse structure to preprogram the device to recognize features it's looking for?" Monchar ventured. "Like terrain-following flyers."
Hunt shook his head. "It depends too much on the way change occurs from one segment to the next—gradually or abruptly. And that varies with the MV dimension you move in. You could have practically stasis going one way, and total discontinuity if you choose another—a single quantum event being magnified, maybe, and triggering a transition to an entirely different reality. We have no idea how to model effects like that."
"To get where you want, you need a map. But you have to be there to draw one," ZORAC commented.
"Does this mean you're about to deliver one of your profound insights, ZORAC?" Hunt asked it.
"No. Just my take on the situation."
"Thanks."
There was not a lot more to be said on that for now. The talk shifted to the work of Garuth and his administration on Jevlen. The program was progressing well, with the Jevlenese getting over their total dependency on JEVEX and learning to mange their own affairs competently. Hunt had noticed from some of the outside views showing on the Command Deck's display screens that the city was looking cleaner and in better shape than the run-down, decaying condition it had been in when he last saw it. He wondered what Garuth and his people would do when their task here was complete. It seemed a question best not brought up at a time like this. But the Shapieron was not decommissioned or stood down from being launch capable in any way. It had played key roles in the ruse that had brought down Broghuilios's Jevlenese regime in the Pseudowar, and afterward, in defeating the mass mind-invasion of Jevlenese that the mental transplants from the Entoverse had intended. Hunt got the feeling that they would be hankering for an excuse to fly their ship again.
And then, after the usual promises to stay in touch more regularly that busy people are always making but seldom keep, they exchanged farewells for the time being. Moments later, Hunt was back in the recliner in the neurocoupler next to the Multiporter at the Quelsang Institute. "Thanks for the ride, VISAR," he said by way of signing off.
"We try to please."
Hunt stretched to take in a yawn, held the pose for a few seconds, and flexed his limbs a few times before getting up and ambling out into the lab area. "Who's still around?" he asked, reverted to avco mode now.
"Only Thurien techs," VISAR replied. "Eesyan left earlier. Josef Sonnebrandt and Madam Xyen Chien have gone on ahead and will see you at dinner with the rest of the Terran group."
"Ah, yes. How long do I have?"
"Little over an hour."
"Does that give me time to get back to the Waldorf to freshen up and change first?" "No problem. There are some available flyers on the terrace outside the cafeteria area two levels below where you are. Take the door at the back and turn right, follow the wall with the windows in it to the concourse, and step onto the downgoing g-line."