The Two Worlds (58 page)

Hunt set his glass down and looked at her curiously. "You've only just arrived on board. How do you know so much already?"

"I took your advice and asked."

"Asked who?"

"visar. Apparently it doesn't occur to very many Earth-people. visar thinks it's because we assume furtiveness everywhere."

Hunt had to smile. It would have come to her so naturally that he should have guessed—as naturally as calling Caldwell and saying she needed help with a book.

Gina finished her drink. "How'd I do?" she asked in a lowered voice.

"Terrific. I'm sure you've got another profession waiting if you find you've got tired of books."

"Is anyone still interested in us, do you think?"

Hunt shook his head. "We can just be natural now. If anyone gets curious later about how you got mixed up with the UNSA group, there were enough witnesses. So, forget any more Mata Hari stuff. Have you had lunch?"

"I'm still too excited about this whole business to have much of an appetite," Gina answered. "But this ship is fantastic! What do you think the chances would be of getting to see more of it while we're here?"

"Oh, pretty good, I should think." Hunt raised his voice slightly. "visar, could you take us on a tour around the
Vishnu
?"

"Be my guests," the machine replied.

They stood amidst stupefying constructions of gleaming metallic shapes, walls of light, and what looked like clean-cut massifs, as big as buildings, of internally glowing crystal. It was all too devoid of even a hint of anything recognizable for Hunt to form any coherent questions for visar of what it meant.

"You seem . . . impressed," Gina said, finding a tactful word to describe the look on Hunt's face.

His frown switched to a faint grin. "It is a bit much for one afternoon, isn't it?" he agreed. "This is all a long way past the ship from Minerva that we found on Ganymede. That was from the same era as the
Shapieron.
We thought it was pretty spectacular at the time. But compared to this it was like the boiler room of a tramp steamer."

"They produce some kind of `stress wave,' or something, don't they?" Gina said. "A bubble of bent space-time around the ship. That's what moves through space, carrying the ship with it. Since the ship is at rest relative to the space inside the bubble, the usual speed limits don't apply."

"That's right. The rules for
space
propagating through space are different." Hunt shook his head wonderingly. "Is there anything you don't get interested in?"

"I told you, journalists are curious, like scientists."

Hunt nodded. "The
Shapieron
used a system that constrained superdense masses to move in closed paths at relativistic speeds, which generated high rates of change of gravitic potential and created a matter-annihilation zone that powered the stress field. The equipment to do it was colossal, but I don't see anything like it here. But there has to be something like it to get us out past Pluto, where the entry port will be projected for transfer to Jevlen. visar, how has it changed?"

"That's all done remotely now," visar replied. "The stress wave is generated by small converters located around the extremities of the ship and coupling into the Thurien h-space grid. The ship itself can be quite compact. Remember the one that landed in Alaska?"

"I take it this is the kind of thing you're finding out more about at Goddard," Gina said to Hunt.

"Trying to, anyway. There's a lot of it. Half the problem is getting the information organized."

"Have there been any big surprises so far—I mean, apart from the ones we've read about? You know: the universe is bigger than we thought, smaller than we thought; parallel universes are real; Einstein was wrong. Anything like that?"

Hunt looked around from the rail he was leaning on. "Well, it's funny you should mention Einstein," he said.

"You mean he
was
wrong?"

"Not wrong, exactly . . . but unnecessarily complicated, like Ptolemy's planetary orbits. It all works out a lot more simply and still agrees with the same experimental results if you take the velocity that matters as being not that with respect to the observer at all, but with respect to the local dominant energy field. The distortions of space that Einstein was forced to postulate turn out to be simply compensations for the breakdown of the inverse square law at high speeds, caused by the finite propagation speed of gravity. If you allow for that, then practically everything in relativity can be deduced by classical methods."

Gina stared at him as if unable to decide whether he was joking or being serious. "You mean everybody missed it?"

"Yes," Hunt answered, nodding. "Take the business with Mercury's perihelion, for instance. You know about that?"

"I thought that Einstein's answer works; Newton's doesn't."

"So do most people," Hunt agreed. He looked away and snorted. "But all the prestige and money for practically the last century has come for building more spectacular gadgets, not for going over the basics of physics. Do you know what visar found while it was browsing through some old European archives?"

"What?"

"The same formula that Einstein obtained through Riemannian geometry and gravitational tensors was derived classically by a German called Paul Gerber, in 1898, when Einstein was nine years old. It was there all the time, but everybody missed it."

The
Vishnu
was home for several hundred thousand Thuriens for periods that varied from short-term to permanent. They lived in baffling urban complexes that resembled their labyrinthine cities back home, amid simulations of external vistas beneath artificial skies, and in isolated spots enjoying the peculiarities of various landscapes, copied and contrived. Life aboard the ship combined all the functions of a complete social and professional infrastructure. The whole thing, Hunt began to realize, was more an elaborate, mobile space colony than anything conventionally thought of on Earth as a means of transportation.

"This is the kind of vessel typically sent out to explore local regions of the Galaxy," visar confirmed. "It might spend several years at a newly discovered planetary system."

Evidently the Thuriens liked to take their comforts with them.

Hunt and Gina sat on a boulder on a grassy slope overlooking a lake with a distinctly curved surface. There were boats on it, scattered among several islands, and on the opposite shore an intricate composition of terraced architecture that went up to the "sky." The sky was pale blue—like that of Thurien. The bushes around where they were sitting had broad, wedge-shaped, purple leaves that opened and folded like fans. According to visar, they could shed their roots and migrate downhill on bulbous pseudopods if the soil became too dry.

"How would you classify them?" Gina mused. "If animals move and plants don't, what are they?"

"Why does it matter what you call them?" Hunt said. "When people have problems with questions like that, it's usually because they're trying to make reality fit something from their kit of standard labels. They'd be better off thinking about rewriting the labels."

They contemplated the scenery in silence for a while.

"It's funny how evolution works," Gina said. "About ninety-five percent of all species were supposed to have been wiped out in a mass extinction that happened around two hundred million years ago. It didn't favor any particular kind of animal: large or small, marine or land-dwelling, complex or simple, or anything like that. Nothing can adapt for catastrophes on that kind of scale. So the survivors were simply the lucky five percent. Whole families vanished for no particular reason at all, and the few that were left determined the entire pattern of life subsequently." She looked at Hunt, as if asking him to confirm it.

"I don't know know too much about that side of things," he said. "Chris Danchekker's the one you ought to be talking to." He stood up and offered her a hand. "Speaking of which, we ought to be getting back. It's about time you met the rest of the crew."

They walked down to the lakeside, where a path brought them to a transit conveyor. Soon they were being whisked back through the Escherian maze, and arrived shortly afterward at the Terran section. As they crossed the mess area, Hunt noticed that the wallscreen that had previously showed the view outside was blank. He knew that the stress wave surrounding a Ganymean vessel cut it off from electromagnetic signals, including light, when it was under full gravity drive.

"visar," he said aloud so that Gina could hear. "Is the ship under way already?"

"Since a little under fifteen minutes ago," the machine confirmed. Which would have been typical of the Ganymean way of doing things: no fuss or ceremony; no formal announcements.

"So where are we now?" Hunt asked.

"Just about crossing the orbit of Mars."

So UNSA might as well scrap all of its designs for the next fifty years, Hunt decided.

At a lonely place high among the peaks of the Wilderness of Rinjussin, Thrax came to a large, flat rock where the path divided. A monk was floating in midair above the rock, absorbed in his meditations. His sash bore the purple-spiral emblem representing the cloak of the night god, Nieru. Thrax had heard that as an exercise in learning to attract and ride the currents, adepts would support themselves on currents that they generated themselves by prayer. He waited several hours until the monk descended back onto the rock and looked at him.

"What do you stare at?" Thrax asked him.

"I contemplate the world," the monk answered.

Thrax turned and looked back at the valley he had climbed, with its scene of barren slopes, shattered rock, and desolation. "Not much of a world to contemplate from here," he commented. "Do I take it, then, that your world is within?"

"Within, and without. For the currents that bring visions of Hyperia speak within the mind; yet they flow from beyond Waroth. Thus, Hyperia is at the same time both within and without."

"I, too, am in search of Hyperia," Thrax said.

"Why would you seek it?" the monk asked.

"It is taught that the mission of the adepts who rise on the currents and depart from Waroth is to serve the gods in Hyperia. Such is my calling."

"And what made you think that you would find it here, in Rinjussin?"

"I seek a Master known as Shingen-Hu, who, it is said, teaches in these parts."

"This is the last place that you should come looking for Shingen-Hu," the monk said.

Thrax reflected upon the statement. "Then my search has ended," he replied finally. "That means he must be here. For obviously he is to be found in the last place I would look, since why would I continue looking after I found him?"

"Many come seeking Shingen-Hu. Most are fools. But I see that you are not foolish," the monk said.

"So, can you tell me which path I must take?" Thrax asked.

"I can."

"Then, speak."

"One path leads to certain death. To know more, you must first ask the right question."

Thrax had expected having to give answers. But to be required to come up with the question itself put a different complexion on things. He looked perplexed from one to the other of the two trails winding away on either side of the rock.

Then he said, "But death is certain eventually, whichever path one takes. Which path must I take, therefore, to achieve the most that is meaningful along the way?"

"How do you judge what is meaningful?" the monk challenged.

"Let Shingen-Hu be the judge," Thrax answered.

"We are in troubled times. The currents that once shimmered and glinted across the night skies have become few and weak. Many come to learn, but few shall ride. Why, stranger, should Shingen-Hu choose you?"

"Again, let Shingen-Hu be the judge. I cannot give his reasons. Only mine."

The monk nodded and seemed satisfied. "You come to serve, and not to demand," he pronounced, climbing down from the rock. "Follow me. I will take you to Shingen-Hu."

The others had gone to take care of various chores, leaving Hunt and Gina together at the dinner table. They had all agreed to meet later in the mess area for a nightcap—or two, or maybe several.

Gina stared down at her coffee cup and unconsciously traced a question mark lightly on the tabletop with her finger. "Is it true that some of the animals on Jevlen have an uncanny resemblance to ones found in Earth's mythology?" she asked after a long silence.

Hunt had been watching her, thinking to himself that she was the most refreshing personality he had encountered in a long time. It wasn't just that she was curious about everything, which was an attraction in itself, and that she took the trouble to find out something about the things that intrigued her; she did it without making an attention-getting display of it, or taking it to the point of where it started to get tedious. Her judgment in knowing how far to go was just right, which was one of the first things in making people attractive to be around. In the course of the meal she had won the company's acceptance by refraining from thrusting herself on them, listening to Danchekker's expositions without pandering like a student, putting Duncan at ease by not flaunting her femininity, and avoiding triggering rivalry vibes from Sandy. In fact, she and Sandy had gotten along instantly, like sisters.

"Do you know, you've never come back with a line that I expected, yet," Hunt replied.

"Seriously, I read about it somewhere. There's a kind of horned wolf with talons that's exactly like the Slavonic `kikimora.' Another has parts of what look like a lion, a peacock, and a dog, just like the `simurgh' of Iran. And would you believe a plumed, goggle-eyed reptile, practically identical to all those Mexican carvings?"

"I seem to remember something about it, but it isn't an area I've really looked at," Hunt said. "Why? What's the significance?"

"Oh, nothing earth-shattering. It just occurred to me that maybe that was where we got them from. Perhaps the Jevlenese agents that came to Earth in the past mixed ideas of their own animal forms into the belief systems that they spread."