Phoenix Café (19 page)

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.

The Busy Person had heard that humans could acquire skills at random. He wished to sound knowledgeable.

responded the scientist rudely.

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 the 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.

agreed the scientist, with cheery contempt.

Bright grinned. he added,
not to embarrass yourself with dumb questions. Just follow me about, leading those poor local beggars behind you. Look interested, that’s all anyone asks.>

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 announced to the Busy Person, in the Common Tongue. He repeated that in English. Inside the cabinet, suspended in an amorphous blob of semi-rigid gel, was another, smaller blob, roundish, roughened and irregular.

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:

said the scientist, calmed by the pleasure of admiring his own creation.

he remarked, after a few moments,

The shipworld was vanishing.

The visitor looked around warily.

Dr. Bright gave him a pitying glance. He flicked his fingers at the exhibit, it became once more a small dark lump. will
be soon, you know. You needn’t lie anymore. What do you want me to tell them?>

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.

asked the visitor, jerking his chin at the dividing wall—after a furtive glance at the ceiling, to make sure the livespace light was off. He did not trust the humans’ inability to follow the Common Tongue. It seemed to him unnatural and improbable: an elaborate hoax.

The Busy Person grimly ducked his chin against his throat, the Aleutian affirmative gesture: with overtones of stark necessity.

said Bright,

agreed the Busy Person, tentatively.

that’s
why we had to quarantine ourselves. Your people gave me enough
fuss
about it at the time.>

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.

He reached for another exhibit.

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.

mused Bright. Your
body is alive, and in a real sense conscious.> He grinned at the Busy Person.

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.

Bright went on, dreamily, anti-self,
developed from a sample of the enemy’s inert tissue (not living tissue, of course, because then the weapons would simply destroy themselves) To start the Buonarotti pump we need a—how can I put it—a general, universal anti-self. But the process is essentially the same, isn’t that elegant.> He turned the exhibit in his hands.