"visar manufactures composite impressions from data originated in different places and delivers them as a total package," Eesyan replied. "It can combine visual, tactile, audile, and other details of an environment with data synthesized from monitoring the neural activity of other persons linked into the system, and provide each individual with a complete, personalized impression of being in that environment and interacting physically and verbally with the others. Hence we can visit other worlds, travel among other cultures, convene for meetings in other star systems, and make visits to artificial worlds out in space . . . and be home in an instant. We do move around physically to some degree, of course, for example in recreation or for activities that require physical presence, but for the most part our long-range business and travel is conducted via electronics and gravitics."
The surface continued curving over and brought them out into a wide circular gallery that looked down over a railed parapet on a fairly busy plaza of some kind a level below. Between the flowing curves and surfaces enclosing the space from above, they could see part of the floor of the arcade that they had been walking along a few minutes earlier. At least, it had seemed like a floor at the time. But by now they were beginning to get used to that kind of thing.
"When we first sat down inside that planet at McClusky, all my senses went haywire for a while," Lyn said as she thought back. "What was that all about?"
"visar tuning in to your personal cerebral patterns and activity levels," Eesyan told her. "It was making adjustments until it obtained correct feedback responses. They vary somewhat from individual to individual. The process is a one-time thing. You could think of it as somewhat like fingerprinting."
"Porthik," Hunt said after they had continued for some distance in silence. "That stunt you pulled on me right at the beginning—you've been getting some mixed-up stories about Earth, and you needed to check them out. Right?"
"It was extremely important, as Calazar will explain," Eesyan answered.
"But was it necessary?" Hunt queried. "If visar can access neural patterns directly, why couldn't it have simply pulled whatever it wanted to know straight out of my memory? That way there wouldn't have been any risk of wrong answers."
"Technically that would be possible," Eesyan agreed. "However, for reasons of privacy such things are not permitted under our laws. visar is programmed in a way that restricts it to supplying primary sensory inputs to the brain and monitoring motor and certain other terminal outputs only. It communicates only what would be seen, heard, felt, and so on; it does not read minds."
"How about the others?" Hunt inquired. "Do you have any idea how they're getting along? I wouldn't exactly recommend your welcoming ceremonies as the best way of making friends."
Eesyan's mouth puckered in the way that Hunt had long ago recognized as the Ganymean equivalent of a smile. "You needn't worry. They haven't all been getting to the bottom of visar as quickly as you did, so some of them are still a little confused, but apart from that they're fine."
The confusion had been intentional, Hunt realized suddenly. It was a deliberate measure calculated to defuse any animosity left lingering as a result of the initial shock tactics. Eesyan's showing up to escort them to wherever they were going was no doubt part of the plan too. "It didn't seem quite like that when I talked to Chris Danchekker on the phone a few minutes before you arrived," he said, grinning to himself as he caught the expression on Lyn's face.
"As a matter of fact, you and Professor Danchekker did have comparatively hard rides," Eesyan admitted. "We're sorry about that, but the two of you were unique in that you both possessed firsthand knowledge of certain events connected with the Shapieron that we were particularly anxious to obtain. The experiences of your companions were more in the nature of discussions concerning their various specialized fields. Their accounts corroborated one another's perfectly. It was very illuminating."
"What happened with you and Chris?" Lyn asked, looking across at Hunt.
"I'll tell you about it later," he replied. What they did might have been unconventional, but it had certainly worked, he told himself. In those first few minutes the Ganymeans had obtained and verified more information than they could have in days of talking. If it was that important, he could hardly blame them after the way they had been messed around by the UN at Farside. He wondered if Caldwell and the others saw things the same way. It wouldn't be long before he found out, he saw as he looked ahead of them. They seemed to have arrived at their destination.
They were walking down a shallow, fan-shaped ramp that was taking them through a final arch out into the open. They emerged into a descending arrangement of interlocking geometric forms, terraces, and esplanades that formed one side of a large circular layout echoing the same theme. The lowermost, central part, directly ahead of them, consisted of a forum of seats set in tiers and facing one another from all four sides of a rectangular floor. The whole place was a vast composition of color and form set among pools of liquid fluorescence fed by slow-motion rivers and fountains of shimmering light. A number of figures were assembled on three sides of the floor, all Ganymean. They were standing and seemed to be waiting. At the front and in the center of a raised section of seats on one side was Calazar, recognizable by his dark green tunic and silvery cape.
And then Hunt saw Caldwell's stocky frame emerge from another entrance on the far side of an open area to his right, accompanied by a Ganymean . . . and beyond Caldwell, Heller and Packard appeared with another Ganymean, Heller walking calmly and with assurance, Packard staring from side to side and looking bewildered. Hunt turned his head the other way in time to see Danchekker walking through an archway, waving his arms and remonstrating to a Ganymean on either side; evidently it was taking two of them to handle him. The arrivals had been synchronized perfectly. It couldn't have been accidental.
Suddenly Lyn gasped and stopped, her face raised to stare at something overhead. Hunt followed her gaze . . . and stopped . . . then gasped.
From three sides beyond the raised rim of the place they were in, three slim spires of pink ivory converged upward above their heads for an inestimable distance before blending into an inverted cascade of terraces and ramparts that broadened and unfolded upward and away for what must have been miles. Above it—it didn't make sense, but above it, where the sky should have been, the scene mushroomed out into a mind-defying fusion of structures of staggering dimensions that marched away as far as the eye could see in one direction, and fringed a distant ocean in the other. It had to be the city of Vranix. But it was all hanging miles over their heads and upside down.
And then the realization hit him. They had walked out into the sky. The three pink spires "rising" from around them in fact surmounted an enormous tower that projected upward from the city, supporting a circular platform that held the place they were in. But they had come out on the underside of it! Their senses had become sufficiently disoriented in the Ganymean labyrinth for them to have inverted without realizing it, and they had walked outside in some locally generated gravity effect to find themselves gazing down over the surface of Thurien stretching away over their heads.
Caldwell and the others had seen it too, and were just standing, staring. Even Danchekker had stopped talking and was looking upward, his mouth hanging half open. It was the Ganymeans' final trump card and master stroke, Hunt realized. Even if any of his companions had been harboring any lingering resentments, they would be too overwhelmed by this—timed precisely to hit them minutes before the meeting was due to begin—to protest very strongly. He liked these aliens, he decided, strange though the thought seemed in some ways at that particular moment. He always enjoyed seeing professionals in action.
One by one the dazed figures of the Terrans came slowly back to life and began moving again, down toward the central forum where the Ganymeans were waiting.
Chapter Eleven
"We owe you an apology," Calazar said bluntly as soon as the introductions had been completed. "I know that's no
t supposed to be the best way of starting a meeting by Earth's customs, but I've never really understood why. If it needs saying, let's say it and get it out of the way. As you no doubt appreciate by now, we needed to check some facts that are important to us, and to you too I would imagine. It seems just as well that we did." It was going to be a far less formal affair than he had been half prepared for, Hunt noted with relief. He wondered if what he was nearing was an accurate translation of Calazar's words or a liberal interpretation concocted by visar. He had assumed that an opening on this note would be unavoidable, and was ready for some fireworks there and then. But as he looked around he could see that the Ganymean defusing tactics appeared to be having their desired effect. Caldwell and Heller seemed in command of themselves and were looking purposeful as if by no means ready to let the matter just go at that, but at the same time they were subdued sufficiently to wait and see what developed before making an issue out of anything. Danchekker had obviously come in spoiling for a fight, but the psychological left hook that the Ganymeans had delivered out of the blue—literally—at the last moment had temporarily knocked it out of him. Packard appeared to be in some kind of trance; in his case the tranquilizer had, perhaps, worked too well.
After pausing, Calazar continued, "On behalf of our entire race, we welcome you to our world and to our society. The threads that have traced the evolution of our two kinds, and which have remained separated until now, have at last crossed. We hope that from this point on they will continue to remain entwined for the benefit and greater learning of all of us." With that he sat down. It was simple, Hunt thought, and seemed a good way of getting things moving.
The Terran faces turned toward Packard, who was officially the most senior in rank and therefore the designated spokesman. It took him a few seconds to realize that the others were looking at him. Then he looked uncertainly from side to side, gripped the sides of his chair, moistened his lips, and rose slowly and somewhat unsteadily to his feet. "On behalf of the . . . government of . . ." The words dried up. He stood swaying slightly and staring dumbstruck at the rows of alien countenances arrayed before him, and then raised his head and shook it disbelievingly at the spectacle of the tower falling away into the metropolis of Vranix and the panorama of Thurien stretching off on every side beyond. For an instant Hunt thought he was going to collapse. And then he vanished.
"I regret that the Secretary of State appears to be temporarily indisposed," visar informed the assembly.
That was enough to break the spell. At once Caldwell was on his feet, his eyes steely and his mouth clamped in a downturned line. Heller had also started to rise, but she checked herself and sank back into her seat as Caldwell beat her to it by a split second. "This has gone too far," Caldwell grated, fixing his eyes on Calazar. "Save the niceties. We came here in good faith. You owe us an explanation."
Instantly everything changed. The forum, the tower, Vranix, and the overhead canopy of Thurien were gone. Instead they were all indoors in a fairly large but not huge room with a domed ceiling, which contained a wide, circular table of iridescent crystal and a centerpiece. The principal participants were placed around it in the same relative positions as before with Caldwell still standing; the other Ganymeans who had been present earlier were looking on from raised seats behind. Compared to the previous setting this one felt protective and secure.
"We underestimated the impact," Calazar said hastily. "Perhaps this will be closer to what you are used to."
"Never mind the Alice-in-Wonderland effects," Caldwell said. "Okay, you've made your point—we're impressed. But we came here at your request and somebody just flipped out as a consequence. We don't find it amusing."
"That was not intentional," Calazar replied. "We have already expressed our regrets. Your colleague will be back to normal very soon."
The exchange did not have the connotations that it would have if this confrontation were taking place on Earth, Hunt knew as he listened. Because of their origins Ganymeans simply didn't seek to intimidate nor did they respond to intimidation. They didn't think that way. Calazar was simply stating the facts of the matter, no more and no less. The standards and conditioning of human culture did not apply to this situation. Caldwell knew it too, but somebody had to be seen to set the limits.
"So let's get down to some straight questions and answer," Caldwell said. "You said that our two races have evolved separately until now. That's not entirely true—the two lines come together a long way back in the past. Since the story you've been getting about us seems to have become confused somewhere, it might help clear up a lot of uncertainty and save us some time if I sum up what we already know." Without waiting for a response he went on, "We know that your civilization existed on Minerva until around twenty-five million years ago, that you shipped a lot of terrestrial life there, possibly to attempt a genetic-engineering solution to the environmental problems, and that the Lunarians evolved from ancestors included among them after you left. We also know about the Lunarian war of fifty thousand years ago, about the Moon being captured by Earth, and about ourselves having descended from Lunarian survivors that came with it. Are we talking the same language so far?"
A ripple of murmurings broke out among the Ganymeans. They seemed surprised. Evidently the Terrans knew a lot more than they had expected. That could put an interesting new perspective on things, Hunt thought.
Frenua Showm, the female ambassador of Thurien, who had been introduced at the commencement of the proceedings, replied. "If you already know about the Lunarians, you shouldn't have any difficulty in finding the answer to one of the questions that you have no doubt been asking," she said. "Earth has been under surveillance because of our concern that it might go the way of its Lunarian ancestors and become a technically advanced, belligerent planet. The Lunarians destroyed themselves before they spilled out of the Solar System. Earth might not have. In other words we saw in Earth a potential threat to the other parts of the Galaxy, and perhaps, one day, to all of it." Showm gave the impression that she was far from convinced, even now, that it wasn't so. Definitely not a Terranophile, Hunt decided. The reason did not come as a surprise. With the Ganymeans being the way they were and the Lunarians having been the way they had, it had to be something like that.
"So why all the secrecy?" Heller asked from beside Caldwell. Caldwell sat down to allow her to take it from there. "You claim to represent the Thurien race, yet it's obvious that you don't speak for everybody. You don't want this dialogue brought to the attention of whoever is responsible for the surveillance. So are you what you say you are? If so, why do you need to conceal your actions from your own people?"
"The surveillance is operated by an autonomous . . . shall we say, `organization' within our system," Calazar replied. "We had reason to suspect the accuracy of some of the information being reported. It became necessary for us to verify it . . . but discreetly, in case we were wrong."
"Suspect the accuracy!" Hunt repeated, spreading his hands in an imploring gesture around the table. "You're making it sound like just a minor aberration here and there. Christ . . . they didn't even tell you that the Shapieron had returned and was on Earth at all—your own ship with your own people in it! And the picture you got of Earth wasn't just inaccurate; it was systematically distorted. So what the hell's been going on?"
"That is an internal affair of Thurien that we will now be in a position to do something about," Calazar assured him. He seemed a little off balance, perhaps as a result of his having been unprepared for the Terrans knowing as much as Caldwell had revealed.
"It's not just an internal affair," Heller insisted. "It concerns our whole planet. We want to know who's been misrepresenting us, and why."
"We don't know why," Calazar told her simply. "That's what we're trying to find out. The first step was to get our facts straight. My apologies again, but I think we have now achieved that."
Caldwell was scowling. "Maybe you ought to let us talk to this `organization' direct," he rumbled.
"We'll find out why."
"That's not possible," Calazar said.
"Why?" Heller asked him. "Surely we've got a legitimate interest in all this. You've carried out your discreet checking of facts now, and you've got your answers. If you in fact represent this planet, what's to stop you acting accordingly?"
"Are you in a position to make such demands?" Showm challenged. "If our interpretation of the situation is correct, you do not constitute an officially representative group of the whole of Earth's society, either. That function surely belongs rightfully to the United Nations, does it not?"
"We've been communicating with them for weeks," Calazar said, taking Showm's point. "They have done nothing to dispel any wrong impressions of Earth that we may have, and they seem disinclined to meet us. But your transmissions were directed from another part of the Solar System entirely, suggesting perhaps that you did not wish our replies to become general knowledge, and therefore that you are equally concerned with preserving secrecy."
"What is the reason for the UN's curious attitude?" Showm asked, looking from one to another of the Terrans and allowing her eyes to rest finally on Heller.
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