"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.
Chapter Twelve
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."
Chapter Thirteen
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."
"It's an intriguing thought," Hunt agreed. He stubbed his cigarette and looked across at her. "Doesn't it come into this new book that you're talking about?"
"Sure. That's why I'm interested in collecting opinions."
"When we talked back at my place, you said you thought Christ might have been one of them." Hunt paused and frowned. "No, wait a minute. It was the other way around, wasn't it. You said he was on the other side, right?"
"If he was Jevlenese, it was as a rebel working against their cause," Gina replied. "Or he could simply have been an exceptionally enlightened Terran. Either way, he wasn't working with them."
Hunt looked at her with interest as he refilled their cups from the coffeepot on the table. "What makes you say that?"
"Well, think about it. The operation that the Jevlenese set up was aimed at retarding Earth's development by implanting notions of the supernatural and starting mass movements based on irrationality. That's where early religions came from. The Lunarians didn't have anything like that."
"Yes, exactly." Hunt looked puzzled. "But isn't . . ."
Gina shook her head, reading the question. "No. He didn't. What people have been told for the best part of two thousand years is wrong. He didn't teach what the churches say he taught. What they daren't tell their followers is the one thing he was trying to say. You see—that's exactly the kind of thing I want to get into."
Hunt stared back curiously. "Go on," he said.
"He told people not to listen to the Pharisees, scribes, priests, or other self-important persons and institutions who were out to control them and exploit them. He taught, simply, that inner integrity and honesty were essential if you want to know yourself and the world. It didn't have anything to do with rituals and dogma, or rules for organizations. It was simply a prescription for a personal code of conduct and ethics aimed at coming to terms with one's nature and with reality. In other words, a philosophy of individual self-knowledge and responsibility, totally compatible with the notions of science and reason that were beginning to emerge at the time, despite all the efforts of the Jevlenese. And that, of course, made him dangerous. A threat to their whole operation." She looked pointedly at Hunt. His eyes widened. Gina nodded. "Exactly. So they got rid of him. Then they exterminated his followers, seized control of what he'd started, and rewrote the whole script."
"Giving us the Dark Ages," Hunt said, seeing the point.
"Right. Which stopped everything dead and put their program back on track. The medieval Church with its Inquisition, holy wars, land grabbing, and its involvements in European power politics had nothing to do with anything Christ taught. It was trying to stave off the Renaissance, which the Jevlenese could see coming. Real Christianity had been dead for centuries."
It fitted with the things Gina had said at his apartment on how things might have gone otherwise, Hunt recalled. She had done more work on it than he had realized. If a lot of powerful institutions had roots in those kinds of murky waters, he could understand why nobody was doing very much talking. At the same time, it was dawning on him just how devastating the book that she was proposing could be. Caldwell would have seen it, too. Small wonder, then, that Caldwell had declined to involve UNSA officially. The wonder was that Caldwell had been willing to have anything to do with her at all.
"Except, maybe, in one place," Gina said, making it sound like an afterthought.
"Uh?" Hunt returned abruptly from his thoughts.
"If my reading of history is right, there was one place where Christianity might have hung on long after it was stamped out across the rest of Europe," Gina said.
"Where?"
"Ireland."
Hunt's eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Begorrah!" he exclaimed.
Gina went on. "Even the Irish aren't told the true story. They're taught that Saint Patrick converted the island in the fifth century, and they've remained staunchly faithful ever since."
"That's what I always thought, too," Hunt said. "Not that it's a subject that I've ever had much reason to get involved in, especially."
"They didn't ally with the Roman Church until the sixteenth century—more than a thousand years later; and that was only as a gesture of defiance against the English after Henry VIII broke away. Roman Catholicism became a symbol of Irish nationalism. What Saint Patrick brought was Christianity."
"You mean the original?"
"Something a lot closer to it, anyhow. And it flourished beca
use it fitted with the ways of the native culture. It spread from there through Scotland and England into northern Europe. But then it collided with the institutionalized Jevlenese counterfeit being pushed northward, and it was destroyed. The first papal mission didn't reach England until a hundred sixty-five years after Patrick died."
"How do you know all this?"
"My mother's side of the family comes from Wexford. I go there for vacations and lived there for a while once."
"When did Patrick die?" Hunt asked, realizing that he really had no idea.
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