Hunt found Duncan and Sandy familiarizing themselves with some of the Thurien equipment, guided by one of the Thurien students who had volunteered to help out. Sonnebrandt was elsewhere-very likely gone to make his peace with Chien, Hunt suspected. Danchekker was out on the balcony fronting the room, Duncan informed him. Hunt went on through and out the glass-panel doors. It was more a terrace garden than what Hunt would have thought of as a balcony. Danchekker was standing at the outer rail on the far side of some foliage and an artificial stream, admiring the surroundings. Hunt crossed the stream by a small footbridge and joined him. The edifices of marblelike surfaces and glass making up the rest of the institute bodied as much thought and expression as a sculpture, rising from landscaped rock and greenery amid gigantic Thurien trees.
"I thought the view from the top floor of Biosciences at Goddard was stimulating," Danchekker commented. "But after this, I fear it will never seem the same again. If I possess an artistic streak somewhere, I'm sure this is the kind of inspiration that would be required to express it. Did you ever read Oswald Spengler? He believed that human cultures are born, grow, flourish, and die to express a unique inner nature, just like any other living organism. The Thuriens are no different. Everything they do is a statement of what they are and how they view the world. It's probably impossible to change, anymore than you can make a sunflower seed grow into a rose. A ready answer, it would appear, to the futile attempts of one culture to impose itself upon another that make such a sorry story of so much of our history, don't you think?" Danchekker was in one of his expansive moods, which might make things easier, Hunt thought to himself. He was happy to remain out on the balcony, out of earshot from those inside.
"Where's Mildred today?" Hunt inquired.
"Off on travels of her own already. She's meeting with Frenua. A challenging encounter, possibly. But I have no doubt she will handle it well." Frenua Showm was the high-ranking Thurien female who would be Mildred's prime guide in organizing her researches. She had been among the few Thuriens to have suspected Jevlenese motives before the exposure of Broghuilio and his plans, and tended to generalize her reservations into a wary suspicion of humankind in general.
"Chris, about that minor disagreement at dinner last night…"
Danchekker turned from the rail, beaming magnanimously, and made a throwing-away gesture. "Oh, think nothing of it. We all have these lapses from time to time. This kind of travel is disorienting and stressful, even if it is measured in a mere day or two. And such abrupt switching to a totally different social and physical environment can only exacerbate it further."
"Yes, but I don't think it's anything like that. There's-"
Danchekker went on, "But I've been thinking about some of the other things that were talked about last night, that I wanted to bring up. The implications could be quite extraordinary. It goes back to something that Mildred said, again." Danchekker had already dismissed the former matter as a triviality, best forgotten, Hunt realized. He groaned inwardly to himself. It was almost impossible to effect course-change once Danchekker launched off into an idea that had seized him. The professor brought his thumbs up to his lapels in an unconscious mannerism signaling that he was in lecture mode. "You may recall that she refused to countenance the suggestion that literally every reality that's physically capable of existing does exist somewhere in the Multiverse. To be frank, Vic, I have long entertained reservations on that score myself, despite what you physics people tell us the formal mathematics might say. But I was never able to identify where, specifically, the model breaks down. I think Mildred may have put her finger on it."
This was the person who grumbled about how his cousin talked unstoppably, Hunt told himself.
Danchekker went on, "She said there isn't a universe anywhere in which her books are produced and sold with blank pages. And of course she has to be correct. What could be more preposterous? But what does your mathematics have to say about it, eh? How does a purely mechanical process distinguish a reality that's humanly plausible from one that unaided common sense says couldn't exist-ever, no matter how remote a probability is assigned to it? It can't. Therefore, your quantum formalism can't be an adequate description of reality, regardless of how successful it might be at predicting the outcomes, over a limited range, of certain kinds of experiments."
Hunt felt again the same confusion he had when Mildred brought this up. There had to be an answer, but he couldn't bring to mind what. It wasn't something he had been giving much thought to since.
"The implications could be profound indeed," Danchekker continued. "Consider this. Physics asks us to accept that the Multiverse in itself is timeless, yes? The sequence of change that we perceive is created by consciousness navigating a path through its succession of alternative branchings. Precisely how it does so is a mystery-and to dispel any rising hope that you might be entertaining at this juncture, not one that I am about to cast further light on now, I fear." Danchekker showed his teeth briefly at his concession to humor. "But the fact that it is able to do so at all perhaps furnishes us with the essential defining criterion for what consciousness is. In fact, I should go beyond that and say 'life.' For by what I'm proposing, it follows that all life is conscious to some degree. Let's not confuse it with self-awareness, which is a qualitatively different subset of the phenomenon I'm talking about."
"So what are you proposing?" Hunt asked, resigning himself. He was obviously going to have to hear it through in any case.
"This. An inanimate object is subject solely to the laws of chance. The future that it comes to experience-or the particular reality that a given version of it exists in, if one wishes to be pedantic about it-is determined by forces and probabilities external to itself. And that is the world that physics accurately describes. But a conscious entity-and by what I said a moment ago, I mean all living organisms-by altering its behavior, has the ability to change those probabilities. It can steer itself toward a future different from the one that it would otherwise have experienced-presumably one which by some means it evaluates as more desirable. The degree to which it is able to do this is, perhaps, a good indicator of how conscious it is. It's a criterion that could conceivably apply equally well within a sapient species, such as ourselves, as across all of life in general."
"Are you talking about plants as well? Bacteria? Fungi?"
Danchekker waved a hand dismissively. "Yes. They all react to environmental cues to improve their odds for living a better life."
Hunt was losing the thread. "So where does Mildred come in?"
"By pointing out, unarguably in my estimation, that conscious beings like ourselves will act to eliminate whole swathes of futures which, although the mathematics of the purely physical might allow them, will never come remotely close to happening for reasons that are only meaningful in terms that consciousness deals in. At some point along the way from the existence of every possible configuration of matter that quantum physics allows, to the actual realities that make up the Multiverse, some kind of 'plausibility bound' sets in that limits the forms they take. Consciousness intervenes to inhibit the quantum transitions that would lead to the excluded realities. How it does so, I have no idea. But it goes a long way toward explaining the somewhat limited success that has attended our efforts to apply physical theory to biological and social phenomena. Much of what the Thuriens talk about suddenly makes a lot more sense." He looked at Hunt expectantly.
But Hunt was still feeling irritated by the condescending air with which Danchekker had dismissed the subject Hunt had tried to bring up, which had been Hunt's prime reason for coming here. Now Danchekker was telling physicists where they had erred in their own domain and offering unasked-for advice on how to fix it. "Well, thanks, Chris, but physicists really are capable of handling the physics," he heard himself say, more shortly than he had intended. "The main job right now is getting the Multiporter to stay connected to somewhere. I don't see how this kind of metaphysical speculation is going to help much."
Hunt propped his elbows on the rail of the balcony, sighed, and stared out at the scene. Some Thuriens who looked like students waved up at him from a terraced enclosure some distance below. Hunt acknowledged with the brief raising of a hand. Yes, he knew he'd been out of line. What was getting into him? A fine way to begin a research project, he told himself glumly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Christian was always telling Mildred tactfully-as closely as he was capable of getting to the meaning of the word, anyway-that she talked too much. If it was true-and she had to concede him something of a point at times, she supposed-then she must try to watch herself and control the trait when she was with Thuriens, she reminded herself. She was here to learn, after all. The trouble was that she always had so many thoughts boiling around inside her head, and she was afraid that if she didn't give vent to them while they were there, they'd sink back below the surface and never come up again. Very probably, it could be exasperating for others sometimes. But surely it was preferable to being like all those people she met everywhere who never seemed to have a worthwhile thought of any kind at all.
Poor Christian! She knew she'd been a pest back in Washington, and he had always been dedicated to his work, even without all the responsibilities of his new job at Goddard. But this project involving a whole, totally different alien culture was so exciting! He was simply too valuable an authority on it all to have just let pass. And he had been a dear to try and extricate himself in such a gracious way, instead of just telling her bluntly that he didn't have the time, in the boorish way that most of the pompous professors she had met over the years would have done. So she had resolved to do her best not to be a deadweight and to cultivate some interest in this Multiverse business that he and the others were getting so involved in with the Thuriens. Actually, it was turning out to be far more interesting than she had ever imagined, even if some of the things they talked about didn't make sense; and she would strive to be independent in pursuing her own work, staying out of their hair as much as possible.
The office the Thuriens had given her to work in couldn't have been better contrived to make her feel at home. It had shelves of reassuringly solid books; a desk and furnishings of polished mahogany and walnut that suited her tastes, along with drapes and a carpet that blended in; a clutter of homey bric-a-brac that included a china-laden mantlepiece, flower vases, and a cuckoo clock; and diamond-paned windows looking out over a valley of the Bavarian Alps. This was hardly surprising, for VISAR had contrived it all to achieve just that. None of it was real, of course, but it all came with a simulated filing cabinet and notepads that she understood, and a work terminal on the desk that used the formats and procedures that she was familiar with back home. The nice thing about it all was that everything she produced while she was on Thurien would find its way back via VISAR and the phone system somehow, and be waiting for her in her own files when she returned. She could even change the pictures on the walls anytime she got tired of them.
Mildred had made the point that if VISAR could create just about any sensory illusion that might be desired, it should be just as capable of putting together a reference system made up of things that she understood, as one incorporating all those annoying menus, options, icons, and incomprehensible boxes that computer people understood. The result was a set of bookshelves unlike any that she had even dreamed of. They were bookshelves because Mildred had insisted that a writer's office had to have books in. But the books arrayed along them changed to suit her particular needs of the moment. If she wanted to check some historical facts, a selection of volumes covering the period she was interested in presented themselves; if something geographical, a variety of atlases, physical, political, biological, and geological, along with travel guides and a picture library; and similarly for biographies, quotations, literature, arts, and every other form of reference that she had experimented with. And she could find her way to anything from indexes that made sense on pages she could turn in the way she had grown up with-except that the indexes rewrote themselves to point to whatever she happened to be researching. It was fantastic!
The other thing she had agitated for was a usable way of keeping track of all those notes, clippings, lists, letters, and so forth that you used to be able to rummage through in a folder, but which none of these desktops on screens ever seemed able to find unless you already knew where to look. In response, VISAR had come up with its single-drawer virtual filing cabinet, which Frenua Showm was just finishing explaining. The drawer looked normal enough, with a wood finish to go with the general decor of the room. It stood on a table at a comfortable height for access, no stooping or stretching to other drawers being necessary because that one could contain anything that was wanted.
"It works the same way as the bookshelves," Showm said. "The label on the front gives the topics the contents are organized under, and the folders inside follow." At the moment, the label was blank. Showm opened the drawer to reveal a set of familiar-looking hangers and tabs, but with all the inserts blank. "Let's try an example. What's a subject that you might be interested in?" she asked.
Mildred ran a virtual fingertip along the line of plastic tabs, feeling them flex slightly and causing a ripple of snapping sounds. It was uncanny. A faint scent of mountain meadows came with the breeze through the open window. She still had to work to remind herself that she was really in a recliner somewhere in the Government Center at Thurios. "One thing I wanted to cover was the Thurien political organization and how it functions," she replied. "How your leaders are appointed, and what guides their decision making. What would all that come under? 'Politics,' I suppose." She was still mildly astounded that somebody of the position that she had been told Frenua Showm held would be taking her through something like this personally and not delegating it to a junior clerk. Thuriens' ideas of priority seemed to be very different from the norms of Earth. Back there, every other value or consideration in modern life seemed subordinated to the great god of "efficiency." The Thuriens didn't seem even to have a concept of the word-at least, not in any economic sense.
Showm gestured. The word politics had appeared on the label above the drawer handle. "The inside will organize itself according to the structure you create as you use it. Suppose you wanted to collect material on, say, how various services across Thurien are managed…" In response to her vocal cue, a subhead Planetary Administration added itself to the label below politics. Inside the drawer, a group of folders acquired contents, along with suitable tabs to mark them. Showm lifted one of the folders out, riffled briefly through the papers inside, and handed it to Mildred. "And you can take it back to your desk and use it in the way you are used to, with no screens or confusing dialogs to worry about," she said.
"Splendid!" Mildred exclaimed. The folder was marked "Regional Congresses," and contained a selection of articles, maps, charts, and tables that VISAR had compiled together as a starting point on the subject.
"Everything is very local here," Showm commented. "Nothing as bureaucratic as the kind of thing you're used to. Much of Earth's ways of going about things results from the need to resolve conflicts. That's not
a problem that we see a great deal of. Conflict arises from competitiveness, which isn't a big part of Ganymean nature."
"Yes, I'd gathered that. On account of your different origins."
"So it would appear."
Mildred dropped the folder back into its place in the drawer. She was still finding her first experience of being able to study one of the aliens alone, at close quarters, too fascinating to make as much of the opportunity for plying Showm with questions as would have been her normal inclination. And besides, her resolution to herself to heed Christian and not talk too much still held sway. There would be other times.
Showm not only towered over Mildred in height, but was built more broadly and massively in proportion, with long, firm limbs, revealed by a short-sleeved tunic to be magnificently contoured and muscled in an athletic kind of way that made Mildred confess inwardly to a feeling of seeming pudgy in comparison. Her skin was a blue-gray, darkening to purplish blooms at the elbows, backs of her hands, and back and sides of her neck, blending onto the black, crinkly head covering that functioned as hair. The effect was somewhat reminiscent of an old-style Roman or Norman helmet adorning the elongated Ganymean skull with its protruding, counterbalancing jaw. It was a strange irony, Mildred thought, that a race so totally devoid of aggressiveness should possess the physique and appearance that evoked images of the warrior caste.
"Is there no competition for office?" Mildred asked. "The leaders who decide your policies. How are they appointed?"
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