The Avatar (30 page)

“Everything isn’t in the current literature. I told you I—we—all right, I am making whirlwind progress. I’ve acquired a, I don’t know, an insight, a near-instinct, and the feedback between me and the system, the continuous reprogramming at each session—” She tugged his sleeve. “Come along. Get to know!”

“What do you have in mind?”

She frowned the least bit. “That’ll depend partly on you, how you’re taking what happens. We’ll begin with you and the 707. Just think in it for a while, get settled down. Then, through the
cross-connections, I’ll phase you in with me and my computer. That will have to be strictly input to you, no access to effectors, or you might ruin some delicate experiments. I’m going to look in on them, you see. My help is called for often enough that we have constantly open channels between them and my system. Genetics at a lab right on this campus; nuclear physics at the big accelerator in Minnesota; cosmology in Sagan Orbital. I hope I can lead you to a hint of what I’m doing these days. I’ll know, because you will have an output of a kind to me. In effect, I’ll be scanning your mind. Yes,” she said into his stupefaction, “I’ve reached that stage.

“Afterward—” She threw her arms around him and kissed him. “Let there be an afterward.”

He responded, but she sensed he sensed that her tone had been kind rather than prayerful.

He lowered himself into the proper lounger, set it at the reclining angle he liked, let muscle and bone go easy, before he pulled the helmet down over his head, adjusted and secured it, put his wrists through the contact loops, tapped fingers across a control plate and checked out the settings. While linking herself likewise, she saw the olden thrill shaking the fret out of him.

“Activate?” he asked.

“Proceed,” she answered.

“I love you,” he said, and pressed the main switch.

Thereafter she felt and thought what he did, with a minor part of her awareness.

Momentarily, senses and intellect whirled, he imagined he heard a wild high piping, memories broke forth out of long burial as if he had fallen back through time to this boyhood swimming hole and moss cold and green upon a rock, that hawk at hover and the rough wool of a mackinaw around him. Then his nervous system steadied into mastery. Electromagnetic induction, amplification of the faintest impulses, a basic program which he had over the years refined to fit his unique self, meshed; human and computer became a whole.

“Think,” she said,
and Joelle knew his response: How could he not, when his was now a mightier genius than any which had been on Earth before his day?

“
Words are no use here,” she told me
.

They were fully cognizant of their environment. Had they wanted to, they could have examined its most micrometric details, a scratch and a reflection on polished metal, the shimmy
of a needle across a meter, mumble and faint tang of oil in the ventilation, back-and-forth tides in the veins. But she sensed that even she no longer entirely mattered to him. He had a perceptual universe to conquer.

In the next several milliseconds, while he cast about for a problem worth tackling, a fraction of him calculated the value of an elliptic integral to a thousand decimal places. It was a pleasant semi-automatic exercise. The numbers fell together most satisfyingly, like bricks beneath the hands of a mason.
Ah,
came to him,
yes, the stability of Red Spot vortices on planets like Jupiter, yes, I did hear talk about that in Calgary
. The sweep hand on a wall clock had barely stirred.

He marshalled a list of the data he thought he would need and sent a command. To him it felt like searching his normal memory for a fact or two, except that this went meteorically faster and more assuredly, in spite of drawing on banks which were hundreds of kilometers away. The theory reached him, formulas, specific values of quantities, yes, that particular differential equation would be an absolute bitch to solve; no, wait, he saw a dodge; but was the equation actually plausible, couldn’t he devise a set of relationships which better described conditions on an aborted sun—?

An ice-clean fire arose, he was losing himself in it, he was getting drunk on sanity.

Eric,
she called: no voice, no name, a touch.

He must wrench his attention from Jupiter, with a vow,
I’ll be back
.

Eric, are you ready to follow me?

It was not truly a question, it was an intent which he felt. It was her. At dazzling speed, as neurone webs adapted to each other’s synapse patterns, she merged with him. The formless eddies that go behind shut eyelids were not shaping into her image; rather he got fleeting impressions of himself, before her presence flooded him. Was it her femaleness he knew as a secret current in the blood, a waiting to receive and afterward cherish and finally give, a bidding she chose not to heed but which would always be there? He couldn’t tell, he might never know, for the union was only partial. He had not learned how to accept and understand most of the signals that entered him, and there were many more which his body never would be able to receive. That became a pain in him as it was in her.

Eric, in this too you are my first man, and I think my last
.

Forebrains, more alike than the rest of their organisms, meshed. Besides, Joelle had practiced cross-exchange on that level and developed the technique of it with fellow linkers, until she was expert. Communication between her and Eric strengthened and clarified, second by second. It was not direct, but through their computers, whose translations were inevitably imperfect. Impressions were often fragmentary and distorted, or outright gibberish—bursts of random numbers, shapes, light flashes, noises, less recognizable non-symbols, which would have frightened him were it not for the underlying constancy of her. What touched his mind as her thoughts were surely reconstructions, by his augmented logical powers, of what it supposed she might be thinking at a given instant. The real words that passed between them went in the common mortal fashion, from lips to ear.

Nevertheless: he took her meanings with a fullness, a depth he had not dreamed could be, there on the threshold of her universe.

“Genetics,” she said aloud. That was the sole clue he needed. She would guide him to the research at this school. Knowledge sprang forth. The work was on the submolecular level, the very bases of animate being. She was frequently called on to carry out the most exacting tasks, invent new ones, or interpret results. Today the setup was in part running automatically, in part on standby; but she had access to it anytime.

Her brain ordered the right circuits closed, and she was joined to the complex of instruments, sensors, effectors, and to the entire comprehension man had of the chemistry of life. Receiving from her, Eric perceived.

He got no presentation of quantities, readings on gauges whose significance became plain after long calculation. That is, the numbers were present, but in the experience he was hardly more conscious of them than he was of his skeleton. He was not looking from outside and making inferences, he was
there
.

It was seeing, feeling, hearing, traveling, though not any of those things, for it went beyond what the poor limited human creature could ever sense or do, and beyond and beyond.

The cell lived. Pulsations crossed its membrane, like colors, the cell was a globe of iridescence, throbbing to the intricate fluid flow that cradled it in deliciousness, avidly drinking energies which cataracted toward it down ever-changing gradients. Green distances reached to golden infinity. Beneath
every ongoing fulfillment dwelt peace. The cosmos of the cell was a Nirvana that danced.

Now inward, through the rainbows, to the interior ocean. Here went a maelstrom of… tastes… and here ruled a gigantic underlying purposefulness; within the cell, work forever went on, driven by a law so all-encompassing that it might have been God the Captain. Organelles drifted by, seeming to sing while they wove together chemical scraps to make stuff that came alive. As the scale of his cognition grew finer, Eric saw them spread out into Gothic soarings, full of mysteries and music. Ahead of him, the nucleus waxed from an island of molecular forests to a galaxy of constellated atoms whose force-fields shone like wind-blown star-clouds.

He entered it, he swept up a double helix, tier after tier of awesome and wholly harmonious labyrinths, he was with Joelle when she evoked fire and reshaped a part of the temple, which was not less beautiful thereafter, he shared her pride and her humility, here at the heart of life.

Her voice came far-off and enigmatic, heard through dream: “Follow me on.” He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at lightspeed across unseen prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator. He became one with them, possessed by their own headlong fervor, the same speed filled him and he lanced toward the goal as if to meet a lover.

This world outranged the material. He transcended the comet which meson he had become, for he was also a wave intermingling with a trillion other waves, like a crest that had crossed a sea to rise and break at last in sunlit foam and a roar—though these waves were boundlessly more shapeful and fleetly changeable, they flowed together to create a unity which flamed and thundered around an implacable serenity—
Bach could tell a little of this,
passed through him, for he had his reasoning mind too; that was a high part of the glory—
but he alone could, and it would only be a little
—

The atom awaited him. Its kernel, where energies querned, was majestic beyond any telling. Electron shells, elfinly asparkle, veiled it from him. He plunged through, the forces gave him uncountable caresses, the kernel shone ahead, itself an entire creation, he pierced its outer barriers and they sent a rapturous shudder across him, he probed in and in.

The kernel burst. That was no disaster, it was an unfolding.
The atom embraced him, yielded to him, his being responded to her every least wild movement, he knew her. Radiance exploded outward. The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

“Cosmology,” said Joelle the omnipotent. He fumbled to find her in a toppling darkness. She enfolded him and they flew together, up a laser beam, through a satellite relay, to an observatory in orbit beyond the Moon.

Briefly he spied the stars as if with his eyes, unblurred by any sky. Their multitudes, steel-blue, frost-white, sunset-gold, coal-red, almost glittered the night out of heaven. The Milky Way rivered in silver, nebulae glowed where new suns and planets were being born, a sister galaxy flung her faint gleam across Ginnungagap. But at once he leagued with the instrumentality which was seeking the uttermost ends of space-time.

First he was aware of optical spectra. They told him of light that bloomed from leaping and whirling gas, they told him of tides in the body of a sun—a body more like the living cell than he could have imagined before—and of the furnaces down below where atoms begot higher elemental generations and photons racing spaceward were the birthcry. And in this Brahma-play he shared. Next he felt a solar wind blow past, he snuffed its richness, tingled to its keenness, and knew the millennial subtlety of its work. Thereafter he gave himself to radio spectra, cosmic ray spectra, magnetic fields, neutrino fluxes, relativistics which granted a star gate and seemed to grant time travel, the curve of the continuum that is the all.

At the Grand Canyon of the Colorado you may see strata going back a billion years, and across the view of them a gnarly juniper, and know something of Earth. Thus did Eric learn something of the depths and the order in space-time. The primordial fireball became more real to him than the violence of his own birth, the question of what had brought it about became as terrifying. With it, he bought the spirals of the galaxies and the DNA molecule with energy which would never come back to him, and saw how it aged as it matured, even as you and I; the Law is One. He lived the lives of stars: how manifold were the waves that formed them, how strong the binding afterward to an entire existence! Amidst the massiveness of blue giants and black holes, he found room to forge planets whereon crystals and flowers could grow. He beheld what was still unknown—the
overwhelming most of it, now and forever—and how Joelle longed to go questing.

Yet throughout, the observer part of him sensed that beside hers, his perception was misted and his understanding chained. When she drew him back to the flesh, he screamed.

They sat in the office. Her desk separated them. She had raised the blind on the window at her back and opened it. Shadows hastened across grass, sunlight that followed was bright but somehow as if the air through which it fell had chilled it, the gusts sounded hollow that harried smells of damp soil into the room, odors of oncoming autumn.

She spoke with all her gentleness. “We couldn’t have talked meaningfully before you’d been there yourself, could we have, Eric?”

His glance went to the empty couch. “How meaningful was anything between us, even at first?”

She sighed. “I wanted it to be.” A smile touched her. “I did enjoy.”

“No more than that, enjoy, eh?”

“I don’t know. I do care for you, and for everything you taught me about. But I’ve gone on to, to where I tried to lead you.”

“How far did I get?”

She stared down at her hands, folded on the desk in helplessness, and murmured. “Still less than I feared. It was like showing a blind man a painting. He might get a tiny idea through his fingertips, texture, the dark areas faintly warmer than the light—but oh, how tiny!”

“Whereas you respond to the lot, from quanta to quasars,” he rasped.

She raised her head, challenging their shared unhappiness. “No, I’ve barely begun, and of course I’ll never finish. But don’t you see, that’s half of the wonder. Always more to find. Direct experience, as direct as vision or touch or hunger or sex, experience of the
real
reality. The whole world humans know is just a passing, accidental consequence of it. Each time I go to it, I know it better and it makes me more its own. How could I stop?”