Have I grown too gaunt and gray for him? She withdrew her touch. "Yes. It'd be easier, ~perhaps more certain, if Fidelio and I could operate as a holothetic unit and take a complete theoretical structure from a memory bank. However, I did master the physical principles the Betans have found apply to the T machines- those were right down my alley, as you'd put it-and he and I have finished ransacking your ship's data collection for exact parameters of local space-time. The information appears to be sufficient. I expect I'll need a preliminary run-through today, then tomorrow work out the guidepath in detail."
He got worry lines between his brows, the way he'd done when first they met, he an Aventureros engineer consulting her about a thorny design problem. Oh, he'd fallen into such awe of her intellect, though really she doubted it was better than his -differently configured and oriented, but not intrinsically better- except when she was joined to her machine. He'd found excuses to meet her later on, which led to outright dinner dates after he was widowed and had moved to Demeter and made occasional trips Earthside. She enjoyed his company as she enjoyed a gust off the sea.
Eventually, impulsively, she let him into her bed, and was astounded. . . . How young those worry lines made him look.
"Supposing we do reach Beta," he said, "will they help us? You and Carlos emphasized how they don't want to interfere, how careful they've always been about respecting less advanced species."
"Humankind is special to them, though," she assured him. "We'll have extensive explaining and persuading to do, I admit. But when we of Emissary described our history and sociology, what little we could convey, they found it no more grotesque than what they'd encountered among other races. Their leaders do believe we can help them through their psychosexual crisis."
"So they'd-m-m-m-what?"
"Make an appearance in the Solar System, I imagine, invincible, but simply protecting us while we broadcast the facts to Earth."
"And they offer us a fabulous bargain, you said. Their technology in exchange for franchises to exploit Jupiter and Saturn, which we can't anyway. Right?" Brodersen struck fire to tobacco, peering at her across it. "Of course, that will destroy the Actionists, and every party like theirs. Quite aside from the scandal, I mean. The whole philosophy will be killed."
"How?"
"Why, it's obvious. As fast as we acquire that same technology, we'll skite off through every star gate the Betans have mapped, as well as mounting our own program to chart new ones. The sheer profit to be made, in countless places and ways, must beggar the imagination. Else why would the Betans bother with our giant planets? So even before we start large-scale emigration, the balance of economic power will shift away from Earth. It'll also shift away from governments, unions, giant corporations, toward small outfits and individuals. There goes the tidy world welfare state the Actionist types hope to build. I daresay Quick foresees as much."
Joelle frowned, striving to comprehend. "But that isn't logical, Dan. Presumably welfare measures serve a need. If the need comes to an end, who would want to continue them?"
Brodersen laughed the ringing laugh she knew. Smoke burst from his mouth. It smelled masculine. "Dear, you're doing it again. Assuming people are logical. They aren't. The welfare state -any state- is an end in itself. It's the way for a few to impose their will on the many. And Judas priest, how those few do want to! Need to." He puffed on his pipe. "Talk with Stef Dozsa if you're interested. His country's been through the mill, over and over. Holy Roman Empire, Mongol Empire, Ottoman Empire, Austrian Empire, Soviet Empire, Balkan Empire. . . . No, maybe you shouldn't. That history's made a rabid anarchist of him. Harmless in his case, but if he converted you-well, under your stiffish exterior, Joelle, you've got a lot of wildness bottled up. I know."
You do, Dan!
Brodersen stirred. "My personal weakness is I ramble," he said. "I'd better stop boring you and carry on in my proper job."
"You weren't boring me," Joelle answered with effort. She felt the heat in her face and breasts. "You never did. Were always rather fascinating, in fact, I suppose because we're so unlike."
"Yeah, we are. Well, anyhow." He rose.
She did too. "Why don't you come by this evenwatch after we're both off?" she suggested. "I could indent for some food and wine. Remember how you used to do the cooking? I'm still terrible at that, but. . . I'll bet you've improved."
"Not much." He looked at his toes. "Besides, I- Happens I have a date. Sorry, but it's not the kind a person breaks."
"May I ask what?" she said through the hurt.
"Caitlin and I have an anniversary. Demetrian calendar; comes oftener that way." He raised his eyes. "Didn't you know? I thought it was obvious. . . - No, we're not married, I'm still with Lis and have no plans to change, but Caitlin-well, she and I are awfully close."
"I see."
He caught her hands. "Joelle, uh, she's not jealous. I mean-oh, hell, it's fine having you here, and- Not propositioning you, but if you'd care to-later--"
She made herself smile, lean forward, touch lips to his. "I might. We needn't be in a hurry, though. And don't you feel obligated." Because I fear that is what you feel right now, obligated.
Caitlin is like a fair-skinned Chris. Besides, I'll soon be transhuman. "All right, Dan. So long."
Small, plain, humble, though never servile, Susanne Granville waited in the main computer room. She had turned on the viewscreen, scanner aimed at Sol, and sat watching. Dimmed but magnified, the disc was a turmoil of spots, flares, fountaining prominences, within coronal nacre. Music sparkled. belle recognized Nielsen's Fynsk Forier. Music, like architecture, was one of the few formal human arts she thought she responded properly to. She and Susanne had talked about it for an hour or more during the memorial party for the gunner.
"Hello," she said. "I didn't expect to find you here."
Susanne jumped up. "I knew you would be running a final check on the software, Dr. Ky, and wondered if I might be of assistance. Just in case, I excused me from `elping the quartermaster."
XXIII
The Memory Bank
"The human brain, and hence the entire nervous system, can be integrated with a computer of the proper design," the speaker was droning. "We have long since progressed beyond the `wires in the head' stage. Electromagnetic induction suffices to make a linkage. The computer then supplies its vast capacity for storing and processing data, its capability of carrying out mathematico-logical operations in microseconds or less. The brain, though far slower, supplies creativity and flexibility; in effect, it continuously rewrites the program. Computers which can do this for themselves do exist of course, but for most purposes they do not function nearly as well as a computer-operator linkage does, and we may never be able to improve them significantly. After all, the brain packs trillions of cells into a mass of about a kilogram. Furthermore, linkage gives humans direct access to what they would otherwise know only indirectly.
"For present, practical purposes, its advantages are twofold.
(a) As I remarked, programs can be altered on the spot, in the course of being carried out. Formerly it was necessary to run them through, painstakingly check their results, and then slowly rewrite them, with possibilities of error, and without any guarantee that the new versions would turn out to be what we most needed. Once linkers and their equipment come into everyday use, we will be free of that handicap.
(b) By the very experience, as I have also suggested, the linker gains insights which he or she could have gotten in no other way, and hence becomes a more able scientist -including a better writer of programs-when working independently of the apparatus, too."
Good Lord! Joelle thought. Do we really have to endure this?
True, the conference was an important political as well as scientific event. The military secrecy in which she had been raised was beginning to lift; here in Calgary, people could freely discuss developments which had been hidden for decades or worse; the public was entitled to information, in popular terms, during the opening ceremonies.
The trouble was, no words could describe being in linkage: creating n-dimensional spaces, and time-variant curvatures for them, and tensors within, and functions and operations that nobody had ever before imagined. You fashioned a conceptual cosmos, learned that it was wanting and annulled it, devised another and another, until at last you saw what you had made and, behold, it was very good. Each time the numbers rushed through you to verify, and you knew how much reality you had embraced, it was an outbursting of revelation. The Christian hopes to be eternally in the presence of God, the Buddhist hopes to become one with the all in Nirvana, the linker hopes to achieve more than genius-is there a vast difference between them? Yes: the linker, in this life, does it.
In days, hours, fractional seconds. Afterward he or she cannot entirely comprehend what happened. The high moment of love also lies outside of time; but we understand it better, when at peace, than the linker understands what the linker has known.
Joelle's gaze roved. Hey, wasn't that a handsome young man a dozen seats to her right! Why hadn't she seen him earlier? Well, she wasn't given to noticing people. War orphan, brought up from infancy in the pioneering holothetic program, lately released into academe as the Troubles faded out, a virgin who didn't know what to do about the opposite sex and wasn't sure she wanted to"-while linkage to macroscopic machinery has not proven cost-effective, the case has turned out to be otherwise for monitoring and controlling scientific instruments. For this it is inadequate to supply the operating brain with numbers such as voltmeter readings and nothing else. For example, a spectrum is best considered-rationally appreciated-when the operator sees it and, simultaneously, knows the exact wavelength and intensity of every line. Through appropriate hardware and software, this can now be done. Subjectively, it is like sensing the data directly, as if the nervous system had grown complete new input organs of unprecedented power and sensitivity.
"Workers elsewhere have experimented with that. The principal thing Project Ithaca did was to take the next step. What is the meaning of those data, those sensations?
"In everyday life, we do not apprehend the world as a jumble of raw impressions, but as an orderly structure. Yonder we do not see a splash of green and brown; we see a tree, of such-and-such a kind, at such-and-such a distance. Although it is done unconsciously, yes, instinctively, since animals do it too, nevertheless we may be said to build theories, models, of the world, within which our direct perceptions are made to make sense. Naturally, we modify these models when that seems reasonable. For instance, we may decide that we are not really seeing a tree but a piece of camouflage. We may realize that we have misjudged its distance because the air is more clear or murky than we knew at first. Basically, however, through our models we comprehend and can act in an objective universe. -
"Science has long been adding to our store of information and thus forcing us to change our model of the cosmos as a whole, until today it embraces billions of years and light-years in which are galaxies, subatomic particles, the evolution of life, and everything else that our ancestors never suspected. To most of us, this part of the Weitbild has admittedly been rather abstract, no matter how immediate the impact of the technologies it makes possible.
"In order to enhance laboratory capability, Project Ithaca began work on means to supply a linkage operator directly with theory as well as data. This was more than learning a subject, permanently or temporarily. Any operator has to do that, in order to think about a given task. And indeed, outstanding accomplishments came out of the Turing Institute here, pioneering ways for the linked computer to give its human partner the necessary knowledge. Project Ithaca greatly improved such systems, and its civilian successors continue to progress. We call them holothetic.
"The work has had an unexpected result. Those operators whom Ithaca trained from childhood, linkers who today are adults advancing the art in their turn, are more and more getting into a mode that I must call intuitive. A baseball pitcher, an acrobat, or simply a person walking is constantly solving complex problems in physics with little or no conscious thought. The organism feels what is right to do. Analogously, we have for example reached the point of manipulating individual amino acids within protein molecules, using ions directed by force-fields which are directed by a holothete, in a manner that perhaps only the Others could plan out step by step. Likewise for any number of undertakings. Direct perception through holothetics is leading to comprehension on a nonverbal level.
"This is doubly true because our theoretical knowledge is far from perfect. Quite frequently these days, a holothete senses that things are not going as intended, that something is wrong with the model-and intuits what changes to make, what the real situation is, as we so often do in our ordinary lives. Later systematic study generally confirms the intuition.
"My colleagues will be discussing various aspects of holothetic linkage. This introductory sketch of mine-"
