Then why do I want somebody holding me? Why is it so long till mornwatch and my work?
Work was absorbing despite every exasperation of zero gravity and Murphy’s Law.
The aim was to adapt Chinook’s holothetic system for Fidelio. First came the mechanical part, a helmet to fit his skull and attachments for the rest of his frame. This was easy. Thereafter came the electronics, circuits built and adjusted to resonate with a nervous web that was the consequence of several billion years of separate evolution. This would have been a major research project if it had not already been one on Beta. As was, most of the requirements were known. Just the same, Su Granville and Joelle herself must spend hour upon Side 113
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The hour writing programs and then in linkage, whenever Wiesenberg had supplied a new fistful of data from his instruments. Leino helped somewhat, and the others did what jackleg jobs they could as occasion demanded. Else they were engaged in astronomy and space physics. Because they had to be kept fed and their clothes and bedding laundered, Caitlin put down her eagerness and did that for the cause of survival. Often at mess or during exercise periods she sang to them. That was almost the only recreation that anybody got.
Hardware available, the true challenge came: to create the basic program by which Fidelio would integrate himself with the computer. Even among humans, each holothete was a unique case. Fidelio was not human. Furthermore, Betan computer technology had considerable differences from Terrestrial. (Yet oddly enough, insofar as comparisons were possible, it did not seem that holothetes of either species had a deeper or broader insight than those of the other. Betan machines possessed numerous superiorities, but, linked into them, Joelle had functioned more or less the same as at home. Did brains have equal limitations?
Or did the Ultimate itself?)
Again, and in a still higher degree, the task would have been hopeless had it not been accomplished beforehand on Beta, when mutual linkage of members of the two races was seen as desirable. Joelle and Fidelio were simply trying to duplicate something from Emissary which they remembered fairly well… except that there was nothing simple involved. Instead there was a whole new computer language – practically a new semantics – plus an elaborate program for translating to a language the Chinook machine could handle, plus a program for translating back, plus an openended set of special instructions. Joelle and Fidelio had the fundamentals in their heads and knew in a general way how to reconstruct the details, by brute-strength logic, calculation, and experiment.
Not as an analogy but as a metaphor: The problem was like that which would face a Peruvian called upon to interpret between a Chinese and an Arab, when he is rusty in both their tongues, the former stutters, and the latter is a deaf-mute.
Without linkage, the problem would have been insoluble. Susanne would hook herself up and check tentative programs for inconsistencies and inadequacies, when she wasn’t needed for the ongoing research elsewhere. Joelle and Fidelio would then try them out. This was hard on Joelle; she would perceive Reality distorted, bleached, fevered, and afterward have nightmares, in which she most commonly saw Eric’s rotted corpse. She would wake, tell herself Fidelio wasn’t complaining, though it must be worse for him, and go back to work. To enter the pure Noumenon again was always healing.
Chinook lay for a pair of weeks in orbit around the planet which humans had given no name.
“Everything seems ready, female of intellect,” he said when he had given the assembly a careful examination. He used the speech, throaty and whistling, that his people did in air. It was much easier for him than Spanish. “Let us make a trial and, if we find we are on a strong tide, go straight ahead to sense the wholeness of this volume-where-we-swim.”
She felt a smile at the idiom. It faded as she looked at him. Half a sea creature, he was beautiful in free fall. Long and richly brown, his body undulated from prowlike muzzle and lapis lazuli eyes to the end of the powerful, precisely controlled tail; each digit of the six limbs knew what it did, and its motion flowed. His tang as of iodine nigh overwhelmed her with memories of beaches on Earth, surf and wind, sunlight and gull wings. How wrong that he was caged in this narrowness between two computer stacks, that meters and switches were before him instead of living underwater fronds, that his sight was bounded by painted metal instead of moving green depths and, overhead, a splintered radiance.