“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 èlping 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 thèwires 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 Side 91
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
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.