“My colleagues will be discussing various aspects of holothetic linkage.
Side 92
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
This introductory sketch of mine-”
When the dullness was outlived and the audience moving toward drinks, Eric came over and introduced himself. He had been noticing too.
* * *
In a canoe on Lake Louise, they shipped their paddles and idled. The water danced blue, green, diamond. Around it, above forest, mountains sheered aloft into silence. Ever so slightly, the boat rocked with each motion they made.
She dipped a finger over the side and watched how ripples spread.
“Electron interferences make a moire too,” she mused. “It’s wonderful finding the same here. I never paid attention before.” She looked at him and savored.
“Thank you for bringing me.” A little scared, she let her eyes drift elsewhere.
“Electrons do it in three dimensions. No, four, but I haven’t perceived that.yet.”
She had made similar remarks to him after they’d attended the ballet in Calgary. Over coffee and brandy she had told him how sublimely Newtonian Swan Lake and Ondine were, when to him -he said- they were sublimely sexy. Still, he, a linker, found as much mathematics as melody in a Bach recital, or admired above everything else the subtle perspectives in Monet. (Looking at the same 3-faxes, she pointed out interactions of colors to which he said he believed critics of the past couple of centuries had been blind.) Today, for whatever reason, she saw unease stir in him.
“Look, Joelle, don’t get lost in abstractions- Wait. Please. Let me explain what I mean. Sure, you and I work with data, set up paradigms, compute resultants, sure. Fine. Fine job. But let’s not let that interfere with what we, well, find in places like this. In our private lives especially. This-” he waved a hand around the horizon-“is what’s real. Everything else we infer. This is what we’re alive in.”
She regarded him for a long while, during which he glowed. That night they became lovers.
He Canadian, she American, in an era when military governments were paranoid after the Troubles, before their countries federated and joined the World Union. . . he and she were separated for more than a year. Meanwhile holothetics was evolving exponentially, from a mere improvement of linkage to a wholly new order of perceiving and existing.
She sensed her growth away from him, and it hurt, but she could no more resist what she was becoming than a fetus in the womb can. By the time he had finally arranged to come join her at the University of Kansas for R & D
purposes, she knew what he must learn and had completed the necessary arrangements.
When he arrived at her office, they made love. Then they made a sandwich lunch and talked. At last she leaned over and kissed him, lingeringly but tenderly, almost as if she bade goodbye to a child. “Let’s go!” she said. As she led the way to her laboratory, her stride became triumphant.
Down there, she warned, “Words are no use here. You must experience for yourself. We’re about to become more intimate than ever in bed. Enormously more.”
Quasi-telepathic effects had been reported, when a passive linker in a holothetic circuit not only received the same data and theory in his brain as the active one did, but “felt” that latter’s ongoing evaluations. “You, uh, you’ll slave my unit to yours?” Eric inquired. “According to what I’ve seen in the literature, that doesn’t convey a particularly strong or clear impression.”
“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 Side 93