Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
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 neuron 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.