Forebrains, more alike than the rest of their organisms, meshed.
Besides, Joelle had practiced cross-exchange on that level and developed the technique of it with fellow linkers, until she was expert. Communication between Side 94
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
her and Eric strengthened and clarified, second by second. It was not direct, but through their computers, whose translations were inevitably imperfect.
Impressions were often fragmentary and distorted, or outright gibberish-bursts of random numbers, shapes, light flashes, noises, less recognizable non-symbols, which would have frightened him were it not for the underlying constancy of her.
What touched his mind as her thoughts were surely reconstructions, by his augmented logical powers, of what it supposed she might be thinking at a given instant. The real words that passed between them went in the common mortal fashion, from lips to ear.
Nevertheless: he took her meanings with a fullness, a depth he had not dreamed could be, there on the threshold of her universe.
“Genetics,” she said aloud. That was the sole clue he needed. She would guide him to the research at this school. Knowledge sprang forth. The work was on the submolecular level, the very bases on animate being. She was frequently called on to carry out the most exacting tasks, invent new ones, or interpret results. Today the setup was in part running automatically, in part on standby; but she had access to it anytime.
Her brain ordered the right circuits closed, and she was joined to the complex of instruments, sensors, effectors, and to the entire comprehension man had of the chemistry of life. Receiving from her, Eric perceived.
He got no presentation of quantities, reading on gauges whose significance became plain after long calculation. That is, the numbers were present, but in the experience he was hardly more conscious of them than he was of his skeleton. He was not looking from outside and making inferences, he was there.
It was seeing, feeling, hearing, traveling, though not any of those things, for it went beyond what the poor limited human creature could ever sense or do, and beyond and beyond.
The cell lived. Pulsations crossed its membrane, like colors, the cell was a globe of irridescence, throbbing to the intricate fluid flow that cradled it in deliciousness, avidly drinking energies which cataracted toward it down ever-changing gradients. Green distances reached to golden infinity. Beneath every ongoing fulfillment dwelt peace. The cosmos of the cell was a Nirvana that danced.
Now inward, through the rainbows, to the interior ocean. Here went a maelstrom of. . . tastes. . . and here ruled a gigantic underlying purposefulness; within the cell, work forever went on, driven by a law so all-encompassing that it might have been God the Captain. Organelles drifted by, seeming to sing while they wove together chemical scraps to make stuff that came alive. As the scale of his cognition grew finer, Eric saw them spread out into Gothic soarings, full of mysteries and music. Ahead of him, the nucleus waxed from an island of molecular forests to a galaxy of constellated atoms whose force-fields shone like wind-blown star-clouds.
He entered it, he swept up a double helix, tier after tier of awesome and wholly harmonious labyrinths, he was with Joelle when she evoked fire and reshaped a part of the temple, which was not less beautiful thereafter, he shared her pride and her humility, here at the heart of life.
Her voice came far-off and enigmatic, heard through dream:
“Follow me on.” He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at lightspeed across unseen prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator. He became one with them, possessed by their own headlong fervor, the same speed filled him and he lanced toward the goal as if to meet a lover.
This world outranged the material. He transcended the comet which meson he had become, for he was also a wave intermingling with a trillion other waves, like a crest that had crossed a sea to rise and break at last in sunlit foam and a roar-though these waves were boundlessly more shapeful and fleetly changeable, they flowed together to create a unity which flamed and thundered around an implacable serenity-Bach could tell a little of this, passed through him, for he had his reasoning mind too; that was a high part of the glory-but he alone could, and it would only be a little- The atom awaited him. Its kernel, where energies burned, was majestic beyond any telling. Electron shells, effinly asparkle, veiled it from him. He plunged through, the forces gave him uncountable caresses, the kernel shone ahead, itself an entire creation, he pierced its outer barriers and they sent a rapturous shudder across him, he probed in and in.