Ultimate reality is easier to understand, yes, to be a part of, than we are, we flickers across the Noumenon.
“Are you ready, Joelle?” Langendijk asked mildly, well-nigh contritely.
“Oh!” She started. “Oh, yes. Any time.”
“I’ve signalled Faraday our intent to start blasting at one gee at fifteen thirty-five hours, and they concur. They’ll pace us; they are maneuvering for that right now. Interlock of autopilots will be made at one Side 6
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
hundred kilometers from Beacon Charlie. Do you have assembled the information you need? . . . Ach, you’re bound to, I’m a forgetful idiot to ask.”
Herself wishful of reconciliation, Joelle smiled a smile he couldn’t see and answered, “It’s easy for you to forget, Willem. I’m holding down Christine’s job” -Christine Burns, regular computerman, who died in Joelle’s arms a bare few months before Emissary started home.
“Navigation is yours, then,” Langendijk said formally. “Proceed upon signal.”
“Aye.”
Joelle got busy. Information flooded her, location vectors, velocity vectors, momentum, thrusts, gravitational field strengths, the time and space derivatives of these, continuously changing, smooth and mighty. It came out of instruments, transformed into digital numbers; and meanwhile the memory bank supplied her not only what specific past facts and natural constants she required, but the entire magnificent analytical structure of celestial mechanics and stress tensors. She had at her instant beck the physical knowledge of centuries and of this unique point in spacetime where he was.
The data passed from their sources through a unit that translated them, in nanoseconds, into the proper signals. Thence they went to her brain. The connection was not through wires stuck in her skull or any such crudity; electromagnetic induction sufficed. She, in turn, called on the powerful computer to which she was also linked, as problems arose moment by moment.
The rapport was total. She had added to her nervous system the immense input, storage capacity, and retrieval speed of the electronic assembly, together with the immense mathematico-logical capacity for volume and speed of operations which belonged to its other half. For her part, she contributed a human ability to perceive the unexpected, to think creatively, to change her mind. She was the software for the whole system; a program which continuously rewrote itself; conductor of a huge mute orchestra which might have to start playing jazz with no warning, or compose an entire new symphony.
The numbers and manipulations did not stream before her as individual things. (Nor did she plan out the countless kinesthetic decisions her body made whenever it walked.) She felt them, but as a deep obligator, a sense of ongoing rightness, function. Her awareness went over and beyond mechanical symbol-shuffling; it shaped the ongoing general pattern, as a sculptor shapes clay with hands that know of themselves what to do.
Artist, scientist, athlete, at the brief pinnacle of achievement thus had linkage felt to Christine Burns.
It did not to Joelle. Christine had been an ordinary linker. Joelle was a holothete who had transcended that experience. Perhaps the difference resembled that between a devout Catholic layman at prayer and St. John on the Cross.
Besides, this present work was routine, she had merely to direct, by her thoughts, equipment which sent the ship along a standard set of curves through a known set of configurations. The unaided computer could have done as well, had it been worth the trouble of readjusting several circuits. Brodersen’s robot performed the same kind of task.
Christine, the linker had been signed on because Emissary was heading into the totally unknown, where survival might turn on a flash decision that could never have been foreseen and programmed for. She herself, had she lived, would have found this maneuvering easy.
Joelle found it soothing. She leaned back in her chair, conscious of regained weight, and enjoyed her oneness with the vessel. She could not hear and feel, but she could sense how the drive whispered. Migma cells were generating gigawatts of fusion power, to split water, ionize its atoms, hurl the plasma out through the jet focuser at a speed close to that of light itself. But the efficiency was superb, a triumph as great as the cathedral at Chartres; nothing appeared but the dimmest glow streaming aft for a few kilometers, and the onward motion of the hull.