Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The ask for their aid but in the same high spirit that is theirs?”
Nightwatch.
Through her electronic senses, integrated by her electronic extra brain and its memories (Fidelio, Fidelio) into an ever more meaningful and magnificent whole, the Noumenon entered Joelle and made her one with itself. Space-time curved, strongly, subtly, mysteriously, through dimension upon dimension; energies flowed, matter like a wave that came and went across their tides; the Law, immanent and omnipotent, was no changeless equation but a music which she had begun faintly to hear.
Thank you, Caitlin, poor animal, flickered in a tiny portion of her. I could never have raised raw emotion in your fellow animals and turned it into will as you did in a single wild hour. Now ahead of me is a dissolution I cannot fear, I who know in my inmost cell that the Ultimate is what is; or ahead of me are the Others.
Nightwatch.
Light in the cabin was low and golden. The data retrieval formed an illusion of roses. Caitlin had set the thermostat for warmth and daubed around extracts of almond and cloves from her galley to scent the air. The audio played
“Sheep May Safely Graze,” that dearest of all melodies.
She stepped from her clothes and stood before Brodersen, hands held out to him. “God damn,” he said, from down in his breast, wishing he had a gift of words, “Pegeen, you’re so beautiful it hurts.”
She smiled. “You are that for me, Dan, darling.”
“No, wait-”
Her laughter blessed him. “Aye, it’s homely you are beside the Apollo Belvedere, and I’m no flashbomb either. But you are beautiful because you are you. You look like yourself, the man I’m in love with. And likewise for you beholding me, is that not true, my Own?”
In a heartbeat she turned serious – woundable – and cast herself against him. “Oh, Dan, Dan, we’re bound into unknownness, we can foresee neither what will become of us nor what we will become; but we have this night. Hold me, Dan, make love to me, love me.”
XLIV
Jump.
Light, everywhere light. It was as if space had become a dewdrop in dawnlight, and they at its heart. Soft iridescences, every color that was which every seeing creature had ever known, swirled, mingled, shivered, flowed, flooded, with here and there a brief rush of starlike sparks in fountains, clusters, dancing pairs and triplets, solitaries arching through graceful great curves before they died out to be rekindled elsewhere. The sight took awareness by storm and bore the beholder off into its mighty harmonies.
They in Chinook had no way to tell what size was the globe of luminance that enclosed them. Surely it was vast. The T machine was dwarfed by the distance at which the ship had emerged. As remote, and of comparable hugeness, were two other things. The first was perhaps a white-hot sphere, though forces and torrents made perception waver; lesser shapes, likewise veiled, moved around it on intricate paths. The second was a sweetly curved ellipsoid which seemed to be more immaterial, quasi-solid and of ultimate strength, than the vessel which had passed through galactic center ages ago. A webwork extended from it, not identical with what the observatories bore at the neutron star and the black hole, but possessing the same intricate delicacy.
Here are the Others! blazed in Joelle. No beings but the Others could have wrought this.
She sent forth her probes, opened her multitudinous senses, summoned her entire comprehension of the Noumenon. I’ll not realize everything that’s happening here, but I’ll grasp enough that I can ask the right questions when the Others arrive, questions to prove me worthy of entering their fellowship.
Then: she was blind, she was deaf, she was numb, she was lame.
Instruments could register nothing except what they were designed to. Theory could account for nothing in an environment whose nature sprang from principles wholly beyond it. An earthworm could more readily imagine and explain birdflight than she could make this place a part of her Reality.
Stunned, she barely noticed the sudden appearance of an asteroid not far Side 173
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The from Chinook. The dark, jagged mass had for companion a small golden-shining prismatic form that moved at once toward the incandescent globe. The asteroid followed. Rapidly gaining speed, the two were soon lost to vision.