Displays- They were not pictures or dioramas, but moving, solid images made of light which was not confined to the humanvisible octave. They portrayed no species, but were wholly abstract: shapes, hues, motions. A line, for instance, would flash into being to point at a number, which in turn was showed by an array of sparks. The nearest that any exhibit came to realism was in schematics of the pulsar.
Or thus Joelle supposed. Most of what she saw was incomprehensible, nothing but streaks, curtains, vortices, ribbands, cataracts. Probably they were intended for races whose visual conventions, maybe whose whole world-views, were totally different from hers. She concentrated on the one that made the most sense. Before long it made an enormous amount of sense. Not that it had been waiting for human beings in particular. But space-time must hold a good many creatures, besides the Betans, who perceived it and thought about it in ways not wildly unlike hers.
Have the Others prepared this for the benefit of any strangers who blunder in? Yes, I think they have.
Representations of atoms, the periodic table, quantum states and their changes- The nucleus of hydrogen-1 was a unit of mass, its neutral emission line in space a unit of length, the frequency an inverse unit of time. Between absolute zero, as indicated by the behavior of molecules, and fusion that exactly formed deuterium, the temperature scale was divided into degrees: twelve to the twelfth power. Variations and reiterations made the initial presentations clear to a holothete.
They developed. In due course came a demonstration of how to operate a specific device. You took a rod from a bracket and touched it to certain light-spots in a certain sequence… “Proceed,” Joelle told Brodersen. He obeyed.
Information flooded her.
It began as transmitted binary digits. They went swiftly on to form patterns she could recognize. (Enough yes-or-no points in a coordinate space will completely describe an image, tone, mathematical function-) Within minutes she learned that she ought to respond, and did through the ship’s dish. Minutes afterward, the automaton had adapted its rate of sending, its whole approach, to the limitations of her equipment and the characteristics of her nervous system.
Alone in the skull, that brain might have needed years to begin fumblingly to comprehend. Holothete, it could make a hundred hypothetical interpretations in a second, test them against what it already knew: and thus, lopping off sterile branches, causing new ones to spring forth and reveal strength or weakness, work its way up a logic tree, ever closer to the bole that was truth. None in the ship but Fidelio could really have grasped what she did; and his ghost helped her onward.
Yet she needed hours to find the central fact, days to see it in anything like fullness, so incredible was it. Upon the pulsar was life, Side 155
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The intelligent life.
Chinook swung around the T machine, its third moon. Williwaw had returned to her. The station being investigated as far as possible, which wasn’t much, and communication started with it, which was perhaps completely open-ended, Brodersen and his group could do little else there. One time Joelle realized transitorily that while she searched and called, her shipmates must be carrying on – routines, games, intrigues, dreams, despairs – like paramecia in a drop of ditch water.
The station robot guided her to contact with the Oracle, which was a creation of the Others but no automaton.
Quasi-solid, subject to shuddering, splitting quakes, the surface of the neutron star lay beneath an atmosphere six millimeters deep. There, under a weight in the trillions of Earth gravities, at densities which were still higher multiples of Earth’s, raw nuclei interacted in ways unthinkable elsewhere.
Protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos, their antiparticles – fugitive higher elements – mesons of every kind – baryons, leptons, bosons, fermions – charm, spin, color, strangeness – fusing, sundering, turning into each other and back again, briefly orbiting, forming assemblages which might endure for whole microseconds – the matter of the star was as manifold, as changeable as the gas and water and dust that begot us.
Life is not a thing, it is a way. It is a series of happenings, it is the evolution of patterns which carry information, it is growth and decay and regrowth. Wherever the possibility of this exists, life will be.