her.
“New project?”
“Yes. Coming along pretty well, too. I’ll show you.” She touched keys on the multiplex and the tape began its playback. Trevelyan sat down to absorb the flow of stimulicolor patterns, music, traces of scent and associated taste. It was abstract, but it called up before him the mountains and
all mountains which had ever been.
“It’s good,” he said. “I felt as if I were ten kilometers
up on the edge of a glacier.”
“You’re too literal,” she answered, stroking his hair. “This is supposed to be a generalized impression. I’d like to work in some genuine cold, but that’s too distracting. I have to settle for things like ice-blue color and treble notes.”
“And you say you never learned the cybernetic theory
of art?”
– “‘Art is a form of communication,”’ she quoted in a singsong. “‘Communication is the conveyance of information. Information is a pattern in space-time, distinguished by rules of selection from the totality of all possible arrangements of the same constituents, and thus capable of being assigned a meaning. Meaning is the induced state of the percipient and in the case of art is primarily emotional-‘ Bother it! You can have your mathematical logic. I know what worts and what doesn’t, and that’s enough.”
It was, be realized. Braganza Diane might not grasp the synthesizing worldview of modern philosophy, but it didn’t
matter. She created.
“You should have let me know you were coming, Micah,” she said. “I’d have made arrangements.”
“I didn’t know it myself until just lately. I’ve been called back. I came to say goodbye.”
She sat quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, it was very low, and she was looking away from him: “It couldn’t wait?”
“I’m afraid not. It’s rather urgent.’
“Where are you going?”
“Sagittari frontier. After that anything can happen.”
“Damn,” she said between her teeth. “Damn and triple damn.”
“I’ll be back,” be said.
“Someday,” she answered thinly, “you won’t come back.” Then, getting to her feet: “Well, relax. You can stay tonight, of course? Good, let’s have a drink now.”
She fetched wine in goblets of Lunar crystal. He clinked glasses with her, listening to the faint clear belling, and raised his to the light before be drank. A ruby flame glowed in its heart.
“Good,” he said appreciatively. “What’s the news from your end?”
“Nothing. There’s never very much, is there? Well, I bad an offer from an admirer. He even wanted a contract.”
“If he’s a right sort,” said Trevelyan gravely, “I think you should take bin. up on it.”
She regarded him where be sat, and saw a big, lean man, his body compact and balanced with the training of modern education. His face was dark and hook-nosed, a deep wrinkle between the green eyes, and most people would have called the look of those eyes cold. The hair was straight aid black, with a reddish tint where the sun caught it. There was something ageless and impassive about him.
Well-the Coordination Service caught its agents young.
They weren’t supermen; they were something less understandable.
“No,’ she said. “I won It.,,
“It’s your life.” He didn’t press the matter.
Their liaison went back several years. For him, she knew, it was a Pleasant convenience, nothing more; be bad not offered a contract and she had not asked for one.
“What is your directive this time?” she asked.
“I don’t know, really. That’s the worst of it.”
“You mean the machine wouldn’t tell you?”
“The machine didn’t know.”
“But that’s impossible!”
“No, it I@t. It’s happened before, and it will happen again with increasing frequency until-” Trevelvan scowled. “The real problem is finding some new principle altogether. It might even be philosophical, for all I know.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look,” he said, “the basis of civilization is communication. In fact, life itself depends on communication and feedback loops between organism and environment, and between parts
of the same organism.
“Now consider what we have today. There are approximately a million stars which have been visited by man, and the number grows almost daily. Many of these stars have one or more planets inhabited by beings of intelligence comparable to ours, but often with action-and-thought patterns so different that only long, painstaking study will ever suggest their fundamental motivation. Full empathy remains impossible. Imagine the effects on these of a sudden introduction to an interstellar civilization! We have to reckon with their future as well as our own.