ENTOVERSE

“You’re getting around, anyway, Duncan,” he half heard Gina saying from across the room.

“If you think Shiban’s run down, come and see this place,” Watt answered.

Something moving caught Hunt’s eye—something bright, appear­ing and disappearing in the shadows higher up between two of the pillars. Several things, tiny white points. Hunt stared at the view, then realized that they were flying, insectlike creatures, crisscrossing through a shaft of light from one of the lamps. They looked like speeded-up images of stars orbiting in a black void, he thought to himself.

“Did you hear about the news from JPC?” Gina was asking Dun­can.

“Not yet. What’s up?”

“Oh, it doesn’t sound too good. .

And then a strange superposition took place in Hunt’s mind of the scene he was looking at, and the picture in his imagination of what should have been there but wasn’t. He saw the void, but its volume filled in his mind’s eye with banks of Thurien processing crystal; the tiny points of light were still there, orbiting through the solid lattices. And suddenly he saw them no longer as stars, but as atoms.

Or as elementary quanta .

Quanta of what? Nobody knew. It could have been anything.

The quanta that a real, physical universe could evolve out of.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Langerif, the new deputy chief of police, had applied himself to continuing his late predecessor’s policy of cooperation with the Ganymean administration. He became a regular visitor to PAC, and in particular showed much interest in learning more from the security people that Cullen had imported from Earth. He even arranged for a three-day training class to be held in PAC for a picked group of his own officers. At the same time, a firm of contractors that the Gany— means had been vainly pressuring to start work on remodeling and redecorating parts of the complex at last responded, zealously sending in a legion of workers as if anxious to make up for the lost time. So, for the last few days, PAC had been swarming with all kinds of Jevlenese.

The scientists, however, had become too engrossed in a com­pletely new explanation of Phantasmagoria that Hunt had suddenly produced from nowhere to take much notice.

The practical usefulness of mathematics arises from the fortuitous ability of some mathematical constructs to approximate real physical processes. There is no obvious reason why such correspondence should exist; luckily for engineers and others, it just does. This makes it a lot easier and cheaper to test a design for, say, a bridge-by making a mathematical model of it and seeing what happens when mathematical trains roll over and mathematical winds blow—than having to actually build the bridge. But as science probes successively deeper and more refined levels of reality, things change. Complexity and nonlinearities become more important in their effects, making mathematical representation more intractable, until the real thing becomes a better model of the model: a daffodil, a single cell of it, or even one DNA molecule from the cell is a far more concise and comprehensible statement of what’s going on than the reams of equations that would be necessary to express it analytically in sym­bols.

Accordingly, the computer techniques used for modeling reality developed from the simple mechanized solving of analytical equa­tions to progressively more elaborate methods of simulation. The trend was reflected in system architectures, where, to accommodate demands for ever greater speed and precision, earlier design philoso­phies based on bringing passive data to a few centralized processing bottlenecks gave way to connecting large numbers of simpler units in parallel to provide on-the-spot processing of large arrays of data simultaneously.

Ganymean technology had long before taken this trend to its ultimate. Their systems consisted of enormous numbers of micro­scopic cells arranged in three-dimensional arrays. Individually, each cell possessed only a limited capability that combined the rudiments of processing, memory, and communication; but ensembles of them working in conjunction could handle staggering throughputs of in­formation. ZORAC exemplified a relatively early phase of develop­ment; VISAR’s astounding ability to cope with the full virtual-travel traffic of the entire, interstellar Thurien civilization in real time was the culmination.

Each cell in a Thurien computing complex was thus an elementary

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