Gina stared at him as if unable to decide whether he was joking or being serious. “You mean everybody missed it?”
“Yes,” Hunt answered, nodding. “Take the business with Mercury’s perihelion, for instance. You know about that?”
“I thought that Einstein’s answer works; Newton’s doesn’t.”
“So do most people,” Hunt agreed. He looked away and snorted. “But all the prestige and money for practically the last century has come for building more spectacular gadgets, not for going over the basics of physics. Do you know what VISAR found while it was browsing through some old European archives?”
“What?”
“The same formula that Einstein obtained through Riemannian geometry and gravitational tensors was derived classically by a German called Paul Gerber, in 1898, when Einstein was nine years old. It was there all the time, but everybody missed it.”
The Vishnu was home for several hundred thousand Thuriens for periods that varied from short-term to permanent. They lived in baffling urban complexes that resembled their labyrinthine cities back home, amid simulations of external vistas beneath artificial skies, and in isolated spots enjoying the peculiarities of various landscapes, copied and contrived. Life aboard the ship combined all the functions of a complete social and professional infrastructure. The whole thing, Hunt began to realize, was more an elaborate, mobile space colony than anything conventionally thought of on Earth as a means of transportation.
“This is the kind of vessel typically sent out to explore local regions of the Galaxy,” VISAR confirmed. “It might spend several years at a newly discovered planetary system.”
Evidently the Thuriens liked to take their comforts with them.
Hunt and Gina sat on a boulder on a grassy slope overlooking a lake with a distinctly curved surface. There were boats on it, scattered among several islands, and on the opposite shore an intricate composition of terraced architecture that went up to the “sky.” The sky was pale blue—like that of Thunen. The bushes around where they were sitting had broad, wedge-shaped, purple leaves that opened and folded like fans. According to VISAR, they could shed their roots and migrate downhill on bulbous pseudopods if the soil became too dry.
“How would you classify them?” Gina mused. “If animals move and plants don’t, what are they?”
“Why does it matter what you call them?” Hunt said. “When people have problems with questions like that, it’s usually because they’re trying to make reality fit something from their kit of standard labels. They’d be better off thinking about rewriting the labels.”
They contemplated the scenery in silence for a while.
“It’s funny how evolution works,” Gina said. “Purely random factors can send it all off in a completely new direction—ones that operate at high level, I mean, not just genetic mutation. About ninety-five percent of all species were supposed to have been wiped out in a mass extinction that happened around two hundred million
years ago. It didn’t favor any particular kind of animal: large or small, marine or land-dwelling, complex or simple, or anything like that. Nothing can adapt for catastrophes on that kind of scale. So the survivors were simply the lucky five percent. Whole families vanished for no particular reason at all, and the few that were left determined the entire pattern of life subsequently.” She looked at Hunt, as if asking him to confirm it.
“I don’t know too much about that side of things,” he said. “Chris Danchekker’s the one you ought to be talking to.” He stood up and offered her a hand. “Speaking of which, we ought to be getting back. It’s about time you met the rest of the crew.”
They walked down to the lakeside, where a path brought them to a transit conveyor. Soon they were being whisked back through. the Escherian maze, and arrived shortly afterward at the Terran section. As they crossed the mess area, Hunt noticed that the wallscreen that had previously showed the view outside was blank. He knew that the stress wave surrounding a Ganymean vessel cut it off from electromagnetic signals, including light, when it was under full gravity drive.
“VISAR,” he said aloud so that Gina could hear. “Is the ship under way already?”
“Since a little under fifteen minutes ago,” the machine confirmed. Which would have been typical of the Ganymean way of doing things: no fuss or ceremony; no formal announcements.