“First, we’ll need to register some more of your personal cerebral patterns,” VISAR said. “It only takes a few seconds.” When Gina had first tried the communicator disk, she had experienced a strange series of sensations and illusions in her hearing and vision. VISAR had explained that the range and activity levels in the sensory parts of the brain varied from individual to individual, and it was necessary to tune the system to give the right responses. Once established, the parameters were stored away for future reference, making the process a onetime thing, analogous to fingerprinting. Presumably VISAR now needed to extend its records to accommodate the other sensory centers, too.
Gina found herself becoming acutely conscious of the pressure of the recliner against her body, the touch of her clothes, and even the feeling of air flowing through her nostrils as she breathed. She could feel her own pulses all over, and then a weird tingling unrolling down her spine. VISAR was experimenting with her sense of touch, exercising her nervous system through its range of responses and reading the neural activity.
She felt herself convulsing in spasms—and then realized that she wasn’t moving at all; the sensation was due to rapid variations of sensitivity occurring all over her skin. She felt hot, then cold, then itchy, then prickly, and finally numb. Sweet, sour, bitter, then again sweet tastes came and went in her mouth; her nose experienced a succession of odors.. . And all of a sudden, she was wide awake and alert again, and everything was normal.
“That’s it,” VISAR informed her. “How would you like me for your dentist?”
Gina was too intrigued by what was going on to reply, but as she waited, a her brow creased in puzzlement. It didn’t seem as if anything much was going on.
She sat up and found Hunt still standing in the doorway, leaning one shoulder against the side, arms folded, watching her curiously with an odd smile twisting his mouth.
“Can I get up now?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
She put her feet on the floor, sat upright, and stood cautiously, not quite knowing what to expect. Nothing changed. Everything felt normal.
“So, what happened?” she asked uncertainly. “Technical hitch?”
“You think so, eh?”
“You mean it worked?”
“Thurien engineering works. That’s one thing you never have to worry about.”
“But. . . we’re still in the ship. I thought we were supposed to be going to Jevien.”
“No. You’re falling into the illusion already. Virtual travel, remember? You knew you weren’t really going anywhere.”
Gina put a hand to her brow and shook her head. “Okay. Let’s not
start getting picky about words. You know what I mean. I thought that sensory information from Jevlen was supposed to be coming to me.”
“VISAR, give us a preview,” Hunt instructed.
At once, Gina and Hunt were standing in a wide, circular space like a gallery, overlooking a central area below. There were figures walking this way and that, some human, some Ganymean. As Gina stared, a small group consisting of two Ganymeans surrounded by a half-dozen or more humans gesticulating and seemingly talking all at once passed close by. Although the conversation was presumably being conducted in an alien tongue, the snatches that came through were transformed into English.
thousands of them, with nothing to do. They must be entertained. You have to arrange something.”
“Why can’t they learn to entertain themselves?” one of the Ganymeans asked, sounding harassed.
“They have always been entertained. It is their right!”
Gina looked at Hunt disbelievingly. He grinned back at her, clearly enjoying himself. “Let’s take a walk,” he suggested, and led the way across to the rail at the gallery’s edge. Gina’s mind was in too much turmoil for her to do anything but follow mechanically.
They looked down over a concourse of various levels and partly enclosed spaces, where more figures were standing or sitting, walking, arid going about their business. The concourse appeared to connect to other spaces beyond, and had pedestrian avenues entering from several directions. The architecture was unusual, with generous use of curvature and asymmetrical divisions of space that blended strange notions of aesthetics and ornamentation with what was clearly a functional purpose. Gina’s first thought as she began to recover her reeling senses was of a Moorishly inspired airport terminal. It was all definitely very futuristic, and unquestionably alien. . . but it did keep itself tidily to definite planes, without assaulting the eye with anything resembling the geometric chaos of the Thurien spacecraft.