“Hold it, Chris. Calm down.” Hunt held up a hand. “It’s not as bad as you think. All that’s-”
“Not as bad? Where in God’s name are we? How do we get out of it? Have you talked to the others? By what right do these alien creatures presume to-”
“You’re not anywhere, Chris. You’re still on the ground at McClusky. So am I. We all are. What’s happened is-”
“Don’t be preposterous! It’s quite evident that-”
“Have you talked to VISAR? It’ll explain it all far better than I can. Lyn’s with me and-”
“No I have not, and what’s more I have no intention of doing anything of the kind. If these Thuriens do not possess the common courtesy to-”
Hunt sighed. “VISAR, take the professor home and straighten him out, could you? I don’t think I’m up to dealing with him right now.”
“I’ll handle it,” VISAR replied, and Danchekker promptly vanished from the screen leaving an empty room in the frame.
“Amazing,” Hunt murmured. There were times, he thought,
when he would have liked to be able to pull that stunt with Danchekker himself.
A knock sounded lightly on the door. Hunt and Lyn’s heads jerked around to look at it, turned back to meet each other’s questioning looks, then stared at the door again. Lyn shrugged and moved across the room toward it. Hunt switched off the terminal and looked up to find the eight-foot-tall figure of a Ganymean straightening up after ducking through the doorway. Lyn stood speechless with surprise as she held the door open.
“Dr. Hunt and Miss Garland,” the Ganymean said. “First, on behalf of all of us, I apologize for the somewhat bizarre welcome. It was necessary for some very important reasons, which will be explained when we all get together very shortly. I hope that our leaving you on your own like this hasn’t seemed too bad-mannered, but we thought that perhaps a short period of adjustment might be beneficial. I am Porthik Eesyan-one of those you were expecting to meet.”
chapter ten
Eesyan was subtly different in form from the Ganymeans of the Shapieron, Hunt noticed as they walked. He had the same massive torso lines beneath his loose-fitting yellow jerkin and elaborately woven shirt of red and amber metallic threads, and the same six-fingered hands, each with two thumbs, but his skin was darker than the grays that Hunt remembered-almost black-and seemed smoother in texture; his build was lighter and more slender, his height slightly less than would have been normal, and his lower face and skull, though still elongated significantly, had receded and broadened into a more rounded head that was closer to the human proffle.
“We can move objects from place to place instantaneously by means of artificially generated spinning black holes,” Eesyan told them. “As your own theories predict, a rapidly spinning black hole flattens out into a disk, and eventually becomes a toroid with the mass concentrated at the rim. In that situation the singularity exists across the central aperture and can be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects. The aperture affords an ‘entry port’ into a hyperrealm described by laws not subject to the conventional restrictions of ordinary spacetime. Creating such an entry port also gives rise to a hypersymmetric effect that appears as a projection elsewhere in normal space, and which functions as a coupled exit port. By controlling the dimensions, spin, orientation, and certain other parameters of the initial hole, we can select with considerable accuracy the location of the exit up to distances in the order of several tens of light-years.”
Eesyan between Vic and Lyn, they were walking along a broad, enclosed, brightly illuminated arcade of soaring lines, gleaming sculptures, and vast openings, which led into other spaces. There were more Escher-like distortions and inversions here and there in the scene, but nothing as overwhelming as the sight they had first seen from the perceptron. Apparently Ganymean gravitic engineering tricks came with the architecture on Thurien. For this
was Thurien. They had emerged from the room and walked through a series of galleries and a huge domed space bustling with Ganymeans, eventually to this place, the illusory blending so smoothly into reality that Hunt had missed the point along the way at which the switch from one to the other had taken place. The meeting between the two worlds was about to take place, Eesyan had informed them, and he had been assigned to escort them there personally. No doubt VISAR could have transferred them there instantly, Hunt thought, but this seemed a more natural way while they were still “acclimatizing.” And having an opportunity to get to know at least one of the aliens informally in advance helped the process further. Probably that was the idea.