That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, reemerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds.
Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboard Envoy whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.
Certain it was that the former, abortive efforts of the Tahirians to make contact had awakened some kind of passion, and the beings were doing whatever they could to establish communication with these better-qualified newcomers. That was astoundingly much.
Hitherto Nansen had not used the virtual-reality terminal in his cabin as anything but a tool, an aid to understanding. He would evoke something — a change in procedures, a modification of a piece of equipment, an unfamiliar astronomical configuration — and study it, try it out, in different aspects under various conditions, until he learned what he wanted to learn. Like most people, he had played with pseudo experiences, fantasies, but that was long ago, in adolescence on Earth, and seldom. He did not fear addiction, he simply preferred truth.
Now he sought back. His project with Emil offered him hard labor and the deep sleep that follows it, but first the work required careful planning, and too often he drifted from a conference or a computer to raw memory. Since he refused drugs — before prescribing, Mokoena would want to explore his inmost needs — he thought a little spell in childland might help.
It did not take him long to set up the program, complex though it was. Elements of landscape, artifacts, personal features and traits, historical or fictional situations, everything anyone had cared to have entered, were in the ship’s database. The computer would combine them according to basic instructions, partly randomly, partly fractally, governed by principles of logic and aesthetics unless he specified otherwise, sketching a world. Likewise would neurostimulation suggest sensory input. Imagination would do the rest, the vividness of dream within the coherence of structure, the unexpectedness of life within the boundaries of desire.
Nansen shaped a small, crooked smile. “Surprise me,” he said, a phrase he had acquired from Dayan. But of course any surprises would spring from himself.
Loosely clad, he attached the bracelets and anklets, donned the cap, snugged every contact against his skin, and stretched out on his bed. For a moment he hung back, half reluctant. Then he grimaced, pressed the switch, and lowered head to pillow.
At first he only saw his illusion. Hearing soon commenced. Tactile sensation followed, temperature, equilibrium. As brain and nerves adjusted and endocrines responded, the primitive centers — gustatory, splanchnic, olfactory — grew active, too. Meanwhile the knowledge that this was entirely within him receded, to wait until he called for it, like the value of e or the date of Paraguay’s independence.
He rode from the estancia. Clouds loomed immense on his left, blue-shadowed white walls and cupolas. Elsewhere sunlight spilled unhindered, glowing off countless wings, down over an endlessness of grass. The wind sent long waves across the plain and around the red anthills, sighed through scattered groves, streamed over his face with odors of sun-warmed earth and horseflesh. Hoofs thudded, muscles rippled beneath his thighs. He rode Trueno, the stallion who was his in his boyhood, whose death first taught him sorrow. The black mane fluttered, the black coat sheened, wholly alive, one with him. Gaucho-clad, pistol at right hip, cavalry saber at left, Ricardo bore west for the mountains.