After the door shut behind him, the place seemed barren. It wasn’t really a home. Two inner cubicles held a bed, a sanitor, a nutrition unit, and whatever else was barebones necessary, but here were only screens, panels, receptors, and other unobtrusive outwardnesses of the great, thinking engine. The ceiling shone cold white, and air circulated odorless.
When the site was converted to an apartment—he had heard that it was formerly a tavern—the secret service of the Peace Authority acquired it under the name of a data-synthetic person and remodeled it, an unnoticeable piece at a time. That seemed a reasonable precaution, inasmuch as the Republic of Luna restricted the Authority to a single office and a platoon in Port Bowen. A listening post and center for safe communications was desirable elsewhere, in a nation this widespread and tricky. Later the huntsman’s corps had installed their special gear, and at the moment he was using the fictitious name.
He went straight to work. More drove him than eagerness in the chase. For too many daycycles he had been just briefly and intermittently in synnoiosis. This episode of it would go longer and deeper, enough to sustain him until he returned to Earth and could again enter a full communion.
Or a Unity—no, he dared not yearn for that. Not now.
Opening the case at his flank, he took out the interlink, unfolded it, and adjusted it on his head. It fitted like a coif of closely woven black mesh with bright small nodules at a number of the intersections. Within was a complexity not much less than that in a living cell, and in certain respects more: crystals and giant molecules never found in nature, interactions down to the quantum level. It was best to be physically .relaxed, however mild the demands of Lunar gravity. He reclined on a couch before a deceptively simple-looking control panel. “Is all clear?” he inquired.
“All clear,” replied the sophotect that had kept watch on the room and the communication lines. “Carry on at will.”
The huntsman plugged in his interlink. Wire and contact were structures comparably intricate. He willed. Synnoiosis began.
The net that nanomachines had woven inside his head, when he was a cadet in the Garden, came active. It traced out the ongoing, ever-shifting electrochemical activity of his brain, rendered the readings as a multiple-terabaud data stream, and passed them on to the interlink, which translated them into machine language and conveyed them farther. As the system responded, the interlink became a generator of pulses and dancing fields whereby the net directly stimulated the brain.
The process appeared to be as uncomplicated as the outward show of the things themselves. It was in fact an achievement beyond the creation or the full understanding of any merely human intelligence. It joined two orders of being that were utterly unlike—organic and inorganic, chemical and electrophotonic, life and post-life.
It was not telepathy, it was communication by language through an interpreter. But to master that language, the huntsman had paid with his childhood and youth. And it was not a language that went through the ears or the eyes, the sensor or the keyboard. It went directly between nervous system and circuitry.
For him, its fullness was a transcendence higher than ever he knew in sexual union, mortal danger, or intellectual challenge. He had asked sophotects how it was for them, but they had been unable to explain. If nothing else, among them oneness was as normal an occurrence as feeding was to him.
This was only a partial,almost superficial, interface. He dealt in straightforward information, material that could have been rendered in text, graphics, and speech. The sophotects involved, the one here and the one at headquarters in Port Bowen, were conscious. They thought, but they were narrowly specialized and focused, content to dwell immobile, essentially bodiless, with all input and output going along the data lines. The system itself was limited in both databases and capabilities. Even on the Moon, larger nets existed; but if he tapped into them, he might alert his prey.
Nevertheless, this synnoiotic session was more than a hurried report or query. Far faster and more comprehensively than could have been done in the flesh, he gave out what he had learned and received what he asked for. He need not trace a way through hypertext; associated facts and ideas came to him as an integrated whole. Entire histories became his. A hundred variant plans of campaign developed, simulated their probable consequences, and left behind them what parts he deemed worth fitting into a new synthesis. Above and beyond loomed the sense of how it all reached through space-time, past and future and the ends of the universe, and how fateful it might yet prove.