His roommate had already arrived and sat studying a text in a reader. He was an intense youth who introduced himself as Cavalheiro. Kenmuir saw no way out of a conversation. It proved interesting.
“I search for God in the quivira,” Cavalheiro tried to explain. The surprise on his listener’s face was unmistakable. “Ah, yes. You wonder, am I dement? A quivira gives nothing but the full-sensory illusion, the dream, of an experience. True. However, one does not passively let the program run. One interacts with it, not so? The result is that the episode affects the brain and goes into the memory just as if it were real.”
“Not quite,” Kenmuir demurred. “That is, whenever I’ve been there, well, afterward I knew I was actually lying in the tank.”
“All you want is entertainment, or sometimes knowledge,” Cavalheiro said. Not always, Kenmuir thought. On long space missions, sessions in the quivira were a medicine for sensory impoverishment. Their input helped keep a man sane.
“I seek the meaning of things,” Cavalheiro went on. “The programs I use were written by persons .who spent their lives pursuing the divine. They had the help of sophotects long intimate with humans, that draw on the whole of every religious culture in history and think orders of magnitude more powerfully than us. The conceptions in the programs go beyond words, images, consciousness. They go to the depths of the spirit and the bounds of the cosmos. I think the Teramind is in them.”
“Urn, may I ask what it … feels like?”
“It is no single thing. I have cried to Indra and he has answered me out of the thunders. I have questioned Jesus Christ. I have felt the compassion of Kwan-Yin. I have—no, it is not possible to speak of near ing samadhi. But do you not see, it is interaction. In a little, little way, I give form to the divine, while it fills me and shapes me.”
“You are both finding and making your God, then?” Kenmuir ventured.
“I am trying to understand and enter into God,” Cavalheiro replied. “I am not unique in taking this path. None of us has lived to walk it to the end, and I do not imagine any human ever will. But it is what our lives are about.”
Aleka having demonstrated high competence and sketchily described what she and Kenmuir claimed were .their intentions, they received permission to proceed. By then the sun stood at mid-afternoon. They said they would like to relax with a walk now and begin next morning. “An excellent idea,” Sandhu approved. “What you desire lies as much in the living world as in any abstractions,” He signed the air. “Blessings.”
Trails wound down the mountain through its woodland. They chose theirs because it looked unfrequented. Their goal was solitude in which to plan their strategy. Time passed, though, while they fared in silence.
High above them, the greenwood rustled to a breeze. That and their footfalls on soil were the only sounds at first, except when a squirrel chittered and sped aloft or a bird-call came liquid from shadowy depths. Light-Becks danced. Air beneath the leaves lay rich and warm. They passed some crumbling, moss-grown blocks that Kenmuir guessed were remnants of a highway; but if a town had once been hereabouts, it was long abandoned, demolished to make room for the return of nature. Presently he began ‘to hear a trill of running water. The path reached a brook thatswirled and splashed in a small cascade, down to a hollow where blackberries beckoned robins.
He and Aleka stopped for a drink. The water was cool. It tasted wild. Straightening, he wiped his mouth and sighed, “Bonny country. And so peaceful. Like a whole different planet.”
Aleka gave him a quizzical glance. Here, where the canopy overhead was thinner, her skin glowed amber below a faint sheen of sweat. “Different from what?” she inquired.
He grimaced. “Those places we’ve lately been.”
“You’ve got it wrong, I think. They are the alien planets. This is the normal one, ours.”
“How?” he asked, puzzled.
“Why, what you said. Here things are beautiful and peaceful. Bueno, isn’t most of Earth?”
“Why, uh—”