'Has it occurred to you that the main room in this building and the sacred chamber in the temple are set up like an auditorium?'
'An auditorium?'
'Elli can be heard only as far as the outer ring of pedestals. The pedestals were obviously meant to be the Tal Tahir equivalent of chairs. With those long arms and legs of his, I'd guess Lord Tern would find one of them to be a comfortable place to sit for a while. I think those pedestals were seats for the males.'
'You're saying the Tal Tahir males came to this place to watch a show?' Frakes sounded skeptical.
'I think they came here for all kinds of reasons. They called on Elli when they needed a counseling session.'
'A what?' Karyn exclaimed.
'I kept wondering what Lord Tern and Elli were getting out of this exchange with humans,' Paul went on. 'Then Elli said that helping us was the reason for her existence. That made me wonder about how the disks work. You touch the rod with the disk and Elli appears.'
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William Greenleaf
'If you use the disk with her picture on it,' Karyn added.
'Exactly. You mentioned that earlier, but I didn't see the significance. You said the personal Tal Tahir god changes each time a new High Elder is elected. You told me the new High Elder selects his own personal god.'
'That's the way it's always been,' Karyn said.
'Right. Which means Captain Anson from the starship Vanguard was probably the man who
discovered the disks and the chauka. That's probably what made him go off the deep end in the first place. But I wondered how the High Elder could simply select a Tal Tahir god. Now I think it was simple—he merely chose a new disk. That means the elders had a supply of the disks.'
Karyn nodded. 'That makes sense. But I don't see—'
'If you use the disk with Elli's picture, you get Elli. If you use the one with Lord Tern's picture, you get him instead. There are dozens of disks, each with a different picture.' He paused to let them absorb that. 'Doesn't that remind you of something?'
'Sure,' Frakes said. 'It's like a tridee cube. You pop it in your player and sit back in your favorite easy chair and watch the show.'
'Right. The show is recorded in the cube. You can get any kind of show you want, from a murder mystery to a horror film to a nature documentary.'
'Are you saying . . .' Karyn let the words trail off.
Paul nodded. 'I think the Tal Tahir disks are the human equivalent of tridee cubes.'
Silence descended over them while they absorbed what Paul had told them. Karyn broke it:
'Lord Tern was an actor?'
'Not an actor as such,' Paul corrected. 'I don't think the Tal Tahir disks were recorded with the same kind of shows we're accustomed to. I've learned a lot from Elli. The social orientation of the Tal Tahir—you can see it in everything they had, even the way their city was designed. They felt each other's emotions—and it would only be natural that their entertainment would be angled toward emotional experiences. If I'm right, some of those disks depict humor, and some depict the Tal Tahir equivalent of love stories, and some are Tal Tahir horror stories.'
'Stories don't talk back to you,' Frakes pointed out.
'These do,' Paul said. 'The technology of the Tal Tahir was also oriented toward emotional fulfillment. The disks were all designed to interact with the viewer.'
Karyn looked at him sharply. 'The disk of Lord Tern . . .'
