The Mind Pool

Mondrian made a check of the incoming messages. Nothing from Kubo. Another complaint from Dougal MacDougal about the energy cost of keeping open the Anabasis-Travancore Link. A confirmation from the Stellar Group ambassadors that no matter what happened, there could be no return from Travancore until the Morgan Construct was destroyed or rendered totally harmless. A query from Phoebe Willard, asking when Luther Brachis would return.

If we knew that, we would be happy to tell you.

Mondrian erased the lengthy string of digits on each recording block. The only written evidence of the Link sequence needed to return the Q-ship to a known region of space vanished.

Once again, Mondrian, Luther Brachis, and Godiva Lomberd sat alone in space, a six-hundred-year journey away from home.

In the folded, multiply-connected mapping provided by the Mattin Link, space lacks both metric and affine connections. There is only the point-to-point Link transformation, with its own discontinuous topology. So long as the Link is maintained between two locations, they remain neighbors in Link-space.

The Q-ship in orbit around Travancore and the control room of Anabasis Headquarters were close, an infinitesimal Link-space distance apart. The Link itself could provide the minute (but hugely energetic) nudge to move matter or messages across that tiny gap.

The Mattin Link seems like magic — is magic — but it is an unforgiving magic. Transfer locations must be specified in real space, and converted exactly to Link-space. Fifty-three decimal digits are needed to specify each of three spatial coordinates for transfer. One hundred and fifty-nine digits identify the full transfer sequence, a sequence that must be stored in a data bank — or remembered, if all stored forms but that of organic memory are rejected.

And there is no symmetry. The digit sequence needed to transfer from Q-ship to Anabasis Headquarters is unrelated to the sequence that takes a message (or an object) from the Anabasis to the Q- ship.

Night and morning, Luther Brachis and Esro Mondrian wrote out for each other’s inspection and approval a 159-digit Mattin Link sequence. It was their life-line to the rest of the universe. Without it, they would be marooned for the rest of their lives in the Travancore system.

Chapter 37

Chan woke late to find himself alone in the tent. When he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and went outside he learned that during the night the other members of Nimrod had also arrived.

The whole group was unusually subdued, as though everyone was waiting for some signal. The two Angels had night-rooted out on the tent side-lip and were sitting now in companionable silence (or ultrasonic communion), their spread fronds absorbing Talitha’s morning blaze. S’greela and S’glya had wandered away on a Pipe-Rilla food hunt. Chan could see them bounding around in the topmost branches, unconcerned by a possible five-kilometer drop all the way to the forest floor. And Ishmael and Shikari had both disassembled. The tent was filled with their purple-black components, covering every free surface. It was impossible to tell which was which.

Chan reached out and picked a component from its roost by the tent wall. The creature fluttered its veined wings indignantly and made an attempt to fly away. The ring of tiny green eyes peered at Chan with no hint of understanding. When he released the component it flew up at once to perch on the vegetation canopy.

Chan watched it hanging there and wondered. How did the two Tinker Composites retain their separate identities? What rule told a single component where to go? What happened if a component from one Tinker tried to cluster with members of the other?

Meaningless questions. What told a human cell that it was to be part of a liver, and not part of a lung? Chan went across to Leah.

She had tied her dark hair back with a scarlet turban, providing the brightest splash of color on Travancore. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the tent, she was eating as fast as the heating unit would produce food. Chan watched for a couple of minutes, then went to put two more servings into the unit. He offered one to her when they were ready, and- was amazed when she took both — and gestured to him to load in more.

Leah ate and ate. It was a long time before she took a final mouthful, said “No more,” and leaned back against the flexible wall. She patted her belly and grinned at Chan. “There. You’ve just paid back the first installment on the thousands of meals that I’ve prepared for you. But take my advice, and stoke up yourself. You’re going to need all the energy and calories that you can get — and I don’t just mean on my account.”

She gave him a quick sideways glance, then deliberately closed her eyes. Casual. They were all too casual. Chan wondered why he seemed to be the only one worried at all about getting away from Travancore. It was hard to remember that just one day ago, all his fears had been of the Morgan Construct.

Chan thought of Esro Mondrian. It was easy to feel omnipotent when the mentality was in its merged state, but it would not take Mondrian long to recognize the weaknesses of Nimrod and Almas. Chan could think of one immediately: during union, the pooled minds were almost immobilized. A mentality could move only sluggishly as a unit. If it dissolved in order to move faster, the union was destroyed.

Leah seemed to think that the mentalities were the next evolutionary step, something that would advance all the Stellar Group members. But Chan did not believe that every change was better for survival. Unless they could gain access to the Q-ship and somehow defeat Esro Mondrian and anyone else aboard, the mentalities would be revealed as evolutionary blind ends.

Was Chan the only one who still thought that the individual members were in some ways more capable than the mind pools?

The return of the two Pipe-Rillas brought an end to Chan’s train of thought. As they dropped together through a leaf layer and crouched down next to the Angels, it was the signal for every Tinker component to rise from its roosting position. They flew around the tent with dizzying speed and precision, and swarmed over each team member. The mentalities awoke, this time without delay. A thick braid of Tinker components formed a living cable between them and offered direct mental connection.

GREETINGS … THE Q-SHIP BEHAVIOR IS UNPREDICTABLE … THE TIME IS SHORT … THE NEED FOR MENTALITY ACTION IS URGENT …

One split-second across the broad channel of communication sufficed for a dozen main messages, a hundred overtones of meaning, a thousand cross-references to existing data. As the pooled minds began their assessment, parallel analyses computed the conditional probabilities corresponding to every option.

OPTION ONE: MOVEMENT OF THE LANDING CAPSULE TO THE Q-SHIP, BUT NO PRIOR COMMUNICATION WITH THE Q-SHIP.

PROBABLE OUTCOME: DESTRUCTION OF LANDING CAPSULE BEFORE REACHING Q- SHIP AT PROBABILITY LEVEL P = 0.58 IF ACTION TAKEN WITHIN 2 TRAVANCORE DAYS, AT P = 0.71 WITHIN 3 DAYS, AT P = 0.96 WITHIN FOUR DAYS.

Chan sat within the group mind of Almas, but this time he retained some measure of individual self- awareness as the powerful thought streams of Nimrod and Almas swirled above him and around him. They created echoes in his mind, weak eddy patterns of the strong main current.

Ideas from individual other team members came swarming in, alien yet accessible. Sometimes they appeared as sounds, sometimes as images, or as transient illusions of physical touch. In that cross-fertilization of mind, new ideas and speculations were like blazing fireships, moving to ignite convoys of thought within every member of the mind pool.

From the Angel, a statistical conclusion blazed in on Chan as a crimson starfish of analysis: