“How do you know all this?”

“My mother’s side of the family comes from Wexford. I go there for vacations and lived there for a while once.”

“When did Patrick die?” Hunt asked, realizing that he really, had no idea.

“In the fifth century. He was probably born in Wales and carried across by pirates.”

“So we’re talking about a long time before that, then.”

“Oh yes. In terms of literature and learning, they were unsurpassed anywhere in Western Europe long before Caesar crossed the Channel.”

“Let me see, every English schoolboy knows that. Fifty-five B.C., yes?”

“Right. Their race was unique, descended from a mixture of Celts and a pre-Celtic stock from the eastern Mediterranean.” Gina stared across the room and smiled to herself. “It wasn’t at all the kind of repressive thing that people were conditioned to think of later, you know. It was a very earthy, zestful, life-loving culture.”

“In what kind of way?” Hunt asked.

“The way women were treated, for a start. They were completely equal, with full rights of property-unusual in itself, for the times. Sex was considered a healthy and enjoyable part of life, the way it ought to be. Nobody connected it with sinning.”

“The real life of Riley, eh?” Hunt commented.

“They had an easygoing attitude to all personal relations. Polygamy was fairly normal. And then, so was polyandry. So you could have a string of wives, but each of them might have several husbands. But if a particular match didn’t work out, it was easy to dissolve. You just went to a holy place, stood back-to-back, said the right words, and walked ten paces. So children weren’t emotionally crippled by having to grow up with two people hating each other in a self-imposed prison; but if the marriage didn’t work out, they weren’t traumatized, either, because they had so many other anchor points among this network of people who liked each other.”

“It all sounds very civilized to me,” Hunt said.

“And that was where early Christianity hung on,” Gina said again. “So maybe it gives us an idea of what it really had to say.”

Hunt watched the faraway expression on Gina’s face for a few seconds, then grinned impudently. “Oh, I can see where you’re coming from,” he teased. “It’s nothing to do with humanist philosophies at all. You just like the thought of having a string of men to pick from.”

“Well, why should men have all the fun?” she retorted, refusing to be put on the defensive.

“Ahah! The real Gina emerges.”

“I’m merely stating a principle.”

“What’s wrong with it? Don’t women fantasize?”

“Of course they do.” She caught the look in his eye and smiled impishly. “And yes, who knows? Maybe one day if you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”

Hunt laughed and picked up his coffee cup. He finished the contents and allowed the silence to draw a curtain across the subject. “How are we doing for time?” he asked, setting the cup down. “Will any of the others be in the bar yet?”

Gina glanced at her watch. “It’s a bit early. What else is there to see of the ship?”

“Oh, I think I’ve had it with being dragged around for one day. You know, I really do make a lousy tourist.”

“That’s too bad. I can’t wait to see Jevlen. Just imagine, a real, actual, alien planet. And we’ll be there tomorrow. I still haven’t really gotten over all this.”

Hunt looked at her thoughtfully. “Maybe we don’t have to keep you waiting that long,” he said.

Gina looked puzzled. “Why? What are you talking about?”

“What you just said has given me an idea… VISAR, are there any couplers nearby?”

“A bank of them, to the right outside the door you came in through,” VISAR replied.

“Are there two free right now?”

“What are you doing?” Gina murmured.

“Wait, and you’ll see.”

“Plenty,” VISAR replied.

Hunt stood up. “Come on,” he said to Gina. “You haven’t seen half of Ganymean communications yet. This’ll be the fastest interstellar trip you ever dreamed of. I guarantee it.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The room was just a cubicle, its main furnishing being a kind of recliner, padded in red, with several panels of what looked like a multicolored crystalline material above and on either side of a concave support where the occupant’s head would be. The wall behind carried equipment and fittings of unfamiliar construction.

Gina ran her eye over the interior. “I take it this is how you connect into the Thurien virtual-travel net,” she guessed.

“That’s right,” Hunt said. He tapped the communicator disk attached behind his ear. “This gadget that they gave you when you came aboard is just a two-way audiovisual link to VISAR-a viphone that goes straight into your head instead of through screens and senses. But this is the full works.”

“What they call total neural stimulation?”

“Instead of you having to go take your sense to wherever the information is, this brings the information to your senses-provided that the place you want to ‘go’ is wired with sensors for the system. It wouldn’t work too well for Times Square or the middle of the Gobi. Also, it intercepts the motor and speech outputs from your brain, and generates the feedback that you’d experience from moving around and interacting there.”

Gina nodded but still looked unsure. After a few seconds, she said, “And all of that two-way information transfer takes place instantly through the same-what do you call it, ‘dimension’?”

“I-space.”

“That’s it… that this ship goes through to get to Jevlen, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay… But the ship has to spend a whole day getting out past Pluto before it can use i-space. How come this coupler can do it from right here? Or how come you can do it from Goddard, for that matter?”

Hunt was already nodding. “A port big enough to take a ship would mess up everybody’s astronomical tables if you projected it into a planetary system. So instant planet-to-planet hopping is out. But for communications it’s a different matter. You can send information on a gamma-frequency laser into a microtoroid that can be generated on planetary surfaces-or in ships like this one-without undesirable side effects. The Thuriens use it for most of their routine business and social calling-and you don’t have to worry about drinking the water or catching any foreign bugs. It’s got a lot of advantages.”

Gina moved forward and touched the material of the recliner curiously. It was soft and yielding. Hunt watched from inside the doorway. “So what do I do?” she asked.

“Just take a seat. VISAR will handle the rest.”

Gina hesitated for a moment, feeling just a trifle self-conscious. The she lowered herself into the recliner, settled her feet on the rest, and let herself sink back. A warm, drowsy feeling swept over her, causing her head to drop back automatically onto the concave support, which was also padded. She felt more relaxed than she could ever remember. The interior of the cubicle seemed to be floating distantly in a detached kind of way. A part of her mind was aware that she had been thinking coherently only moments before, and that someone else had been there for some reason, but she was unable to recall who or why, or really to care. Nothing really mattered.

“Like it?” She recognized the voice as VISAR’s.

“It’s great. What do I do-just lie back and enjoy it?”

“First, we’ll need to register some more of your personal cerebral patterns,” VISAR said. “It only takes a few seconds.” When Gina had first tried the communicator disk, she had experienced a strange series of sensations and illusions in her hearing and vision. VISAR had explained that the range and activity levels in the sensory parts of the brain varied from individual to individual, and it was necessary to tune the system to give the right responses. Once established, the parameters were stored away for future reference, making the process a onetime thing, analogous to fingerprinting. Presumably VISAR now needed to extend its records to accommodate the other sensory centers, too.