Read Gordon R. Dickson for Free Online Page B
Authors: Wolfling
incomprehension on her face made him add, “That’s halfway through my normal growing period.”
“And you stopped growing then?” Ro asked.
“I was stopped,” he said a little grimly. “Some of our medical practitioners ran a lot of tests on me because I was so big for my age. They couldn’t find anything wrong, but they put me on an extract of the pituitary gland to curb my growing. And it worked. I stopped growingphysically. But I went on growing otherwise.”
Jim interrupted himself abruptly. “Never mind that,” he said. “You were going to show me how to move around the ship, from room to room.”
“Thatand other things!” Suddenly she seemed to grow several inches in front of him, and something came into her that was like the cold imperiousness of Princess Afuan. “They can take my animals and give them away or kill them. But they’re not going to hurt you. When I get through with you, you’ll know more than enough to survive. I may be a throwback, but I’m as Highborn as any of them. The Emperor himself can’t dismiss me, without cause, from the Throne World; and everything that is Highborn’s, by right is mine! Come along, and I’ll begin to show you what it’s like to live among the Highborn and be a citizen of the society of the Throne World!”
She took him first to a section of the ship he had not yet visited. It consisted of a large, high-ceilinged, metal-walled room, with one wall covered with the rays of blinking lights of various colors. Tending this wall was one of the short brown men with long hair down his back. He was, Jim discovered, all that the ship possessed in the way of a crewin fact, he was not even that. In actuality, he was nothing more than a standby engineer, on hand in case of the unlikely chance that some small repair or adjustment needed to be made to the ship’s mechanism.
The ship, in fact, ran itself. It not only ran itself, it supplied the motive power for all the transfers of people between rooms, and everything else in the way of visible and invisible equipment aboard. Like some huge robot dog, it responded immediately to the mental whims of the Princess Afuan; and, to a lesser extent, it stood ready to accommodate the whims of everyone else aboard.
“Now,” Ro instructed Jim, “simply stand here and relax. Let it make contact with you.”
“Make contact with me?” Jim echoed. He assumed that she was talking about something like telepathy, and tried to say sobut found he had no word for it in the Empire language. Ro, however, understood him, and to his considerable surprise, launched into a complete and highly technical explanation of how the ship worked. In brief, it was simply that the ship studied the electrical activity of an individual brain and from this drew up what amounted to an individual electrical code for whatever the person was thinking or doing. Thoughts which were visualized clearly enough, Ro explained, triggered off motor subactivity in the bodyin short, the body physically responded at a very low level to the scene it was imagining, as if that scene were real. The ship then matched these responses with the proper scene, and shifted the person to the scene by literally disassembling him at his present position and reassembling him at the location of the imagined scene.
The process by which the ship crossed light-years of empty space was the same method of dissassembly and reassembly, only on a larger scale. That is, the whole ship and its contents were disassembled and reassembled farther along its line of passage. There was a certain limitation to the distance over which one of these shifts could take place, but since each shift took place at computer speeds, the effect was exactly like that of trans-light velocities, without effort.
” … Actually,” wound up Ro, “the ship really never moves at all. It simply changes the coordinates of its position… .” And she went off into an explanation too technical for Jim
“And you stopped growing then?” Ro asked.
“I was stopped,” he said a little grimly. “Some of our medical practitioners ran a lot of tests on me because I was so big for my age. They couldn’t find anything wrong, but they put me on an extract of the pituitary gland to curb my growing. And it worked. I stopped growingphysically. But I went on growing otherwise.”
Jim interrupted himself abruptly. “Never mind that,” he said. “You were going to show me how to move around the ship, from room to room.”
“Thatand other things!” Suddenly she seemed to grow several inches in front of him, and something came into her that was like the cold imperiousness of Princess Afuan. “They can take my animals and give them away or kill them. But they’re not going to hurt you. When I get through with you, you’ll know more than enough to survive. I may be a throwback, but I’m as Highborn as any of them. The Emperor himself can’t dismiss me, without cause, from the Throne World; and everything that is Highborn’s, by right is mine! Come along, and I’ll begin to show you what it’s like to live among the Highborn and be a citizen of the society of the Throne World!”
She took him first to a section of the ship he had not yet visited. It consisted of a large, high-ceilinged, metal-walled room, with one wall covered with the rays of blinking lights of various colors. Tending this wall was one of the short brown men with long hair down his back. He was, Jim discovered, all that the ship possessed in the way of a crewin fact, he was not even that. In actuality, he was nothing more than a standby engineer, on hand in case of the unlikely chance that some small repair or adjustment needed to be made to the ship’s mechanism.
The ship, in fact, ran itself. It not only ran itself, it supplied the motive power for all the transfers of people between rooms, and everything else in the way of visible and invisible equipment aboard. Like some huge robot dog, it responded immediately to the mental whims of the Princess Afuan; and, to a lesser extent, it stood ready to accommodate the whims of everyone else aboard.
“Now,” Ro instructed Jim, “simply stand here and relax. Let it make contact with you.”
“Make contact with me?” Jim echoed. He assumed that she was talking about something like telepathy, and tried to say sobut found he had no word for it in the Empire language. Ro, however, understood him, and to his considerable surprise, launched into a complete and highly technical explanation of how the ship worked. In brief, it was simply that the ship studied the electrical activity of an individual brain and from this drew up what amounted to an individual electrical code for whatever the person was thinking or doing. Thoughts which were visualized clearly enough, Ro explained, triggered off motor subactivity in the bodyin short, the body physically responded at a very low level to the scene it was imagining, as if that scene were real. The ship then matched these responses with the proper scene, and shifted the person to the scene by literally disassembling him at his present position and reassembling him at the location of the imagined scene.
The process by which the ship crossed light-years of empty space was the same method of dissassembly and reassembly, only on a larger scale. That is, the whole ship and its contents were disassembled and reassembled farther along its line of passage. There was a certain limitation to the distance over which one of these shifts could take place, but since each shift took place at computer speeds, the effect was exactly like that of trans-light velocities, without effort.
” … Actually,” wound up Ro, “the ship really never moves at all. It simply changes the coordinates of its position… .” And she went off into an explanation too technical for Jim