(no subject)
It'd been a long day. There were spiders in it. Not the hairy-legged kind that cause screaming and stomping, but-
-well, okay, there was screaming and stomping, but these were metal spiders. No hairy. Just droid maintenance gone completely messed up. Stupid things had made it impossible for Eddie to get through the portable hole in time, and they'd cost Ray his favorite multi-tool. Not to mention that poor Patrick kid getting stuck too. And River and Ace and Moiraine- oooh, the spiders had a lot to answer for.
It sort of made him feel better to remember that he still had the two severed halves of the spider-bot the size of a Hungarian Vizsla. The possibilities inherent in the thing's innards- the implications for fabrication science alone- well, the whole prospect was just enough to reduce him to sentence fragments! How were you supposed to keep a coherent thought in your head in the face of something like that? Especially in light of the fact that the 'bot came from the same time and technology as the Beam generators themselves. Staggering, absolutely staggering. It'd have to go on the back burner, of course. He had to get a no-room built first, and that meant developing an understanding of Holtzmann field technology, given the amount of overlapping shield waveform energies involved in even the most basic no-room design. Anything that could cut the inhabitant off from being perceived through prescience could probably also sever them from the dimensional interlinkages almost certainly responsible for most other forms of psychic ability or spirit activity, and frankly, given the nature and implications of his and Egon's work lately, he really really wanted to make sure that neither of them was going to be receiving spectral messages from the beyond disguised as subconscious impulses of their own minds any time soon. Not to mention the potential uses of Holtzmann fields in, well, the field- assuming they interacted safely with proton streams, or even assuming they didn't. Maybe Ace could help him test that somewhere. The Army would probably notice the explosion if proton streams behaved anything at all like lasgun fire.
He considered the possibility of re-rigging the PKE beacon to put out a line for Eddie to follow. He'd need something vital of Eddie's to do that, though. Something with a hell of a lot of personal resonance. Tim's use of the beacon had been based on the philotic connection and esoteric resonances available with the use of the last drop of Tim's lifeblood- you really didn't get a better resonance than that. Whether anything similar existed for Eddie, Ray didn't know. He'd ask tomorrow, after he slept. Assuming, of course, that the angry throbbing around the vaccination site even let him sleep. Sleep would be nice. He could figure out what to do about Eddie later.
Ray flopped back on the bed, deliberately not looking at the ceiling. The drinking bout with Garion had ended in a phenomenal hangover and the coverage of five out of six flat surfaces in the room with mathematics so complicated it hurt just to think about them. It hurt more to think about how he'd managed to make the ceiling one of those six surfaces, since there was no scaffolding anywhere in sight and the notations looked way too steady to have been done with a marker tied to the end of a stick. Right now, all he wanted to do was-
( An infinitesimally tiny dot on the back of a dot that was the size of the world, and that yet was infinitesimally tiny itself compared to the infinite sea of other dots that surrounded and permeated every possible direction both comprehensible and incomprehensible. They were looking at him again, not the infinitude of other faceless incomprehensibilities, but something else- entities vast beyond comprehension, true, but not faceless themselves. Oh, no, these had forms and faces, a sense of rightness and form and name. And one of them spoke, in a voice that called Eska's image of Great A'Tuin irresistibly to mind, and another, just possibly, might have dropped the barest of winks in his direction. )
-drop off to sleep.
-well, okay, there was screaming and stomping, but these were metal spiders. No hairy. Just droid maintenance gone completely messed up. Stupid things had made it impossible for Eddie to get through the portable hole in time, and they'd cost Ray his favorite multi-tool. Not to mention that poor Patrick kid getting stuck too. And River and Ace and Moiraine- oooh, the spiders had a lot to answer for.
It sort of made him feel better to remember that he still had the two severed halves of the spider-bot the size of a Hungarian Vizsla. The possibilities inherent in the thing's innards- the implications for fabrication science alone- well, the whole prospect was just enough to reduce him to sentence fragments! How were you supposed to keep a coherent thought in your head in the face of something like that? Especially in light of the fact that the 'bot came from the same time and technology as the Beam generators themselves. Staggering, absolutely staggering. It'd have to go on the back burner, of course. He had to get a no-room built first, and that meant developing an understanding of Holtzmann field technology, given the amount of overlapping shield waveform energies involved in even the most basic no-room design. Anything that could cut the inhabitant off from being perceived through prescience could probably also sever them from the dimensional interlinkages almost certainly responsible for most other forms of psychic ability or spirit activity, and frankly, given the nature and implications of his and Egon's work lately, he really really wanted to make sure that neither of them was going to be receiving spectral messages from the beyond disguised as subconscious impulses of their own minds any time soon. Not to mention the potential uses of Holtzmann fields in, well, the field- assuming they interacted safely with proton streams, or even assuming they didn't. Maybe Ace could help him test that somewhere. The Army would probably notice the explosion if proton streams behaved anything at all like lasgun fire.
He considered the possibility of re-rigging the PKE beacon to put out a line for Eddie to follow. He'd need something vital of Eddie's to do that, though. Something with a hell of a lot of personal resonance. Tim's use of the beacon had been based on the philotic connection and esoteric resonances available with the use of the last drop of Tim's lifeblood- you really didn't get a better resonance than that. Whether anything similar existed for Eddie, Ray didn't know. He'd ask tomorrow, after he slept. Assuming, of course, that the angry throbbing around the vaccination site even let him sleep. Sleep would be nice. He could figure out what to do about Eddie later.
Ray flopped back on the bed, deliberately not looking at the ceiling. The drinking bout with Garion had ended in a phenomenal hangover and the coverage of five out of six flat surfaces in the room with mathematics so complicated it hurt just to think about them. It hurt more to think about how he'd managed to make the ceiling one of those six surfaces, since there was no scaffolding anywhere in sight and the notations looked way too steady to have been done with a marker tied to the end of a stick. Right now, all he wanted to do was-
( An infinitesimally tiny dot on the back of a dot that was the size of the world, and that yet was infinitesimally tiny itself compared to the infinite sea of other dots that surrounded and permeated every possible direction both comprehensible and incomprehensible. They were looking at him again, not the infinitude of other faceless incomprehensibilities, but something else- entities vast beyond comprehension, true, but not faceless themselves. Oh, no, these had forms and faces, a sense of rightness and form and name. And one of them spoke, in a voice that called Eska's image of Great A'Tuin irresistibly to mind, and another, just possibly, might have dropped the barest of winks in his direction. )
-drop off to sleep.