My voice creaked like a pine: "I have."

A laugh punched from Sitor Ananta. "The dead come back for laughs, Mr. Charlie. Or as wetware. The Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group used you the way you, in your time, would have used an electronic toy to inform neophytes. Shall we see what program they chose to store in you?"

The stylus swizzled on the moonpiece, and I spoke in a voice orphaned from my will: "In order to locate an electron in a specified spin state at a given moment, measurement must give the differences in the phase fields-parallel and antiparallel components of spin, et cetera. There is no absolute phase. The real and imaginary parts of the wave amplitude are indistinguishable, that is, they can't be separated in some absolute way. Such constraints are functions of observer consciousness-what we humanists call mind. Adopted conventions specify the signs of complementary values, what physicists refer to as a deep-gauge symmetry. The observer perspective is what's important here. The relative ascription of plus and minus signs, used to define oscillations of wave amplitudes, requires the component of V-1, the imaginary value called i. It's

the idea of the thing, for it posits both a thing and its absence. It's easy to believe that a thing can exist out there, independent of the observer, but the posited absence of a thing is obviously an expression of consciousness. So, you see, all energies, forces, and fields that make up the material expression of things are functions of an abstract geometry. And abstract geometry, which requires I, is a function of consciousness!"

"Well, wax me mind, eh, Mr. Charlie?" Sitor Ananta laughed darkly. "Is that how the Friends' crude translators managed amazement? They sounded to you somewhat as you would imagine buccaneers, didn't they? Well, their primitive translators got that unintentionally right.