One of the screens on the console activated, showing Calazar. "Congratulations," he said. "visar has just given me the news. And you have a channel there into jevex?"
Hunt moved next to Keshen. "Do we?"
Keshen checked the indicators on the other screen. "Yes. And you want visar connected into it? Is that so?"
"They're in charge now," Hunt said, waving toward the screen showing Calazar.
An exchange of technical jargon between visar and Keshen followed, ending with Keshen confirming that it could be done. "Do it straight away, while jevex is still asleep," visar said. "Then when they bring jevex up to full power on Uttan, guess who'll be in control of it."
"And Eubeleus won't know?" Hunt asked.
"jevex won't even know," visar told him.
Keshen was looking puzzled. "Uttan? The planet? What has Uttan to do with this?" he asked.
"It's too long a story to go into now, believe me," Hunt replied.
Then the sound of footsteps came from the lounge outside, and Gina appeared at the door with Danchekker. The three men who had brought them from Murray's were behind.
"My God, it's Vic and the others!" Danchekker exclaimed. "You're here. We had no idea what was going on. These—" He hesitated as he heard his words being translated. "These gentlemen collected us."
"You weren't safe there," Hunt explained. "This is Scirio. He had you brought here. And this is Keshen. Don't ask where we've been."
Gina was looking past Hunt with a puzzled expression. "What's doing the translating? Have we got zorac back again?"
"Even better," Hunt answered. "It's visar. We've got a link to Thurien." Danchekker was already staring incredulously, having seen Calazar on one of the screens. Hunt indicated the other section of hardware. "And that's the channel into jevex. Keshen has just hooked them together."
Danchekker blinked. "You've done it? You mean already? They can set visar loose on jevex from here?"
"And with jevex still in a coma, it won't know what hit it—literally," Hunt replied.
The news was so sudden and unexpected that it took Gina several seconds to absorb it. "You mean that's it?" she said finally. "We can keep jevex off permanently, as of now? Then it can be taken apart? The problem's over?"
"Er, no," Calazar said from the screen. He sounded apologetic at having to complicate things. "We've already discussed that. The Ents are a race of fully sapient beings in every respect. What you're saying would amount to genocide."
"What are they talking about?" Keshen muttered to Scirio. "What are Ents?" Scirio hushed him with a warning shake of his head.
The screen split, and Caldwell's face appeared in one half. He nodded at Hunt and the others, evidently having gotten the news from visar. "Great job. Looks like maybe we're in business, then, eh?"
Gina was still bemused by what Calazar had said. "Then what will you do?" she asked. "Isolate it? Leave it as its own, self-contained universe?"
Caldwell shook his head, guessing the way the conversation was going. "The Thuriens won't go with that, either. But in any case, both those options would depend on visar being able to keep control over jevex. Right now, that all hinges on the single link into it that you've just established. If we lose that, we lose our only chance. Once Eubeleus and his people were warned, they wouldn't give us another opportunity."
Hunt was looking perplexed. "What, then?" he asked, shifting his eyes from one side of the screen to the other. "If we're not going to get rid of it and we're not going to cut it off, what are we going to do? What other alternative is there?"
"The real problem that we've got in the short term is staving off a mass exodus of Ents," Caldwell said. "jevex is simply the means that would make it possible. But it wouldn't happen at all, regardless of whether we continued to control jevex or not, if the Ents could be persuaded to change their minds—at least until we've had a chance to understand the situation better and figure out how we can help them solve their problem without wiping out a Jevlenese every time one of them comes out."
"What?" Hunt said. This was a completely new twist. He glanced at Danchekker, then at Gina. They both looked as much at a loss as he was.
"I don't understand," Danchekker said to the screen. "Persuade them? How?"
"By talking to them," Caldwell said, as if that explained everything.
Hunt was completely befuddled. He shook his head. "They're just patterns in a computer, Gregg. How's anyone supposed to talk to them?"
"That's what we've been thinking about," Caldwell replied. "Why don't we go down there and check the situation firsthand? Then, maybe, we'd have a better chance of figuring out what to do."
Hunt's bemusement changed to suspicion. "Who's `we'?"
Caldwell answered in an unapologetic, matter-of-fact kind of way. "Okay, since you're the agent assigned to the job on the spot: `you.'"
Hunt's misgivings deepened. "Down where?" he asked.
"There," Caldwell replied simply. "It was Eesyan's idea: down into the Entoverse." As Caldwell spoke, Eesyan's head and shoulders came into view on the other side of the screen, next to Calazar.
"We can't," Hunt replied. "It takes another Ent to get inside another Ent mind through the couplers. They evolved there. They're the only ones who have the knack."
"Ah, that was before, when the couplers into jevex were the only way of gaining access to the Entoverse," Eesyan said. "But now we have another way."
Hunt still wasn't with it. "What way?" he asked.
"visar," Eesyan replied. "Which has a far greater natural affinity for manipulating jevex's internal processes than even the Ents have."
Hunt stared. It was obvious. In the Pseudowar, visar had obtained the unconditional surrender of the Jevlenese by creating a gigantic Terran battle force that existed only in jevex's imagination.
"If visar can scan the matrix and locate and analyze the data structures that constitute the Entoverse—which it should have commenced doing already, if your connection there is working—it ought to be able to figure out how an Ent is put together: literally, at its `atomic' level," Eesyan explained. "Then, visar would know all it needed to to write an artificial Ent-being of its own into the Entoverse."
"I have identified the planet and its orbit," visar interjected. "There only seems to be the one. It's interesting—about a hundred fifty miles in diameter. It's detectable only through correlation analysis of the cell activity states. I can see why jevex would never have been aware of its existence. Now let's take a closer look at the surface details . . ."
"Extraordinary!" Danchekker breathed.
Eesyan went on. "Given permission, visar would also have access to the full set of mental constructs of anyone neurally coupled into it. Therefore, it should be able to impress that personality into the Ent-being that it had created down there in the Entoverse."
"That's you," Caldwell put in, as if the look on Hunt's face didn't say plainly enough that he knew exactly what Eesyan was talking about.
"I would go, too," Eesyan said. He looked out at Hunt. "Then we would, literally, be down there in the Entoverse, and could talk to them."
It was typical of the Thuriens. After pursuing reasonableness and caution to the point where it seemed they would never be capable of initiating any action at all, they had come up with something so stunning that it made everything everyone else had been talking about look tame. For a moment Hunt was speechless at the audacity of it.
"Then what?" he managed to ask finally.
Caldwell shrugged. "Then it's up to you. But with visar on your side, you ought to be able to pull off something pretty effective. After all, in the Entoverse, visar will be God."
Hauled by two slow-plodding
drodhzes
, their six legs moving in a lazy, lumbering shuffle, the cart slipped and bumped its way down the rocky trail toward the village. A company of cavalry from the Royal Guard went before, while the Examiner and his assistant priests rode in a carriage following, with another squad of soldiers bringing up the rear.
Thrax sat with Shingen-Hu and a dozen or so other captured adepts, tattered and filthy, staring dejectedly out over the side of the cart at the ravaged crops and orchards withering in the gloom. His body still ached from the welts and bruises he had collected when they were captured. The rough chains chafed painfully at his wrists, neck, and ankles. Despite the springy coils supporting the cart's floor, every bump and jolt of the boards beneath them seemed to find a new sore spot and send another stab of pain shooting through his stiffening joints.
So, finally, it had come to this. After all the hopes and aspirations of one day joining the Arisen, and having come so close—only to see his opportunity cruelly snatched from within his very grasp, and to be exterminated ignominiously as a deceiver. For the high priest, Ethendor, had proclaimed all Waroth's afflictions to be a result of Nieru's anger at the pretenders who had been allowed to desecrate the sign of the Purple Spiral, and promised that the stars would return to the heavens when atonement had been made. As a consequence, all the teachers and adepts not affiliated with the temples were being hunted down. The people, frightened and desperate for better times to return, heeded the warnings and gave no sanctuary. He looked at Shingen-Hu, next to him. The Master's eyes were dull and empty, resigned to whatever fate lay ahead.
A crowd of villagers grew and followed as the procession came into the village. Some jeered and pelted the cart with rocks and garbage. Others cheered and called out praises to the priests. The soldiers rode haughtily, jostling aside those who were slow to move, and swinging their rods freely to clear the way, while the Examiner and his retinue sat erect in their carriage, maintaining their stony-faced composure and dignity.
A platform had been erected in the square at the center of the village, where an excited crowd had already formed. On the platform were three stakes with fagots piled ready for lighting, while the executioner and his assistants stood impassively in front, watching as the procession drew up. The guards clubbed and prodded the prisoners down from the cart. From the dignitaries' carriage, the Deputy to the Examiner descended with two acolytes and pointed to three of the prisoners. Guards hustled the terrified three up onto the platform. Thrax and Shingen-Hu were herded to one side with the remainder, while the Deputy climbed the steps behind and raised his hands to address the crowd.
"People of the hamlet of Rakashym,
these
are the heretics who have brought pestilence and ruin to the lands of Waroth." He paused, while the crowd erupted in a new frenzy of ridicule and abuse, then gestured down at the group who had been moved aside. "These shall be taken to Orenash to join the others who have profaned, and there will the vengeance of the gods be exacted. Then will the stain that has sat upon Waroth be cleaned, and a pronouncement shall be heard then of momentous times that are about to befall us."
The Deputy looked over the crowd. They waited dutifully, but that was not what they were interested in at the moment. Reading their mood, he dismissed the rest of the oration that he had intended and turned to point accusingly at the three prisoners quaking behind him. "But Rakashym shall not be denied its chance to see the fate that awaits all who transgress, and to show its devotion." Cheering broke out.
This
was more like it. The Deputy nodded. "Let this day be a lesson . . ."
Among the prisoners watching fearfully below, Thrax turned his head to see how Shingen-Hu was reacting. To his surprise, he found a light shining in the Master's eyes that he had expected never to see again. The strength had come back into his features, and the body that Thrax had watched wasting away was standing straight and vibrant with sudden inner energy.
"Master, what inspires thee so?" Thrax whispered. "What do you see?"
"I hear a voice!" Shingen-Hu answered. "The power returns. I hear a god speaking within me."
A delusion brought on by hopelessness, Thrax told himself. The gods had abandoned them long ago.
Hunt settled back into the neurocoupler in one of the booths off the corridor at the rear of the Gondola. In the few years since he had moved from England to join UNSA, he had walked on the Moon, flown with one of the manned missions to Jupiter and stayed for months on Ganymede, returned to Earth aboard an alien starship, virtual-traveled over much of the Thuriens' domain of the local region of the Galaxy, and finally traveled physically to a distant star. But of all of it, the expedition that he was about to embark on was the strangest ever. In fact it was probably the strangest that had ever been embarked upon by anyone in the whole of time.
Besides himself, the others who would be going down into the Entoverse were Danchekker, since he was equally a part of the team on the spot, Nixie, obviously, as a guide, and Gina, who as a journalist refused to be left out—all of whom were in other booths nearby. Eesyan would be going, too, as technical adviser and principal liaison to visar, coupled in from Thurien.
Since visar would need all of the channel capacity of the single available h-space link to sustain its manipulations of jevex and its behind-the-scenes operations in the Entoverse, it wouldn't be possible for the machine to support continual interaction in real time between the occupants of the couplers and the pseudoversions of themselves written into the Entoverse. Instead, the "surrogates," once they were impressed with the personality patterns extracted by visar from their originals, would proceed to function autonomously. Since what constituted a personality
was
the thinking, feeling information pattern that defined it and not the physical medium that the pattern happened to be supported in, the team would in effect be existing and functioning in the Entoverse.
During that time, their real-world bodies would lie comatose until, at last, visar would erase the Ent-body surrogates and transfer all the impressions and recollections that they had accumulated in the interim back into the human brain patterns. For all practical purposes, the team would have been transported into the Entoverse for a while, functioned there in response to whatever circumstances awaited them, and then been brought back again.