The Two Worlds

by James P. Hogan

  So finally, it seemed, they had gotten to the bottom of what was going on, and why. But that did nothing to solve the problem of what to do next. Given the means, of course, the first thing would have been to contact the Thuriens and get Eubeleus stopped, but with zorac off the air they were incommunicado. So they examined what other options they had.

  Danchekker's proposal was to head for the Thurien-controlled refuge at Geerbaine. If Jevlenese were contesting that, they might be able to find some way of getting aboard the Shapieron, or failing that, maybe one of the Thurien ships.

  Hunt was less confident of their chances of getting there. "It's the first place they'll be looking," he declared. "There's already been trouble even in that area, and some of these cults are just looking for an excuse to get even with Terrans. I don't like it, Chris."

  "There's been a lot of activity in that direction," Murray, who had rejoined them by that time, confirmed.

  "What, then, do you suggest?" Danchekker invited.

  "We might be better off lying low in the city for a while," Hunt said. "Maybe we'll find a way of making contact in the meantime."

  A worried look crossed Murray's face. "I don't know if it would be smart to stick around this place for too long," he said. "If that Jev cop at PAC talked to Nixie, it's not gonna need a genius to figure out where you're probably holed up."

  Silence fell, with nothing any closer to being resolved. Gina stood up and stretched to loosen her shoulders. "I haven't eaten all day," she said. "What kind of options do we have in that direction?"

  "I'm just about out," Murray said. "I was about to stock up today. There are a couple of takeaway joints on the block. One's an herbivore place that does a kind of soya greaseburger with seaweed pulp. The other's the local idea of a deli."

  Gina pulled a face as she recalled Sandy's squid-shit sandwiches at PAC. "Scrambled eggs with corned-beef hash, sausage pate, and a side order of fries," she murmured, staring wistfully at Murray's wall poster of San Francisco.

  "Eggs over medium, bacon, mushrooms, and fried tomatoes," Hunt sighed.

  "Yeah . . . it does kinda get to you after a while," Murray agreed. "I might have a few cans of stuff from home left out back. Let me go take a look."

  As he got up and moved to the door, the chime sounded from the panel again, and Lola's voice said, "Osaya is calling from upstairs."

  "Okay," Murray said. A female Jevlenese voice came on, sounding excited, and Murray said something in reply. While they were talking, Nixie appeared in the doorway. "What's she saying?" Murray asked her. "Something about a hat with a window?"

  Nixie talked to Osaya. "Oh, eprillin!" she announced, spotting his problem.

  "I thought that was a hat," Murray said.

  "Yes. But also it means a kind of fish."

  "So what's the hell's she talking about a fish with a window?"

  "She says there something that look like fish, up there outside window."

  Murray shook his head. "Have they been smoking funny stuff up there, or something?"

  "I go see." Nixie exchanged a few more words with Osaya, then left.

  Murray went into the kitchen, and the others heard him open a cupboard and begin rummaging. Then came the sound of hard objects being thumped down on the floor. "Say, waddya know!" his voice called through the doorway. "Genuine ham . . . And how about some Boston beans?"

  "I've never heard of fried tomatoes," Gina said to Hunt. "Is that something else weird that the English do?"

  "Delicious," Hunt said. "Especially on a slice of fried bread, with the juice soaking in. But what you really need to finish it off is a bit of black pudding."

  "What's black pudding?"

  "I rather think that the wise adage about sausages and politics applies even more in this instance," Danchekker advised.

  At that moment Nixie's voice came from the panel. "Murray, come see here. Bring Vic up."

  Hunt sent Danchekker and Gina a puzzled frown, then rose. Murray stuck his head back through the doorway. "What is it?"

  "Come see," Nixie's voice said.

  Murray shrugged and withdrew. Hunt followed him out through the front door.

  They went up two flights and entered another apartment, situated on the opposite side of the stairwell. The interior was an orgy of feminine extravagance and brilliant colors, with fluffy pink floors that looked like cotton candy, couches and chairs finished in a variety of white, lilac, and red down, outrageously erotic murals, and black walls glowing with constantly changing Mandelbrot patterns. Inside was the tall girl whom Hunt had met before, apparently off-duty at the moment in a simple shirt with pants. She beckoned and led them through a room with an enormous bed, built-in Jacuzzi, and mirrors everywhere, to where Nixie was standing at a window framed by long, silky drapes. Hunt and Murray peered out.

  Below and to the sides was a jumble of interconnected roofs, with parts of various walkways and lower parts of the city visible in the spaces between. A roof enclosed the whole area above, with a web of transportation tubes and lighting installations hanging beneath, and two of the vast channels that cut across the city to carry airborne traffic receding into the distance. Whether there was more of the city above that, there was no way of telling.

  Hanging motionless in the air above an open area maybe a couple of hundred feet away was a drop-shaped, silver-gray object about the size of a small car. It was featureless except for a couple of ribs that flared into rudimentary fins at the tail end, and a cylindrical device on a retractable metal pylon, which seemed to be nodding inquisitively in their direction.

  "Ain't never seen nothing like that before," Murray said, staring at it, nonplussed.

  "Is police thing? Come look for us?" Nixie asked nervously.

  Hunt shook his head, and a faint smile softened his features. "It's looking for us, but it's not the police," he said. "That's one of the Shapieron's reconnaissance probes. They must have figured out where we are."

  "Shit, I hope the cops aren't so fast," Murray muttered.

  Hunt thought quickly. "Murray, is there any kind of portable communications gadget here—a remote pad for talking to the house system or something? If the Ganymeans figured this much out, they'll be scanning for Jevlenese transmissions." Murray consulted with Nixie, who said something to Osaya. Osaya went over to a bedside unit and came back with a tablet of what looked like veined, gray marble with gold inlaid designs and gold touchpads. She held it to the window and tried a few codes, then said something that sounded negative.

  "Does that talk to the city net?" Hunt asked Murray.

  "It should."

  "Tell her to try fifty-six."

  Murray passed it on, and Osaya tried again. Then a familiar voice said, "Ahah! We seem to be through. Hello, is anybody there?" Then it repeated itself in Jevlenese.

  Hunt grinned. "Hello, zorac. Not a bad piece of detective work. Was it your doing?"

  "Elementary, my dear Hunt. I've got Leyel Torres for you."

  "Great."

  Torres's voice came through from the Shapieron. "Vic, you made it. Who else is there?"

  "Gina got out with me. And Chris Danchekker made it with Nixie. We don't know anything about the others."

  "I fear they're in captivity," Torres said. "We don't understand the situation. What are the Jevlenese trying to do. Do you know?"

  "We think so, but it's a long story. And it's urgent. It needs to go to the top, to Calazar. Can you get him through visar?"

  "We're talking to him right now," Torres answered. "He's getting together as many of JPC as he can raise. I'll put you through to the Thurien circuit."

  zorac's voice said something in Jevlenese, and Osaya tapped a code into the tablet. One of the mirrors facing the bed turned into a screen showing Torres standing in the Shapieron's command deck against a background of crew positions manned by Ganymeans. "It looks as if you've found quite a home away from home there, Vic," zorac commented.

  "Have they got ahold of Caldwell?" Hunt asked, ignoring it.<
br />
  "He should be arriving soon," zorac answered. "He was playing golf. It's Sunday afternoon in Washington."

  Then another mirror turned into a view of Calazar in vivid, informal clothes. "Dr. Hunt," he said without preamble. "I feel that we are responsible for all this. What do these Jevlenese at PAC want? They have deactivated the connection to visar there, and we have no access to them."

  To one side, Murray was shaking his head wonderingly. "That's Calazar, the Thurien head honcho, here in Osaya's bedroom? I don't believe this," he muttered.

  "We're pretty sure they're only a smokescreen," Hunt replied to Calazar. "They probably don't know themselves what's really going on. We're certain that Eubeleus is at the back of it."

  The sudden misgiving on Calazar's face, even with its alien Ganymean features, was unmistakable. "Why? Where does he fit into it?" he asked. Just then, he was joined on the screen by Porthik Eesyan, a Thurien scientific adviser whom Hunt and Danchekker also both knew of old.

  Murray nudged Hunt and nodded in the direction of the window. Outside, a police flier had appeared and was buzzing around the probe. The probe had deployed more antennae and drifted away to circle on a leisurely tour of the area, presumably in an effort to obscure the whereabouts of the location that it was communicating with.

  "Look, there might not be much time, so these are the facts," Hunt said, looking back at the screens showing Calazar and Eesyan, and Torres. "The whole jevex business has been a fraud for years. jevex isn't on Jevlen at all. The sites here are dummies and remote interfaces into it. The real guts of the system is all concentrated on Uttan. That's what Eubeleus is really after—the business here is just a diversion. And if he gets control of it, this planet is going to be hit by an invasion of aliens that are stronger than anything any of us has ever dreamed of. We can go into the details later, but for now you have to believe it. Whatever else happens, you must stop him from getting to Uttan and turning that system back on. Tell him anything you like. This is one time to worry about ethics and principles later."

  Hunt's relief at the chance fluke that had given them this connection so soon, just when everything had seemed lost, was such that he had talked on compulsively. But as he finished, the growing agitation that had been registering on the faces of the two Thuriens finally got through to him. A sudden pang of dread seized him as he guessed, a split second before Calazar spoke, what he was going to say.

  "We can't," Calazar replied. "He's already there. Eubeleus and his followers landed on Uttan—when was it, visar?"

  "Four hours ago," visar's voice replied through the audio.

  For several seconds Hunt could only stare back, his mind too paralyzed for him to speak. "He's already there?" he repeated numbly.

  Calazar nodded miserably. "They've made fools of all of us. We Thuriens, I mean. Enough Terrans tried to warn us."

  Hunt put a hand on his head unthinkingly, still in a daze. "Let's worry about that later. Right now we've got an impending catastrophe. This whole planet's ready to reconnect to jevex, which isn't here but at Uttan. And Eubeleus has got Uttan. What do we do?"

  "We can't simply send ships to reoccupy it," Calazar said. "It will be defended. To muster enough force would take too long."

  "We have to assume that there are Federation weapons still there," Torres said from the Shapieron.

  Porthik Eesyan, meanwhile, had been thinking rapidly. "It's true that we can't get near them from the outside," he said. "But there is one possibility that I can see, although at this stage I have no idea how it could be implemented. jevex was defeated before when visar succeeded in taking control of it. If we're going to do anything now, it will have to be in the same way."

  "You mean by getting visar hooked into jevex somehow?" Hunt said, sounding dubious. He agreed with the theory, but was equally at a loss to see how it could be done.

  Eesyan nodded. "Yes. And quickly, before they get jevex back up to full operation. But it's going to have to be done by you and the others there on Jevlen, Vic. After what happened last time, obviously they'll secure jevex's h-space links against external penetration. So somehow you are going to have to—"

  There was a flash outside the window as a beam directed up from somewhere below destroyed the probe.

  And both the screens in Osaya's bedroom blanked out.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The constructions blended together into a composite pattern of rectangular, hexagonal, rhombic, and irregularly shaped metal geometry, rising in gray tiers to fill a ten-mile-wide rift formed between sheer faces of rock. The top surface of one of the more prominent structures—a squat, seven-sided tower, its upper section terraced in the style of a ziggurat—was equipped as a landing area, with overhead doors to interior docking bays. Standing on the external pads were a number of surface lander craft from the Thurien interstellar transporter orbiting two thousand miles above.

  Yet this was just a protruding part of the vast network of integrated manufacturing and assembly facilities that encompassed virtually the entire subsurface of the automated planet, Uttan. Deep below the marshaling and loading complex, in a room where the former director of the resident Jevlenese operations staff had received visitors, Eubeleus and a group of his Axis of Light lieutenants met Parygol, the present commander of the rotating Thurien caretaker force that had been installed since the collapse of the Federation.

  "This must be what is called true dedication," Parygol remarked. "We only remain here for two months at a time, and for me at least that's quite sufficient. I can't imagine anyone choosing to live permanently in such an environment."

  "Our preoccupation is with the world that lies within," Eubeleus replied loftily. "What physical trappings happen to exist on the outside make little difference. In fact, the absence of distractions is beneficial to spiritual development, as has been known to ascetics for thousands of years."

  "Hmm. Yes, well, they tell us that humans and Ganymeans are made of very different psychology." Parygol had studied the history of Jevlenese and Terran mysticism and believed privately that the whole business was just elaborate self-delusion.

  "Is there anything more that you need from us for now?" Parygol's deputy inquired.

  "No, the arrangements are satisfactory," Eubeleus said. "We shall be on our way immediately. The sooner we begin our work, the better."

  "You're sure you wouldn't like some of our officers to accompany you?" Parygol offered again. "Since everything is powered down there's little to see, but they could show you where we'll be dismantling the Federation's military installations. It might help you with your own relocation planning."

  "There's no need," Eubeleus replied. "I'm sure that the schedules we have will be sufficient."

  "As you wish."

  Eubeleus's announced intention was to go with a small group of disciples to conduct a preliminary inspection of some of the places that they had selected as possible habitats. Until he was in full command, he would have to play his role straight with the Thuriens on Uttan, since the zone they were in, plus a few other key locations, had been wired into visar. Before occupation by the Thuriens, Uttan's communications had been integrated into jevex, and thus deactivated with the main system. Any premature seizure of overt control would have been signaled back to Thurien instantly, alerting the authorities before Eubeleus could consolidate himself. However, once jevex was restored and the secret defenses reactivated—which the Thuriens showed no sign of knowing about—it would be a straightforward matter to disconnect visar and lock up the garrison. Then the authorities could do anything they liked. Uttan would be impregnable, and for as long as it remained so, the takeover of Jevlen via h-space would be able to proceed without impediment.

  "This is going to be easier than we dared hope," Eubeleus murmured to Iduane after they left.

  They descended a shaft, through levels of intricate conveyor lines and immense machinery, to a terminal where fast-transit tubes converged from all directions along the surface curve of the planet.
A capsule traveling noiselessly and without a tremor, riding on a localized gravity wave so that even the acceleration produced no sensation, carried them at more than orbital velocity a quarter of the way around Uttan to a supervisory station located in the midst of a vast, subterranean materials-transmutation complex, where rock was reduced to ion plasmas and rebuilt into other nuclei as required. In a basement level of the complex, beneath pipeworks and supporting structures, where the primary energy converters loomed several hundred feet overhead, they opened a concealed door into a further shaft that gave no outward sign of existing, and which didn't appear in any of the official plans or construction records.