“No, it’s real,” Nixie insisted.
“I’m sure it’s utterly convincing,” Danchekker conceded, giving her a lofty smile. He turned back to Hunt and Shilohin. “The whole thing is a JEVEX fabrication.”
“As internally consistent as the physics that VISAR read from Nixie’s memories?” Hunt shook his head. “The people we’re talking about don’t have the conceptual foundations. They could never have generated anything like that.”
Danchekker showed his teeth. “No. But JEVEX could!”
Shilohin looked from Danchekker to Hunt and back again. Hunt got the feeling that she was coming around to the professor’s line. “You’re saying that JEVEX created the same artificial reality for all of them?”
“I’ve said it from the beginning.”
“Why should it do that?”
“Ah, that’s another question, the answer to which will doubtless be forthcoming now that we seem to be heading the right way,” Danchekker said.
“It would account for the consistency,” Shilohin said. “If these are fantasies created in response to unconscious directions, thousands of individuals could never all have produced the same thing. But if they all originated in JEVEX…”
“Precisely.”
Hunt stared at Nixie’s face. And for some reason, which he would have been the first to admit as being totally unscientific, the calm, unwavering certainty that he saw written there persuaded him more, in a way that he could never have justified to Danchekker and Shilohin.
It was too early to commit to any conclusion. He needed more time to let his mind chew its way through the complexities in its own, unhurried way. More to keep things open than for any other reason, he suggested that it would be interesting to find out if a “possessed” Terran also claimed to have come from the same Otherworld that the Jevlenese described. He liked the word Danchekker had used, and referred to it as “Phantasmagoria.” Danchekker and Shilohin agreed that it would be a worthwhile thing to try and find out.
They had Baumer sedated and placed him in a coupler for VISAR to take a look inside his head. But VISAR stolidly refused to violate the privacy of somebody incapable of authorizing such a probe, and no amount of arguing would change it. So Hunt started talking to Baumer instead.
As a day or two went by, Baumer calmed down and his ramblings became less frenzied. With Nixie helping, glimpses of a place started coming together. Soon there was no doubt that it was the same Phantasmagoria that Nixie talked about, identical in every detail that they were able to establish. And in the process, Hunt’s conviction grew that he was not talking to a German who had undergone some traumatic personality change, but to a genuinely different, and very alien, being.
Was this being, then, some kind of software construct that JEVEX had created, which had somehow found its way into Baumer’s head? Hunt had read some of Eubeleus’s claims to being a creation of precisely this kind himself, but had dismissed it as rubbish. Could there be something to it?
But if there were, it would mean that an entity that had originated as a caricature of reality, and that needed all the power and sophistication of JEVEX to sustain it, had taken on the internal depth and complexity necessary to become reality and stand independently in its own right. Hunt couldn’t see how that could be possible. Pinocchio might come to life and work without the strings in a fairy story; but life in the real world depended on structure and organization a lot more complicated than any puppet’s.
A puppet was made to look like a living organism that moved itself from the inside, but it was really operated by forces applied on the outside. Similarly, JEVEX’s puppets were simulations of life, animated by JEVEX’s manipulations. But if Nixie and the person that Baumer had become were as real as Hunt accepted them to be, they could only be functioning by virtue of an innate complexity of structure that JEVEX would never have put there. And that kind of complexity only came about spontaneously, over a long period of time, through evolution in the real, physical world.
Which, of course, was absurd…
Unless “real, physical world” meant something different from what everyone knew it meant.
The thought caused Hunt to spend a lot of time asking himself what he meant by it. It reminded him of the conversation he’d had with Gina in his apartment back home, when she had asked him a similar question. And his answer had been that everything “out there” boiled down to photons and other energy quanta, along with a few simple rules governing the ways they interacted with one another.
Packages of attributes. Bundles of numbers riding together, adrift in an ocean of coordinates…
Numbers and coordinates, specifying… what?
Nobody knew. It could have been anything.
But the whole “real” universe had evolved out of it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Rodgar Jassilane’s Ganymean communications scientists, along with Duncan Watt, who was working with them, had uncovered a technical mystery concerning the residual core of JEVEX that had been left running: There wasn’t enough of it to support the amount of traffic that seemed to be indicated once the size of the Achene’s black-market operation was estimated and allowed for.
MacArthur, the Jevlenese that Shiohin had failed to convince with the laser demonstration, and who was already rising fast in the purple-spiral movement, was a comparative new boy on the scene, having awakened as an ayatollah only in the time since JEVEX was suspended. There were others, too, and the Ganymeans had been analyzing figures of known cases and rumored ones from all over the planet in an attempt to approximate the total. Other sources, including figures gleaned from ZORAC’s unofficial tapping of Shiban’s communications network, gave a figure for the incidence rate expressed as the number of “possession” events per thousand user-hours of exposure-a risk statistic which the khena would definitely not have wanted to become public knowledge. Extrapolated to cover the planet, that figure gave a measure of the size of the total black-market operation. The known operating characteristics of VISAR enabled that to be expressed in terms of the system power necessary to support it. But when the officially sanctioned archive-interrogation and maintenance operations were added in, the total indicated load was far greater than the residual core of JEVEX would have been able to handle.
What the results seemed to say was: Either JEVEX was a lot bigger than the Jevlenese had admitted; or else there was another facility operating whose existence had never been disclosed. Curious, Ganymean engineers, assisted by some of the more cooperatively disposed Jevlenese, began quietly carrying out a program of detailed inspections and tests at the sites where the main nodes and operating centers of the network were located.
Cullen decided to move Gina permanently from Geerbaine into PAC. He didn’t like the thought of her being on her own out there now that he had seen the people that Baumer had been connected with. Accordingly, Gina called the Best Western to terminate her stay, and arranged to drive out later that afternoon with Lebansky and Koberg to collect her things.
A little over an hour before they were due to leave, a call came through for Gina from a woman who introduced herself as Marion Frayne, also from Earth and staying at the BW. She had read and enjoyed all of Gina’s books, she said, and wondered if she could leave a couple at the reception desk for Gina to autograph. “Thank you so very much. You probably don’t remember, but we met briefly once at a party in Lisbon,” she chattered delightedly when Gina agreed.
In fact, Gina had never been to Portugal. The phrase was a code that General Shaw had given her at her unexpected meeting with him in Shiban. Before leaving, therefore, she took from a folder in a compartment of her briefcase the notes she had made of developments inside PAC since then. They included an account of what was happening with Baumer, the help that Nixie was giving, and the various theories being bandied about. This seemed more of a domestic issue to Gina, and not something that would relate to interplanetary politics, but she had been told to omit nothing. Finally, she summarized wh
at she knew of the Ganymeans’ findings on the capacity of the JEVEX core system and Garuth’s decision to have the major sites checked.
She didn’t like what she was doing, she admitted to herself as she folded the sheets and tucked them inside her purse. Ever since the meeting with Shaw, the thought of being a spy inside the UNSA team had been weighing in her mind. It wasn’t her way of doing things, and she wondered why she had agreed to it back at Goddard. True, she hadn’t known Hunt and the rest of them, or Garuth and the Ganymeans, the way she did now… but she hoped it hadn’t been just to get herself a ticket to Jevlen.
General Shaw must have made it sound very important. He was, she recalled, a pretty persuasive salesman.
Nixie, in Phantasmagoria, before she overwrote whoever the original Nixie was, had been a “he.” He trained as a kind of religious disciple in a temple in a large city, but later ran away to study with an independent teacher who sounded like a hermit, up in the mountains. It was from his school that Nixie had “arisen” to the world that seers talked about beyond the sky. What happened to Baumer hadn’t happened to Nixie because her teacher was wise and thorough, and had prepared her with some idea of what to expect. Apparently others who had gone ahead sometimes returned as spirits that spoke in the minds of seers through the mysterious “currents” which Nixie alluded to repeatedly-a result, presumably, of “awakened” ayatollahs somehow applying their extraordinary affinity and reconnecting via couplers to wherever they came from.
Baumer, too, talked about a hermit-teacher who ran a school for mystics up in a wilderness somewhere, although Nixie was unable to locate it from his ramblings. He feared retribution, however, because he said he had emerged from Phantasmagoria in another’s rightful place. Hunt had adopted the practice of calling him “Thomas,” because of his religious origin and the fact that he doubted everything that anyone told him. After what had happened, Hunt felt, it wouldn’t have been decent, somehow, to have continued using Baumer’s name to address the shell that was all that was left of him.
“Look, I’m not a demon for the god of darkness, and I don’t care what you did to his flying angel,” Hunt said. “In fact I’m not much into any gods at all. What makes it so difficult for you to believe us?”
Thomas turned away in his chair and stared into the top of a lab centrifuge that was standing open. After a few seconds he reached out to move the lid to and fro several times on its horizontal swivel, then traced the contours of the drive shaft and gearing, all the time muttering unintelligibly. He was still amazed by machines and the products of machines. Regularity of any kind, such as the repeating architectural features or the mosaic patterns in the corridors of PAC, or the nested arrays of optronics chips and subassemblies in some of the equipment cabinets, fascinated him. The scientists had by now accepted VISAR’s interpretation that the instabilities of form that occurred in Phantasmagoria were due to the elongation of objects in their direction of motion, and that the daily cycles and changes with orientation followed from planetary rotation. Where or how such conditions could come about, however, were anybody’s guess.
“Do I sound like a demon?” Hunt asked after a pause. “Do I look like one?”
Thomas mumbled something, then went quiet and seemed to think it over. “Transformed!” he exclaimed suddenly. “They transform their agents to deceive us. We were warned.”
“Who warned you?”
“Take on forms, any forms… Beware appearances.”
“Who-”
“Spiral! Seek the spiral… Safe from external forms.”
“Have you ever seen a demon?”
“Mighty is the power of-” Thomas stopped and looked at Hunt oddly. “Seen many demons. They come from the gods. Bring signs. Punish those who disobey.”
“Describe one, then.”
“You… don’t believe? Will be punished. Burned, broken, torn in pieces. Smothered in serpents; crawling in worms; poisoned by scorpions; feast of maggots. Slashed by fangs, crushed by coils, blistered, bleeding, oozing, screaming…”
“I’ll risk it.”
“The demon of the sun god’s wrath comes from the sky. Head of eagle, body of lion, with dragon’s wings..
Nixie, who was sitting on Hunt’s other side, nodded. “I know that one, too,” she said.
“He’s not crazy, then?” Hunt checked. “It does exist, the way he says?”
“Oh, yes.”
The strange thing was that, monstrous as these Phantasmagorian creatures were, he should describe them as composites of familiar forms-Thomas was using the closest-fitting terms from his Baumer-bequeathed vocabulary, which was German but converted to English by VISAR. For, if they had indeed evolved elsewhere, under such very different conditions, how could they have any similarities to the products of a completely independent line, which the principles of evolution said would never happen, even if the conditions had been the same? Even more remarkably, the form that Nixie remembered herself having in Phantasmagoria was human!-like the inhabitants in the other pictures that VISAR had extracted from her memories.
Interestingly, Thomas saw elements of familiar Terran animal forms, whereas Jevlenese saw elements of Jevlenese ones. It seemed that, since the full neural apparatus of the possessed person was taken over, the newly established alien entity could only express itself by triggering the conceptual elements that were already there-similar to the way in which a bell could be hit by different hammers, but would still produce the same tone. That would also explain the retention of language abilities, possibly. The explanation was compatible with both Danchekker’s theory and Hunt’s, and the issue between them remained unresolved.
“Suppose I told you that the gods don’t run this place that you’ve arrived in,” Hunt suggested. “They can’t touch you here. We’re under a different management. Would that-”
“Excuse me?” ZORAC interrupted.
“Yes, chief?”
“Sandy’s outside the lab, asking to come in.”
“Oh, sure.”
ZORAC disengaged the lock of the outer door, which was kept closed for security reasons, and Sandy entered a moment later.
“Hi,” Hunt greeted, leaning back in his seat and relaxing. “I thought you were helping Duncan count bootleg headworid shops.”
“He’s with Rodgar’s crew, counting computer throughputs. That’s not my line. I wanted to talk to you about something else.”
“As long as it’s not insurance, saving the environment, or talking to Jesus.”
“No. It’s about Gina.”
“I thought she went to Geerbaine with King and Kong to collect her things.”
“That’s why I wanted to catch you now-while she isn’t around.” Sandy glanced uncertainly at Nixie. “It’s, er, kind of private.”
She seemed serious, Hunt could see. He looked back at Nixie. “Would you mind taking over with Tom for a while? You seem to get through better on your own sometimes, anyhow.”
“Sure. Go ahead,” Nixie said.
Hunt walked with Sandy back through the outer room, then through a darkened area where a couple of Ganymeans were studying patterns in a glowing, changing, holographic image eight feet high. They went on out the far door, through the central hall of the medical facility, and emerged into one of the main corridors of PAC. Hunt stopped and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
“They’ve got to her,” Sandy said without preliminaries.
“Who have?”
“I don’t know. Whoever the Jevlenese are who were really controlling Baumer. They’ve done something to Gina.”
“How do you know?”
“That story she told about the headworld trip she went on. It didn’t happen that way-not the way she says. In fact I don’t think it happened at all.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She wouldn’t have been curious. She’d already found out enough about it. We both had-back on the Vishnu. And I know that he couldn’t have dragged her into a place like that again.”
Hunt scanned Sandy’s face with a quick, interrogative motion of his eyes. “Let’s find somewhere more private to talk,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
They found a small lounge that wasn’t being used, opening off from a library. There were some easy chairs, of both human and Ganymean scale, reading tables, and several workstations with panels and displays.
“Her story simply isn’t credible, Vic,” Sandy said after the door had closed itself behind them. “You don’t understand what that machine can do once it gets inside your head.”
Hunt shrugged in a way that asked what more there was to know. “It creates dream worlds to order. What’s so terrible about that?”
“Have you experimented with it-even since Gina and I went to Chris about it?”
Hunt realized, even to his own surprise, that he hadn’t. “No, as a matter of fact. I suppose I’ve been busy with other things.”
“You see. You’re a scientist. You only see it as a piece of technology. As a tool. I said the same thing to Chris.”
“Okay, so it’s a recreation, as well-even a reality substitute that people can get hooked on. I don’t use drugs, either. Some people tell me it’s because I’m high all the time and don’t need them. But if this lets you do even better without messing up your chemistry, maybe it could be quite fun.”
Sandy shook her head. “You don’t always have control over it. It can work on things that it pulls out of your subconscious that you didn’t even know were there. Or maybe things that you preferred not to think about. Maybe you find out you’re not who you’ve thought you were all your life. Most of the walls that people build inside their heads are to defend their prejudices about themselves from assault by facts. Then, suddenly those walls aren’t there anymore…”
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