Murray sent a puzzled look from one to the other. “Ents? What Ents? I’ve never heard of them. What the hell are Ents?”
“It’s an involved business. But you can think of them as the personalities that people here are sometimes taken over by,” Danchekker said by way of some kind of an answer.
Murray didn’t follow. “I thought that was just headworld freaks getting their brains scrambled,” he said. “That’s what most of the Jevs think.”
“It gets rather more complicated than that,” Danchekker told him. Gina, listening from a chair at the table and thinking to herself that none of this talk was going to get them anywhere, stood up abruptly. Attention focused upon her. For a moment she hesitated, unsure of how she wanted to continue. Hunt was watching her, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
“I’m not sure I understand all this.” She moved over to the door, then turned to face back at them. “This whole planet is wired to operate as a fully computer-managed environment, like Thurien, right? Before the Pseudowar, VISAR ran Thurien, and JEVEX ran Jevlen.”
“Can’t argue,” Hunt agreed, nodding.
Gina tossed out a hand. “VISAR connects all over the Thurien system of worlds via its network of i-space links. JEVEX used the same technology. So, there has to be Thurien-designed i-space hardware all over this planet, which can talk to JEVEX, which turns out to be on Uttan. Have I got that right?”
“Pretty much,” Hunt said. “The i-space connections come in through a number of trunk-beam termination nodes scattered around Jevlen. Those are where the black-hole triodes are generated that give you the I/O ports. You can have smaller ones, too, for special purposes, like the one we’ve got at Goddard. There are a couple inside the Shapieron, too.”
Gina nodded. “Okay. But just sticking to the regular trunk nodes, won’t they have to be reactivated to talk to Uttan when Eubeleus turns JEVEX on again?”
“Yes, I assume so. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much point to the whole business, would there?”
“Fine.” Gina nodded, as if that made her point. “So if these trunk nodes can connect to JEVEX from light-years away, why can’t VISAR?”
Murray nodded slowly as he followed the gist, regarding Gina in a more approving light. “You mean, like it could drown Jevlen out? They wind up the power, and it muscles in?”
“Something like that,” Gina said.
Murray turned his head toward Hunt. “Sounds like a good question to me, Doc. Why not?”
“It isn’t like swamping a radio with a stronger signal,” Hunt explained. “The link terminations on Uttan aren’t simply passive devices that VISAR can force its way into. The nodes here on Jevlen have to be set to a resonance mode that enables them interact with the other end.”
“You mean, like tuning a radio?” Gina said.
“Oh… you could think of it that way. It means that VISAR would have to match JEVEX’s operating parameters as set on Uttan.”
“Oh.” Gina propped herself back against the door and contemplated the far wall. She seemed reluctant to abandon her line of thought without at least some token of a fight. “And VISAR couldn’t match them?” she tried. “Wouldn’t it be like seizing a radio channel with a transmission on the same frequency?”
“I suppose it could-if you knew what they were set to on Uttan,” Hunt said. “But Eubeleus is hardly going to publicize that, is he?” He spread his hands, at the same time sighing in a way that mixed genuine regret with respect for her tenacity. “And even then, it wouldn’t be enough. There’s also an involved coding procedure. When we were upstairs in Osaya’s, Eesyan said that the i-space links would be secured against external penetration. That was what he meant. In other words, after what happened last time they’ll be ready for it.”
“Hmm.” Gina folded her arms and stared down at the floor, stuck for a follow-on but still unwilling to concede. Silence fell upon the room like settling dust.
Then Murray said, “So what did he mean about VISAR getting to JEVEX from the inside? How was that supposed to happen?”
Hunt shrugged. “I don’t know. That was about when he was cut off, wasn’t it?”
“You say that he said something about it having to be done by us, here on Jevlen?” Danchekker said.
Gina looked up. “Because the nodes here will be coded to interact with JEVEX,” she said, stepping forward and sounding insistent again as a new angle presented itself.
Danchekker nodded distantly. “The parameters for connecting to VISAR are public knowledge. So two channels, one into each system, could be established from here.”
Gina looked around, gesturing excitedly. “And if they could be connected together, before JEVEX is fully operational, the way Eesyan said…” She stood, inviting them to complete the rest for themselves.
“Not bad,” Hunt complimented. “But there’s still a small problem with it. I’m sorry to sound negative and all that, but you’re forgetting that Eubeleus’s people control the nodes. I mean, yes, they’ve obviously got the information to close a line into JEVEX. And as Chris says, anyone with the equipment can get access to VISAR, too. But we don’t have any. And the people who do aren’t likely to be very cooperative. In fact, now that the Ganymeans are out of the way, I don’t think you’d even get near one of their sites with a combat assault team. And personally I can’t think of anyone who’d set up the access codes to Uttan for us, even if we did get inside one. Can you?” Gina stood staring at him with an expression that almost accused him of having created the problem. Then she seemed to deflate visibly. “No,” she confessed heavily, turning away. “I can’t.”
“I can,” Murray said.
A second or two went by before Hunt registered it. “Who?” he asked, swinging his head around at the unexpected response.
Murray shrugged and pulled a face that said if he had missed something obvious and was being stupid, it was just too bad. “Well, you’re the scientists… but what’s wrong with the Ichena?”
Hunt stared at him as if he had just sprouted another head. It was a possibility that had not crossed Hunt’s mind. “The Ichena?” he repeated.
Danchekker frowned. “But they’re supposed to be on the other side, surely.”
“True,” Murray agreed. “But if I’ve been hearing right what you people have been saying, they were set up as the fall guys to keep everyone here busy while the Green Guru winds up his computer on Uttan. I mean, didn’t you say he’d already blown their operation to make it look like they were the ones who were pulling the strings of that kraut who went around the twist? So how much longer are they gonna be around after this business that you’re talking about now takes off? So it seems to me they’d be doing themselves a favor by reconsidering their options.” Murray looked from one to another, inviting anyone to tell him where he’d gotten it wrong.
“He’s got a point, you know,” Hunt said, nodding slowly.
Reassured, Murray went on. “But right now they’ve got a connection operating somewhere, which from what you’re saying has to go to Uttan. And if somebody like you was to put them in the picture a little about some of the things you’ve been telling me, I’ve got a feeling they might be interested in talking cooperation.” Murray looked around and spread his hands. “Hell, if it was me, I would.”
“If this is the world beyond, you must be gods,” Baumer said, squatting on the floor and staring around at the mixed company of Terrans, Jevlenese, Shapieron Ganymeans, and Thuriens who had been put under guard in one large room inside PAC. “If you are gods, why can’t you fly? Why can’t we leave this place?” Then he forgot them all suddenly and returned his attention to fiddling with an instrument assembly that he had picked up somewhere and refused to part with.
Sandy had been watching him from a seat by the wall. “I’m still having trouble with this Entoverse thing of Vic’s,” she confessed to Duncan, who was sitting with her. “The idea of information constructs being ‘people,’ who think things and feel things in the ways we do. It’s
weird.”
Duncan scratched the back of his head and smiled faintly. “What else do you think we are?” he asked her. “What is it that constitutes the personality that you call you?” He shrugged before she could answer. “It’s not the collection of molecules that happen to make up your body just at this moment. They’re changing all the time. But the message they carry stays the same-in the same way that a regular message stays the same whether it’s carried by shapes on a page, pulses on a wire, or waves in the air.”
“Yes, I guess I know all that.”
“The personality is the information that defines the organization. And the same with Ents.”
“Like with evolution, I suppose. Organisms don’t evolve. A cat stays what it was when it was born. What’s actually evolving is the accumulating genetic information being passed down the line. An individual is just an expression of its form at a given time.”
“There you go,” Duncan said, nodding.
“The oceans shall burn, and the wrath shall descend!” Baumer roared suddenly, then went back to turning gear trains once more.
“But it’s still just a way of looking at it,” Sandy said. “I still don’t feel like an information construct. I’m too used to feeling like something more substantial.”
Duncan hesitated for a moment, his eyes twinkling. “Then Chris didn’t tell you about Thurien transfer ports, I take it,” he said.
“Why?” Sandy looked at him suspiciously. “What about them?”
“How did you get here-on a Boeing 1017? Catch a bus?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where do you think you got that suit of molecules from that you’re wearing right now?” Duncan asked. He paused pointedly.
Sandy stared at him, then shook her head dismissively. “It’s not true. I don’t believe it.”
Duncan nodded. “The matter that enters the singularity plane of a transfer toroid isn’t magically transferred across space to the exit. It’s destroyed. What’s preserved and reappears at the other end is the information to direct the recreation of the same structure from other materials-which is what a Thurien exit port does.” He laughed maliciously at the appalled expression frozen on Sandy’s face. “Don’t worry about it. Molecules are all identical. When you think about it, all it really does is speed up what happens naturally over time anyway. Vic says that fifty years from now we’ll all be taking it as much for granted as the Thuriens do.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
It could have been because of the general confusion and unrest all over the city. Maybe it was simply that somebody wanted to hear all the angles in a situation where rumors were conflicting. But this time there were no meetings in bars with go-betweens to take them to an unspecified rendezvous. After making a couple of calls to say that Hunt was back with him and had vital business to discuss, Murray was informed that they would be collected at a place less than a block away in thirty minutes’ time.
Because of Nixie’s uniqueness in the circumstances, Hunt decided to take her, too. But he didn’t want to attract attention by having the whole gaggle of them out together in the city; and besides, somebody needed to be on hand in case the Ganymeans managed to restore contact by some means. It was agreed, therefore, that Danchekker and Gina should remain behind. As a precaution, however, they moved upstairs to Osaya’s apartment. A couple of Osaya’s friends were recruited to stay in Murray’s with instructions to say to anyone else who might show up merely that they were keeping an eye on the place while he was away for an unspecified time.
Murray searched around in the closets in one of the bedrooms and came out with a striped, poncho-like garment and a flat-topped, brimmed hat that he said would blend Hunt more naturally into the Jevlenese scene. Feeling like a trademark that he had seen somewhere for a brand of Mexican cigarillos, Hunt sent a parting wave to the two girls in what he hoped was good desperado style and followed Murray and Nixie out onto the stairway.
Outside, the corner bar on the approach to the apartment-block entrance was packed with people watching somebody talking on a screen. Murray stopped for a few moments to get the gist of what was going on. The news was the takeover at PAC: the Jevlenese were reclaiming their planet, and JEVEX was going to be restored. Cheers of approval went up from the crowd. Cult followers or not, a lot of people were going to have all kinds of reasons for going home to their couplers, Hunt reflected. Exploitable recruiting fodder. The phrase went through his mind again.
They went to the end of a side street and crossed a concourse, descended a floor, and stepped onto a moving way running inside a transparent tube above an enclosed square of shuttered doors and storefronts, littered with trash and flooded at one end by dirty water.
“They don’t seem to go in for open gravity-beam travel here,” Hunt remarked. “It’s standard in all the Thurien cities. It was everywhere on the Vishnu, too.”
“Jev maintenance,” Murray said. “How would you like to be a hundred feet up over Times Square when the power goes out?”
They were picked up on one of the street levels by what could have been the same limousine as before. There were two men in front and another two in the passenger compartment, one of whom Hunt recognized as Dreadnought. Scirio himself wasn’t there this time. They drove through a more crowded district, with a confusion of bright lights, Street vendors, noise, and signs. Then a ramp going down brought them suddenly into a different world of huge, gloomy walls and windowless frontages that looked like warehouses. Tangles of girderwork supporting conveyor lines and freight-handling hoists stood above deep concrete canyons containing lines of cars, many of them idle. Much of the machinery had not moved for years, Hunt saw as his eyes accommodated to the twilight. In places, lights came on automatically at the vehicle’s approach, and in the short period before they went off again after it had passed, he caught glimpses of broken machinery, fallen beams, scampering ratlike creatures, and in one instance several figures in the process of stripping the innards from what looked like a piece of control gear.
The city that the Thuriens had planned and laid was disintegrating, and in place of the grandeur it had promised, the tawdriness that Jevelen had become had taken possession of the ruin like weeds entwining themselves through the skeleton of an unfinished skyscraper.
He looked across the compartment of the limousine at Nixie, who was absorbed for the moment in her own thoughts, her eyes flickering curiously across the impassive faces of the khena bodyguards as if reading whatever thoughts went on behind the masks. Watching her, it came to him that he had unconsciously been oversimplifying the situation into an us-them problem of innately paranoid and ruthless Ents, who were from another reality and didn’t belong in the familiar universe, versus everyone else, who did. For he was looking at one of them who was balanced as far from paranoia as anyone Hunt had known; who had come to terms with the strangeness and irreversibility of her new condition, and was able to face the future constructively and with equanimity.
How many more like her, then, were there, integrating themselves inconspicuously into a daunting, alien world, accepting its inhabitants as new fellow-travelers, and able to adapt without fear and malice to the altered state in which they found themselves? Surely there was something here that humans-both Jevlenese and Terran-and Ganymeans could learn profitably from. More to the point, how many more like that were there down in the Entoverse? Looking at the ayatollahs wasn’t the way to tell, for the ones they would encourage to emerge into the Exoverse would be selected to reflect the same qualities as themselves. The threat was not from all of them. All Ents were not malevolent. As was true with humans, the spread within the groups was wider than the differences between groups, making all but the most obvious and trivial generalizations meaningless. It was individuals that counted, and there would be no quick and simple way of separating them.
The limousine ascended again, passing galleries of machinery and storage tanks to emerge suddenly into surroundings of bright, tree lined avenues wh
ere high blocks finished in pastel-colored panels and glass rose above screens of urban parkland and greenery. Whether the pale green sky above was real or simulated, Hunt couldn’t tell.
They swung in through a pair of high gates and followed a short driveway beneath an arcade of branches and flowering shrubs to a glass-enclosed entrance in the base of one of the towers. It stood between buttresses of natural-looking rockeries, with water cascading down into walled pools.
Everyone in the rear compartment of the limousine got out. The doors of the building opened automatically to admit them to a tiled lobby area with seats set among low, irregularly shaped plinth tables, and elaborate ornamentations on the pillars and walls. A stream hemmed in by mossy rocks holding clusters of red, pink, and purple plants flowed the full width of the lobby from one side to another, separating them from an inner entrance that lay across a bridge in the center. Overhead, none of the enclosing surfaces were flat, but met in curves and parts of spirals that twisted away to form other, partly disconnected spaces, without a straight line or regular corner anywhere. As they walked with their escorts across the bridge, Hunt had the feeling of being inside a gigantic rendering of an exotically convoluted seashell. Murray thought that whoever dreamed it up must have liked bagels.
Inside were a doorman, a hall porter, and a security man at a desk, all of whom knew the company, and the party passed by without stopping. An elevator whisked them noiselessly upward. Emerging from it, they came onto a platform that seemed at first sight to be hanging in midair. One side looked down over a vast well, plunging through several floors of promenades and what looked like an open-plan restaurant, while the other was a transparent wall through which they could see the locality outside, with the mass of the city rising like a line of cliffs over the treetops. Looking up, even from this height, Hunt still couldn’t decide if the sky was real or fake.
As they began following the platform, it transformed into a terrace skirting the well, leading around to the ends of several corridors opening on the far side. Dreadnought led them into one of the corridors, which turned out to be curved but quite short, bringing them to a door at the end. A white-jacketed valet and a maid were waiting inside when the door opened. Across the hallway behind them were two more hefty men in dark suits. After being checked for weapons, the visitors were conducted through into the residence.
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