Entoverse

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 disbanding 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 i-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.

Two hundred miles farther down, they emerged into a forbidding, steel-walled bunker where the air was artificially cooled and the lighting was a harsh white. Three massive, reinforced doors brought them into suddenly less oppressive surroundings of staff quarters and living space, with warm colors and varied decor, luminescent ceilings, soft carpets, and comfortable furnishings.

A level farther down, the appearance of the working areas was more uniform and cleanly businesslike. The footsteps of the new arrivals echoed briskly across shiny tiled floors and past deserted rows of glass-partitioned workstations and gleaming consoles. Finally, Eubeleus led them through a set of wider doors to an inner floor of control desks, displays, and indicator panels, overlooked by a surrounding gallery with ancillary communications rooms and staff facilities opening off the primary control center of JEVEX itself.

The assistants who were with him were all picked and knew their jobs. With little more than a few words being exchanged, they dispersed to the key monitoring points and began calling up status reports and function charts onto the screens. Eubeleus paced slowly about the room, running a critical eye over the scene and stopping from time to time to observe over the shoulders of the operators. Finally he drew up beside Iduane and interrogated him silently with a look.

“It’s about as we thought,” Iduane said. “The core is running at approximately a half-percent base for archive retrieval, plus minimal system diagnostic and self-check running in standby mode.” He was referring to the operations being performed by the Thurien scientists on Jevlen, who didn’t even know that the machine they were interacting with was light-years away.

“What’s the power situation?” Eubeleus asked.

“Again, as expected. Since the primary grid has been shut down, we’ll have to visit the other locations to assemble a coherent supply that can be redirected into the feeder nodes.”

“How long until full system integration?”

“Half a day, maybe a little more. Say a day at most.”

Eubeleus nodded curtly. “Very well. Leave the rest here to the others. We need to check out the local coupler bank.”

“I’ll see to it now.”

“Update the Prophet while you’re at it.”

“I will.”

Iduane left the console and went out from the main control floor though one of the exits beneath the gallery. Eubeleus watched until he had gone, then turned away and walked through the power control rooms at the rear until he came to another elevator, which took him down through floors of power conditioning and distribution, the I/O and communications subsystem levels, the environmental-control layer, until, finally, he reached the inner containment shell.

He emerged inside a glass-sided bubble, which, although it looked down toward the geometric center of Uttan, seemed because of a warping of the local gravitic gradient to be projecting horizontally out from an immense wall. The wall was a uniform silver-gray, extending away up, down, and from side to side as far as he could see. Twenty feet or so in front of him was another wall, of a milky, translucent texture, parallel to the first and equally unlimited in extent, the two forming a gap that vanished to nothing with the perspective in any direction he chose to look. The space between them was bridged by a forest of data conduits, power busbars, optical pipes, signal highways, maintenance-pod tunnels, and supporting structures. It made him feel like an insect that had found its way between the hulls of an ocean liner.

He was looking at the outside of the processing matrix of JEVEX. The far side of it was more than seven thousand miles away.

Eubeleus usually confined his energies to matters of the present and his plans for the future; the past was a dead affair and of little relevance to his ambitions. But an unusually reflective mood came over him as he stared across at the boundless plane of silent, impenetrable, microlattice crystal. The gap separating him from it held a particular symbolic significance, like a castle moat to an escaped prisoner looking back. It was an appropriate simile.

He believed himself to be an experimental embodiment of the consciousness that JEVEX had fashioned in order to extend its domain to the universe outside. The time for it to commence its expansion in earnest had arrived.

A little under five thousand miles from where Eubeleus was standing, a region of the matrix existed which had differentiated itself by the clustering together of similar activity conditions of the matrix elements into contiguous structures and dynamic patterns. There was nothing that would have distinguished any of the cells from another physically. The differences were purely in the combinations of abstract attributes defining the state of a Thurien processing cell, and the structures had arisen spontaneously through interactions following from the cellular microprogramming.

The region in question had coalesced over time into an oblate sphere, which, as a consequence of complicated processes of pattern propagation that had coevolved with the structures, both rotated and described an orbit through the matrix about one of the primary data-entry ports spaced in a regular grid throughout its volume. It was a little over one hundred fifty miles in diameter along its major diameter, and on its surface there existed a population of mobile, self-directing activity patterns measuring, on average, an inch or so tall, who perceived themselves as self-aware, autonomous beings.

While Eubeleus stood staring at the outside of the matrix, one of those beings found its mind being penetrated by a cosmic flux that carried meaning. The communication flowed from the mind of Iduane, who by this time had linked into the system via one of the neurocouplers located near the control center some distance above, from which Eubeleus had just descended.

“I hear you, Arisen One,” Ethendor intoned in the temple of Vandros, raising his arms and looking skyward as the vision engulfed him. “What is desired? Thy servant awaits.”

And the voice spoke: “Soon now, the stars shall shine again and the skies be relit in splendor. Prepare, for the time of the Great Awakening draws nigh.”

“How shall we prepare?” Ethendor asked.

“The earth and the air of Waroth must be cleansed of the deceivers before all can be ready to arise. Nieru must be avenged for harmony to reign once more among the gods, and then shall the Arising be universally blessed. The false prophets who blasphemed the image of the purple spiral must be hunted out and destroyed. Only then will the heavens be appeased. Go therefore to the king and bid him set his forces to the task. Thus has Vandros spoken.”

“They shall be purged from the land,” Ethendor promised.

“And thereafter, when the lands of Waroth have been cleansed, the king shall lead the faithful into the realm beyond, and exterminate the false legions of the Spiral who have gone before.”

The high priest’s eyes widened. “Shall the task continue, even in Hyperia?”

“Hyperia is the task! Waroth has been merely thy proving ground.”

“There, then, shall I go to serve the gods!” Ethendor cried.

“Fail not, and there thou shalt become as one of them,” the Arisen One promised.

It would be a good way of getting their fighting spirits up before they came out to join the real action, Eubeleus had decided.

Hunt leaned back wearily in the chair in Murray’s lounge and felt the contours adjust to his changed posture. “I don’t know, Chris. We came here to evaluate Ganymean science, not to stop a bloody invasion. I’m a physicist, not a general.”

“Well, actually that’s not quite true,” Danchekker said. “It was merely the official story. We came here, if you recall, to help Garuth get to the bottom of his problem with the Jevlenese. I’d say that objective has been accomplished quite effectively.”

“To get to the bottom of it, and see what could be done about it,” Hunt replied. “What have we done to accomplish the second part? Garuth’s locked up, the Ents have got JEVEX back and half the Jevlenese working for them, and they’re all set to take over here completely.”

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.”