Entoverse

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Hunt stood with his back to one of the benches in the UNSA labs, his hands loosely gripping the edge on either side of him. Gina sat at the worktable in the middle of the room, chewing a chicken sandwich from the store of good, tasty, Earth-style food that Duncan had accumulated. The one visible effect on Gina after her disappearance was that she was hungry. Sandy was sitting across from her, listening and saying strangely little.

“Okay, let’s go over the main points again,” Hunt said. “You set out from PAC and saw some of the surrounding parts of Shiban center.”

Gina nodded. “A kind of introductory tourist walkaround.”

“You didn’t have any set agenda?”

“No. It was just to help me get my bearings… and to get to know each other a little better, I guess.”

Hunt threw a doubtful glance at Del Cullen, who was leaning with his shoulder against an equipment cabinet, his arms folded. “Weren’t you supposed to be meeting some people from these Jevlenese historical societies, or something like that?” Cullen queried.

Gina shook her head firmly. “That was going to be the day after.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. You must have got the dates mixed.”

Hunt frowned as he listened. That was not the way he remembered it, either. “Do you remember the names of any of these people?” Cullen asked, obviously with a view to checking it out. “Or the organizations they were with, maybe?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Baumer had it all in his head. There didn’t seem any reason for me to go writing it all down at the time.”

Cullen nodded, letting it go at that. They weren’t going to get anything out of Baumer now.

“Okay,” Hunt said. “Then what?”

“We went through a kind of street market, underneath some huge, curving shapes going up into the sky-as if they were part of something from way back that never got finished. It was full of junk, old clothes, secondhand stuff, that kind of thing. Seemed to be a freakout place for the local dropout culture.”

“Kinchabira. I know the place,” Cullen interjected, nodding.

“Baumer blamed it all on Thurien lack of discipline and control. He seemed to think a good dose of Nazism would work wonders.” Gina nibbled another piece of her sandwich and took a sip of coffee-real. “Then there was a deposit company that seemed to be turning itself into a bank. He didn’t approve of that, either.”

“And we’re quite sure that his motivation wasn’t simply the obvious?” Hunt asked. “I mean, here’s this guy, stuck out here on his own for a long time. Pretty girl from home shows up…”

Gina shook her head. “That was the first thing I thought, too. But there was never a hint of it. Anyhow, that isn’t how he gets off.”

“Okay. Then you looked in some luxury-good stores…”

“Right,” Gina said. “And he didn’t agree with that, because it doesn’t force everyone to be equal. I got a speech on why society ought to protect people like him from having to face up to why the world isn’t listening to them. Then we sat on a wall and watched some weirdos with eyeshadow and icicles for haircuts while we ate some Jevlenese pita-burgers.” Gina paused to recollect what they had talked about. “He seemed interested when I asked him if he’d gotten to know any other people here who thought the way he did. He was curious to know more about what you UNSA scientists were doing here.”

“That’s his real reason coming out,” Cullen murmured.

“The punks weren’t any trouble?” Hunt asked. There had been a report of some trouble in that area at around the same time, involving a group who sounded like the people Gina had described. But she shook her head again.

“No. They went away,” Gina continued slowly, reciting the items one by one, as if anxious to be sure that she had everything straight. “We carried on to some kind of a bar somewhere. Baumer started talking about drugs and highs. He asked me what kind of things I use. He said it in a kind of… suggestive way. It was like a hint that there could be something more to it, but he wanted to see my reaction first.”

Hunt nodded. Conceivably Baumer had been acting from purely personal motivations when he approached her. Maybe not. Nothing that Gina was saying clinched it either way. “Go on,” he said.

“He told me there were places where you can still get a total connection into the residual core of JEVEX. He said it’s a trip that beats everything: the ultimate. Only Jevlenese really understood it.” Gina made an open-handed gesture in the air. “That was interesting. It was the first definite proof I’d heard about JEVEX still being available. But when I tried to get more, he said there was no way you could describe it. You had to experience it for yourself. Obviously it was an invitation.”

“Which you accepted,” Cullen said-needlessly, since they had been through the gist of her story once already.

“Well, you know I’m the curious kind.”

Sandy looked across the table at her oddly. “You, ah… you were curious to find out what this was all about?”

“Yes,” Gina said. Her voice was light and matter-of-fact. She frowned, as if momentarily puzzled about something, then nodded. “Yes,” she said again.

“You hadn’t seen enough with VISAR, on the Vishnu?” Sandy spoke with pronounced skepticism, as if she found the answer hard to believe and wanted Gina to reconsider. Hunt was scribbling a note just at that moment, and Cullen missed the implication.

“We didn’t know if JEVEX was the same,” Gina said. She frowned to herself again. Then, as if not quite satisfied with that, added, “It was important to know what Baumer was up to, right?”

Sandy stared for a moment longer; then, when no support was forthcoming from Hunt or Cullen, she let it go at that with a doubtful nod. “Okay.”

Gina went on. “We went to a place that you entered down a passage off an alley. It was all dark, with everything done furtively-the way you imagine speakeasies to have been. Inside was a sort of lounge and bar. And then out back, there were all these neurocoupling cubicles…”

Hunt and the others had decided not to complicate the issue by saying anything about Nixie’s story. Gina went on to describe accurately what was almost certainly the Gondola, where they had found Baumer; and just as almost-certainly, there would be no point in trying to get confirmation since nobody there would know anything. As Hunt had seen for himself, the whole operation was set up to preserve anonymity. Not seeing things was part of the business.

“And he was right,” Gina concluded. “There’s no way I could describe it. That machine can create total realities in your head, indistinguishable from the real thing, that are actually your own creations, except you don’t know it. It’s uncanny-totally compelling. I can see how it could become addictive. I guess I just got carried away and lost all track of time. I eventually came to, left, and came back here. The rest you know.”

“Was Baumer still there when you left?” Cullen asked.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t get anything across to the management. I don’t think they’d have told me anyway.”

They all looked at each other. That seemed to be it. “Well, you probably need more rest than you realize,” Cullen said to Gina. “Don’t bother going back to Best West. We’ll find you a suite in the residential section here at PAC to freshen up and get your head down in. We’ll see you again later.”

“I think you’re right,” Gina agreed. “My head feels as if it’s been through a blender.”

She described some of JEVEX’s capabilities while she finished her sandwich, reiterated the line they had already heard from Danchekker that this seemed to her a more than likely explanation of what had sent the Jevlenese off the rails. Then she departed for the residential sector. Sandy went with her.

“What I don’t understand,” Hunt said to Cullen when they were alone, “is why they’d let Baumer reveal this JEVEX business to her when they must have known she was associating with us and the Ganymeans. If it’s such a big secret, with what sounds like big money involved, why show her it?”

“I wondered the same thing.” Cullen eased himself down onto one of the lab stools and rubbed his chin. “Unless…” He looked over at Hunt. “It depends who the ‘they’ you’re talking about are. The Ichena run the couplers. They’re the ones who’d stand to lose if the traffic was shut down. But suppose Baumer was also working for a political group tied up with the cults. They’re not the same people. See my point? Letting Baumer come across like just another junkie blabbing about where he gets his fixes would be a good way of obscuring his political connection.”

Hunt took out a cigarette and thought while he lit it. “I think I see what you’re saying. A bit of a dirty trick, but it’s the other guys who’ll catch any comeback. But in the meantime it covers any tracks back to them.” He sat back and stared at the notes he had made. “Do you think it could be Eubeleus and the Axis?” he asked.

“I guess it could be-although he seems more interested in collecting his wagon train together at Geerbaine so they can go out and found the new world. And his main sidekick’s there with him. You know something, Vic, I’m even starting to think this Uttan stunt of theirs might be genuine.” Cullen clasped his hands behind his head and swiveled the stool with a foot until he was looking at Hunt. “But one thing’s sure: Baumer isn’t gonna tell us.”

“I guess not,” Hunt agreed with a sigh, pocketing his lighter.

In a suite in the residential part of PAC, Gina dried herself off with the warm-air blower in the shower, combed out her hair, and tottered back into the bedroom to slide gratefully between smooth, clean-smelling sheets. It had been a lot more exhausting than her experiment with VISAR. Or maybe things in general were just catching up with her.

After turning off the light, she went over the things that General Shaw had said in the room in another part of Shiban where she had been taken by the contact who had been waiting when she left the booths. She had said nothing to Hunt and Cullen that she shouldn’t have. Shaw must have come secretly aboard the Vishnu, too, she reflected. She hadn’t expected to see him again until her return to Earth-if at all-after meeting him in the briefing with Caldwell, when she had accepted the assignment. She remembered that quite vividly for some reason-as if it had happened yesterday.

It seemed unnecessarily cautious that she should not be allowed to bring people like Hunt and Garuth into the picture about the Jevlenese having a well-placed spy somewhere inside PAC; but the general had been adamant. She wondered if Baumer had been planted on Jevlen as an insider by whatever agency General Shaw was a part of. Very likely the part of the total picture that Baumer possessed was no larger than her own.

But certainly there was a lot more going on than she knew about, and it had interplanetary significance. The only wise thing was simply to forget the questions and follow orders.

As for Baumer, there was no conclusion to be drawn other than that he was completely mad. His faculty for recognizing even the most basic of familiar things seemed to be completely gone. The walls and doors, fittings and furnishings of the room in the medical facility where he was being confined, all of which were unexceptional, seemed to confound him with awe. He spent hours exploring the surfaces with his fingers and mumbling to himself as he fiddled with such simple devices as the catch on a drawer, or a pen lying on a desktop. He showed no understanding of anything more advanced, such as the touchpad controls of a COM panel unit, and made no attempt at operating them in the ways they were designed to function. And any kind of mechanism, however simple, seemed to bring on a mixture of wonder and terror. On one occasion he sat on the floor for almost an hour with a wastepaper bin that had a lid operated by a foot-pedal, working the lever over and over again. And it was nearly as long before he would even approach a set of scales standing on one side of the room.

He did not seem so much to have forgotten what things were for; it was more as if he had lost the references to relate them to. His entire conceptual framework seemed to have changed-or been replaced by another.

He could still speak, but nothing he said made any sense. The little that he did say was a disjointed tirade about being robbed of his “powers,” and he was constantly making signs and gestures as if he expected to cast spells. When others addressed him, he seemed able to understand the words, but he was too disoriented by fear and confusion to respond coherently. The Terran medics and Ganymean psychologists had no explanation.

But Nixie did.

“This is what the Jevlenese mean when they talk of somebody awakening,” she said. “This is how the ayatollahs arrive. The person who exists inside his body isn’t the same anymore. It’s another who has been transported here from the Otherworld. As I was.”

And what she said seemed indeed to be true. For apart from his faculty of speech, his voluntary motor reflexes-and even those were erratic, though Nixie said that would pass-and the unconscious regulatory functions that his brain supported, everything in his nervous system that had once contributed to the identity of Hans Baumer had apparently been completely obliterated.

“And you say this only happens to somebody who is coupled into JEVEX?” Shiohin asked Nixie in one of the medical offices, where they had retired with Hunt and Danchekker to review Baumer’s condition after observing him.

“Always.”

“Was it true in your case?” Danchekker asked. “Were you-or should I say, the person whose identity you assumed-in a coupler when it happened?”

“I don’t remember,” Nixie replied. “I was too confused for a long time afterward to know what had happened. But that is what I was told by others.”

Danchekker looked from one to another of those present with an I-told-you-so expression that was superficially reluctant, while at the same time the glint behind his spectacles said that he was loving every minute. Finally he said, “Which does rather tend to corroborate my hypothesis, I think. The condition is a profound mental disruption brought about by the interaction between deep-seated processes in the human nervous system and an inappropriate alien technology that was adapted from something never designed to couple to it.” He took of his spectacles and produced a handkerchief to wipe them. “I’m sorry, Vic, but you really have to discard this Phantasmagoria that you’ve grown so fond of.”

“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.