Entoverse

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Danchekker relaxed back into silken cushions in one of the voluminous chairs in Osaya’s lounge, his hands clasped behind his head, and studied the shameless opulence and erotic imagery around him. “You know, I must confess there are times when I feel tempted to consider myself the victim of a misspent youth,” he called over his shoulder toward the open doorway as he heard Gina coming back in. “What tastes these establishments cater to, I fear I might be past daring to imagine.”

Gina appeared, holding two cups of the brew that Hunt had christened ersatz-she’d had to get them from the girls downstairs in Murray’s, since the chef in Osaya’s kitchen only responded to Jevlenese, and the manual controls were a mystery. “Now you can see the kind of hook that JEVEX could be,” she said, closing the door.

Danchekker’s eyes widened suddenly as the full meaning of what she and Sandy had been saying for all this time finally sank home. “My God, I never connected it with things like that!” he exclaimed.

He accepted one of the mugs and conveyed it to a side table. Gina sat down with her own in another of the chairs. She took a sip and tried to relax, but couldn’t. The dragging waiting for something to happen was fraying her nerves.

“Does any of it really matter if you take a long enough view of things?” she asked, mostly just to break the silence. “From the point of view of evolution, I mean. Does anything we do or don’t do really make much difference in the long run to what would have happened anyway?” Then she remembered what she had said to Hunt when they were aboard the Vishnu, about five percent of species surviving and it all being a matter of luck, and admitted to herself that she was only trying to rationalize their situation. It did matter, and they were powerless.

Danchekker’s answer did nothing to assuage her feelings. “Indeed it can. The most minuscule difference in causes can sometimes bring about huge changes in the outcome of a situation. I remember an example that Vic gave me once, when we were discussing highly nonlinear systems.”

“What was that?” Gina asked.

Danchekker settled himself more comfortably, glad to have something else to talk about. “Suppose that you break up the pack of balls on an ideal, frictionless pool table, and that you were able to measure the velocity and direction of every ball with perfect accuracy,” he said. “How far into the future would your computational model continue to predict the subsequent motions with reasonable validity, do you think?”

Gina frowned. “Ideally? For the rest of time, I always thought. Isn’t that right?”

“In theory, yes-which was Laplace’s great claim. But in reality, the mechanism is such an effective amplifier of errors that if you’d ignored the effect of the gravitational pull of a single electron on the edge of the Galaxy, your prediction would be hopelessly wrong after less than a minute.” He nodded at the astonished expression on Gina’s face and warmed to the theme. “You see, what it illustrates is the extraordinary sensitivity of some processes to-”

Just then, a chime sounded and an alluring female voice said something in Jevlenese. Gina and Danchekker looked at each other, puzzled for a second, and then realized that it was Osaya’s house computer. Voices came from the hallway, and a moment later the two girls who had been left in Murray’s apartment appeared, followed by three men. Gina stood up from the chair, uncertain what to expect. Danchekker looked up at them with an expression of defiant resignation, chin outthrust and jaw clamped shut.

A stream of Jevlenese issued from both of the girls at once, accompanied by lots of gesticulating and waving. One of the men, solidly built, with a hard face and narrow, Oriental-like eyes, and dressed in a straight gray jacket and black, roll-neck shirt, uttered a series of sharp, staccato syllables and pointed back toward the outside door.

“It looks as if the party’s moving on somewhere,” Gina said to Danchekker.

“I, ah, rather get the impression that our opinion on the matter isn’t being invited,” Danchekker observed, taking in the looks on the faces of the other two men.

“Right. I get that feeling, too.”

Danchekker put down his mug and rose from the chair. “Very well. Let’s get on with it.”

They followed the three men back outside to the landing. The two girls came down with them as far as Murray’s door, where they waved and disappeared back inside. At least their manner gave no indication of anything threatening. Gina and Danchekker went with the three men down to the lobby and out to where a car in which another two were waiting.

Ten minutes after they departed, a Shiban city police van pulled up on the same spot and disgorged a squad of troopers, who ran clattering in through the apartment-block doors.

The flier landed in a parking area at the rear of some buildings by a traffic highway, where a number of other flying vehicles and ground vehicles were standing. With few words being said, the party disembarked and crossed the lot to a larger craft, which looked like a kind of flying van: windowless, except for the nose compartment, and painted pink and white with garish signs on the sides in Jevlenese.

They boarded through a center door to find half the interior fitted with seats, and in less than a minute they were airborne once again.

Nixie said something to Murray, who gawked in surprise, and they went into a succession of questions and answers.

“What’s it all about?” Hunt asked. -

“These guys must believe in going equipped for the job,” Murray replied. “This thing we’re in is a funeral truck.”

“You’re joking! It looks more like a tour bus for a rock band.”

“It belongs to one of the weirdo sects. It seems they do all their mourning when somebody gets born-on account of all the hassles and shit that the guy’s gonna have to put up with in life. But when he croaks at the end of it all, that’s something to celebrate. So they make this a party wagon. I guess it takes all kinds, eh?”

They landed again after about the same total flight time as the journey out, suggesting that they were back in Shiban. Sure enough, when they climbed out Hunt saw that they were on a wide platform projecting out from the rounded end of a structure high over the city, facing one of the wide traffic corridors receding away between cliffs of buildings. Above, the structure that they were on met what could be seen to be a solid canopy of artificial sky, probably penetrating through it to form one of the towers visible outside. Far below, the buildings and terraces merged together into the structures of the lower city.

They entered a set of doors and crossed a drab, bare hall of crumbling floor and scratched gray walls. It felt like the kind of place that had gotten tired of existing a long time earlier, and was waiting only to fall apart. A slow, creaking elevator carried them down for what seemed an interminable descent, and they came out in a dark, carpeted hallway that smelled old and musty. From there they went down a flight of stairs to a gallery with corridors and halls going off in several directions. One of the corridors brought them to a doorway. Scirio spoke briefly via a microphone to someone, and the door opened. Inside was a narrow passage that opened into another lined by doors on both sides. The surroundings seemed familiar, but the party moved through without slackening pace, and they were entering the lounge with the bar before Hunt realized that they were back in the Gondola Club, where they had come in search of Baumer.

But this time the bar stools and tables were empty and the place was cleared of people, except for a tall, gangly-limbed man with gray hair and beard, wearing a brown checked suit, who was sitting at one of the tables with two others who looked like khena. He stood up as the newcomers entered, and Scirio launched into a dialogue while he was still crossing the room. The man in the suit seemed agitated, and spoke in a nervous voice, confining himself to answering Scirio’s questions.

“He sounds like their technical guy,” Murray muttered to Hunt. “They’re talking about i-space links and Thurien transmission codes-something like that, anyhow.” Hunt nodded but said nothing, realizing with a jolt that they could be much closer to their goal than he had dared hope.

The engineer’s name was Keshen. When he had finished talking to Scirio, he led the way over to another door and around a corner at the rear of the lounge. Hunt, Murray, and Nixie hesitated. Scirio turned and waved for them to follow.

They came to a smallish room filled with cubicles, monitor panels, and equipment racks-evidently this was where the establishment’s couplers connected into the communications net. Somewhere else in the net, possibly far from Shiban, a channel through the net terminated at a live node carrying an i-space link to JEVEX. There was a console with lights and several screens, one of them displaying a pattern of symbols and geometric lines that meant nothing. Keshen sat down and began what looked like a series of status checks. The pattern on the screen altered; new symbols appeared. Keshen gave an intermittent commentary, which Nixie elaborated for Murray, and Murray did his best to explain to Hunt.

“This is their link into the net that connects to JEVEX, okay?”

Hunt nodded. “Out of curiosity, ask him if he knows where the connection into JEVEX is,” he said.

Murray passed the question on. Keshen shook his head.

“The net goes all over the planet,” Murray interpreted back. “The entry into JEVEX could be anywhere. It all depends how the techs who are running the core system have got it set up at the moment-which isn’t something that he makes it his business to go around asking questions about. His ass is on the line enough as it is. Does it make sense to you?”

“Yes,” Hunt replied. It meant that Keshen was not aware that the connection led to an off-planet link somewhere. In other words, he didn’t know that JEVEX proper wasn’t on Jevlen at all-just as Hunt would have expected.

Keshen indicated another section of equipment, and Murray went on. “This channel goes out to an i-space-what would you call it, sender? Connector? Transformer?”

“Transceiver?” Hunt suggested.

“Yeah, right. Anyhow, it’s miles away somewhere. It hasn’t been operating since the Gs shut down JEVEX. But there just happens to be a line into it that isn’t supposed to exist, and he’s just brought it up again and fed in the-some kind of operating numbers?”

“Parameters?”

“If you say so… to tune it for VISAR. So that line’s through to Thurien, okay?”

“It’s through to Thurien?” Hunt repeated. He couldn’t contain a quick laugh. It sounded too good to be true.

Murray checked. “That’s what the guy says.”

“Could we verify that?” Hunt said. “Can he get VISAR through to us here, right now?” -

“Dunno.” Murray asked Nixie, who asked Keshen. Keshen checked with Scirio, and then entered more commands into the console.

Then a voice said something in Jevlenese from the console speaker. Keshen replied, answered a few more questions, and then the voice said in English, “My word, you are there, Vic! It seems you’ve pulled off one of your stunts again.”

A relieved grin spread across Hunt’s face. “Hello, VISAR.” He indicated the others who were with him in the room. “Well, these people had more than a little to do with it, as well.” He heard what sounded like his own phrase being repeated in Jevlenese. VISAR was assuming the role of translator.

“They did a good job.”

“It pays to make friends,” Hunt said. “What’s the situation with the others?”

“Calazar’s here,” VISAR answered. “Gregg Caldwell went away to take care of something else, but someone’s gone to fetch him. We’ve heard nothing more from anywhere else on Jevlen. As far as we know, the others are still where they were when we got cut off.”

“I think Gina and Danchekker are being moved,” Hunt said.

“They’re on their way here,” Scirio said, his words translated by VISAR. “It wouldn’t have been safe to leave them.”

One of the screens on the console activated, showing Calazar. “Congratulations,” he said. “VISAR has just given me the news. And you have a channel there into JEVEX?”

Hunt moved next to Keshen. “Do we?”

Keshen checked the indicators on the other screen. “Yes. And you want VISAR connected into it? Is that so?”

“They’re in charge now,” Hunt said, waving toward the screen showing Calazar.

An exchange of technical jargon between VISAR and Keshen followed, ending with Keshen confirming that it could be done. “Do it straight away, while JEVEX is still asleep,” VISAR said. “Then when they bring JEVEX up to full power on Uttan, guess who’ll be in control of it.”

“And Eubeleus won’t know?” Hunt asked.

“JEVEX won’t even know,” VISAR told him.

Keshen was looking puzzled. “Uttan? The planet? What has Uttan to do with this?” he asked.

“It’s too long a story to go into now, believe me,” Hunt replied. Then the sound of footsteps came from the lounge outside, and Gina appeared at the door with Danchekker. The three men who had brought them from Murray’s were behind.

“My God, it’s Vic and the others!” Danchekker exclaimed. “You’re here. We had no idea what was going on. These-” He hesitated as he heard his words being translated. “These gentlemen collected us.”

“You weren’t safe there,” Hunt explained. “This is Scirio. He had you brought here. And this is Keshen. Don’t ask where we’ve been.”

Gina was looking past Hunt with a puzzled expression. “What’s doing the translating? Have we got ZORAC back again?”

“Even better,” Hunt answered. “It’s VISAR. We’ve got a link to Thurien.” Danchekker was already staring incredulously, having seen Calazar on one of the screens. Hunt indicated the other section of hardware. “And that’s the channel into JEVEX. Keshen has just hooked them together.”

Danchekker blinked. “You’ve done it? You mean already? They can set VISAR loose on JEVEX from here?”

“And with JEVEX still in a coma, it won’t know what hit it-literally,” Hunt replied.

The news was so sudden and unexpected that it took Gina several seconds to absorb it. “You mean that’s it?” she said finally. “We can keep JEVEX off permanently, as of now? Then it can be taken apart? The problem’s over?”

“Er, no,” Calazar said from the screen. He sounded apologetic at having to complicate things. “We’ve already discussed that. The Ents are a race of fully sapient beings in every respect. What you’re saying would amount to genocide.”

“What are they talking about?” Keshen muttered to Scirio. “What are Ents?” Scirio hushed him with a warning shake of his head.

The screen split, and Caldwell’s face appeared in one half. He nodded at Hunt and the others, evidently having gotten the news from VISAR. “Great job. Looks like maybe we’re in business, then, eh?”

Gina was still bemused by what Calazar had said. “Then what will you do?” she asked. “Isolate it? Leave it as its own, self-contained universe?”

Caldwell shook his head, guessing the way the conversation was going. “The Thuriens won’t go with that, either. But in any case, both those options would depend on VISAR being able to keep control over JEVEX. Right now, that all hinges on the single link into it that you’ve just established. If we lose that, we lose our only chance. Once Eubeleus and his people were warned, they wouldn’t give us another opportunity.”

Hunt was looking perplexed. “What, then?” he asked, shifting his eyes from one side of the screen to the other. “If we’re not going to get rid of it and we’re not going to cut it off, what are we going to do? What other alternative is there?”

“The real problem that we’ve got in the short term is staving off a mass exodus of Ents,” Caldwell said. “JEVEX is simply the means that would make it possible. But it wouldn’t happen at all, regardless of whether we continued to control JEVEX or not, if the Ents could be persuaded to change their minds-at least until we’ve had a chance to understand the situation better and figure out how we can help them solve their problem without wiping out a Jevlenese every time one of them comes out.”

“What?” Hunt said. This was a completely new twist. He glanced at Danchekker, then at Gina. They both looked as much at a loss as he was.

“I don’t understand,” Danchekker said to the screen. “Persuade them? How?”

“By talking to them,” Caldwell said, as if that explained everything.

Hunt was completely befuddled. He shook his head. “They’re just patterns in a computer, Gregg. How’s anyone supposed to talk to them?”

“That’s what we’ve been thinking about,” Caldwell replied. “Why don’t we go down there and check the situation firsthand? Then, maybe, we’d have a better chance of figuring out what to do.”

Hunt’s bemusement changed to suspicion. “Who’s ‘we’?”

Caldwell answered in an unapologetic, matter-of-fact kind of way. “Okay, since you’re the agent assigned to the job on the spot: ‘you.’”

Hunt’s misgivings deepened. “Down where?” he asked.

“There,” Caldwell replied simply. “It was Eesyan’s idea: down into the Entoverse.” As Caldwell spoke, Eesyan’s head and shoulders came into view on the other side of the screen, next to Calazar.

“We can’t,” Hunt replied. “It takes another Ent to get inside another Ent mind through the couplers. They evolved there. They’re the only ones who have the knack.”

“Ah, that was before, when the couplers into JEVEX were the only way of gaining access to the Entoverse,” Eesyan said. “But now we have another way.”

Hunt still wasn’t with it. “What way?” he asked.

“VISAR,” Eesyan replied. “Which has a far greater natural affinity for manipulating JEVEX’s internal processes than even the Ents have.”

Hunt stared. It was obvious. In the Pseudowar, VISAR had obtained the unconditional surrender of the Jevlenese by creating a gigantic Terran battle force that existed only in JEVEX’s imagination.

“If VISAR can scan the matrix and locate and analyze the data structures that constitute the Entoverse-which it should have commenced doing already, if your connection there is working-it ought to be able to figure out how an Ent is put together: literally, at its ‘atomic’ level,” Eesyan explained. “Then, VISAR would know all it needed to write an artificial Ent-being of its own into the Entoverse.”

“I have identified the planet and its orbit,” VISAR interjected. “There only seems to be the one. It’s interesting-about a hundred fifty miles in diameter. It’s detectable only through correlation analysis of the cell activity states. I can see why JEVEX would never have been aware of its existence. Now let’s take a closer look at the surface details…

“Extraordinary!” Danchekker breathed.

Eesyan went on. “Given permission, VISAR would also have access to the full set of mental constructs of anyone neurally coupled into it. Therefore, it should be able to impress that personality into the Ent-being that it had created down there in the Entoverse.”

“That’s you,” Caldwell put in, as if the look on Hunt’s face didn’t say plainly enough that he knew exactly what Eesyan was talking about.

“I would go, too,” Eesyan said. He looked out at Hunt. “Then we would, literally, be down there in the Entoverse, and could talk to them.”

It was typical of the Thuriens. After pursuing reasonableness and caution to the point where it seemed they would never be capable of initiating any action at all, they had come up with something so stunning that it made everything everyone else had been talking about look tame. For a moment Hunt was speechless at the audacity of it.

“Then what?” he managed to ask finally.

Caldwell shrugged. “Then it’s up to you. But with VISAR on your side, you ought to be able to pull off something pretty effective. After all, in the Entoverse, VISAR will be God.”