Entoverse

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Hauled by two slow-plodding drodhzes, their six legs moving in a lazy, lumbering shuffle, the cart slipped and bumped its way down the rocky trail toward the village. A company of cavalry from the Royal Guard went before, while the Examiner and his assistant priests rode in a carriage following, with another squad of soldiers bringing up the rear.

Thrax sat with Shingen-Hu and a dozen or so other captured adepts, tattered and filthy, staring dejectedly out over the side of the cart at the ravaged crops and orchards withering in the gloom. His body still ached from the welts and bruises he had collected when they were captured. The rough chains chafed painfully at his wrists, neck, and ankles. Despite the springy coils supporting the cart’s floor, every bump and jolt of the boards beneath them seemed to find a new sore spot and send another stab of pain shooting through his stiffening joints.

So, finally, it had come to this. After all the hopes and aspirations of one day joining the Arisen, and having come so close-only to see his opportunity cruelly snatched from within his very grasp, and to be exterminated ignominiously as a deceiver. For the high priest, Ethendor, had proclaimed all Waroth’s afflictions to be a result of Nieru’s anger at the pretenders who had been allowed to desecrate the sign of the Purple Spiral, and promised that the stars would return to the heavens when atonement had been made. As a consequence, all the teachers and adepts not affiliated with the temples were being hunted down. The people, frightened and desperate for better times to return, heeded the warnings and gave no sanctuary. He looked at Shingen-Hu, next to him. The Master’s eyes were dull and empty, resigned to whatever fate lay ahead.

A crowd of villagers grew and followed as the procession came into the village. Some jeered and pelted the cart with rocks and garbage. Others cheered and called out praises to the priests. The soldiers rode haughtily, jostling aside those who were slow to move, and swinging their rods freely to clear the way, while the Examiner and his retinue sat erect in their carriage, maintaining their stony-faced composure and dignity.

A platform had been erected in the square at the center of the village, where an excited crowd had already formed. On the platform were three stakes with fagots piled ready for lighting, while the executioner and his assistants stood impassively in front, watching as the procession drew up. The guards clubbed and prodded the prisoners down from the cart. From the dignitaries’ carriage, the Deputy to the Examiner descended with two acolytes and pointed to three of the prisoners. Guards hustled the terrified three up onto the platform. Thrax and Shingen-Hu were herded to one side with the remainder, while the Deputy climbed the steps behind and raised his hands to address the crowd.

“People of the hamlet of Rakashym, these are the heretics who have brought pestilence and ruin to the lands of Waroth.” He paused, while the crowd erupted in a new frenzy of ridicule and abuse, then gestured down at the group who had been moved aside. “These shall be taken to Orenash to join the others who have profaned, and there will the vengeance of the gods be exacted. Then will the stain that has sat upon Waroth be cleaned, and a pronouncement shall be heard then of momentous times that are about to befall us.”

The Deputy looked over the crowd. They waited dutifully, but that was not what they were interested in at the moment. Reading their mood, he dismissed the rest of the oration that he had intended and turned to point accusingly at the three prisoners quaking behind him. “But Rakashym shall not be denied its chance to see the fate that awaits all who transgress, and to show its devotion.” Cheering broke out. This was more like it. The Deputy nodded. “Let this day be a lesson…”

Among the prisoners watching fearfully below, Thrax turned his head to see how Shingen-Hu was reacting. To his surprise, he found a light shining in the Master’s eyes that he had expected never to see again. The strength had come back into his features, and the body that Thrax had watched wasting away was standing straight and vibrant with sudden inner energy.

“Master, what inspires thee so?” Thrax whispered. “What do you see?”

“I hear a voice!” Shingen-Hu answered. “The power returns. I hear a god speaking within me.”

A delusion brought on by hopelessness, Thrax told himself. The gods had abandoned them long ago.

Hunt settled back into the neurocoupler in one of the booths off the corridor at the rear of the Gondola. In the few years since he had moved from England to join UNSA, he had walked on the Moon, flown with one of the manned missions to Jupiter and stayed for months on Ganymede, returned to Earth aboard an alien starship, virtual-traveled over much of the Thuriens’ domain of the local region of the Galaxy, and finally traveled physically to a distant star. But of all of it, the expedition that he was about to embark on was the strangest ever. In fact it was probably the strangest that had ever been embarked upon by anyone in the whole of time.

Besides himself, the others who would be going down into the Entoverse were Danchekker, since he was equally a part of the team on the spot, Nixie, obviously, as a guide, and Gina, who as journalist refused to be left out-all of whom were in other booths nearby. Eesyan would be going, too, as technical advisor and principal liaison to VISAR, coupled in from Thurien.

Since VISAR would need all of the channel capacity of the single available i-space link to sustain its manipulations of JEVEX and its behind-the-scenes operations in the Entoverse, it wouldn’t be possible for the machine to support continual interaction in real time between the occupants of the couplers and the pseudoversions of themselves written into the Entoverse. Instead, the “surrogates,” once they were impressed with the personality patterns extracted by VISAR from their originals, would proceed to function autonomously. Since what constituted a personality was the thinking, feeling information pattern that defined it and not the physical medium that the pattern happened to be supported in, the team would in effect be existing and functioning in the Entoverse.

During that time, their real-world bodies would lie comatose until, at last, VISAR would erase the Ent-body surrogates and transfer all the impressions and recollections that they had accumulated in the interim back into the human brain patterns. For all practical purposes, the team would have been transported into the Entoverse for a while, functioned there in response to whatever circumstances awaited them, and then been brought back again.

“How are we doing, VISAR?” Hunt muttered.

“We’re getting there. Sorting through this kind of detail involves a lot of processing, even for me.”

Hunt already knew that. He was just impatient to get on with it.

To avoid an inordinate amount of try-it-and-see experimenting that they didn’t have time for anyway, VISAR would not attempt to create authentic interpretations of how a human nervous system would perceive the actual structures and relationships between them that existed in the Entoverse-if, indeed, any such interpretation was possible at all. Instead, the same principle of correspondence that caused emerged Ents to remember their past experiences in Exoverse-meaningful terms would cause the surrogates to perceive their experiences in terms that were familiar. Rather than try to compose a routine for constructing some physically visualizable depiction of the abstract patterns of intercellular transactions taking place in the Entoverse, VISAR would endow its pseudo-Ents with ready-made patterns of conceptual associations extracted from the hosts. These would respond to external stimuli by selecting the nearest from their stores of elemental human percepts that conformed to the same set of basic attributes. Thus, a feature of the surface configuration that was reasonably permanent, behaved with the properties of mass, and reflected part of the radiant flux impinging on it would look like a rock; a form that absorbed components of its surroundings, stayed where it was, and grew systematically bigger would look like a tree; and Hunt, whatever the nature of the bound pattern of cells that VISAR had needed to commandeer to create his Ent-equivalent acceptable to other Ents, would look, to himself, like Hunt-modified and appareled in whatever way VISAR judged appropriate to the circumstances that it discerned. “There isn’t time to dream up a new, internally consistent world of experience,” VISAR had explained. “We’ll just have to work with what we’ve got.”

“What’s going on now?” Hunt asked.

“I think we’re in business,” VISAR replied. “Nixie’s in touch with one of them down there now. It’s not one of the big chiefs that she was searching for, but it seems like some guys who are in trouble. I can give you a quick preview.”

A scene appeared as if before Hunt’s eyes of a noisy, excited crowd cramming in from the side streets to the central square of what seemed to be a primitive village. The people were dressed in crude, rustic garb of coarse shirts and breeches, jerkins, and cloaks. But there was also a peculiar, wheelless carriage that ran on slides, like a sledge, with occupants who were more finely arrayed in jewelry and robes. In front of the carriage was a protective line of figures wearing helmets and breastplates and carrying weapons, and ahead, more of them mounted on strange six-legged beasts. Behind the carriage was a rough, open cart, also without wheels. Both conveyances were hitched to pairs of strange, bulky animals, again with six legs but heavier than the ones bearing the riders. They looked somewhat like buffalo, but with enormous, pillarlike legs that projected sideways from their bodies, then bent downward in a right angle like a spider’s.

There was a raised platform with more figures, and behind them, Hunt realized to his alarm and consternation, three stakes piled ready for burning. The houses of the village were square and smooth, possibly mud-built, with projections like minarets, and arches connecting across some of the alleys. Here and there in the square, scaly, doglike animals were whooping and leaping like miniature kangaroos. The light was dim, a gloomy twilight. Outlined through it in the background were mountains, more vertical and sharply angular than any natural formations that Hunt had ever seen before.

Although Hunt had been prepared, he still found himself overcome with amazement. “That’s really it, the Entoverse?” he asked, struggling to accept it. “This is really happening right now, inside a computer light-years away from here?”

“Concentrate on the situation,” VISAR replied. “I’ve got a feeling you could get involved real soon.”

Near the base of the platform, surrounded by more soldiers, was a group of what looked like prisoners, dirty, ragged, and disheveled, wearing manacles and chains. Two seemed to single themselves out in Hunt’s field of view as VISAR directed his attention to them. The younger man, scarcely more than a youth, had fair hair and the remains of a long, white tunic. Hunt stared in surprise as he recognized the purple-spiral emblem on the sash hanging from his shoulder. The older of the two, with long, matted hair and a heavy beard, was clad in what had once been flowing robes, now falling apart. But instead of bowing cowed and dejected like the rest of the prisoners, he was standing erect, his face turned upward, wreathed in an expression of ecstatic revelation. Then Hunt heard a voice that he recognized as Nixie’s, which he knew somehow to be speaking inside the bearded man’s mind.

“… the gods that you knew before. All that’s over now. The sky’s about to come under new management.”

The old man’s thoughts came through as another voice, sounding awed and exalted. “More powerful gods shall rule the heavens? And shall I, Shingen-Hu, be their servant? The priests of the temples, and all their powers, and the king and his forces, all shall be overcome?”

“Don’t worry about them. They’re out of it now… Oh-oh.” On the platform, another nobleman in robes was shouting something about bringing down wrath on blasphemers. Three more prisoners were being chained to the stakes, while several sinister figures advanced menacingly toward them holding long, nasty-looking knives.

“Look,” Nixie’s voice said. “We’re gonna send you down one of our troubleshooters right now. You look like you could use help. Just leave it all to him. I’ll explain later.”

“An angel?” Shingen-Hu said. “To aid us in this moment of anguish? We shall yet be saved?”

Hunt realized with a sudden sinking feeling whom she meant. “Hey, wait a minute, VISAR. You can’t do this. I don’t know anything about-”

“Trust me,” VISAR said. “Think about getting your act together.”

Suddenly, Shingen-Hu was thundering and pointing an accusing finger up at the robed figure on the platform. “Desist ye, false prophet and instrument of all that is evil!” A confused hush swept over the crowd, and all heads turned toward him. “Charlatan and deceiver, thou liest! Even now do greater gods sweep thee and thy puny masters aside, to be trodden into the mire like vermin. Behold, an angel descends from the realm beyond, and he shall be my witness, and thy undoing!”

“VISAR, I really don’t think you-”

“Okay, go knock ‘em dead. You’re on.”

And suddenly, Hunt was up there on the platform. Not just as a focal point of impressions being relayed by VISAR. He was there. Instantly, total silence fell, and every face in the square was gaping at him as if he had just materialized out of nowhere.

As indeed, of course, he had.