CHAPTER FIFTY

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 toroids 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 to interact with the other end.”

“You mean, like tuning a radio?” Gina said.

“Mmm…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 puffing 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.”