James Hogan - Entoverse

Under the collective name JEVEX-the processing and networking totality serving the system of Jevlenese-controlled worlds-the computers ran the factories and farms, mining and processing, manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and communications, along with all the monitoring to keep track of what was going on. JEVEX kept the records, stocked the warehouses, scheduled the repairs; it directed the robots that built the plants, serviced the machines, delivered the groceries, and hauled the trash. And it created the dreams into which the people escaped from a system that didn’t require them to be people anymore.

And that, the Thurien and Terran leaders had concluded after the three-day Pseudowar that ended the self-proclaimed Jevlenese Federation, had been the problem. JEVEX had been modeled on the larger and more powerful Thurien complex, VISAR, which, while equipping JEVEX admirably for catering to Ganymean temperaments and needs, had done nothing to satisfy the very human compulsions to seek challenge and to compete.

So, the thinking had gone, the key to remedying the situation would be to switch off all but JEVEX’s essential services for a time. By compelling the Jevlenese to take charge of their own affairs-and at the same time leaving them less opportunity for making mischief-they would stimulate them into learning to become human again. And the Ganyrneans from the Shapieron had agreed gamely to oversee and administer the rehabilitation program with its period of probationary decomputerization.

Garuth was only now beginning to realize what they had taken on. He sat with Shilohin, a female Ganymean who had been the mission’s chief scientist, in his office in the Planetary Administration Center on Jevlen, the former headquarters of the local Jevlenese government at a city called Shiban. Before them an image floated, seemingly hanging in midair in the room. It was being transmitted from Barusi, another city situated several thousand miles away on the coast of one of Jevlen’s southern continents, with three towers of its central composition rising more than a mile into the pale green sky. But the scene that Garuth and Shilohin were watching was set against a background of drabness, the buildings shabby and most of the machines idle. A lot of the populace had moved into shanty camps thrown up around the city’s outskirts, where the simpler routines of living that they had been obliged to revert to were more easily organized-even an act like collecting and preparing food could turn out to be unexpectedly complicated when removed from the context of what had been a totally automatic, self-adapting environment.

The view, taken from the Civic Center housing the Ganymean prefect and his staff responsible for the Barusi district, looked down over the tiered expanse of Sammet Square. A procession of Jevlenese numbering several thousand was spilling in from an avenue leading east out of the city, adding to a comparable number who had been gathering there through the afternoon. Virtually all of them had contrived to be wearing something of purple, and the bands spread at intervals through the parade came to the front as they entered, massing behind banners carrying the device of a purple spiral in a black circle on a red ground.

The focus of all the activity was a figure waiting behind the speaker’s rostrum atop the steps facing the square, backed by a huge, hanging sign showing the purple spiral. As soon as the noise of the bands ceased, he launched into his harangue. His name was Ayultha. He wore a dark blue tunic with a purple cloak, and his face had a fierce, intense look, accentuated by heavy, dark brows and a short beard, which he directed this way and that at the crowd with sharp motions of his head as he spoke, punctuating his words with abrupt gestures of appeal and frequent drivings of a fist into the other palm. His amplified voice boomed across the sea of eager faces to sustained outbursts of roared approval.

“Was it not we who believed in the Ganymeans? Was it not we who trusted them and came with them across light-years of space, willing to join their culture and learn their ways? It was the Terrans who spurned their offer and chose to go their own way.” A pause, with appealing looks to left and right, and a dramatic lowering of voice at the crucial point. “Perhaps the Cerians saw more even in those early days than we credited them for.” A sudden rise to crescendo. “It was not them who were betrayed!”

Cries of outrage; shakings of fists. The speaker waited, glaring, until the noise abated.

“I say again, betrayed! There was an agreement-a solemn covenant honored by us not just through a hundred years, not through centuries, even, but for millennia!” He was referring to the surveillance watch that had been kept over the developing Earth, which the Thuriens had entrusted to the Jevlenese. “We performed our duties faithfully. We fulfilled our obligation.” Another pause. Expectations were almost audible with the buildup of tension. Then, the explosive release: “The Ganymeans broke that covenant!”

Thunderous ovation, unfurlings of banners, waves of upthrust hands.

In the foreground to one side of the image, watching from inside the Barusi Civic Center, stood several more Ganymeans: angular, gray-hued, eight-foot-tall figures, with lengthened, narrowish heads compared to the vaulted human cranium, and protruding lower faces with skulls elongated behind. The nearest, whose name was Monchar, swung around to look out at the two Ganymeans watching from Shiban. Monchar had been second-in-command of the Shapieron mission that Garuth had led.

“But he’s completely distorting what happened!” Monchar protested. “Yes, in the end the Thuriens opened a dialogue with Earth directly. But that was only after things they knew to be fact contradicted what the Jevlenese were telling them. The Jevlenese had been lying for centuries. They systematically falsified their reporting!”

“The Thuriens were being betrayed long before they thought to question anything,” one of the other Ganymeans said.

Monchar motioned with an arm to indicate the crowd outside. “But those people down there know all this. They have been acquainted with the facts. How can they react like this to what he’s telling them? Don’t they possess any critical faculties at all?”

“I think we’re still a long way from comprehending the human ability to see and hear what they want to,” another Ganymean replied. “Facts don’t come into it.”

Below, Ayultha was thundering, “But merely keeping bad faith was not enough. They deceived us by intercepting the Shapieron and bringing it secretly to Thurien after it left Earth, and then overwhelmed us through trickery.”

“But they would have destroyed the Shapieron!” Monchar exclaimed, aghast. “If it weren’t for the Thuriens, we would all have been killed.” He turned back to look at Garuth again. “What are we supposed to do? They change the past to what they think it should have been, and then remember it as having happened. They can’t distinguish their myths from reality.”

Beside Garuth, Shiohin shook her head. Even a year after meeting them, she was still bewildered by the politics of these strange, pink, brown, yellow, and black, aggressively inclined, alien dwarves. “Yet they’re human,” she said. “We got to know many humans well while we were on Earth. They can be excitable, I agree, but they’re not irrational. We know that.”

“They can accept reason or not as it suits them,” Monchar said. In the square, Ayultha shouted, “And now they use the disruption caused by their own trickery as a pretext to impose this alien rule upon us, violating the most fundamental of our rights: the right of any people to determine their own affairs. They try to tell us that we would be unable to function without them. But we functioned well enough before JEVEX was withdrawn. And who withdrew JEVEX? They did themselves! So was not this whole situation planned and contrived with the Terrans all along, because they-they who break their covenant; they who deceive and betray; they who use trickery to impose themselves-they saw the Jevlenese Federation as a threat… A threat because of anything we had threatened? No! Because of anything we had done? No! But because we had committed no other crime than to exist!”