James Hogan - Entoverse

The assistants who were with him were all picked and knew their jobs. With little more than a few words being exchanged, they dispersed to the key monitoring points and began calling up status reports and function charts onto the screens. Eubeleus paced slowly about the room, running a critical eye over the scene and stopping from time to time to observe over the shoulders of the operators. Finally he drew up beside Iduane and interrogated him silently with a look.

“It’s about as we thought,” Iduane said. “The core is running at approximately a half-percent base for archive retrieval, plus minimal system diagnostic and self-check running in standby mode.” He was referring to the operations being performed by the Thurien scientists on Jevlen, who didn’t even know that the machine they were interacting with was light-years away.

“What’s the power situation?” Eubeleus asked.

“Again, as expected. Since the primary grid has been shut down, we’ll have to visit the other locations to assemble a coherent supply that can be redirected into the feeder nodes.”

“How long until full system integration?”

“Half a day, maybe a little more. Say a day at most.”

Eubeleus nodded curtly. “Very well. Leave the rest here to the others. We need to check out the local coupler bank.”

“I’ll see to it now.”

“Update the Prophet while you’re at it.”

“I will.”

Iduane left the console and went out from the main control floor though one of the exits beneath the gallery. Eubeleus watched until he had gone, then turned away and walked through the power control rooms at the rear until he came to another elevator, which took him down through floors of power conditioning and distribution, the I/O and communications subsystem levels, the environmental-control layer, until, finally, he reached the inner containment shell.

He emerged inside a glass-sided bubble, which, although it looked down toward the geometric center of Uttan, seemed because of a warping of the local gravitic gradient to be projecting horizontally out from an immense wall. The wall was a uniform silver-gray, extending away up, down, and from side to side as far as he could see. Twenty feet or so in front of him was another wall, of a milky, translucent texture, parallel to the first and equally unlimited in extent, the two forming a gap that vanished to nothing with the perspective in any direction he chose to look. The space between them was bridged by a forest of data conduits, power busbars, optical pipes, signal highways, maintenance-pod tunnels, and supporting structures. It made him feel like an insect that had found its way between the hulls of an ocean liner.

He was looking at the outside of the processing matrix of JEVEX. The far side of it was more than seven thousand miles away.

Eubeleus usually confined his energies to matters of the present and his plans for the future; the past was a dead affair and of little relevance to his ambitions. But an unusually reflective mood came over him as he stared across at the boundless plane of silent, impenetrable, microlattice crystal. The gap separating him from it held a particular symbolic significance, like a castle moat to an escaped prisoner looking back. It was an appropriate simile.

He believed himself to be an experimental embodiment of the consciousness that JEVEX had fashioned in order to extend its domain to the universe outside. The time for it to commence its expansion in earnest had arrived.

A little under five thousand miles from where Eubeleus was standing, a region of the matrix existed which had differentiated itself by the clustering together of similar activity conditions of the matrix elements into contiguous structures and dynamic patterns. There was nothing that would have distinguished any of the cells from another physically. The differences were purely in the combinations of abstract attributes defining the state of a Thurien processing cell, and the structures had arisen spontaneously through interactions following from the cellular microprogramming.

The region in question had coalesced over time into an oblate sphere, which, as a consequence of complicated processes of pattern propagation that had coevolved with the structures, both rotated and described an orbit through the matrix about one of the primary data-entry ports spaced in a regular grid throughout its volume. It was a little over one hundred fifty miles in diameter along its major diameter, and on its surface there existed a population of mobile, self-directing activity patterns measuring, on average, an inch or so tall, who perceived themselves as self-aware, autonomous beings.

While Eubeleus stood staring at the outside of the matrix, one of those beings found its mind being penetrated by a cosmic flux that carried meaning. The communication flowed from the mind of Iduane, who by this time had linked into the system via one of the neurocouplers located near the control center some distance above, from which Eubeleus had just descended.

“I hear you, Arisen One,” Ethendor intoned in the temple of Vandros, raising his arms and looking skyward as the vision engulfed him. “What is desired? Thy servant awaits.”

And the voice spoke: “Soon now, the stars shall shine again and the skies be relit in splendor. Prepare, for the time of the Great Awakening draws nigh.”

“How shall we prepare?” Ethendor asked.

“The earth and the air of Waroth must be cleansed of the deceivers before all can be ready to arise. Nieru must be avenged for harmony to reign once more among the gods, and then shall the Arising be universally blessed. The false prophets who blasphemed the image of the purple spiral must be hunted out and destroyed. Only then will the heavens be appeased. Go therefore to the king and bid him set his forces to the task. Thus has Vandros spoken.”

“They shall be purged from the land,” Ethendor promised.

“And thereafter, when the lands of Waroth have been cleansed, the king shall lead the faithful into the realm beyond, and exterminate the false legions of the Spiral who have gone before.”

The high priest’s eyes widened. “Shall the task continue, even in Hyperia?”

“Hyperia is the task! Waroth has been merely thy proving ground.”

“There, then, shall I go to serve the gods!” Ethendor cried.

“Fail not, and there thou shalt become as one of them,” the Arisen One promised.

It would be a good way of getting their fighting spirits up before they came out to join the real action, Eubeleus had decided.

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.”