“And me?” Hunt put in.

“Yes. And Shilohin. All of you.”

“Could people like us acquire it?” Shiohin asked.

“Yes-by becoming transformed in the same way. By being taken Over.”

“Taken over by what?”

“Ayatollahs-ones like me. The ones we call awakeners. We bring the ability with us.”

Danchekker drew a long breath and threw Hunt a wary look. “You’re saying that you actually take over the personality of somebody else? Is that what you’ve done?”

Nixie nodded. “Yes, exactly. We are not, as you say, ‘possessed.’ We are really the possessors.”

“What was the original Nixie like, then?” Hunt asked.

“I don’t know. I was never her. From what people say, she sounded excitable and not very smart.”

The three scientists exchanged glances that all seemed to say the same thing. A general trait of the ayatollahs was supposed to be their confusion and insecurity; but Nixie came across as collected, coherent, and in full command of herself. Either Hunt had truly found an exception to the trend, with powers of resilience and fortitude greater than most, or she was too far gone to have doubts. The problem was going to be telling which.

“Let’s get back to what you mean when you say people like us,” Danchekker suggested. “What, exactly, are people like ‘us’?”

“People who are from here,” Nixie replied.

“You mean Jevlen? But I’m not from Jevlen. Vic and I are from Earth. Shiohin is from-God, I don’t know, Minerva, I suppose.”

“No, that doesn’t matter. I meant from this… world, universe, whatever you want to call it.”

Danchekker’s expression became strained. “Are you saying that you came from some other world, and took over the personality of somebody in this one?”

Nixie nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes, that’s it, exactly.”

“Let’s be realistic,” Danchekker said. “These different worlds don’t actually exist as physical entities. Isn’t your way of talking really a symbolic way of referring to the attainment of what some people believe to be a higher state of consciousness? You were always the same self. But the personality which that self once possessed underwent a deep change, and you feel as if you’ve been reborn into a new person. Similar terms and ways of describing one’s spiritual awakening are common among many of the religions and systems of mental training that we’re familiar with on Earth.”

But Nixie was adamant. “No, it’s another place.”

“Where?” Shilohin asked her.

“I don’t know.”

There was the short, cautious silence of three people wondering how to phrase a delicate point. “So, how did you get here?” Hunt inquired finally.

“You must know how to ride the currents of life.”

Danchekker looked away with a sigh, and Hunt could almost hear him groaning to himself inwardly. Here we go, Hunt thought to himself. But there was no choice but to press on. “What are the currents of life?” he asked.

“The undercurrents of existence, which flow from the higher plane through the material world. They come from the stars and are drawn by the celestial spirals, bringing voices and visions from the world beyond.”

“You mean you reach it through the power of mind, is that what you’re saying?” Shilohin offered, taking over Danchekker’s previous tack. “It exists inside you?”

“No,” Nixie insisted. “Outside. It’s real.” She waved a hand. “Look around. Isn’t this real, what we see around us?”

Hunt stared, still unable to make sense of it. “This is the world beyond?”

“And you are inhabitants of it. Our purpose is to learn to flow with the streams of thought and emerge here. That is what I have done.”

“Then, how do you emerge here?” Shilohon asked. “Do you mean that once you were in this other… ‘inner’ world, and suddenly you found you were Nixie, in this one? You had no idea how you came to be here. Is that what you’re telling us?”

“Not quite,” Nixie said. “It has to be through a coupler. You can only emerge through a coupler.”

Hunt shook his head. “A coupler into VISAR?” he queried.

“No.” Nixie looked at him as if it should have been obvious. “Into JEVEX!”

Hunt sat back, stunned. Danchekker’s head jerked around abruptly to look at her again, like a bird’s. Impossible thoughts came into Hunt’s head. “Surely it can’t have been JEVEX itself,” he protested. “We’re not talking about something like what’s just happened with VISAR?”

Shilohin thought for a moment, then pronounced firmly, “No. VISAR’s internal representation of reality is nothing like our own. It has evolved a different world model, utterly incompatible. As you just heard, it doesn’t even share our perception of physical space. An entity like that could never reside in a human nervous system. If this place does indeed exist, which Nixie says she came from, then at least it will have basic geometric and spatial properties in common with what we ourselves recognize. In other words, it exists in space as we know it.” She paused, as if hesitating to voice the implication. “But how anybody could actually travel from somewhere else via a neural coupler, I couldn’t, just at this moment, even hazard a guess.”

Before anyone could say more, Del Cullen appeared in the doorway of the room. He was looking worried. “She’s not there,” he said, directing his words at Hunt. Cullen had gone away to call Gina at the Geerbaine Best Western, since they had expected to hear from her by now on the latest with Baumer. “She didn’t check in last night, and they haven’t had any messages. Baumer hasn’t been seen since yesterday, either. There’s been lots of trouble outside. I don’t like it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Gina was sitting on a wall beside Baumer, eating a grinil sandwich and sipping a hot, sharp-tasting beverage that passed for coffee. Then she was lying on her back, staring up at a strange ceiling.

The transition was as abrupt and as disorientating as that. She had no awareness of anything that had happened in between, not even a sensation of time having passed. It was as if a piece had been cut out of a recording tape in her head and the ends spliced cleanly together again.

For what must have been several minutes, she lay regrouping her scattered thoughts and trying vainly to coax an ounce of a recollection from the gap in her impressions. But there was nothing. Her train of memory was like the trace of a recording clock that had lost power and then started again sometime later, after what could, for all the information she had to go on, have been a moment or a year.

She raised her head and saw that she was still dressed as she had been; she was lying on a couch and covered to the waist by a light blanket. The room was warm and clean, furnished simply with chairs, table, closet, and vanity, and embellished with a few strangely styled ornaments, and some pictures on the walls. It felt more like what could have been a spare room in any private house than a hospital.

But there was a trace of an odor permeating the place, which suggested, if anything, a kind of incense. She could detect no sign of any injury, and concluded that she hadn’t been in an accident. Therefore her amnesia had been induced deliberately; somebody didn’t want her to know where she was or how she’d gotten there.

Which said she was probably a prisoner.

She tried moving and found there was no restraint. But when she got up and crossed the room to try the door, it was locked. She turned to look at the surroundings again, and noticed the standard Jevlenese COM panel by the couch, similar to the one she had seen in Baumer’s office. “ZORAC, are you there?” she said aloud on impulse. “Can you hear me?” There was no response. “Channel fifty-six. Activate channel fifty-six.” Nothing. She went back to the couch and sat down to try and make something of the panel’s manual controls, but without result. On reflection it seemed a pretty silly kind of hope, anyway.