It was too early to commit to any conclusion. He needed more time to let his mind chew its way through the complexities in its own, unhurried way. More to keep things open than for any other reason, he suggested that it would be interesting to find out if a “possessed” Terran also claimed to have come from the same Otherworld that the Jevlenese described. He liked the word Danchekker had used, and referred to it as “Phantasmagoria.” Danchekker and Shilohin agreed that it would be a worthwhile thing to try and find out.
They had Baumer sedated and placed him in a coupler for VISAR to take a look inside his head. But VISAR stolidly refused to violate the privacy of somebody incapable of authorizing such a probe, and no amount of arguing would change it. So Hunt started talking to Baumer instead.
As a day or two went by, Baumer calmed down and his ramblings became less frenzied. With Nixie helping, glimpses of a place started coming together. Soon there was no doubt that it was the same Phantasmagoria that Nixie talked about, identical in every detail that they were able to establish. And in the process, Hunt’s conviction grew that he was not talking to a German who had undergone some traumatic personality change, but to a genuinely different, and very alien, being.
Was this being, then, some kind of software construct that JEVEX had created, which had somehow found its way into Baumer’s head? Hunt had read some of Eubeleus’s claims to being a creation of precisely this kind himself, but had dismissed it as rubbish. Could there be something to it?
But if there were, it would mean that an entity that had originated as a caricature of reality, and that needed all the power and sophistication of JEVEX to sustain it, had taken on the internal depth and complexity necessary to become reality and stand independently in its own right. Hunt couldn’t see how that could be possible. Pinocchio might come to life and work without the strings in a fairy story; but life in the real world depended on structure and organization a lot more complicated than any puppet’s.
A puppet was made to look like a living organism that moved itself from the inside, but it was really operated by forces applied on the outside. Similarly, JEVEX’s puppets were simulations of life, animated by JEVEX’s manipulations. But if Nixie and the person that Baumer had become were as real as Hunt accepted them to be, they could only be functioning by virtue of an innate complexity of structure that JEVEX would never have put there. And that kind of complexity only came about spontaneously, over a long period of time, through evolution in the real, physical world.
Which, of course, was absurd…
Unless “real, physical world” meant something different from what everyone knew it meant.
The thought caused Hunt to spend a lot of time asking himself what he meant by it. It reminded him of the conversation he’d had with Gina in his apartment back home, when she had asked him a similar question. And his answer had been that everything “out there” boiled down to photons and other energy quanta, along with a few simple rules governing the ways they interacted with one another.
Packages of attributes. Bundles of numbers riding together, adrift in an ocean of coordinates…
Numbers and coordinates, specifying… what?
Nobody knew. It could have been anything.
But the whole “real” universe had evolved out of it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Rodgar Jassilane’s Ganymean communications scientists, along with Duncan Watt, who was working with them, had uncovered a technical mystery concerning the residual core of JEVEX that had been left running: There wasn’t enough of it to support the amount of traffic that seemed to be indicated once the size of the Achene’s black-market operation was estimated and allowed for.
MacArthur, the Jevlenese that Shiohin had failed to convince with the laser demonstration, and who was already rising fast in the purple-spiral movement, was a comparative new boy on the scene, having awakened as an ayatollah only in the time since JEVEX was suspended. There were others, too, and the Ganymeans had been analyzing figures of known cases and rumored ones from all over the planet in an attempt to approximate the total. Other sources, including figures gleaned from ZORAC’s unofficial tapping of Shiban’s communications network, gave a figure for the incidence rate expressed as the number of “possession” events per thousand user-hours of exposure-a risk statistic which the khena would definitely not have wanted to become public knowledge. Extrapolated to cover the planet, that figure gave a measure of the size of the total black-market operation. The known operating characteristics of VISAR enabled that to be expressed in terms of the system power necessary to support it. But when the officially sanctioned archive-interrogation and maintenance operations were added in, the total indicated load was far greater than the residual core of JEVEX would have been able to handle.
What the results seemed to say was: Either JEVEX was a lot bigger than the Jevlenese had admitted; or else there was another facility operating whose existence had never been disclosed. Curious, Ganymean engineers, assisted by some of the more cooperatively disposed Jevlenese, began quietly carrying out a program of detailed inspections and tests at the sites where the main nodes and operating centers of the network were located.
Cullen decided to move Gina permanently from Geerbaine into PAC. He didn’t like the thought of her being on her own out there now that he had seen the people that Baumer had been connected with. Accordingly, Gina called the Best Western to terminate her stay, and arranged to drive out later that afternoon with Lebansky and Koberg to collect her things.
A little over an hour before they were due to leave, a call came through for Gina from a woman who introduced herself as Marion Frayne, also from Earth and staying at the BW. She had read and enjoyed all of Gina’s books, she said, and wondered if she could leave a couple at the reception desk for Gina to autograph. “Thank you so very much. You probably don’t remember, but we met briefly once at a party in Lisbon,” she chattered delightedly when Gina agreed.
In fact, Gina had never been to Portugal. The phrase was a code that General Shaw had given her at her unexpected meeting with him in Shiban. Before leaving, therefore, she took from a folder in a compartment of her briefcase the notes she had made of developments inside PAC since then. They included an account of what was happening with Baumer, the help that Nixie was giving, and the various theories being bandied about. This seemed more of a domestic issue to Gina, and not something that would relate to interplanetary politics, but she had been told to omit nothing. Finally, she summarized what she knew of the Ganymeans’ findings on the capacity of the JEVEX core system and Garuth’s decision to have the major sites checked.
She didn’t like what she was doing, she admitted to herself as she folded the sheets and tucked them inside her purse. Ever since the meeting with Shaw, the thought of being a spy inside the UNSA team had been weighing in her mind. It wasn’t her way of doing things, and she wondered why she had agreed to it back at Goddard. True, she hadn’t known Hunt and the rest of them, or Garuth and the Ganymeans, the way she did now… but she hoped it hadn’t been just to get herself a ticket to Jevlen.
General Shaw must have made it sound very important. He was, she recalled, a pretty persuasive salesman.
Nixie, in Phantasmagoria, before she overwrote whoever the original Nixie was, had been a “he.” He trained as a kind of religious disciple in a temple in a large city, but later ran away to study with an independent teacher who sounded like a hermit, up in the mountains. It was from his school that Nixie had “arisen” to the world that seers talked about beyond the sky. What happened to Baumer hadn’t happened to Nixie because her teacher was wise and thorough, and had prepared her with some idea of what to expect. Apparently others who had gone ahead sometimes returned as spirits that spoke in the minds of seers through the mysterious “currents” which Nixie alluded to repeatedly-a result, presumably, of “awakened” ayatollahs somehow applying their extraordinary affinity and reconnecting via couplers to wherever they came from.