“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 pulling 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.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
It could have been because of the general confusion and unrest all over the city. Maybe it was simply that somebody wanted to hear all the angles in a situation where rumors were conflicting. But this time there were no meetings in bars with go-betweens to take them to an unspecified rendezvous. After making a couple of calls to say that Hunt was back with him and had vital business to discuss, Murray was informed that they would be collected at a place less than a block away in thirty minutes’ time.
Because of Nixie’s uniqueness in the circumstances, Hunt decided to take her, too. But he didn’t want to attract attention by having the whole gaggle of them out together in the city; and besides, somebody needed to be on hand in case the Ganymeans managed to restore contact by some means. It was agreed, therefore, that Danchekker and Gina should remain behind. As a precaution, however, they moved upstairs to Osaya’s apartment. A couple of Osaya’s friends were recruited to stay in Murray’s with instructions to say to anyone else who might show up merely that they were keeping an eye on the place while he was away for an unspecified time.
Murray searched around in the closets in one of the bedrooms and came out with a striped, poncho-like garment and a flat-topped, brimmed hat that he said would blend Hunt more naturally into the Jevlenese scene. Feeling like a trademark that he had seen somewhere for a brand of Mexican cigarillos, Hunt sent a parting wave to the two girls in what he hoped was good desperado style and followed Murray and Nixie out onto the stairway.
Outside, the corner bar on the approach to the apartment-block entrance was packed with people watching somebody talking on a screen. Murray stopped for a few moments to get the gist of what was going on. The news was the takeover at PAC: the Jevlenese were reclaiming their planet, and JEVEX was going to be restored. Cheers of approval went up from the crowd. Cult followers or not, a lot of people were going to have all kinds of reasons for going home to their couplers, Hunt reflected. Exploitable recruiting fodder. The phrase went through his mind again.
They went to the end of a side street and crossed a concourse, descended a floor, and stepped onto a moving way running inside a transparent tube above an enclosed square of shuttered doors and storefronts, littered with trash and flooded at one end by dirty water.
“They don’t seem to go in for open gravity-beam travel here,” Hunt remarked. “It’s standard in all the Thurien cities. It was everywhere on the Vishnu, too.”
“Jev maintenance,” Murray said. “How would you like to be a hundred feet up over Times Square when the power goes out?”
They were picked up on one of the street levels by what could have been the same limousine as before. There were two men in front and another two in the passenger compartment, one of whom Hunt recognized as Dreadnought. Scirio himself wasn’t there this time. They drove through a more crowded district, with a confusion of bright lights, Street vendors, noise, and signs. Then a ramp going down brought them suddenly into a different world of huge, gloomy walls and windowless frontages that looked like warehouses. Tangles of girderwork supporting conveyor lines and freight-handling hoists stood above deep concrete canyons containing lines of cars, many of them idle. Much of the machinery had not moved for years, Hunt saw as his eyes accommodated to the twilight. In places, lights came on automatically at the vehicle’s approach, and in the short period before they went off again after it had passed, he caught glimpses of broken machinery, fallen beams, scampering ratlike creatures, and in one instance several figures in the process of stripping the innards from what looked like a piece of control gear.