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.
The city that the Thuriens had planned and laid was disintegrating, and in place of the grandeur it had promised, the tawdriness that Jevelen had become had taken possession of the ruin like weeds entwining themselves through the skeleton of an unfinished skyscraper.
He looked across the compartment of the limousine at Nixie, who was absorbed for the moment in her own thoughts, her eyes flickering curiously across the impassive faces of the khena bodyguards as if reading whatever thoughts went on behind the masks. Watching her, it came to him that he had unconsciously been oversimplifying the situation into an us-them problem of innately paranoid and ruthless Ents, who were from another reality and didn’t belong in the familiar universe, versus everyone else, who did. For he was looking at one of them who was balanced as far from paranoia as anyone Hunt had known; who had come to terms with the strangeness and irreversibility of her new condition, and was able to face the future constructively and with equanimity.
How many more like her, then, were there, integrating themselves inconspicuously into a daunting, alien world, accepting its inhabitants as new fellow-travelers, and able to adapt without fear and malice to the altered state in which they found themselves? Surely there was something here that humans-both Jevlenese and Terran-and Ganymeans could learn profitably from. More to the point, how many more like that were there down in the Entoverse? Looking at the ayatollahs wasn’t the way to tell, for the ones they would encourage to emerge into the Exoverse would be selected to reflect the same qualities as themselves. The threat was not from all of them. All Ents were not malevolent. As was true with humans, the spread within the groups was wider than the differences between groups, making all but the most obvious and trivial generalizations meaningless. It was individuals that counted, and there would be no quick and simple way of separating them.
The limousine ascended again, passing galleries of machinery and storage tanks to emerge suddenly into surroundings of bright, tree lined avenues where high blocks finished in pastel-colored panels and glass rose above screens of urban parkland and greenery. Whether the pale green sky above was real or simulated, Hunt couldn’t tell.
They swung in through a pair of high gates and followed a short driveway beneath an arcade of branches and flowering shrubs to a glass-enclosed entrance in the base of one of the towers. It stood between buttresses of natural-looking rockeries, with water cascading down into walled pools.
Everyone in the rear compartment of the limousine got out. The doors of the building opened automatically to admit them to a tiled lobby area with seats set among low, irregularly shaped plinth tables, and elaborate ornamentations on the pillars and walls. A stream hemmed in by mossy rocks holding clusters of red, pink, and purple plants flowed the full width of the lobby from one side to another, separating them from an inner entrance that lay across a bridge in the center. Overhead, none of the enclosing surfaces were flat, but met in curves and parts of spirals that twisted away to form other, partly disconnected spaces, without a straight line or regular corner anywhere. As they walked with their escorts across the bridge, Hunt had the feeling of being inside a gigantic rendering of an exotically convoluted seashell. Murray thought that whoever dreamed it up must have liked bagels.
Inside were a doorman, a hall porter, and a security man at a desk, all of whom knew the company, and the party passed by without stopping. An elevator whisked them noiselessly upward. Emerging from it, they came onto a platform that seemed at first sight to be hanging in midair. One side looked down over a vast well, plunging through several floors of promenades and what looked like an open-plan restaurant, while the other was a transparent wall through which they could see the locality outside, with the mass of the city rising like a line of cliffs over the treetops. Looking up, even from this height, Hunt still couldn’t decide if the sky was real or fake.
As they began following the platform, it transformed into a terrace skirting the well, leading around to the ends of several corridors opening on the far side. Dreadnought led them into one of the corridors, which turned out to be curved but quite short, bringing them to a door at the end. A white-jacketed valet and a maid were waiting inside when the door opened. Across the hallway behind them were two more hefty men in dark suits. After being checked for weapons, the visitors were conducted through into the residence.
Again, the style was to the general curviform theme of the whole building, but less extreme. Hunt had seen traces of it in other areas of Shiban also, including parts of PAC. He wondered if it reflected a regional or historical Jevlenese style. They moved on through a series of richly carpeted and furnished rooms adorned with pictures, sculptures, pottery, and metalwares of unfamiliar styles, some explicit, some abstract, but all with a distinct feel that Hunt classed as “modern,” as opposed to anything even remotely antique. But from a culture shaped by an alien race that had been flying starships before mankind existed, he should hardly have expected anything else, he supposed.