Shingen-Hu licked his lips hungrily and stared. The skredgen watched them, motionless. The Master’s arm rose shakily, and a finger of his bony hand pointed from the folds of tattered sleeve. The finger jabbed commandingly. The skredgen yawned and rose to its feet; then turned its back and walked away, swishing its tail contemptuously.
“Alms… alms for the holy who have fallen upon evil times,” Thrax called, brandishing his bowl in the square of the village they came to at the bottom of the track.
“Everyone’s fallen on evil times these days. Where have you two been?” a woman asked scornfully as she passed.
One of a group of laborers who were idling outside a tavern called out, “‘Oly men, are yer? Let’s see somethin’ ‘oly, then.”
“That’s what all the beggars who come through here tell us,” another said. “Take us all for fools out here, they do.”
“We’ve seen enough city thieves before. Away with the pair ‘o ye,” a third told them.
“We’re not thieves. We’re genuine,” Thrax insisted defiantly. “This is a Master. He has remained here, that countless others may arise.”
“‘Im? A Master? That walkin’ bag o’ rags? Looks more ter me like the only currents ‘e’d know anythin’ abaht are the ones ‘e pours dahn ‘is throat.” The others laughed derisively.
“Here’s my staff,” the second who had spoken said, holding it up. “A good, solid wooden one. Show us the passing-through of a hand. A junior adept can do that. It should be easy enough to do in his sleep for a-” He looked slyly from side to side, inviting the others to share the joke. “-Master.” They sniggered obligingly.
“You can do it,” Thrax murmured imploringly to Shingen-Hu. “Your powers haven’t deserted you.” But Shingen-Hu just stood and stared at the staff glassily.
They were chased from the village by a jeering mob who pelted them with rocks and garbage, while hounds barked at their heels. Nieru hung very dim in the sky that night. Probably, Thrax thought, because the god was ashamed.
In the city of Orenash at the temple of Vandros, the high priest Ethendor had a vision. A spirit from Hyperia appeared to him and spoke in his mind, telling of great events that would soon come to pass. Filled with wonder at the things he learned, Ethendor hurried to inform the king.
“Our actions to placate Vandros were inspired. We have been tested and found not to be wanting. We shall be saved.”
“Tested? How have we been tested?” the king asked.
“By the gods who look down from Hyperia. We were set the task of sending them disciples, and we have measured well. Hence we have been chosen to be the prime servants to the gods when the Great Awakening comes.”
“The Great Awakening, at last! Tell me, what was revealed?”
Ethendor’s voice trembled portentously. “Soon now, the days will return and the stars will shine again. The heavens will radiate their splendor as never before. Then shall the people of Waroth be called and arise to the sky in great multitudes. Hyperia itself shall be opened to them. Thus it has been revealed to me by the lord of all gods.”
The king marveled at the high priest’s words. “Truly it was spoken? These plagues shall be lifted from us and the world restored?”
“A mighty war has been fought among the gods. The power that lights the sky was stolen and extinguished, but now it has been reclaimed. The pretenders who desecrated the banner of Nieru have been vanquished by the true bearers of Vandros’s green.”
“And now, many are to arise?”
“The time has come for the last of the unclean and the profane who have defiled Hyperia to be exterminated. The faithful from Waroth shall be the wrath and the instrument. Thou, O King, will be their leader, and I, the prophet who will inspire them.”
“We are to see Hyperia?” The king was dumbfounded. Ethendor was exuberant. “We are to rule Hyperia!”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
If JEVEX was indeed what the evidence seemed to indicate, it meant that the Jevlenese war industries were merely what the architects of the Federation had been doing on the surface of Uttan. Inside, they had hollowed out the entire planet and installed an expanded version of JEVEX as a single, monolithic, supercomputing matrix, servicing the Jevlenese world-system via communications though i-space. The intention had doubtless been to acquire, eventually, a system of their own capable of rivaling or even surpassing VISAR; but to keep the project secret, they had concentrated it all in one place instead of spreading it out across hundreds of worlds in the way VISAR was spread. The equipment actually functioning on Jevlen was merely part of the remote interface system into it.
In this way, the unique conditions had been created which allowed the matrix universe to come into being. Hunt christened it the “Entoverse,” or “universe inside,” as opposed to the familiar “Exoverse.” The choice pointed to the obvious term “Ents” for its inhabitants, which was duly adopted, the Tolkienesque connotation being considered doubly appropriate.
All of which was very attractive and exciting, and could give scientists new ideas to amuse themselves with for years. But, as Danchekker pointed out, it was all still nothing but speculation. A Phantasmagoria of software-originated delusions could not be ruled out simply because of Nixie’s convictions, and a planet-size JEVEX contained in Uttan was just as capable of creating them as a distributed JEVEX was. In other words, until somebody actually went to Uttan and looked, they were no nearer to knowing if an Entoverse actually existed.
But if JEVEX was concentrated on Uttan, then Eubeleus’s motive was obviously to gain control of it; and whatever his plans were after that, they spelled no good. Hence there was a justification for taking the whole thing to JPC and the Thuriens. Such an approach would entail Garuth’s going direct to Calazar. Since the team was only talking conjecture at this stage, to insure that Garuth’s case would be as convincing as possible they devoted an all-night session to going over the questions that the Thuriens might come up with and seeing what other known peculiarities of Phantasmagoria the Entoverse theory could be made to account for.
The pattern-switching algorithm that Hunt had postulated for moving clusters of activated cells-solid objects, in the Ent world of perception-provided a possible explanation for a range of mystifying phenomena. Shilohin, in reviewing early Thurien processing methods, discovered that it had been common practice for the leading edge of a pattern that was being shifted through the matrix to activate before the trailing edge was switched off. Thus there would be a slight overlap of the two images, causing the pattern to be fractionally longer in the direction of motion than when it was at rest. Moreover, the degree of elongation would increase with the propagation speed. That one fact would account for the absence in the Entoverse of the invariances of dimension with motion-and because of the effects attributed to the planetary rotation that VISAR had inferred, with time and with spatial orientation, too-that gave the Exoverse the regularity and consistency that made possible the organized body of knowledge called science, the construction of machines, and the technologies that sprang from using them.
What about the apparent ability of solid objects in the Entoverse to penetrate one another on occasions? It was not difficult to see how that might happen if one of the “quantum numbers” defining an activated cell was some kind of priority indicator. Two objects meeting would, in effect, be competing to possess the same cells. If, as was usually the case, they were composed of equal-priority elements, they would simply bounce apart. But if one happened to be designated higher-priority, it would “borrow” the volume previously belonging to the other object for as long as their parts coincided, returning it to its previous condition upon separation. Similar causes could be found for such other phenomena as the differing “affinities” of some materials for others, the inconsistencies of cause and effect that made prediction in the Entoverse a risky business, and the sudden discontinuities that appeared as cataclysms and catastrophes.