The scientific mission ship Shapieron was sent to conduct experiments on altering the radiation dynamics of a distant star to assess the feasibility of changing the Sun's output as an alternative solution to Minerva's problem if the attempt based on atmospheric reengineering coupled with biological modification failed. But the star went unstable, forcing the Shapieron to make an emergency departure when partway through overhauling its drive system, which operated by creating a local distortion of spacetime. The result was that the ship experienced an artificially compounded time-dilation in which twenty-five million years passed by before it was able to reintegrate with the local solar reference frame, compared to only twenty years of ship's time. Hence, it returned to find the configuration of the Solar System changed, Minerva gone, and a new race of terrestrial humans spacefaring among the planets.
The "Giants" came to Earth, where they were cordially received, and remained for six months. But the most significant outcome of their presence was the opening of the first direct contact between Earth and the Thuriens, bypassing the Jevelenese intermediaries established by longstanding precedent. The story of how the Jevlenese had schemed to retard Earth's development and misrepresent its modern-day situation was finally exposed. In the ensuing confrontation the Jevelenese, who had been secretly making military preparations of their own, proclaimed their independence, staged a demonstration of strength, and demanded submission from the Thuriens. But their hand had been forced; the bid was premature and collapsed when the Terrans and Thuriens working together turned the Jevlenese's own stratagem of deception against them by inventing a fictitious Terran battle force manufactured entirely within the supercomputing entity VISAR, which supported the Thuriens' interstellar civilization. (See Giants' Star.)
The Jevelense leaders believed the deception and capitulated, after which the world of Jevlen was placed under Ganymean and Terran administration while a reformed system of government was being worked out. Because of the autonomy and privacy to run their own affairs that the Jevlenese had always insisted on, this was the first opportunity for outsiders to look closely into what had been going on there. What they found was even stranger than anything that had gone before.
Obsession for conquest and fixation on the irrational ideas that had been imported to Earth was not a general trait common to all Jevelenese. They stemmed from a small, disaffected but influential group within the race that had appeared suddenly. Something about their deeper psychology seemed to set them apart from the majority of Jevlenese. They were the source of the beliefs in magic and supernatural powers that defied all experience and had never arisen among the Ganymeans or Lunarians, yet sprang from inner convictions that were unshakable. It was as if their instincts about the nature of the world and the forces operating in it had been shaped by a different reality.
And it turned out that this was indeed exactly the case. For the "Ents"-from "Entoverse," or "Universe Within," as the unique realm where they originated came to be named-were not products of the familiar world of space, time, matter, and physics at all. In setting up their own planetary administration, the Jevlenese had created an independent computing complex, JEVEX, to serve a comparable purpose to that of the Thuriens' VISAR. In a peculiar concurrence of circumstances, information quanta took on a role analogous to that of material particles, interacting and combining to form structures in the dataspace continuum that corresponded to molecules and more complex configurations in physical space. A complete phenomenological "universe" resulted, eventually producing self-organizing entities that were sufficiently complex to become aware of their own existence and perceive themselves as inhabitants of a world. But the "forces" that guided the unfolding of events in that world derived not from the physics of the universe outside, but from the underlying internal rules imposed by the system programmers.
Following Thurien practice, the primary method for interfacing with JEVEX was by direct neural coupling to the mental processes of the user. Some of the Ents discovered that they could interact with the data streams flowing through their world, and from them they extracted perceptions of a "higher space" beyond the one that they existed in, where superior beings lived and impossible things happened. Adepts among the Ents learned to project their psyches into these "currents" and transfer themselves into this world "beyond," where they became occupiers of hosts who had literally been possessed. So the aberrant element among the Jevlenese were not deviants who had acquired their aggressions, insecurities, and strange notions of causality in the same world of experience that had molded the minds of Ganymeans, Lunarians, and Terrans; they were victims of a form of alien invasion more weird than science fiction had ever conceived. (See Entoverse.)
Such "possessed" Jevelenese-taken over by Ent personalities-seemed also have been at the root of the schism that subverted the Lunarian enterprise when it had almost succeeded-fifty thousand years before JEVEX even existed! How could this possibly be?
Following from the earlier Ganymean spacecraft propulsion technology, the Thurien interstellar transportation and communications web exploited artificial manipulations of spacetime to bypass the restrictions of ordinary space. The mathematics of the physics involved also admitted solutions that implied the possibility of transfer through time. Since the Thuriens had never been able to put a physical interpretation to this, they regarded it as no more than a theoretical curiosity. But then, in the final stage of the "Pseudowar" in which the Jevlenese believed themselves about to be assailed by VISAR's imaginary Terran invasion fleet, their leadership attempted an escape to a distant planet that they had secretly made into a fortress. When JEVEX initiated creation of a transfer port to transport their ships, VISAR intervened in a countermove to neutralize it. Nobody ever knew quite what happened as the two supercomputers grappled across light-years for control of the same knot of spacetime-except that the fleeing Jevlenese craft were swept into the convulsions. Afterward, all sign of them had vanished. Everywhere.
But the last images to be received from a surveillance probe that had clung in pursuit showed they had rematerialized somewhere. There was a background of stars. And there was a world. The world was Minerva, intact, as it had been. The starfield showed the time to have been the late period of the Lunarians. In fact, it was at just before the time when the Lambians adopted their militant and uncompromising policy toward Cerios. This was surely too much to have been a coincidence.
With Jevlen pacified and on probation while its population adjusted to life undisturbed by the influence of the Ents, the scientists of Thurien and Earth were free to turn their attention to the latest, and perhaps the most baffling mystery of all. (See also the "Giants Chronology" compiled by Dr. Attila Torkos, page 403.)
PART ONE: The Multiverse
CHAPTER ONE
The object appeared out of nowhere on the Earth-ward side of the Sun, roughly halfway between the mean orbits of Earth and Mars. Its bulk ejected the flux of solar-wind particles and cosmic-ray photons that happened to be occupying the volume that it materialized in, and generated a mild gravitational ripple fitting for its mass of several tens of thousand tons equivalent. But otherwise, its arrival was as unremarkable as its appearance.