“No,” Nixie insisted. “Outside. It’s real.” She waved a hand. “Look around. Isn’t this real, what we see around us?”
Hunt stared, still unable to make sense of it. “This is the world beyond?”
“And you are inhabitants of it. Our purpose is to learn to flow with the streams of thought and emerge here. That is what I have done.”
“Then, how do you emerge here?” Shilohon asked. “Do you mean that once you were in this other. . . ‘inner’ world, and suddenly you found you were Nixie, in this one? You had no idea how you came to be here. Is that what you’re telling us?”
“Not quite,” Nixie said. “It has to be through a coupler. You can only emerge through a coupler.”
Hunt shook his head. “A coupler into VISAR?” he queried.
“No.” Nixie looked at him as if it should have been obvious. “Into
JEVEX!”
Hunt sat back, stunned. Danchekker’s head jerked around abruptly to look at her again, like a bird’s. Impossible thoughts came into Hunt’s head. “Surely it can’t have been JEVEX itself,” he protested. “We’re not talking about something like what’s just happened with
VISAR?”
Shilohin thought for a moment, then pronounced firmly, “No. VISAR’s internal representation of reality is nothing like our own. It has evolved a different world model, utterly incompatible. As you just heard, it doesn’t even share our perception of physical space. An entity like that could never reside in a human nervous system. If this place does indeed exist, which Nixie says she came from, then at least it will have basic geometric and spatial properties in common with what we ourselves recognize. In other words, it exists in space as we know it.” She paused, as if hesitating to voice the implication. “But how anybody could actually travel from somewhere else via a neural coupler, I couldn’t, just at this moment, even hazard a guess.”
Before anyone could say more, Del Cullen appeared in the doorway of the room. He was looking worried. “She’s not there,” he said, directing his words at Hunt. Cullen had gone away to call Gina at the Geerbaine Best Western, since they had expected to hear from her by now on the latest with Baumer. “She didn’t check in last night, and they haven’t had any messages. Baumer hasn’t been seen since yesterday, either. There’s been lots of trouble outside. I don’t like it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Gina was sitting on a wall beside Baumer, eating a grinil sandwich and sipping a hot, sharp-tasting beverage that passed for coffee. Then she was lying on her back, staring up at a strange ceiling.
The transition was as abrupt and as disorientating as that. She had no awareness of anything that had happened in between, not even a sensation of time having passed. It was as if a piece had been cut out of a recording tape in her head and the ends spliced cleanly together again.
For what must have been several minutes, she lay regrouping her scattered thoughts and trying vainly to coax an ounce of a recollection from the gap in her impressions. But there was nothing. Her train of memory was like the trace of a recording clock that had lost power and then started again sometime later, after what could, for all the information she had to go on, have been a moment or a year.
She raised her head and saw that she was still dressed as she had been; she was lying on a couch and covered to the waist by a light blanket. The room was warm and clean, furnished simply with chairs, table, closet, and vanity, and embellished with a few strangely styled ornaments, and some pictures on the walls. It felt more like what could have been a spare room in any private house than a hospital.
But there was a trace of an odor permeating the place, which suggested, if anything, a kind of incense. She could detect no sign of any injury, and concluded that she hadn’t been in an accident. Therefore her amnesia had been induced deliberately; somebody didn’t want her to know where she was or how she’d gotten there.