ENTOVERSE

They had Baumer sedated and placed him in a coupler for VISAR to take a look inside his head. But VISAR stolidly refused to violate the privacy of somebody incapable of authorizing such a probe, and no amount of arguing would change it. So Hunt started talking to Baumer instead.

As a day or two went by, Baumer calmed down and his ramblings became less frenzied. With Nixie helping, glimpses of a place started coming together. Soon there was no doubt that it was the same Phantasmagoria that Nixie talked about, identical in every detail that they were able to establish. And in the process, Hunt’s conviction grew that he was not talking to a German who had undergone some traumatic personality change, but to a genuinely different, and very alien, being.

Was this being, then, some kind of software construct that JEVEX had created, which had somehow found its way into Baumer’s head? Hunt had read some of Eubeleus’s claims to being a creation of precisely this kind himself, but had dismissed it as rubbish. Could there be something to it?

But if there were, it would mean that an entity that had originated as a caricature of reality, and that needed all the power and sophistica­tion of JEVEX to sustain it, had taken on the internal depth and complexity necessary to become reality and stand independently in its own right. Hunt couldn’t see how that could be possible. Pinocchio might come to life and work without the strings in a fairy story; but life in the real world depended on structure and organization a lot more complicated than any puppet’s.

A puppet was made to look like a living organism that moved itself from the inside, but it was really operated by forces applied on the outside. Similarly, JEVEX’s puppets were simulations of life, ani­mated by JEVEX’s manipulations. But if Nixie and the person that Baumer had become were as real as Hunt accepted them to be, they could only be functioning by virtue of an innate complexity of structure that JEVEX would never have put there. And that kind of complexity only came about spontaneously, over a long period of time, through evolution in the real, physical world.

Which, of course, was absurd . .

Unless “real, physical world” meant something different from what everyone knew it meant.

The thought caused Hunt to spend a lot of time asking himself what he meant by it. It reminded him of the conversation he’d had with Gina in his apartment back home, when she had asked him a similar question. And his answer had been that everything “out there” boiled down to photons and other energy quanta, along with a few simple rules governing the ways they interacted with one another.

Packages of attributes. Bundles of numbers riding together, adrift in an ocean of coordinates . .

Numbers and coordinates, specifying . . . what?

Nobody knew. It could have been anything.

But the whole “real” universe had evolved out of it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Rodgar Jassilane’s Ganymean communications scientists, along with Duncan Watt, who was working with them, had uncovered a techni­cal mystery concerning the residual core of JEVEX that had been left running: There wasn’t enough of it to support the amount of traffic that seemed to be indicated once the size of the Achene’s black-market operation was estimated and allowed for.

MacArthur, the Jevlenese that Shiohin had failed to convince with the laser demonstration, and who was already rising fast in the purple-spiral movement, was a comparative new boy on the scene, having awakened as an ayatollah only in the time since JEVEX was sus­pended. There were others, too, and the Ganymeans had been ana­lyzing figures of known cases and rumored ones from all over the planet in an attempt to approximate the total. Other sources, includ­ing figures gleaned from ZORAC’s unofficial tapping of Shiban’s communications network, gave a figure for the incidence rate ex­pressed as the number of “possession” events per thousand user-hours of exposure—a risk statistic which the khena would definitely not have wanted to become public knowledge. Extrapolated to cover the planet, that figure gave a measure of the size of the total black—market operation. The known operating characteristics of VISAR enabled that to be expressed in terms of the system power necessary to support it. But when the officially sanctioned archive-interrogation and maintenance operations were added in, the total indicated load was far greater than the residual core of JevEX would have been able to handle.