What the results seemed to say was: Either JEVEX was a lot bigger than the Jevlenese had admitted; or else there was another facility operating whose existence had never been disclosed. Curious, Ganymean engineers, assisted by some of the more cooperatively disposed Jevienese, began quietly carrying out a program of detailed inspections and tests at the sites where the main nodes and operating centers of the network were located.
Cullen decided to move Gina permanently from Geerbaine into PAC. He didn’t like the thought of her being on her own out there now that he had seen the people that Baumer had been connected with. Accordingly, Gina called the Best Western to terminate her stay, and arranged to drive out later that afternoon with Lebansky and Koberg to collect her things.
A little over an hour before they were due to leave, a call came through for .Gina from a woman who introduced herself as Marion Frayne, also from Earth and staying at the BW. She had read and enjoyed all of Gina’s books, she said, and wondered if she could leave a couple at the reception desk for Gina to autograph. “Thank you so very much. You probably don’t remember, but we met briefly once at a party in Lisbon,” she chattered delightedly when Gina agreed.
In fact, Gina had never been to Portugal. The phrase was a code that General Shaw had given her at her unexpected meeting with him in Shiban. Before leaving, therefore, she took from a folder in a compartment of her briefcase the notes she had made of developments inside PAC since then. They included an account of what was happening with Baumer, the help that Nixie was giving, and the various theories being bandied about. This seemed more of a domestic issue to Gina, and not something that would relate to interplanetary politics, but she had been told to omit nothing. Finally, she summarized what she knew of the Ganymeans’ findings on the capacity of the JEVEX core system and Garuth’s decision to have the major sites checked.
She didn’t like what she was doing, she admitted to herself as she folded the sheets and tucked them inside her purse. Ever since the meeting with Shaw, the thought of being a spy inside the UNSA team had been weighing in her mind. It wasn’t her way of doing things, and she wondered why she had agreed to it back at Goddard. True, she hadn’t known Hunt and the rest of them, or Garuth and the Ganymeans, the way she did now. . . but she hoped it hadn’t been just to get herself a ticket to Jevien.
General Shaw must have made it sound very important. He was, she recalled, a pretty persuasive salesman.
Nixie, in Phantasmagoria, before she overwrote whoever the original Nixie was, had been a “he.” He trained as a kind of religious disciple in a temple in a large city, but later ran away to study with an independent teacher who sounded like a hermit, up in the mountains. It was from his school that Nixie had “arisen” to the world that seers talked about beyond the sky. What happened to Baumer hadn’t happened to Nixie because her teacher was wise and thorough, and had prepared her with some idea of what to expect. Apparently others who had gone ahead sometimes returned as spirits that spoke in the minds of seers through the mysterious “currents” which Nixie alluded to repeatedly—a result, presumably, of “awakened” ayatollahs somehow applying their extraordinary affinity and reconnecting via couplers to wherever they came from.
Baumer, too, talked about a hermit-teacher who ran a school for mystics up in a wilderness somewhere, although Nixie was unable to locate it from his ramblings. He feared retribution, however, because he said he had emerged from Phantasmagoria in another’s rightful place. Hunt had adopted the practice of calling him “Thomas,” because of his religious origin and the fact that he doubted everything that anyone told him. After what had happened, Hunt felt, it wouldn’t have been decent, somehow, to have continued using Baumer’s name to address the shell that was all that was left of him.
“Look, I’m not a demon for the god of darkness, and I don’t care what you did to his flying angel,” Hunt said. “In fact I’m not much into any gods at all. What makes it so difficult for you to believe us?”