ENTOVERSE

“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, 0 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 Jevienese 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 Jevien 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.

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