“What’s the power situation?” Eubeleus asked.
“Again, as expected. Since the primary grid has been shut down, we’ll have to visit the other locations to assemble a coherent supply that can be redirected into the feeder nodes.”
“How long until full system integration?”
“Half a day, maybe a little more. Say a day at most.”
Eubeleus nodded curtly. “Very well. Leave the rest here to the others. We need to check out the local coupler bank.”
“I’ll see to it now.”
“Update the Prophet while you’re at it.”
‘‘I will.’’
Iduane left the console and went out from the main control floor though one of the exits beneath the gallery. Eubeleus watched until he had gone, then turned away and walked through the power control rooms at the rear until he came to another elevator, which took him down through floors of power conditioning and distribution, the I/O and communications subsystem levels, the environmental—control layer, until, finally, he reached the inner containment shell.
He emerged inside a glass-sided bubble, which, although it looked down toward the geometric center of Uttan, seemed because of a warping of the local gravitic gradient to be projecting horizontally out from an immense wall. The wall was a uniform silver-gray, extending away up, down, and from side to side as far as he could see. Twenty feet or so in front of him was another wall, of a milky, translucent texture, parallel to the first and equally unlimited in extent, the two forming a gap that vanished to nothing with the perspective in any direction he chose to look. The space between them
was bridged by a forest of data conduits, power busbars, optical pipes, signal highways, maintenance-pod tunnels, and supporting structures. It made him feel like an insect that had found its way between the hulls of an ocean liner.
He was looking at the outside of the processing matrix of JevEX. The far side of it was more than seven thousand miles away.
Eubeleus usually confined his energies to matters of the present and his plans for the future; the past was a dead affair and of little relevance to his ambitions. But an unusually reflective mood came over him as he stared across at the boundless plane of silent, impenetrable, mi— crolattice crystal. The gap separating him from it held a particular symbolic significance, like a castle moat to an escaped prisoner looking back. It was an appropriate simile.
He believed himself to be an experimental embodiment of the consciousness that JEVEX had fashioned in order to extend its domain to the universe outside. The time for it to commence its expansion in earnest had arrived.
A little under five thousand miles from where Eubeleus was standing, a region of the matrix existed which had differentiated itself by the clustering together of similar activity conditions of the matrix elements into contiguous structures and dynamic patterns. There was nothing that would have distinguished any of the cells from another physically. The differences were purely in the combinations of abstract attributes defining the state of a Thurien processing cell, and the structures had arisen spontaneously through interactions following from the cellular microprogramming.
The region in question had coalesced over time into an oblate sphere, which, as a consequence of complicated processes of pattern propagation that had coevolved with the structures, both rotated and described art orbit through the matrix about one of the primary data-entry ports spaced in a regular grid throughout its volume. It was a little over one hundred fifty miles in diameter along its major diameter, and on its surface there existed a population of mobile, self-directing activity patterns measuring, on average, an inch or so tall, who perceived themselves as self-aware, autonomous beings.
While Eubeleus stood staring at the outside of the matrix, one of those beings found its mind being penetrated by a cosmic flux that carried meaning. The communication flowed from the mind of Iduane, who by this time had linked into the system via one of the
neurocouplers located near the control center some distance above, from which Eubeleus had just descended.
“I hear you, Arisen One,” Ethendor intoned in the temple of Vandros, raising his arms and looking skyward as the vision engulfed him. “What is desired? Thy servant awaits.”