ENTOVERSE

Gina sat down on the arm of the couch, shaking her head bemusedly. “This isn’t real. I’ve known this guy for an hour. The phone rings, and it’s aliens calling from another star system? What happens next?”

“Oh, stick around and we’ll find out,” Hunt answered cheerfully.

“Who knows? If you’re not burned at a stake in the meantime, or exiled to Pluto or somewhere, it might be the beginnings of a new book.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Thuriens were a very rational, nonquarrelsome race of beings to whom the benefits of a society that based itself upon mutual coopera­tion were too self-evident to require much pondering, let alone debate. As a consequence, the Thurien institution of government was a modest, service-oriented affair concerned mainly with resolving disputes and disagreements, and managing the comparatively few functions that it was felt preferable to consign to public agencies. It certainly had nothing to do with projecting power over individuals, enforcing policies that were none of anybody else’s business, or bestowing upon a few the right to decide how the many should be compelled to live.

Having no concept of any alternative, they established the same system—or lack of one, in the opinion of many Terrans—on Jevlen in the period following the destruction of Minerva. So instead of producing the authoritarian institutions that were the inevitable out­come of the ferocious power struggles and ideological confusions char­acteristic of social evolution on Earth, Jevienese society developed as a kind of patronized anarchy, secure in the guarantee of unlimited goods and products indefinitely, and the total absence of threats. Hence, survival had never played any great role as a shaper of individ­ual or collective behavior; therefore, the rationality that human sur­vival ultimately depends on had received little incentive to bloom.

Over the years, many popular political and quasireligious cults had come to flourish on Jevlen. They appealed by catering to the needs of individuals to discover some purpose and to affirm their identity in a risk-free, unstructured society, and to the fascination of the uncritical for peculiar beliefs. One of the largest and most militant of them called itself the Axis of Light. Its symbol was a green crescent. The leader, whose real name was Eubeleus, had been well connected with the previous regime responsible for the short—lived Federation, and went by the public title of Deliverer.

The Deliverer’s followers numbered millions. Their faith was a conviction that the key to opening up latent, mystical human powers lay in the supercomputer, JEVEX. Their indignation at the Gany­means’ shutting down of JEVEX, therefore, stemmed not merely from material deprivations or fears of a political tactic to encourage dependency, but from what they saw as a persecution of their beliefs.

One of the most commonly used methods of interfacing to Thurien networking systems—JEVEX and VISAR—was by direct coupling into the user’s neural centers, bypassing the normal sensory apparatus. The central dogma that the Deliverer taught was that the close-coupled interaction between the inner processes of the human psyche and the more remote levels of supercomputing complexity could unlock the mind to new dimensions of reality. Thus stimulated, the believer would be enabled to conquer the ultimate reaches of time and space. He would come to know his frill self in all the dimensions of its existence, and gain access to the powers encom­passed by them.

All heady stuff. The followers were suitably impressed. For his part, it was clear that the Deliverer, Eubeleus, held JEVEX in extraordi­nary awe and reverence, with an unswerving belief in its abilities that bordered on fanatical. But such loyalty was really to be expected: He believed himself to be a physically incarnate extension of JEVEX.

The day after Garuth’s call to Hunt, Eubeleus met with a man called Grevetz at the latter’s walled villa and estate in a forested valley known as Cerberan, located among hills not far from the city of Shiban. Grevetz was the regional boss of the local Jevienese criminal syndicate that had been making the most of the new black-mark ‘t opportunities created by the surges in wants that the withdrawal of JEVEX had brought about. With them was a lieutenant of Grevetz’s, Scirio, who ran the operation in a part of Shiban.