A crowd of villagers grew and followed as the procession came into the village. Some jeered and pelted the cart with rocks and garbage. Others cheered and called out praises to the priests. The soldiers rode haughtily, jostling aside those who were slow to move, and swinging their rods freely to clear the way, while the Examiner and his retinue sat erect in their carriage, maintaining their stony—faced composure and dignity.
A platform had been erected in the square at the center of the village, where an excited crowd had already formed. On the platform were three stakes with fagots piled ready for lighting, while the executioner and his assistants stood impassively in front, watching as the procession drew up. The guards clubbed and prodded the prisoners down from the cart. From the dignitaries’ carriage, the Deputy to the Examiner descended with two acolytes and pointed to three of the prisoners. Guards hustled the terrified three up onto the platform. Thrax and Shingen-Hu were herded to one side with the remainder, while the Deputy climbed the steps behind and raised his hands to address the crowd.
“People of the hamlet of Rakashym, these are the heretics who have brought pestilence and ruin to the lands of Waroth.” He paused, while the crowd erupted in a new frenzy of ridicule and abuse, then gestured down at the group who had been moved aside. “These shall be taken to Orenash to join the others who have profaned, and there will the vengeance of the gods be exacted. Then will the stain that has- sat upon Waroth be cleaned, and a pronouncement shall be heard then of momentous times that are about to befall us.”
The Deputy looked over the crowd. They waited dutifully, but that was not what they were interested in at the moment. Reading their mood, he dismissed the rest of the oration that he had intended and turned to point accusingly at the three prisoners quaking behind him. “But Rakashym shall not be denied its chance to see the fate that awaits all who transgress, and to show its devotion.” Cheering broke out. This was more like it. The Deputy nodded. “Let this day be a lesson . .
Among the prisoners watching fearfully below, Thrax turned his head to see how Shingen-Hu was reacting. To his surprise, he found a light shining in the Master’s eyes that he had expected never to see again. The strength had come back into his features, and the body that Thrax had watched wasting away was standing straight and vibrant with sudden inner energy.
“Master, what inspires thee so?” Thrax whispered. “What do you see?”
“I hear a voice!” Shingen-Hu answered. “The power returns. I hear a god speaking within me.”
A delusion brought on by hopelessness, Thrax told himself. The gods had abandoned them long ago.
Hunt settled back into the neurocoupler in one of the booths off the corridor at the rear of the Gondola. In the few years since he had moved from England to join UNSA, he had walked on the Moon, flown with one of the manned missions to Jupiter and stayed for months on Ganymede, returned to Earth aboard an alien starship, virtual-traveled over much of the Thuriens’ domain of the local region of the Galaxy, and finally traveled physically to a distant star. But of all of it, the expedition that he was about to embark on was the strangest ever. In fact it was probably the strangest that had ever been embarked upon by anyone in the whole of time.
Besides himself, the others who would be going down into the Entoverse were Danchekker, since he was equally a part of the team on the spot, Nixie, obviously, as a guide, and Gina, who as journalist refused to be left out—all of whom were in other booths nearby. Eesyan would be going, too, as technical advisor and principal liaison to VISAR, coupled in from Thurien.
Since VISAR would need all of the channel capacity of the single available i—space link to sustain its manipulations of JEVEX and its behind-the-scenes operations in the Entoverse, it wouldn’t be possible for the machine to support continual interaction in real time between the occupants of the couplers and the pseudoversions of themselves written into the Entoverse. Instead, the “surrogates,” once they were impressed with the personality patterns extracted by VISAR from their originals, would proceed to function autonomously. Since what constituted a personality was the thinking, feeling information pattern that defined it and not the physical medium that the pattern happened to be supported in, the team would in effect be existing and functioning in the Entoverse.