ENTOVERSE

During that time, their real-world bodies would lie comatose until, at last, VISAR would erase the Ent-body surrogates and transfer all the impressions and recollections that they had accumulated in the interim back into the human brain patterns. For all practical purposes, the team would have been transported into the Entoverse for a while, functioned there in response to whatever circumstances awaited them, and then been brought back again.

“How are we doing, VISAR?” Hunt muttered.

“We’re getting there. Sorting through this kind of detail involves a lot of processing, even for me.”

Hunt already knew that. He was just impatient to get on with it.

To avoid an inordinate amount of try-it-and-see experimenting that they didn’t have time for anyway, VISAR would not attempt to create authentic interpretations of how a human nervous system would perceive the actual structures and relationships between them that existed in the Entoverse—if, indeed, any such interpretation was possible at all. Instead, the same principle of correspondence that caused emerged Ents to remember their past experiences in Exoverse—meaningful terms would cause the surrogates to perceive their experiences in terms that were familiar. Rather than try to compose a routine for constructing some physically visualizable depiction of the abstract patterns of intercellular transactions taking place in the Entoverse, VISAR would endow its pseudo-Ents with ready-made patterns of conceptual associations extracted from the hosts. These would respond to external stimuli by selecting the nearest from their stores of elemental human percepts that conformed to the same set of basic attributes. Thus, a feature of the surface configuration that was reasonably permanent, behaved with the properties of mass, and reflected part of the radiant flux impinging on it would look like a rock; a form that absorbed components of its surroundings, stayed where it was, and grew systematically bigger would look like a tree; and Hunt, whatever the nature of the bound pattern of cells that VISAR had needed to commandeer to create his Ent-equivalent acceptable to other Ents, would look, to himself, like Hunt—modi­fied and appareled in whatever way VISAR judged appropriate to the circumstances that it discerned. “There isn’t time to dream up a new, internally consistent world of experience,” VISAR had explained. “We’ll just have to work with what we’ve got.”

“What’s going on now?” Hunt asked.

“I think we’re in business,” VISAR replied. “Nixie’s in touch with one of them down there now. It’s not one of the big chiefs that she was searching for, but it seems like some guys who are in trouble. I can give you a quick preview.”

A scene appeared as if before Hunt’s eyes of a noisy, excited crowd cramming in from the side streets to the central square of what seemed to be a primitive village. The people were dressed in crude, rustic garb of coarse shirts and breeches, jerkins, and cloaks. But there was also a peculiar, wheelless carriage that ran on slides, like a sledge, with occupants who were more finely arrayed in jewelry and robes. In front of the carnage was a protective line of figures wearing helmets and breastplates and carrying weapons, and ahead, more of them mounted on strange six-legged beasts. Behind the carnage was a rough, open cart, also without wheels. Both conveyances were hitched to pairs of strange, bulky animals, again with six legs but heavier than the ones bearing the riders. They looked somewhat like buffalo, but with enormous, pillarlike legs that projected sideways from their bodies, then bent downward in a right angle like a spider’s.

There was a raised platform with more figures, and behind them, Hunt realized to his alarm and consternation, three stakes piled ready for burning. The houses of the village were square and smooth, possibly mud-built, with projections like minarets, and arches con­necting across some of the alleys. Here and there in the square, scaly, doglike animals were whooping and leaping like miniature kan­garoos. The light was dim, a gloomy twilight. Outlined through it in the background were mountains, more vertical and sharply angular than any natural formations that Hunt had ever seen before.

Although Hunt had been prepared, he still found himself over­come with amazement. “That’s really it, the Entoverse?” he asked, struggling to accept it. “This is really happening right now, inside a computer light-years away from here?”