ENTOVERSE

“The beam from Thurien has gone down. We’ve lost the connec­tion to JEVEX, too.” Keshen sat back and tossed up his hands. “That’s it. Zilch.”

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“What can I do? Somebody’s cut the links. They’re dead.”

In the room behind, the others were on their feet. Scirio bit his lip, thinking furiously. He hadn’t expected repercussions so quickly. Maybe Grevetz had had connections that even he hadn’t known about. And they would need to be high-level connections for this to have happened. He had backed what had sounded like the winning side; now it was all a mess. Did the freaks from inside JEVEX that these Terrans had talked about own the whole city already?

Fendro, the club manager, who had been out in the reception office, burst into the far side of the club’s main lounge through the door from the front passage.

“Boss! Boss! Where’s Scirio?”

Scirio went back out to the lounge. “What?”

Fendro pointed excitedly back toward the front entrance. “Cops! There’s cops outside like walking artillery. No m,essing. I mean, they’re coming in!” A series of solid concussions sounded from the front of the club to emphasize the point.

Another of the staff appeared from the back. “They’ve got the yard covered. Ain’t no way out that way.”

“Shit,” Scirio muttered. What had he stirred up now? “Okay, look, take a couple of guys, get back up front, and try to stall them there. Speedball, Beans, dig in here to cover Fendy when they pull back. We’ll go on up the tower to move out the hearse. Split as soon as you get three beeps on the box. Blow this place to hold ‘em if you have to.”

Murray waved along the corridor in the direction of the booths. “What about the guys dreaming in there?”

“You brought ‘em here. They’re your problem. If you want ‘em out of here, get ‘em up the tower. We’re getting out.”

On Thunen, in the Government Center in the principal city of Thurios, Calazar turned a bewildered face toward the others who had been following events in the village with him. In reality they were still coupled into VISAR at different locations, including Caldwell in Washington, and Leyel Torres aboard the Shapieron at Geerbaine, and not together in the same room as they perceived.

“VISAR, what’s happening?” he demanded.

“The channel through the i-space link from Jevien has been cut. I don’t have access to there, or to JEVEX.”

“You mean you’ve lost them? Aren’t they still there?” Caldwell had not completely followed the technical dialogue between the Thuriens and VISAR about autonomous personality transfers and temporary state suspension.

“They’re all still there and functioning in the Entoverse,” VISAR replied. “But I can’t communicate with it to talk to them or manipu­late events anymore.”

Caldwell looked confused. “But those were just. . . ‘copies,’ or whatever, weren’t they? The original people are still in the couplers, right?”

“Yes,” VISAR said. “But the capacity of the one channel wasn’t sufficient for me to continually update the original personae-inside the bodies that are in the couplers—in real time. So they were left in a suspended state. The transformed versions that I wrote into the Ent surrogates are the only ones functioning as coherent, conscious iden­tities. In effect, they’re there: inside the matrix on Uttan.”

Caldwell was still uncertain. “But the bodies in the couplers still contain the original personalities, surely. Won’t they reanimate inde­pendently?”

“They’ll reanimate, yes,” VISAR said. “But without any knowl­edge of what happened to the surrogates in the Entoverse.”

“Then we’re okay—” Caldwell caught the looks on the Thuriens’ faces. “No? Why not?”

“I don’t think you quite see our point, Gregg,” Calazar said. “As far as we’re concerned, ever since the transfers down into the En­toverse were made, the beings that VISAR created there are real, bona fide identities in their own right, as much as any other Ent. Whether or not they originated as psychical clones of other beings existing out here in the Exoverse is beside the point. They’re stuck there, and we can’t get them out.”

“Okay, go knock ‘em dead,” VISAR’s voice said. “You’re on.”

Hunt tensed with involuntary apprehension . . . And then the distant, dreamy feeling brought on when the mind was being flooded by sensations fed in from the machine left him suddenly. He opened his eyes, puzzled. “VISAR?” The booth was silent. He sat up in the recliner. The image of the three terrified figures chained to the stakes, the executioners advancing toward them with knives, and the ragged prophet shouting from below was still vivid in his mind. What had gone wrong?