“Who’d need to go?” Hunt snapped. “Keshen for a start, I assume.” He turned back to the Jevlenese engineer. “Will you do it?” Keshen swallowed hard, but nodded.
“I’ll go with him,” Jassilane offered promptly. “That’s all. You won’t get more than two of us into one of the i-fitted probes, anyway.”
There wasn’t time to for any more finesse. Eubeleus was probably wondering already why the ship wasn’t accelerating. Hunt looked at Torres and indicated Keshen with a jerk of his head. “Let’s do it. Get him to a coupler, quick.”
Torres confirmed the order with a brief wave to one of the Gany-means. “ZORAC, prepare a sounding probe for launch.” He waved to two more of the ship’s officers. “Have two EV suits made ready at the access lock, one Terran model, one Ganymean.”
Keshen was already being speeded through a doorway out from the command deck to the couplers. The other Ganymeans saluted and hurried away.
Chained again, and with guards keeping them constantly covered at spearpoint, the prisoners sat morosely in the bumping, sliding cart as it approached the outskirts of Orenash. It was amazing, Hunt thought. Now that he was adjusting to the crazy dynamics of the place, he could see the change between north-south and east-west lengths every time the cart rounded an approximately right-angle bend. The scientist in him, even in a predicament that made anything else seem pointless, noted it as a detectable alteration in the cart’s length-breadth proportions. No wonder the people here had never made anything beyond a few primitive tools. And the mountains discernible off to the left in the twilight were noticeably closer than they had been when the procession came out onto the plain, although the route was surely more or less parallel to them.
Beside him, Gina was pressed close, fighting to keep her emotions under control. He reached across her lap to squeeze her arm reassuringly. One of the guards growled something threatening. Hunt drew back.
“Well, here it is,” she said. “The world of Earth’s mythology, only real, just like we said. But who’d have thought we’d end up in it?” She drew a long, shaky breath, and the brave face she had been struggling to maintain broke down. “Look, I’m not very good at this. I don’t know what they’ve got lined up at the end of this ride, but—”
“Save it,” Hunt said. “As you said, it’s a mythology become real. Miracles can happen.”
“What miracles?”
“Who knows?”
“You know what a fluke it was for us to get that connection. What chance is there of anything else, anywhere in Shiban? If it got cut off, it must mean either that the club was taken over, or Eubeleus shut down all the links. What else can any of them—” She shook her head, unable in her fear and confusion to sort out the philosophical niceties. “—us, whoever those people still out there are. . . What can they do? Do you know?”
“Not exactly,” Hunt confessed.
“See!” Possibly from the workings of some inner defense mechanism, Gina became almost belligerent. “You don’t know. But the you out there is every bit the same person, isn’t it? And up to the point where we got detached, he knew as much as you did. So why should he have any better ideas? And the same goes for the rest of us.”
Hunt didn’t have an answer. He could only look away.
They were coming into the city of Orenash. The architecture was massively imposing, and foreboding. Ahead, trumpets sounded as the leading body of soldiers passed through a large gate set between two square towers in a high wall. Crowds were milling around the vehicles, shouting praises to the priests and jeering at the captives.
It was an odd feeling, trying to project how he would feel about himself, Hunt found. To the originals of themselves that they had been derived from, they were just knots of computer code. He wondered how much those originals out there would really care. Right now, he didn’t feel at all like a piece of computer code, and he cared very much. But how much of that was likely to impress itself on other beings in another universe, whatever their superficial resemblances and theoretically coincident identities? They didn’t have the same stake in the outcome of all this.