“Bit of a technical hitch out here,” the familiar voice replied in his head. “It’s all under control now. I presume the details can wait until later.”
Above them, Ethendor was coming down the temple steps almost at a run, his face writhing in fury and incomprehension. Some of the other priests were trailing after him, while the rest remained gripped by fear and consternation on the platform above.
The Chinook swung around to hover broadside-on to the temple above the cringing throng. Its large side door was open, and framed in the opening stood the figures of Shingen-Hu and Thrax, gazing down lordlike and majestically, borne from the gods.
It had been a test, the Examiner saw. He would not fail. “Hail to the Chosen One, indeed true messenger of the highest gods!” he exalted, going down onto both knees this time. Around him the other dignitaries and soldiers who had come from Rakashym took up the cry and followed suit.
Ethendor stormed out onto the terrace below the steps, flung back his robe and aimed his arms up at Shingen-Hu. Moving reflexively in self-defense, Shingen-Hu pointed back, and ail the power that had been focused within him by the intensity of the moment went into the bolt that flashed downward before Ethendor could concentrate his will. The figure of the high priest went rigid and became incandescent. From below, Hunt and his companions watched in horrified fascination.
And then, a very peculiar thing happened.
The shock of psychic energy that annihilated the mind that had been Ethendor propagated back along the current perfusing it and out through the attached neural coupler into the brain of Eubeleus. And since the system controlling the coupler was now under the direction not of JevEX but VISAR, VISAR saw the configuration of mental constructs that formed the person of Eubeleus beginning to dislocate and come apart.
VISAR’s basic programming gave it a nature that sought to protect and preserve life. There was nothing it could do to save Ethendor, for what had been Ethendor was gone; and the milliseconds that it had to consider what could be done about Eubeleus gave little opportunity for innovation or profound reflections on possible consequences. It used the tools that it had. And the only way it knew to preserve a human personality was to inject it, while it was still functioning as a coherent whole, into an artificial Ent-being—which VISAR promptly wrote into the Entoverse. For the same reasons why the surrogates of Hunt and the others looked to them as their human forms looked in the Exoverse, the Eubeleus surrogate looked like Eubeleus.
Who found himself suddenly at the foot of the temple steps, clad in a Roman toga, standing beside the smoldering heap that moments before had been Ethendor, and staring at a twin-rotor helicopter hovering over the petrified crowd.
He stood gaping down at himself and from side to side, confused and bewildered, while the priests who had followed Ethendor down the steps backed away, terrified. . . And then his mouth fell open as
he recognized for the first time the group of figures who were standing a short distance below.
“No,” he protested, shaking his head. “This can’t be! How could you be here?”
“Hello, Eubeleus!” Hunt called back cheerfully. “We seem to have this habit of showing up in the oddest places, don’t we?” He managed to look nonchalant, but inside he was as mystified as to how Eubeleus came to be there as Eubeleus himself seemed to be.
“JEVEX, what is the meaning of this?” Eubeleus demanded savagely.
“Sorry, but the system is no longer operating under that management,” came the reply. “This is your new, friendly, integrated computer service, VISAR, brought to you at no charge all the way from Thurien. Have a nice day.”
“That is not possible!”
“What else can I tell you?”
Eubeleus came to the edge of the terrace and screamed down at the soldiers. “Kill them! I command you, kill every one of them!” The soldiers’ weapons turned into party squeakers and candy canes. Around where Eubeleus was standing, the pyres, gibbets, and instruments of torture became a garden swing set, seesaw, and slide; some lawn ornaments, a Christmas tree, and a beach umbrella.