ENTOVERSE

“VISAR, it’s too crowded. Get me away from people.” Gina glanced at Jasene. “I’ll get back to you about that visit. . . And thanks. I assume VISAR has your number?” Jasene inclined her head in what Gina hoped was an understanding nod.

Then Gina was standing on a barren, rocky ridge, looking down into a huge crater of molten magma, dull red and turgid, bubbling sullenly below yellow vapor and oily smoke. She could feel the heat on her face, and a choking, sulfurous odor seared her throat. The far rim was invisible through the haze, and behind her a tortured land­scape of jagged peaks and bottomless fissures vanished into banks of dark, stormy cloud.

“I can take you where you couldn’t survive physically,” VISAR’s voice said. “Here’s a new world being born. The heat and fumes that you feel are just to give the flavor. In reality you’d be asphyxiated instantly, roasted in seconds, and flattened under two tons of body weight.”

“This doesn’t make sense. Do the Thuriens actually put sensors in places like this? It’s crazy. How many visits does it get in a thousand years?”

“Actually, this is largely simulation—interpolated from data being captured long-range from orbit.”

“Too hot and stuffy,” Gina pronounced.

Then she was in a sea of fantastic, mountain-size sculptures of shining white, rising and curving into delicate pinnacles against a sky of pale azure, fading into pink lower down in every direction. “A wind-carved ocean of frozen methane, not much above absolute zero in temperature,” VISAR said. “Again, interpolated reconstruction by instruments in orbit. Cool enough?”

“Too much. My bones feel cold, looking at it. But you don’t have to use sensor data at all, do you? It could all be pure simulation?”

“Sure—I can make you a world. Any world.”

“Let’s go home, then. How about Scotland? I’ve always wanted to go there but never have. I imagine it with mountains and lochs, and little villages tucked away in glens.”

She was sitting on a hillside by a rocky stream, looking across a valley over the tops of pine trees at green slopes topped by craggy bastions of gray rock. Off to one side, rooftops and a church spire huddled together before an expanse of water. Birds were chirping and insects humming. The air was cool and moist with spray from the stream.

“Is this real?” Gina asked, frowning. It couldn’t be, she told herself. Scotland wasn’t wired into VISAR.

“No,” VISAR answered. “It’s just something I made up—from what you said and what I know about Earth. I told you, I can make any world you want.”

“It’s too modern,” Gina said, studying the offering. “The road down there is built for automobiles. I can see power lines by the houses, and there’s a tractor in a tin shed.” She could feel herself being carried away by the novelty of it all. Perhaps she was feeling a sense of relief in being back among surroundings that she understood. “If we’re getting into fiction, let’s go back a bit and make it more romantic,” she said. “Maybe somewhere around Bonnie Prince Charlie’s time.”

“Those times weren’t really very romantic,” VISAR observed. “Most of the people lived lives ravaged by disease, poverty, igno­rance, brutality. Three-quarters of the children died before they were—”

“Oh, shut up, VISAR. This is just a game. Leave that kind of stuff out, and make it the way we like to pretend it was.”

“You mean like this?”

The roadway turned into an unfenced cart track, while the power lines, tractor, communications dishes, and Other signs of the twenty— first century disappeared. The houses changed into simpler affairs, with roofs of thatch and slate, and a steel footbridge crossing a brook below transformed into an arched construction of rough-cut stone. A dog was barking somewhere. As stipulated, everything was neat and pretty.

For a few moments Gina was astounded, even though she should have had a good idea by now of what to expect. She stood up, staring hard and consciously going through all the impressions being re­ported by her senses. She could feel a pebble under her shoe, and a branch from a bush beside her brushing her arm as she moved. It was uncanny. The sensation of being there was indistinguishable in any way that she could find from the real thing. Her clothes felt unusually heavy and enveloping. She looked down and saw that she was wear­ing a shawl and an ankle-length skirt of the period.

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