ENTOVERSE

But once the Lunarians absorbed the Ganymean comprehension that the resources of the universe were infinite in any sense that mattered, all that would be changed. Unrestricted assimilation into the Thurien culture and access to all the bounties that it had to offer would allay aggression, relieve insecurities and fears, curb the urge for domination and conquest, and build in their place a benign, homoge­neous society founded on grateful appreciation. Freed, like the Thuriens, from want, doubt, and drudgery, the Jevlenese would unlock the qualities that were dormant inside them like the potential waiting to be expressed in a seed. No longer fettered by time or space, nor constrained to the things that one mere planet had to offer, they would radiate outward in a thousand life—styles spread across as many worlds to complete the upward struggle that had begun long before in Earth’s primeval oceans, and thence become whatever they were capable of.

At least, that was the way the Thuriens had imagined it would be. But in all those millennia the Thuriens had learned less about human perversity than Garuth, former commander of the Ganymean scientific mission ship Shapieron, from ancient Minerva, had in six months on Earth.

For self-esteem could only be earned, not given. Dependence bred

feelings of inadequacy and resentment. The results were apathy, envy, surliness, and hate.

The more ambitious minority who gained control of Jevlenese affairs had lied, schemed, and eventually gained control of the surveil­lance operation set up by the Thuriens for monitoring developments on Earth. They had intervened covertly to keep Earth backward while they built up a secret military capability, and almost succeeded in a plan that would have enabled them to overthrow the Thuriens. Although Thurien technology had been indispensable in thwarting the Jevlenese, what had actually saved the situation had been the Thuriens’ decision to open direct contact with the Terrans—when the Shapieron’s story from Earth contradicted the Jevlenese version— and thus involve other minds capable of working at comparable depths of deviousness.

But the circumstances of the greater mass of Jevlenese were very different from those of the minority who rose to take charge. For them, the society that grew under the Thurien guidance became a protective incubator cocooning them until the grave. Smothered by largesse to the point where nothing they did or didn’t do could make any difference that mattered to their lives, they abandoned control of their affairs to impenetrable layers of nameless administrators and their computers, and either sank into lethargy or escaped, into empty social rituals of acting out roles that no longer signified anything, or into delusion.

Under the collective name JEVEX—the processing and network­ing totality serving the system of Jevlenese-controlled worlds—the computers ran the factories and farms, mining and processing, manu­facturing, distribution, transportation, and communications, along with all the monitoring to keep track of what was going on. JEVEX kept the records, stocked the warehouses, scheduled the repairs; it directed the robots that built the plants, serviced the machines, deliv­ered the groceries, and hauled the trash. And it created the dreams into which the people escaped from a system that didn’t require them to be people anymore.

And that, the Thurien and Terran leaders had concluded after the three—day Pseudowar that ended the self-proclaimed Jevlenese Feder­ation, had been the problem. JEVEX had been modeled on the larger and more powerful Thurien complex, VISAR, which, while equip­ping JEVEX admirably for catering to Ganymean temperaments and needs, had done nothing to satisfy the very human compulsions to seek challenge and to compete.

So, the thinking had gone, the key to remedying the situation would be to switch off all but JEVEX’s essential services for a time. By compelling the Jevlenese to take charge of their own affairs—and at the same time leaving them less opportunity for making mischief— they would stimulate them into learning to become human again. And the Ganyrneans from the Shapieron had agreed gamely to oversee and administer the rehabilitation program with its period of proba­tionary decomputerization.

Garuth was only now beginning to realize what they had taken on. He sat with Shilohin, a female Ganymean who had been the mission’s chief scientist, in his office in the Planetary Administration Center on Jevlen, the former headquarters of the local Jevlenese government at a city called Shiban. Before them an image floated, seemingly hanging in midair in the room. It was being transmitted from Barusi, another city situated several thousand miles away on the coast of one of Jevlen’s southern continents, with three towers of its central composition rising more than a mile into the pale green sky. But the scene that Garuth and Shilohin were watching was set against a background of drabness, the buildings shabby and most of the machines idle. A lot of the populace had moved into shanty camps thrown up around the city’s outskirts, where the simpler routines of living that they had been obliged to revert to were more easily organized—even an act like collecting and preparing food could turn out to be unexpectedly complicated when removed from the context of what had been a totally automatic, self-adapting environment.

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