“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 Ganymeans. “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.
It was not a very reassuring line of thought to find himself being drawn along.
“Data update from Jevlen,” an operator sang out suddenly. Eubeleus swung to face him from the middle of the floor, his haste betraying a tenseness that he had been striving not to show. “The Shapieron is accelerating out of free-fall now. Readings indicate profile consistent with maximum ramp up to interstellar speed.”
It took Eubeleus a moment or two to register the fact fully. Then, gradually, the realization percolated through that his gamble had paid off. He let his tension dissipate slowly, savoring the feeling of relief flowing over him to take its place.
He had expected some delay, despite the harshness of his ultimatum, for there were bound to be deliberations between those aboard the vessel and whoever else they were in contact with. Their final submission, expressed in the form of the ship’s departure, would come only as a last resort. His worry had been that they would call what they thought to be a bluff and so force his hand, thereby necessitating what would have been a regrettably ugly note on which to begin the new regime. But now the danger was past.
“Our congratulations,” one of the others offered. “This is exactly the kind of unswerving will that the plan needs.”
Eubeleus dismissed the remark offhandedly, as if the fact should have been sufficiently obvious not to need voicing. “So much for their last, desperate attempt, which as you see, turns out to have been a mere distraction.” he said. “And now, back to our main task. Is JEVEX running now?”
“Fully functional, Excellency,” the familiar voice of JEVEX responded. Reassured looks passed between the others around the control center.
“Before we open the links to Jevlen, I want a final check that we are not registering any attempts at irregular access, either via the i-links, or through the conventional Jevlenese planetary system,” Eubeleus said. “I want the system fully secure on all counts.”
“Commencing core reintegration prior to connection to Jevlen,” JEVEX confirmed.
“Breakdown of Shapieron’s stress field is beginning,” the first operator called out. “Ship is decoupling from normal space… Delta index is fading… Last readings give acceleration as undiminished.”
At last Eubeleus felt safe, and he permitted a smile of triumph to play around the corners of his mouth for an instant. “It is time to proceed,” he announced. He turned to one of the aides. “I shall guide the Prophet personally, as intended. You watch here until Iduane returns.” He allowed his gaze to drift slowly over the company. “When we see each other again, Shiban will be ours.” Applause greeted his words. Eubeleus turned and left the room.
Meanwhile, in the blackness of space twenty thousand miles above the surface of Jevlen, a tiny speck that the tracking sensors had missed in the disturbance from the starship’s departure emerged unseen from the electromagnetic upheaval and disappeared into the starry background.
“Probe away, on course, and checking positive,” ZORAC reported. “Well, that’s it,” Hunt said in the center of the Shapieron’s command deck as the screens showing the external views being picked up by the ship’s scanners blanked out. The vessel was now out of touch with the universe electromagnetically, its sole means of communication being by VISAR, using i-space.
“It’s out of our hands,” Danchekker agreed. “There’s nothing more we can do now but play out our role as decoys.” He thought for a moment and sighed. “It’s not an especially gratifying role to find oneself reduced to, considering what’s at stake. In the situations you’ve landed us in before, we have generally been able to contribute something more positive.”
Hunt was about to reply, but checked himself and looked at Danchekker oddly. “Well, that’s not exactly true, is it, Chris?”
“What do you mean?”
“It isn’t out of our hands-not exactly. A lot depends on what those surrogates who are still d
own in the Entoverse have managed to pull off. And they’re every bit as much ‘us’ as you and me, aren’t they-if what Calazar and the others are saying is correct?” He frowned and rubbed his chin, finding the thought as bemusing as the look on Danchekker’s face indicated that Danchekker himself did.
“It’s a peculiar situation, when you finally get a moment to think about it, isn’t it?”
A messenger forced his way through the crowds packed into the grounds of the temple of Vandros and went up to the chambers inside. He spoke to one of the priests, who went to the door that led out to the main steps from where the ceremonies were being led, and beckoned Ethendor over.
“Word from the main gates,” the priest informed him. “The Examiner and his caravan are entering the city now. They are bringing more heretics-faces unknown, who claimed to have come from the gods.”
so the celebrations shall be complete,” Ethendor said, nodding. He understood it all now.
“This is why the people were told to be patient?” the priest queried.
“The plan unfolds in its perfection,” Ethendor assured him.
Then the Voice came again into Ethendor’s mind. “The time will come very soon now, Prophet chosen by the gods. Are you prepared to receive the Great Spirit?”
“The last of our enemies are being brought before us to face atonement, and Waroth has been cleansed of its stain,” Ethendor replied. “All is prepared.”
“You have done well. All that was promised shall be yours in Hyperia.”
“I shall rule over vast multitudes? My word shall move armies and my wishes shall be law? Kings shall tremble at my displeasure?” Ethendor’s inner voice shook, and his eyes blazed with the vision. “I shall scatter mine enemies mercilessly before me as dust to the winds, and be mighty as the gods themselves?”
“Thus was our contract.”
“Humbly, I accept.”
The satellite was in the form of a stepped octagonal prism, cluttered with protrusions and antennae. Using manual guidance, Rodger Jassilane moved the probe gradually in until it was hanging a few yards from the rear access port, approaching from the outward direction to avoid interrupting any signal beams directed at the planet. “Arrived and docked,” he announced. The i-space equipment that the probe was carrying gave them a link to VISAR on Thurien. He glanced across at Keshen, also suited up and squeezed awkwardly into the cramped space. “Okay?”
Keshen nodded behind his facepiece.
“Open hatch,” Jassilane instructed the onboard computer.
With a few expert pushes and tugs, Jassilane propelled himself out of the opening and turned on his checkline to collect the tool pack from a stowage compartment that had opened alongside the hatch. Inside, Keshen seemed to be having more difficulty in moving and was extricating himself clumsily.
“Not too much experience in zero-g, eh?” Jassilane remarked, leaning in and unhooking a buckle of Keshen’s pack harness from a projecting hinge of the hatch cover.
“I’ve never been off-planet before,” Keshen told him.
For a second the Ganymean froze, not knowing what to say. “You kind of, er… left it a long time before saying so,” he managed finally.
“Nobody asked me before. I didn’t want to sound like I was chickening out.”
Jassilane thought about it. “Did Hunt, the Terran scientist, get you into this?” he inquired.
“That’s right. How did you know?”
“Oh… I just had a feeling,” Jassilane said as he attached the probe by a tether.
While Jassilane burned open the hatch into the satellite with a plasma torch, Keshen unreeled the cable that would provide a connection for VISAR from the link hardware inside the probe. They entered the satellite, and Keshen located a maintenance and test console, which he used to find the boxes containing the buffer terminals for the output circuits into the planetary communications net. Jassilane set up a terminal back to the probe’s onboard computer, which ZORAC had loaded with Jevlenese interconnection protocols and reference data, as well as the activation codes that VISAR had retrieved from Keshen’s memory.
“You seem to know what you’re doing,” Jassilane remarked, hoping that his relief didn’t show in the translation coming back through VISAR.
“You see? Not all Jevs are meatheads.”
“What did you do before?”
Keshen checked the connectors against the set of Jevlenese standard patterns that Jassilane had collected from the Shapieron’s stores. “Operations supervision-part of the JEVEX remote-input system. When JEVEX was shut down, some people approached me to set up a few connections into the residual core system that was left running-without asking questions about what they wanted them for.”
Jassilane searched through what he knew of the motivations behind the strange things that humans did. “Out of revenge?” he guessed. “To get even with the authorities? Or was it to assert your identification with an ideological principle that you saw as being violated?”
“No. For the money.”
They found a connector combination that matched. Jassilane began fitting it together, while Keshen used the console to isolate one of the satellite’s primary downlink beams. The neat thing about the way they were doing it, he thought as he worked, was that JEVEX could check all it wanted to for somebody trying to break into it; it wouldn’t find anything. VISAR would be connected, via the satellite, to one of the surface nodes-wherever it was located-that Eubeleus himself had ordered to be shut down, and which wouldn’t activate again until JEVEX itself opened its channels to Jevlen for the invasion. It was a bit like dressing the robbers up as the security guards, and waiting for the bank to call them in.
The pervasion of the Voice seemed to fade, and Ethendor felt another presence taking form in his mind, somehow colder and more remote, aloof and dominating. “Does the Prophet hear?”
Ethendor looked upward in reverence. “Is this the Great Spirit who comes at last to this unworthy servant?”
“It is. I see and hear through you, and shall be your soul. Go forward now to the people and proclaim to them that the moment that was promised is at hand. Now will the sun shine, and when the day returns, the currents shall come down to you again.”
Visions of Hyperia came to Ethendor. Moving slowly in a semi-trance, he raised his arms high and advanced to the edge of the platform at the top of the steps, while the priests who had been performing the devotions parted to let him pass. An expectant hush swept over the crowd below. The priests on either side and slightly to the rear of him assumed attitudes of prayer and waited.
“The time is upon us!” Ethendor’s voice thundered across the silent throng. “All of our patience, our sufferings, our labors against the unbelievers, and our unwavering faith will be rewarded. The Great Spirit from beyond has come into me, and now I proclaim to you that the Awakening is to begin.” He stretched his arms high and threw back his head. “Let the sun shine again and the days return upon Waroth! And then shall the currents descend that shall carry the multitudes to Hyperia!”
In the gloom, the entire mass of the crowd lightened as thousands of faces turned upward simultaneously.
And in the sky above, the sun began to brighten.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
A mighty roar of cheers, shouts, songs, and praises swept over the crowd as the twilight turned to day and the city stood revealed in its full extent and color. To Hunt’s eyes it was a strange mixture of classical colonnades, spires and minarets of a vaguely Eastern flavor, and massive, terraced pyramids that looked Aztec, with materials varying from polished white, like marble, to crude dwellings of brown and muddy yellow. There were arches framing many of the smaller side alleys, and high bridges that could have been aqueducts. The dress of the people was a mixture of ancient and medieval, consisting in some places of long robes and skirted tunics, in others of hooded jerkins and coarse coats. More riders formed up on either side of the train, and the cavalcade wound its way through the packed streets toward a
high structure on a rocky hill, surrounded by an inner wall.
“What does this mean?” Nixie asked Hunt. “The daylight returning. What has happened outside?”
“JEVEX is operational again,” Hunt told her soberly.
She looked at him with an uncertain expression. “Is there anything they can do, now, outside? Will it still be possible for VISAR to reconnect?”
Gina was watching with a tense look. Hunt said nothing.
“JEVEX will be checking for access attempts,” Eesyan said expressionlessly.
Nixie looked up, and a strange, distant expression came over her face. After several seconds it became grave.
Hunt stared at her. “What is it? Nixie, can you hear me?”
“The sky is dense with currents. There must be thousands waiting, coupled into the system in Shiban.”
Hunt looked up at the sky. It looked normal. “I don’t see anything,” he said.
“You wouldn’t.”
They passed through a gate in the inner wall to a wide space that was as packed as the streets outside. Before them was the mount, its base hidden among elaborately ornamented buildings and statues. Above, its mass was carved into a pyramid with high, wide steps taking up most of the side facing the gate, and higher up, a summit of vertical walls topped by a dome surrounded by smaller spires. At the top of the steps was a terrace, upon which a group of figures in high headdresses and white and red robes stood arrayed about a central one in gold, standing with his arms extended. A larger terrace near the base of the steps had been prepared with stakes and their gruesome devices of execution, while below, scores of bruised and tattered shapes stood herded forlornly behind a line of stern-faced soldiers.
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