Hogan, James - Giant Series 04 - Entoverse (v1.1)

by Entoverse [lit]

  “What do you think of a Thurien starship?” Jassilane asked.

  “Impressive—but a bit overwhelming,” Hunt confessed. “You know, Rod, when all’s said and done, I think I prefer your old ship on the parking lot back there at Geerbaine.”

  “Me, too,” Jassilane agreed. “Technology that you grew up with is always more comfortable, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Definitely,” Hunt said.

  “That’s why we never bothered adapting more of the sensor network in PAC to work with VISAR,” Garuth said. “We experi­mented with the small part that you know, but old-time Ganymeans like us don’t really take to it. The Thuriens can have virtual travel. We prefer to stick with ZORAC.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Hunt said.

  Garuth extended an arm to indicate the general surroundings, then singled out the passage by the security guard’s desk. “This is the part of PAC that I normally inhabit. The staff here simply call it the Ganymean offices. So now you know where to find us.”

  “Where will we be working?” Hunt asked. “I assume that since we’re officially here as an UNSA scientific group, we’ll have some office space or something. It’s a bit of a messy situation, I know, but Gregg didn’t exactly give anybody a lot of notice.”

  “Naturally,” Shilohin said. “We’ve found some space for you on one of the levels lower down, where we run some other work of our Own.”

  “Maybe the best time to see it would be later,” Garuth suggested. “Del can take you to your quarters in the residential sector now to freshen up, and we can all meet for, lunch in, say He made a vague gesture.

  “About an hour?” Hunt suggested.

  “Fine,” Garuth agreed. “And then we’ll show you the lab area when you’re all together.”

  The Ganymean planetary administration employed numerous scien­tists, both Jevlenese and Thurien, in connection with various aspects of its work, some of whom were based within PAC itself. The area that had been designated the “UNSA labs” was a segregated section approached through a single entrance, on a floor of offices, work­shops, laboratories, and other workrooms in the lower part of the complex.

  The general working area consisted of a large room with a wide lab bench taking up the center of the floor, smaller benches by two of the walls, and several desks with computer workstations. A graphics table took up part of the third wall, and alongside it was a generously equipped imaging and processing system. A short passage led to several smaller offices, and another door from the passage doubled back into a second laboratory situated alongside the main area. There was also a direct interconnecting door between the two. All in all the place was well fitted and furnished, with plenty of storage space and instrumentation.

  “What do you think?” Garuth asked as the Terrans walked around like prospective buyers inspecting a house.

  “It’s marvelous,” Hunt said. “How many of us did you expect? You could house half a Goddard department in this.”

  “Officially you’re here to study Ganymean science,” Del Cullen said. “You might as well be comfortable and make it look good at the same time. And, who knows, there might be more coming later.”

  “Oh, I’m not complaining,” Hunt assured him.

  Another room, off the side of the main area across from the second lab, contained several Thurien neurocoupler reeiners. “So you’ll have full access to VISAR,” Shilohin explained. “We have an i-space link direct into PAC.”

  “But the regular facilities around PAC are managed by ZORAC?” Duncan asked.

  “Yes. There’s a direct line back to the Shapieron. The ship has an onboard i-space connection, too. So ZORAC and VISAR can com­municate directly.”

  They came back out of the coupler room. Sandy went on through into the smaller lab, where she activated a terminal and began talking to ZORAC about something. In the main area with its central worktable, Danehekker wandered around, checking closet space, looking in drawers, and activating a couple of screens. “Most satisfactory,” he pronounced. “I must say, you seem to have gone to an inordinate amount of trouble for us.”

  “Not at all,” Garuth assured him.

  Danchekker rubbed the palms of his hands together and looked about. “It’s all very splendid and lavish for just the four of us.”

  “Plenty of room if you find you need extra help,” Cullen said. Hunt saw that Duncan was about to make another wisecrack, no doubt about the company that Hunt had reappeared with from the city, and silenced him with a warning look.

  And then Sandy’s voice came through the open interconnecting door from the adjoining lab. “Hello, out there?”

  “What is it, Sandy?” Hunt called back.

  “ZORAC has a call for Professor Danchekker. Shall I leave it on here?”

  Danchekker looked at Hunt bemusedly. “What? Already? But we’ve barely arrived, for God’s sake. Who could it possibly be?”

  “One way to find out,” Hunt said.

  Frowning, Danchekker went through into the next lab. Hunt sent Duncan a puzzled look. Duncan shook his head and shrugged. “Don’t ask—”

  “Arghh!”

  The scream that came back through the open doorway was one of pure, animal terror. Danchekker bolted back into the room, white-faced. He looked imploringly at Hunt. “It can’t be, not here.. . Vie, you’ve got to do something.”

  Hunt strode through the door and found Sandy, looking at a loss, standing to one side of a live display screen. On it, the face of Ms. Mulling from Goddard confronted him frostily.

  “Ah, Dr, Hunt,” she observed. “I distinctly saw Professor Danchekker there a moment ago. Could you call him back, please? There are some questions concerning certain records that he left, and it is most imperative that I speak with him.”

  Hunt fought back the urge to burst out laughing. “Er, I think he’s been called away,” he said. “His assistant is here, though. Couldn’t she help?”

  Ms. Mulling sniffed disdainfully. “Very well. I suppose so.” Hunt moved out of the viewing angle and gave Sandy an encour­aging wink. Then he went back into the main lab. “Don’t worry, Chris,” he said cheerfully to Danchekker, who had sunk onto a stool.

  “We’ll take care of it if this keeps up. It’ll probably be some time before we go back.”

  “What makes you imagine that I intend to?” Danchekker replied miserably.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The team spent the rest of the day relaxing, adjusting to local Jevlen time, and catching up on their rest. The next morning, Hunt and Danchekker met with Garuth and Shilohin in Garuth’s suite in the Ganymean offices. The items of equipment and other effects that they had brought from Earth had arrived, and Sandy and Duncan were busy getting things organized in the UNSA labs. The two Ganymeans summarized what they had learned after six month~ with the Jev­lenese.

  “We thought we might draw a lesson from the dismantling of socialism on Earth,” Garuth said, speaking from behind his huge Ganymean desk, which was also an elaborate console. “It seemed that the JEVEX dependency here could be thought of as analogous to the over dependency that developed there on the too-protective state.”

  “A lot of people on Earth have been saying the same thing,” Hunt commented.

  “But simply unhooking them from JEVEX doesn’t seem to be the answer,” Garuth went on. “Or at least, not enough of an answer. It seems to work for some of them. Those are the ones who are finding what needs to be done and doing it. That was how we hoped the majority would react, more or less as happened on Earth.”

  “But they turned out to be relatively few,” Shilohin said.

  Garuth continued. “The general mass of Jevlenese seem to suffer from a.. . you could call it a ‘predisposition’ toward irrationality that goes beyond anything seen on ancient Earth. They just don’t seem to possess any faculty for distinguishing possible from impossible, or the plausible from the ridiculous. So we get these cults of unreason flourishing across Jevlen, and we’re at a loss for a
n effective answer to them.” Garuth motioned in the air with a gray, double-thumbed hand. “We watch the intellectual degeneracy of what once showed every promise of maturing into an advanced technological civiliza­tion. It’s like a plague from somewhere, but one which affects the mind. We need you to help us find where it’s coming from.”

  “That’s not all there is to it, though, is it?” Hunt queried. “Didn’t you say something when you called me in Washington, about being worried that JPC might be about to pull you out?”

  “Some of the Terran representatives on JPC have been saying that the Ganymean administration here isn’t working, and that the situa­tion is heading toward breakdown,” Garuth replied. “They’re not disagreeing with the Thuriens’ policy, but they believe that it’s going to need some kind of backing by force to make it work.”

  Which would mean Terran-style force, Hunt understood; in other words, putting in a Terran military occupation. Ganymeans didn’t work that way.

  “They may not be entirely wrong,” Hunt cautioned. “The Jev­lenese stayed away from violence while they had the chance to exploit Thurien know-how. But they were going to end all that, as we all know, and they came frighteningly close. Now they don’t have that restraint anyway. Once they get themselves reorganized, there could be serious trouble.”

  “I’m not disputing that,” Garuth conceded. “I accept the differ­ences that set us and humans apart. But I’ve also studied enough of your history to have an idea of the kind of inflexibility that an authoritarian solution will lead to once it’s adopted. The cause of the Jevlenese problem won’t be important; all that will matter will be how to suppress the effects. And that would be a tragedy, because we’re convinced that at the bottom of this mass insanity there’s something important waiting to be uncovered, that we don’t under­stand. We know what sent Earth off into irrationality thousands of years ago. But none of that applies here.”

  Garuth got up and moved a short distance across the room to stand staring for a moment at a framed picture of the Shapieron standing on the shore of Lake Geneva. He turned and faced the others again.

  “This may sound strange to you, but in many ways I’m beginning to feel the same toward the Jevlenese as I did toward my own people aboard that ship, when I was their leader through all those years in space. I feel a responsibility for them, an affection, even. I’d like to see them develop the confidence and self—reliance that Earth is start­ing to display now. But that can’t happen until we find out what’s undermining them. And to do that, we need help from people who understand humans better than we do. Del Cullen is doing his best, but we know that none of us would make a very good Mac—” Garuth hesitated. “ZORAC, who was that famous Terran who wrote about intrigue and deceit?”

  “Machiavelli?” the computer replied.

  “Yes. Was he Scottish?” “No. Italian.”

  “I thought ‘Macs’ were Scottish.”

  “Not always.”

  “Oh.” Garuth sighed. “Is there anything about Earth that’s com­pletely consistent, ZORAC?”

  “If there is, I haven’t found it.”

  Garuth looked back at Hunt and Danchekker. “So those are my fears. If there’s a risk of our being replaced, there might not be very much time. That was why we came to Vie when we did, and in the way that we did.”

  There was a short pause. Then Danchekker clasped his fingers together, his elbows resting on the arms of his chair, and cleared his throat. “Can you be sure that there really is an identifiable cause of this ‘plague,’ as you put it, waiting to be tracked down?” he asked. “We know that in the case of Earth, the Jevlenese deliberately intro­duced nonsensical belief systems thousands of years ago and engi­neered supernatural workings to support them. But the Jevlenese have always been under the totally rational guidance of the Thuriens, which, one would suppose, should produce exactly the opposite results. That turns out not to have been the case, however.”

  “Naturally, we wondered about that, too,” Shiohin said. “Do you have an explanation?”

  Danchekker took off his spectacles and proceeded to wipe them with a handkerchief. “Only that possibly you’re thinking too much like Ganymeans, and not making sufficient allowance for the limitless human capacity for sheer, pigheaded obstinacy. The reason why socialism fell apart on Earth wasn’t because its ideals were unachievable--Ganymeans achieve them as a matter of course, instinctively. It failed because they are alien to human nature. And when its advocates tried to change human nature to make the fact fit their theory, people resisted. The social engineers didn’t understand that Newton’s third law applies to social forces as well as to physical ones.”

  “Go on,” Garuth said, listening attentively.

  Danchekker showed a hand in a reluctant acknowledgment that he, too, had no choice but to accept the facts as he found them. “And I can see humans, any humans, reacting in the same way to the kind of enticement by which the Thuriens tried to shape them—” He gestured at Garuth. “—and to the kind that you are attempting now. In other words, couldn’t what you’re up against be simply a funda­mental, ineradicable human trait? Are you sure that what you’re looking for actually exists at all?” He drew a pad and pencil from his pocket and began scribbling some notes.

  Garuth returned to his desk and sat down again. “We asked our­selves that, but we don’t think it’s the case,” he answered. “You see, there’s a distinct category of Jevlenese that the infection seems to spread from. They account for practically all of the cult founders and the agitators. All the trouble seems to emanate from them.”

  “You mean like the one all these purple people have been getting into a frenzy over since yesterday?” Hunt interjected. “What was he called, Ayatollah, or something?”

  “Ayultha,” Shilohin supplied.

  ‘‘Oh, yes.”

  “There’s something very unusual about them,” Garuth said. “Something that can’t be explained as simply an extreme of some general human characteristic. There’s too much of a pattern, too much that’s systematic for it to be coincidental aberration.”

  ZORAC interrupted. “Excuse me. I have a call for Professor Danehekker.”

  Danchekker’s pencil broke, and the color drained visibly from his face.

  “Who is it, ZORAC?” Hunt asked.

  “Sandy, from the UNSA labs.”

  “Put her through.”

  “Oh, sorry to interrupt, but we’re wondering where to put your personal things, Professor,” Sandy’s voice said cheerfully. “Do you want to be out in the lab? Or I thought maybe one of the smaller offices would be better for privacy.”

  Danchekker nodded rapidly and licked his lips. “Yes. . . yes, that would be preferable, thank you,” he agreed in a shaky voice.

  “Okay.”

  “Hold any more non urgent calls until we’re through, ZORAC,” Garuth instructed.

  Hunt looked back at Garuth. “You were saying that there’s too much of a pattern to these ayatollahs,” he said.

  Garuth nodded. “For one thing, they’re all very unscientific. Chronically unscientific. I don’t mean simply low in aptitude; they lack the basic conceptual machinery that makes any rational account of an objective world possible. They don’t seem to share the ordinary, commonsense notions of causality and consistency that you have to have, even to begin understanding the universe. You’d almost think they weren’t from this universe at all.”

  “Can you give some instances?” Hunt asked.

  “Fundamental things—things that any six-year-old wouldn’t think twice about,” Garuth answered. “We take it for granted, for exam­ple, that objects remain unaltered by changes in location or orienta­tion; that things measure the same in the evening as they do in the morning; that the same causes always produce the same results. Chil­dren grasp such fundamentals naturally. But the—what did you call them?”

  “Ayatollahs,” Hunt said. He shrugged at Danchekker. “Sounds like a good name for them, to me.”
/>   “They don’t seem to see anything natural about predictability at all,” Garuth went on. “They act as if it were mysterious. Machines baffle them.”

  “They talk instead about magic and mysticism,” Shilohin said.

  Garuth made a gesture of incomprehension. “They believe it,” he said. “As if that was how their perceptions of reality had been condi­tioned. Hence my question: We know who performed the conjuring tricks that spread such beliefs on Earth. But who did it to the Jev­lenese?”

  Danchekker stared at him. “I have no idea. Have you?”

  Garuth waited for a moment, then nodded. “Possibly. We think it could have something to do with JEVEX. But we’re not sure exactly how.”