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CHAPTER FIVE

  The Thuriens were a very rational, nonquarrelsome race of beings to whom the benefits of a society that based itself upon mutual cooperation were too self-evident to require much pondering, let alone debate. As a consequence, the Thurien institution of government was a modest, service-oriented affair concerned mainly with resolving disputes and disagreements, and managing the comparatively few functions that it was felt preferable to consign to public agencies. It certainly had nothing to do with projecting power over individuals, enforcing policies that were none of anybody else’s business, or bestowing upon a few the right to decide how the many should be compelled to live.

  Having no concept of any alternative, they established the same system-or lack of one, in the opinion of many Terrans-on Jevlen in the period following the destruction of Minerva. So instead of producing the authoritarian institutions that were the inevitable outcome of the ferocious power struggles and ideological confusions characteristic of social evolution on Earth, Jevlenese society developed as a kind of patronized anarchy, secure in the guarantee of unlimited goods and products indefinitely, and the total absence of threats. Hence, survival had never played any great role as a shaper of individual or collective behavior; therefore, the rationality that human survival ultimately depends on had received little incentive to bloom.

  Over the years, many popular political and quasireligious cults had come to flourish on Jevlen. They appealed by catering to the needs of individuals to discover some purpose and to affirm their identity in a risk-free, unstructured society, and to the fascination of the uncritical for peculiar beliefs. One of the largest and most militant of them called itself the Axis of Light. Its symbol was a green crescent. The leader, whose real name was Eubeleus, had been well connected with the previous regime responsible for the short-lived Federation, and went by the public title of Deliverer.

  The Deliverer’s followers numbered millions. Their faith was a conviction that the key to opening up latent, mystical human powers lay in the supercomputer, JEVEX. Their indignation at the Ganymeans’ shutting down of JEVEX, therefore, stemmed not merely from material deprivations or fears of a political tactic to encourage dependency, but from what they saw as a persecution of their beliefs.

  One of the most commonly used methods of interfacing to Thurien networking systems-JEVEX and VISAR-was by direct coupling into the user’s neural centers, bypassing the normal sensory apparatus. The central dogma that the Deliverer taught was that the close-coupled interaction between the inner processes of the human psyche and the more remote levels of supercomputing complexity could unlock the mind to new dimensions of reality. Thus stimulated, the believer would be enabled to conquer the ultimate reaches of time and space. He would come to know his full self in all the dimensions of its existence, and gain access to the powers encompassed by them.

  All heady stuff. The followers were suitably impressed. For his part, it was clear that the Deliverer, Eubeleus, held JEVEX in extraordinary awe and reverence, with an unswerving belief in its abilities that bordered on fanatical. But such loyalty was really to be expected: He believed himself to be a physically incarnate extension of JEVEX.

  The day after Garuth’s call to Hunt, Eubeleus met with a man called Grevetz at the latter’s walled villa and estate in a forested valley known as Cerberan, located among hills not far from the city of Shiban. Grevetz was the regional boss of the local Jevlenese criminal syndicate that had been making the most of the new black-market opportunities created by the surges in wants that the withdrawal of JEVEX had brought about. With them was a lieutenant of Grevetz’s, Scirio, who ran the operation in a part of Shiban.

  Eubeleus had influence because the size of his following translated into a substantial inflow of cash, a hefty block of political leverage, and when the occasion demanded, a guaranteed turnout to add physical pressure to rhetoric and persuasion on the streets. But the greatest benefit that he brought to Grevetz’s organization was a result of the demand for the services of JEVEX itself. For although the primary operating functions of JEVEX had been suspended, a residual core capability had been left ticking to support certain maintenance and housekeeping functions, and to monitor faults and sustain system integrity; also, Thurien analysts were exploring parts of the records accumulated over centuries in an endeavor to uncover exactly what the Jevlenese had been up to. Through connections that existed somewhere in the planet’s communications grid, Eubeleus could provide access into that core system of JEVEX. He had not told anybody how he did it.

  “I am the one who is endowed with the vision,” Euheleus told the other two on the fronded patio, bordered with shrubs, at the rear of the villa. “My mind touches deep into JEVEX’s soul. I know the things that must come to be. The design that is prepared has been revealed to me. That is why you must heed my words all the more closely when I say that this man is an instrument of forces that lie beyond the bounds of your present awareness of things. An obstacle that must be removed-” Eubeleus picked up an imaginary stone from in front of him and tossed it aside. “-from the path.”

  He had a lean yet large-boned frame, and was tall in build, with yellow hair that curled at the back of his neck, and piercing, electric blue eyes, which the word among the faithful held to be a manifestation of the paraphysical forces that operated through him. He was clean-shaven, which was unusual for Jevlenese cult gurus and mystagogues, but the countenance thus displayed was perhaps even more striking. It comprised angled cheekbones and hollowed features that objectified resilient austerity; a straight, undeviating nose that gave him a line along which to look downward unwaveringly on the lesser species of creation; a mobile, expressive mouth, and a hard, tapering jaw, obstinately set in a line that had never felt a need of questioning or known the twinges of self-doubt. He was dressed in a loose, two-piece tunic of orange with green-crescent devices on the lapels, topped by a green cape. His manner as he spoke was grandly imperious, an oration, even in private, his sonorously modulated phrases emphasized by dramatic bodily poses and flourishes of his hands and fingers.

  But Grevetz and Scirio, used to that from somebody who thought he was a walking extension of a computer, reacted impassively.

  The subject of Eubeleus’s wrath was a document lying on the table at which Grevetz and Scirio were sitting. It was a report from Obayin, the deputy chief of the Shiban police, to Garuth, head of the Ganymean administration headquartered at the Planetary Administration Center, on the facilities for illicit access into JEVEX that had been uncovered both in that region of Jevlen and elsewhere. And it reported them straight, without playing things down. That kind of overzealousness could lose the Axis a lot of followers-not to mention cost Grevetz a lot of lost revenue from his own clients-if the authorities started taking serious action. A deputy chief of police who was any use would have known that. And there were longer-term plans that Eubeleus had chosen not to divulge yet that were far more important and stood to be disrupted even more. The risk was intolerable.

  “So what if we do get rid of him?” Grevetz asked. “Do you have anybody in particular in mind to take over?”

  “Whom do you have prepared?” Eubeleus threw back.

  Grevetz looked at Scirio. “What are we paying Langerif these days?”

  “Enough. It has to be. It’s the second cut down, anyhow.”

  “We’d go for Langerif,” Grevetz told Eubeleus.

  The Deliverer nodded. “I shall have his record checked by my own sources. If it proves satisfactory, a word in the right quarters will assure his appointment.” He tossed out an arm beneath his cape as if casting out an evil and moved a few paces away. “Then I can leave the more immediate aspect to you?” he said, turning and staring at Grevetz.

  Grevetz looked across the table at Scirio. “He’s on your turf. Reckon you can arrange a convenient accident or something for citizen Obayin?”

  “It would take a little thought. He likes to be careful.”

  “I can arrange some suitable disturbances about the
city,” Eubeleus offered. “A turbulent and discordant background, against which all manner of the unlikely and the unexpected might happen?”

  “It’s the kind of thing that would get him out there,” Grevetz agreed.

  Scirio rubbed his chin and nodded. “Like I say, let me think about it from a few angles. I figure we should be able to come up with something.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The window behind the desk looked out over the bronzed-glass office towers, concrete experimental buildings, and tree-lined avenues of the UN Space Arm’s Goddard Space Center. At the desk in front of it, a stockily built figure with a craggy face and close-cropped, steel gray hair drummed a tattoo on the leather top with his fingers. “What did they want?” Gregg Caldwell, director of UNSA’s recently formed Advanced Sciences Division, demanded in his gravelly, bass baritone voice.

  The Thurien contact had made nonsense of all the plans for Man’s expansion into space, just when those plans had at last begun taking shape as a united effort by the entire race. Accepting the pointlessness of preserving forms that even its bureaucrats were unable to deny now served no sensible purpose, UNSA had scrapped most of its previous organizational structure to clear the decks for the new challenges. This had included wrapping up Caldwell’s former Navigation and Communications Division, which would have had about as much relevance to the changed circumstances as an astrolabe on the command deck of one of the Jupiter mission ships. Caldwell had moved to Washington to set up a new division charged with assimilating as much of the alien technology into Earth’s space program as was practicable and desirable, and Hunt had moved with him to become deputy director.

  Hunt answered from a leather-upholstered easy chair in front of a battery of display screens on the opposite wall. Caldwell had always liked big windows and lots of screens. His old office at Navcomms HQ in Houston had been fitted the same way.

  “Garuth’s realizing that he bit off more than he could chew when he agreed to take charge on Jevlen. Let’s be frank, Gregg-it was a daft idea in the first place. Ganymeans aren’t cut out to be planetary overlords. We should have put our foot down harder when Calazar and the rest of the Thuriens came up with it. Neither of us was happy about it at the time.”

  Caldwell shrugged. In the headiness of those times, everyone’s judgment had been affected. Nothing could be done about it now. “You can’t miss if you never shoot at anything,” he replied. “What kind of problems are they having with the Jevlenese?”

  “Nothing that would seem especially strange to us: civil disturbances and agitation. But to Ganymean minds it doesn’t make any sense. They don’t know how to handle the illogic of it.”

  “They still don’t know what to make of people acting normal, eh?”

  “I’m not sure they ever will-completely.”

  “What kind of illogic are we talking about? Give me a specific.” Hunt spread his hands for an instant. “Oh, keeping JEVEX shut down means that the Jevlenese can’t function without Ganymean help-at least, so some of them say. Therefore the situation equates to forced subjugation and violates their rights of self-determination. And then the standard terrorist line: If we end up killing each other because we don’t like it, it will be your responsibility.”

  “Which the Ganymeans buy, right?”

  “They believe it, but they don’t understand it.”

  “It sounds as if the leash is on the wrong way round, all right,” Caldwell agreed.

  “Yes… but what’s making matters worse is the withdrawal symptoms of unhooking them from JEVEX, which it seems everyone underestimated. Garuth says the number of headworld junkies there was epidemic. You have to admit, it is the ultimate in escapism. People could get into it in a big way-even the Thuriens admit they sometimes have problems with it. But in the case of the Jevlenese, it’s left half the population with no idea of how to cope. They’ve been conditioned to be totally, uncritically receptive, which makes them complete suckers for anyone with a message to put in their heads.”

  “Hmm.” Caldwell drummed on the desk again for a second. “I thought the UN sent a bunch of sociologists and psychiatrists there who were supposed to know about how to deal with that kind of thing. How come they’re not handling it?”

  Hunt made a you-know-how-it-is gesture. “They’re out-of-work social engineers looking for new places to take their theories now that people here are managing their own lives instead of expecting governments to do everything for them. Apparently the experts are producing lots of reports and statistics, but when anything serious happens they head for cover and leave it to the riot police.”

  “So why is Garuth coming to us? Our business is Ganymean physics, not Jevlenese psychology.” Caldwell already had a pretty good idea of the reason; he just wanted to hear Hunt’s reading of it.

  “He’s worried that if things get worse and JPC starts to panic, he might be pulled out and replaced by a Terran military administration. They’ve been putting in a lot of work there, Gregg.”

  Caldwell nodded. “Garuth doesn’t want to see it all go to waste,” he guessed, saving Hunt the need to spell it out. “Just when they might have been about to see some results?”

  “That-and more.” Hunt motioned briefly with a hand. “He sounded as if he thought they were close to discovering something important about what’s screwing up the Jevlenese-more than their simply being JEVEX cabbages. But putting in a Colonel Blimp-style board of governors there would blow any chance of getting to the bottom of it.” Hunt shook his head before Caldwell could ask. “He didn’t go into any more details.”

  Caldwell paused a shade longer than would have been natural before speaking-just enough to impart more currency into his question than its face value. “What do you think we should do?”

  Properly speaking, there should have been no question. By all the formal rules and demarcation lines, it was none of Advanced Sciences’ business. Hunt knew that, Caldwell knew that, and both of them knew that Garuth did, too. The department had close working relationships with plenty of influential figures in both political hemispheres, and all that the situation called for was a friendly word to refer the matter to them.

  But as Hunt wasn’t saying and Caldwell understood, there was more to it in reality. This was old friends appealing for help, and it couldn’t be let go at that. The first encounter with Garuth and the Ganymeans at Jupiter had been, strictly speaking, a “political” problem, too; yet the UNSA scientists on the spot had achieved a common understanding without complications while the professional diplomats on Earth were still conferring about protocols and arguing over rivalries of precedence. That was why Hunt had raised the matter in the way he had. Caldwell was very good at interpreting his terms of authority creatively. Properly speaking, even before the Ganymeans appeared, getting involved with the Lunarian mystery when it had first surfaced should not have been any of Navcomms’s business, either.

  Hunt rubbed his chin and adopted an expression appropriate to weighing up a matter of considerable gravity. “You know, there could be a lot at stake here, Gregg… when you think about it. Our whole future relationship with what’s shown itself to be an erratic and temperamental alien culture. Even with the best of intentions, the wrong people could get things into a big mess.”

  “I think so, too,” Caldwell agreed, nodding solemnly.

  Hunt shifted in the chair and recrossed his legs the other way. “It’s not a time for taking risks with untried procedures. Tested methods would be safer, even if a little… irregular?”

  “It ought to be played safe,” Caldwell affirmed.

  “It wouldn’t be violating any precedent. In fact, it would be fully in accordance with the only precedent we’ve got.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hunt had wondered on and off whether Caldwell’s promotion to Washington might spell the beginnings of a slow ossification into the role of dedicated administrator, and a waning of the dynamism that had helped fling humanity across the Solar System. But as he stared bac
k across the desk, he saw the old light that came with anticipation of a challenge, still there as bright as ever beneath the bushy brows. Hunt dropped the pretense. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

  Caldwell’s manner became businesslike. “Garuth says he needs help. So see what you can do to help. Your job is to look into Ganymean science. Well, he’s right in the middle of a whole civilization based on it. You’ll find more there than you will from the scraps we’ve been sent here.”

  “There?” Hunt blinked. “You want me to go there-to Jevlen?” Caldwell shrugged.

  “That’s where the problem is. You don’t expect Garuth to bring the planet here. The Vishnu will be going back to Thurien before very much longer, with a stop on the way at Jevlen. I’ll get you a slot on board.”

  Hunt found himself with his usual feeling of already being left behind in seconds once Caldwell had made a decision. “Washington hasn’t changed you, Gregg,” he said resignedly.

  “I know when you’re curious, and I trust your instincts. You’ve never failed to come back with something better than we hoped for, yet. I sent you off to Ganymede to look into some relics of defunct aliens, and you came back with a shipload of live ones. You went up to Alaska to meet a starship, and discovered an interstellar civilization.” Caldwell tossed out a hand. “Okay, I’ll buy in again. I’m curious, too.”

  Caldwell wasn’t missing any tricks of his own, either, Hunt realized. Already he had spotted territory for sending out feelers to explore growth potential for his new, embryonic empire. It was the old Gregg, as opportunistic as ever. And Hunt had one of his fuzzily defined, free-ranging assignments again.

  “You’d better start giving some thought to who else you might need along,” Caldwell said. He almost managed to sound as if Hunt had been dragging his heels over it.

  “Well, Chris Danchekker for a start, I suppose-especially if it’s going to involve alien psychology.”