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"I don't remember," Nixie replied. "I was too confused for a long time
afterward to know what had happened. But that is what I was told by others."
Danchekker looked from one to another of those present with an I-told-
you-so expression that was superficially reluctant, while at the same time the
glint behind his spectacles said that he was loving every minute. Finally he
said, "Which does rather tend to corroborate my hypothesis, I think. The
condition is a profound mental disruption brought about by the interaction
between deep-seated processes in the human nervous system and an inappropriate
alien technology that was adapted from something never designed to couple to
it." He took of his spectacles and produced a handkerchief to wipe them. "I'm
sorry, Vic, but you really have to discard this Phantasmagoria that you've
grown so fond of"
"No, it's real," Nixie insisted.
"I'm sure it's utterly convincing," Danchekker conceded, giving her a lofty
smile. He turned back to Hunt and Shilohin. "The whole thing is a JEVEX
fabrication."
"As internally consistent as the physics that VISAR read from Nixie's
memories?" Hunt shook his head. "The people we're talking about don't have the
conceptual foundations. They could never have generated anything like that."
Danchekker showed his teeth. "No. But JEVEX could!"
Shilohin looked from Danchekker to Hunt and back again. Hunt got the feeling
that she was coming around to the professor's line. "You're saying that JEVEX
created the same artificial reality for all of them?"
"I've said it from the beginning."
"Why should it do that?"
"Ah, that's another question, the answer to which will doubtless be
forthcoming now that we seem to be heading the right way," Danchekker said.
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"It would account for the consistency," Shilohin said. "If these are fantasies
created in response to unconscious directions, thousands of individuals could
never all have produced the same thing. But if they all originated in
JEVEX..."
"Precisely."
Hunt stared at Nixie's face. And for some reason, which he would have been the
first to admit as being totally unscientific, the calm, unwavering certainty
that he saw written there persuaded him more, in a way that he could never
have justified to Danchekker and Shilohin.
It was too early to commit to any conclusion. He needed more time to let his
mind chew its way through the complexities in its own, unhurried way. More to
keep things open than for any other reason, he suggested that it would be
interesting to find out if a "possessed" Terran also claimed to have come from
the same Otherworld that the Jevlenese described. He liked the word Danchekker
had used, and referred to it as "Phantasmagoria." Danchekker and Shilohin
agreed that it would be a worthwhile thing to try and find out.
They had Baumer sedated and placed him in a coupler for VISAR to take a look
inside his head. But VISAR stolidly refused to violate the privacy of somebody
incapable of authorizing such a probe, and no amount of arguing would change
it. So Hunt started talking to Baumer instead.
As a day or two went by, Baumer calmed down and his ramblings became less
frenzied. With Nixie helping, glimpses of a place started coming together.
Soon there was no doubt that it was the same Phantasmagoria that
Nixie talked about, identical in every detail that they were able to
establish. And in the process, Hunt's conviction grew that he was not talking
to a German who had undergone some traumatic personality change, but to a
genuinely different, and very alien, being.
Was this being, then, some kind of software construct that JEVEX had created,
which had somehow found its way into Baumer's head? Hunt had read some of
Eubeleus's claims to being a creation of precisely this kind himself, but had
dismissed it as rubbish. Could there be something to it?
But if there were, it would mean that an entity that had originated as a
caricature of reality, and that needed all the power and sophistication of
JEVEX to sustain it, had taken on the internal depth and complexity necessary
to become reality and stand independently in its own right. Hunt couldn't see
how that could be possible. Pinocchio might come to life and work without the
strings in a fairy story; but life in the real world depended on structure and
organization a lot more complicated than any puppet's.
A puppet was made to look like a living organism that moved itself from the
inside, but it was really operated by forces applied on the outside.
Similarly, JEVEX's puppets were simulations of life, animated by JEVEX's
manipulations. But if Nixie and the person that Baumer had become were as real
as Hunt accepted them to be, they could only be functioning by virtue of an
innate complexity of structure that JEVEX would never have put there. And that
kind of complexity only came about spontaneously, over a long period of time,
through evolution in the real, physical world.
Which, of course, was absurd...
Unless "real, physical world" meant something different from what everyone [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]