“Oh, stick around and we’ll find out,” Hunt answered cheerfully. “Who knows? If you’re not burned at a stake in the meantime, or exiled to Pluto or somewhere, it might be the beginnings of a new book.”

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?”