04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (37 page)

Haldayne, it turned out, had no more desire to be a woman than to have a woman's breasts, nor did the sexual preference turn interest him. The idea of being killed and an earlier version revived appalled him the most. He was convinced that it wouldn't be him but some new creation that just thought it was him. In the end, he went up to administration to work in the labs at finding a different solution and failed, but he discovered a number of women who worked there seemed fascinated by him. Although the locals shunned him as a freak, he discovered that he had some different appeal to some women from what he'd had, but it wasn't a fatal handicap. In fact, he eventually returned with a short, plump, yet pleasant and attractive woman named Jean and married her.

There were other physical mishaps, but they were all transitory and rather easily corrected. The emotion factor drew much attention, since it explained some of the successes of the rather primitive and untrained wild ones out there living in the void. Out there, they had faced, and been distorted by, their own inner demons, their own fears and frustrations and neuroses and psychoses, but this irrationality gave them great power. The more raw emotion they maintained, the stronger they were against a victim or one another. The more animalistic they became, the more dangerous they became. Many were weakly interfaced to the grid, and could throw mere illusions at the intended victim, but those illusions were frighteningly real to others who saw them and in many cases were as good as the real thing.

All of the Sensitives in the project were carefully monitored by the most skilled psychologists, and the computer was told to flag certain things, but the process did change people, and not always for the better.

Toby and Mickey, however, remained strong and full of control but not essentially changed by the power they were still developing.

"Let's take a walk," Mickey suggested one afternoon.

"O.K.," he agreed. "Where to?"

"In the void."

He was a little surprised. They really didn't go in unless they were practicing or researching, but neither feared it or anything it might contain. They held hands, walked in, and were soon enveloped in the pinkish blinking fog and its silence.

"You may think I'm crazy," she said, "but I'm actually beginning to like it out here more than back there. Nothing personal—it's your Anchor—but out here there's just peace and quiet and the feeling that nobody's staring down at you. I'm beginning to think like a Pathfinder."

He laughed. "No, I know what you mean. I feel it myself. If I have to choose between Seventeen and Security, I'll take Seventeen."

"Toby—I think we have to talk. About us."

"Yes?" He felt a gnawing fear in the pit of his stomach. She had come to mean just about everything to him, and he was always afraid he would lose her one day. He knew the most intimate details of her life, but, deep down, there was something there that was as unfathomable as the psyche of Seventeen.

"Most of my life here I've been insecure as hell. No roots, no foundation. A stranger in somebody else's really interesting fantasy. I know I've been a little crazy to be around, but there are some things I never told you."

They sat down on the spongy artificial surface of the void. "Go ahead. You should know me by now."

She nodded. "I
think
I do. At least, I hope so. First of all, I'm older than you think."

"So am I, Grandma. Around here, what's the difference if you're seventy? You've lived maybe a seventh of your life."

"I know. It makes a difference only because, well, I was married before. Twice, in fact."

That startled him. And he thought he knew her! "Go on."

"The first time was back on Earth. I was twenty, he was nineteen. He was a real charmer, a real dream, and fantastic in bed. He went to university—pre-med, then med school— and I took odd jobs to support us and kept house. The pressure got enormous. He wanted a wife who wasn't as smart as he was, and he was fairly bright but nothing fantastic. I found myself living a lie, pretending I needed help with the checkbook when you know I had it constantly balanced, pretending not to be interested in crossword puzzles and computers. I really wanted it to work; I was willing to sacrifice myself to make it work, but I got so bored and I couldn't really hide it for long and it enraged him every time it showed. He also couldn't take the pressure of med school, and the more frustrated he got, the nastier he got with me. I was the only one he could take it out on, and he did."

"He beat you?"

She nodded. "Eventually, I couldn't take it anymore. One really violent night, without even thinking, I picked up a heavy piece of driftwood we had for decoration and when he turned I cracked his skull with it."

There wasn't much to say to that.

"The bastard pressed charges when he got out of the hospital! I got a public defender, we drew a judge who was married to a bank president and wasn't at all sympathetic to Roy's views, and I got off with probation and a quick divorce. I heard he flunked out of med school, but I never saw him again. Then I enrolled myself, got a better set of jobs, and worked my own way through. Math was a breeze, and I got full scholarship offers from all over the place, and job offers up the ass after the Ph.D. I took the Kagan job you know about, wound up on Titan, where I met and married a physicist.

"He was a kind guy, totally unlike Roy, and so brilliant in Flux universe physics that he left
me
behind. Eventually, he had to do that literally, though, going up to establish the primary Borelli Point. He wasn't the chief, but he was the operations director. I stayed behind on Titan with my job. A month later they came and told me he'd been killed. An accident. A really stupid, one-in-a million accident. Out there, revolving around a Borelli Point, with all the high-tech in the universe and no enemies, he slipped on some soap in a shower and broke his neck. We'd been married less than a year when he left."

Toby Haller sighed. "I think I see. And you were man-shy ever since."

"Yeah, well, it was one of those things. Couldn't live with 'em, couldn't live without 'em, but I was scared, Toby. One really wrong one, then another snatched away. So I used the mains here eventually to give me a whole new look and I slummed. I got what I wanted, but not what I needed, but even though I met some really wonderful guys I just never could bring myself to go again."

He put his arm around her. "I understand."

"Toby—I'm scared to death, but I think I'm ready to go again. If you are."

He laughed and kissed and hugged her, and they both cried and laughed in turn, and it turned into more than that. Much more, but without much thought, just raw emotion.

The commands were sent, received, interpreted, formed, matrixed, and returned. Because they were so close, the programs were combined and linked.

Iwill love you and cherish you and keep you forever. Together we are one, till death do us part. We will love, honor, and obey one another, and no man or woman or computer program shall alter this. The love that we feel now will bind us together and not fade so long as we both shall live. Our souls and hearts and minds are as one, and we will think of the other before ourselves in all things. You are my one, my only love; my passion and devotion will never cool, and you are the standard by which all others are measured.

When they had finished, several other things had happened. Each of them had changed, although it would take the project to point this out to them. Both were physiologically young—he perhaps twenty, she perhaps eighteen. Both still looked much as they had looked before, allowing for age, but all blemishes, all imperfections, were gone. Her skin was smooth, her figure perfect, just the way he had idealized her. He was strong, and large, and had a sexual organ of singular size that fit her perfectly, and he was the idealized Toby of her own fantasies. Every day was a newlywed day, and their passion was enormous for each other and unabashed. They seemed almost to know each other's conscious thoughts, even when not directly with the other, although he still couldn't do math at her speed or level.

It wasn't for another couple of months, though, that they found out she was pregnant.

13

AND ALONG CAME A SPIDER. . .

The redoubtable Chief Shindler informed Rembrandt van Haas that the admiral was at his home playing with his choo-choo.

Cockburn was always the all-business sort of military administrator, the sort that lived his job and took his responsibilities quite seriously, not just as an occupation but as a life style. Still, he had one quirk, one that caused a great deal of debate and emotion when he revealed that he had digitized the thing and had it shipped to New Eden.

He was an admiral without oceans or spaceships, but Admiral Sir Thomas Cockburn had his toy train.

It wasn't merely a toy train, either, but a handcrafted reproduction to exact scale of an early twentieth-century steam locomotive. It was big enough for the admiral to ride on, sitting on a padded seat atop the cab, and it really was a steam locomotive requiring wood and water. Its track ran for almost two kilometers through a forest north of headquarters, starting and ending near the front of his spacious home, a large house that looked almost Victorian in design but was modern inside to a fault. Van Haas waited near the "station" there for the admiral to come around again.

Cockburn was always in high spirits when driving his train, and he greeted the director warmly with a smile and a handshake. "Want a ride?"

"No thanks. I'm afraid I'm here on business."

The admiral signaled for aides to take over and service the train and with van Haas he walked up to the front porch. Another aide brought the admiral his rum and tonic and van Haas a stein of lager beer. The beer was quite good; it wasn't synthesized from programs but was actually a product of Anchor Charley.

"Tom, you know the routine by now," the director began. "Security was supposed to keep very close tabs on Watanabe, not climb in bed with her. I want to know just what the hell Coydt's up to."

The admiral sighed. "You know the trouble with Watanabe, Van. You wanted her genius intact, so we didn't dare do anything but standard psychiatric treatment after Coydt brought her back, and we were pressed for time. That meant she was still nutty as a squirrel but nutty in directions that were useful to us. Still, I'm a bit surprised at your comment. She never has liked the military, and she still hates Coydt's guts as far as I can tell."

"You know what it's been like in X-ray," van Haas commented. "The people there are mostly Hindu and Buddhist, but get outside the farming regions and the coffee slopes and it's entirely Watanabe's preserve. The capital's a strange place, what with her technicolor nuns running all over and the sexual segregation of practically everything. It's gotten to be two Anchors—Watanabe country and the rest, with the rest trying not to even have any contact with the administrative leadership. Still, the people there are pretty tolerant of the most bizarre offshoots, and her church takes things from both Hinduism and Buddhism, mixing it with what appears to be Shintoism and other exotic beliefs. They've tolerated enough nut cults in their own histories that one more is just another to live with."

"Yes, yes. That's why we've let her continue."

"Well, there's a fair body of evidence now that suggests that Watanabe's been working on a whole library of complex Flux master programs involving the grid areas themselves. Some of the folks there believe she's aiming at large-scale enforced conversions to her system by marching whole farms and villages into Flux and running a single set of programs on them using amplifiers."

"But her amps were destroyed! We witnessed it!"

"No.
Security
witnessed it and certified it. At least, they said they did. There's sufficient power drain in the region west of X-ray to indicate that at least three big remotes are still in operation there, not for landscaping but for large-scale transitory work. Tom, those farmers and craftspeople are trapped there. They can't escape en masse into the void, or easily pick up roots at this point. They depend on Security to protect them and their rights. There's clear evidence that Coydt's playing false with us and games with Watanabe. I don't underestimate what an unbridled and unchecked Suzy could do with those big computers. She understands them better than any other human. I've never forgotten that she bridged the 7240 safety system like it wasn't there and she's lost none of her genius. What the hell is Coydt's game with her? Is there something you're not telling me?"

"On my word of honor, I'm as shocked as you are to hear that any remotes are still operational except the one authorized for the Luck project. Coydt's zeal often exceeds her charter, but I've never had any cause to feel she wasn't doing the job given her with loyalty and faithfulness."

"Tom—are you sure Coydt likes men?"

"Oh, yes. Preferably large, muscled, with big tools, and cabbage for brains. She's been known to go both ways at times, but her overall preference is quite clear, and she's too wary and well-protected to get caught in a reprogramming trap. This doesn't mean, however, that subordinates couldn't be playing as false with her as with us. Brenda depends on her computer reports and subordinates just like we all depend on ours." He paused a moment. "Oh, my! The big amps were to be dissolved in the void. Suppose, instead, they were programmed to influence the observers? Watanabe would be more than capable of it. and of disguising the energy drain they would register since she's also Energy Systems. But— this would have been
years
ago now."

"Yes, I know. You've just put your finger on why it's taken us so long to find out. The real question is what we do about it. What we
can
do about it."

Cockburn scratched his chin. "Well, we must assume that everyone working in Security in X-ray is in her power. She's not one to be lured out easily either. Keeps herself holed, up and well-protected. We could, of course, call a board meeting here, then summarily fire her, arrest her, and put her through the wringer. Should have done that years ago."