04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (50 page)

Faced with mounting pressure to do
something,
Ryan's staff ordered all the former landscape engineers identified wherever they were and the codes and strings for limited landscaping programs turned over to the officers in charge and Signals engineers. With the god guns dead, their ability to create new permanent pockets was gone, but if they could access the landscaping programs, it might be a different story.

"Small Anchors," he said thoughtfully, munching on his omnipresent cigar. "Or big pockets, as you prefer. Strictly from the mind. I like it, but will it work?"

"
Some
of the Sensitives are strong enough, although how many we don't really know," his chief engineer told him. "Everybody who was experimenting with this thing has thought about it, but I don't know of any who've really tried it with any determination. This Haller couple who broke through to their computer before the clampdown said that the thing told them to do just that—create their own world and live in it."

"Then we'll have to try it. Assign a series of well-spaced grid areas to the most powerful in each region and see what they can come up with. Go slow though. I don't want to alter the world's temperature or kill us and the Anchors off by straining the system."

"There's little chance of that, we think. We'll be using some of the same programs, including the discretionary ones, so the computer will add or subtract or adjust as necessary to make it work, but it won't be like the Anchor programs. Those are permanent, handled by the maintenance computer network. These will be transient programs, keyed to individuals by the 7800's themselves. If the creator dies, the program will be terminated and everything from the void will be returned to it. I wouldn't worry about strain, though, sir—the computers wouldn't allow it. There is, however, a major danger from the creators themselves."

"What?"

"Well, they're just people, sir. Pretty much normal human beings like all of us."

Ryan nodded. "In other words, neurotic, selfish, egotistical, and all the other traits that make folks interesting."

"Exactly. There will probably be some psychotics too. If not at the start, then certainly after they create their fantasies. The places won't be stable. They may change as the creator's mood changes. The less stable the creator, the less stable the creation. Worse, anyone and anything under their program's control will be subject to the creator's rules to one degree or another. It will be
real.
Those within the affected area with lesser power would be essentially subject to the creator's control. Those within the area with no power, such as our refugees, would have no way to fight it off and would become, as have the people of the Anchors, part of the program."

"I see what you mean. Hundreds of little kingdoms run by tinhorn little gods with petty minds and a population that was enslaved and subject to their every whim. I don't know, maybe van Haas was right. This place is sure shaping up to be a nice echo of Hell. Look—can we control them? Can we protect our own selves from these petty godlings?''

"We'd be subject to the same conditions. It'd take somebody more powerful than the creator to override and dissolve or alter the program against the creator's will. Still, we have an advantage so long as we can maintain ourselves as a military organization."

Ryan's eyebrows went up and he was clearly interested. "Explain."

"The fact is, the powers of many Sensitives, including those of greater and lesser sorts, can be combined for specific actions, such as breaking a program or, more easily, breaking a sub-routine like a force field. They all know this, but any creator who is any sort of potential threat is not going to be the sort to combine with a lot of others to increase power. They might get a power draw factor from their allies greater than their own and lose out. They'll never be totally secure. We, on the other hand, are a unitary military organization and, in effect, a cultural family. Our current percentage of Sensitives is extremely high, thanks to our experiments over the past few years and to the fact that almost everyone in Signals has at least a touch of the ability because we live and work in the stuff. Some aren't much, but I've never met a corpsman in the last ten years who couldn't both see and read the strings. Our psychology department first raised a lot of this and agrees with it."

Ryan nodded. "Go on."

"We must become a closed society of our own. We hold the only means of mass communications, the only real technology based in the present, left on this world. Psychology urges that we socially interact only with our own people. We marry within the corps, we have children within the corps who are raised in the values and superiority of the corps, and we allow no outsiders to enter the corps. We can absorb the military refugees from the other commands now, of course, and it might pay us to recruit Sensitives with strong powers or specialized knowledge none of our divisions now possess, but after that we close it out. We live, eat, sleep, work, play, love, and fight only in the void. We learn how to deal with even the most powerful creators, and we develop and train in strategy and tactics for dealing with them as we must. For any knowledge we might need, we'll trade service. We'll continue to do, on a more primitive basis, what we've always done—maintain commerce and communications between Anchors and between these new large pockets as well."

Ryan leaned back and thought about it, shaking his head in wonder. "I really like the idea of keeping the corps intact. No good can come of its dissolution. I'm not totally comfortable with your extreme of a large and hidden society, but if that's the price, then we've got to pay it. We can't kill those people and we can't continue to look after them forever. We need these new lands, no matter what their problems, to accommodate our refugees and the rest. It seems to me that the computers have given us two complete and separate societies, one too static, the other far too dynamic. I hate to say it, but the proposal makes real sense. There has to be a buffer between the most dynamic societies to keep them from eating themselves and each other alive, and there also has to be a middleman, a link, between the dynamic and the static. Our knowledge and skills can do a lot for those poor Anchor people. Rewire some of the places for electricity. Provide communication between the various powers that be in the various Anchors, and give them what they lack that another Anchor has. Our Anchor Guard recruits will be handy there. Almost all of 'em are really in Logistics."

"Psychology feels that if we present it right to our own troops, and go strongly with the sense of mission, it'll work."

"Well," replied Ryan, puffing on his big cigar, "at least it won't be dull."

17

THE BIRTH OF DEMONS

It was finished, and it looked impressive as hell, even to Micki Haller, whose vision it had been, and Toby, whose programming skill had called the turns just right.

It looked like Anchor and it felt like Anchor, but there was no bubble and no insulation from the grid. It was in Flux, but it was no void.

Its location was one hundred and forty kilometers southwest of Anchor Luck, although no telltale strings led to it and it could be located only by someone sensitive to the minor variations in grid power flow who could also find the starting point from a blue route string with just the most subtle variation in its pattern at a specific point. They had elected to keep it that way, and with a force field around it that made it invisible unless one were to bump into it by accident, and impenetrable unless by permission of the Haller family. The force field had limited the size a bit, but they had great power, and Toby was not about to go against the instructions of Seventeen at this point. It was shaped as a rough square, about a hundred and twenty-five square kilometers.

It consisted of rolling hills dotted with brightly colored flowers and grass of the deepest green, with patches of large, leafy trees and palms. There were birds, mostly songbirds, fluttering about, and through its center flowed a clear, shallow winding stream that fed a broad reflecting pool. The house was on one side of the pool, a modest place, patterned very much after the one they'd been forced to abandon back in Anchor Luck, where they had spent all their past time together. Flanking the house and pool on either side were two marble buildings of Grecian design, ornate and columned. One was a library, with readers and an enormous number of bubble modules containing vast knowledge smuggled from Anchor before the big change. The distribution had been rather random, however; it would take a lifetime or more just to find out and recatalog what was in them.

The other building was basically a shell; Micki called it the temple, since it had in its open center an Oriental garden with fountains and many ornate plants and places to sit and meditate. The few rooms in the shell were basically offices for them to get away and work for a bit at whatever they wanted to do, and even contained a room for meditation, but the main interior space was for a small museum, to collect and store and catalog many of the objects and devices they had taken for granted in their old lives which no longer worked but should not be forgotten.

The buildings, the gardens, the trees, even the blue sky with no trace of a monstrous gas giant to be seen anywhere, were all the creation of Toby and Micki Haller with some fine tuning and suggestions by Christine, the only child of theirs currently old enough to understand and use the powers that she received through inheritance. Micki intended to try much research on this creature of energy her daughter hosted, for it worried her a great deal, but that would come later.

They had selected their staff of fifty-four well and carefully from among the refugees. None had power, but they were drawn from every religious and cultural background they could find among the crowd, and all had specific duties and places that fit their past lives. The basic staff was also selected as family groups, so they would be a community and not a master family and employees in a social sense. Clearly, there would always be a class division based on dependency upon the Hallers, who had the power, but Toby and Micki were determined to minimize this as much as possible.

There would be no lack of work, even if the place were generally self-maintaining. The library had to be sifted through and cataloged. The limits of the powers had to be tested and learned to the full. Histories and cultures of the various people there were to be taken, orally and otherwise, and recorded so that they would not be lost.

The scarcity of horses had been solved by some refugees from the old original Special Projects who'd suggested that some of the people accept being transformed into radically different creatures. The network could not create life, but it had a tremendous amount of leeway with the alteration of it. People had been willing to help, but they'd objected to transformations into horses or mules themselves, even if such a thing were promised as temporary. The solution was to go back to mythology and create centaurs, with the body and strength of horses but the head and torso of human beings. It worked quite well, and gave some of the biologists a great deal to study 'in how the computers solved everything from the center of gravity to the respiratory and digestive problems this entailed.

Psychologists also would have a time trying to discover why so many ultimately chose to
remain
centaurs, including a dozen or so of the Hallers' staff. In one step, without even meaning to, they had created the first new life form other than humans and animals on the world.

Both Toby and Micki had been busy with the post-creation setup and getting the staff settled in and oriented, and this was the first time they'd really been together just to relax and not so tired they wanted only to sleep. They relaxed on the grassy lawn between the house and the pool and looked over their little world and decided that it was good.

Toby had just returned from the last trip out to the Signals pocket while Micki'd remained to get things in shape here.

"I saw Lisa Wu," he told her, relaxed and content.

"Oh? I wish she'd taken us up on our offer to come here. We could use a historian and an administrator."

"Everybody could. No, she and the family talked it over and decided to sign on with the Signal corps. She's got the power, although not as strong or as developed as we have, and the kids have some, and Signals needs somebody with a good grounding in history, both ancient and recent, and administrators as well, and that man of hers has black belts in martial arts I can't even pronounce. He'll make one hell of a training sergeant for them."

She sighed. "I just can't help thinking that it's all gone. Everything we knew. What dreams we all had! Unlimited power, unlimited sources of power to transform energy into whatever matter or other energy forms we needed—the millennium at last. Now it's gone. Even the people, the vast cultures that were born of Earth and made great civilizations— all gone. Gone forever." She gave a dry chuckle. "Some gods we are, sitting here in this little speck walled off from the world."

"A world that isn't anything we want, honey. The millions of diverse people and cultures in our beautiful Anchors are stuck now in happy ignorance back in the Middle Ages or something like it, while the areas between are inhabited by small groups of people with more power than anyone ever dreamed of and nothing much to do with it, policed by an ingroupish brigade of telephone repairmen. You know there have been a number of forays back into some of the Anchors, including Luck."

"Oh? They were talking about that, but I hadn't heard anything."

He nodded. "They say the reports didn't do justice to how primitive it is, and all that great technology and rich diversity of cultures is just gone. Coydt's version of Watanabe's nut cult made true believers of everybody and controls church and courts, which are somewhat Islamic in their rigidity and severity, while the men run the civil administration and the military. It's said they all have an ingrained terrible fear of the void. They're a frightened, superstitious lot, and there's even talk in some of them of establishing guard towers with barbed wire or even building walls to keep the monsters of the void out."