05. Children of Flux and Anchor (2 page)

Nervously, expecting a trick, he walked towards the lip of the Gate, stopping just before it, so that he could see most of the crater. He made a simple hand gesture and materialized a pair of field glasses in his left hand, then put the glasses to his eyes and scanned what he could.

Except for the fact that for the first time in forty-seven years the entire dish was clear of debris and visible, there was nothing unusual. There was nothing in the dish at all. Frowning, his nerves more on edge from this than if the dish had held a huge invader ship, he walked forward to the edge of the depression itself and stared, first with his naked eyes, then with the glasses. Nothing. He focused on the small black hole in the center of the dish, the normal access to the Gate. For a moment he thought he saw the reflection of some internal light in there, but then it was gone. He stared hard through the binoculars, squinting because it seemed that something was blurry right by the access hole, but it was certainly nothing substantial.

He still didn't like it, but he couldn't help but give a sigh of relief. "There's nothing in there!" he called back to the soldiers. "Come and look!"

Slowly, apprehensively, arms at the ready, they did. "Now what in the name of anybody's heaven was
that
all about?" one man muttered, voicing the thoughts of the rest.

"Anybody see
anything
?"
Bandichar asked, not able to believe what he wasn't seeing.

"Looks like a couple of little puffs of mist or something floatin' up over there," a woman noted, pointing. They all looked and spotted the two clouds or whatever they were— transparent, not terribly large, and rising to the rim about a hundred and fifty meters away from them. Bandichar realized that those were the indistinct blurs he'd seen in the glasses.

"Probably just some aftereffect of the Gate opening and closing," he told them. "Either that or the residue of whatever was sent."

They all looked at him, startled.

"This don't make any sense unless you think along the lines of somebody who wants in," he explained. "Say the fuzzballs check and find the Gates are open, but they got no report from their advance forces even after all this time. Maybe they just noticed after all the years that they were open at all. Now, after all those centuries, if I suddenly checked and found the Gates open, I'd send through something first to see if my senses or machines or whatever were lying."

"Well, what in hell would they send?" somebody asked. "Air or a bomb or something? It sure didn't look like much."

"Who knows how fuzzballs think?"

"Holy Angels!" somebody else swore, betraying a link with the old faiths. "Suppose it was some kind of poison gas or something?"

That started a mild panic reaction, but Bandichar shook his head. "Naw. Two little mist balls? If they were anything like that we'd be goners, and I think anything of that kind would be a lot bigger than what we saw. Anybody still spot the two little clouds?"

Everybody strained to look but nobody could. They had risen like the steam they resembled to the top of the dish wall and merged into Flux.

One middle-aged bearded man with a shotgun sighed and turned away from the dish and stopped dead, his mouth dropping, staring. Immediately behind the small group hovered two mist-like clouds, each smaller than a human and with no clear form, yet distinct from the Flux and flashing inside with a singular intensity of electrical activity. Suddenly the man raised the shotgun and shouted,

"
Hey! Look
—" but he was cut off, frozen in mid-sentence and mid-gesture, just as the others started to turn and bring their own weapons up if they had them. They, too, were suddenly frozen in an eerie tableau.

The two clouds approached the statue-like forms of the guard and drifted among them, as if looking them over and trying to decide just who and what they were seeing. Had the guards been able to see and think and react, they would have discovered that the clouds were not clouds at all, but two dense, pulsing masses with a mathematical logic about them. By their movements, there was no question that the things were either sentient in some impossible way or directed by ones who were.

The "clouds" moved from the humans to their dwellings and animals, seeming to take a full inventory as if inspecting the premises before deciding whether or not to buy the place. The horses were not frozen, but ignored the things, although when they were almost literally enveloped by them, one at a time, they expressed not so much distress as annoyance.

Finally they moved out into the void itself, clear of all recently arrived beings and artifacts, and touched the soft, sponge-like floor of the world. Had Bandichar been able to view the scene he would have recognized immediately that the clouds were sending and receiving "spells" along the computer grid that underlay the entirety of the world. The spells were quite complex, too much so for any human, and entirely in the language of the great machines themselves.

Bandichar and the others might have been upset, even threatened, by this sight, could they have seen it, but they knew that whatever talked in this way was nothing more than a local threat. The great machines had taken their minds somewhere else almost three thousand years earlier, leaving only data and automatic programs to handle maintaining and nurturing the world and its people, and indiscriminate access even to the data was blocked by firm military-imposed and reimposed codes that not even another great machine like the ones buried in the Anchors of World could break.

The "clouds" themselves were discovering this, and were clearly agitated by it, pulsing and changing shape rapidly as their questions and commands were mostly refused or ignored. Clearly whatever they were they could feel anger, or at least frustration.

Finally they stopped, seemed to merge, and clearly had a heated discussion on what to do next and how to do it. Finally, they decided on something, at least, broke apart, and drifted back towards the frozen humans. Then, after giving a series of spells to the grid, they were away again into the void, quickly vanishing from view.

The humans unfroze. "What the hell . . . ?" the wizard muttered, looking puzzled. They
all
looked puzzled, or so it seemed, each one aware that something had happened, some time had passed, but unsure of whether or not the others felt the same or if they'd just gone a little bit mad.

There was a sudden crackling sound from inside the great dish itself, and several of them cried out and stepped back as the delayed program went into action.

As they watched, awed and more than a little scared, the dish gathered in sufficient Flux and transformed it into a precise duplicate of all the enormous volume of junk and trash that had been in the dish before.

Atita Saag turned white-faced to Bandichar. "
Now
what? There's not even any evidence anything happened. Who's gonna believe this
now
?"

"We'll report it," he told her. "They'll pick us clean but they'll be convinced that we all saw what we saw and heard what we heard. It's even possible that the incoming calls were heard in the Anchor temples. But we'll let wiser heads than ours figure it all out."

"Figure
what
out?" she wanted to know. "Just what
did
happen here?"

"Hell, ma'am, that's simple," said the old fellow with the rifle behind her. "Somebody just done stole our garbage, didn't like it, and dumped it back."

2

DISCOURSES ON SOCIOLOGY AND POKER

The air was damp and slightly chilled in the early morning light, the huge orb of the gas giant that provided World's illumination sending eerie ripples over the land as it rose. Two riders mounted on strong black horses made their way slowly down the well-worn dirt road, side by side. One was an older man with a full gray-black beard and long flowing hair of the same color, dressed in a long black suit coat and heavy black work pants, looking like the elder in some ancient and austere religious group. The other was far younger, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and blue denim trousers; a man of medium build, clean-shaven and with dark hair cut very short. Only the most astute observer would see any resemblance in the two, or even guess a relationship.

They had now been two days together in New Eden, that vast Anchor area three thousand kilometers across, and still with vast empty stretches of land like the one they now traversed.

"I can't get over how little has changed," said the younger man in a low, raspy tenor. "Forty-seven years, all the leadership dead, the women freed of their spell-enforced limits, and it all seems the same."

This was not the first time he had said it, but he still couldn't really believe what they'd found.

"It's not so odd," the older, bearded man responded in a rich baritone. "It's the way people in groups work, son. You take a bunch of lifelong slaves from some Fluxland. Something happens to the Fluxlord, and the slaves are suddenly free and they run off with one of them who's a wizard himself and set up their own Fluxland. Do they establish freedom and democracy and equality for all? Hell, no. They were born into a system with slaves and rulers and taught from the cradle that it was the system that was right, just, God's will, and whatever. They ain't been thinking of a different world—they don't know any other anyway. So they set up the same system with
them
on top and make slaves out of everybody else they find. Same system, only they're on top. You seen it again and again here, and I hear tell in the old histories of the ancients there's hundreds of similar things."

"Yeah, but this isn't like that."

"No? What's the difference?"

The younger man shook his head wonderingly. "I mean, O.K., it's one thing for the original New Eden. That far I'll accept your analogy. Coydt hated all women, and he got his men from matriarchal Fluxlands where they were on the bottom so naturally they set up this system. And when the Church the anchors all had been born and raised with, an all-female hierarchy, was shown false, there was some natural resentment there as well among some of the men. But they used Flux, after all, in the long run, to physically change the women so they couldn't read, write, do simple math, or fully control their emotions. But after the Invasion was beaten off—mostly by women, as it happened—and those brain changes were reversed, you'd think women would demand their rights."

The old man sighed. "Son, you sell old Adam Tilghman short. Like most of Coydt's hand-picked leaders, he was a brilliant man. He was actually born in Anchor, and thrown out under the old lottery system. Sold to some doddering Fluxlord goddess where he became one of her bodyguards and kept men, serving and servicing the underwizard women who worked for the old girl and ran her affairs. He had good cause to hate women, since it was women in the old priesthood who threw him out into Flux and it was in a Fluxland dominated by women that he was a courtesan, slave, and if need be, soldier. The fact was, though, he
didn't
hate women."

"I didn't know all that about him. So you mean he was just a product of his environment? When he got sprung by Coydt he just wanted to reverse things?"

"Well, you sell him a little short there, but not much. Fact was, he was a brilliant man who learned everything well. Even bright enough to understand what I'm saying about him. Trouble was, he was too human to accept that in himself, or see it in his own makeup. He felt comfortable with his new role and his new society, although not with its early brutality, but he felt a need to justify it all to himself. See, Coydt was honest with himself. He was out for revenge against women and he felt he had good cause. Old Adam, though, was too moral a man to be honest with himself. So he went through all of those fragments of ancient books Coydt had collected over the years, and out of it he built the religious foundation for New Eden. He was the New Eden theoretician, so to speak, and because he found that level of justification for all they were doing they accepted his conclusions wholeheartedly."

"Yeah, well, I know New Eden was the original name our ancestors had for the whole world when they came here, and I know they had a lot of religions, but I don't know if they led in
this
direction."

"Well, that depends. You read
fragments
and
excerpts
from holy books and it's taking things out of context. You can draw all the wrong conclusions. Then there was selectivity. He read lots of stuff from old religious texts—the Bible, the Koran, a couple of ones from a religion called Hinduism, and there he found what he wanted to find. The parts that didn't fit his vision he just ignored. Oh, I doubt if he knew he was ignoring them or being so selective; it was probably a subconscious editing. And remember his background—the old Anchor Church. You think the way you're raised, and even though he didn't believe in the Church he still thought in the same logic and context as the Church did. He couldn't help it. He read where Adam came first, then Eve was created second. That's in both the Bible and the Koran, so it's one good nail. Now, he figures evil couldn't corrupt Adam, so it worked on Eve and corrupted her. She was the one who disobeyed God and got punished for it, dragging Adam down with her. When two different religious books agree, that's holy writ. And when it becomes clear that the other beliefs were also basically patriarchies and that patriarchy was the rule for much of early human history—well, that cinches it. He's got God on his side."

"But he's forty-seven years dead!"

"Uh huh. But think about this place. Only a handful of New Eden's citizens are older than New Eden. The vast bulk of them were born and raised in the system, and even the older ones lived under it for decades. It was always a collective leadership after Coydt was killed, and only Adam died. The rest just made him a saint and enshrined his system as holy writ. These folks have been born and raised in this in the same way as he was born and raised in the system of the Holy Mother Church. They don't know any other system, and they believe in their religion. Besides, they have no alternative system anymore."