“Oh, it’s not that bad,” the major replied. “They have recording machines that they just feed the information into on a district by district basis. It all goes over the wires to the bigger machines in the capital, and they spot anything odd and notify the local authorities. Those machines have everybody’s numbers and descriptions on them. New Eden is crime-free and peaceful, thanks to the system. Everyone knows his place and does his duty.” He said that like it was something to be very proud of.
Machines, Matson thought sourly. That’s what the place was—one big machine. Everybody was cared for, absolutely, cradle to grave, and protected from all harm, so long as they did everything exactly the way it was ordered. Individuality was frowned upon, and creativity might rock the boat, but if you conformed and did your duty you’d have everything you needed. If you didn’t like it, well, the government had ways of making you love it, too. To Matson, it made people of equal importance to the electric poles and other gadgets: all were just cogs and gears in a larger machine.
They spent the night in a small town that had once been much larger, but wasn’t as necessary now to supply the surrounding farms and provide a rural cultural and service center. Still, in the town he saw his first Fluxgirls at close range, and realized how different they were. Nature could never make such exaggerated beauty and sexuality, yet in their own way they were as dull and docile as the female workers. The only difference was, the Fluxgirls had more fun, and mooney-eyed men made fools of themselves around them. Yet in the dining room he saw men making it with other men while Fluxgirls served them dinner and drinks and always with a smile. Fortunately, Taglia seemed to be the kind that doted on the Fluxgirls—fortunately for Taglia, Matson thought sourly.
He had expected not to like New Eden, and he hadn’t been disappointed, but he certainly hadn’t expected the men to be as oppressed as the women. The Fluxgirls probably had the best of the bargain, he decided. They didn’t know any better, and he bet they enjoyed what they were designed for more than any man or normal woman.
He couldn’t help wondering if those fools of the old Anchor Logh would have fought against liberation at the cost of mass death if they could see what their society had turned into. Hell, probably some of them were still around, turned into what he saw. It was one thing to be at the mercy of a wizard in Flux, unable to do or even be anything that wizard didn’t wish, but it was quite another to have a choice, even this or death, and see how somebody could choose this.
It took another day and a half to reach the city, but once there he was quickly quartered and his horse bedded down in government stables. The city was so radically changed he could hardly recognize it, with its tall buildings and stately mansions and mass apartment blocks stretching out in all directions. Still, it was a very big city with all the basics needed to support a large, population, including various shops and markets, and it seemed to have the kind of life of its own cities seemed always to take on. General use of horses was banned in the center city, but the masses of people seemed to get along well on foot and using various kinds of bicycles, tricycles, pedicars, and even pedal-powered wagons.
Here the Fluxgirls roamed freely, in various states of dress and undress, and it seemed like every other one was pregnant and carrying at least one small infant in a carrier on her back as well. This was the home of the key bureaucracy of an expansionist empire, and it looked and felt it, even if the place and most of the buildings were pretty dull and drab. Still, the people seemed generally happy, not the dull-eyed creatures he’d so often seen populating Fluxlands.
He had a special visitor’s card and they’d not given him any restrictions on where he could go, but he didn’t feel like walking around much. It seemed like there was a cop on every street corner and while they didn’t spend all their time asking for I.D.s—the paperwork would have killed them young—he was a marked man if only because he stood out.
From the officer’s quarters where he’d been housed he could look out the window and see Temple Square, about a block away, and he felt a little of the history of the building and the place itself. From there, many long years ago, he’d hauled Cassie and Suzl and a lot of others, most dead now, into Flux for the first time and had somehow started the chain of events which had now come to this. He didn’t feel particularly guilty—he knew that everything he did from then on he’d do the same way over again—but he did feel a sense of the stream of events that had so radically altered World, as a key participant in that history.
He thought of all those people down there, trapped by this crazy culture, and then wondered if he should be all that smug. He’d taken Cass on the trail because she’d wanted it, and he’d been down about Arden’s death and wanted some, too. He still might have taken up with her, if he hadn’t gotten shot down in the fight over Persellus and if she hadn’t decided to become a saintly priestess before he woke up, but he knew he’d never have married her. He was a stringer, and stringers married stringers. Everybody knew that. He’d been trapped by his own culture just as sure as they’d been trapped down there.
And he’d married a good stringer woman, finally, and they’d had kids and a new and more settled life up north in the Fluxland hideaway for those who were running from World and those who had done things preventing them from ever going back into it. He and his wife had each needed somebody right then, and that had been the basis of it. They liked and respected each other, but mostly stayed together out of habit and for the sake of the kids. He wondered if he ever really loved anybody, and wondered, too, for the millionth time, whether it was in him to love. Loving was being out of control, and stringers could never be out of control. It was a condition of the job and the life. Stringers had duties and responsibilities, that was all, and it was supposed to be enough.
He looked down again at the people going back and forth in the street below. Duties and responsibilities. Was it possible to be poles apart from another society and culture and yet pay the same price? Stringers were individualists because the job required a high degree of independence, intelligence, and stubborn, confident egomania. But they were so because as cogs in the Guild’s machine they needed it to work effectively. Kill a stringer, though, and ten would avenge him while another out of more or less the same mold took his place on the job. And when you got to the top, if you did, you wound up like him, protecting and refining the machine.
Like those men in those big mansions off Temple Square or whatever they were calling it these days. The top men, they weren’t dull-eyed or ignorant; their minds were creative, individualistic, strong, and ambitious. Yet what were they doing at the top but protecting and refining their own machine and making it grow bigger? Perhaps the basic difference between the Guild and New Eden, in the final analysis, was that the Guild could not grow any bigger, and spent its whole time preserving the status quo. “We are a military organization,” he’d told Mervyn, and that was quite true. Why did he feel uncomfortable in this one?
Adam Tilghman lived in one of those houses down there, as did Cass and Suzl and probably a mess of their kids by now. Not the Cass and Suzl he’d known, but the products of all this. Looking down at the city with its criss-crossing maze of communication and electrical wires he was struck by just how similar those things looked to the strings he followed and used in Flux. Just blot out the city and color code the wires as to function and it would be very, very familiar. . . .
He lay down on the comfortable bed and relaxed for a while, but the depression would not go away.
Maybe we just ought to let them open those Hellgates. he thought sourly. What the hell are we protecting now. anyway?
* * *
When they had returned from the war and Suzl had been informed of Welz’s “heroic” death, she’d taken it so calmly that it was clear that any love that might have been there once was long gone. She’d been mostly concerned about her fate and that of her younger children, and when Adam Tilghman talked to her and made her his offer she jumped at it. Even more, she jumped at the idea of a binding spell such as the one Cassie and had taken, and it was easily done.
The “new” Suzl, complete with a new tattoo and number, knew that she had been born in pre-New Eden times, but didn’t really remember any of it. She had just remembered being a farm girl, sort of, who’d been claimed and married to Weiz in the early days, and had met and became best friends with Cassie only when both were married and living in the capital. Like Cassie, she neither remembered nor had any concept of another life or culture. The memories had not been merely suppressed, but erased and supplanted by the spell’s details.
Once the marriage to Tilghman had taken place, things seemed to sort themselves out very well in the household. Suzl had been used to handling a large brood; the kitchen was her domain, and she seemed to remember every recipe she’d ever devised and was a whiz as a cook and kitchen manager, and with the easing of the clothing restrictions she also proved skilled at sewing, clothes design, even the making of drapes and curtains. Cassie made up the beds, did the basic washing, and kept the house clean and spotless. Both virtually worshipped Adam, but they also loved each other, and although Cassie was nominally chief wife it was Suzl who was dominant by sheer personality. Each felt that she was at the top, as far as any girl could hope to be, and they were more than content to stay there. Neither felt any sense of ambition, curiosity, nor saw any sense in competition.
Suzl’s oldest daughters still at home, ages twelve and fifteen, were heading the household staff; she also had two sons by Tilghman, both now in the hands of the state, and a daughter barely two. Cassie’s twins still had a ways to go to puberty, but had already developed into the absolute image of their mother as she was now. They were absolutely identical and real charmers; only their tattooed names allowed even their mother to tell them apart. She’d also had two other daughters—Cori, six, and Cissy, three—but no sons. A staff of ranking daughters of other officials was still retained which helped to take care of the younger children and helped manage the housework.
Today was particularly busy, since Adam had told them that there would be a guest for dinner, an outsider from beyond New Eden—a realm they thought of only occasionally and always with a mixture of fear and distaste. But this man, called Matson, was a very important man out there, or so Adam had told them. Their husband had, in fact, seemed somewhat nervous and ill at ease when telling them the man’s name, but it meant nothing to either one of them and he’d relaxed. They had spent the day shopping and then cleaning and preparing for the meal, which was far less of a task than the parties and state dinners they had hosted so many times in the past, and now were fixing each other’s hair and adjusting one another’s makeup and outfits.
Adam had been clear about what they should look like. Although there was a loosening of all codes and they had formal dresses for many occasions, Adam had specifically asked them to look as they had at their weddings, wearing the coarse netting at the hips which hid nothing at all— silver for Cassie’s bronze complexion, gold for Suzl’s lighter shade—and matching jeweled belt and the highest heeled matching shoes it was possible to wear, with heavy makeup, lashes, and jewelry.
Adam Tilghman never missed an opportunity to make a point.
The man who arrived, right on time, was a different sort than either of them had ever seen before, despite his dull black clothing. His broad-brimmed hat, creased in the middle, the left brim fastened to the crown, his shiny, thick belt with the genuine silver trim, and his lack of any insignia, rank, or ribbons, marked him as someone apart. It was his look, though, that indicated something odd and frightening about him. The thick, neatly trimmed gray hair and drooping gray moustache only served to set off his ruddy, worn complexion, and his reddish-brown eyes seemed cold, almost artificial, hiding everything about the man within. He was ruggedly handsome and looked about Adam’s age, although they knew that looks could be and usually were deceiving. He looked in his fifties, but the eyes seemed hundreds of years old.
Matson hadn’t looked forward to this, and he’d wondered much of the day how he’d feel, how he’d react, when he first saw the two women. The one reaction he didn’t expect was to feel cynical, but that was exactly how he felt when he saw them, Flux-modified, made up like bar girls and mostly naked to boot. He would not have recognized Suzl at all under any circumstances; Cassie bore a resemblance to her former self, but had he not known the truth he would have dismissed it as merely that—a resemblance. He knew it wasn’t going to be very hard for him, anyway. The two people he’d known may once have been this pair, but they were dead as far as he was concerned.
“Our husband’ll be down in a li’l while,” Cassie told him. “Meantimes, you kin sit’n ‘lax in the li-bry. There’s brandy’n good cigars in there always. Adam don’t ‘low no smokin’ in the house ‘cept in there.” Her voice, he noted, was still unnaturally deep for a woman’s, but the spell had given it a sexy, throaty quality while taking away her pronunciation and grammar. As a “girl” who’d grown up uneducated and ignorant as the law demanded, this was to be expected, but it was the final break with the past for him. She had lost far more than her memories.
He nodded. “Thank you, ladies.” he responded, in a voice that was melodious but one of the deepest they’d ever heard. “Show me the way, and tell him not to hurry.”
Once the awkwardness was over, Matson’s mind went right to work. He went into the library, which was a large room with several comfortable chairs, a single oversized ash tray, two walls lined with printed books and a third with modules—small square objects that would fit in one’s palm easily and weighed only a few grams, but which, he knew, contained more information each than a hundred walls of printed books. He helped himself to a cigar but not the brandy, a drink he’d never much cared for, lit the cigar and studied the printed titles on the spines of the bound books. He was relieved to see that neither of the wives nor any of the staff had stayed around, particularly after he’d lit the cigar, and he idly looked at the titles. Most, he saw, were of relatively recent origin—books on New Eden’s laws, religion, and the like, some histories both of New Eden and of other areas including a standard huge book on the old Church and its doctrines, some on math and wizardry, some on geography, but nothing odd. The old stuff, and the interesting stuff, was on the modules.
Each little cube was in its own short binding, attached to a page in a pocket, with a typed index that often ran a hundred pages of single-spaced type included. The spines were number-coded and gave little indication of what the contents were, although he noticed that a dozen or so were in older, worn bindings of a distinctive purple shade. He took one out and saw embossed on the front in gold the initials “OH”—just like that. Idly he wondered how much time he had, but he picked one at random and thumbed through its yellowed index, mostly in longhand. The first had nothing unusual from a quick scan, nor did the second or third, but the fourth had, in the middle of the index, an entry circled in red with a red exclamation point attached. The entry merely said, “Misc. longhand ramblings.” but he took a guess that was it. Glancing out the doors to see if anyone was coming, he removed a small cube that looked identical to the one in the front from a small concealed pocket in his pants, slipped the cube in the binder out and slipped his own in. He reshelved the binder, but still had his finger on the pocket when Adam Tilghman suddenly entered.
Slickly, Matson turned, prayed that the cube was secure, smiled, stubbed out his cigar, and extended his hand. “Matson, Stringer’s Guild,” he said pleasantly. He hoped he hadn’t been observed for some time before the old man revealed himself. It would be very much in character with the man and the place.
“Adam Tilghman,” the other responded, taking the stringer’s hand and shaking with a strong, firm grip. “I see you’ve been looking at my private collection.”
“Just browsing out of curiosity. The old ones with the purple bindings—they were Coydt’s?”
Tilghman nodded. “Indeed, they were the ones he kept to himself pretty much. There’s a lot of crap in them, mostly stuff we’ll never understand, but some very interesting things that it would be best not to reveal at large are in there as well.”
“Oh? What sort of things would be so dangerous they shouldn’t be read?”
“Well, the legendary journal of Toby Haller is up there, for example.”
Matson tensed a bit. Was the old boy having fun with him? Still, he kept it cool and casual. “I’ve heard of it, of course. I guess everybody has who’s been around a while. I don’t say I disbelieve you, but I have a pretty hard time believing in any book whose printed words can drive folks nuts.”
“Some folks,” Tilghman responded with a slight smile. “Actually, it will be common knowledge someday, even required reading, but the world isn’t ready for it yet. You, for instance, would find it instructive and revealing, even shocking, but while it would change your world view forever it would simply cause you to get yourself in hot water with most of the population, perhaps tried and executed for blasphemy by the old Church.” He went over, took out the volume that Matson had pulled the switch on. and held it up. “Here it is. Want to read it? I have a machine in my office, if you want to spoil your dinner and a lot of dinners afterwards.”
Although still inwardly tense and poised for some sort of emergency action, Matson thought that there was real humor in the situation if Tilghman didn’t know of the switch. “It’s tempting, but not tonight, thanks, unless you want to do a print-out and let me take it with me. We have more immediate matters to discuss.”
Tilghman shrugged and put the binder back. “As you wish—but I can think of no one more than yourself who’s entitled to read all this.” He changed the subject, and Matson relaxed a bit. “I see that you have met my wives.”
“I met ’em. Two extremely attractive and sexy young ladies, if I can take the liberty.”
Tilghman smiled and nodded. “You can. You know, of course, who they are?”
“I know who they were, and I know who they are now, and who they are now is all that counts with me.”
The Chief Judge seemed slightly disappointed by the visitor’s pragmatism. Although not a petty man. he allowed himself the pleasure of rubbing noses in bis triumphs when he got the chance, and Matson’s calm was something of a letdown.
They went in to dinner, Matson sitting on one side of the table, while Tilghman, flanked by his two stunning wives, sat on the other. The meal was served by the twins, whose resemblance not only to each other but to their mother was startling, and by Suzl’s two oldest, and was passed mostly with small-talk or no talking at all.
For his part, Tilghman’s playful time had passed, and his mind was all on his visitor now. Matson was not a man to be trifled with, even here and now. He tended to imagine figures in history as being disappointingly ordinary if one were to meet them; Matson really was larger than life and every inch the legend, animated and sitting in his dining room. There was tremendous power and confidence there, at least equal to Tilghman’s own presence and possibly greater, and something else, too, that neither he nor even Champion had—a sense of chilling moral ambivalence, of a man who could play cards and trade jokes with Coydt van Haas as an equal, then kill him without fear or regret because his personal code demanded it. Sheer brilliance totally devoid of passion or conscience. Even Coydt had had passion, although of a destructive sort. Tilghman knew from Taglia’s reports that Matson considered New Eden a human machine. Well, he thought, it takes one to know one.
Suzl served dessert and Cassie poured after-dinner drinks for the two men. as they talked vaguely of conditions on World and swapped general information that went over the heads of the two wives. Matson, however, seemed a bit irritable, and finally betrayed a measure of human weakness. “If you don’t mind the smoke, can we discuss these things further in the library?” he asked Tilghman. “I always like a cigar after a fine meal. I don’t get too many of them in my line of work.”
Tilghman nodded, and the two men got up and walked out and over, to the library area. Cassie and Suzl started to clean up the table, and Suzl whispered, “Ain’t that the creepiest man you ever seen?”
Cassie nodded. “He’s handsome ’nuff, but I can’t ‘magine no girl ever takin’ up with him. A girl’d freeze t’death with what he’d put inside her.”
“Yeah, but I can’t ‘magine no girl or no man neither turnin’ him down.”
“If that’s what them outside men’re like, I’m glad to be here in New Eden,” Cassie said firmly.
* * *
“The Guild asked me to come down for several reasons,” Matson told Tilghman when both were settled in the library. “I haven’t been too keen to get back into action of late, but I thought it had to be done, so here I am.”
“It was a big shock to a lot of men here when we received word that you wished to come. Our own people and even our contacts outside indicated that you had died several years ago.”
“Not hardly. I tried dying once, and I’m not too anxious to repeat the experience. I’d just as soon stay officially dead, though, as much as I can. I got sick and tired of killing young wizards who wanted to make a reputation by nailin’ Coydt’s killer or young punks in Anchor who wanted to show me how tough they are or how perfect some spell’s made ’em. I’m a pretty good false wizard, but I don’t put much stock in the power, real or false. Somehow you lose all the ability to do things the hard way, and sometimes that’s the only way. I got a daughter with all the power you want and I can’t knock a lick of practical sense in her head. Never could.”
Tilghman didn’t want to press that, wondering if the daughter he meant were Spirit or someone less awkward to talk about. “I think we agree on that, although I have to admit Flux made all this possible. I understand you don’t like what we’ve done here.”
Matson shrugged. “Don’t mean nothin’ to me one way or the other, to be frank. I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. I got to talking about that with some people a few weeks back, in fact. New Eden may be Anchor, but it’s really just the biggest Fluxland, and the system’s no less total than the one the Church ran here and runs in most of the others. Sorry if that offends you, but I think you’re the kind who wants the truth.”
“I do. I do. Would it surprise you to know that I’m in agreement on that as well? No matter how convenient Flux and magic spells and the very long lives that go with them are, they’re the ultimate crutches. I wonder if we could survive without the set of crutches? I have pretty good evidence that our ancestors once did, long ago.”
“I might accept that, but I don’t see that it matters. I think we forgot how to live without it. Oh, it might have been different fifty years ago, although I doubt it, but not now. Maybe not for the past couple of thousand. This place, for instance, is going to be strained when that work force starts growing old and having all sorts of old-people illnesses, and when most of the people here who run things but aren’t high enough to have been treated to these eternal youth spells start aging and even dying.”
Tilghman was interested. “You really think so? That we can’t have a generational changeover? The old teaching the young and then retiring?”
“Never happen. You and your leadership and even your wives are protected, pretty much. You’re never going to surrender that power to a younger generation that might get it in its head that it’d be cheaper and easier, not to mention safer, to just bump you all off.”
“You may be right, but I hope not. At least as we develop more and more machines we’ll be less dependent on this slave labor concept. I dream of a time when machines do all the labor, freeing both men and women for creative work of a higher order, wanting for nothing. There’s no medical reason why human beings can’t live a hundred, maybe two hundred years or more without any Flux magic. The brain is the only organ, they tell me, whose cells die and are not replaced, and we use only a small fraction of it. Yet some of the really old wizards seem to live beyond half a millennium without losing their mental faculties.”
“Maybe, but I think there’s a trick to it. I think they cheat and generate new brain parts by magic, then still forget most of their early lives. Me, I’m eighty-three and I find real holes in my memory now. I remember the important stuff—or at least I think I do—but most of the rest just isn’t there any more. I may not be making any new brain cells, but the brain’s always housecleaning and throwing out all the stuff it decides I don’t need any more. I suspect it’s the same with you.”
Tilghman thought about it. “I suppose you’re right, but it doesn’t alter my own vision. It’s possible, and if it’s possible and worthwhile it’s worth attempting.”
“Maybe. That’s really your affair, none of mine. My business is more here and now. First off, we know you’ve set up a communications network along strings. This disturbs us for two reasons.”
Tilghman grew suddenly cold and deliberative. He hadn’t known that the network had become such common knowledge so quickly. “Go on.”
“First, the Guild doesn’t like Anchors or even wizards making their own strings. You know that. Let one group do it, and soon every Fluxlord and half-baked wizard on World will be doing it. The void’ll get so crowded with ’em that it’ll become cluttered and confusing, and the overlapping networks won’t be good for anything. You have all them communication and electrical wires strung out there and it looks like a mess as it is. Now set up a hundred, or even a thousand, competing networks of poles and wires, each belonging to somebody else, and you get a real mess. Now wipe out all your roads and all your road signs and just follow the wires. That’s the kind of thing the void can become and real quick.”
“I suppose the Guild’s monopoly on the existing network isn’t a factor,” Tilghman responded slyly. “This is all in the name of altruism and a safer, saner World.”
“The two things are the same thing, and it doesn’t matter if the safe and sane coincides with our own business. The Guild has always run the strings, and maintained them, and not only turned a good profit but also provided a steady, dependable service. We believe in it, and we enforce it as well as protect and service it.”
“And what, might I ask, could you do about it if I weren’t in the mood to accommodate your demands?”
Matson sighed. “Judge, you never wondered why we keep such control, and have held it all these centuries? I mean, there have been some really powerful wizards out there, and at times some pretty big armies, yet we’re still here and still in control.”
Tilghman said nothing, but, in fact, he had wondered about it when they first began their own network. At the time he’d dismissed it as an idea whose time had come.
“You see us in our black outfits moving trains and hauling passengers and cargo from one place to the other,” Matson continued, “but you only see the bottom of the Guild. You never see the linesmen who service it. and you never even think about the organization behind it, but it’s a big and powerful one. It’s a skilled trade guild run like a big corporation. Judge, and it’s a corporation run like a tight military organization. We have specialized units that are like nothing you’ve ever seen. You got all your knowledge out of the ancient books, Judge, ones like those on the wall over there that got scattered around all over creation. We never lost ours. There were stringers here from the start, and we know our business. We use very different and very specialized equipment, including amplifiers of a type you’ve never seen or heard of. Judge, just one of those units, if activated, could disrupt your communications, overload your amplifiers and cripple or kill your linesmen just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You’d never see or hear them, either, even with your whole army and a wizard’s convention.”
Tilghman was at one and the same time fascinated and uneasy. Such information explained a lot about the stringers and their grip, but it was not easy to hear. Still, it couldn’t go unchallenged. “If the Guild is really that powerful, why don’t you use the strings for communication?”
“Well, first of all that requires a lot of power and amplifiers of a type big enough to be visible and obvious—and easy targets. Ones like yours. Second, and most important, we don’t think it’s in the best long-term interest of World to have a mass worldwide communications network. About ten days after you set it up somebody would figure a way to tap into it and all seven Hellgates would fly open just like that.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yes, I believe it would happen, and the Guild board believes it, too. We could secure conversations along the network, but there would be no way to secure the entire system from illegal extra use. Guild men and women have died to prevent the establishment of such a network. I’m not as afraid of the Hellgates opening as most of World is, but I never saw a reason for fighting a war, with all its cost in lives, if you can avoid it.”
“And you think that’s what we’d get from the Hellgates? A war? I’m fascinated by this, Matson, I must admit. I have strong documentary evidence that war is exactly what we face if they are ever opened, but a war with an enemy that even our ancestors feared to face. You seem to think we could where they could not.”
Matson restated his arguments with Mervyn. “There are ways to make the odds even better for our side, if we wanted to, but most folks don’t want to even think of the possibility. Every time I’ve brought up such plans any place here they always bring up the cost and the point that nothing has happened for over two thousand years so it’d be a waste of time and resources. Me, I think you people have opened the magic box with all the tricks and paraphernalia to make it happen, and I think the Seven will get their hands on it and use it, maybe not soon, maybe tomorrow. But I’m getting off the subject.”
“No, no! I’m very interested in this,” Tilghman insisted. “That won’t be Coydt van Haas coming through there, you know. It’ll be something totally inhuman, totally different than anything we know or can imagine, but it’ll have all of the ancients’ science and technology as well as, most likely, total control of Flux.”