Matson sighed. “I have to. if only to try to save Sondra’s neck. Also, this place has possibilities. I think it’s gonna be the easiest area to defend when the Gates come open, and I think Tilghman’s ready to listen on that score. Also, bet on them pretty well evacuating the Anchors as much as possible and moving their main centers inland fast. It’s their best defense. With their limited manpower, the Guild’s in the best position to contract to service the new areas they’re gonna build.” He shrugged. “Don’t look so shocked. We do business with just as bad, always have. And maybe we can dampen down that broadcast scheme a little. Gates open, Gates not open—somebody from the Guild’s got to be there to represent our point of view and our interests.”
He got up to leave, then stopped, turned, and reached into his pocket, removing a small cube which he bounced like a the on the table. Mervyn just stared at it.
“I hope you can duplicate that exactly,” Matson said. “That there’s your precious Toby Haller journal, and I think I can sneak it back into the old boy’s library if you can.”
Mervyn stood up and stared at the cube in wonder. “Toby Haller’s journal . . . . You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He picked it up and looked as it as if it were some magical jewel. “This is a service I can never repay. Perhaps it will have the answers. Perhaps it will make the difference.”
“You can make a copy?”
“Easily, although by more conventional means than magic. You’re leaving right away?”
“Tomorrow. No sense wasting time with a daughter at stake.”
“It will be read, printed out, and duplicated tonight, I swear.”
Matson nodded. “Much obliged. Make two printouts and I can read it before I leave if it’s not too long. I’m kind of curious myself.” He paused a moment. “Uh, Mervyn?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for saving Spirit.”
The wizard shook his head and sighed. “No, that’s not necessary. In more ways than one, it was Spirit who saved me.”
14
TOBY HALLER’S JOURNAL
The device produced a book of several hundred very large pages. What was surprising about it was that the thing was handwritten, in very small, close script that was not very easy to read. Apparently it had been kept entirely in longhand, and then simply photographed onto the recording slate to preserve it.
Much of it was illegible, and there were large gaps, and often great events took only a line or so, while he went on and on about mundane matters that were of no consequence to anyone alive these past twenty-five hundred or so years. But when fitted in with what Mervyn already knew, it painted a stunning picture.
March 28, 2117: Talley ho! We’re finally on our way! Four bloody years shot to hell on Titan, which once bore a strong resemblance to our little project but now is less akin than Spitsbergen is to Nassau, but now it’s going to pay off. At .8 light speed it takes almost no time to get to the Borelli Point, even though it’s halfway to the stars.
April 2. All sealed up in this damned shell, can’t even see the Borelli Point. They have photos of it. looking something like an eclipsed sun, but I sure wish I could have seen it. (Unintelligible) . . . Heigh ho! Wonder what it feels like once you’re strapped in that tube and turned into a lot of particles? Find out tomorrow, and so will you, old record book!
April 3 (I think). Well, they took us down and strapped us in just fine. First of a whole bunch of people, but the forward parry’s been there for four years already. The thing looked like the biggest room you’ve ever seen, going on for kilometers in all directions, all with very narrow aisles. Place looked like a breeding ground for giant test tubes, only we poor humans were the stuff what’s in ’em. No clothes, no nothing. You get taken there in the buff, and some tech boy barely out of college pushes a button that raises the tube and you get on the little platform. Then down it comes, and you stand there for what seems hours waiting, while a bunch of women techs walk through and make lewd gestures. They pipe in music, but it’s a bore. Finally, they break in, tell you to relax, the lights dim, and you just go off to beddy by standing up. Damn Einstein for being so right! So instead of a nice faster-than-light drive, we get turned into atoms, shot through a well-regulated hole punched into another universe, and squirted along highways of energy there where energy is solid and the lightspeed thousands of times faster than in this universe. I keep telling these young people that it’s nonsense to shoot a whole gaggle of people, cows, chickens, even pigeons, God help us, and a thousand million tonnes of seed to a place they don’t even know where it’s at!
Gravity pulls between the universes dictates the bends and swirls of the energy strings, but most times we never know where exactly we are. The Old Man agreed it was a hell of a way to run a railroad. . . .
April 10. Busy, busy, busy! Don’t know how long I was out or how long it took for them to get to me, but aside from the gravity it all felt the same. I’m just dating this on guesses, but it’ll show how much time passes for me. Exit in the middle through a hole in the floor, and down the egress tube. You can actually see the stuff pouring out of that stupid universe next door and the Borelli Lock that keeps it nice and regulated. Wonder what would have happened if Borelli had lived to see corporations like ours using it to build worlds? Probablv shit ten bricks. He was an Italian who did most of his work in America, but he was a good old commie. Of course the Russkies are doing as well as we, and the Chinese are out populating half the universe, but we’re good old Westrex Ltd., a nice, cozy, unified culture, all American, Canadian. Australian, British, Nigerian, Indian. Japanese, and a few more. At least with the corporate headquarters currently in Aukland they all have to speak English on this job.
Another short electric squirt and I’m in Anchor. Doesn’t look like much, yet. We’ve got the masts up but no building yet—took ten full shiploads just to get the bloody computer through and a crew of machines weeks to burn out the basement, pour the foundation, and set the machine in it. Control room and engineering modules came next, and then the towers. Now we’ve got an Anchor—twenty-eight, in fact—and they all look like Hell. Burnt out wasteland, mostly hot. Well, we’ve got a heat source, and that mother of a gas giant just fills the sky all day, making it bright and a rainbow of colors. The brown landscape just ripples all the time. Fantastic effect, good selling point.
May 11. Getting sick of living in tents, but, oh, my! Is it ever intimate! More all-around nudity here than in Cannes, but without the privacy, damn it. We must get some modular housing up. Not that I really mind, but it’s that damned priest and his corps of nuns tramping about. I still wouldn’t mind, since the Vatican’s paying for this and the Board’s half Catholic anyway, but why should a good Presbyterian boy from jolly old Wellington have to endure it, too?
June 16. Maybe the Russians have the right idea. Multinational corporations wind up infested with culture shock. I can take the idea that India has Hindus and Nigeria is infested with Moslems and Methodists, and they all have their rights, but when they’re all dumped and squeezed into a little place barely the size of Belgium it’s bedlam. Some fun, though. The Moslems had a big to-do about which direction faced Mecca and decided to pray heavenwards, to the sky. Well, at least it’s finally gotten the Catholics and the Moslems to pray in the same direction, but I wonder in a couple of generations if their kids will think they’re praying to that planet up there?
June 29. Hurrah! Finally enough energy Flux has bled out from the Anchors and the Gates to create a minimum field. Now maybe we can do something with this cursed place.
July 19. Bingo! Do I know how to write a program or do I know how to write a program? We’ve got grass now, and even some trees. But today was our first real gully-washing rainstorm, and we celebrated so much we all went out in the mud and acted like kids and got ourselves filthy. Did you know you can’t tell an Ibo from a Yorkshireman or a nun from an Imam when all have been covered in ten centimeters of the best mud you’ve ever seen?
August 12. What a transformation in so short a time! Our little world is coming into being. I know how it works, and it still looks like a miracle every time we use the energy converters to duplicate trees and shrubs and the like. Landscaping has already started work on drains and laving out stream courses. No oceans yet, but I hope to live to see the day when this merry little land doesn’t end in a drab void.
October 9. Army signal corps rode in today, all the way from Engineering on horseback, in their shiny black uniforms and silly cowboy hats. We’re connected now. Sufficient Flux has built up and settled uniformly around our little world that they can now run energy strings between the Anchors. Seems some folks can see ’em without the glasses and some folks can’t, but for me I’ll stay close to home for now. The thought of getting lost out there in that nothingness scares me to death, and horses scare me worse. Here we are, 22nd Century Homo Saps, riding horses like the wild west! But Flux plays hob with conventional power supplies, and causes all sorts of nasty reverberations to the programs, so back to pioneer days it is. Give me an Anchor and a good Indian racing bike any day!
December 17. Temperature has been stabilized and smoothed out. We’re too far from the star to get anything but gravity, but our old planetary friend gives us plenty of glorious light. The heat we must supply using Flux, but that’s an advantage. It means no polar caps here. We’ve left the equatorial Anchors permanently warm, but introduced some mild seasonal variations in the two northern and one southern cluster, just for variety. Since Flux within the cluster zone stabilized at 33.333etc. degrees centigrade, just where it should be, we get enough radiated heat to keep our own needs small in any case. Since we’re losing only a half a degree per degree of latitude, the whole place should be quite comfortable.
December 25. First Christmas. With the Operations Building newly poured and settled, it’s the dominant thing in the Anchor. Somebody said the seven broadcast antennas looked like steeples, so Engineering managed somehow to come up with some brightly colored lights and festoon them top to bottom. I wonder what the preachers in Dickens’ time would think of their descendants squirting through space and creating worlds out of nothing? Blasphemy, I suspect. As for me, if God hadn’t wanted us to fashion pretty-worlds out of rockpiles He would have made only Einstein and struck the relativists and high energy-particle physicists to dust with lightning bolts. Or at least made only one universe. I always wonder if we were the main one or were we just practice?
I take it back, all my comments about the polyglot here. The sight of those sari-clad Hindu women and turbaned Moslem holy men sitting there listening to a bunch of nuns in workboots and jeans singing O Little Town of Bethlehem is worth all the rest of this nonsense!
There was much more of it, including a detailed account of how Toby met and let himself get trapped and tied down by a “tiny, beautiful-looking mathematician named Mioki Kubioshi—Mickey for short.” and tales of wedded bliss.
What he’d said, even up to that point, would, if known, shake World to its very foundations. Mervyn tried to imagine a civilization that could punch holes in space-time and ride great strings through to another universe and other worlds, yet still produce so ordinary and likable a fellow as Toby Haller. The names and faiths of that ancient civilization meant nothing now—how was a Japanese, for example, different from a Nigerian? It was impossible to say. But for all his cynical good humor, Toby Haller had hit the nail on the head when he wondered whether people praying to an indistinct Heaven might wind up praying to the most dominant and spectacular object in their skies.
Mervyn understood enough of gravity to at least get a general concept of the process. Haller seemed to say that in the universe of men nothing could go faster than light, which seemed logical, or you’d get someplace before you started. The same was true of this other universe, but light traveled so much faster there that distances that would take perhaps centuries to cross. This was evident from just looking at the astronomical distances Haller casually noted for the distance to the big planet, and to the solar system’s sun—so dim it seemed just another star from here yet dense enough to hold a world as big as the Holy Mother in tight orbit. Somehow they had managed to punch a hole between the universes and control the very different energy that was there as wizards on World controlled the Flux.
He tried to imagine it—an entire universe filled only with the densest Flux energy. They took some sort of machine, threw it into that universe, and it just kept going, but deviated due to pulls of some sort between our universe and that one, telling scientists where things were.
How would they start it? Punch back out with their machines, probably, and record what they saw. Follow it up with more specific machines that could see and measure and find worlds, worlds that had the elements, even if in the wrong order or mix, to be turned into places for human beings to live using the same energy flowing from that other universe, but harnessed and under control. All of World, all of the Flux, was that energy, coming out in a regulated stream from the Hellgate.
So they punched seven tiny holes to get at this limitless source of power and energy, and then they used it to transform a world. But not all worlds would work. There were more failures, it seemed, than successes, for technical reasons Mervyn, and perhaps no one, would ever understand. To find out if it would work, you had to experiment.
To this end, engineers and masters of the machines and of the greater Flux came in and built a variety of little worldlets out of Flux, and stabilized them and introduced a variety of plants, animals, whatever, from their home world. And people, too, who would make it all work and build the place into something livable, then try to survive there.
Clearly, in Toby Haller’s time, it was still very new and they were still learning. There seemed no indication in the early years of the journal that he knew what power some humans could command over Flux without his machines, and he never seemed to make the jump from creating trees and flowers from Flux to creating Fluxlands and remaking people. To him, Flux was merely a tool to do a job.
His employer was a private company of some sort, that was clear, yet the army—the army from his old world— was there, had been there, apparently, first, Mervyn thought of the Signal Corpsmen creating the network to travel between Anchors and all he could see was the Stringer Guild. It was a total vision both grand and glorious—and something of a comedown. The fact was, these people really had the technology to do miracles on a scale that would put the most powerful wizard to shame, yet they were oblivious to their greatness, took it for granted, and were, in the end, pretty much the same as people today. How many worlds had they tried this on? How many had succeeded? One could infer four or five from the journal, but it could just as likely be fifty, or five hundred, or fifty thousand.
Toby Haller chronicled the development of World, which he generally called the project. When the first children were born, he rejoiced that they were “completely normal— crying, helpless brats that made life miserable.” Yet when his own first born came along, the child was “absolutely beautiful, perfect in every way. She has her father’s brains and big mouth and her mother’s beauty. What a terror she’s going to be!”
But the project was never completed. Man, it seemed, wasn’t the only one riding the strings of that other universe, and it had the tremendous bad luck to run into another quite quickly. Nobody knew their name, and they were just called “the Enemy” most of the time, although quite often terms like “demons” and “devils” came into it. It was only certain that if they somehow found your string, and rode it to you, you were never heard from again.
There was no way to guard against them, for to do so you’d have to shut off the flow of energy from the Gates, and that would kill World. The military assumed general control of the planet and redirected much of its efforts for defense. There was some talk of pulling out, abandoning the project, evacuating for home, but not a lot. It had been thirty years now since Haller had come to World, and he was a man who helped create and shape it. His children had been born here. More, most of the population had nothing to return to. This was the new frontier, the outlet for the dispossessed who were perfectly willing to be guinea pigs in an experiment for a chance to be the first families of their own world. What exactly made it profitable for a company wasn’t clear, for it certainly was long-term in the extreme and had to cost a fortune, but profit there was. It just wasn’t in any of the surviving records.
And then Earth, as they called their home, had sent a delegation with an ultimatum. Losses were running high. They could not protect the colonists until they knew much more, and could take the battle to the Enemy. In the interest of Earth’s own security, the master terminal—the Borelli Point as Haller had called it—would be sealed. The project families had just one month to evacuate or they were on their own.
They didn’t have a month, even though many, if not most, would have stayed anyway. There was nothing to return to. Military monitors on the Gates revealed a sudden, massive surge along the string, which when converted to matter using their formula would be a very large mass, and headed for them with only a few days remaining. The nature and size of the energy indicated it was nothing Earth had generated.
The army moved quickly. Its engineers worked feverishly to seal all seven of the Gates, and, effectively, to seal off the humans of World from the rest of their kind. By this time there were over fifty thousand people on World, and all of them were stuck.
Because leakage had to be allowed to maintain World, the mysterious Enemy knew that they were here and now had it on their maps. But because most of the energy was blocked, they could not flow from the Gate into the large dish-like area where buried machines would reconvert them into matter once more. There were fears that the Enemy, knowing the location, would punch through elsewhere and invade, but something made that impossible. Scientists ran it through their machines and decided that the most likely explanation was that the Enemy invasion force itself was present to arrive on World and was now in Flux form against the Gate but unable to crash through. Powerful automated amplifiers held them back.
The Enemy was trapped in energy form in the other universe, unable to even know it had been stopped, let alone back up and return. And because it was there, nothing else could punch through without punching through that invasion force first. By attacking at all Gates simultaneously, the Enemy had trapped itself and blockaded the string for the defenders.
With time to breathe, the defenders of World worked long and hard to create better, more powerful self-repairing mechanisms. Nothing would come through those Gates except the specific amount of Flux necessary to maintain World. But that limited the available power, and made it very unlikely that the “terraforming,” as Haller called it, could be extended much beyond the Anchors, “or at least not much more than the clusters around the old Gates.” And because they hadn’t received the “shiploads of semen and eggs and all that”, they considered population expansion too long-term a project to really consider. With their relatively small population in Anchor, any population problem seemed centuries down the road anyway. None of them. Haller included, seemed to think that this would last forever, or, in their situation, none could think much beyond the immediate moment and crisis.
There was always the fear, though, that some madman might loose a seal, and there was a reluctance to make it forever impossible to gain access. What if Earth sent a force to them, and it was behind the Enemy? What if the Enemy dissipated over time? Might they not be able to reopen contact with their universe, then? So the Gates could be opened, but only by a complex mechanism. The seven cluster commanders each had a combination, one they alone knew. Using the psycho-conditioners, the combination would be impossible to pry out of them. Their juniors were each given a small part of the combination and also conditioned.
The center tower of each Anchor headquarters linked with and coordinated with the other Anchors of the cluster. A combined signal, an automatic check, could be bounced off the upper atmosphere to the other clusters. Those thinking machines, which Haller called “computers” but were apparently much, much more than mere adding machines, would require the seven locks to be keyed to open within one minute or they would run a charge through all seven tunnels electrocuting everything inside. To insure extra security, just in case one day one of the invaders would punch through anyway, the tunnels would fry anyone entering from the dish side. The headquarters side remained relatively unguarded, since it would be necessary sometimes to check them and perhaps check the Flux transformers, but this was considered relatively safe. Any enemy that got through would now have to attack overland, over hundreds of kilometers of void, opening them up to attack without cover. They would have to take the headquarters to gain control, and the computers were reprogrammed as tremendous defensive weapons of death, which could be activated only when the Gates were opened.
Mervyn sighed and rubbed his eyes. So much. Too much. Yet, these people had a world, and a strong measure of security, and all that knowledge and power. How had they fallen to their present state? The seeds of World’s culture were certainly there, and told much. An intermarriage of cultures would eventually produce one. Religions might get all mixed up, and new ones grow out of the old in subsequent generations. They had agreed on a common language, implying that there were several, but that language would change over the years. But how had we lost, or forgotten, so much? And why did Seven otherwise sane individuals work like mad to let the Enemy in?
There weren’t many more pages in Toby Mailer’s journal, but, as tired as he was, he knew he had to find out. The script was changed quite a bit from the last entries, indicating that Haller had changed a great deal, and there was no pretense at a diary any more, just a narrative even harder to read as it got squeezed down to fit into the remains of the book.
Hunting through some very old stuff when I found this book. Actually, Christine, my oldest, found it while rummaging around. No sense in rummaging around for the dates; the old ones were probably off anyway. Well, no matter. There are official histories and such in the Anchor libraries that will be of import; this was mostly a lark although, looking back through it, I recaptured, at least for a little, the joys of my youth.
There are only a few pages left in the old thing to tell a lot, if it’s worth anything at all. Perhaps, at least, my children will read this one day and know from whence they came and maybe hoist a beer to the old man. I could start another, of course, but after all this time it hardly seems worth the effort.
Well, where to begin? The Anchors were never intended as fully self-supporting enterprises, just as test zones and bases for experimenting with Flux transmutation. The latter, I fear, works all too well.
We needed the transmutation, of course, for that which we had to have but couldn’t possibly make for ourselves. The population is booming and we had to provide for the future. For all we know, we’re the last humans left. Probably not, but we have to act as if we are at all times.
A small percentage of the children born here seem to have an inordinate sensitivity to the Flux. We’re studying this, but don’t quite understand it. From the start some folks were able to see the strings—which is why they were in the Signal Corps to begin with—and see, or sense, energy flow and changes. We engineers could do it through the amplifiers, of course, but we found that the more we used the machines by direct input—brain to computer to Flux—the more we managed to see it without needing the machines. It’s a fascinating and somewhat terrifying sensation which I, of course, also have, since I’ve spent half my life on those damned machines.
The military has developed into a supra-government of its own, using its exclusive knowledge of string maps to regulate commerce and travel between the Anchors. There’s a District Commander for each cluster, plus General Yoshida’s Headquarters command and General Coydt’s Engineering command, and they’re a closely knit group. By controlling and regulating commerce in Flux they have us by the short hairs, but since they also are responsible for guarding the Gate locks they get away with it.
But all this leaves our destinies in others’ hands. There was a message received by the military just before the big energy power surge, one that was suppressed for some time but which was recently revealed and admitted to. I’d hate to be the soldier chap who shot his mouth off, but the thing apparently said, “Do not worry, we are friends, and together our two races will become gods. We are coming, wait for us,” or words to that effect.
This caused quite a split in the civil ranks. The Anchors have developed steadily enough, but our standard of living has become quite basic due to the limitations on the amount of power required. The company field directors, which constitute the Anchor’s civil authority, are being pressed by many of the scientists and engineers to, would you believe, open the Gates. They argue that the best we can hope for is a stabilization of clusters which might unfavorably alter the ecological balance of existing Anchors, but that Anchors can’t support their populations at their rate of growth. Better to gamble on the message’s validity than to starve and sink into savagery. I personally see it as just another engineering problem, but the pressure on the directors is enormous. The military, of course, opposes taking any chances on the Enemy, and is fighting like hell to sway people to their side.
I, for one, have been experimenting with this odd Flux power. A number of us have achieved amazing results on a small scale, although stability is poor. Basically, you just stand there in the nothingness and concentrate on something real hard, and you watch and there it is. Somehow our minds have gotten boosted, or linked, by those amplifiers after years of use so that the amplifiers, on a small scale, aren’t really necessary. Too bad we can’t get the amps to work much away from Anchors or Gates—they require a very hard and direct access to Flux before it’s been dissipated—or it would make life easy. All of my children seem to have the power to some degree, leading either to the conclusion that use of Flux has changed us, somehow, or that they have the power simply because I want them to have it. That last, I fear, may be closer to the truth.
Apparently it works like the amplifiers, to a degree. One thinks of what one wishes, this is somehow transmitted along lines of force to the terraforming sectors of the nearest Anchor computer, and almost instantly back come the mathematical strings needed to do the job. This is an almost godlike power we don’t quite understand, and since it’s mainly limited to those with massive overexposure to the amplifiers and their offspring, it’s created a sticky situation. The civil groups are scared to death of men and women with such powers, and I’ve actually heard the terms “witches” and “warlocks” and even “wizards” used, all with more fear than awe. The military also seems to fear it for more pragmatic reasons, since it threatens their power and control. Thev would prefer the civil population to remain in Anchor, fearful of Flux, where it can be ignorant and controlled. Most religious groups denounce us, and there have been some incidents of violence, and there’s a new and bizarre religious movement growing up that seems to advocate the military’s ideal. I saw the same movement, which seems all-women, when up in Engineering, and I’m suspicious. Coydt, after all, is a tough old woman, very creative but with a ruthless military mind.
There was then a break, since the final entry was in a different pen and was obviously written rather hurriedly, spilling over into the margin of the last page.
What we’ve feared has come! With the failure of the Company to oust the military and open the Gates, the army’s taken over with a vengeance. Coydt’s made that idiot cult the only permitted religion and is ruthlessly stamping out opposition. Power was cut beyond the capitals in a well-coordinated move. There are executions galore, and (unintelligible) must flee into Flux and depend on our powers there to provide. They might as well open the Gates, for Hell is already here. Remember, my children! Remember. . . .
“Oh, my God!” said Mervyn Haller.
15
THREE BLIND CONFERENCES
The Seven who Come Before, also known as the Seven Who Wait, did not meet very often. All were extremely powerful wizards, masters of their craft, and each had large staffs to handle their worldwide enterprises. The current Chairman, by majority approval, was Zelligman Ivan, and he looked his colleagues over with a serious eye and grave expression.
“There is no need to tell you that this is the most important meeting in the history of this association,” Ivan began. “Until now, we were more or less playing the game, mouthing our ideals and our goals and using our own and each other’s power and wit to comfortably strengthen our position. And we are powerful—we truly control, through well-concealed webs, much of World, with such finesse they don’t even know it. Discord among us is minimal; none of us has been fatter, richer, more powerful or more content than now. Our enemies delude themselves that things are as they were, but we know differently. And for what? Allegedly for our ultimate goal of opening the Gates and attaining more than human beings could imagine.”
“That’s all true,” Rosa Haldayne put in, “but so what? I admit I’m kind of bored with it all, but considering the alternatives boredom is not too high a price to pay.”
Ivan nodded. “Now, however, my dear Rosa and you others, we face a dilemma, a crisis, a decision point that all of us have paid lip service to throughout our long lives but never really felt we’d reach or have to deal with it. The time is close at hand. The technology exists and has been checked out. We are facing a bald fact: within this decade, and perhaps within the next couple of years, we can open the Hellgates. There is no doubt of that fact, and I have checked and rechecked my computations. Oh, events might delay it, or hasten it, but the decade figure is a worst-case one. I don’t mean it will be easy to accomplish, but if we are to do it we must lay the groundwork for it now. If we do, success is inevitable within that decade. And that, of course, brings up the ultimate question—do we really want to?”
Chua Gabaye, a stunning woman dressed in silver and black silks, stood up and pointed a finger at Ivan. “What do you mean by that crack?” she demanded. “Is this some sort of silly test?”
“No, my lovely Chua, it’s no test at all. It is instead an honest question. You all know that I met and talked at some length with Mervyn of the Nine, and during that time he asked me why in the world I wished to open the Gates. I gave him our pat answer, but, of course, it was just that—the pat answer, ready when needed even among ourselves and used to justify all our actions to ourselves and to any others we felt compelled to answer at all. It got me to wondering just how much of our ritualistic dedication was simply self-justification, and whether we really would open the Gates if the opportunity arose. I finally, after much agonizing, concluded that I would, but I have been a part of this group for centuries and I must honestly say that I only really decided a few years ago. There can be no deviation. If six act properly and one hesitates, even at the last moment, those six, at least, are dead. I want each of you to address that question and answer it, because if all of you really want it, I can tell you how it will be done.”
“And what if somebody balks, or doesn’t want to give the right answer?” Gifford Haldayne asked him. “We lie a lot anyway, you know. It’s part of doing business. Why should we be expected not to lie now when we sometimes even lie to ourselves?”
“I’ll tell you why,” Ivan responded. “Although I have decided that I want the Gates opened, it is not something that I feel any imminent compulsion to do. If any of you vote against, then I, too, will vote against. The technology that is now there will continue to be there, and it will get better as time goes on. That’s tempting. I will not support any move to oust anyone who votes against, and I will be on their side if any move or attack is made upon them. The reason is simple: I wish an honest answer.”
For a while they were silent, pondering his statement, but finally Ming Tokiabi spoke. “Zelligman, I must admit the truth of what you say. The game has been amusing, the rewards great, but faced with actual checkmate, a total victory—I don’t know. Perhaps it would help if you explained why you wish to have the Gates opened.”
“Fair enough,” Ivan agreed. “I have multiple reasons, and they’re compelling to me. First, as Chua said, I am bored. I have attained as much power and wealth as I believe it is possible for one individual to hold on World. The game is amusing only so long as there is a chance for one to lose. When, over eight years ago, I placed myself in Anchor Nantzee during the New Eden attack, I had what I thought were good reasons, but after I almost lost my life there I can tell you that those reasons were false. The fact was, I had every reason to know I was at great risk, and I allowed myself to be trapped there. I got out with Mervyn’s help by a matter of seconds—and I had the best damned time I have had in two centuries! The thrill was incredible, but it was also a telltale sign. We always wondered why Coydt spent so much time in Anchor, and now I know why. He was vulnerable there, and he walked with danger every moment. He was compelled to do it. That disease is now striking me, and, I know, sooner or later, just like Coydt, I’ll lose. Someone will kill me, and I will cease to exist. The more you tempt it, the more inevitable it becomes.”
He paused a moment, looking at their faces, and saw in at least a couple of expressions glimmerings of comprehension of what he was talking about.
“Second,” he continued, “is the reason I was bored and regressing to a thrill-seeking idiot. All of us, when we start out in life, have lofty goals we aspire to, and very few of us attain all of them. I have. The only thing left for me is to perhaps take you all on and see if I can control the whole of human civilization on World. But don’t worry—I can see nothing in it. I would inherit a larger slice of what I now have, and I have exhausted all my possibilities with that. Nor is there any long-range goal, ideal, or vision within me. I would probably lose and be killed, but even if I won—even if I won—I wouldn’t know what the hell to do next. I have no goal but the playing of the game itself, and that is truly a terrible thing to admit.”