Horrible, tentacled creatures with blood-red eyes and matted hair doing something disgusting, something they don’t want to look at, something they don’t want to look at.something they cannot avoid. . . . They are eating the children alive, and the children are screaming and pleading, “Mommy! Mommy!”
Fields of death after a great battle: the patron of the Reformed Church walks among a field so littered with dead that the blood stains her robe and she cannot avoid stepping on what had so shortly before been young men and women, the future of world. . . . “No more . . . ! No more . . . !”
Countless Fluxlands filled with transformed people worshipping their Fluxlords and being happy, obedient slaves, while they travel through them marveling at how pretty things look and how nice it all seems, ignoring the faces, the minds, the horror because it isn’t theirs. . . .
‘”No building can be built upon an existing site until the old one is demolished.” Mervyn says matter-of-factly. “We must destroy World in the name of the Empire in order to save it. . . .”
“No more! No more!”
A world ruled by tentacled monsters, the Demons of Hell itself, their foulness owning and controlling everything, while a subject human population lives in soulless misery without hope, only with evil, even giving their children over to their Demon Masters as toys. . . .
Above, the Samish checked all systems, as power suddenly seemed flickering and intermittent. It switched to full battery power as an emergency and called back the scout ship. That there was a problem was undeniable, but all checkouts came back with “Undefinable error.”
Below them the regulator clicked and whirled and fed what was necessary to the two tiny figures between it and the Gate. They could feel the power; it was all around them, a living, massive entity.
They’re up ahead, at the end of the tunnel. The Monsters. The Demons of Hell. With them there is no hope. Under them there is no salvation. Thev are evil. They will devour you. They will devour love. No love, no joy, no dreams, no hopes. . . . No more . . . No more . . . !
Cassie’s mind reached back into the computer and it fed her what she most wanted, the only thing she wanted. And with it flowed the continuing stream of images.
She saw Adam’s dream, a land of beauty and love and peace and joy. She saw the land torn asunder by giant black tentacled shapes dripping foul slime and crushing the land and the dream.
Above, the Samish checked out its erratic lines and sent probes down along the Flux string to check the source of the difficulty, but they could not reach beyond a point of absolute brilliance, an energy wall that was unbelievably raw and churning.
Inside Cassie, the tension became unbearable; the massive force coalescing around the two bodies into a great ball of pure Flux was a part of herself and could not long be held in check. The visions continued, even multiplied in horrifying intensity.
This time the Guardian supplied the mathematics and the timing.
“No more!” she screamed, the tension unendurable. “NO MORE!”
The force shot up the tube at the speed of light and struck the bottom of the Samish ship. It blew right through the shielding and then blew in the lower hatch, and still it went on, burning through all the levels of the ship, shorting out all electrical systems. But the primary load was on the Flux receptors around the hatch, which opened full, carrying the bulk of the energy directly to the storage batteries, now still mostly full. They overloaded and ruptured almost immediately, and the entire bowl was suddenly filled with terrible heat and the sound of massive explosions. At the same moment the shields collapsed, the great ship actually rose into the air from the force of its internal throes, like some great beast in mortal agony, then flipped over back down to rest almost on its side, pierced by a gaping series of holes surrounded by boiling liquid metal.
The energy surged into the Gate apron, making it crackle with electricity, frying the Samish and their works. With one exception it did not extend beyond, for its target had been the Enemy and the same computer control that focused it now damped it. The only exception was the exposed end of heavy cable, cut at the very edge of the apron by the initial purge and still just at it. The cable had been built to conduct Flux, and conduct Flux it did, straight to the great tower and from it through all the electrical lines. The tower began to melt, and when it reached structural instability it collapsed on the groups of people below, most of whom were already dead or in agony from the massive surge of electricity.
Near the edge of what had been the shield, the small craft of the Samish suddenly became unstable. It started wobbling in the air, then stopped dead, poised for a moment, while the few surviving military men watched and held their breaths. Then it dropped like a stone to the ground, hitting it so hard it actually bounced three times before coming to rest on its side.
Outside the shield boundary, the reserve troops watched and cheered as loudly as they could, then moved in towards the Gate to pick up the pieces.
Deep in the tunnel, Jeff, Matson. and Sondra huddled over two still figures lying sprawled near the regulator. Jeff checking Cassie and Sondra checking Suzl. Both nodded, and the two men each lifted a small, frail-looking woman and stepped back through the now-reopened Anchor access Gate.
21
SOME UNSETTLING SETTLEMENTS
In the two northern clusters, the Samish had first been deprived of their remote eyes and ears and then, with the destruction of the southern ship, their command. The two northern Samish “brains” could not agree on what had happened in the south—things had been going along quite well, quite normally, when suddenly all communication had ceased. What they did know, eventually, by some sort of monitoring devices, was that the southern ship had exploded and that it had proven vulnerable, despite their computations, from the tunnel beneath. They had gotten word that there was a problem in the Flux power linkage before it blew.
There had been initial fear on the part of the defenders that one or both of the northern ships would leave to get help or reinforcements or merely to report the problem. They couldn’t be stopped from doing so. and once out there, even after all these centuries, it was unknown just what they would find and what might come calling as a result.
The Samish, however, were prisoners of their own strange culture as much as the humans were. A defeat, even a strategic retreat, was simply unthinkable. To move in that direction would be to admit that they were not the godlike superiors of this puny under-race. A faulty transformer, bad batteries, even unworthiness in the First Lord’s sight they could accept as reasons for the southern defeat, but they could not accept, or perhaps were not programmed or permitted to accept, any thought that their theology might be wrong or their god might be false.
The northern military command centers immediately received and analyzed the methods and the reasons for the success of the southerners. When the Samish retracted the bulk of their shield to concentrate on protecting the immediate area around their ships and then began feverish building activities, there was no question as to what they were up to. Mobile ground amplifiers were obviously being constructed in preparation for a methodical breakout. Right now they were totally dependent on the ship’s power, but clearly they were working to draw not only on the ship but on World’s own Flux. If they did that, they would weaken the Soul Rider and the wizards while still having the ship’s power for protection and reinforcement.
Having both the advantage of Flux and the advantage of a successful program run in the south, the wizards of the north concentrated on creating and molding similar personalities and similar powers among their own. It took more of them, but one try was successful, and then there was one Samish vessel remaining.
That one analyzed that indeed this population was so infused with evil that it had found a way around their defenses. Instead of retreating, this Samish apparently considered it an honor to be put to such a challenge. It moved its entire population out of the ship and away from the apron, and proceeded to build what it needed to implement a total breakout.
Ultimately, the fanaticism of the Samish with their amplifiers met the angry and frightened wizards of Flux with their amplifiers head to head. The carnage was terrible, yet somehow the two were evenly matched. The unitary nature of the Samish made them dedicated, nearly suicidal fanatics—but so were the minions of the Fluxlords. who willingly fought to their deaths for their deities. As Flux wielders. the Samish were fully as expert as they claimed to be, but they were now fighting wizards with minds of their own and the full programs of their own master computers to tap. But in one respect, each side had something going for them. The Samish ground weapons were far superior to anything that World could offer, and the resulting body count was very much in the aliens’ favor, with a ratio of five hundred humans killed for every Samish. It cost over a million human lives, enormous by World’s scale.
But there were a lot more human beings than Samish. With more flocking there from the other clusters every hour, the Samish were ultimately outnumbered by more than fifteen hundred to one.
Without Samish bodies and Samish minds, the shields could not hold. While this one had outguessed and outmaneuvered its attackers from below, it was now alone, a bare computer with considerable local power but no way to implement it. Faced with retreating or being destroyed by the forces now converging on it. it chose to destroy itself in one huge blast.
With no reinforcements coming, no Samish at the equatorial Gates, the battle was finally over.
Despite the horrible cost in lives, most of World breathed a sigh of relief when, after waiting a decent interval, nobody else showed up in any of the Gates. Considering how many people on the planet had been raised from the cradle to believe that the opening of the Gates was tantamount to the end of the world, the whole thing actually seemed somewhat of an anticlimax. The fact that it had been neither easy nor cheap was not a factor: except for a very few, nothing had ever come easy or cheap on World except slavery and death.
It seemed ironic to many that the ancient army of their ancestors that had come to World from some far-off place had made all the right decisions, even if it could never guess the timing or the type of people who would finally make it all pay off. They had closed and locked the Gates just in time; the enemy had been right there, and would have walked all over that first generation with its total dependence on its machines and its ignorance of true Flux power. They had severed direct contact with the computers when they first encountered this sort of powerful link, and by that move almost certainly saved humanity on World from becoming one with their computers and. perhaps, a version of the Enemy they eventually faced and defeated.
There was no indication in the records that the early scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who acquired the Flux powers were actually executed; instead, they were driven into Flux by the army and the odd church it supported for its own ends, there to breed, pass on the talents to new generations, and learn to perfect what they had. They destroyed the existing amplifers and other advanced terraforming and weapons systems primarily to safeguard and secure Anchors against attack—and until the Empire had arisen to destroy the rigid division of Flux from Anchor and Coydt van Haas had rediscovered how to build some of the ancient machines and use them, it had worked. Worked, probably, for far more years than those who’d created the plans and the society dreamed it would.
Ultimately, they and their computers had come to the same conclusion as Matson would tens of centuries later: that the existing technology and defense systems had not stopped the unknown enemy. Flux power might, if that technology were not allowed to interfere with its growth and development. But it was Matson who realized that raw, unbridled emotion was the method by which the maximum amount of power would be collected in a single individual. The computers were the epitome of pure reason; this sort of thing was beyond them, and even the reasoning human-machine interfaces, the Soul Riders and the Guardians, fell back on logic and reason no matter what their feelings. The Ancient men and women who created the system had human emotions, but tried very hard to filter them out and allow reason and logic alone to remain when doing their jobs.
Matson’s plan had created an unthinkable mixed marriage, in which reason stood back and waited until all was right, then coolly fed the mathematics and controlled the results of highly complex physics, fed to, and through, human beings reduced to raw unbridled emotion.
Why this was so, and why Flux power worked at all, was unknown and perhaps could not be known by these people, with these machines, in such isolation. The computers themselves had solid, convincing theories—about eighty thousand of them, in fact, almost all contradictory. Earth, if it still existed, might know by now.
All of World’s actions and activities in this area had been aimed at what to do when and if the Gates were opened; there was no thought at all of what to do after the Enemy was disposed of, for nobody, in ancient times or on World, had really believed humanity could win—except Matson, and even he wasn’t as sure of things as he’d let on. He simply had seen no profit in believing otherwise.
The first conference on the future of World was held not too long after victory was assured, but only fifty-six people were involved. At that point, they were the only ones who counted.
The first question the Guardians and Soul Riders discussed was whether to retain their interfaces with, and control of, the computers. There was vast knowledge there, and almost unlimited power, and that finally decided them. The system would be reset. The Guardian and Soul Rider interfaces would be disengaged from the existing humans and reset to their original forms so that they, too, would be ignorant once more of their purpose. They were surrendering their heritage from Earth and their ancestors, but by doing so they chose to remain human. The logic was inescapable: if one were to defeat an enemy, only to become just like him, then who wins?
They had seen creatures who looked monstrous, but who still at one time had been a race of curious individuals who’d probably told dirty jokes and laughed and faced tragedy and died, who’d known joy and sorrow, fear and pain, and also pride and love. In surrendering their animal selves to the machine, they had become machines, and in doing so had lost far more than they had gained.
The decision was not unanimous, but was sufficiently large that the others had no choice but to agree or be forcibly restrained and disengaged by the collective might of the others.
The coldly logical and reason-dominated computers, interestingly, not only did not argue against this but supported it. Considering the human viewpoint and the alternative they themselves had just seen, they could see no logical alternative.
The next questions were on the kind of world they would re-enter. The Church was through as any sort of effective institution; despite Guardian and Soul Rider moves to lift all binding spells, the truth had shattered its foundation. World would change, now—perhaps radically so, without a cohesive cultural force to bind it—but that was the price of truth, and it was not necessarily bad. Perhaps it was time for a dynamic rather than stagnant civilization to emerge.
No attempt would be made to extend landscaping and terraforming beyond New Eden; clearly Flux had been the margin of victory in the war, and clearly it should not be weakened further. On the condition that all ancient writings and records, both the Codex and New Eden’s library, be available to all the governments of Flux and Anchor, New Eden would not be tampered with, so long as it obeyed the rule that the building and use of amplifiers was now banned. What they did with their philosophies, or even their armies, was their affair; Flux, however, must remain Flux.
The Gates would not again be locked. The combinations were known, of course, and there was no way known to change them, but there was another way. The alien ships were to be left the wrecks they were in the dishes. They could be studied, probed, and analyzed, even gutted, but they must remain. At least equal mass of some kind would be placed in the four other dishes. The computers assured them that this would prevent any more “incoming” due to the safety systems; however, “incoming” would be announced and would activate the defensive systems once more. Removing that mass from any of the Gates would now be an additional criterion for activation. The defensive system in each tunnel was reset, this with a new bypass code known only to the Soul Riders and Guardians. The computers picked and encoded it themselves; no human would ever be able to find a place to look it up. Access to the Gates and regulators, then, by wizards or researchers, would be only through Anchor, which gave a measure of control.
New Eden’s disposition was left to the four Guardians of its quadrants. The Soul Riders served a military function in crisis but were chiefly concerned with Flux; the Guardians were supreme in Anchor if they wished to be. While the Soul Riders had been equally split between males and females, there were three female Guardians to one male, he a supply sergeant in Mareh and formerly a foreman in a textile mill. All were natives of their respective Anchors; all three of the women, like Suzl, were Fluxgirls now and had been at least since their Anchors had fallen. All were products of the old Church-dominated Anchor system, which was important. All believed that a culture had to have a unifying faith to bind it as a practical matter, and all were somewhat uneasy at the collapse of it elsewhere.
The only confidant Suzl would accept from outside the circle was Cassie, because of their closeness and Cassie’s great experience in such matters. At the start, Suzl had a vision of New Eden that was logical but not to her friend’s liking at all.
“We should just turn the tables on them the way we turned it on those monsters,” Suzl said flatly. “I wonder how these guys would like it if they couldn’t read or write and were only good for sex and the shit work?”
“No!” Cassie shot back, looking alarmed. “Don’t you see, Suzl, that would just keep things going in the same old pattern? Is it less a crime, less wrong, if I murder you than if you murder me?”
“Well, I’d rather not have either one, but I’m selfish enough to admit I’d dislike being murdered more.”
“But that’s just the point! New Eden’s injustices, even Coydt’s crazy view, came from doing just what you’re talking about doing. Even Adam admitted that they were turning this place into just another giant Fluxland kingdom. Oh, maybe you’ll get some temporary satisfaction out of a reversal, but in the end it’s the same crime. If it was wrong for them to do it to women, it’s equally wrong for us to do it to men.”
Suzl sat down, sighed, and chewed on her cigar. She did look a bit disappointed. “So what would you suggest we do? We have a mess here, you know. All the top dogs are dead, the younger ones were brought up in this system and believe in it, and most of the women have big families.”
“I’ve been giving that a lot of thought, and I can’t see any way we can be perfectly fair and create something wonderful out of what’s here. People are going to suffer, as usual, but we’ve got to accept that and try for some sort of balance.”
“I’m listening.”
“First of all, considering it’s Anchor and there’s the master program, just how much physical change in people is possible?”
“With individuals, a lot. With large groups, like millions, only basics. Cassie, disengagement of computer interfaces is only a few weeks away, maybe sooner if they can get their other messes cleared up. There’s no time to process everybody individually.”
“Maybe not, but maybe we can get a compromise that won’t be a hundred percent right but will give some people a fighting chance. First of all, a certain measure of restoration should be made just in the interest of the innocents. We can’t change this system, Suzl, we can only give everybody the chance to make their own hard choices. Let’s start with the intellectual part. Can we arrange it so there’s no longer a barrier of literacy or mathematical skill?”
“Sure. The program simply took a short cut and shorted one small area in the message paths of the brain. It’s a common birth defect, in fact, that was just duplicated. I’ve known other folks who were never here that had it.”
“Well, that puts all the women back on an equal footing, so to speak. If they knew how before, they’ll know again, and the children can be taught. It’s been my experience that even if the system conspires to keep a kid from learning to read, she’ll do it anyway if she gets the chance. But what about this ‘body rules the mind’ business?”
“Well, hormones are hormones and glands are glands. Everybody’s different, really, as to that. You can’t suppress one thing without doing it to everybody. I don’t know about you, but I did all this in this body and it hasn’t really affected my performance. It’s more a matter of believing that stuff and going with it than anything else. I can suppress it if I need to. I don’t feel I’m in any way unqualified to run this Anchor with the body I’ve got.”
Cassie nodded. “It’s a shame we can’t allow them the choice of new or old bodies, since the very fact of looking like this tends to reinforce that body-mind business. I know it does for me. We acted like fools right here in the control room during the crisis just because we looked that way and for years acted that way.”
“Yeah, but we snapped out of it and did our jobs perfectly when the push came,” Suzl pointed out. “When we had to suppress it, we could and did. When we needed to let it all out, like in the tunnel, we did that, too.”
“Yes. The tunnel. All that forced me to look hard at my whole life and attitudes, and I’m not at all happy with what I saw.” She sighed. “Still, you’re right. We were acting the way New Eden expected us to act because we’d been just that way for so long. Well, then, we leave it as it was. If their minds can triumph over their bodies they deserve to lead. Can you adjust it so that the bodies could be individually redone in Flux?”
“The formula was an add-on to the master program in the cluster, but not in Anchor, remember. All the Anchor girls are no different in Flux than anyone else, including the two of us, since we’ve removed all the binding spells. Still, something taken out of Anchor into Flux should be transmutable, just as something made in Flux and brought in is fixed. Yes, they could reach equality but not on their own. Any good wizard could fix it, though, one-on-one. But there are millions like that. Nobody will ever be able to cover them all.”
“It’ll have to do.”
“If we do it this way, it’s gonna make for a real rough period,” Suzl warned. “You’ll still have New Eden boys and Fluxgirls and the basic system but now the Fluxgirls will have their smarts and their past knowledge back. At the start it won’t be much, but after a while those women aren’t gonna take being kept down, not all of them. Conditioning, like we said, may hold the majority, particularly the older generations, but the foundations will be shaky. Smart, knowledgeable women won’t be kept out of power and influence forever. That’ll threaten the men. There’ll be beatings and violence and rapes and stuff again, like in the old days.”
“Maybe. If there’s anything to Adam’s dream and ideas, though, they’ll work out a compromise and build their new society. It there isn’t, it’ll fall apart, but there are far too many people here now and it’s far too big a land to exercise the kind of control they worked on Anchor Logh. The men would need Flux to do it. and odds are the women have a lot more power in Flux than they do. They won’t chance it. They’ll adjust or the system will fall apart. They have to.”
“Maybe. I’ll try and sell it to the other Guardians and I guess they’ll buy it. Nobody else has come up with anything that sounds better, mess though it is.”
“All we can do is give the women the chance to be whole human beings again. Anything else, no matter how long it takes, will be up to them. We inherited this, we didn’t create it.”
Suzl looked at Cassie thoughtfully. “And what about us? You. me, the kids?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Well, I was down in that tunnel, too, remember. First time in years I had to face myself, old and new. I’ve been in this body almost half my life. I think that if I had the mental freedom I had then, like I have now, it and I can live pretty happily together. I’m not the old Suzl—I’m the collection of the old and the new. I like parts of both. I’m gonna keep myself just this way, I think, except I might get rid of this damned tattoo. What about you?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been topside and I know what’ll happen if I go back and pick up from here. What I want is something I never had or had the chance to have. I had a part of it with Adam, but it was flawed by the system. In a way, Adam was too much like I used to be, when I headed the Church, and I got to take a good hard look at myself in that as well as in the tunnel. I took a gamble when I accepted that spell at the wedding, and I won part and lost part. Maybe it’s time for me to take one last gamble.”