“Impressive,” Connie replied. “Why don’t we just get a few hundred of those and have you march south?”
“Wouldn’t work. These are very limited devices, with a choice of thirty or forty preset options. It is, as I told you, a survival tool, nothing more. To get complex programs over more than a two-or grid-square area would take a full computer interface and all that implies. It won’t even work inside the bubble. It requires direct contact with the grid and that layer of rock and dirt effectively blocks it. It’s useful, but it’s no big thing.”
No big thing, Haller thought wonderingly. Look at how far we’ve come. What he just did is miraculous, incredible, even to me, and I know how it works. How quickly we take even the most revolutionary concepts for granted! That was, he realized, Pandit Singh’s and the company’s point with the Anchors and their nonflux-based system. Something like this was no use on the plains of India or in the mountains of Kenya, but it could make New Edenites indolent pleasure-seeking slobs as easy as pie. Earth didn’t have a grid, or Anchor bubbles either, and the billions there could hardly be moved off someplace for ten or twenty years while it was created and then fed by-what? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred Gates? More?
They settled down for some prepacked food and canteen water, then prepared to bed down for the night.
Gorton was right about one thing: with little to do and the muffled silence and dim, eerie electrical light, the mind tended to play tricks on you. More than once both of them found themselves turning quickly around, a reflexive reaction to something seen, or imagined, in the corner of the eye. The distance took on odd shapes and forms, and it was impossible not to give them some kind of unreasoned paranoiac cause. Alone, it would be absurdly easy to go mad in this place, to be consumed by your own innermost fears awashed only in loneliness and spatial disorientation. Signals, Haller decided, earned every bit of brag they could muster for working in this environment so well.
The air was dead, and it was hot as hell, but Connie had little shivers. She wanted to talk to somebody before going to sleep, if she could sleep in this sort of place. “I think I know what you mean now, brudda,” she told the corporal. “How can you stand it for weeks on end?”
“You get used to it,” he told her. “We had simulators that were at least as bad back on Titan, maybe even worse, the only thing different being that you always knew you were in a simulator and somebody was monitoring you and ready to pull you out. Even the officers, up to the brigadier himself, have to survive all the training. That’s one reason I found I could stand it. Didn’t want to fail at doing something a fifty-one year-old brass hat managed. He’s the one that dreamed up the final test here, the one you pass or either die or wind up in Logistics or administration.”
“Huh?”
“They take you out twenty kilometers from Anchor, sedated and stripped stark naked. You wake up and have to make it back in. If you fail completely, a little sensor in your tooth aligned to the grid gives you a chance at being located.”
“Jesus! But, you can’t see anything, smell anything, or have any landmarks! How do you get back?”
“Well, there’s a trick to it, a trick nobody really tells you and one that not every bloke can master. Them that can make it back.”
Haller, too, was fascinated. “What’s the trick?”
Gorton gave a wry chuckle. “If you can find it out, maybe we’ll fit you for a black hat, eh?” And, with that, he prepared to get a good night’s sleep.
The corporal bedded down near the horses. He wanted to make certain that he was on hand in case anything spooked or bothered them, and was sensitized to it, but the odor was a bit much for both of the engineers and they moved away far enough to dampen out the odor and noise but near enough to spot the corporal and the horses and the remains of the haystack. It also, as it proved, was far enough to dampen the corporal’s very loud snoring.
“Well, he may well sleep in that uniform, but I’m hot and sore and I’m going to strip,” Connie told Toby, and proceeded to do so. She then arranged one of the saddlebags as a pillow and lay down. “It’s really soft and warm,” she told him. “Not bad.”
Toby Haller was looking more at her than the ground. “Not bad, indeed.” he murmured to himself. He tried it Gorton’s way and decided she was right. The heat of the ground was magnified by clothing, and if he had any modesty left after the rainstorm, it certainly wasn’t around Connie, and who the hell else was going to stumble over them here?
He was very tired, but his muscles hurt like hell, particularly in the thighs and calves, and he found it next to impossible to sleep. The bag wasn’t much of a pillow, and even putting his shirt on top didn’t help. He finally pushed it out of the way and lay flat on the soft, springy ground, just staring into the void. To avoid the phantoms there, he shifted and looked over at Connie and tried to get his mind to go blank. It was impossible to tell if she was asleep or not.
Slowly, he lapsed into an odd, hypnoticlike state between sleeping and waking, fixated on her form. The aches and pains faded into nothingness, and he seemed to be almost floating.
After more time passed, he became aware of a sound—no, not a sound, but something—all around him. It was unlike anything in his experience, a seething, pulsing aliveness that could not be pinned down or confined. It was as if—as if the insulating ground material were somehow human skin, and beneath it he was hearing the rush of blood along the veins and arteries and the distant pumping of the heart.
The void, he thought suddenly, is not a void at all. It’s alive! And anything in contact with it is a part of it.
He stared again at Connie’s form, and saw an aura there around her contours, as if a black border perhaps ten centimeters thick had been drawn separating her from the Flux discharges, which seemed far more numerous; seemed, in fact, to be coalescing around her.
Go with the flow, go with the flow, the strange sensations all about him seemed to say, and he succumbed to it and it seemed to sweep him along toward her, although neither he nor she moved.
Go with the flow. . . .
And then he was one with her body, at the same time his own eyes saw her covered with and outlined in countless tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of electrical flashes. The pattern was far too complex for his mind to comprehend or even fully realize, but he knew somehow that it was logical, even mathematical. The pattern, he realized, was linked to the ground, to the grid—that was why her head was so indistinct, lying on her saddle pillow, while the rest was so clear. The grid, however, also linked her to him in some strange way, and the both of them to something infinitely more complex and wondrous blow the surface.
He turned her body with her own hands and muscles and she pushed away the bag-pillow and settled back onto the ground itself, now wholly ablaze and engulfed in the sparkling life. He could repress nothing now, nor did he want to do so. He was Toby Haller, yet he felt Connie’s body as he did his own, and he felt impelled to join the two in physical union and there was no impulse to stop him. Her eyes opened, but he saw himself over her, through her eyes, as well as her through his own. He felt every bit of the stimulation he gave her, and that she gave him; he was both. He felt both giver and receiver, and he joined with her body and every cell of both was erotically alive. He had no idea how long it lasted, but the dual waves of ecstasy and the dual massive orgasms were unbelievable.
He felt totally spent when it was done, but he had no regrets, no shame. He made his way back to his own area and lay down once more, just staring at her.
Go with the flow, go with the flow. . . .
To the refrain of the strange life around him, he slept.
10
THE HUMAN FACTORS
Gorton awakened him gently in the morning, and he got up, feeling like he still needed another week’s sleep but oddly without pain or discomfort either. There was, in fact, almost a warm glow inside.
He remembered the previous night, but wasn’t sure how much was real, if any, and how much was a dream, a reaction to this eerie place. The genital region had some dried-on material he had to wash off, but certainly if it was a dream it would have been a really wet one.
Connie was also in a surprisingly good mood, and sponged herself off before putting her clothes back on. There was something different about her, Haller thought, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. It was something in the way she moved, certainly—sexier, more erotic even, but that just might be the aftereffects of his dream. She seemed younger somehow, more twentyish than in her thirties. He knew it was more than imagination when she put her clothes back on. The pants seemed ill-fitting, while the day before they’d been about right, and the shirt was much too small, ending above her navel by some distance. The material shrank to fit, but didn’t enlarge again unless thoroughly washed and heat-dried.
She came over to him, looking puzzled. “Toby—do I look any different to you?”
“Um—now that you mention it, a little. I thought it was just me. Your more than ample proportions seem, well, more ample, and you look ten years younger.”
“I feel ten years younger, at least. You don’t look so bad yourself, by the way. Trimmer, leaner, more muscles showing.”