They both looked over at Gorton, who seemed to take no notice and had changed not a bit. He was preparing prepacks for breakfast. “You think maybe there’s something out here they’re not telling us about?” he wondered aloud.
“I think there is. I wonder what Special Projects’s gonna think about this?” She paused a moment. “By the way— thanks for the fuck last night. I really needed it.”
He was shocked and startled beyond words. Then it had happened—and she’d known it! Finally, his mind started to assemble what he knew into place and he asked, “Um— about last night. Did you feel anyting—unusual? I mean, strange?”
“Well, it was the best one I ever remember, and that’s saying a lot. I’m not saying that because you’re the boss either.”
“It’s been a while for me,” he said honestly. “I guess it was just all built up inside.”
“Me too,” she told him. “Jeez, I still feel turned on. I feel like a hooker after a month’s vacation. If you or laughing boy over there made half a pass, I’d tumble even in that hay.”
Gorton seemed to take no notice of what they perceived as their changed appearances, and Haller decided to see if he could put some things together. “I think I know how you got back to Anchor on your test,” he commented almost casually.
The corporal looked up. “Yes?”
“You go with the flow.”
Gorton stared at him for a moment. Connie looked at them both as if they were nuts.
“You felt it even your first night out?” the signalman asked him.
“I did. What I want to know is what it was.”
The man in black sighed. “Only guesses. We’re dealing with new forms of energy here, remember, and a whole new technology. I’m no physicist, but the thinking right now is that the grid network is more than the network it was designed to be. We tied twenty-eight of the biggest super computers ever together, gave them access to all the power they wanted, and made them self-repairing and gave them a lot of autonomy in order for them to maintain an environment humans could live in. Somehow, we don’t exactly know how, some folks get sensitized to the energy constantly going beneath us. Best guess always was that the more you interfaced with the grid, the more sensitized you got to it, but that don’t always hold true.”
Connie looked at both of them quizzically. “Would you two mind telling me what the hell you’re talking about?”
The corporal shook his head slowly. “Ma’am, it’s not something you can explain. Either you got it or you don’t. You might get it yet, if you’re out here enough.”
“Why can’t I feel it now?” Haller asked him.
“You can if you concentrate real hard. Hardly nobody loses it once they got it. The trick is to have enough concentration and presence of mind to block it out completely when you don’t need it.”
“So, out here naked and alone, if you bring it up and find the most powerful signal and follow it back, you get home. The receive lines are mounted on top of the send lines, so you always just follow the strongest signal in the direction in which it grows even stronger.”
“That’s about it. Give, the man a black hat. Maybe you oughta think about switching over to our R and D department when you get this Anchor up and running.”
Haller didn’t reply. He was beginning to wonder what else he didn’t know and someone else did. How many independent research programs were there here investigating things unknown to even the top technical people? And how much, if any, did they talk to each other?
“Are you two trying to tell me that you somehow hooked into the computer network?” Connie asked skeptically. “That’s a little hard to take, I think. I mean, no matter how sophisticated our big machines are, they’re totally different than the human brain. They might be programmed by other human brains to meddle, but alone, out here, at random . . . ? Uh-uh. There’s no scientific basis whatsoever for it.”
They began to pack up and ride on, continuing the conversation as they did so.
“There’s a scientific explanation for everything,” Haller told her. “It just shows that even with all this power there are vast gaps in what we know. As usual, what we think we know isn’t the same as what’s true. You stand here on a world that not long ago was a barren chunk of space debris, on your way to create in a matter of minutes a garden of space debris, on your way to create in a matter of minutes a garden from a wasteland with some expert commands and directions and the help of some mighty powerful machines, and you’re saying something’s impossible!”
“I don’t believe in magic,” she stated firmly.
“What is magic but a term the ignorant use to describe anything their present knowledge and means of measurement cannot explain or duplicate? Come on—let’s get moving or we’ll be here another day!”
It was only a seven hour ride, but subjectively it seemed endless, and because of the damping and the need to follow Gorton there was little chance to do anything but think and brood. At a break, though, he did manage to get Gorton aside for a brief period and whisper a few questions.
“All right—she’s physically changed from yesterday, and she says I am too. Is it just in our minds, or is there something more you’re not telling me?”
“I met you all too briefly yesterday and we were off,” the corporal noted. “After that there was a lot of business to attend to and I had the lead, so I really didn’t notice all that much. Still, it’s possible. Happens with some folks, anyway, for good or ill. Don’t look like either of you had any changes for the worse, so don’t complain.”
“But it didn’t change you at all,” he noted. “Or did it?”
“I’ve had lots of training, mate. It’s all mental. Those who ride the void got control. They use it when it’s convenient or necessary, otherwise they tune it out. If you’re the type that lets the boredom open the way to you, then you’re better off in an Anchor job. We had eleven hundred troopers come in here, and now we’re down to maybe five or six hundred who can handle things. That’s what’s taking so long getting this bleedin’ place all wired and connected up. But the ones that can handle it, they’re gonna be the elite. They’re gonna be the best, mate. Bet on it.”
“This—sense. These changes. They happen to everyone?”
“Very few, actually. Only the ones that work with the big computers on an intimate basis, if you know what I mean, and those of us who spend most of our time out here connected on and off to the grid by the god guns and other equipment. You and the lady better watch it if you come back out for any length of time, by the way. You either control it or it controls you.”
You either control it, or it controls you. …
He wasn’t too sure if he could control it. The boring, empty trek left him little to do, and his mind kept going back to the power of the grid and the subtle mathematics it represented. Even on horseback he found himself drawing it from the very ground, and he saw that Connie, too, was drawing it. The difference between him and her was simply that she didn’t consciously realize it. Gorton, however, was right about his own kind. He was not drawing it, except at certain times when he was obviously using it for directional confirmation.
Such power, he thought. To draw it and shape it by will alone. But whose will? His? Or was, perhaps, the computer network experimenting with them, with all of them? Trying to build a direct human interface with all that power and no Guard. No, he decided, that wasn’t it for the signal corpsmen controlled it, or at least their interaction with it. He had been overriding last night—or his subconscious had—not the computer. The computer, as usual, had simply delivered the programs requested. Somehow he had changed Connie, in subtle and basic ways, into what his lust wanted her to be. The physical change he could accept, and could reverse, if desired, in the lab. He knew how now. What was disturbing was that she was convinced that she had initiated the love-making. Nobody in Special Projects had intimated that a computer could do that. But, then again, nobody had ever said they’d told him the whole story either.
Connie herself was feeling a little confused and disoriented. She’d awakened still turned on, as she sometimes had in the past, but it hadn’t gone away. Hours later she was still turned on and feeling very tense, and riding between two good-looking guys didn’t help any. More than once she found herself caressing places on her body that she just didn’t touch in public. Worse, for perhaps the first time in her life she felt her self-confidence eroding faster than that rain-soaked patch of ground they’d covered. Today, somehow, her occupation and life-style just didn’t seem as personally important or even as interesting to her as it always had.
She’d worked hard, damned hard, her whole life. She had worked her way through university, worked sixteen-hour days at shitwork in the University of the Pacific computer complex getting hands-on experience for peanuts in pay while holding down a weekend job teaching swimming and surfing to would-be beach bums. Then had come the low-level job with Newcastle in Aukland, which was a minor subsidiary of Westrex, and she’d worked like a maniac to be one of those who qualified for this project, taking the night shift so she could get her necessary doctorate days. Then came Titan and learning the whole new Kagan system, faking much and staying up nights finding out what she really needed to know, then this.
She knew she was pretty, and she liked dressing and acting the half-naked Polynesian girl with the different-bed-each-night and let’s-party personality, but it was a phony. The fact was, except for last night, she’d been laid by maybe six guys in her whole life and by nobody here. It wasn’t for lack of offers, but her career, her need for independence, had gotten in the way. Now she was thirty-five, and, after this Anchor was formed up, she had maybe ten years of simulations and math and frustration until they maybe let her design a quadrant—a quadrant that would of necessity be compromised by the designs of three other top programmers, all of whom had differing visions. At fifty she could be a middle-aged head girl of some department someplace with a big office, lots of perks, and two ulcers.