“So am I.” He looked at her. “Another one-night stand?”
“We’ll see.”
He went back down to his unused suite and got a change of clothes and his toiletries bag, then returned upstairs. She was already waiting for him.
12
THE SORCERERS LEAGUE
Toby Haller counted forty-six people in the room, counting himself; twenty-seven women and nineteen men. Many had guesses about why they were there, but few had any real idea and all were curious to see if their speculations were right or wildly off the mark. Interestingly, there were no military personnel present, at least in uniform or looking like they had followed military dress codes. If he’d guessed right, then only Signals and Security would have been represented anyway, and those were little independent kingdoms of their own.
No one expected Rembrandt van Haas and Admiral Cockburn to both enter the room. Both bosses, though, meant something very big was up.
Van Haas didn’t look much older than he had when Haller had met him fifteen years before for that first and only personal interview, but he didn’t look any younger either. Cockburn with a tall, gaunt figure, looking old but ramrod-straight, with piercing blue eyes, a hawk nose, and a mane of thick white hair. He wore the khaki uniform of headquarters command, loose and with no tie, but the four stars on his collar were easy to see. Several years before, to maintain morale among the officers, all the commanders had elevated themselves, Cockburn to full admiral, the other three to lieutenant generals, so there would be some room to establish local commands with a promotion path.
Haller was so impressed, he almost forgot his tiredness and his hangover.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlmen,” van Haas began. “I’m sure you are all curious as to what is going on here, and I will, with some necessary background, attempt to inform you, with the admiral’s help, as best I can.
“I’m sure you’re all wondering what you are doing here, although some of you may have guessed the heart of it. All of you have had long sessions with the direct computer interfaces either at the computer center or in remote locations, and all of you have spent a fair amount of time in the raw Flux region, or void, as it’s commonly called. All of you have demonstrated, at one time or another, to a very significant degree, the ability to call up programs from raw Flux without the aid of mechanical devices. All of you have managed to gain some control over this, to varying degrees, and all of you have also reported this yet kept full security on this abiltiy from anyone not your superior. You are not all the people who have developed this unprecedented ability, nor even all the ones who have reported it to us, but you are among the top ten percentile in ability and control and you have shown yourself to be loyal and reliable. None of you are in the military arm, as you might have noticed. There are reasons for this. Admiral?”
“This morning, we, the combined boards of military and company, took the unprecendented step of dissolving the existing organization and and forming a new one,” Cockburn told them in a clipped upper-crust New Zealand accent that sounded quite at home to Haller. “This is because the nature and mission of this colony has changed. Until now, everything was in getting this place established, running smoothly, and undertaking all the research projects our charter commanded. This has now been done. Now we are looking beyond this, inward, to our own future and our children’s future.”
“The corporate board of directors will continue to have jurisdiction over New Eden,” van Haas told them, picking it up, “but the divisions will be changed. Each board member will be responsible for all of the operations going on in a specific region rather than along narrow departmental lines.
Many departments will be eliminated or merged, while a few new ones will be created, under regional directors responsible to the board member in charge of the region. This way, each region will operate in an autonomous manner.”
“There will be no military as such,” Cockburn added. “A reserve headquarters will be maintained for emergency purposes here, which I will head, but save for some refresher training on an annual basis and a small corps of professional officers and noncoms for each military division, there will be no active military. Security and Transportation will maintain a small squad under a single divisional chief at each Gate to handle routine traffic, and to keep the twenty-eight core interfaces secure from unauthorized use. Elected Anchor councils will make internal law as needed and support it, and create proper court systems to handle it. Most have already done so to a degree, so this is painless. Only General Ryan’s Signal corps will be retained pretty much intact, and they and a new force, the Anchor Guard, made up initially of troops surplused from the other reduced commands and new recruits, will be the only forces other than Gate and command center security forces authorized to carry weapons.”
There was some surprised rumblings at this, mostly because there seemed no real need for anyone to carry weapons.
“The reason why Signals needs weapons and an Anchor Guard is necessary,” Cockburn explained, “is that there have been a number of very disturbing things going on in the void. Some men and women have gone off in it for one reason or another, either to experiment or out of madness, boredom, or whatever, and have had sufficient prior interface with the big computers to be somewhat Sensitive. They have been changed —horribly in most cases—by this, and have actually attacked legitimate people and even some supply trams with varying degrees of success. Signals must now send armed patrols with every major shipment of goods or movement of passengers between regions. This is a most unexpected and distressful development, and it appears to be growing worse each day. These people are demented and deformed, but they are not stupid. They were once people just like yourselves, perhaps even ones who worked for or with you. They are growing bolder and more successful. and they seem to be after women in particular. We believe they intend to breed colonies out there. There is no question that sooner or later they may attack within Anchors themselves to keep their mad colonies alive. The thought is disgusting.”
There was a great deal of rumbling at this. Finally, someone in the back called out, “Why can’t they just be located on the grid, then tracked down by grid and satellite and wiped out, sir?”
“A good question. Van?”
“We’ve tried it and tried it,” the director told them, “and it just doesn’t work. There is some kind of conflict in the master computer programming set up by this. Nobody, not even the computers, anticipated the idea of Sensitives in the first place, and we certainly haven’t explained the phenomenon yet to anyone’s satisfaction. The fact remains that any Sensitive who doesn’t want to be found is invisible to the network, at least as far as a query from us goes. We don’t know what the computer sees when it sees a Sensitive on the grid, but it doesn’t see a human being or even an anomaly by the definitions of its programs. The satellites by themselves were never designed for independent work except in communications, and they just can’t penetrate Flux of the density we have and need to maintain our heat and atmospheric balance. If a non-Sensitive is lost in Flux, the grid can locate him or her. If a Sensitive wants to be located in Flux, we can find him or her. But it there is a specific command that their locations not be reported, there’s no way we can locate anyone. And these poor wretches do not want to be found. And that, my friends, brings us to the primary reason why you are here.”
There was much disturbance and agitation in the audience now. People who had felt totally secure for years were now beginning to have worries and the willies.
“The Anchor Guard will establish secure borders around the Anchors, although this will likely take some time to do, building it the old way. There was some thought given to extending the Anchors far enough to build such a border, but we have found this, for a variety of reasons you in engineering might understand, to be impractical. Other plans called for the establishment of force fields supported by permanent amplifiers within the void itself, but this would expose individuals to prolonged, continuous interfaces and essentially seal off each Anchor from the rest of the world, something that is hardly desirous. Also, I am told, it is not easy simply to lower a section of force field long enough for traffic to move in and out at specified times. Not only do the psychologists believe this would be harmful to Anchor populations, but it would interfere with such things as drainage, Anchor maintenance shells, and the like. So we build a border, and give the keys only to Signals. They alone know the void well enough to keep commerce moving, so everyone and everything will move with them anyway.”
Van Haas looked them all over. “Clearly, this is an alarmist’s reaction to a problem that is still relatively minor, but it’s one we must face before it grows all out of proportion. The key, of course, is not locks and guards and guns, it is correcting the problem. Some of our best people have worked for two years now, but we cannot find the programming flaws. The 7800’s have been unable to use their self-diagnostics on this either. We have reached the point in that direction where it is clear that even if we find the problem and specific solutions, we would have to literally turn off and reprogram from scratch the entire 7800 network. That, of course, would entail first the evacuation of, then the erasure of, New Eden as it is today.”
Haller found himself joining in a chorus of, “No! No!”
“Very well, then,” the director said. “The only other way is to learn just what this process, this phenomenon, is. To establish a project to learn what is going on, why it is going on, how to control it and master it, and to use it to our advantage. This group is you. Effective at ten hundred tonight, an order will go out over both my and the admiral’s signature ordering that all remote computer interface machinery will be declared surplus and reduced back to Flux. In sixteen weeks Signals will complete its project of creating water and supply caches along all void routes, then it, too, will surrender its network interfaces for destruction. The only exception will be a lone big amp, one subsidiary interface, one remote Guard computer with interface, and four of the network interface guns. Those will be under your control and for your work only.”