The Soviets had almost three months to prepare for the enemy, and managed to evacuate close to a hundred thousand people and many vital records as well as deploy in a logic nearly identical to that proposed for New Eden. When word came down the line that six of the seven Soviet Gates were reporting incoming, the colony seemed to halt, even though there was nothing more they could do. It still took almost ten days to get a message down the line from the Soviet position to New Eden. By the time the first messages had arrived, the issue had probably already been decided. There was nothing really to do but await the slow-breaking news.
14
OF PAST AND FUTURE
The messages were strictly in encoded text form. They included no pictures or support of any kind, but because of the time and distance involved, there was simply no way to ask questions and request verifications without leaving things open for an enemy.
The first ship that came to the Soviet colony was one of the Soviet ships that had been sent to help out the Chinese. The aliens had not only returned the ship, they had also brought back, alive, some of the Soviets on board. Although wary, the defenders had taken their people back in while the aliens remained out of view.
The Chinese, they were told, had put up a ferocious fight, and totally refused to negotiate. There had been some early communications problems, and the aliens had found themselves in a full-scale war before anything could be done. The Soviets, there primarily as not fully trusted observers anyway, had attempted independent contact and finally located the means by which the aliens were trying to talk to the Chinese. The aliens were not at all human, but the products of a very different evolution, and even when mediation was attempted the Chinese called them “demons” and “devils” and fought all the harder. In fact, it had taken aid from the aliens just to protect the bulk of the Soviets from the Chinese commanders, and some were in fact slain and one ship damaged and now, repaired. They now were being sent back with an alien advance guard to make certain such bloody misunderstandings would not happen again. Rather than fear them, it was said, it was the aliens who needed reassurance and demonstrations of cooperation and trust that humans were not all animallike mad dogs.
Best yet. the alien culture was as pure and perfect a form of communism as could be dreamed of, and their culture would transform and finally realize the ultimate dream of human perfection. They would teach us, as they learned about us, for although they had been riding the strings of the Flux universe for centuries and had discovered other higher life forms, they had never before discovered one as advanced and expanding as ours. We were, in fact, the only one to discover on its own the Flux universe and the matter-energy transfer process. In the end we would have reached their stage on our own. They now would lift us through centuries of discovery and pain to perfection in one easy step.
For the next few months the civilized Soviets would be instructed in the ways of perfection and taken into the community. They, with the aliens, would then come inbound, the Soviets like gods, it was promised, and provide this to the rest of humanity. There was nothing to fear. We had lucked into greatness.
The process would take a while, and while it did the Gates outbound would be closed to traffic and messages. When the communion of the two races was complete, though, they would send a message of peaceful intent and follow exactly five standard days later. This was necessary to mate and adjust their computer network to the alien standard.
With joy and salutations the messages ceased.
“Can you believe this shit?” Brenda Coydt snorted after going through it. “They had a chance to really take them on, a chance maybe to win, and they up and surrender, the assholes!”
Cockburn turned to Ryan. “You agree with the sentiments?”
“Pretty much. It’s not verifiable, and we have to assume they have the standard message codes for Flux travel. They’d have ’em from the Hispanic conquest. I cannot more believe that the Chinese, among the most civilized and adaptable people humanity ever grew, would fight to the last man rather than try an accommodation at least, when it was clear that they were outgunned and outclassed. Not when two Soviet survey ships could tune them in and make nice with them as easy as calling the next office. It just doesn’t ring true somehow.”
“Still,” the admiral noted, “there was ample provision for emergency messages to fly, considering they had ships sitting in six of the seven Gates, and even for whole ships to come inbound. There clearly was no fighting.”
“Trojan horse,” General Ngomo noted. “When they took the Chinese, they wound up with an unexpected bonus—two ships full of folks from the next objective.”
“Hmmm . . . And they were taken into Flux chambers and turned around to be alien stooges? Possible. Evidence though? I have some of the scientists and bureaucrats on my back already over this, even though we worked very hard to keep a tight lid on the account.”
“The initial battle reports we had from the Chinese action came from the Soviet observer ships,” Ngomo noted. “Nothing was said about contact or even attempting contact, and they sent pictures as long as they could. No, I think it’s pretty clear that the enemy knew that word and picture had gone down and they also had already surveyed and discovered only one open Gate at the next target—not enough firepower to do things efficiently. So, as you say, they turned around a bunch of captured Soviets, sent them back in their own ship, and made them willing traitors and at the same time freed up a second Gate for their own use. They’ll be nice and polite and even do a few miracles for the local savages until equipment can be brought in to remove the blocked ships and get a sufficient alien force in place to take over.”
“If they have to,” Coydt noted. “If they hook into and gain control of an entire cluster’s master computers and the interfaces involved, they might not need more forces. There’s no doubt they’ve been at it longer than we have and know a lot more about the process and, with all those records, about us here and humans in general. They sure got sophisticated in a hurry, you’ll note. A society of pure ideal Communists, my , ass!”
“Well, the board seems to want to swallow this wholesale. They want us to roll out the red carpet and the trumpeters and embrace the slimy bastards. That’s another thing—I don’t even know yet if they’re slimy or what.”
“Even Watanabe?” Coydt asked.
“Especially Watanabe. The old loony believes that our technology has been some sort of divine spoon-feeding, eventually to raise us all to the angelic state. She thinks these— things—have already reached that point and she can skip the next ten incarnations or whatever. Some of the others are naive, others are just plain scared and grasping at straws. Only van Haas has any guts among ’em, and he’s been vacillating on the whole thing up to now. This has given him an excuse to side with his own people. Frankly, the old boy’s getting a bit loony himself. Carrying that heavy burden all those years is finally telling. The bottom line with Van is that he’s scared of the aliens, yes, and I doubt if he trusts them, but for some reason he’s even more scared of us. So scared, in fact, he’ll take the very slight chance on the aliens rather than leave this world to us.”
They all nodded gravely. These were four of a kind, in a sense. Career military in spite of different cultural and national origins, they tended to look at the world the same way.
“The board,” Ngomo pointed out, “no longer has any authority.”
“No, not legally, but they still command the loyalties of a great many scientists and technicians. You all know that even after thousands of years civilians still don’t look upon the military as other human beings. They mistake discipline for dictatorship and have no understanding of our sense of duty and our grave responsibilities.”
Ryan seemed to look directly at Coydt. “But can we close the Gates against the will of these people? Don’t we need them to do the job? We don’t have much of a staff, and I’m not sure we could count on the loyalties of the Anchor Guards if they were called on to shoot their own. I’m not sure that we could get control of Gate Three at all. I just can’t see us being able to put that one over on Watanabe.”
“I can handle Watanabe,” Coydt assured him.
Cockburn’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “Indeed? Van Haas intimated as much, and it set him off to paranoia over you.”
“Watanabe has continued to have regular sessions, even something of a relationship, with her old psychiatrist, who is also in charge of Special Projects, if you remember. The old girl is incredible with her computers, but she’s human all the same. Like almost all the high-tech types, she believes what her computers tell her and she believes she’s made herself invulnerable to any outside coercion. We wanted her to think that. In actual fact, we preprogrammed the Gate Three computers before she arrived and took over. Every single thing that Watanabe has discovered, every single thing Watanabe has found out, and every single plot and plan she has are in her when she’s interfacing, and she communes with her beloved machines a lot. All of that is then sorted, coded, classified, interpreted, and spit out in Special Projects.”
That shocked them all, but particularly Cockburn, who’d known nothing of this. “Who gave you the authority to do such a thing?”
“I interpreted it. I had specific orders to leave her alone, no matter how batty she was, because she was doing enormously valuable research. She was and is doing just that. But everyone was happy to let a woman who knew everything that human beings can know about these monster computers have a free hand, and look the other way when she got some brilliant minds and turned them into devoted cult members who thought her way. Everyone knew she was doing it—and it didn’t take much extra brains to figure out she’d managed it on the security people there and she’d managed to get control through her computer of all the monitoring and recording devices as well. Dr. Suzuki saw all this coming back at Site Y, and she strongly urged that if Watanabe was ever given access to a 7800, we do just this. I felt it my duty to do it. If she’d gone ahead and learned how to seize control of and reprogram every damned computer in the network and changed us all into her vision of what the world should be, we’d all be helpless and I would be responsible. That’s been her aim all along, you know.”
There was no arguing with that sort of logic. Still, Cockburn, said, “I just wish you would have told me. It not only would have eased my mind, but it would relieve me of this nagging question of what else all three of you haven’t bothered to tell me.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but one leak anywhere would have done it in. She’d have been tipped and spared no brainpower to locate and remove those programs and she might well be the only one here who could. She fooled you all with those copies of herself she made out of some of her assistants. With all due respect, sir, a commander can’t be told everything. That’s what you pay me for. You trust me to do the job and replace me if I don’t.”
“All right, all right. Point taken. Now—do we agree that we should reject this message and any subsequent messages as a fraud? That we should proceed to close and seal this world anyway?”
There were three other nods.
“Very well. Yes, it can be done. I’ve already invoked a host of military programs none of them even knew existed, and there are some more that would give us control of the computers. Ryan, your Signals boys can pretty well guard the Gates themselves and control access along the matter transmission lines. I have enough totally loyal and efficient technicians to do what has to be done if they can get physically inside each administrative headquarters and interfaced at the main computer centers. Ngomo, I think you can find enough trusted personnel to maintain a military guard over this, with the help of Coydt’s permanent parties.”
The Nigerian nodded. “I believe so. It’ll simply be a matter of making a convincing enough cover story. Something, perhaps, about changing the programs so that the wizards and magicians and monsters won’t have power anymore. That’s going through everywhere anyway, so it’s just capitalizing on their existing fears.”
“And what of the safety of our wizards and magicians when all this hits the fan?” the admiral asked, concerned.
“If they can’t fend for themselves, in Flux, they’re no threat to anyone anyway. In Anchor they have sufficient security troops to at least cover their asses. The independents I don’t care about at all. I need the cover, which also provides a convincing set of reasons for the military guard. Some will try to stop this because they want the power for themselves. See?”
“All right. I don’t like it, but I’ll accept it. Coydt, the third cluster alone is your baby. I want you to handle it personally. You have carte blanche there. I don’t care if you have to shoot the bitch and run poison gas through the headquarters complex.”
“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary, sir,” the security chief responded.
. “Very well. It’s your head, and maybe all our heads, if it doesn’t get done. The clock is running on us. I want to commence exactly seven days from today. That will give all of you a chance to map out contingency plans and assemble and brief your teams. Shindler will give you the names of the technicians in each cluster and their units. You and your officers have the full authority to do whatever is necessary to accomplish the sealing. At 0400 hours one week from today all access to 7800 interfaces will be denied all personnel not specifically encoded in the computer memory by the military programs. You may submit a list of others on your staff to be added to the existing very tight limits. None of the researchers and not one of the board will have access.”
“That will drive them all nuts, but particularly Watanabe,” Coydt noted. “This means we’ll have to act to secure her before commencing operations. She’ll otherwise try to get around everything.”
“I want the board neutralized for the duration.” Cockburn told them. “House arrest if possible, but if you must shoot them, then shoot them. Understood? I want no one sowing the seeds of revolt and discord who can get an instant following. Understand that they’ll have to be kept under wraps. What we do won’t seal anything—it’ll simply allow me to do so. I will wait until the last possible minute I deem safe, for purposes of information and in hopes there can be some sort of breakthrough. I expect Earth to concur with us, but I must tell you that if it does not, I feel I must commit treason. Like you with your Watanabe monitor, Coydt—if I have to save the bastards from taking their own lives, I’ll do anything necessary to save them. The decision is made. Only the when of it remains. Now—move!”
Suzy Watanabe slept in a small flat she’d converted out of two offices right off the master computer center for Anchor X-ray. She rarely left the building these days, and in fact rarely even-left the heart of her private interface with the system.
After her usual routine of meditation, exercise, a shower, and a very light breakfast, she donned her robe and walked to the door to go into the center itself. The door, however, refused to budge for her.
Cursing, she pulled down the manual switch and threw it, then found that it, too, had no effect. She was suddenly suspicious, and went back to one of the two doors exiting into different halls of the administration building. Neither of those doors worked either. She got on the intercom at once.
“Energy and Transport switchboard,” said an unfamiliar woman’s voice.
“This is Watanabe! I am locked in my chambers and I demand to know who did it and why!”
“Doctor, this is Military Security. By order of Admiral Cockburn, commander, you and the other directors are under temporary house arrest and all access by nonmilitary personnel to computer interfaces is hereby revoked.”
It shocked her. She never thought it could or would happen here, in her own temple of worship, in her own inner sanctum— without warning, like thieves in the night! She didn’t even know how it was possible considering the people loyal to her and the automatic defensive system she’d established. Still, fury got you nowhere.
“Are my people all right?”
“Yes, ma’am. All permanent party personnel assigned to this building were removed for their own safety and protection. There was, in fact, some strong resistance, including the use of arms against us, but we managed to subdue everyone without having to kill. Those who identify as your own personal guard are under heavy sedation, however, for their own safety. If they came to with that dedication, we would surely be forced to kill some of them.”
She sighed, and felt a bit stupid to have thought that her girls would be a match for a well-planned and expertly executed takeover by military professionals. She realized, too, it was a fatal flaw in her own psyche that did it. She so detested military people and the military mentality that she had totally excluded them from her own control. Even the security people assigned here had been processed only to accept her authority and deeds as nonthreatening. She had not trusted them enough to leave them as professionals, but adopting her code and ways, since they were often rotated and it would make things obvious, that left them, in circumstnces like these, still under the orders of Coydt.
Cockburn, Coydt—they were all of a package. She had no doubt that this move was not a direct threat to her or her group; the fact that they had said they were arresting all the board made that plain. Clearly, it was something of a military coup. They were setting up their defenses without even talking to this new alien presence, getting ready to either kill them or seal the Gates forever in their typical knee-jerk reactions.
She reached into her robe and pulled out a tiny hand-held personal computer no larger than her hand and as thin as a ten-page pamphlet. It had limited abilities—a mere hundred thousand gigabytes of memory and it had to be downloaded to a main computer through a special interface—but it was a useful tool. Everyone working with any kind of figures had one. Nobody, however, had one programmed the way Suzy Watanabe could program.
“Ready,” said a soft, small voice from the hand-held computer.
“The military has sealed me in my rooms and has removed all of my people from the temple under guard,” she told it. “All other board members are also under arrest. Analysis of this coup?”
“They are going to seal the Gates.”
“Yes, I figured that. How could they do it in such a way that I could not undo it?”
“Unknown. Probably thousands of ways to do so. Most probable would be existing undetected prior programming using the network to override.”
“Undetected!” She didn’t like that. She didn’t like anyone, even a computer, to suggest that there was something in her computers she hadn’t even discovered.
“Information, please,” the computer responded. “Was the takeover without strong resistance, and has any sign or mention been made of computer resistance to takeover?”
“It was bloodless, they tell me, and there was no mention of problems.”
“Then they have overriden your entire defensive program series. Either that or they are lying, in which case they will come for you and do whatever is necessary to gain bypasses.”
Ego flaw number two, she thought ruefully. It simply had never even entered her mind that someone would capture her alive and imprison her so easily. Short of suicide, there seemed no way they couldn’t get the bypass information out of her if they wished. No, even suicide wouldn’t help. It had been Coydt, after all, who’d resurrected her in the first place. Damn! They didn’t even need to come for her. All they had to do was kill her while she was trapped here and then resurrect a very obedient new Suzy somewhere else. She felt angry not at them but at herself.
And, of course, Short Stuff, her personal, was absolutely right. They probably hadn’t run into anything because she was still here and still herself. That meant they’d bypassed all that sophisticated defensive programming before they’d even entered the temple, and that meant sending overriding commands to her own 7800 and everyone else’s before they ever got through the front door. Short Stuff was right. There were layers of that big computer she never detected or even suspected were there. Now, for the first time, she understood the real reason why the only operational 7800 had gone to Security at Site Y, and what had been their primary mission there.
There was, however, still one chance to foul them up. She went into her office and tripped a series of secret panels built into her desk and the wall beside it. With the right ID codes and prints, it all folded down into a crude but working Overrider interface. She put on the crude headset, adjusted the controls, and opened her mind.
The interface played a stirring rendition of “God Save the King.” It played it over and over, and there was no way to break through or get any other response. After a half-hour trying to do so, she was so sick of that song, she was happy that her former homeland, Australia, had finally declared itself a republic.
This had really torn it though. Clearly they had simply ignored her whole set of local protection commands, and the computer had no choice but to obey. Years ago she’d discovered and turned to her own ends Coydt’s little trap allowing someone else to be Watanabe and filter through all her work. If they’d tried that route, they would have had a rude surprise, so they had simply overridden all of it.
She needed to think. Assuming they could do this, Short Stuff was certainly right that an override of the military system was unlikely. If they sent a tapeworm through the Gate program, destroying its knowledge of how to reset for incoming, she might be able to write new programs to do what they had erased, given enough time. Transportation, after all, had pretty much designed those Gates, and she knew exactly how they operated.
They, of course, would know that too. Realize that not only she but lots of Transportation people could do it. It was too insecure for them. Even if they shot everyone involved, they’d never be sure they didn’t miss somebody.
Some sort of program, then, within this special military override. A set of commands using a language and system proprietary to them and probably using computer-generated security ciphers and filled with deadly traps to anyone even looking over how to reverse them. Unless you had all seven parts of the cipher and then were able to decode it and apply it in a preset manner—probably all seven at once or something like that—it could never be overridden. Then Cockburn would scatter that code all over the place so that not even he knew where it all was, and you’d need a fair number of people agreeing to furnish their parts just to reassemble it. It was impossible. She would have to accept the fact that, unless these aliens or Earth could break through, the Gates would remain shut. Only by going out into space, finding an optimum point, and opening up a new Borelli Point would it ever be possible to go inbound or outbound—and except for some small automated devices, all spacecraft had been destroyed or cannibalized after New Eden was terraformed to prevent such a thing and the Point in space closed and blown.
They would be truly sealed in, that was sure. She knew that the nature of the Flux strings in that alternate universe were pretty easily fixed. Nobody could open up a new hole outbound or inbound without the new string immediately converging on the existing one. So long as the Borelli Points were still open, even if sealed to incoming traffic, here on New Eden, any attempt to punch through would result only in nothing reassembling. That was true for traffic coming from either direction. They were stuck. The only way out now would be for somebody to build a spacecraft capable of creating and controlling a Borelli Point in space, then punching through from there—only, probably, to get stuck at the next set of Gates down.
She sat back in her chair and sighed. All right, then—she couldn’t stop it, and she probably couldn’t get into the computers and override the defensive systems without destroying herself. She had to accept what was, or would soon be, if the fools could do it at all. Then what?
The gods had teased her, tantalized her. They had shown her the way to the true inner light, then snatched it away. It was not to be achieved as a gift, that was certain. She saw the pattern. Those who had opposed the shining path of perfection had been destroyed. Those who had embraced it now were receiving it. Here, on New Eden, there was division. The people and those of the true path would embrace it, but there was an evil infrastructure that opposed it—the military. They were not to be denied salvation, but they would have to earn it. They would have to achieve a state of near perfection themselves, and they would have to cleanse the world of evil. But how?
With its control of all weaponry and all the top levels of technology, the military would always be supreme. Even to wipe it out would simply result in the creation of a new overclass. Such power as this corrupted everyone, even herself. She had hoped that by communion with the computers they could attain the highest state, but she knew now that even her beloved computers were corrupted by the evil.
With a start she realized that the gods had been showing her that from the start, but she had simply failed, in her blind love of her machines, to divine the meaning. Those horrible monstrosities, those duggers. The computer had corrupted them, deformed them, made them not great but lesser beings. Even the experiments with direct network access among deliberate scientists had corrupted those scientists, turned them into freaks or riddled their souls with the evil lust for ultimate power over others, the same evil that corrupted the military by its very nature.
Salvation, then, could not come through the computers, yet the computers were necessary to sustain life. She had been given the gift to understand all that was good in the computers while denying her its most evil heart. Even so, had she not understood her own divine will by being exposed to the potential evils of the computers?
At last she understood the message that the ghosts of her parents had brought her so long ago. She had sensed the great evil inherent in the big machines and she had attempted to shirk her duty, her divine mission, when she was their chosen instrument. They had not let her, making her own worse enemy, the source of much of the evil, Coydt, personally bring her back and yet leave her untouched when it would have been so simple to alter her mind and will! She had decided to come here only because the ghosts had intimated a great duty and responsibility to do so. Now she thought she understood.
Earth could not be saved. It was dominated by the Coydts and the Cockburns and always had been and always would be. Borelli had been less a genius than a prophet, sent by the gods, first to prevent the Cockburns and the Coydts and their minions from destroying humanity prematurely, then by providing the basis for some of humanity to get out. Now Earth, cut from this power and fearful of any use lest it attract the enemy they did not know but feared, was doomed to starvation, war, and eventual death no matter what. Only those out here, in the new worlds, had the possibility of finding the true path to salvation and union with the gods.
Humanity had been given two examples—to fight was oblivion, to accept was nirvana. Humanity had chosen to flee instead, wall itself out. It was too infused with evil to do otherwise. Now those lost souls of Earth would be reborn on the colonies so that their souls would have the chance. It was up to her to preserve this colony until that had the chance to occur, then, when perfection was attained, humanity would no longer need the Gates but would be capable of direct communion with the gods and their angels up the line. It was all so very, very clear to her now.