There were several thousand all told, said the Signals officer, at various pockets established all around the Anchor, and thousands more in similar positions around virtually all the other Anchors.
There were few direct problems. Although the pockets weren’t nearly large enough to support these people, the void was quite large if foreboding to them, and a very large number of Sensitives were with each group, so they could be fed and have their general needs tended to. Still, it was a condition that could not go on for long, and these people were scared and restive in the nothingness. The soldiers from the the old commands, however, had readily accepted the command authority of the Signal corps and were effectively guarding and organizing the groups as best as anyone could. It did, however, take weeks to sort out and plan for them, and the continuing failures of communications gear were hampering their efforts to unify their actions worldwide.
Ryan had been meeting with his best technical staff to try to find a way around things. There would be no trouble in a hard-wired transmission system, but it couldn’t be secured from the duggers, whose ranks were certain to multiply with the refugees who hadn’t linked up with Signals or didn’t trust Signals either, and had plunged blindly in. And. of course, the idea of stringing so many million kilometers of wires, poles, switching stations, and the like was staggering, even taking Flux abilities into consideration.
Somebody began to wonder if perhaps the strings, which were a different sort of Flux energy, might not be available to transmit and receive. They were held there, stabilized, by a magnetic field that allowed no tolerance for error and thus gave them a constant—or series of constants, depending on the string’s color and consistency. Their problem was finding a consistent power source.
Only after much agony did one engineer look up and say, “We can create water, trees, guns and ammo, clothes, saddles—you name it. Why the hell can’t the Sensitives just duplicate some unused portable storage battery units?”
Again, it was as simple as that. Because of the order to conserve at all costs, most field units had a few fully charged unused portable power units. They wouldn’t get the transports rolling again—they didn’t hold a charge but ran from energy constantly supplied from the grid—but it immediately restored some of their abilities in communications. When word of this was spread, a unified worldwide communications system was again in effect and Ryan and his staff could get reports, analyze data, and make recommendations.
Mike Ryan hadn’t been at all pleased by any of this. He had, in fact, urged the continued incarceration or computer alteration of Watanabe—or, he’d suggested, just blow the old bitch’s brains out. He had been ignored, and it was not long before he found out why. Coydt hadn’t given him any real options. Watanabe was the only way to block Ngomo and retain control. He knew she was playing a dangerous and treasonous game, but it was Coydt and Ngomo versus Cockburn and himself, and Cockburn had as many legions as the Pope, which was zero, and his troops were scattered over an area the size of Asia. He’d gotten feelers from van Haas, of course, but Cockburn had been right about the former director—he was so paranoid that he was determined that opening the Gates was the only way to save New Eden from a fate worse than death. He’d sided with Coydt by default, confident that her Security people could keep this contained, and he’d lost that one too. In a no-win situation, though, he’d come out virtually intact and in control of his element—if he could control the immediate problems.
Faced with mounting pressure to do something, Ryan’s staff ordered all the former landscape engineers identified wherever they were and the codes and strings for limited landscaping programs turned over to the officers in charge and Signals engineers. With the god guns dead, their ability to create new permanent pockets was gone, but if they could access the landscaping programs, it might be a different story.
“Small Anchors,” he said thoughtfully, munching on his omnipresent cigar. “Or big pockets, as you prefer. Strictly from the mind. I like it, but will it work?”
“Some of the Sensitives are strong enough, although how many we don’t really know,” his chief engineer told him. “Everybody who was experimenting with this thing has thought about it, but I don’t know of any who’ve really tried it with any determination. This Haller couple who broke through to their computer before the clampdown said that the thing told them to do just that—create their own world and live in it.”
“Then we’ll have to try it. Assign a series of well-spaced grid areas to the most powerful in each region and see what they can come up with. Go slow though. I don’t want to alter the world’s temperature or kill us and the Anchors off by straining the system.”
“There’s little chance of that, we think. We’ll be using some of the same programs, including the discretionary ones, so the computer will add or subtract or adjust as necessary to make it work, but it won’t be like the Anchor programs. Those are permanent, handled by the maintenance computer network. These will be transient programs, keyed to individuals by the 7800’s themselves. If the creator dies, the program will be terminated and everything from the void will be returned to it. I wouldn’t worry about strain, though, sir—the computers wouldn’t allow it. There is, however, a major danger from the creators themselves.”
“What?”
“Well, they’re just people, sir. Pretty much normal human beings like all of us.”
Ryan nodded. “In other words, neurotic, selfish, egotistical, and all the other traits that make folks interesting.”
“Exactly. There will probably be some psychotics too. If not at the start, then certainly after they create their fantasies. The places won’t be stable. They may change as the creator’s mood changes. The less stable the creator, the less stable the creation. Worse, anyone and anything under their program’s control will be subject to the creator’s rules to one degree or another. It will be real. Those within the affected area with lesser power would be essentially subject to the creator’s control. Those within the area with no power, such as our refugees, would have no way to fight it off and would become, as have the people of the Anchors, part of the program.”
“I see what you mean. Hundreds of little kingdoms run by tinhorn little gods with petty minds and a population that was enslaved and subject to their every whim. I don’t know, maybe van Haas was right. This place is sure shaping up to be a nice echo of Hell. Look—can we control them? Can we protect our own selves from these petty godlings?”
“We’d be subject to the same conditions. It’d take somebody more powerful than the creator to override and dissolve or alter the program against the creator’s will. Still, we have an advantage so long as we can maintain ourselves as a military organization.”
Ryan’s eyebrows went up and he was clearly interested. “Explain.”
“The fact is, the powers of many Sensitives, including those of greater and lesser sorts, can be combined for specific actions, such as breaking a program or, more easily, breaking a sub-routine like a force field. They all know this, but any creator who is any sort of potential threat is not going to be the sort to combine with a lot of others to increase power. They might get a power draw factor from their allies greater than their own and lose out. They’ll never be totally secure. We, on the other hand, are a unitary military organization and, in effect, a cultural family. Our current percentage of Sensitives is extremely high, thanks to our experiments over the past few years and to the fact that almost everyone in Signals has at least a touch of the ability because we live and work in the stuff. Some aren’t much, but I’ve never met a corpsman in the last ten years who couldn’t both see and read the strings. Our psychology department first raised a lot of this and agrees with it.”
Ryan nodded. “Go on.”
“We must become a closed society of our own. We hold the only means of mass communications, the only real technology based in the present, left on this world. Psychology urges that we socially interact only with our own people. We marry within the corps, we have children within the corps who are raised in the values and superiority of the corps, and we allow no outsiders to enter the corps. We can absorb the military refugees from the other commands now, of course, and it might pay us to recruit Sensitives with strong powers or specialized knowledge none of our divisions now possess, but after that we close it out. We live, eat, sleep, work, play, love, and fight only in the void. We learn how to deal with even the most powerful creators, and we develop and train in strategy and tactics for dealing with them as we must. For any knowledge we might need, we’ll trade service. We’ll continue to do, on a more primitive basis, what we’ve always done—maintain commerce and communications between Anchors and between these new large pockets as well.”
Ryan leaned back and thought about it, shaking his head in wonder. “I really like the idea of keeping the corps intact. No good can come of its dissolution. I’m not totally comfortable with your extreme of a large and hidden society, but if that’s the price, then we’ve got to pay it. We can’t kill those people and we can’t continue to look after them forever. We need these new lands, no matter what their problems, to accommodate our refugees and the rest. It seems to me that the computers have given us two complete and separate societies, one too static, the other far too dynamic. I hate to say it, but the proposal makes real sense. There has to be a buffer between the most dynamic societies to keep them from eating themselves and each other alive, and there also has to be a middleman, a link, between the dynamic and the static. Our knowledge and skills can do a lot for those poor Anchor people. Rewire some of the places for electricity. Provide communication between the various powers that be in the various Anchors, and give them what they lack that another Anchor has. Our Anchor Guard recruits will be handy there. Almost all of ’em are really in Logistics.”
“Psychology feels that if we present it right to our own troops, and go strongly with the sense of mission, it’ll work.”
“Well,” replied Ryan, puffing on his big cigar, “at least it won’t be dull.”
17
THE BIRTH OF DEMONS
It was finished, and it looked impressive as hell, even to Micki Haller, whose vision it had been, and Toby, whose programming skill had called the turns just right.
It looked like Anchor and it felt like Anchor, but there was no bubble and no insulation from the grid. It was in Flux, but it was no void.
Its location was one hundred and forty kilometers southwest of Anchor Luck, although no telltale strings led to it and it could be located only by someone sensitive to the minor variations in grid power flow who could also find the starting point from a blue route string with just the most subtle variation in its pattern at a specific point. They had elected to keep it that way, and with a force field around it that made it invisible unless one were to bump into it by accident, and impenetrable unless by permission of the Haller family. The force field had limited the size a bit, but they had great power, and Toby was not about to go against the instructions of Seventeen at this point. It was shaped as a rough square, about a hundred and twenty-five square kilometers.
It consisted of rolling hills dotted with brightly colored flowers and grass of the deepest green, with patches of large, leafy trees and palms. There were birds, mostly songbirds, fluttering about, and through its center flowed a clear, shallow winding stream that fed a broad reflecting pool. The house was on one side of the pool, a modest place, patterned very much after the one they’d been forced to abandon back in Anchor Luck, where they had spent all their past time together. Flanking the house and pool on either side were two marble buildings of Grecian design, ornate and columned. One was a library, with readers and an enormous number of bubble modules containing vast knowledge smuggled from Anchor before the big change. The distribution had been rather random, however; it would take a lifetime or more just to find out and recatalog what was in them.
The other building was basically a shell; Micki called it the temple, since it had in its open center an Oriental garden with fountains and many ornate plants and places to sit and meditate. The few rooms in the shell were basically offices for them to get away and work for a bit at whatever they wanted to do, and even contained a room for meditation, but the main interior space was for a small museum, to collect and store and catalog many of the objects and devices they had taken for granted in their old lives which no longer worked but should not be forgotten.