The buildings, the gardens, the trees, even the blue sky with no trace of a monstrous gas giant to be seen anywhere, were all the creation of Toby and Micki Haller with some fine tuning and suggestions by Christine, the only child of theirs currently old enough to understand and use the powers that she received through inheritance. Micki intended to try much research on this creature of energy her daughter hosted, for it worried her a great deal, but that would come later.
They had selected their staff of fifty-four well and carefully from among the refugees. None had power, but they were drawn from every religious and cultural background they could find among the crowd, and all had specific duties and places that fit their past lives. The basic staff was also selected as family groups, so they would be a community and not a master family and employees in a social sense. Clearly, there would always be a class division based on dependency upon the Hallers, who had the power, but Toby and Micki were determined to minimize this as much as possible.
There would be no lack of work, even if the place were generally self-maintaining. The library had to be sifted through and cataloged. The limits of the powers had to be tested and learned to the full. Histories and cultures of the various people there were to be taken, orally and otherwise, and recorded so that they would not be lost.
The scarcity of horses had been solved by some refugees from the old original Special Projects who’d suggested that some of the people accept being transformed into radically different creatures. The network could not create life, but it had a tremendous amount of leeway with the alteration of it. People had been willing to help, but they’d objected to transformations into horses or mules themselves, even if such a thing were promised as temporary. The solution was to go back to mythology and create centaurs, with the body and strength of horses but the head and torso of human beings. It worked quite well, and gave some of the biologists a great deal to study ‘in how the computers solved everything from the center of gravity to the respiratory and digestive problems this entailed.
Psychologists also would have a time trying to discover why so many ultimately chose to remain centaurs, including a dozen or so of the Hallers’ staff. In one step, without even meaning to, they had created the first new life form other than humans and animals on the world.
Both Toby and Micki had been busy with the post-creation setup and getting the staff settled in and oriented, and this was the first time they’d really been together just to relax and not so tired they wanted only to sleep. They relaxed on the grassy lawn between the house and the pool and looked over their little world and decided that it was good.
Toby had just returned from the last trip out to the Signals pocket while Micki’d remained to get things in shape here.
“I saw Lisa Wu,” he told her, relaxed and content.
“Oh? I wish she’d taken us up on our offer to come here. We could use a historian and an administrator.”
“Everybody could. No, she and the family talked it over and decided to sign on with the Signal corps. She’s got the power, although not as strong or as developed as we have, and the kids have some, and Signals needs somebody with a good grounding in history, both ancient and recent, and administrators as well, and that man of hers has black belts in martial arts I can’t even pronounce. He’ll make one hell of a training sergeant for them.”
She sighed. “I just can’t help thinking that it’s all gone. Everything we knew. What dreams we all had! Unlimited power, unlimited sources of power to transform energy into whatever matter or other energy forms we needed—the millennium at last. Now it’s gone. Even the people, the vast cultures that were born of Earth and made great civilizations— all gone. Gone forever.” She gave a dry chuckle. “Some gods we are, sitting here in this little speck walled off from the world.”
“A world that isn’t anything we want, honey. The millions of diverse people and cultures in our beautiful Anchors are stuck now in happy ignorance back in the Middle Ages or something like it, while the areas between are inhabited by small groups of people with more power than anyone ever dreamed of and nothing much to do with it, policed by an ingroupish brigade of telephone repairmen. You know there have been a number of forays back into some of the Anchors, including Luck.”
“Oh? They were talking about that, but I hadn’t heard anything.”
He nodded. “They say the reports didn’t do justice to how primitive it is, and all that great technology and rich diversity of cultures is just gone. Coydt’s version of Watanabe’s nut cult made true believers of everybody and controls church and courts, which are somewhat Islamic in their rigidity and severity, while the men run the civil administration and the military. It’s said they all have an ingrained terrible fear of the void. They’re a frightened, superstitious lot, and there’s even talk in some of them of establishing guard towers with barbed wire or even building walls to keep the monsters of the void out.”
“I guess the computers wanted to make damned sure we stayed out here and they stayed in there.”
“Well, as far as Anchor is concerned, they sure wanted to ensure that people could live and work without their machines, that’s for sure. The only real contact so far has been between Signals and the church.”
“No!”
“Uh-huh. They neither like nor trust anyone from the void, but they have to be able to communicate with other Anchors and keep the church and culture unified, and they need some trade between themselves. It seems our old buddy Dr. Patricia Suzuki is number two to Watanabe, and neither of them were subjected to the program. They are scared of Signals, it’s true, and they don’t consider them humans in any real sense, but they don’t classify them automatically as demonic either, like they would anybody else. Ryan’s going to get his control simply because they can’t live without him and they have no choice but to do business with him.”
“I heard about some of the other new lands that have been done. Haldayne’s crazy place where everybody looks as androgynous as he does and treats him like hereditary royalty was one I knew about.”
“It’s to be expected, and a lot worse. The old board members read all our reports; they got themselves very much involved with their own computer interfaces even if they hadn’t before. Ryan’s got detainment orders out for all of them, but they’ve vanished. Probably, I think, into other identities, building their own little kingdoms out here. Nobody takes them lightly—they are the people who made this project work when all the odds were against it even being funded at the basic levels. They’re even in the Holy Book of the Anchor church.”
“No! How?”
“The Seven Who Come Before. The demons, the epitome of evil, to be feared and destroyed on sight. The ones who would open the gates of Hell and let the demonic forces in to overrun us. Coydt’s people were damned clever. I have to admit that. Even in reducing the people to ignorance, they wanted to make sure they never would let those gates be opened. It’s quite an ingenious system and theology. I got a copy and brought it back. You’re going to have to read it. In its own evil, insidious way, it’s brilliant.”
“I will. I almost feel sorry for the board though. Some of them were really good people whose dreams have been shattered. They’d have given their lives for this project, yet now it’s the worst form of perversion of those ideals. How they must hate! Yet there they are, out there, hunted by Signals and loathed by Anchors. No friends, no love, and little hqpe. If they survive at all, they’ll be monsters.”
He sighed. “I wonder. The more I see, the more I wonder why we keep going on with this at all.”
“You’re thinking about what the computer said again.”
“Uh-huh. I want to deny the place in which it put us— obsolete, at the pinnacle, unable to progress—and yet I’m not certain I can. We progressed at such a great rate because of our machines. Ultimately, we reached a point where we could go no further without machines that were greater than we. This world exists because we made the 7800 series so powerful and so godlike. We’re not the gods. Never have been, never will be. The bloody computer’s the god. That’s the only place that church got it wrong. They shouldn’t be worshipping that big ball of poison gas up there. They should be worshipping their computers. So should we. We’re the magicians, the sorcerers, the high priests of the almighty machine. We might as well just call ourselves that and our powers, which come from the computer and are beyond our comprehension, are granted to some of us because we serve some need or requirement of the machine. It gives the power to do miracles to a select group of ordinary human beings, and it can take it away. No matter whether God almighty, or Allah or Vishnu or whatever, exists or not. We truly created our own gods, as our ancestors fashioned their idols. The only thing different is that our idols really do have the powers.”
“We created our gods in our own image,” she noted. “None of the leaders back on Earth ever gave serious thought to where we were going, or the scientists either. What happened was inevitable. The physics for all this has been around as far back as the twentieth century. Even Borelli, who showed the physics of energy-to-matter transfer, never really considered that it was so complicated, we’d need to build machines with almost godlike speed and memories and who would, with that power, be godlike. You can’t have the magic power without the machines, and you can’t expect machines that advanced to not consider us irrelevant. Up to now we were partners, but we no longer have anything left to offer them on our part. I think we got off pretty lucky, considering. Look around our little pocket paradise and you will see what they gave us in return.”
He gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “A few crumbs of their power as respect to senile parents.”
“No,” she responded softly. “They left us a mirror, and they challenged us, those who understood the process, to stare endlessly into that mirror and become our own reflections. The void is nothing but a great surface; the power is the high gloss. It becomes what we are. It can become anything we become. If we use that mirror to reflect our fears, our lusts, our egomania, then we are what they say. They didn’t abandon us the way they abandoned the Anchors. Oh, no, they did something far fouler than that to us. They abandoned us to our own inner selves. That’s what Seventeen was trying to tell you. What we are, inside, is what we’ll get. It’s a fair bargain.”
“I supposed you’re right.” He sighed, drawing her close and kissing her softly. “I love you very much,” he added suddenly. “You’re the best thing that happened to me and the reason I’m going to stay here and build what’s possible.”
“I love you too,” she responded, kissing him back. “You know, there are some things we got from the animal parts that aren’t bad at all, that no damned computer will ever know. Maybe us old, obsolete animals will show them up someday.” She shifted and smiled at him. “Besides, who but humans would make Catholic computers?”
“What?”
“Hell is for punishment. Purgatory is for justice.”
Suzy Watanabe was in the Headquarters Anchor administration building learning just what could be salvaged and what could be used. Here was the primary network interface for the entire system; the walls were honeycombed with electronic connections and circuits, and, she felt, it was the best, perhaps the only, chance left to reestablish direct links with the computer. The Angel of the Goddess had said that she could travel freely and that the Signal corps would not harm her, and it had been so.
She had directed several walls be penetrated and had reached the master boards, but they were stone dead. As she’d determined back at X-ray, the computers hadn’t really gone to the bother of totally reconstructing the buildings as temples, but it wasn’t doing much good to discover that. The entire interfacing system was directly Flux-powered from the master control room far below, and that was closed to everyone, it seemed. What they had done was simply convert the temple equipment to two hundred and forty volts, sixty cycles, accessible only through the large transformer they’d placed in the sub-basement. She had no means to switch temple power to those boards, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
The only interface left now was the master regulator in the Gates, the only exposed hardware remaining on the planet. There were ways to tap into that, at least to the 7240 series computers in maintenance, which would be sufficient for now, but it would be one hell of a complex undertaking, particularly without also triggering the Gates into incoming and opening them, a very remote possibility, or frying the regulators and shutting the Gates down, which would have meant a slow, cruel death for the world.
She sighed and finally accepted it. The world was as it was now. The past was gone forever. Even the Angel of the Goddess had not convinced her, deep down, that this was so, which was why she’d come here. Now she’d proved it to herself, and that was that.