At that moment a young security officer came in. Internal security hadn’t been very friendly to them up to now, but because they were directly involved in this there was a certain level of consultation that was grudgingly given.
Suzl grinned sardonically when she saw the officer. Major Verdugo did not look pleased at being a messenger boy.
“Yes, Major?” Matson prompted.
“Verdugo, sir. Internal security. I’ve been assigned as your liaison in this unpleasantness so long as you remain in New Eden.”
Matson’s lips curled into a sour smile. “In case we get contacted by the kidnappers or something, you mean. I’m not a novice at this system, Major. You did what you did under orders, but your patron’s dead now and your superiors have decided that it’s all your fault because it can’t be theirs. Your career depends on a successful resolution of this mess. All right—we can’t avoid you at this stage. Have they found where the raiders crossed into Flux yet?”
Verdugo was not used to being spoken to like that, and he bristled. His eyes clearly betrayed his wounded ego. Matson had deliberately made an enemy of him.
“No, sir. No trace of the lorry or the others. It’s most puzzling. We’ve had the army scouring every millimeter of Flux border along the eastern frontier and there’s nothing. No sign at all, not even tracks.”
“Uh huh. Then they didn’t go out that way.”
“But they must have, Mr. Ryan. They would certainly be conspicuous now heading either west or southwest along the route they came from.”
“Then you’ve either missed them or they’re still here someplace. It was well-planned and well-executed. There was excellent intelligence before the raid and good timing. They even knew that ranch would have sufficient horses for their needs. Any of the newer staff up at Vishnar’s unaccounted for? No body, I mean?”
Verdugo seemed suddenly struck by the logic. “Yeah! Yeah! Just one. In the gardening staff. . . . Well I’ll be damned!”
“Amateurs,” Matson spat. “You’re so hung up on your technology and controls that you consistently underestimate a determined enemy. All right—Dell, here, is about to take the two boys home and get some messages out to the clan. We’re going down to the old West Gate to meet some people and decide what to do next. Nothing else we can do unless they contact us or until your folks find them.”
“The old West Gate? You mean the old Anchor Gate?”
Matson nodded. “I mean exactly that. They’re not going east, because that would take them through Assam, and the wizards of Assam were on very friendly terms with Vishnar and will be hell-bent, like all the Flux wizards, on getting that gadget for themselves in any event. If they go northeast they’re going into Freehold territory. Hostages and gadgets or not, they’re no match for Freehold if they even run into one of ’em by chance. At some point they have to go north, where they have good relations with the local Fluxlords and have the additional cover of a Flux war up there. The old Gate’s a good compromise location. They have to break out sooner or later. I know they still have that little train going down that way, so we’ll use it if we can. You can be a big help arranging it for us, including transport of our horses.”
For now, the major was resigned to this. “I’ll see what can be done. And you?”
“I have some messages to send, and I’m going to do some shopping.” He turned to Suzl, who’d been ignored through all this. “You any good at barbering?”
“Yeah, sure,” she responded. “You ought to be chief mommy to a hundred Freehold brats.”
“No thanks. I’ll want everything set up in the room when I get back, though. I want to pull out of here as early tomorrow morning as the schedule permits.”
“I’ll arrange the necessary permits,” Verdugo broke in. “May I ask who we are meeting down there?”
“Oh, nobody you’re going to like,” Matson told him, and prepared to go out on his errands.
5
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Suzl had examined the packages Matson had brought with him, and watched as he removed a small wooden case from his pack. He did not open the case right away, but instead removed his old clothes and took a shower. Matson believed that showers were the one great thing New Eden had rediscovered, having always disliked baths.
He was quite hairy, a mixture of black and gray over most of his body, and still quite lean and solid, as he had been in his younger days. Suzl found his body extremely attractive, and couldn’t help noting that his sexual equipment was at least as formidable as the rest of him. He radiated power, self-confidence, and strength at all times. With the fear element removed, as with her, he was a considerable turn-on.
He did not bother to dress again immediately but settled in for a haircut and a shave. “You know how I want it.” he told her.
She was mixing the materials, but she had doubts. “Are you sure you want to do this? You went to a lot of trouble getting ‘killed’ that second time convincingly, and there’s a statue of you facing outward from the temple not three blocks from here. It’s like painting a huge sign.”
“I know. That’s just exactly what I’m doing. First, it’ll cut through this New Eden bullshit, since, as Matson, I hold the titular rank of Field Marshal. More important, those women back at the ranch knew who Matson was. If they knew, then those above them know. I want to be easy to find. If we have to go through Flux after them, I’m going to be in a much better position as Matson to deal with the Fluxlords as well.”
“Yeah, but everybody also knows that you don’t have much Flux power. You’ll be a sitting duck out there. Everybody likes their heroes well dead.”
“Maybe. That’s why I’m taking the rest of you along. It’s a lot of Flux firepower if need be. As for Flux power, if I had a lot of it I’d be dead now. What good’s it done you lately? The old Suzl, the one who worked dugger on stringer trains, now she didn’t have any power at all, but I think she was a lot happier.”
She began to cut. “You’re right, I guess. Seems like everybody knows my problem. Even Verdugo.”
“It’s a natural deduction based on your own self now and then and knowing the way things work. You weren’t cut out for this role; you’re trapped in it. You should never have stayed at Freehold. You should’ve come with us at the start.”
She stopped clipping for a moment, then continued. How could she ever explain to Matson that she’d been jealous of him? “It would have worked out just the same,” she told him. “At least in Freehold I was needed for a long while.”
“Then why’d you decide to leave now?”
She sighed. “Because first of all there are so many good parents there I wasn’t really needed anymore. And, well, it was getting worse—faster. All my fantasies have been bondage fantasies. I only really feel alive, worth something, when I’m doing something like this. The rest of the time I’m either in deep depression or I just switch off, like downstairs until you turned to me. I’ve been alternating between acceptance, letting go, and killing myself.” She stopped suddenly, feeling a bit embarrassed. Why was she going on like this? How could any man, let alone Matson, understand any of this?
“You don’t have to have wizard power to feel like that,” he told her. “Lots of people get into things they feel they can’t solve, that they’re buried too deep, and get into that kind of mind rut. Most folks get into it without any effort at all on their own part. We now—all of us— were victims of outside forces beyond our control. That damned Soul Rider got all of us into a mess, including Cass, Sondra, Jeff, even me. The Guardian, now, sold you down the river for a mess of years. They not only allowed New Eden to happen, they actually gave it several pushes, since it served their own purposes. They didn’t care about people in particular if it helped them guard people in general. It could have been done a lot cleaner than New Eden, with a lot less bloodshed and misery, but it was here, it was convenient, so they took it. Hell, that’s the real legacy to the children of Flux and Anchor. For thousands of years people used machines. Now we’re at the point where we’re tools of the machine, to be used and used up and sacrificed or discarded when no longer useful or even if we’re just in the way. That wasn’t you over in the Master Control Room playing God. That was the Guardian doing what it damned well pleased and using you to do it because it needed you.”
That stopped her for a minute, while she thought it over. It wasn’t the way she or anyone else had thought of things, but clearly Matson was right. She hadn’t really done anything. The Guardian had picked her and salted her away here until needed and then used her as a conduit to connect it to some other computers. The original Fluxgirl spell Coydt had forced upon her, in fact, had been in machine-language code, far too complex for her to really follow—or anyone else. The same with Spirit’s. How had Coydt gotten such codes together? Or had he? Had they, in fact, been furnished by either the Soul Rider or the Guardian?
“The way you say it, it’s like we’re in a zoo,” she said thoughtfully. “Or some kind of laboratory, maybe. Being played with by our—owners.”
“Yeah, I think that, too, sometimes,” he admitted. “I keep feeling like there’s an audience out there, observing us for its own amusement. Makes you feel sometimes like nothing’s worth it. I get that way a lot, particularly now that I’ve grown so old and learned so much. You get to wondering what the use of it all is. Those things are so far in advance of us we can never understand them, and because we got no way to provide even the basics for ourselves without ’em we’re stuck. The big difference between us and the animals is that we alone can know that we’re owned and operated.” He stopped, realizing he was getting her more depressed than ever, which hadn’t been his intention at all.
“Now, look,” he added, “this really isn’t the end of it all. When I get too down I figure it’s not much different in the long run between what we got and all those religions we clung to. We were always somebody’s property—the gods, the goddesses, the wizards, whatever. O.K., so we now know who and what our gods are. So what? A wizard’s spell is nothing more than a prayer to the gods for a miracle. Unlike most folks, that wizard usually gets the prayer answered. No big difference. So we do just what everybody in the past has done with their religions—we cope. We live our own lives and hope the gods won’t notice us. And, if they do, we dance their tunes and play their games until they get tired of us and let us go again. We can’t help it when the gods play tricks, but the rest of it is ours. Your problem was started by them, maybe, but it continues because of you. You said it yourself. Your own mind is doing it to you and you know it. You get the choice—become a sheep like most folks here, Flux and Anchor, male and female, or become one of the few who have control. Most folks don’t have that choice.”
She sighed. “I wish it was that easy.”
“Being a sheep’s the easy part. That’s why New Eden works. And, the plain fact is, New Eden’s just a bigger example of World itself. Oh, maybe the victims aren’t the women, or just some women, or just some men and women, or maybe everybody at once, but it’s all the same. Folks like Coydt and Adam, they were sheep once. They broke out and took charge.”
“Yeah—and look at the harm they caused.”
He chuckled. “Maybe that’s part of your problem. Coydt and the rest of the Seven took charge and caused a lot of evil and misery. Mervyn and the rest of the Nine led lonely, empty lives devoted to keeping all World down. The Fluxlords went nuts. With that much power, even Cass went nuts—living like an animal and leading armies of conquest. Now the whole world’s gone nuts, with no real objective, no sense of the future, that’s not pretty evil itself. New Eden built this super gadget so they could make the whole world into New Eden, and I saw that scared you. I kind of think that our raiders have a similar use in mind, but to make a different kind of world. I don’t know what kind, but I have a sneaking suspicion that men aren’t included in it.”
She was almost finished with him now. “But I thought this Borg Habib was the leader. He’s a man, I heard.”
“He’s a puppet. Dangerous, but still a puppet. More dangerous because he’s probably got an ego big enough not to even understand that he is one. No, the brains behind him is definitely his whore.”
She hesitated a moment. “This—Ayesha. Anybody know what she looks like?”
“All I heard is that she’s the ultimate and extreme Fluxgirl and she’s under the original program. It’s been too long for more, and most of the old records were destroyed by Habib when he left.”
She was finished now, and he stood and looked in the mirror and gave a nasty sort of grin. “Looks like I never was away,” he said approvingly. He turned to her, but saw that she was still deeply troubled and just sitting there on the couch, staring off into space. “You all right, Suzl?”
“Huh? Yeah. I—I was just remembering. Thinking.”
She looked directly up at him. “Matson, I never told anybody about this. Anybody. I half forgot it myself. After we beat the Samish, and when we were still debating what to do next, we were all feeling like gods. All of us. It was impossible not to. I took time to order the computer to look up some folks. Family first, both old and present, and friends—what they had been before all this, if anything, that kind of thing. Seeing if I could give anybody a lift. I ran into my ex-husband’s record doing that, and I found out that he was mostly responsible for making the New Eden system possible. He was real smart, maybe a genius, and he had a lot of access to the old records and old psychological texts. Coydt had assembled a bundle. He invented or developed the shock collars, the group sessions, the brain-mashing stuff that worked for awhile on me and worked even on Cass.”
Matson shrugged.”I didn’t really know him, but somebody would have done it if he hadn’t.”
“Yeah, but when they attacked Nantzee he was given a combat slot because that was the only thing keeping him a junior officer instead of a big wheel. They told me he was killed in action, and I believed it. There wasn’t a lot of love between us anyway—ever. It’s just that how comfortable I was, and how much position I had, depended on how much he had.”
“Uh huh. I understand.”
“Yeah, well, maybe not yet. He wasn’t killed. He was a bookish type who never even held a gun except at target practice. When he got put in a position where the odds were way against him, he chickened out. His troops mutinied and won anyway. You know what happens to officers in charge who turn into cowards?”
He began to see where she was going. “Yeah. I know. Got to talking about it just the other day. I told Dell that Ayesha had to have been a man once.”