“Sure. But see over there—there’s women in the field picking beans or something. Probably from a lot of farm families—they pick one, then the other. The system guarantees them the basics. Their husbands or fathers must provide for them. The Church makes sure you do, and those men go through their own indoctrination and reinforcement sessions. The system makes them a hundred percent responsible for all women and children in their families. All of it. They are not allowed to fail. If those women screw up the harvest, they’re not responsible. He is. If he doesn’t feed, house, and protect them even at the cost of his own life, he is held responsible. Hell, if his wife and daughters go off and rob a train, he’s punished for the crime. And if his business fails, the Church will help out the women but he’s left to starve in the gutter. The pressure’s enormous. I’ve yet to meet a New Eden man who didn’t have ulcers and whose hair wasn’t gray while he was still relatively young. Very few of the women commit suicide—I don’t think I know of one offhand. But a fair percentage of the men do.”
“Some system,” the younger man noted dryly.
“Yeah. Yet there are folks, men and women both, who know the score and yet beg, borrow, or steal some stringer or friendly wizard to get ’em here. If you’re willing to accept the system as a price, there’s still land to homestead here, protected from all wizardly magic and capricious Fluxlords and Anchor civil wars—stability and security. New Eden has contracts with the Guild to bring anyone here who wants to come, you know, and their missionaries have converted an Anchor or two far from here.”
The younger man nodded glumly and sighed. “Seems like we never learn. We get rid of one bad system, then trade it for another one that’s even worse.”
“People will swap liberty for security every time, son. Right now old World’s just living through a period like our ancestors did back on Earth long ago. Maybe still do, for all we know. We had it easy all those centuries, ’cause everybody traded for the same system and it worked. Now folks are trading for other systems that also work but are both equally unpleasant and mutually antagonistic. That’s how bloody revolutions and wars come, and that always feeds the largest and strongest no matter how ugly it is. Somehow, I think Coydt knew that and planned it this way. He’s laughing at us from someplace in Hell. By God, sometimes I wish I believed in this reincarnation business. It’d be real justice if he was reborn as one of those New Eden girls, now wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, but I never put much stock in that stuff myself. Who cares if we are reincarnated if we don’t know it and can’t remember our old selves? Might as well be dead, since without memory you’re dead anyway. As you’re fond of saying, there ain’t no more justice in the world than in a crap game.”
“Yep. Life’s a crap shoot, but it’s more of a poker game. You play the cards you have, and if you’re good enough you’ll win even if you were dealt shit. Win, that is, until you meet a better player than you. Most folks are bad players or never try the game. I learned long ago that the bulk of humanity are born victims, and no matter what you do they keep running back to being victims again.”
The younger man looked at the old one seriously for a moment. “Seems to me with that attitude you might as well just stop and blow your brains out.”
“Uh uh. Son, I been killed twice, once for real, and the cards kept coming back good. The purpose of life is to play the hands. You don’t fold when you’re holding aces, and you sure as hell don’t quit the game when it hasn’t beat you. One of these days I’ll meet the one who’s better than me, but not yet. If I check out now, I’ll never find out what they’re like.”
“Grandpa, you sure got a sick outlook on life.”
“Maybe. But I’m still here.”
The young man’s tone changed and he pointed forward. “Riders up ahead.”
“I saw ’em. Most likely a patrol. Yeah. Look real smart in their shiny leather uniforms, don’t they?”
They did not speed up to meet the oncoming riders, but let them come to them. The patrol consisted of a dozen men, all clean-shaven, muscular, and handsome, almost like a recruiting poster. They certainly didn’t look very routine, though; while the officer wore a traditional revolver, the rest had submachine guns in their saddle holsters and a few appeared to have some of the new laser pistols as sidearms as well.
The old man nodded casually. “Morning, Lieutenant,” he said pleasantly.
“Morning, gentlemen. I don’t remember seeing either of you in these parts before. May I have your serial numbers and travel permits, please?”
“We’re registered guests, Lieutenant, not citizens, but here are our papers.” Both he and the younger man produced small packets in neat squared envelopes and handed them over. Neither could miss the fact that the two men in the rear with the clearest shots had their hands on their sidearms.
The lieutenant looked over the booklet and papers inside the first envelope. “You are James Patrick Ryan, Stringer’s Guild, Retired?”
The old man nodded. “I am.”
“This is not your first time here?”
“First time in a long time. I was here many years ago—during the Invasion—in the Signals service and helped on the railroad telephone project.”
“Before my time,” the lieutenant responded, but there was a note of respect in his voice. Very few stringers of the old man’s day, and not too many even now, lived long enough to retire from the Guild. The officer opened and looked at the younger man’s papers. “Rondel! Hattori Akbar of Freehold. You are of the Freehold families?”
“I am,” the younger man responded.
“Freehold is to the northeast. Why are you approaching from the west?”
“Colonel Ryan is an old friend of my family who we have not seen in quite some time. There is a war breaking out now between Atram and Tambaloo which he couldn’t have known about. I went to make certain he came through New Eden rather than Flux.”
The officer nodded and handed back the packets.
“May I ask why all the heavy guns?” the bearded man said. “These days this is the most peaceful spot on the whole world.”
“Well, sir, most of it is, but we’ve had real problems with these border areas of late. A lot of the settlers here have pulled out and moved south, abandoning farms and fields and even a couple of towns. There’s a nasty dugger gang that’s been raiding of late out of Flux. We’ve got a whole army division up here trying to catch them but so far it’s been like chasing smoke.”
“From Atram?” Ryan was surprised.
“Well, geographically. We don’t have much to do with them, but they keep to their side and we keep to ours mostly. Last few months, though, they began to have troubles with other Fluxlands and they pulled almost all their forces north and west for that. With the attention of those wizards on that war the gentleman here spoke about, the region bordering us has become something of a no-man’s land. So long as this gang doesn’t rock any boats up there, nobody in Atram cares much about ’em. That gives ’em pretty free reign.”
Ryan stroked his beard and thought about it. “I see. And you can’t pursue into Atram because, with the war up north, they’ll consider it an attack on their back and you’d face some world-class wizard power. Well, I sympathize, Lieutenant, and if we spot anything we’ll get a message off.”
“Well, sir, if you take my advice, if you see ’em, you hide. If they see you, fight to the death and take some of ’em with you. They’re a small army, well-armed and as vicious as any wild animals. They don’t just raid, they torture and mutilate. They’re wild savages.”
“Well, thanks, Lieutenant, we’ll take precautions. I’ve had a lot of experience with duggers in my time, even this kind. Good luck.” And, with that, the two groups parted and the pair of strangers continued on down the road.
“You heard much about this?” the older man asked the other.
“A little. Not much. You know how long it’s been since I’ve been here. Almost as long as you. The stuff I heard, though, is pretty much the way the lieutenant there told it. Their leader’s supposed to be a fellow named Borg Habib, who was a New Eden officer around the time of the Invasion who backed the wrong side in the revolt against Tilghman. Grabbed a couple of his girls and got into Flux one step ahead of the firing squad, or so it’s said. Went wild out there, I guess. Word is he’s not the world’s brightest man, though, so he’s never climbed above being a raider and a hired gun.”
Ryan nodded. “I heard of him now that you mention it. He’s got some brains somewhere in his band or they’d have gotten him by now. This army’s a pretty good one. Somebody with fair Flux power, too. Nasty business. I wouldn’t like to run into him out here.”
“Let’s try not to,” the younger man said, and checked his gun.
For almost twenty-six hundred years a unified culture existed among the twenty-eight Anchors on World, held together by a single religion and code of laws and social conduct and isolated by fear from Flux. At the same time, those in Flux even with great personal power were somewhat limited: the massive power tended to corrupt massively as well, and none of the truly great wizards who established their own Fluxlands could be considered sane. They were tyrants, some better, some worse than others, but all limited to what one mind, no matter how powerful, could create. None of the Fluxlands tended to be larger than five hundred kilometers square and most were substantially smaller. The power of even the best of them had created an understandable egocentrism and also a sense of paranoia, for they did not wish to lose what they had. They seldom if ever cooperated or even met with each other unless to meet a common threat, and then only for the duration of the emergency.
New Eden had shaken both Flux and Anchor to its core. Civil war within the Church for decades followed by its collapse in the face of the Invasion from the stars caused a total breakdown in the Anchors. The Church collapsed when met with incontrovertible evidence that it was false, leaving no social or cultural foundation. Everyone who ever had a grievance against the Church or the system and could find adherents tried to grab power; theory contested theory, and resulted in civil wars within the various Anchors themselves. These in turn broke down the always-fragile economics and caused massive death, destruction, and starvation.
New Eden had managed to capitalize on this in three Anchors near to it, supporting pro-New Eden factions there with arms and even some troops and eventually installing its system there. Others farther away had taken other tacks; a few were still in ferment, or divided into mini-states, but most had seen one or another faction win out and extend their own social and economic theories over their Anchors with increasingly totalitarian methods patterned after the successful New Eden methods but towards different ends.
In Flux, even the maddest of Fluxlords had been faced with the realization that his or her power came not from divine providence but from the remnants of the technology of an ancient civilization whose machines still worked— and that their power could be threatened by other technology being rediscovered all the time in ancient files and records. New Eden had once been four Anchors surrounding vast areas of Flux; technology had made it all Anchor, and in the process eliminated Fluxlands of some of the strongest wizards ever known.
Clearly Fluxlords who wished to remain Fluxlords had to unite or face ultimate attack from others who would or from new machines that could render them impotent to attack. They met and combined into multiple godheads with a single agreed-upon vision reinforced by Flux spells and some of that very technology that threatened them. Vast new Fluxlands, some extending a thousand kilometers or more, were formed with a hierarchy of gods ranked according to their relative Flux powers in a feudal system of gods and demigods.
A few independent and small Fluxlands remained, of course, but there was none of the ancient sense of permanence about them. The most independent and flourishing ones were in the broad gaps between the northern clusters, although a few, like the Freehold, were in the midst of the expanding states and held because they were sparsely populated regions inhabited entirely by families of powerful wizards.
Some of the new technology, however, was denied everyone. The big amps had been deactivated when the first settlements of the ancient ones collapsed; Coydt had discovered a way to tap the tremendous power differently and had used them again. Now, however, before the shutdown of the defensive computers, that loophole in physics had been plugged. The big amps would work no longer, and some of the other wondrous things that ran on the same sort of power were still nothing but useless junk. Some things, however, did work. The small handheld amplifiers used a different energy principle which might have been cut off but through oversight had not been. And New Eden was developing both steam and electric power once again, and also finding ways of actually tapping the raw Flux of the great Gate at its center.
Everyone had cheated for their own or their area’s gain before the big shutdown. Vast numbers of program modules covering history, philosophy, economics, and technological wizardry had been removed or recorded before the great library was closed once more.
Many of the smartest men and women of World had prognosticated that New Eden would eventually dominate and perhaps swallow the whole of World no matter how abhorrent its system. It offered a curious mix of religion-and technocracy-based culture that provided stability and a sense of place in the cosmos to those of Anchor and those dispossessed by violence. Its system was so tight and so absolute that rebellion from within was next to impossible. Its lands were so vast and rich that no outside force could conceivably take it by attack, and its economic system, tightly state controlled but offering some independence at the producer and retail levels, worked. The state provided technological help and a guaranteed price to the farmer or manufacturer, so production was high. The state alone controlled all transport and wholesale trading, so prices were controlled. The Church fostered communalism: everyone helped you build your new barn, or repaint your house, and you did the same for them. If someone had bad accidents, or a series of reverses, and needed help, it came from the others.
At the same time, New Eden welcomed the refugees from anguished Anchors and paid the stringers to bring anyone who wished to New Eden. Civil and ideological wars elsewhere following the loss of more than a million lives in the battle against the Samish invasion had left much of World weakened and battered. New Eden remained pretty much intact and had a growing and thriving population. It was estimated that it might take a century or more for the rest of World to regain its former levels; by that time, New Eden would have a large enough army and technological base to take on or dominate both Flux and Anchor. Flux power was inherited; it was known that even now New Eden was in a breeding program to produce and train an army of powerful wizards all of whom would be true believers. And New Eden was patient, and would nibble bit by bit.
To a world whose people were shaped by a culture left static for twenty-six hundred years, New Eden, for all its faults, offered a powerful lure.