“Well, I can’t see myself ever staying home all day, fixing the meals, cleaning house, pressing clothes, stuff like that, but I can’t condemn anybody else for feeling that’s a decent way to spend a life.”
“It was the only real normalcy I ever had. It was my house, and my kids, and I had a place, a role, that was clear-cut and approved. It was a simple world, with simple rules, and it was peaceful and routine. I had no worries, and my responsibilities were clear-cut and easy to handle. If I’d had a better husband, one who loved me and who I could love, with a normal-type job and normal ambitions, I could have stayed that way forever and been happy with it. That’s the wrong thing to say, I know. Women are as good as men in most things and better in some. I never yet met a man, Matson included, I thought could handle a childbirth in Anchor without becoming a simpering wimp. I guess that’s my problem. Ever since the Invasion, every time I’d tell somebody I just wanted that kind of life, man or woman, they’d get shocked. I was weak. I was unambitious. ‘You’re smart, Suzl, you could be anything you wanted.’ Like there was something evil about it. Evil’s when you’re forced into something like that, like New Eden. Everybody kept acting like I wanted all women to be like that. Well, that’s stupid. People shouldn’t be forced into things. They should be able to try and be whatever they want to be.”
“I—I think I understand,” Morgaine said, and meant it.
“New Eden, now, they took something potentially nice and made it ugly. I think that’s why I hate them so much. It’s also why I want to remake this place. Everything is always ‘men can’t’ and ‘women can’t.’ They’re forced into roles. The New Human can’t be forced by reason of sex. No man in any Anchor could ever stay home all day and keep house and diaper the baby. He’d have the shit beat out of him. And no woman is supposed to do that because she becomes just a supplement to the man. So you work into your ninth month, then in a couple of weeks drop the kid off in communal care and trot back to your big career and power plays and all that. The commune raises the kids and the parents see each other only when they go to bed for the night, but that’s O.K.; it insures that the little kid will follow in Mommy or Daddy’s footsteps and not have the freedom to do something else. If a woman wants to be a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer or whatever, then she should be able to do it if she’s able without any hold-ups or hang-ups, and if a man wants to cook and clean and keep house and maybe cry when he’s sad or even make his face up, that should be O.K., too. It’ll never happen the way people are, but when there’s no men and no women, just people, both sides will be freed from that. You understand?”
“I think so. I certainly hope you’re right. Still, a lot of us like men. Like the differences, the contrasts. The deep voices, hairy chests, and tight asses. All the New People look female.”
“Until a man can have a baby, there’s no equality,” Suzl noted. “And to have it, he needs the equipment.”
She sighed. “Still, I may live to see it but I won’t be a part of it. I’ll be there, huge and immobile, blind and helpless, pandering to folks to offer a unique sexual thrill.”
“We’ll never let that happen,” Morgaine assured Suzl honestly.
“You know, twice I been saved from these ‘permanent’ spells by outside forces so unlikely even once was improbable. Yet, even if I got rid of this, it wouldn’t last. I have to be the freak. When this is all over, when I know the dream is real, then we’ll see.”
Morgaine had to go back on duty, but she felt very badly about Suzl, both her condition and her attitude. She was so good, and meant so well, and no matter what happened she’d gotten a load of cosmic shit dumped on her. Now she led an army she could not see, against an enemy she hated but whose lifestyle haunted her, in the name of a dream she couldn’t share. And all she really wanted at all was somebody to love, and to love her in return. Happy endings were for fairy stories. The best she could hope for was victory. Morgaine felt that at least they could all give her that.
14
THE BATTLE OF NEW EDEN
Matson had been getting edgy and impatient. As much as the stringer had wished for another six months, it was impossible to keep troops like this—particularly the high-strung wizards—on edge forever. They had been there over a week; New Eden knew they were there—there had been spies about and probes and even a small patrol. They had caught it and turned them into nice Fluxgirl warriors with some glee, and expected them to be good fighters. If they ever ran back to New Eden, looking like Fluxgirls, they would be interrogated, believed, and then processed as Fluxgirls. All they knew, though, was that there were a lot of soldiers about in Logh District and along the open border, and lots of ordnance and some new secret weapons for Flux as well.
“If they’re not coming out,” Matson told Suzl and the general staff, “then we will have to draw them out.” The proposal was to deploy batteries of battle rockets with explosive heads as far as possible around the border, shooting in. “We’ll keep bombing randomly until they send troops out to stop it. Then we’ll take those troops and bomb them some more. If they fall back and still won’t come out, we’ll have no choice but to bring up some of Chua Gabaye’s big stuff and reverse the order of battle we planned. When even New Canaan starts burning from the air, they’ll come out.”
New Eden certainly didn’t like the rocket attacks. Although they were standard gunpowder rockets, and could not really be aimed, they had a fierce bang when they landed and could start a nasty fire. Their range was limited, a mere five kilometers at maximum elevation, but within those five kilometers they could make life hell. The chance of inflicting any really serious damage to the force was slight, but the psychological effects were devastating.
New Eden was not amused, but it learned pretty quickly not to send mere troops out to stop things. The next time they sent out a pretty strong wizard with the troops. It took Suzl seven seconds to locate him, run a matter-to-energy conversion, then reverse it within the camp. The amount of sheer Flux power surrounding him was enough to make some of them almost sympathize with his plight, and his expression resembled that of someone who’d just been shown his only child’s severed head. Suzl had yet another Ayesha-like wizard for her stable, but since they’d had— of necessity—to erase both memories and personality, it would be some time before she would be of any real use.
Matson allowed the rocket crews to actually take on the small company of cavalry that had come with the wizard. At this point, they needed some action more than New Harmony needed more recruits, and a few of the men were allowed to escape back into Anchor to report as the next barrage sounded. Fluxgirls! They were New Eden women on those rockets, I swear, sir! Called us insulting names, then fought like demons. . . . The wizard, sir? We don’t know. I guess they shot him. . . .
The generals of New Eden were disturbed. With the rumors spreading like wildfire, they could hardly contain the troops, yet they didn’t want to fight on the enemy’s turf and at the enemy’s beck and call. At the speed they could move the lumbering projectors, even on the new tractors, a solid flanking maneuver would take days and could not be moved up undetected. They didn’t know the range, but couldn’t assume more than fifty kilometers. Out of range of the main body, at that. They hadn’t dared to test them in the void since the first one was stolen; all had been tested and tuned at Gate Four, which wasn’t much room for real testing nor was there sufficient Flux to really see what they could do. The rockets had done negligible damage, but so unnerved and infuriated the troops that they were starting to grumble that their officers were cowards. There was no choice. They had to attack, and frontally.
Staff meetings of brigade-level officers and wizards were called.
“They’re coming out!” the forward observers radioed back, the dense Flux of the void shortening their range to only ten meters, but in back of them was another with a radio, and another, and another.
Matson studied the map as the reports came in. With a quasi-Fluxland environment, the radios in the rear could communicate to virtually all of them if need be, and this was the time.
“Five projectors initially, at map coordinates GG-267, IL-109, KB-026, MN-041, and PD-144. Projector ready?”
“Ready!” came Suzl’s excited response.
“Wizards deploy with units to each position!” Four each from Suzl’s crowd would cover each position, the rest in reserve in case of problems or other breakouts. The fourteen allied wizards were dispersed to get to any position that needed them in the minimum amount of time. New Eden would send its wizards out with a quick shield thrown up, then reinforce it with more wizards. Then the projectors would come through, and the troops behind them. There was a temptation to break the preliminary shield and gobble up the wizards, but then the projectors wouldn’t come through. The prizes could not be easily won. The wizards of New Harmony would have to be close enough to actually see the shield to really have a crack at it, and while New Eden didn’t have the range or the practice, it had easily discovered how to make a sweep and deactivate a wizard.
Matson was certain they wouldn’t fail for lack of trying. Earlier some of the spies who’d managed to make it out had told them all about New Eden’s plans for World. They would run a transitory version of the master program in Flux, but amended. There were about sixty million men and women on World, and about five million of them were New Eden men. Each of those men had been promised when it was over that they would get twelve wives as a harem, and that all, even the lowest, would be lords of vast domains to give to their own sons. Only Ayesha needed to have the arithmetic of that explained to her, and she already had the general idea. New Eden men would be the only men, until they had sons of their own.
More, the program had been altered, thanks to their new research into Flux and its powers, and it had already been tested on large numbers of women inside New Eden: A new standard for female I.Q., setting it at no more than seventy percent of the male average. High enough for all the things a woman was expected to do in New Eden society, but not one bit more. Permanent, total, inheritable intellectual inferiority, coldly and scientifically designed to create the perfect harem wife.
If they lost, every one of them who survived, wizard or commoner, would have this program run on them. More, success or failure would probably be determined in the first hour or so.
And they came out, very well timed thanks to internal Anchor communications. Now, however, the initial forces were on their own, cut off from real communication with the rear except by runner. Although the radios had limited use in Flux, the signals broke up into garbage when crossing an Anchor border.
The early shields were almost pathetic. A forward volunteer line of sharpshooters fired into them and they were so flimsy that several men within those first shields actually fell wounded.
Matson had been true to the vow made earlier to Gillian, and had gotten Morgaine to change the Sondra form to that of a Fluxgirl, and a pretty good looking one even by Fluxgirl standards. Still, it was a Fluxgirl mounted on a large horse, wearing boots rather than heels, and wearing a gunbelt and holding a radio.
There was no way to really communicate with the forward units by radio now, not along a nearly-fifty-kilometer fragmented front, but Matson could talk to Suzl, and Suzl with the projector could talk to anybody.
“Don’t wait for them all,” the stringer warned. “As soon as your scan shows one projector fully in Flux, go for that shield.”
“They’ve got a pretty solid shield now right in the middle,” Suzl reported. “I think some of those early shots into the others might have nabbed a couple of wizards. Yeah! In the center! Here it comes!”
The projector only superficially resembled the one New Harmony had. The seat was padded and belted-in, the chassis more stylized, and it sat upon a large flat like a wagon bed, only under it were whole sets of wheels all turning two belts, one on each side, guided by a forward driver. It wasn’t fast—it might do two kilometers an hour flat out—but it was effective and highly maneuverable. The shield was extended out in a U-shaped bubble that was growing to be several hundred meters out and about a hundred and fifty meters wide. Since it was open to Anchor at the back, it was nonporous—somebody else had thought of using gas—but that worked against the men inside. A shield that was too solid and too strong limited the effectiveness of the wizards inside, and particularly the projector. A shield drew from the grid squares beneath it; a too-solid and firm one could actually cut signal flow in both directions.
The allied wizards changed form and took to the air, five of them heading for the center position. As soon as they were within range, all nine wizards, the five in the air and the four on the ground, began a concentrated assault on the bubble.
There was no way of knowing how many wizards were inside maintaining the bubble, but they were certainly not prepared for the strength of the assault on their lone position. They had mostly practiced this sort of thing against each other; they were not prepared for the ferocity of skilled veterans with everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Messengers were sent back as the bubble weakened, pleading for more reinforcements from the wizard corps, but the commanders had already sent part of the reserves in to shore up the other positions and were reluctant to commit more. They simply didn’t have all that many really strong wizards trained for this, and their best had been the first out. These weren’t amateurs at Flux, but fighting as mercenaries in somebody else’s static Flux war between two equal teams of Fluxlords was not the same as this. The orders came back: lower the shield strength and use the projector and your own powers to find and disable the wizard attackers.
Suzl pushed first, committing two more allied wizards and her own projected strength just as the shield was being lowered in intensity. All of them had seen shields collapse before, but none of them had ever seen one burst like a soap bubble. The ground troops rushed forward, firing volleys as they advanced, but Suzl didn’t wait for them. She ran in and with a shock met the outgoing projector pulse on the same grid path. The two operators were suddenly locked in a wizard’s duel as if they were face to face.
Oh, no, you don’t, you bastard! Suzl thought, fury rising to a peak within her. You’re mine!
Abruptly, she broke contact, went over to a side channel, and then down and back over to the projector. The New Eden operator was suddenly stunned by the release, and she had him before he could even check his grid position. The projector, tractor, driver, wizard, and all, shimmered, then vanished. The troops on the ground cheered, but the wizards working with them wasted no time in erecting a vertical shield behind the perhaps six hundred to a thousand New Eden troops who had poured in behind the projector as the shield had weakened. The aerial wizards had already peeled off for the far eastern position, the next to solidify and grow, as two of the four on the ground left for the positions on either side. The two remaining would be sufficient to mop up.
The projector materialized in a preplanned area forward and south of Suzl’s position. There, the troops made short work of the two men on it and pulled their bodies off. It would have been nice to save the wizards, but there wasn’t really time to be subtle. Jodi climbed on, checked the contacts, and tried it.
“It’s no good!” she radioed to Suzl. “The thing works, but the grid positions are all wrong! I don’t have the focal point to make sense of them!”
Suzl’s electronic voice came back to her. “No matter. Run ‘clear memory’ and stand by to receive my coordinate map!”
“I’m cleared,” Jodi responded, sounding surprised that it worked. “Send.”
The new map, identical to the one in Suzl’s program module, was the familiar one, and Jodi tested it out. The machine seemed to accept it, and she relaxed. She was in business!
In the center, a couple of wizards survived, offering some protection to the infantry there, and they actually started trying some elaborate spells to stop the New Harmony advance. They were, however, all old tricks out of the standard training bag and easily handled. The tricks the New Harmony wizards showed them, which included illusions of giant lizards, horrible, nightmarish creatures, and which, not incidentally, obscured the very real crevasses forming under them and the equally real heating of the grid to the point where it started to burn combat boots, were far more effective. New Eden’s wizards found it difficult to mount an assault involving concentration and mathematical programs while their feet were on fire.
They threw the force of ten wizards against the far eastern position, and it cracked in nine minutes. This time Jodi had the honor on the projector, and ten minutes after that Morgaine was aboard her own.