03. Masters of Flux and Anchor (24 page)

"I met 'em. Two extremely attractive and sexy young ladies, if I can take the liberty."

Tilghman smiled and nodded. "You can. You know, of course, who they are?"

"I know who they were, and I know who they are now, and who they are now is all that counts with me."

The Chief Judge seemed slightly disappointed by the visitor's pragmatism. Although not a petty man. he al¬lowed himself the pleasure of rubbing noses in bis triumphs when he got the chance, and Matson's calm was some¬thing of a letdown.

They went in to dinner, Matson sitting on one side of the table, while Tilghman, flanked by his two stunning wives, sat on the other. The meal was served by the twins, whose resemblance not only to each other but to their mother was startling, and by Suzl's two oldest, and was passed mostly with small-talk or no talking at all.

For his part, Tilghman's playful time had passed, and his mind was all on his visitor now. Matson was not a man to be trifled with, even here and now. He tended to imagine figures in history as being disappointingly ordinary if one were to meet them; Matson really was larger than life and every inch the legend, animated and sitting in his dining room. There was tremendous power and confidence there, at least equal to Tilghman's own presence and possi¬bly greater, and something else, too, that neither he nor even Champion had—a sense of chilling moral ambivalence, of a man who could play cards and trade jokes with Coydt van Haas as an equal, then kill him without fear or regret because his personal code demanded it. Sheer brilliance totally devoid of passion or conscience. Even Coydt had had passion, although of a destructive sort. Tilghman knew from Taglia's reports that Matson considered New Eden a human machine. Well, he thought, it takes one to know one.

Suzl served dessert and Cassie poured after-dinner drinks for the two men. as they talked vaguely of conditions on World and swapped general information that went over the heads of the two wives. Matson, however, seemed a bit irritable, and finally betrayed a measure of human weakness. "If you don't mind the smoke, can we discuss these things further in the library?" he asked Tilghman. "I always like a cigar after a fine meal. I don't get too many of them in my line of work."

Tilghman nodded, and the two men got up and walked out and over, to the library area. Cassie and Suzl started to clean up the table, and Suzl whispered, "Ain't that the creepiest man you ever seen?"

Cassie nodded. "He's handsome 'nuff, but I can't 'magine no girl ever takin' up with him. A girl'd freeze t'death with what he'd put inside her."

"Yeah, but I can't 'magine no girl or no man neither turnin' him down."

"If that's what them outside men're like, I'm glad to be here in New Eden," Cassie said firmly.

*   *   *

"The Guild asked me to come down for several reasons," Matson told Tilghman when both were settled in the library. "I haven't been too keen to get back into action of late, but I thought it had to be done, so here I am."

"It was a big shock to a lot of men here when we received word that you wished to come. Our own people and even our contacts outside indicated that you had died several years ago."

"Not hardly. I tried dying once, and I'm not too anx¬ious to repeat the experience. I'd just as soon stay offic¬ially dead, though, as much as I can. I got sick and tired of killing young wizards who wanted to make a reputation by nailin' Coydt's killer or young punks in Anchor who wanted to show me how tough they are or how perfect some spell's made 'em. I'm a pretty good false wizard, but I don't put much stock in the power, real or false. Somehow you lose all the ability to do things the hard way, and sometimes that's the only way. I got a daughter with all the power you want and I can't knock a lick of practical sense in her head. Never could."

Tilghman didn't want to press that, wondering if the daughter he meant were Spirit or someone less awkward to talk about. "I think we agree on that, although I have to admit Flux made all this possible. I understand you don't like what we've done here."

Matson shrugged. "Don't mean nothin' to me one way or the other, to be frank. I've seen better and I've seen worse. I got to talking about that with some people a few weeks back, in fact. New Eden may be Anchor, but it's really just the biggest Fluxland, and the system's no less total than the one the Church ran here and runs in most of the others. Sorry if that offends you, but I think you're the kind who wants the truth."

"I do. I do. Would it surprise you to know that I'm in agreement on that as well? No matter how convenient Flux and magic spells and the very long lives that go with them are, they're the ultimate crutches. I wonder if we could survive without the set of crutches? I have pretty good evidence that our ancestors once did, long ago."

"I might accept that, but I don't see that it matters. I think we forgot how to live without it. Oh, it might have been different fifty years ago, although I doubt it, but not now. Maybe not for the past couple of thousand. This place, for instance, is going to be strained when that work force starts growing old and having all sorts of old-people illnesses, and when most of the people here who run things but aren't high enough to have been treated to these eternal youth spells start aging and even dying."

Tilghman was interested. "You really think so? That we can't have a generational changeover? The old teaching the young and then retiring?"

"Never happen. You and your leadership and even your wives are protected, pretty much. You're never going to surrender that power to a younger generation that might get it in its head that it'd be cheaper and easier, not to mention safer, to just bump you all off."

"You may be right, but I hope not. At least as we develop more and more machines we'll be less dependent on this slave labor concept. I dream of a time when machines do all the labor, freeing both men and women for creative work of a higher order, wanting for nothing. There's no medical reason why human beings can't live a hundred, maybe two hundred years or more without any Flux magic. The brain is the only organ, they tell me, whose cells die and are not replaced, and we use only a small fraction of it. Yet some of the really old wizards seem to live beyond half a millennium without losing their mental faculties."

"Maybe, but I think there's a trick to it. I think they cheat and generate new brain parts by magic, then still forget most of their early lives. Me, I'm eighty-three and I find real holes in my memory now. I remember the important stuff—or at least I think I do—but most of the rest just isn't there any more. I may not be making any new brain cells, but the brain's always housecleaning and throwing out all the stuff it decides I don't need any more. I suspect it's the same with you."

Tilghman thought about it. "I suppose you're right, but it doesn't alter my own vision. It's possible, and if it's possible and worthwhile it's worth attempting."

"Maybe. That's really your affair, none of mine. My business is more here and now. First off, we know you've set up a communications network along strings. This disturbs us for two reasons."

Tilghman grew suddenly cold and deliberative. He hadn't known that the network had become such common knowl¬edge so quickly. "Go on."

"First, the Guild doesn't like Anchors or even wizards making their own strings. You know that. Let one group do it, and soon every Fluxlord and half-baked wizard on World will be doing it. The void'll get so crowded with 'em that it'll become cluttered and confusing, and the overlapping networks won't be good for anything. You have all them communication and electrical wires strung out there and it looks like a mess as it is. Now set up a hundred, or even a thousand, competing networks of poles and wires, each belonging to somebody else, and you get a real mess. Now wipe out all your roads and all your road signs and just follow the wires. That's the kind of thing the void can become and real quick."

"I suppose the Guild's monopoly on the existing net¬work isn't a factor," Tilghman responded slyly. "This is all in the name of altruism and a safer, saner World."

"The two things are the same thing, and it doesn't matter if the safe and sane coincides with our own business. The Guild has always run the strings, and maintained them, and not only turned a good profit but also provided a steady, dependable service. We believe in it, and we enforce it as well as protect and service it."

"And what, might I ask, could you do about it if I weren't in the mood to accommodate your demands?"

Matson sighed. "Judge, you never wondered why we keep such control, and have held it all these centuries? I mean, there have been some really powerful wizards out there, and at times some pretty big armies, yet we're still here and still in control."

Tilghman said nothing, but, in fact, he had wondered about it when they first began their own network. At the time he'd dismissed it as an idea whose time had come.

"You see us in our black outfits moving trains and hauling passengers and cargo from one place to the other," Matson continued, "but you only see the bottom of the Guild. You never see the linesmen who service it. and you never even think about the organization behind it, but it's a big and powerful one. It's a skilled trade guild run like a big corporation. Judge, and it's a corporation run like a tight military organization. We have specialized units that are like nothing you've ever seen. You got all your knowl¬edge out of the ancient books, Judge, ones like those on the wall over there that got scattered around all over creation. We never lost ours. There were stringers here from the start, and we know our business. We use very different and very specialized equipment, including amplifiers of a type you've never seen or heard of. Judge, just one of those units, if activated, could disrupt your communications, overload your amplifiers and crip¬ple or kill your linesmen just like that." He snapped his fingers. "You'd never see or hear them, either, even with your whole army and a wizard's convention."

Tilghman was at one and the same time fascinated and uneasy. Such information explained a lot about the string¬ers and their grip, but it was not easy to hear. Still, it couldn't go unchallenged. "If the Guild is really that powerful, why don't you use the strings for communica¬tion?"

"Well, first of all that requires a lot of power and amplifiers of a type big enough to be visible and obvious—and easy targets. Ones like yours. Second, and most important, we don't think it's in the best long-term interest of World to have a mass worldwide communica¬tions network. About ten days after you set it up somebody would figure a way to tap into it and all seven Hellgates would fly open just like that."

"Do you really believe that?"

"Yes, I believe it would happen, and the Guild board believes it, too. We could secure conversations along the network, but there would be no way to secure the entire system from illegal extra use. Guild men and women have died to prevent the establishment of such a network. I'm not as afraid of the Hellgates opening as most of World is, but I never saw a reason for fighting a war, with all its cost in lives, if you can avoid it."

"And you think that's what we'd get from the Hellgates? A war? I'm fascinated by this, Matson, I must admit. I have strong documentary evidence that war is exactly what we face if they are ever opened, but a war with an enemy that even our ancestors feared to face. You seem to think we could where they could not."

Matson restated his arguments with Mervyn. "There are ways to make the odds even better for our side, if we wanted to, but most folks don't want to even think of the possibility. Every time I've brought up such plans any place here they always bring up the cost and the point that nothing has happened for over two thousand years so it'd be a waste of time and resources. Me, I think you people have opened the magic box with all the tricks and parapher¬nalia to make it happen, and I think the Seven will get their hands on it and use it, maybe not soon, maybe tomorrow. But I'm getting off the subject."

"No, no! I'm very interested in this," Tilghman insisted. "That won't be Coydt van Haas coming through there, you know. It'll be something totally inhuman, totally dif¬ferent than anything we know or can imagine, but it'll have all of the ancients' science and technology as well as, most likely, total control of Flux."

"They'll probably breathe what we do. Otherwise, why be interested in this place? It's no threat, particularly as we are now, so they either want our world to use for themselves, which is why they're attacking, or they're missionaries willing to kill us if they can't convert us. You seem sure they're not people."

"I'm sure."

"Then I doubt if they're missionaries. So they want this place, either to live on or because we're blocking traffic, I don't know, but it's a good bet that they're air breathers. If they're not they'll have to carry their air with them or make it from Flux, and that gives them a real weakness. If they are, then anything that breathes can be stopped by making it stop breathing. There's a thousand ways to do that. I don't know about the rest, but enough to do any harm will probably have to fill up the big hole, not that puny little inside Gate. You pile those tunnels with several tons of high explosive and a detonator triggered through the passageway or whatever it is to the temples. The explosion won't hurt those walls—we haven't been able to carve so much as an initial in whatever those temples are made of. So what you get is the biggest damned cannon in the history of World, and if we figure that the Gate end is damped—otherwise all that stuff would just keep shooting into World and do nobody any good—you ran it all right up the ass of anybody sitting in that big hole in the ground. Then you attack them from outside and pick up the pieces."

"You make it sound so easy."

"No. it'd be a hell of a dirty, messy war." countered Matson. "They'd still have their weapons and all that knowledge like you said, and we would have cut off their retreat. They'd have to win or die. I'm betting on sheer numbers. Way long ago, when they sealed up the Gates, there were probably not many people here on the whole planet. If there were, we'd be up to our armpits in people now. I figure. Now there are maybe forty, fifty million people in Flux and Anchor, and all of them have the same problem as the enemy. Backs to the wall and no place to run. There are only seven Gates and those holes are only so big. So you take forty million against maybe a few thousand very well-armed, well-trained combat troops with nothing to lose. They might take out half the population, but we'd get them."