03. Masters of Flux and Anchor (31 page)

April 2. All sealed up in this damned shell, can't even see the Borelli Point. They have photos of it. looking something like an eclipsed sun, but I sure wish I could have seen it. (Unintelligible) . . . Heigh ho! Wonder what it feels like once you're strapped in that tube and turned into a lot of particles? Find out tomorrow, and so will you, old record book!

April 3 (I think). Well, they took us down and strapped us in just fine. First of a whole bunch of people, but the forward parry's been there for four years already. The thing looked like the biggest room you've ever seen, going on for kilometers in all directions, all with very narrow aisles. Place looked like a breeding ground for giant test tubes, only we poor humans were the stuff what's in 'em. No clothes, no nothing. You get taken there in the buff, and some tech boy barely out of college pushes a button that raises the tube and you get on the little platform. Then down it comes, and you stand there for what seems hours waiting, while a bunch of women techs walk through and make lewd gestures. They pipe in music, but it's a bore. Finally, they break in, tell you to relax, the lights dim, and you just go off to beddy by standing up. Damn Einstein for being so right! So instead of a nice faster-than-light drive, we get turned into atoms, shot through a well-regulated hole punched into an¬other universe, and squirted along highways of en¬ergy there where energy is solid and the lightspeed thousands of times faster than in this universe. I keep telling these young people that it's nonsense to shoot a whole gaggle of people, cows, chickens, even pigeons, God help us, and a thousand million tonnes of seed to a place they don't even know where it's at!

Gravity pulls between the universes dictates the bends and swirls of the energy strings, but most times we never know where exactly we are. The Old Man agreed it was a hell of a way to run a railroad. . . .

April 10. Busy, busy, busy! Don't know how long I was out or how long it took for them to get to me, but aside from the gravity it all felt the same. I'm just dating this on guesses, but it'll show how much time passes for me. Exit in the middle through a hole in the floor, and down the egress tube. You can actually see the stuff pouring out of that stupid universe next door and the Borelli Lock that keeps it nice and regulated. Wonder what would have happened if Borelli had lived to see corporations like ours using it to build worlds? Probablv shit ten bricks. He was an Italian who did most of his work in America, but he was a good old commie. Of course the Russkies are doing as well as we, and the Chinese are out populat¬ing half the universe, but we're good old Westrex Ltd., a nice, cozy, unified culture, all American, Canadian. Australian, British, Nigerian, Indian. Japanese, and a few more. At least with the corporate headquarters currently in Aukland they all have to speak English on this job.

Another short electric squirt and I'm in Anchor. Doesn't look like much, yet. We've got the masts up but no building yet—took ten full shiploads just to get the bloody computer through and a crew of machines weeks to burn out the basement, pour the foundation, and set the machine in it. Control room and engineer¬ing modules came next, and then the towers. Now we've got an Anchor—twenty-eight, in fact—and they all look like Hell. Burnt out wasteland, mostly hot. Well, we've got a heat source, and that mother of a gas giant just fills the sky all day, making it bright and a rainbow of colors. The brown landscape just ripples all the time. Fantastic effect, good selling point.

May 11. Getting sick of living in tents, but, oh, my! Is it ever intimate! More all-around nudity here than in Cannes, but without the privacy, damn it. We must get some modular housing up. Not that I really mind, but it's that damned priest and his corps of nuns tramping about. I still wouldn't mind, since the Vatican's paying for this and the Board's half Catho¬lic anyway, but why should a good Presbyterian boy from jolly old Wellington have to endure it, too?

June 16. Maybe the Russians have the right idea. Multinational corporations wind up infested with cul¬ture shock. I can take the idea that India has Hindus and Nigeria is infested with Moslems and Methodists, and they all have their rights, but when they're all dumped and squeezed into a little place barely the size of Belgium it's bedlam. Some fun, though. The Moslems had a big to-do about which direction faced Mecca and decided to pray heavenwards, to the sky. Well, at least it's finally gotten the Catholics and the Moslems to pray in the same direction, but I wonder in a couple of generations if their kids will think they're praying to that planet up there?

June 29. Hurrah! Finally enough energy Flux has bled out from the Anchors and the Gates to create a minimum field. Now maybe we can do something with this cursed place.

July 19. Bingo! Do I know how to write a program or do I know how to write a program? We've got grass now, and even some trees. But today was our first real gully-washing rainstorm, and we celebrated so much we all went out in the mud and acted like kids and got ourselves filthy. Did you know you can't tell an Ibo from a Yorkshireman or a nun from an Imam when all have been covered in ten centimeters of the best mud you've ever seen?

August 12. What a transformation in so short a time! Our little world is coming into being. I know how it works, and it still looks like a miracle every time we use the energy converters to duplicate trees and shrubs and the like. Landscaping has already started work on drains and laving out stream courses. No oceans yet, but I hope to live to see the day when this merry little land doesn't end in a drab void.

October 9. Army signal corps rode in today, all the way from Engineering on horseback, in their shiny black uniforms and silly cowboy hats. We're connected now. Sufficient Flux has built up and settled uniformly around our little world that they can now run energy strings between the Anchors. Seems some folks can see 'em without the glasses and some folks can't, but for me I'll stay close to home for now. The thought of getting lost out there in that nothingness scares me to death, and horses scare me worse. Here we are, 22nd Century Homo Saps, riding horses like the wild west! But Flux plays hob with conventional power supplies, and causes all sorts of nasty reverberations to the programs, so back to pioneer days it is. Give me an Anchor and a good Indian racing bike any day!

December 17. Temperature has been stabilized and smoothed out. We're too far from the star to get anything but gravity, but our old planetary friend gives us plenty of glorious light. The heat we must supply using Flux, but that's an advantage. It means no polar caps here. We've left the equatorial Anchors permanently warm, but introduced some mild seasonal variations in the two northern and one southern cluster, just for variety. Since Flux within the cluster zone stabilized at 33.333etc. degrees centigrade, just where it should be, we get enough radiated heat to keep our own needs small in any case. Since we're losing only a half a degree per degree of latitude, the whole place should be quite comfortable.

December 25. First Christmas. With the Operations Building newly poured and settled, it's the dominant thing in the Anchor. Somebody said the seven broad¬cast antennas looked like steeples, so Engineering managed somehow to come up with some brightly colored lights and festoon them top to bottom. I won¬der what the preachers in Dickens' time would think of their descendants squirting through space and cre¬ating worlds out of nothing? Blasphemy, I suspect. As for me, if God hadn't wanted us to fashion pretty-worlds out of rockpiles He would have made only Einstein and struck the relativists and high energy-particle physicists to dust with lightning bolts. Or at least made only one universe. I always wonder if we were the main one or were we just practice?

I take it back, all my comments about the polyglot here. The sight of those sari-clad Hindu women and turbaned Moslem holy men sitting there listening to a bunch of nuns in workboots and jeans singing O Little Town of Bethlehem is worth all the rest of this nonsense!

There was much more of it, including a detailed account of how Toby met and let himself get trapped and tied down by a "tiny, beautiful-looking mathematician named Mioki Kubioshi—Mickey for short." and tales of wedded bliss.

What he'd said, even up to that point, would, if known, shake World to its very foundations. Mervyn tried to imagine a civilization that could punch holes in space-time and ride great strings through to another universe and other worlds, yet still produce so ordinary and likable a fellow as Toby Haller. The names and faiths of that ancient civilization meant nothing now—how was a Japanese, for example, different from a Nigerian? It was impossible to say. But for all his cynical good humor, Toby Haller had hit the nail on the head when he wondered whether people praying to an indistinct Heaven might wind up praying to the most dominant and spectacular object in their skies.

Mervyn understood enough of gravity to at least get a general concept of the process. Haller seemed to say that in the universe of men nothing could go faster than light, which seemed logical, or you'd get someplace before you started. The same was true of this other universe, but light traveled so much faster there that distances that would take perhaps centuries to cross. This was evident from just looking at the astronomical distances Haller casually noted for the distance to the big planet, and to the solar system's sun—so dim it seemed just another star from here yet dense enough to hold a world as big as the Holy Mother in tight orbit. Somehow they had managed to punch a hole between the universes and control the very different energy that was there as wizards on World controlled the Flux.

He tried to imagine it—an entire universe filled only with the densest Flux energy. They took some sort of machine, threw it into that universe, and it just kept going, but deviated due to pulls of some sort between our uni¬verse and that one, telling scientists where things were.

How would they start it? Punch back out with their machines, probably, and record what they saw. Follow it up with more specific machines that could see and measure and find worlds, worlds that had the elements, even if in the wrong order or mix, to be turned into places for human beings to live using the same energy flowing from that other universe, but harnessed and under control. All of World, all of the Flux, was that energy, coming out in a regulated stream from the Hellgate.

So they punched seven tiny holes to get at this limitless source of power and energy, and then they used it to transform a world. But not all worlds would work. There were more failures, it seemed, than successes, for techni¬cal reasons Mervyn, and perhaps no one, would ever understand. To find out if it would work, you had to experiment.

To this end, engineers and masters of the machines and of the greater Flux came in and built a variety of little worldlets out of Flux, and stabilized them and introduced a variety of plants, animals, whatever, from their home world. And people, too, who would make it all work and build the place into something livable, then try to survive there.

Clearly, in Toby Haller's time, it was still very new and they were still learning. There seemed no indication in the early years of the journal that he knew what power some humans could command over Flux without his machines, and he never seemed to make the jump from creating trees and flowers from Flux to creating Fluxlands and remaking people. To him, Flux was merely a tool to do a job.

His employer was a private company of some sort, that was clear, yet the army—the army from his old world— was there, had been there, apparently, first, Mervyn thought of the Signal Corpsmen creating the network to travel between Anchors and all he could see was the Stringer Guild. It was a total vision both grand and glorious—and something of a comedown. The fact was, these people really had the technology to do miracles on a scale that would put the most powerful wizard to shame, yet they were oblivi¬ous to their greatness, took it for granted, and were, in the end, pretty much the same as people today. How many worlds had they tried this on? How many had succeeded? One could infer four or five from the journal, but it could just as likely be fifty, or five hundred, or fifty thousand.

Toby Haller chronicled the development of World, which he generally called the project. When the first children were born, he rejoiced that they were "completely normal— crying, helpless brats that made life miserable." Yet when his own first born came along, the child was "absolutely beautiful, perfect in every way. She has her father's brains and big mouth and her mother's beauty. What a terror she's going to be!"

But the project was never completed. Man, it seemed, wasn't the only one riding the strings of that other universe, and it had the tremendous bad luck to run into another quite quickly. Nobody knew their name, and they were just called "the Enemy" most of the time, although quite often terms like "demons" and "devils" came into it. It was only certain that if they somehow found your string, and rode it to you, you were never heard from again.

There was no way to guard against them, for to do so you'd have to shut off the flow of energy from the Gates, and that would kill World. The military assumed general control of the planet and redirected much of its efforts for defense. There was some talk of pulling out, abandoning the project, evacuating for home, but not a lot. It had been thirty years now since Haller had come to World, and he was a man who helped create and shape it. His children had been born here. More, most of the population had nothing to return to. This was the new frontier, the outlet for the dispossessed who were perfectly willing to be guinea pigs in an experiment for a chance to be the first families of their own world. What exactly made it profitable for a company wasn't clear, for it certainly was long-term in the extreme and had to cost a fortune, but profit there was. It just wasn't in any of the surviving records.