03. Masters of Flux and Anchor (49 page)

Inside Cassie, the tension became unbearable; the mas¬sive force coalescing around the two bodies into a great ball of pure Flux was a part of herself and could not long be held in check. The visions continued, even multiplied in horrifying intensity.

This time the Guardian supplied the mathematics and the timing.

"No more!" she screamed, the tension unendurable. "NO MORE!"

The force shot up the tube at the speed of light and struck the bottom of the Samish ship. It blew right through the shielding and then blew in the lower hatch, and still it went on, burning through all the levels of the ship, short¬ing out all electrical systems. But the primary load was on the Flux receptors around the hatch, which opened full, carrying the bulk of the energy directly to the storage batteries, now still mostly full. They overloaded and rup¬tured almost immediately, and the entire bowl was sud¬denly filled with terrible heat and the sound of massive explosions. At the same moment the shields collapsed, the great ship actually rose into the air from the force of its internal throes, like some great beast in mortal agony, then flipped over back down to rest almost on its side, pierced by a gaping series of holes surrounded by boiling liquid metal.

The energy surged into the Gate apron, making it crackle with electricity, frying the Samish and their works. With one exception it did not extend beyond, for its target had been the Enemy and the same computer control that fo¬cused it now damped it. The only exception was the exposed end of heavy cable, cut at the very edge of the apron by the initial purge and still just at it. The cable had been built to conduct Flux, and conduct Flux it did, straight to the great tower and from it through all the electrical lines. The tower began to melt, and when it reached structural instability it collapsed on the groups of people below, most of whom were already dead or in agony from the massive surge of electricity.

Near the edge of what had been the shield, the small craft of the Samish suddenly became unstable. It started wobbling in the air, then stopped dead, poised for a moment, while the few surviving military men watched and held their breaths. Then it dropped like a stone to the ground, hitting it so hard it actually bounced three times before coming to rest on its side.

Outside the shield boundary, the reserve troops watched and cheered as loudly as they could, then moved in to¬wards the Gate to pick up the pieces.

Deep in the tunnel, Jeff, Matson. and Sondra huddled over two still figures lying sprawled near the regulator. Jeff checking Cassie and Sondra checking Suzl. Both nodded, and the two men each lifted a small, frail-looking woman and stepped back through the now-reopened An¬chor access Gate.

21

SOME UNSETTLING SETTLEMENTS

In the two northern clusters, the Samish had first been deprived of their remote eyes and ears and then, with the destruction of the southern ship, their command. The two northern Samish "brains" could not agree on what had happened in the south—things had been going along quite well, quite normally, when suddenly all communication had ceased. What they did know, eventually, by some sort of monitoring devices, was that the southern ship had exploded and that it had proven vulnerable, despite their computations, from the tunnel beneath. They had gotten word that there was a problem in the Flux power linkage before it blew.

There had been initial fear on the part of the defenders that one or both of the northern ships would leave to get help or reinforcements or merely to report the problem. They couldn't be stopped from doing so. and once out there, even after all these centuries, it was unknown just what they would find and what might come calling as a result.

The Samish, however, were prisoners of their own strange culture as much as the humans were. A defeat, even a strategic retreat, was simply unthinkable. To move in that direction would be to admit that they were not the godlike superiors of this puny under-race. A faulty transformer, bad batteries, even unworthiness in the First Lord's sight they could accept as reasons for the southern defeat, but they could not accept, or perhaps were not programmed or permitted to accept, any thought that their theology might be wrong or their god might be false.

The northern military command centers immediately re¬ceived and analyzed the methods and the reasons for the success of the southerners. When the Samish retracted the bulk of their shield to concentrate on protecting the imme¬diate area around their ships and then began feverish build¬ing activities, there was no question as to what they were up to. Mobile ground amplifiers were obviously being constructed in preparation for a methodical breakout. Right now they were totally dependent on the ship's power, but clearly they were working to draw not only on the ship but on World's own Flux. If they did that, they would weaken the Soul Rider and the wizards while still having the ship's power for protection and reinforcement.

Having both the advantage of Flux and the advantage of a successful program run in the south, the wizards of the north concentrated on creating and molding similar person¬alities and similar powers among their own. It took more of them, but one try was successful, and then there was one Samish vessel remaining.

That one analyzed that indeed this population was so infused with evil that it had found a way around their defenses. Instead of retreating, this Samish apparently con¬sidered it an honor to be put to such a challenge. It moved its entire population out of the ship and away from the apron, and proceeded to build what it needed to implement a total breakout.

Ultimately, the fanaticism of the Samish with their amplifiers met the angry and frightened wizards of Flux with their amplifiers head to head. The carnage was terrible, yet somehow the two were evenly matched. The unitary nature of the Samish made them dedicated, nearly suicidal fanatics—but so were the minions of the Fluxlords. who willingly fought to their deaths for their deities. As Flux wielders. the Samish were fully as expert as they claimed to be, but they were now fighting wizards with minds of their own and the full programs of their own master com¬puters to tap. But in one respect, each side had something going for them. The Samish ground weapons were far supe¬rior to anything that World could offer, and the resulting body count was very much in the aliens' favor, with a ratio of five hundred humans killed for every Samish. It cost over a million human lives, enormous by World's scale.

But there were a lot more human beings than Samish. With more flocking there from the other clusters every hour, the Samish were ultimately outnumbered by more than fifteen hundred to one.

Without Samish bodies and Samish minds, the shields could not hold. While this one had outguessed and outmaneuvered its attackers from below, it was now alone, a bare computer with considerable local power but no way to implement it. Faced with retreating or being destroyed by the forces now converging on it. it chose to destroy itself in one huge blast.

With no reinforcements coming, no Samish at the equa¬torial Gates, the battle was finally over.

Despite the horrible cost in lives, most of World breathed a sigh of relief when, after waiting a decent interval, nobody else showed up in any of the Gates. Considering how many people on the planet had been raised from the cradle to believe that the opening of the Gates was tanta¬mount to the end of the world, the whole thing actually seemed somewhat of an anticlimax. The fact that it had been neither easy nor cheap was not a factor: except for a very few, nothing had ever come easy or cheap on World except slavery and death.

It seemed ironic to many that the ancient army of their ancestors that had come to World from some far-off place had made all the right decisions, even if it could never guess the timing or the type of people who would finally make it all pay off. They had closed and locked the Gates just in time; the enemy had been right there, and would have walked all over that first generation with its total dependence on its machines and its ignorance of true Flux power. They had severed direct contact with the comput¬ers when they first encountered this sort of powerful link, and by that move almost certainly saved humanity on World from becoming one with their computers and. perhaps, a version of the Enemy they eventually faced and defeated.

There was no indication in the records that the early scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who acquired the Flux powers were actually executed; instead, they were driven into Flux by the army and the odd church it sup¬ported for its own ends, there to breed, pass on the talents to new generations, and learn to perfect what they had. They destroyed the existing amplifers and other advanced terraforming and weapons systems primarily to safeguard and secure Anchors against attack—and until the Empire had arisen to destroy the rigid division of Flux from An¬chor and Coydt van Haas had rediscovered how to build some of the ancient machines and use them, it had worked. Worked, probably, for far more years than those who'd created the plans and the society dreamed it would.

Ultimately, they and their computers had come to the same conclusion as Matson would tens of centuries later: that the existing technology and defense systems had not stopped the unknown enemy. Flux power might, if that technology were not allowed to interfere with its growth and development. But it was Matson who realized that raw, unbridled emotion was the method by which the maximum amount of power would be collected in a single individual. The computers were the epitome of pure reason; this sort of thing was beyond them, and even the reasoning human-machine interfaces, the Soul Riders and the Guardians, fell back on logic and reason no matter what their feelings. The Ancient men and women who created the system had human emotions, but tried very hard to filter them out and allow reason and logic alone to remain when doing their jobs.

Matson's plan had created an unthinkable mixed marriage, in which reason stood back and waited until all was right, then coolly fed the mathematics and controlled the results of highly complex physics, fed to, and through, human beings reduced to raw unbridled emotion.

Why this was so, and why Flux power worked at all, was unknown and perhaps could not be known by these people, with these machines, in such isolation. The com¬puters themselves had solid, convincing theories—about eighty thousand of them, in fact, almost all contradictory. Earth, if it still existed, might know by now.

All of World's actions and activities in this area had been aimed at what to do when and if the Gates were opened; there was no thought at all of what to do after the Enemy was disposed of, for nobody, in ancient times or on World, had really believed humanity could win—except Matson, and even he wasn't as sure of things as he'd let on. He simply had seen no profit in believing otherwise.

The first conference on the future of World was held not too long after victory was assured, but only fifty-six peo¬ple were involved. At that point, they were the only ones who counted.

The first question the Guardians and Soul Riders dis¬cussed was whether to retain their interfaces with, and control of, the computers. There was vast knowledge there, and almost unlimited power, and that finally decided them. The system would be reset. The Guardian and Soul Rider interfaces would be disengaged from the existing humans and reset to their original forms so that they, too, would be ignorant once more of their purpose. They were surrender¬ing their heritage from Earth and their ancestors, but by doing so they chose to remain human. The logic was inescapable: if one were to defeat an enemy, only to become just like him, then who wins?

They had seen creatures who looked monstrous, but who still at one time had been a race of curious individuals who'd probably told dirty jokes and laughed and faced tragedy and died, who'd known joy and sorrow, fear and pain, and also pride and love. In surrendering their animal selves to the machine, they had become machines, and in doing so had lost far more than they had gained.

The decision was not unanimous, but was sufficiently large that the others had no choice but to agree or be forcibly restrained and disengaged by the collective might of the others.

The coldly logical and reason-dominated computers, interestingly, not only did not argue against this but sup¬ported it. Considering the human viewpoint and the alterna¬tive they themselves had just seen, they could see no logical alternative.

The next questions were on the kind of world they would re-enter. The Church was through as any sort of effective institution; despite Guardian and Soul Rider moves to lift all binding spells, the truth had shattered its foundation. World would change, now—perhaps radically so, without a cohesive cultural force to bind it—but that was the price of truth, and it was not necessarily bad. Perhaps it was time for a dynamic rather than stagnant civilization to emerge.

No attempt would be made to extend landscaping and terraforming beyond New Eden; clearly Flux had been the margin of victory in the war, and clearly it should not be weakened further. On the condition that all ancient writ¬ings and records, both the Codex and New Eden's library, be available to all the governments of Flux and Anchor, New Eden would not be tampered with, so long as it obeyed the rule that the building and use of amplifiers was now banned. What they did with their philosophies, or even their armies, was their affair; Flux, however, must remain Flux.

The Gates would not again be locked. The combinations were known, of course, and there was no way known to change them, but there was another way. The alien ships were to be left the wrecks they were in the dishes. They could be studied, probed, and analyzed, even gutted, but they must remain. At least equal mass of some kind would be placed in the four other dishes. The computers assured them that this would prevent any more "incoming" due to the safety systems; however, "incoming" would be an¬nounced and would activate the defensive systems once more. Removing that mass from any of the Gates would now be an additional criterion for activation. The defen¬sive system in each tunnel was reset, this with a new bypass code known only to the Soul Riders and Guardians. The computers picked and encoded it themselves; no hu¬man would ever be able to find a place to look it up. Access to the Gates and regulators, then, by wizards or researchers, would be only through Anchor, which gave a measure of control.