03. Masters of Flux and Anchor (50 page)

New Eden's disposition was left to the four Guardians of its quadrants. The Soul Riders served a military func¬tion in crisis but were chiefly concerned with Flux; the Guardians were supreme in Anchor if they wished to be. While the Soul Riders had been equally split between males and females, there were three female Guardians to one male, he a supply sergeant in Mareh and formerly a foreman in a textile mill. All were natives of their respec¬tive Anchors; all three of the women, like Suzl, were Fluxgirls now and had been at least since their Anchors had fallen. All were products of the old Church-dominated Anchor system, which was important. All believed that a culture had to have a unifying faith to bind it as a practical matter, and all were somewhat uneasy at the collapse of it elsewhere.

The only confidant Suzl would accept from outside the circle was Cassie, because of their closeness and Cassie's great experience in such matters. At the start, Suzl had a vision of New Eden that was logical but not to her friend's liking at all.

"We should just turn the tables on them the way we turned it on those monsters," Suzl said flatly. "I wonder how these guys would like it if they couldn't read or write and were only good for sex and the shit work?"

"No!" Cassie shot back, looking alarmed. "Don't you see, Suzl, that would just keep things going in the same old pattern? Is it less a crime, less wrong, if I murder you than if you murder me?"

"Well, I'd rather not have either one, but I'm selfish enough to admit I'd dislike being murdered more."

"But that's just the point! New Eden's injustices, even Coydt's crazy view, came from doing just what you're talking about doing. Even Adam admitted that they were turning this place into just another giant Fluxland kingdom. Oh, maybe you'll get some temporary satisfaction out of a reversal, but in the end it's the same crime. If it was wrong for them to do it to women, it's equally wrong for us to do it to men."

Suzl sat down, sighed, and chewed on her cigar. She did look a bit disappointed. "So what would you suggest we do? We have a mess here, you know. All the top dogs are dead, the younger ones were brought up in this system and believe in it, and most of the women have big families."

"I've been giving that a lot of thought, and I can't see any way we can be perfectly fair and create something wonderful out of what's here. People are going to suffer, as usual, but we've got to accept that and try for some sort of balance."

"I'm listening."

"First of all, considering it's Anchor and there's the master program, just how much physical change in people is possible?"

"With individuals, a lot. With large groups, like millions, only basics. Cassie, disengagement of computer interfaces is only a few weeks away, maybe sooner if they can get their other messes cleared up. There's no time to process everybody individually."

"Maybe not, but maybe we can get a compromise that won't be a hundred percent right but will give some people a fighting chance. First of all, a certain measure of restora¬tion should be made just in the interest of the innocents. We can't change this system, Suzl, we can only give everybody the chance to make their own hard choices. Let's start with the intellectual part. Can we arrange it so there's no longer a barrier of literacy or mathematical skill?"

"Sure. The program simply took a short cut and shorted one small area in the message paths of the brain. It's a common birth defect, in fact, that was just duplicated. I've known other folks who were never here that had it."

"Well, that puts all the women back on an equal footing, so to speak. If they knew how before, they'll know again, and the children can be taught. It's been my experience that even if the system conspires to keep a kid from learning to read, she'll do it anyway if she gets the chance. But what about this 'body rules the mind' business?"

"Well, hormones are hormones and glands are glands. Everybody's different, really, as to that. You can't sup¬press one thing without doing it to everybody. I don't know about you, but I did all this in this body and it hasn't really affected my performance. It's more a matter of believing that stuff and going with it than anything else. I can suppress it if I need to. I don't feel I'm in any way unqualified to run this Anchor with the body I've got."

Cassie nodded. "It's a shame we can't allow them the choice of new or old bodies, since the very fact of looking like this tends to reinforce that body-mind business. I know it does for me. We acted like fools right here in the control room during the crisis just because we looked that way and for years acted that way."

"Yeah, but we snapped out of it and did our jobs perfectly when the push came," Suzl pointed out. "When we had to suppress it, we could and did. When we needed to let it all out, like in the tunnel, we did that, too."

"Yes. The tunnel. All that forced me to look hard at my whole life and attitudes, and I'm not at all happy with what I saw." She sighed. "Still, you're right. We were acting the way New Eden expected us to act because we'd been just that way for so long. Well, then, we leave it as it was. If their minds can triumph over their bodies they deserve to lead. Can you adjust it so that the bodies could be individually redone in Flux?"

"The formula was an add-on to the master program in the cluster, but not in Anchor, remember. All the Anchor girls are no different in Flux than anyone else, including the two of us, since we've removed all the binding spells. Still, something taken out of Anchor into Flux should be transmutable, just as something made in Flux and brought in is fixed. Yes, they could reach equality but not on their own. Any good wizard could fix it, though, one-on-one. But there are millions like that. Nobody will ever be able to cover them all."

"It'll have to do."

"If we do it this way, it's gonna make for a real rough period," Suzl warned. "You'll still have New Eden boys and Fluxgirls and the basic system but now the Fluxgirls will have their smarts and their past knowledge back. At the start it won't be much, but after a while those women aren't gonna take being kept down, not all of them. Conditioning, like we said, may hold the majority, particu¬larly the older generations, but the foundations will be shaky. Smart, knowledgeable women won't be kept out of power and influence forever. That'll threaten the men. There'll be beatings and violence and rapes and stuff again, like in the old days."

"Maybe. If there's anything to Adam's dream and ideas, though, they'll work out a compromise and build their new society. It there isn't, it'll fall apart, but there are far too many people here now and it's far too big a land to exercise the kind of control they worked on Anchor Logh. The men would need Flux to do it. and odds are the women have a lot more power in Flux than they do. They won't chance it. They'll adjust or the system will fall apart. They have to."

"Maybe. I'll try and sell it to the other Guardians and I guess they'll buy it. Nobody else has come up with anything that sounds better, mess though it is."

"All we can do is give the women the chance to be whole human beings again. Anything else, no matter how long it takes, will be up to them. We inherited this, we didn't create it."

Suzl looked at Cassie thoughtfully. "And what about us? You. me, the kids?"

"What do you want to do?"

"Well, I was down in that tunnel, too, remember. First time in years I had to face myself, old and new. I've been in this body almost half my life. I think that if I had the mental freedom I had then, like I have now, it and I can live pretty happily together. I'm not the old Suzl—I'm the collection of the old and the new. I like parts of both. I'm gonna keep myself just this way, I think, except I might get rid of this damned tattoo. What about you?"

"I've been thinking a lot about that. I've been topside and I know what'll happen if I go back and pick up from here. What I want is something I never had or had the chance to have. I had a part of it with Adam, but it was flawed by the system. In a way, Adam was too much like I used to be, when I headed the Church, and I got to take a good hard look at myself in that as well as in the tunnel. I took a gamble when I accepted that spell at the wedding, and I won part and lost part. Maybe it's time for me to take one last gamble."

22

VISIONS AND SPIRITS

A lone rider sat atop a black horse on the apron outside the ancient gate of Anchor Logh and looked momentarily back, deep in reflection. The old gate had plenty of holes in it now; it never had been much good to those who'd built it to keep out the horrors of Flux, but it had made the inhabitants feel safe and secure. He felt a great deal of kinship with that old gate and its old attitudes. Both of them had shared a lot of experiences and both were rather old-fashioned and out of date in the world today.

Another rider, coming hard, emerged from the gate and rode up to him, halting expertly. "I hoped I'd catch up with you," Spirit said to him. "It would be hell finding you in the void."

"Well, you made it." Matson responded dryly. "I can't say I'm really surprised to see you, daughter."

"What were you doing that slowed you down here, if I might ask?"

"Just—remembering. Wondering if an old fossil like me is going to be able to survive in this new world of ours."

"You'll always survive," she assured him confidently. "Besides, you're a hero to World. Even Fluxlords who hate everybody and everything, even themselves, and An¬chors suspicious of their own, call you a hero—the man who saved World. Even New Eden will build statues to you, maybe as big as the ones they're building of Adam Tilghman."

He laughed dryly. "Well, that's what the old boy wanted. And, sure, I'm safe enough now—anybody who'd draw down on me would be killed by his best friends. The thing is, I'm not any hero. I'm the same crusty old hellhound son of a bitch I always have been, no different. There were hundreds of people on World who came up with the same ideas I did. The fact is, I stole all those ideas and all those plans from other folks. Mostly women, too. Didn't figure out a one. Only I mouthed them off around a Soul Rider, a Guardian, and big-shot wizard so the computers knew my name and let me in where I could talk 'em up."

"It doesn't make any of it any less true. Shall we go into Flux a ways? I want to be well away from here when disengagement comes."

He nodded, and both figures eased their horses through the reddish-gray curtain of the void. They were in no hurry, and he, at least, hadn't decided just what to do next. He wondered about her, and asked her about her plans.

"None, really," she told him. "I have a lot of hard decisions to make myself. I figured a little time out here would help me make them."

"I gather that one of them wasn't to stay in New Eden and see now it all comes out."

"Hardly. Dad. I may be old in years, but the fact is that I'm really just going on eighteen, so to speak. I've never really been out here in full possession of my wits, as a real human being. My entire adult life, except for the brief period in the takeover days of Anchor Logh, is a total blur. I could relate to some people and some specific incidents, but it seemed entirely like a dream. Now, suddenly, I wake up, and I have to take up a real life again. I like it, but I'm as jittery as any schoolgirl."

"You ought to travel around a bit, see the place," he told her. "It's interesting, if a little depressing. Even when you lose your friend you'll still have enormous power and that beautiful fine-tuned machine of a body."

"I'd like to, but that's one of the hard choices to make. Dad, I'm pregnant."

He and the horse stopped dead in their tracks. "What!"

She nodded. "When that terrible change came over Pericles and Jeff, and I was forced to run, I grew terribly depressed. I didn't have much of anything, but I did have a son I loved, and I felt I'd lost him. Oh, I know it was a silly, emotional action, but it's done."

"How far along? And who's the father?"

"Barely three months, if I guess the timing right. And the father's Mervyn. Oh, don't look so shocked. He was very kind to me and pretty good looking near the end."

"It don't look like Mervyn's coming back. You've got a fatherless kid holding you down. You've got the power. It doesn't have to be that way."

"I know—for some. But this is the last of the Hallers in direct lineage, and that's a responsibility, I think. And to use the power to transfer it and walk away—not even my mother did that with me, under her circumstances. And if I have it, I'll bring the child up. It'll be the great-great¬grandchild of a founder, the child of a great wizard, and the grandchild of Matson and Cass. That's quite a proud line."

"Sounds like you've already decided."

"On that, anyway. Where and with whom I'm not so sure of. You said it yourself, though—we're practically immortals. I have time. I can't just have it and abandon it, like I was abandoned. Oh, don't look so guilty! I know you didn't know about me, and I know the reasons for it all, but this is different. It's a matter of choice."

They rode a while more in silence, each deep in their own personal worlds. Suddenly Matson said, "The Samish could have been us, you know. I think about that a lot."

She nodded. "Yes, I know. No matter how horrible they looked, or what hellish world spawned them, they were in many ways only one step further on than us. That, the time lag they never did seem to know about, and our sheer numbers were all that saved us, even with what we had to fight."

"It could still be us, if everybody hadn't agreed to disengage."

She shook her head. "Not now. We'll be free to laugh and cry and love and hate and be our own petty selves. Still, it wasn't unanimous."

"So I heard. I wonder if we're not seeing it start all over again. The overwhelming majority for disengagement and blocking the Gates, a small but passionate minority saying, 'No, stop—the price is too high. We can handle what they couldn't.' The Nine versus the Seven. The army versus the Company. It's all there, just as they must have faced it long ago."

"Oh, I hope not! God! I hope not! I hope we've learned this time, and that the technology and knowledge we do have will keep us in perspective, at least. There's nobody lurking at the Gates any more that we can't prepare for." She sighed. "It'd be different if we knew how to build and use ships of our own and go out there ourselves, but for security reasons that wasn't in the computer files, and the three ships of the enemy are too melted down and burned out to figure out. Even if they were perfect, it still wouldn't help. We don't have the programs, the cosmic stringers, to keep us riding out there to a destination or get in anywhere else with the proper entry codes. So all we can do is close the Gates, shove the garbage in there, wipe clean the memory records of the Guardians and Soul Riders so they're back to their command shell states, and disengage. Unless human beings show up and give us the stars, our future has to be made right here."