04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (20 page)

In front of the pit were various large tents with the division logos on them, both civil and military. Engineering's classical symbol, even without the superimposed apple tree, was easy to spot.

Beyond, though, as far as his eye could see, was a field of what looked, felt, and even smelled like genuine, plain old dirt. And on that dirt, back to the pinkish haze that surrounded it on all sides, was a sea of tents large and small. There was an odd and shifting quality to the light, but the place was duller and drabber than Titan had ever been, and the sky was a mass of pinkish-gray gloom beyond which could be glimpsed, just barely, the enormous orb of the great gas giant that held them all. There were no buildings evident, no power lines, no trees, grass, flowers, or anything else, and the air, while quite warm, was deathly still. It was, overall, the most depressing hole he'd ever seen in his life, and it was all his now.

"Hi, ho!" he mumbled to himself, making it sound like the clap of doom.

8

THE GODS OF ANCHOR LUCK

Sir Kenneth Korda hadn't been kidding when he'd warned Haller that the area around Gate Four was the dumping ground. There was the convent, for example—a huge complex of wall-to-wall nuns from an order that liked to dress in the ancient style, like penguins, Haller thought. They were part of the advanced force for Populations—most were teachers, although some were nurses and the like—and they were here, bought and paid for, by the Vatican itself and as a favor to some of the board, a majority of whom were Catholics, including van Haas himself.

The dumping-ground concept extended to many of those assigned to the engineering team. They had given him what had been called even back on Titan the Yankee Maniacs, a group of young and middle-aged engineers and computer experts who had managed to get out of dominated North America or who were from some of the Pacific islands, many of which, like Hawaii, had been hit by the pulses but had been ignored afterward. This gave him some expatriate Canadians with names like McKenzie and Franco-Russian accents as well as Americans with thick southern accents slightly tinged with Spanish and a lot of Polynesian-looking people to boot. All had kept their nationalist loyalties intact and the Canadians and Americans would refer, every once in a while, to their homelands as "occupied" or "captive nations."

All engineers were considered slightly mad, including Haller, but this was a particularly odd group, many looking to establish outposts here of the old cultures that were dying out back where they came from (or, rather, some idealized version of them). The Polynesians, male and female alike, tended to make comments to each other in tongues like Hawaiian to keep others from knowing what they were saying and tended to go around barefoot dressed only in colorful skirts or skirtlike garments with no tops. Haller decided to let them have their eccentricities so long as they did their jobs well, and he also decided not to tell the Polynesians that he'd discovered that their little language was close enough to Maori, which he'd picked up as a boy in New Zealand, that he could make out what they were saying.

There were fourteen primary programming engineers in the Anchor Luck team, and another twelve assistants, for a total of twenty-six under him. Twelve were Polynesians—eight women, four men—and there were ten expatriate Americans and four equally dispossessed Canadians, of whom eight were women and six were men. The sexual division was not unusual among the various departments as a whole; many more women than men had grabbed at the equal-opportunity chance to be a high-tech pioneer, particularly from places where the society was still very male-dominated. It was, overall, a young crowd for such expertise, with a large majority of those over forty married, some with children, about an even split between married and unmarried in the thirty-to-forty age group, and almost no one married under the age of thirty.

His team tended to regard him as a bit too straight and stiff, and he had been unnerved to overhear himself being referred to as the "Old Man," but he got along reasonably well by giving them their head and letting them participate in decisions.

The Kagan 7800 was indeed an impressive machine, and when they studied its power grids and networks, they saw the potential as almost unlimited. It was possible to remotely address a meter square of grid far from the center of Anchor and tell everything about whatever was in it by simple commands.

Connie Makapuua was his chief assistant. She'd been among the first on the scene and had the most experience working out simulations on the 7800, and he studied her plans and recommendations carefully. There was unanimous agreement that the core area around the headquarters was the place to start, simply because they could test out ideas and then build over their mistakes. Once that was out of the way, though, an overall program to expand and stabilize the Anchor and create a miniature climatological system was the first order of business. They wanted clearly defined boundaries, clear air and good light, and a system of water circulation which, they decided, would have to be based primarily on convection. The land could have some roll to it, but was basically flat on the master plan; this was to minimize erosion and runoff and because Luck was to be basically an agricultural unit.

They felt they were ready to begin, but they were held up for lack of remote connection units. These large devices were actually small auxiliary computers tied into the Overrider interface of the 7800; with one riding Guard at the 7800, deep below the still building headquarters complex, the operational engineer could sit in the midst of no-man's-land connected through his remote unit to the big one and at once be with the computer and in the field to see and adjust his or her handiwork. Without the remotes, or "big amps" as they were called by the engineers themselves, they could do little. Some administrator with no idea of the technical situation had an idea to get some teams of initial settlers from Populations out there to plant what seed could be planted, but Haller had to patiently point out that the Anchor only
looked
formed. It was still basically a Flux area and anything done to it now would simply be negated by his people when the big amps arrived.

A much bigger surprise was the arrival in Gate Four of a transitory Soviet ship on its way to the next world out. Only the transport crew was released for a little discussion and walking about though; everyone else was kept sedated. Although it was known that both the Russians and Chinese had colonies up the line under way with some preliminary personnel, nobody had any idea that one of them at least was this far along. It showed just how thin the time margin had been in settling New Eden.

The Soviet ship resembled the Westrex ships to a great degree, only partly because of the shared technology agreements to make sure all the ships fit all the gates on all the worlds. When the only way to point C was with a required stop at point B, it wouldn't do to have any incompatibilities there. Haller was able to meet with some of the officials from the ship and discuss their own plans for their new world. They had one advantage over him, a genuine planet about the size of Venus and in the right orbit. It hadn't been nearly human-habitable until Points had been punched and computer work begun, but the implications for back home were obvious. The Soviets already had Mars; Venus was clearly next.

In a way, he envied the Soviets, not only for their planet but also for their seemingly uniform culture and solidly secular outlook. He thought he had enough problems with the nuns, but now a whole contingent of Hindus had arrived and  shortly another large group of Shi'ite Moslems was due in. The culture shock was building, with various incredibly wild versions of English the only real common denominator.

This was even more of a problem for administration and Populations, since some of the groups were not naturally friendly toward one another and all insisted on keeping their basic customs and cultures as much as practical. Everything from meals to child care services was communal out of necessity, and that created frequent cultural conflicts over everything from dietary requirements to sexual mores and values. The Moslems, for example, many of whom were quite conservative, with about two thirds of the women, for example, in long black
chadoors
with veils, had a hard time dealing with the likes of a Connie Makapuua, who hadn't worn much more than a thin flowered skirt since coming to New Eden.

Police powers were vested in the Security unit, a much-feared and distrusted group with considerable powers from the board. They patrolled the area, enforced basic rules, stopped fights, and settled arguments even if it meant knocking both antagonists cold, and, occasionally, would remove a real troublemaker, who was never seen again. The official line was that they were either sent to another Anchor or shipped home on the deadhead returns of the transit ships, but no one really knew for sure. Although relatively crime-free except for petty stuff, there were now and then cases of rape or attempted rape and these were dealt with quickly and harshly. There were few secrets possible for long in the increasingly crowded tent city.

The Moslems had a long series of arguments about the direction of Mecca and finally decided that the only logical direction to pray in was heavenward, which, Haller decided, at least got all the religions to agree on one thing anyway. Watching the call to prayer, though, it seemed to him as if they were praying not to heaven but to the giant gaseous planet that hovered over them and gave them their strange light. He often wondered, as there was inevitable cultural dilution which could be seen even this early as so many diverse groups became crammed together in communal squalor, if their children, or grandchildren, might ever get confused as to who or what they were praying to.

Haller had been maintaining his diary, on and off, although he forgot it far more than he went to it. His dates, since arriving, had been guesswork, and he'd adopted the administrative calendar, as they all had, for uniformity's sake.

Still, they worked under extremely primitive conditions, out of prefabricated offices with long cables snaking back into the administration building's foundation below which the computer and communications centers were already built and in operation. Much of the interior structure was in, laboriously built piecemeal, by Christmas, but no one wanted to pour the exterior and plasticlike interior wall sets until they were certain that they had everything in there that would be needed. Once the thing was actually poured and completed, it would have to be dissolved and then redone almost from scratch. In spite of the discomfort of the people, the powers that be had no sense of urgency about completing it as long as work was going on within the temporary structures nearby.

It wasn't until April that the massive and tough walls of the headquarters building were poured, the interior having already set, and the resultant large building dominated and dwarfed everything, the synthetic outer walls covering the whole structure from masts to street level, giving it the appearance of a single unified structure with surrealist overtones. It shone and gleamed in the odd light, and looked to some like a distorted medieval castle, and to others like some ancient cathedral. It was imposing, and its solidity lifted all their spirits even though they still lived in tents and were still discovering the joys of mass pit toilets and chamber pots.

Two days later Haller received the first of four big amps— the remote computers with which he and his team could work their magic. These four were all they would get, but they were more than enough. From this point they could use the existing remotes to create out of Flux as many more as they would require.

They were finally out of the dark ages and into the twenty-second century plus. If they had a prototype of an object, they could now create as many of that object as they needed by sheer energy-to-matter transfer. From this point, they all knew, things would proceed at a rapid pace, and as crowded and miserable as everyone was, this raised everybody's spirits.

On June 19 Haller carefully began what he called a "controlled bleed" from the Gate into the areas of his Anchor boundary, restoring some of what the initial program had cleared away. Over the next week all save the area immediately around the headquarters building began to be covered in a permanent haze that gradually thickened and occasionally sparkled with little dancing discharges. For a while it seemed like fun, but as the days went by and it became quieter, gloomier, and harder to see—even the sounds seemed damped in it—more gloom descended over the still growing little colony, and irritations and fights increased.

By June 29 sufficient Flux had built up within the Anchor bubble to allow some tentative testing and localized experimentation. He would get no second chance here without endangering the lives of the people, so Haller wanted to be very, very conservative. He was being pressed, though, by local leaders and by Security to lift the fog as much as possible, for things were beginning to get out of hand. On July 3 he decided that the time had come to test the program for the city core, and all save his own people were evacuated.

Although the master program for the core was really Connie's, he decided to "ride the amp" himself, simply to get a good feel of things. She was not that put out; he, after all, controlled her promotion and performance ratings, and if it flopped now, he'd take the fall.

The big amp was nothing more than a huge rectangle painted military olive drab. It was far too large to be mobile, a problem they hadn't really solved as yet, but they moved them around on large tanklike treads powered from the grid at the astounding speed of five to seven kilometers per hour. That was better than dropping them anyway. As Overrider, he sat in a small plush chair in a little cab on the rear to which an override helmet and associated equipment was connected.

Assured by Security that there was an all-clear in the core area—even headquarters had been evacuated except for a skeleton staff, although it should not be affected by the program—he pulled down the helmet, checked his power switches, and called Connie.