04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (31 page)

"What?" several people said at once.

"Almost all the Anchors of the other regions are culturally unified. They may be different from one another, but within they are either composed of the same or compatible cultural groups. Area Four is the dumping ground, and as we've already seen, every petty hatred and cultural conflict of earth is reflected here. Crime is petty and minor in almost all the other regions. Major crime is almost unknown. Here it's increasing. Starting the settlement programs and creating the villages will help for now, but in years to come these groups will crowd each other as the population grows. If familiarity and intermarriage do not show positive results, we may well be forced to impose some sort of cultural unity. Face it, ladies and gentlemen. That's the bottom line for why they stuck us and this project here, and why we can get away with our Eves and our Kittens."

11

THE PILGRIMS' PROGRESS

Everything has changed, Toby Haller reflected, even the void and myself.

The change in the void was most dramatic. He'd been out more than once with a signals crew and watched them ride their little scooters along the grid lines so slowly you could outrun them, with their small masts and riflelike projectors mounted, cutting through the dense Flux of the void and creating a line of plasma energy about as thick as a good hemp rope.

Even back on Titan they'd had to address the problem of journeying overland through the space between the Anchors for the duration of the first phase test and had discovered that a rather mild but quite specific magnetic-based charge would alter the Flux in the field to a slightly different form, one that was fixed, rigid, and intangible. A different angle of charge would cause a shift in the color spectrum, allowing the Flux lines, or strings, to appear almost any color of the rainbow. Special goggles, which themselves had a slight magnetic field in a vacuum between the lenses, were necessary to see these strings at all, but they were easy to set down, easy to maintain, cheap, and efficient.

Toby had always wondered how they'd discovered it, considering the incredibly close tolerances necessary. It was like Edison's original phonograph—he understood exactly the physics of why it worked, but he would never understand how Edison thought of it in the first place.

Now the void was crisscrossed with lines of energy in blues, yellows, reds, greens, and all sorts of other colors in between, each with a specific mission to a Pathfinder, a signalman equipped to see and read the things and know just where he or she was going—and take any people or cargo along with them. Sometimes, the whole void looked like a carnival two days early.

Signal corps personnel these days didn't need the goggles anymore, or even carry them. Long-time exposure to the grid or some alterations through their computers allowed them to see the strings just fine, although few others could. Haller was one who could see them, and it gave him a sense of independence and real confidence in the void.

It had been eleven years since he'd come here, eleven years that had changed everything. Certainly the investment had more than paid off for all concerned. New forms of grain, developed on the Kagans and tested in dry Anchors, proved capable of growing well and swiftly in near-desert environments, taking what moisture they needed from the driest air and able to take minerals directly from the most arid soils, were now making the massive desert areas of Earth bloom once more. Construction was nearly complete back there on Earth of five medium sized Borelli Gates that were intended strictly for power and would open up vast areas of heretofore useless land to new expansion, as well as creating localized climate changes in the regions of extreme cold and tropical drenching. True, there was much worry and much opposition that these things could unfavorably alter world climate in other regions, but after the Soviets launched their giant project to thaw parts of central Siberia and the Northwest Territories region of North America, everybody was getting into the act anyway.

Haller suspected that the attempts to create a New Eden— style setup on old Earth would create more problems than it solved, as did the computers, but they'd be different problems— and, as the Soviets had said, they'd be somebody else's problems for a change.

Those kinds of technological revolutions, and the dramatic changes and new and unanticipated problems they might cause, were a logical result of all this. Infinite energy and the power to transform it simply and, after the initial setup costs, cheaply into any other energy or matter needed was the ultimate revolution, the ultimate technological dream of the human race.

New Eden wasn't alone, nor was it even first now. There were nine more such colonies, including six farther out and, embarrassingly, three farther in toward Earth on the great strings between the gravity points in the Flux universe. Left far behind, some bright person in the Franco-Brazilian technocracy decided to actually do extensive exploring of the solar systems in which Westrex had found nothing suitable and had in fact found planets much farther in quite suitable for this kind of project indeed. They, of course, had the extra benefit of having the experience of the pioneers to build on, and the treasuries not depleted by the seed money New Eden had taken.

Haller had been pretty pleased with his part in the Anchor Luck design, even if he did have to suffer the comments of the geographers that the place was shaped like a baked potato. Hell, it
was
shaped like a baked potato, but he hadn't noticed that the other Anchors were any more regular.

The climate was more tropical than he'd intended it to be, and had a narrower temperature range than his master plan called for, but that was due to the early bad calls on rainfall and the compensations for that followed by the compensations for the compensations and so forth. He'd taken some guff for the mistakes, particularly from people in other parts of the technocracy who didn't have to contend with the complexities he had, but he'd gotten pats on the back from his own superiors and he'd risen sufficiently high in the New Eden bureaucracy to have a great deal of comfort and a great deal of freedom to pursue what he wanted, no matter what it was. He was also valuable to them, since he was a powerful Sensitive, as they called those who could maintain some contact and even control over the computer without mechanical aids, and perhaps the only one generally trusted by both the Security and Signals factions.

That sensitivity had fascinated everyone, but no one wanted to face the most likely explanation. He'd discovered, almost by accident, that simple programs could be transmitted to remote operators of computer interface machinery by the computer, and he very much suspected that, for reasons he could not divine, Seventeen and the other computers had somehow changed the operators, either added something or retuned something in the brain, that allowed it. Whatever it was, it was proving hereditary. Children of Sensitives tended to be sensitive themselves. When a Sensitive and a non-Sensitive had children, the ability seemed to have the same genetic distribution as hair or eye color.

He had grilled Seventeen repeatedly on this—as, of course, he'd been grilled by others, as had all the other Kagans—but the computer denied everything. Some in Main Computers had suggested, not altogether facetiously, that they had unwittingly created a new form of life here, the Kagan network and the grid being the whole, and that, in fact, if computers really thought, they might also have hangups mirroring their human origins. Others pooh-poohed this idea, noting that even if they had this kind of life and thought, the theorists were being misled by the human shells they wore for the interfaces and that in reality the computer's mind was so alien and so totally unrelated to anything we knew or could understand that such ideas as a neurosis in the human sense were impossible, mere wishful thinking.

Toby Haller really wondered about that. The one thing they threatened computers with by the human interface and Guards was being totally cut off from the real world. If this fear of isolation from the outside world really forced them into straight behavior, as it definitely had, might not they try some way, any way, to circumvent it? To prevent themselves from being cut off from reality? The 7240 series might have tried, and failed. Who would know? But give the 7800's a network— twenty-eight super brains working together on common problems and concerns along with unlimited energy and virtually unlimited memory storage abilities, and who knew what they might be trying?

There was no way to know for sure that was it, but there was no indication from any of the others—the Chinese, the Soviets, the Hispanics, the Franco-Brazilians, the Titan project, any of them—that this had ever occurred. None of them, of course, were using the 7800's, and the few that might have had equivalents didn't network them in this way.

He often wondered when he rode the void whether or not the network was carrying everything back to Seventeen via the grid and other computers. Did the computer live vicariously in him, seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard? He wondered, but he knew he'd never really know. How could you ever hope for a computer who thought millions of millions of times faster than he to make a slip, a simple mistake, and betray the fact?

No matter anyway. The grid wouldn't carry through Anchor, and he spent ninety-five percent of his time there anyway.

Recently, he'd gone back to work with a new team composed of some old hands and many new ones to fill in and detail the Area Four Landscaping Master Program. He didn't think they were going to do anything with it very soon, but the big folks wanted it for security. Populations had fleshed out the completed Anchor Luck to almost thirty-five thousand, only six or seven hundred of whom were of the technocracy that was still Westrex New Eden. Those folks had built a network of communal farms around small towns designed to meet their basic needs. A Central Planning Council, on which he sat, determined the proper economic mix and crops grown, coordinating with other Anchors as well, but otherwise the farms were communally held and run affairs, autonomous and sharing in the profits by getting what they wanted or needed from other communes in exchange for what they produced.

There was even a central bank and a basic money system, which kept track of the trade, but the money was just used for the purchase of small personal items by individual commune members, and as rewards and bonuses voted by the farm councils.

The core around the headquarters building was now commonly referred to as the capital, although no one had yet named it. Not that they hadn't tried—it was just that everyone had a different favorite and there was no consensus. It was really still a small town of about four thousand, but it was the biggest population center in the Anchor and the home of almost all the technocrats, including himself.

With the help of robot machinery, a network of roads had been built, and power, through more conventional buried cables, was brought, with varying degrees of efficiency, to most of the land. Farming was, however, a mixture of the highest tech and most ancient form. No one eschewed using an automatic milking machine, for example, but no robotic system ever designed had convinced the cows to line up there and let themselves be hooked up to it automatically, and no robot had ever broken a horse or trained it.

Large vehicles were used for major transport, but individual vehicles were pretty well banned. The company had a few, and there were a few taxis in the capital, but mostly the farm folk used horses, which weren't terrain-sensitive, didn't need recharging or a mechanic's shop, and didn't cause traffic and other enforcement problems. He always wondered if his ancestors could have imagined such a silly thing as robot sweepers patrolling the streets sweeping up the end products left by myriad horses—and losing the battle.

The contrast between the norhtern and southern Anchor regions was both geographic and cultural. The African and Near-Eastern Moslems had pretty well taken the south, where they managed to raise some sheep and cattle while also creating some fine vineyards, olive groves, and vast numbers of fruit orchards. The north, the original area, tended to be Catholic and Baptist and Buddhist and probably Druid as well. It had more trouble and was a lot looser than the south, which had tended to be very conservative overall, but it was more fun to him.

Some of the southern mullahs complained about the open atmosphere of the capital, as did some of the ministers, but the average people, no matter what their faith or politics, didn't seem to mind. The town was a fun place at times, with its own little theater group, a dance company, and an orchestra that played with more heart than unity, all composed of amateurs with a few paid staff. There were also some pubs and high joints, where you could get chemicals and feel like anything you wanted fora time, which was the main focus of religious disapproval, but they had their shot too. There were far more churches and mosques than pubs and high joints. There was even a lone synagogue in the capital.

A lot of folks were out of technical jobs now, and a lot more had quit to become colonists themselves. None of the departments needed nearly as many people anymore, and even the military divisions were mostly just communal economic units now. Signals got you and/or your products from one Anchor to another or from one region to another, and also transmitted communications between the same and kept the network maintained. Transport had skeleton crews for the most part, more than enough to handle the one ship a month they averaged now for themselves, and the three or four others they simply passed on through to the colonies up the line. Most of that, now, was automated.

Logistics handled the Anchor transport system—the powered vehicles, building and maintenance robots and repair shops, and the main road bus system, and also got products and produce from point to point and Anchor apron to customer. Security was still around, of course, mostly as the Anchor investigative police force, but local cops from among the indigenous populations handled the routine local stuff. Special Projects was still going, although he'd been cool to them since a few years back when somebody who used to work there had let slip to him that Kitten had not been an entirely voluntary creation.