04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (45 page)

"Maybe not even a first one if they're foolish enough to trust Watanabe to do their program right."

"She will do it their way, for as I said, they are not stupid and the distances are quite large between Anchors. They will try it one Anchor at a time, and test it carefully. Watanabe, too, is no fool, even if mad. She knows as well as they that there is no second chance if she tries to cross them. One false move and they will cut her lines absolutely, then physically overwhelm her even if they must kill every man, woman, and child in Region Three. The programs, if they work at all, will work as they wish. Watanabe is a good politician. Her madness is always tolerated so long as Signals and we and the directors and the rest are out there in the void, with powers and some contact with one another and the network, they cannot afford not to have her. She is patient. She will bide her time, which might be considerable, then strike only when success is absolutely assured."

"Ngomo must know that too."

"Indeed, but he has little choice. I only know that it is far easier to make a revolution than to keep it, and that it will in the end be a question of who strikes first. We consider the odds to be even."

"And Coydt? Where is she in all this?"

"That, I'm afraid, is an unanswerable question. I only know she took Suzuki, several of Suzuki's staff, and a number of Pathfinders and rode off. I have my suspicions, considering that all in her party were women, but I do not want to know any more."

Lisa Wu sighed. "I think I better call a meeting now. How can we contact Signals if we need them? If nothing's running out there, we're gonna need horses, mules, wagons, whatever, not to mention manpower."

"The security troops here know what is happening. They will be with you. The officer of the day has communications equipment to reach Signals personnel in the area if need be." He paused, looking sheepish. "It was necessary to monitor you in the void."

"We figured that out long ago. Don't worry. It might pay, though, to get some people to go into Anchor and beg, borrow, buy, or steal some horses. They'll be in very short supply out there for quite a while and not critical here yet since everything's still working."

"It is being done." He got up and offered his hand, and she did likewise and shook it. "I must go now. Go with God's blessings and protection. I hope to see you once more, out there."

"It better be. I'm a Buddhist and I certainly don't want to be reincarnated in one of these Anchors."

"Remember the lesson of the Flux," he said sagely. "No matter what things are,
nothing
is permanent. Nothing. All things change, and all things are mutable. So long as we remain keepers of the ideas and seekers of truth and justice, we will eventually prevail."

"That's
my
line," she responded sourly, never more depressed in her entire life.

He sat there in his black uniform and black bush hat atop a horse just as dark, relaxed and smoking a big cigar. His bodyguard was all around him, although many were invisible to the onlooker and certainly to the approaching riders.

In the old days of just a few weeks before, the journey the women now approaching had undertaken would have taken perhaps four days. Instead, it had taken them almost three weeks of constant riding and prearranged horse-switching and minimal sleeping and eating.

The leader of the women showed her exhaustion in her face as she approached him and came to a stop: She nodded. "Hello, Mike. You haven't changed a bit."

"Brenda, you look like hell," replied General Michael Ryan dryly. "Come on and follow us. We've got a small pocket over here with all the comforts of home."

To one who could not see the invisible energy bands, the strings, of the Signal corps, finding the pocket would have been next to impossible. Even those who could see the strings had to know their complex code to find anything of value. It had kept the duggers away and retained the transport routes through the void pretty much intact, although at a snail's pace.

The pocket was a small area formed by god guns using specific sorts of programs. It was not large—perhaps two hundred square meters—but it was enormous by pocket standards. Quite a number of the things had been provided not merely as food and water resupply stations but as small bases for Signal corps local administrative personnel. There were actually some small one-room buildings here, along with some fruit and coconut palm trees as well, surrounding a nice little pool of clear water. It was lit by some interaction of the void with the bubble, and the water was constantly renewed. There was even a small but modern lavatory and shower. The whole area was thickly carpeted with soft green grass that seemed manicured. The light level was lower than Anchor by a fairly strong factor, but it was constant, and seemed sufficient to keep the plants thriving on their own. The program that had created it also kept a constant supply of water in that pool. A small creek flowed from the void down a slight incline to the pool, although it had its origin in the void and not in any condensation. What was needed was simply being transmuted from Flux energy. What was consumed and then given off was reconverted and sent out to the void.

It was, however, quite warm and very humid, even when allowing for the contrast of entering from the desertlike dryness of the void, as if the still atmosphere were an amorphous and penetrable woolen blanket soaked with water. Without this humidity sufficient water would not be introduced to the trees and grasses to maintain them.

Brenda Coydt noted the gun belts and holsters worn by Ryan and his people. "What in hell are
those
?"
she asked him.

Ryan grinned, took out a massive-looking pistol of metallic black with white pearl handles. "This, my dear, is a .44-caliber Magnum handgun. These are the bullets—the projectiles— that it fires with really lethal effect."

She stared at the thing, which she hadn't seen outside of museums and historical dramas. "And those?" She pointed to some of the others.

"Various pistols, rifles, shotguns, and even a submachine gun or two capable of pumping hundreds of rounds of these things in a general direction in seconds."

"Where in hell did you
get
them?"

"Cockburn had his toy train, van Haas had his art collection, I don't know what you brought in. Me, I brought my antique gun collection. Every one mint and in perfect firing condition. We've been having our Sensitives grind out these damned things and the bullets for them—particularly the bullets—at a feverish pace ever since we got cut off, and I'm having pistol and rifle instruction all over the damned place. Not nearly as effective as the lasers and the stun rifles we used to have, and much harder to use properly, but they sure work real nice. You know we can't charge those damned laser weapons anymore. We can
create
the suckers, but they always come up dry. So, what the hell. Right now I'm having some folks comb the historical records we got out of headquarters for all sort of other shit like this. We made some really good if basic cannons, and even got some kind of chemical powder that's better and more efficient than gunpowder out of those Sensitives' commands—but we can only go so far. Ancient-style caissons I can manage—they were pretty simple. Just a matter of pump and prime and making sure the damned cannonballs fit the barrels. The more sophisticated stuff we can't manage. Tolerances are too close."

"Yeah, but—antique explosive projectile weapons?"

"Listen, I'd use crossbows if I had to. Or stones and spears. They're not worth shit against what the Anchor Guard can put against us, I admit, but they're golden in Flux where
their
weapons run dry too. Two of those submachine guns cut a band of twenty-nine duggers to ribbons the other day. Nobody's gonna come in here and get us. I swear. They'll have to terraform the whole bloody planet to do that."

"They can't," she assured him. "The climatology was never really worked out and tested, and it'd probably bring massive changes if they even did a single region. When they shut the Gates, they had to limit the amount of opening for incoming Flux bleed so a ship couldn't creep in during a time when the computers were getting large refills. They don't have enough for the whole world. You can relax on that score." She relaxed and spread out on the grass.
"God!
I'm tired!"

"Well, we'll get you all food and you better get as long a sleep as you need here. Time's really wasting."

Her eyes had closed, but one of them opened. "What do you mean by that?"

"The old bat's ready to test out her own personal theories on X-ray within days. If it goes well, then 'bye-'bye Charley, George, and Queen. The word is that if it all works, then Anchor Luck will be the test of the Holy Islamic program, followed by Nancy, Mary, and Baker, because there's such a large percentage of devotees of the fundamentalists there. That's where they sent all the bad boys to begin with, remember. If
that
goes well, they'll try to convert the rest close to simultaneously once they deploy their people from Region Four. A matter of a couple of months. But that's not the kicker. A bunch of our bright boys and girls, using what computer power remains to them, postulated Watanabe's complete, rip-roaring success and asked the little thinkers to think like dear old Suzy. We tried to figure out her game for once, and I think the computers confirmed our worst fears."

"Huh?" She sat up, feeling more awake. "Come on, as little as I can stand worse than this."

"We think she's gonna prove her own program out, then give them loaded modules interfaced together. If you just postulate to the network of all twenty-eight fucking 7800 computers a set of 'if, then' conditions, then when those conditions occur, a process will be enacted automatically. That's what we did with the military programs. We weren't even able to use or access those suckers until all twenty-eight big brains agreed that there was a threat sufficient to enact them. That's what gave me and some of my folks with nasty minds the suspicion in the first place."

"Go on."

"Well, she's been working on the network a long time now. Been making and testing out her big super-tranformation programs. Checking them out. She would need access to the data for all the Anchors to allow for all sorts of conditions, including number of people, types, ages, skills, you name it. Old Suzy knows that Ngomo's gonna have her blown to her own special hell as soon as he's sure he doesn't need her anymore, and that could be as early as the enactment of the master programs. He's got a lot of bright computer people, after all. Not of Suzy's genius, but after this her genius is a total liability.
I'd
sure blow her away."

She nodded. "I'm listening."

"O.K., so we plant a master series of programs down in the hearts and minds of the assembled 7800 congregation. Suzy's programs. But they don't exist because they're conditional independents. We taught her how to do it by showing her the military programs in operation. These programs are like big bombs. They sit there, fat, dumb, and happy, doing nothing, not being noticed, ignored even by the computers, unless all twenty-eight agree that a certain condition exists and at that point these are independently triggered. Say these are called defensive programs. They are only to be used to safeguard everyone in Anchor
if
all twenty-eight Anchors have had their stabilization programs modified.
''

She sank back on the grass and closed her eyes. "Oh, my God!" She paused a moment, seeming to be asleep, but then said, "I wish I'd never resurrected the old bag."

"Well, you did, and now it's cost us. Who could have foreseen all this though? An external enemy, the Gates sealed, coups and revolutions . . ."

"Every great event in human history results from a combination of unlikely, almost unbelievable circumstances coming together. This is no different. Still, it really screws up our plans."

"Yup. Just blowing the old bag away and taking out Ngomo won't do it all, love. We've got to intercept those modules somehow when they get distributed to the faraway Anchors, if they haven't been already."

"You've contacted Ngomo?"

"Oh, sure. I never could get Tom on the line as quick as I got Al. He was cordial, even conciliatory. Offered a whole set of deals. Didn't believe a word I was saying though. I could tell. He thinks it's just one last desperation gambit on our part—which, in a sense, it is. It's no less real a threat, though, for being that. Fact is, unless we can prove our case, he won't accept the double-cross."

"How can we prove it? He
must
be blind or mad!"

Ryan chuckled. "Just as blind and mad as you and me and Tom and the rest, maybe? We had the power, love, and power breeds arrogance and contempt for the lowly. We were so damned fucking secure with our godlike powers and our master computers feeding us just what our enemies wanted us to hear. Why should he be any different?"

She sighed. "I'm going to sleep on it. A long sleep. Wake me if you get a date and place for the big demonstration."

"How are you gonna get in there, love? You think they won't have that whole damned sector of Anchor sealed off? And if the old bag's in the void, she'll.be under one hell of a big amp force field."

"I'm going in the Gate. She'll return to the capital as soon as it's done to check her work and coordinate her takeover."

"Now, how in
hell
are you gonna do that? Security system, remember? It'll run a tube purge if you trip the second-section lights going in."

She smiled dreamily, half out already. "That's no problem if you know the right codes," she mumbled, and was out.

She remained with Ryan for three days, plotting out the means and methods and contingency plans should she fail. Coydt did not, of course, intend to do the job herself; without the big computer she was unable to really alter her appearance beyond recognition and she would not be welcome in Anchor X-ray. She would see that everyone got through, and cover the rear—and be ready with other plans should failure result.