01. Spirits of Flux and Anchor (39 page)

There was little resistance because it was so obviously futile, and while whole families wept as the conquerors marched by they could not resist these battle-hardened veterans with anything but

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insults and more tears. Without guns, which were outlawed in Anchor, there was no chance of even inflicting a minor blow. Most of the population seemed dazed by it all, in fact, for this sort;-of thing simply did not and never had happened as far as they knew. The compact between Flux and Anchor upon which the church and its people de- pended was suddenly in ruins, and it was a simply inconceivable event. Anchor's own children, cast into Flux as a part of that compact, now returned to it-

The Temple was the one trouble spot, and not easy to take. It was built like a fortress of materi- als so hard that diamonds could not scratch it, and it was guarded from within by a force of armed wardens with electronic traps and devices. Bronze doors, however, needed far less than diamonds to blow apart; they needed only a good, solid shot from a single cannon.

Inside, confused, frightened, and dazed, the Tem- ple staff prepared for the inevitable rapid fall. Be- hind still-locked doors piles of papers and other documents were burned, and the administrative section worked feverishly as the invaders conquered level after level to rid the Temple of hard evidence of its activities and files. They did as best they could, but they could not destroy it all.

One figure slipped through a little-known rear passage and went down a long series of old 'and dusty metal stairs and through doors that creaked and groaned from disuse to the sub-basement. For a moment it stood there, looking at the small power transformer network buzzing away, then walked over to the grid, reached down into a large bag, and picked out a small rectangular cube with two small buttons on it. The figure then pressed both buttons simultaneously and tossed the brick into the metal cage hiding the wires and transformers.

Quickly now she went up to the section of wall

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that seemed boarded, pressed on two spots, and the boards swung away on hinges to reveal a door. She did not wait for a key, but took a pistol and shot out the lock, then kicked the door in, then flipped on the light switch, climbed over the rub- ble of crumbled concrete and masonry to a spot in the rear of the room with chalk marks on the floor. She looked down at them, pistol still in hand, and mentally traced the strange and incomprehensible design. In an instant she was standing not in the room, but in front of the great machine that guarded the gate to Hell.

She paused to stare at it all for a while, now feeling no great hurry. She had never been here before, and the sight was awesome. There was something almost suicidally hypnotic about that swirling mass at the tunnel's end, giving one the same feeling as she might get standing on an in- credibly tall spot. She turned, though, and walked up the tunnel, each section lighting as she passed, until she reached the wire grid to climb up and out. She realized how badly out of condition she'd become in climbing up and out, but she made it to the bottom of the saucer-shaped depression, then walked up the slope to the metal ladder there.

"There is no way out for you," said a voice from above, at the top of the ladder, echoing across the depression and sounding ghostly and almost in- human. She stopped, and instead of trying the ladder stepped back from it, pistol still in hand, and looked up.

"Who's there?" she called. "Show yourself!"

A somewhat familiar figure moved to the edge of the ladder and looked down at her sadly. "You have been in Anchor too long. That pistol cannot harm me here."

She fired anyway, emptying the entire clip. The figure at the top of the ladder just stood there, unmarked and unmoved. In disgust, she tossed the

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pistol away, and it fell with a clatter and rolled back down the depression.                    :

"I know you!" she shouted, frustration buildipg within her. "Who are you?"                  .;

"You ordained me Sister Kasdi," came the reply. "What do you want with me now?" called back Sister General Diastephanos.

"I want to know why. You weren't like Sister Daji, a professional undercover agent. Nobody shot you full of drugs and gave you orders to turn. You're the same woman who left Pericles full of commitment and dreams."

The Sister General looked up at her in disgust. "You're barely nineteen, I think. What can you possibly know? Your ordination was a political show for the benefit of the masses. You have no background in theology, let alone management. What gives you the right to judge me?"      '.

Cass sighed. "The same right Haldayne had to murder and rape and destroy- The same right you, in the end, used to. pervert the scripture and rule Anchor Logh. / have the power, and that gives me the right."

That stopped the Sister General cold for a moment. Finally she said, "You ask me why. Why are you doing this? Because you see a church cor- rupted and a people forever stuck in one place. You can't change it. They make you so accountable, send wardens from Holy Anchor to keep tabs on you, to eliminate you if need be. You play the Queen of Heaven's game, and send her her dues, or you don't play at all. So you settle back and enjoy being dictator of your own little world, becoming fat and corrupt like the whole rotten church, or you do something. Anyone who is for the over- throw of the church is on the side of the frustrated. There is less difference between the Seven and the Nine than you realize."

"There is less difference between the Seven and

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the church than you seem to realize," Cass came back.

"You are so young," the Sister General sighed. "You may win your little revolution. It's happened before -- oh, yes. But each time a better wizard comes along, or age and all those people you de- pend on to keep your revolution going begin to enjoy their own power, and become corrupted by it. You can't keep tabs on it all, nor can you live forever. The church, however, has had two thou- sand years of practice. It will entice and corrupt those it can, ultimately conquer the rest with its power to unify, and, if it cannot conquer you, it can wait you out. You can't win, but Haldayne can. When you are finally old enough and frus- trated enough to realize this, you will see that the Seven is the only hope humanity has."

"You might be right," Cass admitted, "but I have seen the Seven at their worst, and there is no hope at all if you are. I choose to believe that you are not right, not so much because I deny your view of human nature, which is so well proved out in both Anchor and Flux, but because the alterna- tives are too terrible to bear. If, in fact, we cannot win, then maybe the human race deserves what it gets, whether it's the church, or Haldayne, or Hell itself. But if we don't try to win, then we most certainly deserve it all."

"You speak the beautiful dreams of youth, but, in the end, you will become me."

"Perhaps you need to have some of those beauti- ful dreams of youth restored yourself. Come up to me, and surrender yourself to my visions. We can use your vast knowledge and experience to avoid the same mistakes." She put out her hand over the top of the ladder.

Sister Diastephanos shook her head sadly. "I am too old, and it is too late, for me to join a fool's parade. But, tell me, please -- how did you know?

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Even poor Daji had no idea she was doing my work."

"She knew, I think, as she died. She understock! the depths and layers of Haldayne's tricky mind, although the full plot only came to her when he so coldly allowed her to be sacrificed on his orders. There are no windows in the Temple. The order had to be given by intercom from inside by some- one who knew exactly who and what Daji really was, fast enough for a messenger to signal out the front doors before we got there. But, clearly, noth- ing on the scope or scale of the excavations in the basement, the vanishing of novices, the addition .of new personnel smuggled in through the drainage pipes in the waif, could have remained hidden from the wardens and the Temple at large without your knowledge. Your own spies, and the spies of the Queen of Heaven, would have betrayed it."

She sighed. "When I saw Pericles I knew that she would eventually figure it out. That was why I gave the order to hit her first, then Daji. But Haldayne was outside, and he reversed the orders. I knew there would be only one chance to get Pericles, but Daji was far more of a threat to Haldayne." She paused a moment, took a deep breath, then said, "I believe my time is past now. I could not bear to witness your childlike innocence destroyed." With that she turned and walked back to the black, gaping hole.

Cass gasped and cried, "No! Come with us! We will forgive all! This need not happen!"

The Sister General paused a moment, then shook her head sadly, and descended the mesh to the floor of the tunnel. Cass scrambled down the ladder, but had barely reached the bottom when there was a sudden flare of bright energy from the hole, and a single, agonized scream, and then silence and darkness once more.

She resisted the impulse to run to the tunnel,

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knowing that the Guardians would not harm her but she decided not to. There would be nothing there. Instead she turned and started back up the ladder, but as she did she began to do something that Sister General Diastephanos would never have understood.

She wept, and repeated prayers for the newly dead.                                    - -

20

QUESTIONS

We are the spirits of Flux arfd Anchor ....

"You'll have to excuse the candlelight," Cass apologized. "We're trying to get a whole network of oil lamps set up so we can at least function."

The wizard Mervyn nodded and took a chair. "Perfectly all right. Still, it's times like these when one appreciates the ease of Flux. Just snap a finger and, poof, all the light you need. I often think that our ancestors must have taken electric power for granted. Otherwise, why have such a building with no windows and no manual air ducts?" It did smell stale and musty, but maintenance personnel as- sured them that enough air was moving due to pressure differentials to pose no major health hazards, although they had closed down the least ventilated parts of the Temple.

"We'll have it again some day," she told him. "Already we are scouring the land for experts who can rebuild the system, and there are enough Flux wizards to duplicate the damaged parts once we have them sorted out. Some of your people have already taken a look at it and told me that it is theoretically possible to have far larger storage of this energy and even transfer it by wire to smaller storage and distribution points. If possible, I would

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like to one day see the whole of Anchor Loeh wired

11 up.

"I told you that energy physics was one of my hobbies. I'll take a good look at everything before I leave and then research it in Pericles. We can copy the books well enough, if only we can find a few good trained technicians to translate them into fact. In the meantime, how's it going on your front?"

"I've never seen so many people so eager to change sides. It's amazing the level of cooperation we're getting."

"Human nature, that's all. Already the sermons are going out telling how Haldayne and the Seven had corrupted the Sister General herself, and how you are here to restore normalcy. They know you are an ordained high priestess, and things have been getting back to normal, so they'll buy it. No, I'm talking about the long run."

"Well, Sister Tamara will be installed as the new Sister General. It will be a popular choice, since she's from the Anchor, and we can count on everyone to minimize the age factor. The first thing we'll start doing is short transfers of Temple per- sonnel in small groups from here to the Temple in Hope, where we'll sort the had, the good, and the reclaimable. Once we do the Temple, we'll do the parishes one by one."

"They won't all be easy to convert. Not deep down. Not voluntarily, anyway."

"I know that- But I and a number of others have been reading every single bit of scripture bit by bit, and there is a scholarly team compiling in- formation. Although the whole project will take years, I've already directed them to specific areas and found some very fine and useful things. Vows/ for example. In order to come back to Anchor as a priestess, all will be required to undergo the sacra- ments of ordination and conferrence once again in Hope, but this time with the knowledge that a

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binding spell will be cast at the same time. This spell will simply render them incapable of violat- ing their vows for any reason, nor any added vow they may be required to take in the future. I don't' think it will be long before we have a purified" church here, no matter what their intent."

He chuckled. "Clever, and effective. And you?"

"I am going to be quite busy working with oth- ers on the restructuring of this society. Barbarities like the Paring Rite must be replaced by more humane practices, and we must remove this deep prejudice against Flux and its people on the part of Anchor-folk. The worst offenders we can help in Flux itself; for the rest, it will be slow, but I am leaning towards a required trip by all schoolchildren of certain ages from here through the void to Hope. Rooting it out in the young is the best hope for a true breakdown of fear and prejudice. We're just beginning to set up our own training system in Hope, and we will need far more instructors of wizard caliber. Of course, any priestesses who show talent in that direction will be redirected there. I'm going to be very, very busy."