04. Birth of Flux and Anchor

SOUL RIDER IV:

 THE BIRTH OF FLUX AND ANCHOR

Jack L. Chalker

Copyright © 1985 by Jack L. Chalker

ISBN: 0-812-53284-8

e-book ver. 1.0

To David and Jessica and Adam and Randy and Meridel

and AnnaBeth and Kristina and Jason and Andy and Reeny

and all the rest of the next generation.

I hope we keep the world in one piece for you all.

A Prefatory Note from the Author

This book is a novel created not out of whole cloth but rather out of research notes for another book. That book,
Spirits of Flux and Anchor,
has be published in three volumes by Tor Books (as the Soul Rider series, Books One, Two, and Three, the first under the original title, the second as
Empires of Flux and Anchor,
and the third as
Masters of Flux and Anchor.
Not only was it always intended that those volumes be read first, it was not my intention to write this book at all.

However, the success of those three books, together with my inability to find a proper place to fully draw the background detail that created and shaped the world and its characters without violating continuity, and reader requests, convinced me that not only should this background be given, but that there was a pretty good (I hope) novel in it. It certainly beats dry appendices and genealogical charts.

If you have not read the previous three books, it will not spoil that novel to read this one—this one is set twenty-six hundred years earlier and understandably doesn't have much dramatic continuity with the big three-volume novel nor much in the way of overlapping characters. Its tone, in fact, is rather different. Still, I believe you will find it more satisfying overall if you read the first three before this one, and I urge anyone not having done so to go now and buy them at your local paperback bookstore (and don't let them tell you they are not available!).

This novel fits in well with the overall theme of the big novel, addressing an aspect of the series theme not covered in the three prior books.

Earlier reviewers could not decide if the Soul Rider volumes were fantasy or science fiction, as if that made a difference. I will answer that: it's a novel. As Arthur Clarke put it, any technology that is far in advance of our own will appear to us as magic. Or, as Chalker puts it, magic is a term one uses when one does not understand how it is done.

I will leave it to the reader to decide if this saga is fantasy or science fiction and if that makes any difference. Here is how World works, and the seeds of what it would become socially and politically. Not everything, however, is laid out plain and fancy in front of you, and not every little detail is explained. Readers may speculate after reading this how any character in the future could be named Coydt van Haas, for example. As I said, I write novels. I don't do genealogical charts.

Jack L. Chalker                                     Manchester, Maryland

1

HISTORY LESSON

One of the most momentous events in human history was when the combined talents of eleven Ph.D.'s combined, after many failures, to at last make a crude ashtray.

The laboratory looked like many conventional laboratories, with numbers of white-coated scientists and technicians staring grimly into monitors or checking large-screen readouts while trying mightily not to spill coffee into the works. There was no real way to tell that this laboratory was not on Earth, nor anywhere near it, but was in fact orbiting like a small planetoid in the vast and comparatively empty space between the asteroid belt and Jupiter. There had been a great deal of debate on whether or not to allow it even this close to Earth, but, as usual, competitiveness and economics had won out over caution. Nor was this the only lab out there giving this experiment a try; no one was quite certain, for example, where the Soviet and Chinese labs were beyond the certainty that they were not on Earth. Cost or not, they weren't stupid.

Having managed two hundred years without destroying the entire human race deliberately, they were not about to chance doing it by accident. A human race clever enough to invent new and bloody ways of waging war without pushing nuclear buttons was neither one to stay away from the potential power unleashed here nor one to fail to respect that power.

Far away from the lab, in its own separate orbiting module thousands of kilometers off, the actual devices used in the experiment resided, although because of the type of hookup, the screens, the allowed-for computer delays, they were as close as right there.

Dr. Amahl Kybitoki, a small, nervous man who looked and dressed more like he was going to a political rally in some small Asian country than the head of the most expensive and ambitious project in human history, paced up and down, checked everything one more time, then picked up a small wireless microphone. A large digital clock above the wall of viewing screens was frozen at 00:09:00.

"Systems have checked," he announced to them all, the tension and nervousness creeping into his oddly accented English. "Recommence countdown at seven eighteen sixteen. Places, everyone!"

Down below, two individuals moved forward and took down large helmets attached by pivoting arms to control consoles and lowered them carefully onto their heads as assistants helped and checked for fit. The readout clocks in front of them both read 07:18:14, with a seconds counter counting forward. The two helmeted figures now relaxed and looked forward, apparently at nothing in particular. One was a thin, young, attractive black woman, the other a middle-aged oval-faced man with Mediterranean features. Both had shaved their heads for their duty.

The clocks of the pair reached 07:18:16:00. Instantly the big countdown board that all could see beyond the consoles began to count down the last nine minutes.

"Master locked in on schedule," came a woman's voice over the intercom.

"Overrider locked in," said a man immediately after. "All systems normal."

The status reports were for the observers and those not directly participating, such as Dr. Kybitoki, the project director. They could only pace and watch and sweat and wait.

It was a long nine minutes for everyone; it always was. Up to now they'd done this more than four hundred times— Kybitoki could give the exact number in a moment—and had destroyed a number of satellite labs, had countless times when there had been no payoff at all, and had at least two scares that had threatened their very existence.

The operation was entirely computer-controlled; the human monitors, with the exception of the two directly wired into the computer system, were there mostly as witnesses and to make certain that all that was being done was being recorded and transmitted well in-system. If anything went radically wrong and they no longer existed, there had to be a complete record of everything that went wrong to keep it from happening again. Still, they gave the operation more of a human dimension than it actually had, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that every thought in that room was right there, working the experiment with the machines.

The counter finally passed three other critical points without shutting down—even Kybitoki couldn't say how many times
that
had happened—and now every pair of lips in the room seemed to count off the final ten seconds, those whose job didn't require monitoring screens and equipment staring not only at the big clock but at the big screens themselves.

What they showed looked very much like the inside of a bank vault, but a vault that was surrounded by equipment that seemed haphazard and without much purpose; it looked, in fact, like an electrical engineer's spare-parts room. In its center, and on center screen, however, was a small round plate about the size of a dinner plate but made of an incredibly smooth yet dull metallic compound. A similar plate was suspended by wires and a pivoted arm about a meter above the lower one.

Suddenly, the voices came thick and fast as the counter reached all zeros. Of course, the status report lagged far behind the actual events, which occurred too quickly for even the cameras to catch.

"We've got a good punch!"

"Confirm! Duration sixty-two milliseconds!"

Kybitoki held his breath. He had hated to keep a Borelli Point open for that long, but shorter durations hadn't let in enough. They'd been far too cautious since holding it open almost a full second and almost blowing it and them away and creating a new force in this orbital plane. Computer photographs of this event, taken every trillionth of a second—almost time enough to catch the space between atoms in a mass—would show what had happened in detail. For now, it was enough that they and the lab were still there, and the Point had been successfully closed and sealed, but not before the vacuum in the remote lab had drawn from it what they wanted.

If only it were a sufficient
amount
of what they wanted . . .

It was there, now, visible between the plates on the screen, held suspended in that magical meter of nothingness by computer-generated electromagnetic forces whose nature was only dimly understood.

It looked vaguely like a cylindrical jar filled with thick smoke, although there was no jar there. The shape was determined by the shape and distance of the plates. Inside the smoke, the detailed picture, magnified hundreds of times on the wall screen, showed a vague pinkish coloration with what seemed to be thousands of tiny little golden sparks inside, winking on and off in a random pattern.

There was a mild cheer, but no real celebration as yet. They had gotten this far a number of times before. There was, however, a sense of relief; they had the substance they fished for, the Point was closed, and their forces holding and imprisoning it were adequate to the job.

Perhaps most frustrating to most of the men and women in the room was the fact that they had very little to do with it at this point. All the preliminary planning and work had been done with the computers; now they could only watch to see if, this time, they had guessed right. Now only two were active, or interactive, participants in the experiment, and even they weren't sure what they were doing.

"Computers are locked on," reported one man at his own panel. "Go to introduce anomaly."

On the screen a mechanical hand could be seen dipping down next to the area with the trapped, shimmering energy, and when it came back up, it bore a small object, very crudely fashioned but unmistakably a small ashtray. It was the pride and joy of the seven-year-old daughter of the silent man in the other helmet, fashioned by tiny hands as best she could, then glazed and fired by her elementary-school teacher as the fruition of the girl's class project. Crude, lumpy, and irregular, and covered with a pretty sickening shade of yellow glaze, it even bore the fingerprints of its small maker.

A small arm swung around, its viselike protrusion bearing opposing plates, one top, one bottom, in many ways similar to the device now holding the strange, shimmering energy field. The arm pivoted until it was exactly centered on the ashtray, then power was applied to the plates. Carefully, the mechanical arm let go of the ashtray, although it was perhaps twenty centimeters off the tabletop, and moved back and out of the way. The ashtray remained suspended between the two plates, held by magnetic forces working with the magnetic particles in the glaze.

Now the arm moved forward, tilting a bit as it did so, so that its jaws were perpendicular to those holding the energy field, and then it closed on and entered that field, centering the ashtray in the midst of the shimmering plasma. Although submerged in the strange energy, the form of the ashtray could still be seen.

"We have a lock-on!" the technician reported, the excitement in his voice merely communicating what everyone else suddenly felt. "Withdrawing anomaly protractor."

Slowly, the arm that had held the ashtray suspended moved away, leaving the small object suspended in the energy field, held now by the same forces containing the energy itself.

The black woman with the helmet took a deep breath, then let some of it out. "Activating analytical programming."

Rapidly, the ashtray seemed to shrink until it was finally too small to be seen—or, perhaps, had vanished. Within a few seconds, however, it was back, first as a dark spot, then growing to its former size.

There was now some mild exclamations of joy from the various scientists and technicians in the room, but it lapsed back into tense silence as the other arm was swung back into the mass and then extracted the ashtray, handed it off to the mechanical arm, and then all was as it had been again.

Below the table the arm was allowing every sort of instrument to check and double-check the ashtray, comparing size, weight, even the magnetic force in the glaze, as well as the most minute irregularities in its highly irregular surface. Ultimately, although there was no way to be absolutely certain, the computers pronounced the ashtray absolutely the same one and absolutely unchanged.