04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (27 page)

They settled down for some prepacked food and canteen water, then prepared to bed down for the night.

Gorton was right about one thing: with little to do and the muffled silence and dim, eerie electrical light, the mind tended to play tricks on you. More than once both of them found themselves turning quickly around, a reflexive reaction to something seen, or imagined, in the corner of the eye. The distance took on odd shapes and forms, and it was impossible not to give them some kind of unreasoned paranoiac cause. Alone, it would be absurdly easy to go mad in this place, to be consumed by your own innermost fears awashed only in loneliness and spatial disorientation. Signals, Haller decided, earned every bit of brag they could muster for working in this environment so well.

The air was dead, and it was hot as hell, but Connie had little shivers. She wanted to talk to somebody before going to sleep, if she could sleep in this sort of place. "I think I know what you mean now, brudda," she told the corporal. "How can you stand it for weeks on end?"

"You get used to it," he told her. "We had simulators that were at least as bad back on Titan, maybe even worse, the only thing different being that you always knew you were in a simulator and somebody was monitoring you and ready to pull you out. Even the officers, up to the brigadier himself, have to survive all the training. That's one reason I found I could stand it. Didn't want to fail at doing something a fifty-one year-old brass hat managed. He's the one that dreamed up the final test here, the one you pass or either die or wind up in Logistics or administration."

"Huh?"

"They take you out twenty kilometers from Anchor, sedated and stripped stark naked. You wake up and have to make it back in. If you fail completely, a little sensor in your tooth aligned to the grid gives you a chance at being located."

"Jesus! But, you can't see anything, smell anything, or have any landmarks! How do you get back?"

"Well, there's a trick to it, a trick nobody really tells you and one that not every bloke can master. Them that can make it back."

Haller, too, was fascinated. "What's the trick?"

Gorton gave a wry chuckle. "If you can find it out, maybe we'll fit you for a black hat, eh?" And, with that, he prepared to get a good night's sleep.

The corporal bedded down near the horses. He wanted to make certain that he was on hand in case anything spooked or bothered them, and was sensitized to it, but the odor was a bit much for both of the engineers and they moved away far enough to dampen out the odor and noise but near enough to spot the corporal and the horses and the remains of the haystack. It also, as it proved, was far enough to dampen the corporal's very loud snoring.

"Well,
he
may well sleep in that uniform, but I'm hot and sore and
I'm
going to strip," Connie told Toby, and proceeded to do so. She then arranged one of the saddlebags as a pillow and lay down. "It's really soft and warm," she told him. "Not bad."

Toby Haller was looking more at her than the ground. "Not bad, indeed." he murmured to himself. He tried it Gorton's way and decided she was right. The heat of the ground was magnified by clothing, and if he had any modesty left after the rainstorm, it certainly wasn't around Connie, and who the hell else was going to stumble over them here?

He was very tired, but his muscles hurt like hell, particularly in the thighs and calves, and he found it next to impossible to sleep. The bag wasn't much of a pillow, and even putting his shirt on top didn't help. He finally pushed it out of the way and lay flat on the soft, springy ground, just staring into the void. To avoid the phantoms there, he shifted and looked over at Connie and tried to get his mind to go blank. It was impossible to tell if she was asleep or not.

Slowly, he lapsed into an odd, hypnoticlike state between sleeping and waking, fixated on her form. The aches and pains faded into nothingness, and he seemed to be almost floating.

After more time passed, he became aware of a sound—no, not a sound, but
something
—all around him. It was unlike anything in his experience, a seething, pulsing aliveness that could not be pinned down or confined. It was as if—as if the insulating ground material were somehow human skin, and beneath it he was hearing the rush of blood along the veins and arteries and the distant pumping of the heart.

The void,
he thought suddenly,
is not a void at all. It's alive! And anything in contact with it is a part of it.

He stared again at Connie's form, and saw an aura there around her contours, as if a black border perhaps ten centimeters thick had been drawn separating her from the Flux discharges, which seemed far more numerous; seemed, in fact, to be coalescing around her.

Go with the flow, go with the flow,
the strange sensations all about him seemed to say, and he succumbed to it and it seemed to sweep him along toward her, although neither he nor she moved.

Go with the flow. . . .

And then he was one with her body, at the same time his own eyes saw her covered with and outlined in countless tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of electrical flashes. The pattern was far too complex for his mind to comprehend or even fully realize, but he knew somehow that it was logical, even mathematical. The pattern, he realized, was linked to the ground, to the grid—that was why her head was so indistinct, lying on her saddle pillow, while the rest was so clear. The grid, however, also linked her to him in some strange way, and the both of them to something infinitely more complex and wondrous blow the surface.

He turned her body with her own hands and muscles and she pushed away the bag-pillow and settled back onto the ground itself, now wholly ablaze and engulfed in the sparkling life. He could repress nothing now, nor did he want to do so. He was Toby Haller, yet he felt Connie's body as he did his own, and he felt impelled to join the two in physical union and there was no impulse to stop him. Her eyes opened, but he saw himself over her, through her eyes, as well as her through his own. He felt every bit of the stimulation he gave her, and that she gave him; he was both. He felt both giver and receiver, and he joined with her body and every cell of both was erotically alive. He had no idea how long it lasted, but the dual waves of ecstasy and the dual massive orgasms were unbelievable.

He felt totally spent when it was done, but he had no regrets, no shame. He made his way back to his own area and lay down once more, just staring at her.

Go with the flow, go with the flow. . . .

To the refrain of the strange life around him, he slept.

10

THE HUMAN FACTORS

Gorton awakened him gently in the morning, and he got up, feeling like he still needed another week's sleep but oddly without pain or discomfort either. There was, in fact, almost a warm glow inside.

He remembered the previous night, but wasn't sure how much was real, if any, and how much was a dream, a reaction to this eerie place. The genital region had some dried-on material he had to wash off, but certainly if it was a dream it would have been a really wet one.

Connie was also in a surprisingly good mood, and sponged herself off before putting her clothes back on. There was something
different
about her, Haller thought, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. It was something in the way she moved, certainly—sexier, more erotic even, but that just might be the aftereffects of his dream. She seemed
younger
somehow, more twentyish than in her thirties. He knew it was more than imagination when she put her clothes back on. The pants seemed ill-fitting, while the day before they'd been about right, and the shirt was much too small, ending above her navel by some distance. The material shrank to fit, but didn't enlarge again unless thoroughly washed and heat-dried.

She came over to him, looking puzzled. "Toby—do I look any different to you?"

"Um—now that you mention it, a little. I thought it was just me. Your more than ample proportions seem, well, more ample, and you look ten years younger."

"I
feel
ten years younger, at least. You don't look so bad yourself, by the way. Trimmer, leaner, more muscles showing."

They both looked over at Gorton, who seemed to take no notice and had changed not a bit. He was preparing prepacks for breakfast. "You think maybe there's something out here they're not telling us about?" he wondered aloud.

"I think there is. I wonder what Special Projects's gonna think about
this
?"
She paused a moment. "By the way— thanks for the fuck last night. I really needed it."

He was shocked and startled beyond words. Then it
had
happened—and she'd known it! Finally, his mind started to assemble what he knew into place and he asked, "Um— about last night. Did you feel anyting—unusual? I mean, strange?"

"Well, it was the
best
one I ever remember, and that's saying a lot. I'm not saying that because you're the boss either.''

"It's been a while for me," he said honestly. "I guess it was just all built up inside."

"Me too," she told him. "Jeez, I still feel turned on. I feel like a hooker after a month's vacation. If you or laughing boy over there made half a pass, I'd tumble even in
that
hay."

Gorton seemed to take no notice of what they perceived as their changed appearances, and Haller decided to see if he could put some things together. "I think I know how you got back to Anchor on your test," he commented almost casually.

The corporal looked up. "Yes?"

"You go with the flow."

Gorton stared at him for a moment. Connie looked at them both as if they were nuts.

"You felt it even your first night out?" the signalman asked him.

"I did. What I want to know is what it was."

The man in black sighed. "Only guesses. We're dealing with new forms of energy here, remember, and a whole new technology. I'm no physicist, but the thinking right now is that the grid network is more than the network it was designed to be. We tied twenty-eight of the biggest super computers ever together, gave them access to all the power they wanted, and made them self-repairing and gave them a lot of autonomy in order for them to maintain an environment humans could live in. Somehow, we don't exactly know how, some folks get sensitized to the energy constantly going beneath us. Best guess always was that the more you interfaced with the grid, the more sensitized you got to it, but that don't always hold true."

Connie looked at both of them quizzically. "Would you two mind telling me what the hell you're talking about?"

The corporal shook his head slowly. "Ma'am, it's not something you can explain. Either you got it or you don't. You might get it yet, if you're out here enough."

"Why can't I feel it now?" Haller asked him.

"You can if you concentrate real hard. Hardly nobody loses it once they got it. The trick is to have enough concentration and presence of mind to block it out completely when you don't need it."

"So, out here naked and alone, if you bring it up and find the most powerful signal and follow it back, you get home. The receive lines are mounted on top of the send lines, so you always just follow the strongest signal in the direction in which it grows even stronger."

"That's about it. Give, the man a black hat. Maybe you oughta think about switching over to our R and D department when you get this Anchor up and running."

Haller didn't reply. He was beginning to wonder what else he didn't know and someone else did. How many independent research programs were there here investigating things unknown to even the top technical people? And how much, if any, did they talk to each other?

"Are you two trying to tell me that you somehow hooked into the computer network?" Connie asked skeptically. "That's a little hard to take, I think. I mean, no matter how sophisticated our big machines are, they're totally different than the human brain. They might be programmed by other human brains to meddle, but alone, out here, at random . . . ? Uh-uh. There's no scientific basis whatsoever for it."

They began to pack up and ride on, continuing the conversation as they did so.

"There's a scientific explanation for everything," Haller told her. "It just shows that even with all this power there are vast gaps in what we know. As usual, what we
think
we know isn't the same as what's true. You stand here on a world that not long ago was a barren chunk of space debris, on your way to create in a matter of minutes a garden of space debris, on your way to create in a matter of minutes a garden from a wasteland with some expert commands and directions and the help of some mighty powerful machines, and you're saying something's
impossible
!"

"I don't believe in magic," she stated firmly.

"What is magic but a term the ignorant use to describe anything their present knowledge and means of measurement cannot explain or duplicate? Come on—let's get moving or we'll be here another day!"

It was only a seven hour ride, but subjectively it seemed endless, and because of the damping and the need to follow Gorton there was little chance to do anything but think and brood. At a break, though, he did manage to get Gorton aside for a brief period and whisper a few questions.

"All right—she's physically changed from yesterday, and she says I am too. Is it just in our minds, or is there something more you're not telling me?"

"I met you all too briefly yesterday and we were off," the corporal noted. "After that there was a lot of business to attend to and I had the lead, so I really didn't notice all that much. Still, it's possible. Happens with some folks, anyway, for good or ill. Don't look like either of you had any changes for the worse, so don't complain."

"But it didn't change you at all," he noted. "Or did it?"

"I've had lots of training, mate. It's all mental. Those who ride the void got control. They use it when it's convenient or necessary, otherwise they tune it out. If you're the type that lets the boredom open the way to you, then you're better off in an Anchor job. We had eleven hundred troopers come in here, and now we're down to maybe five or six hundred who can handle things. That's what's taking so long getting this bleedin' place all wired and connected up. But the ones that can handle it, they're gonna be the elite. They're gonna be the best, mate. Bet on it."