04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (49 page)

"None but you know the revealed truth," she told the worshipful slave. "All others see me as you once did, merely a mortal woman. No one else is worthy of revelation. I will remain with you awhile and teach and guide you. If you keep faith with me absolutely, I will make you my right hand. If you reveal or attempt to reveal my true nature to others, then you will lose my favor and wander the void forever."

"I will never betray thee," Watanabe assured her. "I am thy slave, thy property. I will think only what thou tells me. I will believe only what thou states, even if thou says that black is white and the sky is grass. I will never doubt thee, I swear."

It had taken a computerized team of writers, sociologists, economists, psychologists, legal experts, and all the rest to write a strong and cohesive religious volume that hung together and worked in models. It was not what Watanabe had in mind, not exactly, but it used her ideas as a rough frame. Her own computer experts, having examined the master modules, had found the programs inside incomprehensible but nonetheless had felt that there was no problem in grafting on the contents of the book and its theology. Large numbers of copies could be made in Flux and distributed to the Anchors as needed to reinforce this. It wouldn't be hard. Everyone here in X-ray, for example, had just had a profound and absolute religious experience and revelation themselves.

It was still a shock going into Anchor, and Suzuki conferred almost immediately with her experts. True, the landscape looked the same, and so did the sky and the buildings, but something was wrong.

"Where are the power lines?" she asked them. "Where are the electric cars we left here a few hours ago?"

They had no answer for that any more than they had an
answer as to why the big amps had vanished along with Watanabe's powers—and the pocket those powers supported.

The slow ride in showed other changes not in the plans. Paved roads had become dirt ones. There wasn't a trace of any kind of power or power lines anywhere, and, more upsetting, there was no sign of anything that might have used such power. Farmers, both male and female, young and old, bowed their heads in respect as the hooded figures of Watanabe. and her staff went by, then went back to tilling a field with a primitive plow steered by muscle and pulled by a mule or horse. Their clothing seemed solid but hand-made, and unfamiliar in its look. It also seemed well-worn.

Modern bams now seemed made of wood and quite a bit more basic. The paint was peeling on many of them, and behind the communal houses, which still had something of a cubist, prefabricated look, could be seen what might have been outhouses. There were central wells about, and troughs with hard pumps for the animals.

It was as if they had been transported back into the earlier history of Earth, perhaps the eighteenth century.

By the time they'd reached the capital, a two-day ride, this had been pretty much confirmed. It wasn't precisely an age ago, but it was clearly an amalgam of preindustrial times. Somehow, the program had undone the entire Industrial Revolution, with compromises here and there. More interesting, there hadn't been much of an underground aquifer system for any of the Anchors, since the system was tailored for a small area. All those wells shouldn't work, but they did.

There wasn't even any power in the capital. Oil lamps had replaced electric streetlamps, and crude cobblestones had replaced slick weatherproofed paving. The buildings were still laid out much the same, but they looked quite different. Suzuki, who had a fondness for history, thought of them as Victorian.

What was most interesting were the interviews with the people they came across. Not a single one of them thought any of this was unusual. Not a single one really understood the questions about electric power and machines in general.

They were doing basically the same things they had done before, but in the socio-economic context of this new setting.

Not a one of them remembered things ever being any different. Not a one remembered Earth, or anything about it. When pressed, they really didn't have more than vague ideas of their early background and schooling, having retained memories of their parents and basic formative things but not any clear idea of where or when or whether things had been different. More interesting, this lack of clarity didn't bother any of them in the least.

And they all worshipped that big banded orb in the sky as their material goddess, and they all prayed to it three times a day faithfully. Their basic theology was better than any in the group who'd known of and read, or helped write, that holy book. The grafted-on system had taken whole, much to Suzuki's relief. It had, in fact, taken better than they'd written. The computers had improvised.

About ten percent of the population had been technology-based and no longer fit in this new and quite primitive system. That had left about four thousand men and women with no place or function in society, and no easy way to fit them in. A farmer was still a fanner, a merchant was still a merchant, and a soldier, with weapons that looked out of Ryan's collection, was still a soldier. But programmers weren't programmers anymore, and agents for transportation systems, mass communications, and the rest could not be so generically adapted—and the filters and add-ons had to be pretty basic and generic to cover a wide and diverse population and geography.

Yet every village, every town, had its share of priestesses and assistant priestesses with the proper robes and even copies of the holy book which they seemed to know cover to cover already. There were only makeshift churches now, but communities were getting together to build them for themselves.

The priestesses seemed to have no memories whatever of their former lives, having sprung whole and incarnated as they were. Only the head priestesses in the hierarchy even appeared to have names, all taken from the holy book and all prefaced with "Sister." Lower ranks were without individual identity and simply referred to one another as "Sister."

Suzuki's computer experts were pretty certain that this entire cadre of in-place priestesses came from the technologically unemployed ten percent. Even the men had been transformed into female priestesses, who accepted their lack of individuality and their immaculate conception on the spot as normal things. This was proved out to an extent in the capital, when certain women who'd been in the technocracy and were known to Watanabe and her staff appeared as priestesses themselves.

The central square still looked much as it had. The brick walks were still there, and the nice park, and the administration building, looked essentially unchanged. When they entered it. though, they found its interior quite different.

Only here, inside the building, was there power, but it was used for basic electric lighting and for air-conditioning. The former administrative reception area just inside the door had become a cathedrallike chapel, complete with pews and altar and a set of statues of human-looking forms that almost made Suzuki and some of the others crack up.

You had to look really close and use a little imagination, but if you did they were clearly Admiral Cockburn and the Board of Directors.

"The computers, or somebody, had a real sense of humor," Suzuki noted dryly to her people. It was clear to all of them that someone had done what they had done—grafted on additions to Watanabe's master program, ones that drastically limited the technology level and filled in some of the gaps.

The admin—the
temple
interior had been extensively redesigned, as if it were, in fact, a main temple. All traces of the departments and interfaces and laboratories was gone. The lower areas were now quarters for the sizable staff, and Watanabe's big lab on the second floor had been turned into a luxurious office and suite of rooms.

Some things had not changed. The electrical outlets not needed for heavy equipment were still in place, used for lamps and things like that now. Even the intercom still was in, and it still worked. Security was still in its old offices, although they were a bit more spartan and primitive and the priestesses inside called themselves Wardens of the Holy Mother Church, but they still had control and still could listen in. Visuals, however, were out. Inside the temple, electricity and the telephone had been invented, but not much beyond that, and certainly nothing wireless or battery-operated.

In the sub-basement they found only a small and rather primitive electric transformer plugged into the master power plate, and the plate itself. Suzuki's chief technician, Martha Langtree, tried the plate, and found that she could reach the Gate but not the master control center or the transport and communications level. She reported all that had happened to the waiting Coydt, who was not at all surprised.

"Tell Suzuki it's worse than she thinks," the general ordered. "I've been up top and I've plugged into the communications system and contacted Ryan. Reports are coming in from all over.
Every fucking Anchor is the same way! Every one!
It happened to all twenty-eight Anchors simultaneously. Same technology level, same shit. No computer interfaces, no access to the main control rooms—nothing. No power to the Signals vehicles and weapons either. In fact, even his communications network is down in places and headed out to obsolescence. None of the equipment will draw a charge anymore. Once the units run down, that'll be it. No mass communication at all. Ryan's using what he's got left to contact everyone and get them all to a series of meetings all over the world. His only comment was that we'd better start a horse-breeding program damned fast."

"Anyone know what happened, or how?"

"Yeah. Ryan got the report from someplace down in Region Four. Guy there managed to get a big amp running for a bit before it dissolved on him. We've been done a number by our own beloved computers. They liked our little idea so well, they improved on it, then bugged out. We're back in the nineteenth century, girl. You and me and a lot more are gonna have to decide whether we put on colored robes and join the crowd or go find other jobs. Those damned fucking computers just made us unemployed."

They had expected a massive logistical jam but never had it entered the Hallers' heads that there would be refugees from Anchor.

There they were though—
hundreds
of them—men, women, and children from what appeared to be all the cultures of Anchor Luck, and they were told by the Signals officer in charge of the pocket that they were seeing only the tip of the iceberg.

Not everyone had been happy in Anchor Luck, or had steered clear enough of all the trouble and politics to feel safe and secure there, and many of those had heeded the whispered warnings, made it to the border, and linked up with Signal corps personnel before the big program had been run. Others were more technically proficient or highly educated technicians and engineers who feared the big computers enough that they weren't willing to risk their families and their futures on the warnings being lies.

These included, as well, the staff of the project village and many of the locals who'd stuck with them but had seen their power and dared not disbelieve, and their guardian troops and deserters—lots and lots of deserters—from Ngomo's Anchor Guard.

There were several thousand all told, said the Signals officer, at various pockets established all around the Anchor, and thousands more in similar positions around virtually all the other Anchors.

There were few direct problems. Although the pockets weren't nearly large enough to support these people, the void was quite large if foreboding to them, and a very large number of Sensitives were with each group, so they could be fed and have their general needs tended to. Still, it was a condition that could not go on for long, and these people were scared and restive in the nothingness. The soldiers from the the old commands, however, had readily accepted the command authority of the Signal corps and were effectively guarding and organizing the groups as best as anyone could. It did, however, take weeks to sort out and plan for them, and the continuing failures of communications gear were hampering their efforts to unify their actions worldwide.

Ryan had been meeting with his best technical staff to try to find a way around things. There would be no trouble in a hard-wired transmission system, but it couldn't be secured from the duggers, whose ranks were certain to multiply with the refugees who hadn't linked up with Signals or didn't trust Signals either, and had plunged blindly in. And. of course, the idea of stringing so many million kilometers of wires, poles, switching stations, and the like was staggering, even taking Flux abilities into consideration.

Somebody began to wonder if perhaps the strings, which were a different sort of Flux energy, might not be available to transmit and receive. They were held there, stabilized, by a magnetic field that allowed no tolerance for error and thus gave them a constant—or series of constants, depending on the string's color and consistency. Their problem was finding a consistent power source.

Only after much agony did one engineer look up and say, "We can create water, trees, guns and ammo, clothes, saddles—you name it. Why the hell can't the Sensitives just duplicate some unused portable storage battery units?"

Again, it was as simple as that. Because of the order to conserve at all costs, most field units had a few fully charged unused portable power units. They wouldn't get the transports rolling again—they didn't hold a charge but ran from energy constantly supplied from the grid—but it immediately restored some of their abilities in communications. When word of this was spread, a unified worldwide communications system was again in effect and Ryan and his staff could get reports, analyze data, and make recommendations.

Mike Ryan hadn't been at all pleased by any of this. He had, in fact, urged the continued incarceration or computer alteration of Watanabe—or, he'd suggested, just blow the old bitch's brains out. He had been ignored, and it was not long before he found out why. Coydt hadn't given him any real options. Watanabe was the only way to block Ngomo and retain control. He knew she was playing a dangerous and treasonous game, but it was Coydt and Ngomo versus Cockburn and himself, and Cockburn had as many legions as the Pope, which was zero, and his troops were scattered over an area the size of Asia. He'd gotten feelers from van Haas, of course, but Cockburn had been right about the former director—he was so paranoid that he was determined that opening the Gates was the only way to save New Eden from a fate worse than death. He'd sided with Coydt by default, confident that her Security people could keep this contained, and he'd lost that one too. In a no-win situation, though, he'd come out virtually intact and in control of his element—if he could control the immediate problems.