04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (5 page)

He walked beyond the customs check to another sliding door, which opened for him as he approached, apparently scanning the badge he wore and reacting accordingly. He had worked on a number of classified projects back on Earth, and the system wasn't much different. He often wondered, though, just how effective it was. No system was ever really safe and secure unless it could either be completely automated, which was out of the question after what automation had tried to do to people, or until they could peer into the very heart and soul of everyone working there. That last they probably could do now, but if they did, they wouldn't have anybody left who could be cleared who knew their ass from a hole in the ground.

"Dr. Haller?"

He was startled at the sound of his name, and turned to see a small, thin Chinese woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties, her hair shorter than his own, dressed in casual shirt and jeans. Clipped to the shirt was a badge that seemed to have every color of the rainbow, depending on how the light struck it. "Yes?"

"I'm Lisa Wu. I've been asked to see that you get oriented and settled."

He nodded, feeling a bit less lost and a little more wanted. "Glad to get some assistance. Where do we go from here?"

"Depends on you. If you're tired, we can go directly to your quarters and I'll meet you later for dinner, or, if not, I can show you around a bit and take you over to where you'll be working."

"After six weeks in a tin can I'd like to roam," he responded. "Lead on."

Outside the terminal he stepped, for the first time, into the open. It was a nervous experience, since while he knew it was safe, he also knew just how far the sun was and just how nasty Titan had been in all his schoolbooks.

The sky was a dull gray and not really penetrable, but the temperature seemed quite comfortable, perhaps twenty-four degrees Celsius, with a very slight breeze. The air smelled quite normal, with a few unpleasant odors easily attributed to the spaceport and some nearby other large buildings. He might be somewhere at home on a cloudy day in early spring.

She led him to a small electric cart in one of the parking areas and he got in beside her. All around, others were doing the same.

"Is it usually this busy, Ms. Wu?" he asked her.

"Lisa, please. We all go by first names or nicknames around here. Too many doctors of this and that, too many fancy titles. About the only ones we call by family names or title are the military folks and His Nibs, of course. And if your first name's too common, we sometimes just use the last as a proper name. You are—Tobias, I think?"

He winced. "Toby, please. I had to suffer through Tobias through all my grade-school years and I've never used it unless I had to. Meant to get it changed someday, but never got around to it."

She smiled and nodded. The base itself was both impressive and totally unimpressive at one and the same time. It was a very plain, drab place, although quite large, with massive gray buildings against the gray sky, wide boulevards for the electric cart traffic, lots of folks in lab whites or utility olives, and a singularly ugly and unappealing kind of grass, the best thing that could be said about which was that it was a sickly green.

What was impressive was that it was here at all, and that it hadn't been blasted out of the savage surface of Titan and domed but almost literally created out of thought by some good computers, a lot of hairy programming and applied physics, and a massive amount of bled-in Flux.

She pointed out the various buildings, which had a prefabricated sameness to them. They were, in fact, prefabricated, as were all the man-made things he saw, not by Flux but in the old-fashioned way and trucked in here. These days they could do quite a bit more with it using Flux, but it was more trouble than it was worth considering that it was already here. The aesthetics of the place repelled him—early army camp— but, then, one of the reasons they'd hired him and many like him was to do something about that when the time came.

"Those are dormitories over there," she told him, pointing to a tall building perhaps two square blocks around. "The accommodations aren't all that wonderful, I'm afraid, but you'll have a private room and a decent bed, desk, and a terminal in the room. You share the bathroom with whoever is next door, I fear. The second floor is a dining hall, where meals are served at all hours of the day and night. If you wish breakfast, there's a cafeteria area for it. Lunch, another, and also one each for supper and for just a tea. Over there in that building is a health club, swimming pool, sauna, whirlpool, and other such things. It's quite nice, but all the instructors seem to be army sergeants, so beware before you ask them to work out an exercise program for you."

He chuckled. "I'll remember. Oh—I meant to ask. How did you pick me out of that crowd without a photograph?"

She chuckled. "They told me to look for someone huge who appeared to be an advert for New Zealand wool."

He felt suddenly provincial. It was true though. He was 188 centimeters tall and built solid as a rock, weighing in at a bit over 111 kilograms. He had dark red hair and a neatly trimmed reddish beard, and was given to wearing wool sweaters, slacks, and tough station boots, and his eyes were a steely blue. His face was blocky and square-jawed, and he knew he looked more rugged than handsome, but this hadn't been the first time he'd been teased about looking like a man in some advertising poster.

"I'm originally from Singapore," she told him, "although I spent a great deal of time in Kenya and went to school there and I tend to think of that as home. No matter which one you choose, it's pretty far from here."

He nodded, feeling a little far away from home himself.

"Before we go up to the labs, I'm going to swing by and show you the master Flux Gate," she said. "It's like nothing you've ever seen before."

Because of the physics involved, the Gate, which was the source of all this, was in the center of the enclave. It was enclosed by a high metal wall and its own entrance was guarded by armed military personnel. With a little talking, her clearance seemed enough to get them through.

They parked just inside the entrance and went over to a railing, then looked down at the Gate itself. It was a dish-shaped thing, ribbed so that it provided some footing, leading down to a dark central area.

"We aren't allowed down the hole itself right now, although later on they'll probably take you in. It's a pretty awesome sight in there."

"It's pretty awesome right here," he told her. "And a little scary, if I do admit it."

Deep below here was, he knew, an environmental maintenance computer controlling the air, the temperature, the humidity—everything. Back inside that dark hole, at its very end, was nothing less than a Borelli Point, quite small, yet, because of the forces and energy fields at work, probably very impressive indeed to look at. The Point was constantly opening and closing, far too briefly for any human to see, letting in just a little Flux at a time, as needed, to be converted by the machinery there into whatever was required to retain stability. Its steady operation was a matter of life and death to them, and it was unnerving to consider that all this, and all life, could be wiped out with a single major malfunction of that equipment. It had happened before, although not in the past decade, and not when things were set up this well, and if it failed, there was no emergency procedures that would do any good. The only margin was a matter of a few hours, the time it would take for the temperature to drop below any tolerance and for the population to use up the last of the energy and atmosphere. There were three shuttles, of course, but like the lifeboats on the
Titanic,
they were far too few to save many people.

"A power grid is bonded into the surface here, under everything you see and stand on," she told him. "All our general power comes from here as well, although there's some independent storage supplies for the labs, of course."

They walked back to the electric cart, and for the first time he noticed the small strips dropping from under it to the pavement. Even the cart took its power from the grid.

"We'll go back up to the dorm now and get you settled in, then get something to eat. Your schedule should be up and posted on your terminal under your employee ID. number— the one on the badge. You'll want to sleep and freshen up before you start in. You almost certainly have an audience with His Nibs tomorrow."

His bushy eyebrows rose. "Dr. van Haas?"

"Nobody else. Landscape engineering is one of his passions. You see, he's one of those brilliant minds that can grasp just about anything anyone is doing around here with a minimum of explanation, although he's not expert at any. That's what makes him the ideal administrator—the only one of the big bosses who's not from the unified military commands."

He looked at her and frowned. "And what about you? What do
you
do when you're not meeting adverts for New Zealand wool?"

She laughed. "I am with the Department of History."

"Huh?"

"History. Our job is to record every bit of what is happening here for future reference and understanding, as well as the organized history of the development of the world itself. After we're there, my office will also try to keep the links to Earth's cultures among the young who will be born and raised there, so that they will never be ignorant of or cut off from their heritage. Not a very glamorous job, I'm afraid, and not one that the leadership here or the scientific establishment believes is very important. Fortunately, some of our most affluent backers do."

"History was never one of my strong suits, I'm afraid."

"It should be—and will be." She looked out at the drab grayness of the small research station.  "This,"  she said softly, "
is
history."

Rembrandt van Haas was a tall gaunt man with a lantern jaw and tiny eyes that seemed jet black. Although barely forty, he was mostly bald except for some gray fringes on the sides and in back, and he tended to walk like an old man with a slight stoop. That, and his large hawklike nose, earned him the nickname of The Vulture, but never within earshot of him.

His grandparents had been the Netherlands' ambassador and trade attaché to Indonesia when the great blackout was triggered. Their tiny country survived—it was one of those nations that had evolved under rough conditions and always seemed to survive—but in a wrecked and ruined state. They had gone back, of course, to see what they could do in aid. and coordinated a great deal of the initial relief efforts, but ultimately they had returned to Djakarta, where the children had remained with the small but still cohesive Dutch community there. Shortly after he was born they'd immigrated to Australia, which had better opportunities for them and for him, yet was close enough to the family that it wasn't a complete parting. He always considered Melbourne his home.

He was an only child and spoiled rotten. His mother had been a talented sculptor, his father eventually became a symphony conductor, and she hoped that, he would be the ultimate fusion of the arts and had named him Rembrandt. The few friends he made called him Van, but to almost everyone he was Dr. van Haas.

He had always been somewhat cold and distant to others, and never really related well one-to-one, but it was clear early on that while he was gifted with tremendous intelligence, he was not inclined to the arts but to physics. He had his doctorate at nineteen, and before he was thirty he had designed the regulatory mechanisms for the Borelli Point and presented the first theoretical models of how to terraform with Flux. This had brought him to Westrex, and the Titan Multinational Experimental Station Project had been handed to him. Within five years Titan had proved out all his theories and designs, and he was ready for bigger and better things.

When the first probe had electrified humanity by its message and its data, back when van Haas was just a toddler, it had been followed up with a second, armed with more extensive communications and data-collection equipment. The ships had not emerged near black holes or neutron stars, but they had emerged well out in solar systems containing rather dense stars. It was theorized that the greater forces somehow interacted in the Flux universe and deflected the injected foreign energy to some secondary point. Why one star over another they hadn't figured out. As new trails were blazed there didn't seem to be any common thread, but there was always a solar system at the end.

The first such system discovered was a dry hole, a solar system with a tremendous amount of debris but no planets at all. The star map proved useless, as the computer had complained. Although with imagination it was possible to match patterns here and there with models of the sky, there really were no reference points. It appeared to be impossibly distant, although probably still within the Milky Way somewhere.

The theory behind that was simply that the speed of light in the Flux universe was many times, perhaps thousands of times, faster than in our own, and our injection at (our) speed of light was taken and stepped up to the Flux universe's speed. This meant, quite literally, that the computer probes could be almost anywhere at all, so long as it was a spiral galaxy.

Once something was proved, it was discovered how to do it quicker, cheaper, and better. Unmanned but computer-controlled stations were set up at Base One, as it was called, and from there they shot more arrows. In twenty-five years they had established a road of sorts through Flux from one base to the next, extending through thirteen different systems. The route was serial—everything launched from the solar system went to Base One; everything sent from Base One went to Two, and so on. The road we had built in the Flux universe, which we could neither see, measure, nor understand, seemed quite solid and quite linear.

When van Haas was twenty-nine Base Fourteen was established. It was in fact the next to last. Funding was drying up. Titan looked more promising as a payoff than pure exploration with no immediate utility or return, and the project itself was winding down to a data-collection station, but Fourteen changed all that—and got Titan fully funded as well.