Masters of Flux & Anchor

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Oh, my God!” said Mervyn Haller.

  15

  THREE BLIND CONFERENCES

  The Seven who Come Before, also known as the Seven Who Wait, did not meet very often. All were extremely powerful wizards, masters of their craft, and each had large staffs to handle their worldwide enterprises. The current Chairman, by majority approval, was Zelligman Ivan, and he looked his colleagues over with a serious eye and grave expression.

  “There is no need to tell you that this is the most important meeting in the history of this association,” Ivan began. “Until now, we were more or less playing the game, mouthing our ideals and our goals and using our own and each other’s power and wit to comfortably strengthen our position. And we are powerful—we truly control, through well-concealed webs, much of World, with such finesse they don’t even know it. Discord among us is minimal; none of us has been fatter, richer, more powerful or more content than now. Our enemies delude themselves that things are as they were, but we know differently. And for what? Allegedly for our ultimate goal of opening the Gates and attaining more than human beings could imagine.”

  “That’s all true,” Rosa Haldayne put in, “but so what? I admit I’m kind of bored with it all, but considering the alternatives boredom is not too high a price to pay.”

  Ivan nodded. “Now, however, my dear Rosa and you others, we face a dilemma, a crisis, a decision point that all of us have paid lip service to throughout our long lives but never really felt we’d reach or have to deal with it. The time is close at hand. The technology exists and has been checked out. We are facing a bald fact: within this decade, and perhaps within the next couple of years, we can open the Hellgates. There is no doubt of that fact, and I have checked and rechecked my computations. Oh, events might delay it, or hasten it, but the decade figure is a worst-case one. I don’t mean it will be easy to accomplish, but if we are to do it we must lay the groundwork for it now. If we do, success is inevitable within that decade. And that, of course, brings up the ultimate question—do we really want to?”

  Chua Gabaye, a stunning woman dressed in silver and black silks, stood up and pointed a finger at Ivan. “What do you mean by that crack?” she demanded. “Is this some sort of silly test?”

  “No, my lovely Chua, it’s no test at all. It is instead an honest question. You all know that I met and talked at some length with Mervyn of the Nine, and during that time he asked me why in the world I wished to open the Gates. I gave him our pat answer, but, of course, it was just that—the pat answer, ready when needed even among ourselves and used to justify all our actions to ourselves and to any others we felt compelled to answer at all. It got me to wondering just how much of our ritualistic dedication was simply self-justification, and whether we really would open the Gates if the opportunity arose. I finally, after much agonizing, concluded that I would, but I have been a part of this group for centuries and I must honestly say that I only really decided a few years ago. There can be no deviation. If six act properly and one hesitates, even at the last moment, those six, at least, are dead. I want each of you to address that question and answer it, because if all of you really want it, I can tell you how it will be done.”

  “And what if somebody balks, or doesn’t want to give the right answer?” Gifford Haldayne asked him. “We lie a lot anyway, you know. It’s part of doing business. Why should we be expected not to lie now when we sometimes even lie to ourselves?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” Ivan responded. “Although I have decided that I want the Gates opened, it is not something that I feel any imminent compulsion to do. If any of you vote against, then I, too, will vote against. The technology that is now there will continue to be there, and it will get better as time goes on. That’s tempting. I will not support any move to oust anyone who votes against, and I will be on their side if any move or attack is made upon them. The reason is simple: I wish an honest answer.”

  For a while they were silent, pondering his statement, but finally Ming Tokiabi spoke. “Zelligman, I must admit the truth of what you say. The game has been amusing, the rewards great, but faced with actual checkmate, a total victory—I don’t know. Perhaps it would help if you explained why you wish to have the Gates opened.”

  “Fair enough,” Ivan agreed. “I have multiple reasons, and they’re compelling to me. First, as Chua said, I am bored. I have attained as much power and wealth as I believe it is possible for one individual to hold on World. The game is amusing only so long as there is a chance for one to lose. When, over eight years ago, I placed myself in Anchor Nantzee during the New Eden attack, I had what I thought were good reasons, but after I almost lost my life there I can tell you that those reasons were false. The fact was, I had every reason to know I was at great risk, and I allowed myself to be trapped there. I got out with Mervyn’s help by a matter of seconds—and I had the best damned time I have had in two centuries! The thrill was incredible, but it was also a telltale sign. We always wondered why Coydt spent so much time in Anchor, and now I know why. He was vulnerable there, and he walked with danger every moment. He was compelled to do it. That disease is now striking me, and, I know, sooner or later, just like Coydt, I’ll lose. Someone will kill me, and I will cease to exist. The more you tempt it, the more inevitable it becomes.”

  He paused a moment, looking at their faces, and saw in at least a couple of expressions glimmerings of comprehension of what he was talking about.

  “Second,” he continued, “is the reason I was bored and regressing to a thrill-seeking idiot. All of us, when we start out in life, have lofty goals we aspire to, and very few of us attain all of them. I have. The only thing left for me is to perhaps take you all on and see if I can control the whole of human civilization on World. But don’t worry—I can see nothing in it. I would inherit a larger slice of what I now have, and I have exhausted all my possibilities with that. Nor is there any long-range goal, ideal, or vision within me. I would probably lose and be killed, but even if I won—even if I won—I wouldn’t know what the hell to do next. I have no goal but the playing of the game itself, and that is truly a terrible thing to admit.”

  He sighed. “And so, still I look at the alternatives,” he went on. “I do nothing, and, inevitably, the cancer of New Eden spreads. I would not like to live in a world without Flux, and New Eden’s mix of animalistic humanity and ancient technology is worse than evil—it is incredibly boring. Their society is boring, their culture and values are simplistic and boring, and once they achieve that system throughout World they will become a static society, without imagination or creativity, in which everyone will be perfectly happy, essentially identical—well, they might as well all be dead.”

  “Do you actually believe they will do that?” Gabaye asked, appalled at the thought.

  “As our newest member can assure you, they can and they will. Oh. because it is so spiritless and mechanistic we can take it over in time, but what do we do with it then? Do any of you have a vision for humanity? What fun is there in being the one who orders the animals to jump through hoops? We can be worshipped by masses made in our images now. Would it mean any more if those masses were larger? I can only see to the horizon: the number of multitudes beyond that horizon are irrelevant. It has become a simple decision for me. Eternal boredom, death, or—take a chance. Open the Gates. They know Flux—they must know it far better than we, for they are coming from the source of all Flux. They promised to make us gods, and we are already gods as far as World is concerned. What do they mean by the term? What kind of beings are they? What kind of place do they come from? These are the only questions left for me. the only challenge, the only game. With that much power they certainly did not grow bored. It is a chance, one I am willing to take.”

  “And if the other side is right, and they are here to kill or enslave us all?” Varishnikar Stomsk asked worriedly. “What then? With their knowledge and power we could hardly stop them.”

  “True. It might be some monstrous version of us out the
re, more powerful than we could ever know. So then my choices are death or death. So, of the possibilities, two are death and one is godhood. Two to one odds against are not the best, but they are the best I have. And if you have not reached my point where I would grab those odds and embrace them with all my heart and soul—you will one day, and the votes might not be there to save you. either. Discussion?”

  There was a telling deadly silence, with each of them looking not at Ivan or each other but within themselves. For many, being so brutally honest with themselves was a new and revealing experience. Finally it was Gifford Haldayne who said, quietly, “Let’s take a vote.”

  Ivan nodded and looked at them all, his expression still grim. “Rosa Haldayne?”

  “I’m getting a little sick of it myself. You’re right, Zell—it’s all or nothing. Open them.”

  “Gifford Haldayne?”

  “Why not? All the interesting enemies are dead.”

  “I take that as a yes. Chua Gabaye?”

  “I never would have considered anything but a yes vote. All or nothing, darling—always.”

  “Ming Tokiabi?”

  She hesitated a moment, as if still undecided. Finally she said, “Yes,” without elaboration.

  “Varishnikar Stomsk?”

  “Our ancestors sealed the Gates almost twenty-seven hundred years ago now, and World as we know it and see it today is the end result. Had they been able to see what we’ve become, they would never have closed those Gates—never! Better the end, better slavery, better anything than this! Hell, yes!”

  All eyes now turned to the seventh and newest member, Coydt van Haas’ replacement. He alone would now decide, and he alone had the most stake in keeping things as they were.

  “I know what you all are thinking,” he said. “With burgeoning power and new discoveries being made almost daily, and with me ranking high on the side that will win, why should I? It might interest you to know what I am really like, inside. I want a different thing than the rest of you; I want the ultimate power. I want to know everything. It is not enough to know that something works, or how it works—I must know why it works, what forces and principles guide it. I want to know everything. That is power to me, and that is my dream. Godhood is not being worshipped by slaves, nor is it creating a little world of your own design by sheer force of will, as if you just told a machine to do it and then it read your mind and did exactly what you desired. Godhood is knowing how to build that machine, how it works, how it does what it does. Wizards aren’t gods, they are machine operators—lowly operators; button-pushers and switch-throwers—and they’re too ignorant to even realize that fact. I want to understand why and how it works.

  “And I cannot know,” he sighed. “We have sunk too far. We hold the end product of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in our hands, but that chain of accumulated knowledge is denied us. It was cut off when the Gates were closed. In thousands of years we might be able to reinvent it, but as friend Zelligman points out, we are mortal gods, liable to be victims ourselves eventually or victims of our own minds. Human culture is not going in the direction of rediscovery, either, but into a permanent dark age of the mind. I am pessimistic, and I am impatient. That chain of knowledge exists, somewhere—on the other side of those Gates.

  “There is a fellow in New Eden right now, the very same Matson who killed Coydt van Haas. He suggests a fourth alternative, Zelligman, one that may be far-fetched but which nonetheless tips the odds a bit more in our favor. He suggests that it might be possible to defeat them if they are an enemy. If we defeated them, we would be capable again with an irresistible lure to discover and link up once more with our relatives who created this world. Not two to one, but perhaps three to two—still against, but I am willing. No. I am compelled to vote yes.”

  Zelligman Ivan sighed and sank back in his chair. “The resolution is adopted unanimously with the chair, obviously, voting yes. Now I’m going to tell you exactly how we are going to do it.”

  Neither Mervyn nor anyone else had ever seen pain and anguish on Matson’s face before, but it was certainly there now and he couldn’t conceal it. It had taken almost five months to find Sondra in the still rampant confusion of the enlarged New Eden, and Matson still could hardly believe that the one he had was his daughter. She neither looked nor acted in any way like her, and only the tattooed name on her rump indicated any connection with the woman he’d raised.

  After months of relative inactivity while he got the lay of the land and determined his next movies, Mervyn was suddenly in a hurry. Still he would not, could not, desert Matson and Sondra at this time.

  The wizard identified her at once, and took her inside his small office in his new and increasingly permanent Flux haven, but before he went to work he talked with Matson.

  “This won’t be easy,” he warned the stringer. “Even with all my power and experience, the fact is I revert to that New Eden body I have every time I sleep or relax for a while. I’ve found, too, like many other wizards caught in it who got out, my power is diminished. It’s part of a worldwide situation—that much Flux removed has caused perhaps a fifteen percent overall decline in everyone’s powers and abilities. Those caught inside when it blew lost additional power, since whatever power was needed to stave off complete domination by that damnable program was quite literally lost.”

  “What’s that mean in layman’s terms?”

  “It means, first of all, that their attack and assimilation spell, being written in the same language as the landscape spell, got appended to it. Everyone caught in it was essentially made a part of the new reality, so that my default body, my genetic makeup, is not my old self but this new one. That’s why I’ve kept it—it takes a lot of will to keep any other form.”

  “You mean that what’s in there now may be a spell creation, but it’s replaced her real self? There’s nothing of me or her mother in her?”

  Mervyn nodded. “I’m afraid so. Second, my powers are still considerable, but they are perhaps sixty percent of what they were. That’s still better than almost everybody else’s eighty-five percent, but it’s a major decrease. As strong as I was, look at how much damage it did to me. Sondra had great power, but we never knew how great because she never developed it fully. Her own protective spells and reaction time were a hair too slow, as was Jeff’s, and he had far more training than she. What I’m saying is, I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know how much that will be, particularly after nearly six months and some preliminary conditioning. The mental spell is far easier to work with, since it wasn’t complex or in what I call machine language, but as I’m finding out myself, behavior has far more physiological causes than I would have believed. Uh—she has a husband, children?”

  “No. She spread that rumor herself to get folks off her back. After she quit the trail she tried retirement, went nuts after a few months, and was back out as a linesman for the Guild.”

  “What about her mother?”

  “I’ve sent word. They weren’t particularly close after Sondra joined the Guild, and her brother’s her mother’s boy all the way. You know her mother and I split years ago. The kids were grown, and I decided to go full time into the Guild officer corps.”

  “No, I didn’t know, but it explains why you’ve been down here so long with no rush to get home. All right—I’ll see what can be done.”

  The vacant, servile girl who was there showed no trace of anything going on in back of those beautiful but empty eyes. Only a dozen or so wizards had managed to stave off complete domination by the program; for the others, it seemed the harder you resisted the more extreme the result. Mervyn placed one hand on each side of her head and probed.

  Eliminating the mental block that caused a sensation of pain when any but the most basic thoughts were formed was easily dissolved—it apparently was set to slowly dissolve over a year’s time anyway. But six months of that might shatter anyone’s ego, no matter how strong. He had to try to rebuild it. He probed and poked and sti
mulated memories, and was not surprised to see her fight against his efforts. The amount of fear and conditioning was enormous, but so was her subconscious, madly fighting to keep from facing those last six months. It was long, difficult, careful work, and he was soaked with perspiration at the effort that still was, basically, mental, but in four and a half hours he achieved a breakthrough.

  Sondra began screaming hysterically, and Matson rushed in to see her pressed up against a wall, looking wild and terrified. He started to move towards her, but Mervyn put out a shaky hand and prevented him. It went on interminably, until both men thought they could bear no more, but finally she collapsed into a sobbing heap. Then Mervyn allowed Matson to go to her. But it was another day before she came around enough to even recognize him.

  “They took me and they made me into cattle,” she managed to utter at last. “They took from me all that was human and made me an animal!“She sat there on the bed, legs up, arms clasped around them, as if trying to shrink into a tiny ball. “I was raped, even gang raped, so many times I can’t count. Raped and beaten, too. I hated it. I felt filthy, degraded—but I couldn’t resist them,” she said, with a faraway look in her eyes and a flatness in her tone. “After a while, all that’s left of your mind just surrenders. You just don’t care anymore. Your mind stops working, and only your senses are left.” She paused for a moment, then added, “You wind up doing any disgusting thing they want and they want a lot. We ate human flesh near the start to stay alive. They killed her and we ate it raw.”