Birth of Flux and Anchor

304 Pages·2011·1.1 MB·English

by  Chalker Jack L

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.
Rembrandt van Haas always liked to meet and greet new people when they
arrived, if, of course, he regarded them as his social peers. That meant a Ph.D.
after your name, some prestigious past work, and a real feel for true science.
There were only to be 112 men and women with Toby Haller's job title, and they
were vital and special to the project.
The director's office was wide and spacious, with oak paneling and soft
lighting. The chairs were plush, the art on the walls prints of classic paintings,
and the shelves were full of reference books. It looked like the office of some
major bank president on Earth, but for the model in the center of the room.
There was no way not to make it one's immediate and undivided center of
attention. It was a relief globe in ugly lead-gray of a very unappetizing-looking
place, but a place that clearly was not even Titan.
Van Haas always enjoyed seeing first-timers suddenly divert from their anxiety
at meeting him to that globe, and he had demoted or sent packing a number of
people who hadn't responded that way. Haller's glowing, fascinated eyes passed
the test, and he had some trouble snapping out of it.
"I'm sorry," he said, sounding slighlty flustered, "but I took one look there and
—"
"I know, I know," responded the director. "I often still gaze at it myself. Our
little rock, with its seven percolators awaiting full placement and activation.
Soon, now, though, young man. Very soon. You come on a most auspicious
day."
Van Haas was taller and thinner than his pictures indicated, and he looked far
older and more worn than Haller had expected. Still, he had a pleasant baritone
voice that sounded friendly and reassuring, and carried an undercurrent of
passion in it when the project was discussed—and that was about all Rembrandt
van Haas ever discussed.
"Sir? Something big break today?"
The director nodded, giving a slight smile. "Very big. It will be the talk of the
day, and perhaps the year, around here when news gets out. A big day in human
history, my boy. Today we have sent humans into Flux—two of them anyway—
and brought them back whole, sane, and none the worse for wear."
That was stunning news. "Then—we're really going?"
Van Haas gestured to a plush chair, then took his own high-backed chair
behind his large executive desk. "Does that excite you—or disturb you?"
Haller frowned. "Beg pardon, sir, but everybody here seems bloody intent on
proving that I really want to turn tail and run away."
"And you'll get more of that," the director warned him. "Especially now. We
don't have more than one shot at this, Haller. We do it, or we don't, and if we
don't, we shall most probably be dead. You'll find yourself doing it to others, by
and by. Everyone who goes must be committed, almost like a religious crusade.
We don't have sufficient room for those we absolutely must have, so we don't
want to get to the last moment, or, worse, even out there, and discover that we
brought someone along we regret and thereby left someone behind we needed.
Can you accept that?"
"I suppose. But I hope I shan't be doing it to others. I have a feeling that those
who shouldn't go will weed themselves out when push comes to shove before we
pack off for the universal bush, as it were."
Van Haas sighed. "I wish I had your confidence in that. However, let's see what
it is we're really talking about." He reached down to a control panel below desk
height and pushed some buttons. The office lights went down to off, but the
globe became eerily illuminated from within. It was a startling effect.
"Seven Gates to Heaven or Hell," said the director. "We'll be placing them
quite carefully above and below the equatorial region. Three would be sufficient
for temperature and atmospheric maintenance, we feel, but the rest will provide
backup in case of failures and excess with which to work. It's your medium,
Haller. What will you design?"
"I only just arrived, sir. Still, it'll be a team effort all the way. To turn a lifeless
lump like that into a balanced, well-maintained world of its own will take a lot of
coordination. Water and atmospherics will take precedence over everything, and
they are global phenomena."
"The computer model you proposed in your application was most ingenious,"
van Haas noted. "Why so many large seas when we can adjust the water forms to
suit?"
"For the same reason we're taking farmers and handcrafts folk. We are kidding
ourselves that we can ever be independent of our machines there—we are too far
from the sun to sustain life in a natural state—but assuming that temperature
gradients are maintained, everything else should be natural. We're working with
less surface area and a bit less mass than Earth, so seas are more appropriate than
oceans, but natural runoff should be allowed for. Our weather and climate should
be self-generating and self-renewing, accepting that temperatures are
maintained."
"There are some that believe we are insane to even take those farmers and
carpenters, you know. They'd make it another Titan, only on a full global scale,
and use hydroponics and eventually I suppose transmutation to get whatever
they needed. Just scientists—no common folk to get in the way."
"But this isn't a private project! It's a new world we're talking about!"
Van Haas nodded. He really liked the look of this one. "God knows, we are
bleeding the people dry for this as it is. We must give them something, some
romance, some identification, or the revolts will be quick and bloody. Most of
our colleagues don't see it that way. I admit, though, I don't like to sell this as pie
in the sky—sacrifice now and we'll turn the Earth into paradise, all that rot.
We're lying through our teeth and gambling as it is, and our only allies among
the people are poverty, misery, hopelessness, and despair. It's a hell of a way to
sell a railroad."
"Still, it might just pay off for them."
"It might, but you should be very clear as to why those farmers and
craftspeople are really coming along. There are no immediate payoffs, no instant
dividends. When this becomes apparent, funding will be reduced, perhaps cut to
the bone. There will be moves to close the project, even perhaps just cut us off
and starve us out. I couldn't grow a tomato from a hole in the ground. I haven't
more than the vaguest notion of how to plow and reap and sow unless it's
programming robots to do it from knowledge furnished me by farmers. I
wouldn't know how to butcher a cow, or even if I managed to shear a sheep how
to make it into a wool suit I could wear. What we got out there fast will be all
that there is. I want us self-sufficient in food, clothing, all the basics of life as
quickly as possible. We technocrats don't know how to do that without our
machines, and out there we'll first have to make the land in order to grow things
on it."
Rembrandt van Haas sighed and got up, the lights coming on at the same time.
"You will design that land, and I will oversee the entire project, but they will
keep us in food and shoes and underwear. Come on with me. I'm going over to
the Flux Transfer Section and see just what we have here. That is, if you wish."
Toby Haller felt newly invigorated, and his excitement was hard to contain.
This was not the cold, austere van Haas everyone pictured or feared, the dreaded
administrator without heart, but a dreamer like himself, and a visionary too. He
wanted to see and know it all.

Suzi Watanabe was a small, plain, diminutive woman, less than 150
centimeters tall and thin enough to pose for a starvation charity poster. She
seemed to chain-smoke cigarettes and always have one in her mouth and one in
an ashtray, even though the things were considered unsafe and antisocial almost
everywhere. She wore big round glasses with lenses as thick as the bottoms of
beer bottles, and judging from her overall appearance she hadn't slept in a week
and had last slept in the clothes she still wore. She darted nervously around, this
way and that, a coiled spring that released itself in every movement, then wound
tight once more.
She greeted the director with a perfunctory nod and didn't even seem to notice
Haller.
"Well, we've got it," she said flatly. "No problems, checks out every time. The
failure before was in the shipping medium."
"Shipping medium?" Haller repeated, puzzled.
"Yeah. We always knew we needed as close to immobility as possible for the
computers to get a precise digitized reading, but you can't shut down the human
body entirely. You can't even kill it and expect all the processes to halt at once.
Hair, fingernails, that kind of thing, keep on. Every time we tried some sort of
suspension, it was impossible to keep the liquid or gas from co-mingling with
the subject and causing problems in the rebuilding."
Van Haas broke in. "Haller, you remember Edison and the light bulb? He had
the whole thing worked out, but he couldn't find the filament that would burn for
long periods without exploding or consuming itself faster than a candle wick.
We've known how to do this for some time, but there was apparently only one
liquid that would both not interfere with the reassembly of the human subject
and also wouldn't kill the subject."
"A little more complicated a problem than old Edison had," Watanabe
responded. "Anyway, it's a muitistep process. First we sedate, using
conventional cryogenic gasses, but then we flush it all out using a high-density
energy plasma that is slightly altered Flux energy, and that stuff maintains the
suspension for a sufficient time to digitize the subject. The computer treats it as
Flux—which means it ignores it—so the stuff simply remains in Flux during
reassembly and rapidly reverts to its original state. No foreign substances."
"You make it sound so simple," the director noted. "Now— can we adapt our
existing ship designs to this method, and how long would that take?"
"A matter of months," she responded. "After all, we knew what we had to have.
We just had to have the formula to make it work. I'd like to run as many tests as
possible, but I think we might be able to try our first distance jump in three
months, no more."
Van Haas looked at Haller. "It's the most frustrating thing we have here, even
when we have it. As an administrator, I'd love to order them to rush it, but this is
one area where no mistakes can be tolerated."
Haller nodded. "I'm not sure I want to go on something that'll do that to me
when it hasn't been jumped through hoops. Just where does this set the timetable
though?" He was already feeling like one of the team.
"I've given orders to the remote stations in orbit to being the robotized
placement of the Gates and preliminary testing. That'll eat up our three months.
Then we'll have to begin the bleeds"—allowing Flux to come into the world
—"and that will take quite some time. When sufficient Flux is formed to create a
physical atmosphere, we will begin to ship and put in place the network of
twenty-eight master-computer stations. We'll have to anchor and test them,
create the proper atmospheric balance and study what it does—quite a lot. Our
current estimate is seven years, but I hope we will be able to shorten it."
Haller was dumbstruck, his romantic vision rapidly fading away. "Seven years
. . ."

The orders went out from Borelli Station through Flux and were received by
the already awaiting units in orbit around the tiny world, all of them dwarfed by
the gigantic planet the moon orbited.
The robotized stations were gigantic, although modular in construction, having
assembled themselves from pieces sent through one by one. Now they would
have a better and surer way to transmit and receive. The earliest ones had created
a small automated counterpart to Borelli Station in orbit themselves; now they
began to receive what they needed.
Every square millimeter of the moon's surface had been scanned and mapped,
and calculations made. Modules now detached from the orbiting mothers and
descended to the surface, where crawlers had already checked and double-
checked the terrain, the surface and underlying composition of the ground; made
seismic estimates; even bored with strong lasers for several kilometers into the
very heart of the place.
Cost was always a factor, even with the availability of Flux energy. To totally
use the entire place, a network of twelve Borelli Points would be required, but
they had to make do with seven. This would be sufficient to maintain
temperature and atmosphere within tolerable limits, but it would create a life
zone extending only from forty degrees north to thirty degrees south latitude,
give or take a degree. Beyond that, Flux would begin to thin, sufficient for
atmospheric maintenance but with rapidly declining heat as you went beyond the
zone, and without sufficient Flux density to properly use it in transmutation.
Now they dug out the holes for the Gates, first with crude explosives, then
smoothed with powerful lasers, then they assembled the great dish-shaped
depressions that would be the multipurpose, multifunction hearts and souls of the
operation. With the precision that only computers could command, the fit was a
perfect one.
Now the feed tubes were blasted by other, smaller machines using only laser
drillers, the tunnels becoming smooth as glass and far, far harder than diamond
with the addition of selected compounds. Everything was checked and double-
checked again and again, for there was absolutely no tolerance for error. They
had learned that bitterly on Titan.
At the end of the feed tunnel, now, was installed a massive, complex machine,
actually a Borelli generator. It was designed to fit into the walls and practically
surround the tunnel's end; anyone at this point would be literally within the Gate
itself. Covered with the same compounds as the tunnel, it would be invisible,
only an emergency control panel showing that there was anything there at all.
The object was to begin the bleed from the strange alternate universe of energy
as quickly as possible. Up to this point the machines were working with
conventional technology and conventional energy; even the initial punches
creating the Borelli Point in each of the seven feed tunnels would be done with
massive conventional generators loaded up with Flux power from the orbiting
Borelli Gate, the storage mechanism inside converting that energy into raw
power.
Only then would come the real test, the real question. A sample or short test
burst was out of the question here; you either had it right the first time, or you
didn't.
Engineers on Titan liked to explain the process as analogous to jump-starting a
dead engine. Now the great energy cells and the true Gate mechanism itself was
inert, lifeless. It was designed to draw what power it needed from the Borelli
Point itself and store it. If the punch into another universe was successful, the
machines would start up and draw what they needed to come to full life and
operation. If it failed, or if the regulatory mechanisms failed to hold, a number of
things could happen. The Point could remain open, allowing Flux to ooze out in
an uncontrolled stream indefinitely, and no one quite knew what the result of
that would be. It was only hoped that if it did happen, this place was so far from
Earth that it might be millions of years before humans found out the hard way.
The opening might also be too small, in which case sufficient power would not
flow from the initial punches into the installed machinery to keep the Point
opening and closing at a regulated rate and thus charge the rest of the system. In
that case, all of this had been for nothing.