05. Children of Flux and Anchor Read Online Free PDF Page A

who established their own Fluxlands could be considered sane. They were tyrants, some better, some worse than others, but all limited to what one mind, no matter how powerful, could create. None of the Fluxlands tended to be larger than five hundred kilometers square and most were substantially smaller. The power of even the best of them had created an understandable egocentrism and also a sense of paranoia, for they did not wish to lose what they had. They seldom if ever cooperated or even met with each other unless to meet a common threat, and then only for the duration of the emergency.
    New Eden had shaken both Flux and Anchor to its core. Civil war within the Church for decades followed by its collapse in the face of the Invasion from the stars caused a total breakdown in the Anchors. The Church collapsed when met with incontrovertible evidence that it was false, leaving no social or cultural foundation. Everyone who ever had a grievance against the Church or the system and could find adherents tried to grab power; theory contested theory, and resulted in civil wars within the various Anchors themselves. These in turn broke down the always-fragile economics and caused massive death, destruction, and starvation.
    New Eden had managed to capitalize on this in three Anchors near to it, supporting pro-New Eden factions there with arms and even some troops and eventually installing its system there. Others farther away had taken other tacks; a few were still in ferment, or divided into mini-states, but most had seen one or another faction win out and extend their own social and economic theories over their Anchors with increasingly totalitarian methods patterned after the successful New Eden methods but towards different ends.
    In Flux, even the maddest of Fluxlords had been faced with the realization that his or her power came not from divine providence but from the remnants of the technology of an ancient civilization whose machines still worked— and that their power could be threatened by other technology being rediscovered all the time in ancient files and records. New Eden had once been four Anchors surrounding vast areas of Flux; technology had made it all Anchor, and in the process eliminated Fluxlands of some of the strongest wizards ever known.
    Clearly Fluxlords who wished to remain Fluxlords had to unite or face ultimate attack from others who would or from new machines that could render them impotent to attack. They met and combined into multiple godheads with a single agreed-upon vision reinforced by Flux spells and some of that very technology that threatened them. Vast new Fluxlands, some extending a thousand kilometers or more, were formed with a hierarchy of gods ranked according to their relative Flux powers in a feudal system of gods and demigods.
    A few independent and small Fluxlands remained, of course, but there was none of the ancient sense of permanence about them. The most independent and flourishing ones were in the broad gaps between the northern clusters, although a few, like the Freehold, were in the midst of the expanding states and held because they were sparsely populated regions inhabited entirely by families of powerful wizards.
    Some of the new technology, however, was denied everyone. The big amps had been deactivated when the first settlements of the ancient ones collapsed; Coydt had discovered a way to tap the tremendous power differently and had used them again. Now, however, before the shutdown of the defensive computers, that loophole in physics had been plugged. The big amps would work no longer, and some of the other wondrous things that ran on the same sort of power were still nothing but useless junk. Some things, however, did work. The small handheld amplifiers used a different energy principle which might have been cut off but through oversight had not been. And New Eden was developing both steam and electric power once again, and also finding ways of actually tapping the raw