05. Children of Flux and Anchor Read Online Free PDF

Flux of the great Gate at its center.
    Everyone had cheated for their own or their area's gain before the big shutdown. Vast numbers of program modules covering history, philosophy, economics, and technological wizardry had been removed or recorded before the great library was closed once more.
    Many of the smartest men and women of World had prognosticated that New Eden would eventually dominate and perhaps swallow the whole of World no matter how abhorrent its system. It offered a curious mix of religion-and technocracy-based culture that provided stability and a sense of place in the cosmos to those of Anchor and those dispossessed by violence. Its system was so tight and so absolute that rebellion from within was next to impossible. Its lands were so vast and rich that no outside force could conceivably take it by attack, and its economic system, tightly state controlled but offering some independence at the producer and retail levels, worked. The state provided technological help and a guaranteed price to the farmer or manufacturer, so production was high. The state alone controlled all transport and wholesale trading, so prices were controlled. The Church fostered communalism: everyone helped you build your new barn, or repaint your house, and you did the same for them. If someone had bad accidents, or a series of reverses, and needed help, it came from the others.
    At the same time, New Eden welcomed the refugees from anguished Anchors and paid the stringers to bring anyone who wished to New Eden. Civil and ideological wars elsewhere following the loss of more than a million lives in the battle against the Samish invasion had left much of World weakened and battered. New Eden remained pretty much intact and had a growing and thriving population. It was estimated that it might take a century or more for the rest of World to regain its former levels; by that time, New Eden would have a large enough army and technological base to take on or dominate both Flux and Anchor. Flux power was inherited; it was known that even now New Eden was in a breeding program to produce and train an army of powerful wizards all of whom would be true believers. And New Eden was patient, and would nibble bit by bit.
    To a world whose people were shaped by a culture left static for twenty-six hundred years, New Eden, for all its faults, offered a powerful lure.
    They didn't realize it, but they were following a classic pattern of human history which Tilghman apparently had deduced and which the new analysts now saw as well. It would not be the first time that people embraced a shallow and repugnant, even insane, system, turning a blind eye to all its faults and excesses and seeing only the stability, the power, and the glory of being part of an empire.
    The mother in some northern Anchor, watching her children starve, does not think of the morality of a cultural system. Find the New Eden missionaries; get out, get down to the land of peace and plenty. . . .
    The man who backed the losing side in the civil war knows that they will come for him and his family. Get out — get out or else. But where? What do high-sounding ideals mean when it's life or death? New Eden can't be as bad as all that, anyway. . . .
    We die willingly for the greater glory of the Emperor! Banzai!
    "Concentration camps? What concentration camps?"
    "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
    " I will take the explosives into the heart of their camp. I shall die a martyr's death and God will be so pleased He will elevate me to the Paradise of the Martyrs. . . ."
    Adam Tilghman may have been fragmentary and arbitrary in his knowledge of human history, but he got the mechanics right.
     
     
    Almost four hundred kilometers of border had illustrated what the lieutenant had meant. The land was good, fertile soil and showed signs of cultivation and had buildings that seemed recently abandoned, but few had stuck it out. Now, however, they were far in from the border area