Soul Rider #01: Spirits of Flux and Anchor

by Jack L. Chalker

  That caught some of them off balance. Those who had been able to follow things so far tried to figure out his last comment and fit it in, the others just stood there trying to look like they understood it all.

  "What that means," he went on, "is that energy, what you see back there, can be changed into matter. Solid things. If you're good enough, or smart enough, you can do almost anything there— Those who can totally control it are like gods. In fact, some of 'em think they are gods and act like it, too. We call 'em wizards—master magicians. They really do have the power of gods in the Flux, and they run tilings. They're the ones who created the Fluxlands, the independent places in the Flux, and they run them like gods as well. Watch out for them.

  "As for the rest, there are those who have varying degrees of skill in manipulating the Flux. Some of 'em are what we call false wizards. They, say, turn you into a bird. You think you're a bird, and everybody else thinks you're a bird, and when you jump into the air off the cliff you and everybody else thinks you're flying. But you're still you, and you can't fly, so you crash and die. Watch out for the false wizards. In their own way they're more dangerous than the real ones."

  He looked them over, then allowed a half-smile to come over his face. He knew they didn't understand much of it, and probably the ones that did didn't believe a word of it, but that was okay. This lecture would come in handy when they saw the reality of Fluxlands.

  "Now, within the next day we'll he going into the Flux itself," he told them. "You'll be on my strings, but relatively free and loose. It might be possible for somebody to escape." He turned back towards his tent. "Jomo! Kolada! Front and center!"

  From the direction of the tents came two creatures that probably were human once. One of them, Jomo, must have weighed a hundred and fifty kilos or more, but that was not what struck anyone who looked at him. His face was a mottled, misshapen mass with the standard features barely recognizable in it. His hands were massive, claw-like things that seemed useless for grasping much, and his shoeless feet were enormous caricatures of what feet should be— He looked, in fact, very much like Cassie's vision of a troll from the old children's stories. He wore only a skirt-like rag fastened by a crude belt-

  Kolada was even worse. It was hard to tell if the creature was male or female. It was tall and humanoid, but its entire body was covered by tremendously thick brown hair including the face, from which gaped an animal-like mouth with two fangs rising up from the lower jaw and a pair of blood-red eyes that seemed to shine with an inhuman fury— Its arms were so long that they just about reached the ground, terminating in two huge paw-like hands.

  "These two duggers are my chief driver and my point guard," Matson told them. "To answer your question even though you haven't asked, both are, or were, human just like you. Both, at different times, escaped from stringer trains into the Flux. Anybody who does that and either has no natural power over it or doesn't run into somebody who lives there will be dead quickly, for there's no food and water you don't make yourself in the void, nor any way at all to get your bearings to know where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. Only stringers and wizards know their position in the Flux, and we make certain that nobody else ever finds out how we do it. No dugger can do it, and they try all the time.

  "Now, if you're wondering what happened, both of them did run into others, but they ran into different sorts. Jomo has a little of the real Flux power, you see, but no control. We've all got our little fears and insanities in the back of our minds. Well, see what Jomo's do to him. He doesn't always look like this. Sometimes he looks worse, occasionally better. Kolada, on the other hand, ran into somebody with real power in the Flux, somebody who was very, very dangerous. In a story far too long to go into here, that person changed a nice, normal Anchor woman into the creature you see here. And, because it was a wizard, she's absolutely stuck like this unless somebody even more powerful changes her, for she has no Flux powers at all.

  "Most of the people on the apron, the daggers, have similar stories. They're all quite mad and they've all been changed in one way or another by wizards or their own minds. But they're the rare lucky ones. They survived in the Flux, and, after a while, they signed on with stringers like me and have about as much security and stability as it's possible to have in there—and some independence. In the Flux, most people more or less belong to other people, because whoever has the most power over the Flux can control everybody below them. Duggers belong to no one except themselves. These people work for me and they get paid for it. Now, if anybody wants to take a risk on surviving long enough to become a dugger, now you've seen what duggers are like, you just escape. That's it. Get some food over there at the big tent and come back here to eat."

  They went in orderly silence. The earlier lecture hadn't had much effect, but the duggers had, and as they entered the apron camp and saw that Matson's "employees" were among the least exotic variations around, the effect was greatly enhanced. The whole place was a terrible, crawling creep show. Most had little appetite when they returned to their grassy spot.

  The small group reformed for the first time since back in the gym, but they were a sober lot.

  "Did you see that one that looked like a squirmy, squishy thing?" Nadya asked, shivering a bit.

  "And how about the one with the wavy things coming out of its head?" Ivon added.

  "I think I've seen more than I want to right now," Cassie put in. "I don't need to catalog it. It's tough enough to eat now, and I was starving ten minutes ago."

  They nodded agreement, but most managed to get something down nonetheless. At least the food was palatable—some sort of warm meat and vegetable pies and a very sweet cake, with some sort of wine that was not at all sweet but a good thirst-quencher, Ultimately, though, the conversation returned to their own fates, past and future. They talked about their long drugged march, and compared aches, pains, and bruises, as well as leg muscles which were pretty outstanding, even on the girls. Finally, it was Nadya who noticed. "Hey— what happened to the other group?"

  They all looked around. Sure enough, there was no sign of the first group, the one that was to go with the other stringer. Jomo, who was looking to the mules grazing nearby, heard, turned, and in a gruff, barely human voice, said, "They go before you wake up with Missy Arden. They well into Flux now."

  Rather than be startled by the dugger's attention, they all turned and looked towards the imposing Flux itself. The void, Matson had called it. The void between the Fluxlands. After a while they snapped out of it and attention turned to the future, although it was mixed with a little caution. Jomo had accomplished his main purpose of letting them know that they were being overheard.

  "What do you think is going' to happen to us?" Dar asked at last. "I mean, once we go—in there?"

  Cassie sighed. "I don't know, but it doesn't sound very promising, does it?"

  "Do you buy this magic business?" Ivon put in. "Sounds like those crazy old stories to me."

  "I think he's telling the truth. Some of it, anyway," Suzl opined. "If what he was saying was true about the Flux energies, then it's very possible to have magic and a whole little set of mini-godhoods. The only thing I can't figure out is why some people have the power and others, probably most, do not. It seems to be something you're born with, anyway, if the story of Jomo is right, not something you learn or get from your parents, although practice probably makes you better and better."

  Nadya looked worried. "They have made a lot of changes in us, you know, so I can see how that might be taken further. I wonder, though, if they can change your mind like they can change your looks?"

  "They can do it with drugs and conditioning in Anchor," Cassie pointed out, "so why not in Flux as well? What's really odd, though, is that the changes seem to be so real, so permanent. I mean, if it was just in Flux, then these people would change back to their old selves here in Anchor, right? They didn't. That means to me that we've got some real trouble in there. Anything they did to us i
n Anchor can be changed around in Flux, but anything done to you in Flux is permanent."

  Nadya looked at the Flux. "A world of magicians, madmen—and slaves. It's horrible."

  Cassie thought of the Sister General, the machines, the Paring Rite, and Lani's catalog of terrible drugs, and could only wonder just how different it was from Anchor Logh after all. In a way, it just might be a more direct, more honest and open version of the world from which they had come.

  It took quite some time to form the stringer train, and it was an impressive affair. There were twenty mules, all loaded down with things in large packs, as well as two horse-drawn wagons driven by duggers. Between the mules and the wagons Matson placed his human cargo, four abreast in familiar pattern, and linked together with common thin rope of the sort used on farms for clotheslines. He had expertly reformed and sized them so that the shortest were in front and would thus set the pace. The lines were then tied off to the last pair of mules ahead of them. None of the lines were intended to keep anyone captive, it was pointed out to them, but merely to give some logical distribution to the train and set a logical pace. It was also their lifeline, Matson added, for it was very, very easy to get lost in the Flux, and with a train this size, even with a dozen or more duggers managing it, it would not be possible to keep an eye on all parts of it at once.

  All the duggers were mounted on horses except the impressive Jomo, who preferred being on foot, the better to get wherever he needed in the mule train. They noticed that Matson and all the duggers had small bugles or some similar instrument on their saddles or in their belts. These, it turned out, were the means of communication along the train, and each stringer had his own private codes so that none could easily trick him with false signals.

  After the train had been completely assembled,

  Matson rode slowly all the way down it from front to back on one side, then back up to the front on the other, stopping occasionally, shouting orders to adjust or fix this or that, positioning and repositioning people and things. This went on for some time until he was completely satisfied and then rode quickly up to the front and stopped. He undipped his bugle from his saddle, raised it to his lips, and, turning back, blew a series of sharp notes of differing length and pitch, repeating the same pattern three times. The duggers on the wagons to the rear returned a slightly different signal twice, and they saw the hairy creature called Kolada suddenly ride forward and vanish into the Flux at full gallop. They waited then another minute or two, then Matson gave one last, long blast on his horn which was returned by all of the other duggers. The train began to move forward, towards the Flux.

  Dar and Ivon were both big men. so they were well back in the group, but Nadya, Cassie, and Suzl had maneuvered themselves to be near one another, being only slightly different in height, and Matson had allowed it. They began to walk towards that huge, shimmering wall.

  "Here we go," Cassie muttered under her breath. First Matson vanished into the stuff, followed by Jomo and his mules. As the great Flux region came ever closer, they all felt themselves stiffen, felt an urge to break and run, but duggers on both sides kept shouting and growling curses at them and they slowed and staggered a bit but went on. The first rows went in and essentially vanished from view, then it was Cassie's row and they were through before they even realized it.

  They entered an eerie world such as none of them had ever known before.

  There are a few times in everyone's life when they feel totally and completely helpless, at the mercy of fate. The bull that suddenly appears out of nowhere and charges when it's fifty meters to the nearest fence. The time when you're patching the roof and grab frantically for something to break the fall, only nothing's there. Cassie and the others felt that way now, which is why even the roughest and most boisterous of them were meek and quiet through this experience. They were caught in the web of deceit in Anchor Logh and now they were tethered and bound together by the stringer's spidery lines.

  The effect of suddenly entering the Flux was too much for some who had endured so much. Somebody screamed, somebody else started sobbing hysterically, as they were pulled, helplessly, by the mules away from the Anchor that was all the reality they'd ever known, away from all that was safe and sane and real, into the terrible, shimmering void.

  There was a sensation of dry heat, like being in an oven that had not yet quite warmed up to intolerable temperatures. The raw Flux was around them all now, producing an odd, slightly tingling sensation that was more eerie-feeling than uncomfortable.

  There was also a terrible absence of sensation. It was dead quiet in a way that simply could not exist in Anchor, the only sounds those of the train itself, and even those beyond the immediate people in front and back seemed curiously damped or muffled. The air, too, was perfectly still and had none of the odors that were always present in normal air. No scent of grass, or the very subtle fragrances of things you never even knew were there until they were gone. The effect was to heighten the sense of smell of everyone in the group, but the only source for that was the now very pungent body odor that was already hard to take even back on the apron.

  Nor had Matson been exaggerating when he warned them that they would have no sense of direction in the Flux. Every direction looked exactly like every other direction, and there were no landmarks, no markers of any sort. Even the ground was more sensed than seen; it felt slightly soft and spongy, and visually, they and the train walked as spirits through empty air on a surface that was totally invisible and indistinguishable from the air around them— It was extremely disorienting, and only the solidity of something underfoot, seen or not, allowed them to keep their balance. It was still better, they found, if you didn't look down.

  The duggers on either side of the train dropped back in alternation, checking on the marching lines. They seemed somehow different now, far less deformed if no less mad, and they seemed to radiate an air of comfortable confidence. This was their element, and they were comfortable with it.

  Some of them still slobbered and drooled and made bizarre, often animal-like sounds, but they never seemed to look the same way twice. For a while Cassie thought they might be different people. She soon made a sort of game of it, something to occupy her mind in the midst of the terrible nothingness, watching the one nearest her on her side as best she could. The dugger seemed almost hunchbacked one time, then ramrod straight the next. The creature went from fat to thin, almost but not quite while you were looking at it. One time she was sure she saw a beard on the dugger, yet the next time it went by it seemed clean-shaven and even had rather formidable breasts. The clothes, too, so tattered and filthy on the apron, seemed to undergo changes in color, design, and newness. It was both frightening and confusing. The horse, though, seemed solidly real.

  Matson was unchanged through it all, but in constant motion, riding up and down, back and forth, making certain that all was going well. He was all business and he had no patience with anyone or anything that was out of step. Once in a while, of course, somebody in the group would become disoriented and slip, and there would be a yell from those around, a blast from the nearest dugger's bugle, and this would bring everything to a stop as the blast was echoed by all—and bring Matson at full and angry gallop. Maybe nobody else knew where they were. but he did, and he had a schedule he wanted to keep.

  It was strange, though, that gallop, and those of the dugger horses. The horse was making no sound as its hooves struck invisible ground, although you could hear the great beast breathing hard and the sounds of saddle and rider.

  Suddenly, in the row in front of her, one girl stepped in some mule droppings, slipped, and fell. There was the yell, the bugles, the very efficient stop, and here came Matson. He stopped and looked down at the fallen girl in disgust.

  "We can't keep having this," he said, mostly to himself. "You! Get up—now!"

  The girl gaped at him, then broke down and started sobbing, but she simply couldn't bring herself to her feet. Matson spat, gave a disgusted sigh,
and made a casual gesture in her direction with his hand.

  Energy flew from that hand in a pencil-thin line, striking the girl in the head, and she screamed in terrible agony. Just as quickly as it had appeared, the beam was gone, and the victim almost collapsed in relief. Matson waited a moment, then asked, casually, "Want me to do it again?"

  "No! Please! I—"

  Another, very brief jolt was sent. "Please what?"

  "P—Please, sir!"

  He nodded. "Now get up and resume your place in line. You just had your warning. Next time it gets tough."

  "That son of a bitch," some boy in the back muttered loudly. "One day I'll kill the bastard for that."

  The stringer's head shot up, and his eyes seemed to glisten. "Well, well, well… The gallant tough guy standing up for the little lady. How chivalrous. Trouble with chivalry, boy, is that then you got to make good on it." He rode back several rows and looked directly at the offending boy, although it was impossible to see how he could have identified the speaker. "I don't want to break you, son, because my customers are buying that spirit of yours, but I think I'll put a mark on you so I can remember you."

  Cassie found it hard to turn around and see properly without twisting the line, but she managed, as did most of them forward of the incident. She remembered the face of the boy Matson was confronting—he'd been the strong one with the "brain of a cabbage" they were talking about as some sort of soldier.

  Matson seemed to concentrate a moment, then he fixed his eyes intently on the outspoken boy. Energy flashed and coalesced around him, but only for a few seconds, and then vanished. The watching duggers chuckled, and those among the exiles who didn't scream either gasped or gaped.

  The boy was in every way the same as he'd been from the shoulders down, but above that point he now had the perfectly proportioned head of a mule. The mule-mouth opened to say something, but only a mule's bray came out. His hands went up and felt along his neck and head, and you could feel the horror in his body movements.