Vale of the Vole

by Piers Anthony

  “That must be it,” Chex agreed grimly. She spread her wings part way, as she tended to do when wrestling with a concept, and the zombie did the same.

  Then she stepped forward, into the gate. The doppelganger duplicated the motion.

  They merged. Their two front sections disappeared into each other, leaving a two-reared beast. Then the rears merged, leaving only the two briefly swishing tails. Finally, the tails drew together in the center and were gone.

  Then a picture formed, superimposed over the gate. It was of Chex, galloping through a forest, casting worried glances back over her shoulder. What was she fleeing from?

  She entered a field. Now the pursuit came into view. It consisted of a herd of centaurs: males, females, and young ones, brandishing spears and bows. They seemed intent on killing her!

  The field terminated in a rough slope strewn with rocks. Chex had to slow to avoid cracking her hooves against the rocks, and the pursuing centaurs gained. One aimed his bow.

  The descent became sharper, until she could go no farther without losing her footing entirely. Beyond was a drop-off to a raging river. There was no chance of fording that; if she tried, she would be dashed to death against the rocks in the river. Her plight and her terror were manifest.

  “It’s only a vision!” Esk called. “It can’t hurt you! Just a bad dream!”

  Chex heard him. She glanced at him with realization—and abruptly was back in the passage with them, the dream gone.

  The zombie centaur was back on its side of the gate, unchanged. The way remained barred.

  Chex was breathing hard; she had evidently had quite a scare. “You saw it?” she asked.

  “We saw it,” Esk agreed. “You were being chased by centaurs.”

  “They condemned me because of my wings,” she said. “They regarded me as a freak!”

  “Exactly as the real centaurs do,” Esk agreed.

  “Then that is your deepest fear or shame,” Marrow said. “The worst dream the night mares can bring you: rejection by your own kind.”

  She shuddered. “Yes. I try not to think about it, but it does hurt terribly. I want to be part of my species, and I cannot be.”

  “You must face it down,” Marrow said.

  “How can I do that? They will kill me if I do not flee them!”

  “But a dream death is not a real death,” Esk reminded her.

  “I hope you’re right,” she said grimly. “Don’t wake me, this time.”

  She marched back into her doppelganger. The two disappeared again into each other, and the dream reappeared.

  Chex was fleeing through the forest, heading for the field. But this time she forced herself to stop, and to turn and face her pursuers. “You have no right to harass me like this!” she cried. “I am what I was foaled to be! It is no fault of mine!”

  “Freak! Freak!” they chorused. “Death to all freaks!”

  Then they stabbed her with their spears, and shot her with their arrows, and carved her with their knives, until only a shuddering mass of flesh remained.

  Chex woke screaming. The second dream had been worse than the first! The threatened violence had been no bluff.

  Esk jumped over to her and opened his arms. She reached down and clutched him to her, heedless of the physical or social awkwardness. “Oh, it was horrible!” she cried. “I died! They killed me, and it hurt, and I was mutilated and dead!”

  “Terrible,” Esk agreed, holding her as well as he could, though her pectorals were squeezing against his neck.

  “That was evidently an improper way to face that fear,” Marrow said.

  “First I fled, then I faced them!” Chex sobbed hysterically. “Both were wrong. What else can I do?”

  “That iv for uv to convider,” Volney said. “Vhe hav tried the ekvtremev; what remainv between?”

  Chex disengaged from Esk. “Here I’m acting like a silly filly! Of course this is a problem to be analyzed and solved. I was reacting in blacks and whites, when reality is generally in shades of gray. But the dream had such verisimilitude, it overwhelmed me!”

  “Such what?” Esk asked, daunted by the six-syllable word she had used.

  “It was realistic,” she clarified. “It made me believe I was there even though I knew better.”

  “It made me believe you were there, at first,” Esk said.

  “And I thank you for your support,” she said. “I am coming to appreciate the value of friendship.”

  “Friendv,” Volney said, nodding in his emulation of human idiom. “Could we join you there, and oppove the ventaurv?”

  “Say, yes!” Esk exclaimed. “Four are better than one! And Marrow could give them a real start!”

  “I appreciate the offer,” Chex said. “But I wouldn’t want to put you into that sort of danger. Perhaps you could not actually be killed, but believe me, you could be hurt; I felt that pain! In any event, I believe this is my personal challenge to surmount; if I should do it with help, it wouldn’t count.”

  They saw the justice in her position. “But if you can’t fight them, or reason with them, or escape them, what can you do?” Esk asked.

  “Reject them,” Marrow said.

  Chex’s eyes widened. “I think you’re right! I was treating them seriously both times, and so they had power. I gave them that power!”

  “Yet you knew they were figments of a dream,” Esk said. “They still attacked you. I’m not sure that just telling them you reject them will do any good.”

  “No, it won’t,” she agreed. “I have to prove it. And, since this is a dream, I think I know how.” She faced the gate. “Wish me luck.”

  “Mountains of it!” Esk said.

  “Cavev of it,” Volney agreed.

  “Rib cages of it,” Marrow said.

  She nerved herself visibly, then strode into the gate. She disappeared against the zombie centaur, and the vision formed.

  This time she ran to the field, then braked and whirled. The horde of centaurs charged up, brandishing their weapons.

  “You have no authority here!” she cried. “This is my dream! I reject you and all you stand for—narrowness, intolerance, violence! That is not my way, and should not be yours.”

  They charged on her, weapons flashing. Oh, no! Esk thought. It wasn’t working.

  Then Chex spread her wings and leaped into the air. The wings stroked powerfully, the downblast stirring up a cloud of dust and blowing back the manes of the centaurs. She rose above them, slowly, grandly.

  She was flying!

  The centaurs gaped. This was entirely unexpected!

  “I reject your land-bound ways!” Chex cried. “You have no wings, so you condemn those who do! That is your fundamental failing—sour grapes!”

  Now the centaurs began to recover. They lifted their weapons—and Chex accelerated her wing beats and launched up into the sky, quickly passing out of range. “I don’t need your approval; I don’t fear your condemnation!” she called. “I have my own life to live! I leave you behind!”

  Then she woke. She was back on the floor, panting, flushed with victory, and the dream was gone.

  “But in real life, I still can’t fly,” she said sadly. “I recognized that the terms of the dream were different, and that if I had awful liabilities, I also had wonderful abilities. They go together; the extremes are feasible, in the dream. So I drew on the positive, and vanquished the negative. And do you know, it’s true! I don’t need the centaurs anymore! I’m free of my liability of false desire; I no longer want to be like them or accepted by them. I want to explore my own horizons, which are so much greater than theirs! Their reality is valid, for them; I could not flee them as long as I desired their acceptance, nor oppose them as long as I knew that their dream presentation was merely an exaggeration of their actual way. I could not defeat them on their own turf. But when I invoked my turf, they were helpless!”

  She paused, realizing that the others were staring at her. “What’s the matter? Do you disagree?”


  Esk found his voice. “You’re through,” he said. “I—” She looked around. “Why, I’m on the other side of the barrier!”

  “Your victory,” Marrow agreed.

  “I came to terms with my worst fear or shame,” she agreed. “It no longer haunts me. The dream was only the representation of it. The barrier was only another representation. Neither exists for me anymore.” And she walked through the gate without hindrance, turned, and walked through it again. The metal bars had no substance.

  Esk stepped up to touch the bars—and his doppelganger matched him, reaching out to meet his hand from the other side. Esk jerked his hand back; that barrier remained real for him!

  “The vombie ventaur iv gone,” Volney said. “But the otherv remain.”

  “We must conquer our own bad dreams,” Esk said.

  “I vhall tackle mine,” the vole said, and marched into the gate.

  The zombie vole met him snout-on. The two merged, and the dream formed. It was of a tunnel whose walls glowed prettily with colored fungus. He entered it by boring through the wall, the magic metal talons on his front feet gouging through the rock as if it were mud.

  Another vole was there—no, Esk realized that there were subtle distinctions of form and coloration. It was a female, and not of precisely Volney’s species. Her eyes and fur changed color as his did, but she differed too.

  “The wiggle princess,” Chex murmured. She had crossed the barrier again and now stood beside him.

  Oh. Esk thought of the demoness Metria, and began to understand the nature of the vole’s deepest shame.

  Volney came to stand before the wiggle. She approached, and they sniffed noses. There was a pleasant smell, as of blooming flowers. It reminded him somehow of Bria Brassie, and that was funny, because she was made of metal and smelled of polished brass.

  Volney jerked away, and the dream ended. He was back in the passage, on the near side of the gate. “I wav afraid it would be that,” he said.

  “You desire the wiggle princess,” Chex said.

  “But the trap—”

  “Yes, you explained,” the centaur said. “But you avoided her, so you should have no shame in that connection. You did what you had to do, and we are on this quest for the containment spell because of it.”

  “Yet I came so clove to failing,” Volney said. “Because of my unworthinevv.”

  “Your what?” Esk asked. “You always struck me as a fine figure of a vole.”

  “I am not,” Volney said. “The rejection by her kind that Chekv feared—iv alvo mine.”

  “This requires explanation,” Chex said. “Aren’t you on a mission for your folk?”

  “I am—but it iv not becauve I am the bevt for it, but becauve I am ekvpendable.”

  “Expendable?” Chex asked. “How could that be?” Volney sighed. “It iv the time for the baring of vecret vhamev. I was a vuitor for an ekvtremely volivh female vole, but vhe turned invtead to another.”

  “An extremely volish vole turned you down?” Chex asked. “Surely that is no fault of yours!”

  “Yev it iv,” Volney insisted. “Volve mate for life, and when I wav rejected, I became ineligible for any vubvequent matvh. There wav nothing for me to do but depart.”

  “One rejection makes you—taboo?” Chex asked. “That hardly seems reasonable.”

  “You are not a vole,” he reminded her. “Think of me av having vprouted wingv.”

  “Point made,” she agreed, grimacing.

  “But then you were going—and helping your folk,” Esk said. “Where is the shame in that?”

  “I did not undertake the mivvion for the good of the Vale, but av a pretekvt to depart,” Volney explained.

  “Still, you did plan to complete it, didn’t you?”

  “Yev. But when I met Wilda—”

  “You were tempted to forget your mission,” Chex concluded. “Yes, I can appreciate that. But you did resist that temptation, so there is no shame.”

  “The vhame iv in the temptation,” Volney said. “I vhould not have been.”

  “I doubt it,” Marrow said. “You resisted that temptation both in life and in the dream.”

  Chex nodded. “I think you have not yet faced your deepest fear or shame.”

  Volney sighed with an exhalation of “v’s.” “Then muvt I fave it now,” he said. He walked forward into his doppelganger vole.

  The scene re-formed. Dulcet Wilda Wiggle came forward to meet him, sniffing noses. The smell of flowers grew strong.

  Volney hesitated, then took the plunge. If seduction by her was not his deepest potential shame, what was? He moved in to embrace her in the volish way.

  Her nose wiggled. She was smelling something. A picture formed above them, a scene within the scene: a female vole turning away from the Volney of the scenelet.

  “She realizes he is a rejectee,” Chex murmured.

  Abruptly the wiggle turned away. The scent of flowers faded. Volney was left there—rejected again.

  Abruptly he woke, back beside them in the passage. Now his deepest concern was clear: that his basic unworthiness as a vole would have alienated the wiggle princess, had he chosen to dally with her. Then he would have been guilty twice: of betraying his mission and his Vale, and of failing at that.

  “There is only one solution,” Chex said. “Complete your mission. Then if there is fault, it is none of yours, and you need have no further shame. The wiggle princess would not reject you then, but if she did, you would know that it was her error, not your own.”

  “But I am guilty of unvolivh weaknevv,” he protested.

  “Only in your bad dream,” she said. “You are afraid of weakness; you have not practiced it in life.”

  Volney shrugged. Then he marched back into the zombie vole. The dream formed—and dissipated immediately, leaving Volney on the far side of the gate.

  “Now you believe,” Chex said. “The dream has lost its power over you. Thus it was unable even to form.”

  “Now I believe,” Volney agreed. “I will complete my mivvion, regardlevv of temptation or rejecvion.”

  Esk took a breath. “My turn,” he said.

  The zombie man came to meet him. Esk merged—and his dream opened out.

  It consisted of a swirling universe of stars and dust and moons, all moving in the splendor of their separate trajectories, rather than being fixed in their shell the way they were in reality. The moon, instead of being a mass of green cheese, was in this weird vision a monstrous ball of cratered rock. And, strangest of all, the Land of Xanth was but a peninsula on the surface of a giant mundane sphere. Esk would have known that this was a hallucination even if he hadn’t already been aware that it was only a dream!

  The scene kept coming toward him, the detail expanding, until it became a map of Xanth, on which he was standing. Then a parallel picture formed, identical to the first, except that Esk was not in it.

  That was all. He stood disembodied, studying the two pictures, one with his image and the other without. There was absolutely no other distinction between them.

  He screamed. In a moment he found himself back in the passage. Chex hurried across and embraced him, much as he had embraced her between her dreams, comforting him as his horror slowly faded.

  “But what doev it mean?” Volney asked, perplexed. “I vaw no monvterv, no vhame. Merely two venev.”

  “There was no difference!” Esk cried. “None at all!”

  “True,” Chex murmured. “But this was no horror to us. Why should it be to you?”

  As he thought about it, Esk came to understand it. “I am in one, and not in the other—and there is no difference. I make no difference at all!”

  “Yes, Esk,” Chex said.

  “It doesn’t matter whether I live or die,” Esk said. “Xanth is just the same. What justification is there for my existence?”

  “That is only your fear, not the reality,” Chex reminded him.

  “But maybe it is reality!” he argued. “I am n
othing and nobody; what I do doesn’t matter. I realize now that I set out to see the Good Magician because I needed some proof that I had some importance, some mission in life. Getting rid of the demoness, saving my folks from her—that was only a pretext. I hoped the Good Magician would somehow—make me worthwhile.”

  “But you are worthwhile!” Chex said. “How can you doubt that?”

  “I tell myself I am,” Esk said. “But deep inside, I’m not sure that it is so. What have I done to make any difference at all to Xanth? If I had never lived, would it matter to anyone or anything? The picture with me in it is just the same as the one without me.”

  She considered. “I suppose that could be. But it would be similarly true for all of us. Objectively viewed, we may all be unworthy. But I think there is an answer. You don’t have to settle for what you are at this moment. You can work to make a difference. This is what Volney will do. Then the pictures will change.”

  Esk nodded. “When you say it, it does seem to make sense. But how can I make a difference? Xanth is so big, and I’m so small.”

  “How much difference would the Kiss-Mee River make?”

  “A lot. But that’s Volney’s mission. We’re only helping.”

  “But if he can’t do it without you?”

  “And if I could help him do it—then there would be something that would not be the same without me,” Esk said, liking the notion.

  He walked back into the gate. The zombie met him, and merged, and the dream came again.

  “I am nothing now,” Esk said. “But I can make a difference, and I’m going to try. If I succeed, I will be something. That’s all I can do—all any person can do. To make an honest try. If that’s not enough, then nothing’s enough, and it’s not worth having any bad dreams about.”

  The pictures shimmered. Then something wriggled on the one that had his image. A river that was almost straight on the other map was assuming curvature here.

  That was all. It was only a dream, but it gave Esk tremendous satisfaction. He knew what he had to do to abolish his deepest fear. To guarantee that his life had some bit of meaning. His life was not necessarily empty until he failed to accomplish that mission.

  The vision dissipated. Esk found himself standing on the other side of the gate.