Charon: A Dragon at the Gate flotd-3

by Jack L. Chalker

  “He could, but I doubt it. He would be the only one capable of coordinating the hunt, not to mention reporting to the government. Besides, he couldn’t fool Koril, so once he got here he’d just have betrayed us anyway. No, don’t worry about that part. But that was quite a show all the same… Say, speaking of shows—how the hell did you wind up like that, anyway?”

  Briefly I told him the sequence of events.

  “Fair enough. I thought you’d have sense enough to stay in the town hall, damn it, so I didn’t pay any attention to you. I was far too busy trying to keep out of the line of fire while trying to spot Morah; then I got bogged down helping with the escapes.”

  “How*d you know it was me here?”

  He smiled. “Your wa—your Warden brain pattern. It’s unique, distinctive, as everybody’s is. Not that I remember everybody’s, but you were around for months in the same building.”

  “What about these spells, Tully? Are they really permanent?”

  He stopped and turned to look at me. “Nothing’s permanent, particularly not on Charon. But it’s far, far easier to add than to subtract, if you know what I mean. When you cast a changeling spell, you form a mental set of instructions in your mind and transmit them to your subject’s Wardens. Those Wardens then proceed to do whatever they’re instructed to do. They draw energy from somewhere—external, certainly, but where nobody’s ever found out. They draw the energy in, convert it into matter often at astonishing speed, and apply the redesign.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not just changing shape,” I replied. “Hell, I need a far stronger backbone; I have a different digestive system better adapted to this; a different balance mechanism—and a million other things, big and small, that make this creature that’s the new me work. You can’t possibly know or think of all the little details required. It would take an extensive biomedical library complete with full biological design capabilities to do that”

  He looked at me seriously. “Want the truth? I warn you, it’s something we don’t tell everybody.”

  “I sure do.”

  “We haven’t the slightest idea how it’s done, and that’s the truth. Some of it, I think—the basic stuff—simply borrows from the Wardens elsewhere on the planet. Information requested and exchanged in a way we can’t comprehend—it’s a whole different form of life. The bunhar parts of you, the pigmentation and so on, are probably borrowed like that. In fact, we know they are—one can sense the request for and flow into the subject of that information. But when there’s no equivalent, or when you have to put bunhar and human together and make the new creature work, well, that’s a whole different story. The Warden organism doesn’t think. It’s more like a machine, waiting for instructions. It’s too simple a thing to think, even if you considered all of them on the planet as a single organism. Without instructions, it’s totally passive.”

  I could only nod and file the information away—for now. I returned to the immediate subject at hand. “But basically once you’re changed you’re stuck.”

  “Fairly much so. It took very little time to remake you, but it’d be a ticklish operation and maybe take a year or more to put you back the way you were. First of all, you’d be destroying the homes of all those billions of extra Wardens, and they have a fair survival instinct. Second, the extra mass has to go somewhere, and in general the only place it can go is back to energy. Do that wrong, or in too much of a hurry, and you get a big flash and bang and you’re dead. Far easier to modify you. In fact I think some modification may be in order. I can tell by looking at both Darva and you that your spell’s become somewhat unraveled, and if that isn’t checked, you’ll have even bigger problems.”

  “Huh? How’s that?”

  “Well, the situation’s unusual, but I’ve seen it before. Both of you have an abnormally high sensitivity to the wa, and it in turn listens to you. Without control, your subconscious, your animal parts, take over. If the trend isn’t checked or modified, it’ll turn both of you completely into bunhars. Tell me—have you been having any odd, ah, mental problems or urges lately?”

  Sheepishly I told him of the hunting experiences in the wild.

  He nodded gravely. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that as soon as I can make a complete examination of you. It’ll be tricky for several reasons. They’re your Wardens, and wa will follow what it perceives as the will of its host first and foremost. We work by convincing it that you’re some other way—by convincing you. In these reversions, the mind is the first to go since it’s not only unnecessary to the ultimate goal but often gets in the way. The process is so slow only because it does not occur on the conscious level—and because you’re around other people. If you’d missed us though, and stayed in the wild, the process would have accelerated. In a few months you’d have become a total bunhar, running with herd, and absolutely no different from a natural-born one. You were lucky.”

  I shivered. “Tell that to Darva, will you, Tully? That’s what she wanted to do—and I almost caved in.”

  The changelings were being moved out in very small groups, usually by ship but occasionally even by air. Koril’s network was far wider and deeper than I’d suspected.

  Tully took the time we had there to work with us as much as possible. Our days were spent in a series of exacting and often extremely boring mental exercises, many of which gave us headaches. There were all sorts of effective blocking techniques as well, many based on simple self-hypnosis that I could do in a moment, that kept the growing understanding of the power within us under some sort of control.

  The basics were simple. First, you couldn’t make something out of nothing. There had to be Wardens there to work with. Thus, one could not materialize something out of thin air—it just wouldn’t happen. But given something very small, even a rock or pile of sand, you could cause it to grow, multiply, and transform itself. You could not, however, give non-Warden life to something that had no life at the start. You could create a lot of things with simple sand, but you couldn’t make it a living thing. You could, however, reshape it, then direct and motivate it, puppet like, by your own powers of concentration.

  Darva was, in many ways, a quicker study than I was, because she was taking up where she’d left off so long before. Tully warned us, though, that there was only a small chance of us growing beyond very powerful apts, since the younger you were the easier the Art was to learn. Still, he had learned it starting at an age not far from mine, and that spurred me on. Koril, in fact, had become perhaps the most powerful and he’d learned it after he was forty.

  You would think that the more you practiced a thing the easier it would become, but in fact it became harder as we progressed, since the more ambitious you became the more complex the instructions and the more millions of Wardens had to be contacted.

  Finally though, when we’d been there almost four weeks and the company had dwindled to only a handful—meaning we were soon due to depart—Tully admitted he’d taken us as far as he could under these conditions. It was not far enough, of course, but we had far more self-control and power than either of us could have hoped to have had without his help. In point of fact, we were full-fledged, if still minor, apts.

  “You’ll be leaving in two days,” Tully told us finally. “Going south, to Gamush, on my recommendation. You should feel nattered—only apts with potential are sent there. You might even meet the big man himself.”

  “What about the reversion?” Darva asked nervously.

  “Well, you’ve stabilized it. I think we caught it just in tune, in fact. But down in Gamush you’ll get the top professional help you need, extra training, and—who knows?”

  “How will we be going?” I asked.

  “Well, we’ve been having problems with the ships, of course. Troopers are boarding and searching every one they spot, and they have effective aerial patrols out. We’ve been able to fake a lot—they don’t have much of a list of names, let alone changeling descriptions, but it’s a slow and risky process. No, we�
�ll get you out by air. Rather direct, I’m afraid, but the best way.”

  Tully’s “rather direct” turned out to be an understatement. We were not built for the compartments of a soarer, but a soarer modified and controlled by a sore could be used to transport humans up top—and changelings by having the damned thing swoop down and pick us up in its huge prehensile feet.

  Though we were both sedated for the sudden “pick up,” it was still one of the most frightening things I’d ever experienced. Crossing an ocean held in the grip of a great flying creature’s toes is not guaranteed to make anybody comfortable, although, it proved more comfortable than riding in that damned cabin. Not reassuring, though, when you looked down at countless thousands of square kilometers of open ocean and knew that you could be dropped in a moment if the big flying monster had an itch—and nobody would ever know.

  Our sense of security was no greater when, several hours flying time later, we crossed the barren coast of Gamush. For one thing, this was the first time I had seen a broken sky and bright sun since landing on Charon. The sky was reddish-orange, with gray clouds, and it looked really strange. The gas layer was thin enough for the real sun of the Warden system to be clearly visible—and it was a real hot one. Since our body temperatures rose or fell to adapt to the outside temperature, I began to worry about just how high that temperature could go in our kind without boiling our blood. It really was that hot, or so it felt—and incredibly dry. Below, orange and brown sand, ridged and duned, stretched as far as the eye could see.

  What a world, I remembered thinking. Tropical rain forests north and south and a desert baked almost beyond imagining in the middle.

  Still, there were creatures about We could see them flying around; apparently wingless cylinders, but none came close enough for us to get a really good look at them. Somewhere down below, other things also must live, I realized, for those creatures to feed upon. Yet in the whole journey I never saw a single tree, shrub, or animal. Nothing but desolate sand.

  We were rather rudely dropped at the end although we had trained as best we could and been prepared. There was no place for a soarer to take off from around here—not enough elevation on the dunes and no footholds—so it soared in low, stalled almost to a crawl, then dropped us a few meters into the sand. It then rapidly gained altitude until it was a small blot in the sky, and we saw those in the passenger compartment, mostly humans and human-sized creatures, parachute to the ground over a square kilometer or more. Parachuting was not a common art on Charon, but broken legs mended in a few days thanks to the Wardens.

  We were met by a small group of men and women, all humans, dressed in thick yellow robes and wide-brimmed hats. They were quite efficient at moving about and gathering together the dozen or so humans and changelings that had been deposited by the soarer.

  “How are you?” Darva asked, concerned.

  I checked myself. “A little bruised and burned by the sand, but otherwise all right,” I told her. “I feel rotten, though, and I need a drink. You?”

  “Same here,” she responded. “Let’s see how we get out of this hole. This place is like something from the worst nightmare. It’s hell itself.” It was hard to disagree with that, although for her this was the first time she’d ever seen or experienced this sort of climate and desert terrain. But what she considered normal wasn’t so nice, either.

  One of the robed men holding a clipboard quickly checked our names, seemed satisfied, then brought us to a central spot in the sand not in any way distinguishable from any other point in the desert. They looked around, checked something or other, and suddenly we started sinking into the sand.

  It was an eerie and unnerving sensation, although after the Sight it was pretty tame. I held my breath as I sunk to my mouth, then continued down under.

  For a brief moment my entire body was encased in sand, and I had this horrible feeling of smothering, but it soon passed as I felt cool air hit my feet and hindquarters and I realized we were entering some sort of huge passage. Spitting sand and wiping my eyes, I managed to get hold of myself and look around.

  What I saw was impressive—a huge hangar like building, well-lit with very modern industrial lights, with a lot of people running around below apparently working on or servicing a lot of stuff. What struck me most was the machinery—this place could almost be out of the civilized worlds. It was at least as modern as the shuttle—the first time I’d seen such a technological level since arriving at Montlay in what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  We were standing on some kind of translucent platform on a large piston like device that was gradually lowering us from the opening to the huge floor. Looking up, I had to gasp as I saw a huge roof apparently composed entirely of sand with no support whatsoever. How the effect was managed I never did find out, whether by some Warden sorcery or by some sort of force field, but this clearly was why the all-powerful Charonese and their alien allies had never found the place. Hell, I wouldn’t be able find it myself again no matter what the inducement.

  As we reached bottom, our greeting party quickly removed then robes and left them on the platform. A glance at them and at many of the personnel around the place showed that, down here, the mode of dress was closer to undress. I wondered how some of our moralistic Unitites were going to take that.

  Another party arrived to greet us, dressed rather scantily though a couple had on medical like garb. One of them approached Darva and me. “You are the two with the reversion problem?” she asked clinically.

  We nodded. “I’m Dr. Yissim,” she continued. “Follow me, please.”

  We followed her across part of the vast work area to a large tunnel like opening and went down it for a hundred meters or more, finally walking into a large, comfortable room that had large pads on the floor and little else.

  “We’re going to start your first treatment right away,” she told us. “Otherwise you’re going to have problems down here with fresh meat, among other things. Each of you please sit on a separate pad.”

  We looked at each other, shrugged, and did as instructed. The doctor stood back, looked at each of us in turn, then touched her temples and seemed to go into a light trance. I was familiar with the technique now, but it still surprised me. Hell, we’d only just arrived.

  She stood still that way for several minutes, and I could sense her Warden power—her wa—reaching out to me. It tingled, sort of, as I suddenly felt myself under the most absolute of microscopes. Darva felt the same. Then the doctor came out of her trance, nodded to herself, and started mumbling into a small recorder I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Limik!” she called, and a young man came in also dressed in hospital garb. She wasted no time on amenities. “Six liters number forty,” she told him, “for each of them.”

  He nodded, left, and in a short while returned with two large jugs full of a clear liquid. He approached us-—without a flinch or without even staring oddly at us, I noticed with some satisfaction—and handed us each a jug.

  “Drink all you can,” Dr. Yissim instructed us. “It’s basically water, which you need badly, with some additives. Drink it all it you can.”

  There was absolutely no problem in drinking it all. I seemed to have a bottomless reservoir.

  “Master Kokul’s analysis of the two of you was sent on ahead,” she told us as we finished. “He’s quite thorough. Now, you’ll both start to feel a little sleepy, lethargic, and relaxed. Don’t fight it. This is going to be a tricky series. If we don’t get this exactly right from the start we could merely accelerate the process, and we don’t want that. I realize you’re both starved, but I want empty stomachs for now.” With that, she turned and walked out of the room.

  Darva looked over at me, already seeming a bit sleepy.

  “She’s the coldest person I’ve ever met We might as well be two lumps of mud.”

  I nodded. “I’ve met a lot like that. Don’t let it worry you. Her type almost always know what they’re doing. Let’s just help it, get into
the relaxation mode, and let them do their job.”

  Using some of the concentration and relaxation exercises Tully had taught us, we needed very little time to reach a state of quasi-sleep. We were aware of what was going on, but floating in a cloud of peace and comfort, we just didn’t give a damn. In many ways it was like the state I’d been placed into before the old woman had made me a changeling.

  A wall flicked, and suddenly became transparent. I saw Yissim there, along with two men and three women, all sitting at a console of some sort. They looked at us then at the console; we could see only them.

  It began. It began without any of the gyrations or mumbo-jumbo everyone before had always used. You could see it, sense it, feel it, as a tremendous concentration of Warden direction flowed out from those people behind the partition to us. It was blinding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and within seconds it was in control of my mind. I found myself involuntarily resisting, and a minor fight ensued, made worse because, thanks to Tully, we knew the blocking techniques.

  Somehow’ I managed a slight turn so that I could see Darva, and despite my drugged state I nonetheless had a fascination for what I was seeing, a fascination that was neither shock nor horror nor anything else but just that—fascination. I found I didn’t really care. Darva’s body was undulating, going through rapid, fluid changes. I knew that my body was probably undergoing the same. Her torso was thickening up, her arms becoming shorter and smaller, and merging into her head, which was also changing, flowing liquidly out, taking a whole different shape.

  The Wardens in our bodies, aided by the animal foundations of our brains, were fighting the treatment, fighting it effectively by accelerating the change. We were turning into true bunhars—and worse, we were gaining mass in the head and torso as we did so, mass that would be very hard to remove. This then was the loaded gun of the changeling, the reason why it was next to impossible to change back. Reversion…

  I was aware my vision was changing. It was becoming impossible to focus close in, although I could still see Darva clearly and she could see me. I could see, blurrily, that I had a snout and I realized that my eyes, like hers, must be set much farther apart. It was becoming more and more difficult, though, to think at all. My mind was dying; I knew it, yet, eerily, even as it was lost I experienced less and less a sense of any loss at all.