Empires of Flux & Anchor sr-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  “I think you ought to see a spell doctor in Flux,” she suggested. “It sounds to me like either you’ve got spells you don’t know about or some are becoming unravelled.”

  They were very nice, agreeing to go out for him and get the few items he wanted, and then showing on the map a quick way out of the Anchor that would avoid major population. They understood.

  The supplies consisted mostly of two boxes of cigars, a huge box of safety matches, a generalized map of World, and an octarina—a small instrument made from a specialized type of gourd. He had learned to play one on the trail and had lost it long before.

  It took two more days to exit the other gate through the route the temple had suggested, but there were only minor incidents and no trouble. They headed now southwest, towards more familiar territory again. Suzl had decided that if he needed a Flux doctor, he might as well satisfy an old curiosity itch and visit Pericles, home Fluxland of the wizard Mervyn, the only publicly known member of the Nine Who Guard.

  Pericles itself was off the usual beaten track and visitors were generally discouraged, although it was closer to the four-Anchor cluster in which both Suzl and Spirit had been born than to any other.

  The map that Suzl had was pretty barren; it showed only some major Fluxlands and all the Anchors, but it was still something that simply would not have been permitted in the old days. The Church and the stringers had kept geography as much to themselves as possible, so much so that the amazing pattern even this bare-bones map showed was unknown to most of the population, Anchor and Flux.

  Anchors varied in size from as small as twenty by forty kilometers to more than a hundred-and-fifty by two-hundred-and-fifty kilometers, and they varied widely in shape as well—Anchor Logh reminded most people of a shelled peanut, while Anchor Kaegh was an irregular crescent—but the twenty-eight Anchors were clustered in groups of four, all four’s closest inner point being equidistant from a Hellgate. It was evidence of intelligent design that gave skeptics like Suzl pause.

  The prime function of the Nine was to guard those Hellgates from any intrusions, and one lived near each cluster in a private Fluxland, although only one let it be known that he was, in fact, one of the Nine. Mervyn was the oldest and the dean of his group, as well as an instructor in Flux power both privately and in the wizards’ mad university town of Globbus, where Suzl’s original curse developed so many years before. Most Fluxlands were open; a few were closed off by a permanent shield of force maintained by the Fluxlord and could be entered only by permission. Pericles was one of the latter.

  Because of the shield, the only thing visible to outsiders was a huge, ornate marble archway into which had been set a massive bronze set of double doors. Only this was apparent. One could walk around the gate and even see the other side of the door, but nothing else but void.

  Before Suzl could even knock, though, the huge doors swung open to reveal a beautiful scene within. It was green, rolling countryside with lots of trees and what seemed like thousands of different kinds and colors of blooming flowers all around. Insects buzzed about, and the air was warm and humid, the sky a light blue with a bunch of fluffy white clouds. A creature approached them, a creature of Flux that was strange indeed, having the head and torso of a beautiful woman and the hindquarters of a spotted pony. She trotted up to them and stopped, and Spirit gaped. Suzl had seen stranger, of course.

  “Welcome to Pericles,” the centauress said. “I’m Melana. I’ll take you to Mervyn.”

  “I gather we were expected,” Suzl commented.

  Melana smiled. “He knows whatever he wants to know, and what he doesn’t know he devotes the bulk of his time to finding out. Come.”

  Suzl urged the mule onward, and Spirit tagged along, keeping pace and just looking at the beauty of the land.

  Here and there were columned structures of fine marble and statuary. Museums, libraries, and special collections, Melana told them. The statues and buildings were copies of things Mervyn had seen in some of his treasured ancient books.

  Around and about were other centaurs, and there were half-human fish in a wide lake, sunning themselves on rocks. There were many races of strange creatures in Pericles, it seemed, most of them half human and half some animal or another. They all seemed happy and friendly and content, something which Suzl envied. They were as perfectly adapted as any human stock could be to new form; he, on the other hand, was an example of how not to put somebody together.

  He had stared again and again at those four photos on the official document, and liked what he saw less and less. He couldn’t understand what Spirit saw in him, and he loved her all the more for not seeing what was so evident. The profiles were particularly shocking, since the size of that belly and ass stood out along with the grossness of the breasts. It had been years since he’d been able to see down past those breasts, and he avoided mirrors. Without the stomach’s support, though, those mammaries now would droop literally to his crotch, and he would be unable to stand. Recently he’d been feeling some pain in the lower back, legs, and ankles, and this helped explain it.

  Mervyn met them in a pleasant open glen near one of the marble buildings. He looked old and frail and his white beard was long and scraggly, but he had tremendous power in him, a power which maintained all this for hundreds of square kilometers with lots to spare.

  The usual greetings were brief but warm, and Mervyn and Suzl sent Spirit off to frolick with some of the creatures nearby. He then materialized two stuffed chairs in the middle of the glen for them. They looked rather comic where they were, but Suzl sat gratefully.

  After explaining the problems and worries, Suzl poured out his heart to Mervyn, how he’d been feeling about himself, his total sense of helplessness, and his tremendous closeness to Spirit which by now was close to worship. The old man listened attentively, particularly at his account of the growing romantic feelings and the emotional bond that created communication and his tale of the curious linking spell.

  Finally he said, “All right. While we’ve been talking, I’ve been analyzing both your mind and your spells. I find the rest fascinating, and hope that the two of you will remain here a while so that I may study your bonding. There is something afoot here that is beyond what Coydt intended or I or Sister Kasdi could see. But first we must address your current problem.”

  “It’s a spell, isn’t it? Somebody threw another whammy on old Suzl when he wasn’t looking.”

  “Something like that. Let’s start at the beginning. You were a normal human woman, short and pudgy, but that was all. Then you got involved in that attempt to remove Dar’s sexual spell and got caught in the crossfire, getting his penis and a variation of his curse. That curse is quite good and nothing for amateurs to deal with. You knew that at the time, and were told the possible consequences of trying to remove it.”

  He nodded. “I understand the problem. Anybody who tries to remove it might wind up with nastiness back at them. But I accepted that. I really didn’t mind, after a while, although it took me years to decide on one direction and one identity. I can handle that. But this other…”

  “And you really had few problems until you signed on with this Ravi a few years ago?”

  “That’s about it. After all those years I just got sick of being on the low rung, and when he offered me a foreman’s job, I took it.”

  “But there was a price.”

  “Well, yeah, but I just figured he was doing that game with his own power to magnify what he liked. I never thought of it as permanent.”

  “Apparently he knew this and decided to keep a hand on you. This spell is not something he did; it’s something he bought, and he also bought control of it. And you accepted it, even though you didn’t know you were accepting all of it.”

  “Yeah, I—shit! You mean it’s one of those things like Cass has?”

  “Well, yes and no. Yes, it is one of those self-imposed spells. No, it isn’t as absolute as hers or Spirit’s because you have no Flux power, so the linkage
, while voluntary, was done for you. What if did was redesign your body and give him control of it. He could change what he willed, and the spell would adjust the body to cope. What he did when you quit was simply relinquish control of the spell to you. He knew what this would do. As you had no Flux power, you could not maintain a balance in yourself, and things began to go a bit wild. It is the same sort of thing that happens to duggers lost alone in the void that turns them into unhuman and semi-human creatures. You have been, I think, sexually hyperactive, so those were the areas that were stimulated, this time beyond the spell’s ability to cope. It’s good you came when you did. The sexual areas are receiving all the attention, and soon you would have been immobile.”

  He shivered. “And my shrinkage and growing weakness?”

  “There again it’s you. You feel ugly, deformed, unhappy. This goes to make you more so. You feel totally powerless, while always in the past you’ve been aggressive and in charge of yourself. You love Spirit.”

  “She is the only thing of any importance in my whole life. She is my whole life, Mervyn. I couldn’t stand life without her now.”

  He nodded sagely. “But to be with her, with her limitations, you must surrender yourself totally to her. She provides everything—food, water, love, protection—you see where I’m leading? You had never surrendered yourself before, but now the choice was surrender or leave her. You’ve placed all your needs directly in her hands. You killed your aggressiveness for this and, in the dugger way, this unconscious decision reflects in your physical self. You see yourself as weak and helpless, and so you become weak and helpless. In the void you would eventually become so helpless she would have to feed you.”

  He gave a low whistle. “So what can I do?”

  “Ravi’s spell is cleverly linked to your curse. At this time I would not like to remove it, but if you remained here and I could bring in others from time to time, we might eventually find a way to reverse it. I believe, after all this time, I see the internal logic of the curse and its clever traps, and I might be willing to take a crack at it. But this will have a result you might not like. It would take a massive voluntary binding spell that would supply an equal counter, and that would not only make you female once again, but would also lock that sex in permanently.”

  He shook his head. “A while ago I’d have jumped at it, but I am different now. Spirit’s all oral.”

  “It would end that part of your relationship,” he admitted.

  “So what’s the alternative? I can change into a vegetable or I can lose Spirit. I’d rather die.”

  “The only alternative I can see now is also a problem. I can’t say we couldn’t break that add-on, but it would take a very long time before we were confident. You can leave it as it is, and I’ll give you some easing spells that might slow the process down, and wait for a cure I’m sure is possible—if I can get time from the experts to work on it.”

  “So you’re saying the same thing. A cure is possible, but it might take years during which time I’ll get worse, and there might not be a cure at all at the end of it.”

  “There’s certainly a cure, but, yes, it might be long before anyone will risk those traps on your curse, and there is the possibility of the cure being worse than the disease. There always is. The point is, there is hope that way.”

  “Big deal. Either way, I lose.”

  “The other alternative is a drastic one, but simple. It would involve adjusting and fine-tuning your current body for the condition you now have. But to keep your own unconscious from undoing it, it would have to be strong and voluntary. Only you could change it, and without Flux power you never could. You would be frozen in your current condition forever. And I would have to insist that you agree to some psychotherapy spells to make it work at all.”

  He sat there a moment, thinking. He could be a human woman again and lose Spirit. He could let his unconscious turn him from freak into monster and lose everything. Or he could submit to wizardry once more and be forever trapped an ugly freak. It was a rough choice.

  He was suddenly conscious of Spirit nearby, and turned and saw the mute girl behind her chair, looking down at him and smiling, and he instantly knew the only choice he could make.

  “Freeze it,” he told the wizard, and Spirit took and squeezed his hand.

  “Well, sit back, relax, and make your mind a blank if you can. Be patient with me, though. This nonhuman biology is a bit complex, and you only get one chance to get it right.”

  The physical process, however, was not difficult to do. There was a good deal of permanent muscle to build where there should have been only fat. The trouble was, he had to work around the curses rather than changing them, so the mass he needed he had to take from elsewhere on her. Removing much of the fatty, buildup from her face restored it very much to its original, cute appearance, which helped in several ways. The legs were needed for support, so material had to be taken from her arms, which were then shortened a little. Muscle had to be placed in the breasts, so the stomach could do more counterweighting and less supporting, but those breasts, thirty centimeters long, would stick almost straight out. That allowed him to bring the stomach in and force the mass to her spine for rigidity and counterweighting. The tremendous thighs and rigid, heavy-curved spine would carry the counterweight.

  Mervyn was suddenly aware that Spirit was following everything he was doing and, more interesting, seemed to understand it in detail and even, it seemed, somehow was able to suggest something here, something there. Finally, the physical part was done, and he turned to the psychological. He needed a tool to rebuild her sense of identity and self-esteem. Suzl was male in one way only, but wanted to be more. He decided to make him/her more at ease. He sensed that Spirit liked the female aspects of Suzl, and so he addressed that problem first. Suzl had been desperately trying to think of herself as a “he,” when actually both were and would always be correct. He examined what made Spirit attractive physically to Suzl, and melded that image in with those areas, both physical and expressive, that would make her like that in herself as well.

  Mervyn had much experience in what was the art of psychological adaptation. There was no sense in turning someone into a centaur if they didn’t love to be one. His handle on the matter was Spirit, who seemed again to understand the question. What did Spirit see when she looked at Suzl? He took a gamble that the unintelligible mathematical series she sent was what he wished, and used it. If it worked, Suzl would no longer fight battles in her own mind over whether he was she or vice versa. Spirit, it seemed, thought of Suzl as “she” and so “she” it would be.

  The solution was frame of reference. Suzl loved Spirit, but now only Spirit, not Suzl or anyone else, would be her mental frame of reference. If her looks pleased Spirit, that was enough. If her split sexual identity was erotic and what Spirit thought made Suzl a unique treasure, then she would be content with it and no longer have any conflicts over it. It was the correct solution, and he knew it. Her ego was now based on Spirit and nothing else.

  His only real worry about the spell was his inability to talk to or understand what Spirit thought. It was all well and good to freeze Suzl this way, but would Spirit always feel the same? The answer came from an astonishing quarter, and he almost reeled from it.

  Something else took control, something that was from Spirit but not Spirit. Mervyn was so excited he almost lost his whole train of thought. For the first time, he was in a sort of direct contact with a Soul Rider! He stared with wizard’s senses at the faint double aura around Spirit and saw it work through her.

  The mysterious and complex language Coydt had imposed, or thought he had imposed, on Spirit was the language of the Soul Riders themselves. As the Soul Rider worked, there were occasional flashes in the same language that seemed to superimpose again. At first it confused the wizard, but now he realized that, whatever it was, it was coming from yet another source. The Rider was getting, at a speed far too rapid for Mervyn to comprehend, instructions from an o
utside source. The strange language could handle the speed; human language could not.

  The Soul Rider completed its work and seemed to sense the old wizard looking at it. He felt an eerie sense of awareness, and found his sense being directed to a different area of Spirit. He saw, and he understood.

  The Soul Rider’s plan—or its master’s plan, whoever that was—would continue. Spirit was pregnant by Suzl, and had been for some time. She was so lean and trim that it was already starting to show, but it just hadn’t been noticed yet. And then the contact was broken, and Suzl slept.

  She slept for three full days.

  9

  WEDDING GIFTS

  Kasdi looked pale. “Even when I heard, I could hardly believe it. I mean, how often does your best friend fall in love with your daughter? And Suzl? She’s the same age as I am!”

  “You know age isn’t what’s bothering you,” Mervyn responded accusingly. “You love Suzl, and you love duggers, but she’s a dugger and a freak and she’s gone and taken your daughter, not somebody else’s.”

  She stared at him, but knew that he spoke true. “All right, I admit it, but Heaven help me, I can’t get rid of it. I had hoped for some strong, handsome wizard. That may have been the mother talking or a girlish fantasy, but nothing in Spirit’s background says this is even remotely thinkable. The list of boys she turned down is amazing, and the ones she went out with were all big, handsome, virile types.”

  “But her circumstance and her way of looking at things have changed. Ever see the way she looks at a flower? As if she can see right through the surface to some inner beauty and complexity? She sees everything, and everybody, that way. I think we’d all be better off if we could think or see others only that way.”