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 outside 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.”
“But Suzl’s always been so impulsive and irresponsible!”
“Not now. Oh, to everyone else, yes. But not towards Spirit. After all those years and all those ugly people and spells, she needed somebody badly—and she got that somebody. She always put on a big front, and she still does, but it was an act. She was miserable and she hated herself and almost everything else. She doesn’t, not anymore.”
“I still want to see them—right away.”
Mervyn grinned. “Suzl predicted you would, and said they’d wait. Um—Kasdi. Don’t muck it up. I doubt if you could, considering the nature of that spell, but don’t muck it up. They’re really happy.”
“I just want to talk to them.”
“Go then. But take care. Coydt has dropped out of sight of late, and there are rumblings that whatever those evil ones are planning is close at hand. Also, there is more to this Spirit and Suzl business than was at first apparent. It may be connected. I know that we have some divine intervention at work here, and it’s working in its usual mysterious fashion.”
She stared at him. “You mean the Soul Rider?”
He nodded. “It is interesting, but the new spell linking both of them is organized in much the same way as the language Coydt imposed on Spirit, but it does not bear her signature. I begin to suspect that the spell that Spirit has is only superficially the spell that Coydt designed for her. It looks right, smells right, tastes right, even to me and certainly to Coydt who must have checked the work, but I think he got took. I think that language is Soul Rider language—the pure mathematics of Flux married to the human brain, a brain in which it was designed to ride as a supplement and observer, but which now thinks just that same way. Our Soul Rider, I think, has plans for Spirit and for Suzl, too—and perhaps as well for our friend Coydt.”
There was nothing to say to that, so she let it pass. “Anything new on this Matson business?”
“No. He’s been effectively disposing of Coydt’s agents in Anchor, including some of the best, while keeping out of sight himself. He lets Jomo draw the flies, then traps them, milks them for information, and disposes of them. He’s getting closer—or was, until Coydt dropped out of sight. Since then, our mysterious “friend dropped out as well. The fact that Coydt chose to go underground rather than face down his foe is uncharacteristic. It means the evil one has something more important to do. It all begins to sound ominous.”
“Let them try their worst,” she replied. “I don’t fear it—I welcome it. Let’s get it out in the open so we can deal with it. I respect their power and the deviousness of their minds, but I don’t fear their attempts. But now, I suppose I should fly. It is not every day that your best friend takes up with your daughter and fathers her child.”
To Suzl it was like being reborn. She was happy, truly happy, and very excited about life. She didn’t care what anyone else thought about the way she looked, and she liked things just fine. In fact, she’d fight the whole world and spit in its eye if it didn’t like her, or Spirit, or anything else they liked or did. And that went for dear old Cass, too, who, she knew, was inevitably coming.
Wizards traveled conventionally only when it suited their needs. Otherwise, they transformed themselves into birdlike creatures and sped to places perhaps weeks of travel away in a matter of hours.
When she arrived in Pericles and reformed into her familiar self, she went immediately to where the two were. She found Suzl sitting on a rock playing a tune on the octarina as a bunch of satyrs danced. Spirit lounged lazily beside her, stroking her a bit. It was disconcerting to Kasdi to see the affection.
Suzl stopped playing and got up. “Hi, Cass. We knew you’d be along sooner or later.” The satyrs looked miffed, but stopped and wandered off.
She was somewhat shocked by Suzl’s appearance. Although Mervyn had prepared her somewhat, it was not the same person she’d known. The face was more than ever the old, cute Suzl she’d known, but the body was extremely bizarre and unsettling. She was a head shorter than Kasdi now, no more than one-hundred-forty centimeters. Her arms were short and stubby and barely reached her waist—or, rather, where her waist should have been. Two enormous, impossibly firm breasts stretched out a full thirty centimeters, and while she had a short, fat stomach, it seemed as if her thighs began just below the breasts and were certainly more than half her body, and her back curved into it, giving her an almost birdlike gait. The male organ, which seemed to have grown to about fifteen centimeters, rested on a leathery forward scrotum in a state of permanent semi-erection, but it did allow her freedom to walk. Spirit seemed to have a preference for long hair, though. Both her lush auburn hair and Suzl’s thick black hair reached like capes almost to their ankles.
Spirit was as lovely as ever, but her breasts were obviously enlarged and below them was an extremely prominent and obvious bulge. She looked as if she’d swallowed the world’s largest melon. And she looked very content and very happy. “Want to tell me how all this came about?” Suzl shrugged. “It just . . . happened, that’s all.”
“But you’re old enough to be her mother. Father, anyway,” she said, repeating her lame argument that had not worked on Mervyn.
Suzl grinned. “Yeah, I’m the same age as you, but I don’t look it or feel it like you do. Come on—you know the age isn’t bothering you, nor even who I am. It’s what I am that disturbs you. Some of my best friends are freaks, but I don’t like my daughter marrying one.”
She started to reply, then closed her mouth, wondering if Suzl had given the comments to Mervyn or if it had been the other way around. Nevertheless, what Suzl said was still true, but she had felt forced to say it, and although she felt a little ashamed of herself, it didn’t change the gut feeling of wrongness inside her, however much her vows kept her from acting on the prejudice. “All right,” she said finally, “I accept that. But—do you two really love each other?”
“You can’t know how much,” Suzl replied, and Kasdi was both surprised and shocked to see Spirit nod and smile.
“Can she understand me now?”
“Not in the sense you and I can. Actually, not you at all, except through me. We can’t talk, but we know each other better than any two people I ever heard of. Call it reading emotions or feelings or whatever, but it’s got most conversation beat to Hell, I’ll tell you that.”
“But—what about you? Particularly in Anchor. How do they react?”
Suzl grinned. “More shocked than with any dugger I ever saw, of course. But I love it, and you know the rules. You wrote ’em. If it’s the result of an involuntary spell, standards can’t be applied against a Fluxer in Anchor. Not your Anchors, anyway. I actually went into a temple a while back and registered myself. I am now, legally and officially, an Anchor-born male with Flux spells and dispensation. It drove the bureaucrats nuts, but they couldn’t deny the sex. I can wear clothes again, if I could ever find a fit, but I won’t because Spirit doesn’t want it.” She paused for a moment, growing serious. “You’re very upset. Am I really such a shock to you?”
She looked at the dugger and had to nod sadly.
“Yes. I’m sorry, Suzl. May Heaven forgive me, but I have to be honest, particularly with you.”
“Well, this body’s no fun to travel with, but it is the most excessive in a small area I think possible. I didn’t ask for any of it. I was born short, and when my body was adjusted to carry all this, I wound up even shorter. Eighteen years of different wizards with crazy ideas and a lot of power did this to me, and if you’d stayed a dugger in Flux all those years without any Flux power, you would have wound up at least as different. What I couldn’t handle, though, up here in the brain, was fixed by wizards. I don’t care if I’m a monster to you, or to all of World. I’m not a monster to Spirit, or to myself, and that’s all that counts. Don’t you pity her or me. We pity you and your prejudices.
“All this time I’ve been playing at being a woman when actually I’m a man. I’m a man with a magically deformed body. All I wanted was two things— to forget the play acting and say, ‘Here I am; take me as I really am,’ and somebody who’d totally ignore what I looked like on the outside and see me as a human being and nothing else. Well, finally I got it all, and there’s nothing more I want. I love her, Cass, more than you know, and she loves me the same despite what you see.”
Kasdi was touched by Suzl’s frankness and sincerity, and it was clear just by the way Spirit looked at her and stroked her body that it was in fact mutual. She would have to accept it, she knew, no matter what her inner feelings and prejudices. But she knew Suzl well, and she wondered how long all this would last.
“Suzl—this will sound funny, all things considered, and I know your feelings about religion, but—are you sincere enough in this to marry her in a binding spell in Flux?”
“In a minute,” came the unhesitating response.
Kasdi thought a minute. “But how can Spirit take the vows? Or even understand them?”
“She will. If you’re big enough, we’ll do it right here and now with you performing the service. Spirit understands and goes along.”
Kasdi looked at Spirit and got the odd feeling that she did understand all this.
“All right, then. Join hands and come forward.”
The service was simple, the spell voluntary but binding. It was actually less a spell than a locking in of what was already there, and what was there was more than in ninety percent of all marriages. Spirit could not follow the service, but she accepted the spell in the same way Suzl did.
Something stirred, coming from none of the three humans. Kasdi saw and felt it, and was somewhat startled by it. The binding spell merged with the odd linking spell, absolutely freezing their emotional bond at the level it then was, which was high indeed. They would never separate of their own accord as long as they both lived.
They embraced and kissed passionately, and it was done and official.
Mervyn arrived and seemed satisfied at this resolution. He had been very nervous of Kasdi up to the bitter end.
Kasdi remained with them a while, ashamed of her own prejudices, but she knew she had to get back shortly. No one even knew where she was at this point. She explained the situation to Suzl, who nodded.
“We must be leaving, too.”
Kasdi looked at Spirit. “What? Now?”
“I’ve given them a wedding present,” Mervyn told her. “It’s a small new Fluxland not on any maps, and only Spirit can see the string that leads there. I’ll show you where it is, but nobody can pass the shield except Spirit, Suzl, and those whom they allow. Yet it’s within your cluster and within easy reach of any of us. It’s a tropical garden, with some pretty lakes and waterfalls and lots of harmless wildlife. Though not very large, about ten kilometers by ten, it will support them without need for magic or fear. It’s a refuge, a home. Spirit could not create it, but Suzl was able to tell me what they both wished, and so I created it and gave it to them. Spirit most certainly can maintain it, and that shield is total self-protection. A few of my people, centaurs and mermaids mostly, will be there to help them with any problems, and may stay if these two wish it.”