There was no answer.
“I believe,” the old wizard said carefully, “that certainly four, if not more, of the clusters are in such a position that the existing order could be overthrown in a moment, on orders from the shadowy authority who controls them.”
“But they couldn’t hold them. We proved that years ago,” the tall, stately Hjistoliran noted.
“They don’t have to. Once all seven are under their influence, they need only wait until it is time and strike at once, quickly. They can hold long enough for all seven to take the temples and reach the Gates. You can see their enormous influence now. What scientific project takes precedence over all others in the eyes of Church and state?”
They thought a moment. “Inter-Anchor communications,” the tiny, green Talanane said. “Oh, my!”
Mervyn nodded. “And they’ll get it, too, if it is possible—and it almost certainly is, or no other safeguards against the Seven are really needed.”
“Do you believe that they already control all seven, then?” Krupe asked him.
“No. The south is the key, in many ways. The New Eden Brotherhood is not merely a revolt by the have-nots against the Church and World, it is in every sense of the word a religious movement and an expansionist one. Within two years after the collapse of the Empire it had abrogated its treaties and made alliances with very powerful Fluxlords. Within five, it had overrun Anchor Bakha and secured the Fluxlands between. They have developed new and devastating weaponry that can be used in Anchor, and I believe Anchor Nantzee is in imminent danger of falling, giving them the factories and heavy industry to really expand their program.”
“But where are they getting all of this knowledge, all of this new and revolutionary weaponry?” the rock-like Makapuua asked him. “From the Seven?”
“No. If the Seven had such weaponry and knowledge it would have used it long ago. Coydt had amassed a massive amount of ancient writings over the years, and had whole teams of his people working on them. From those writings he created the Flux amplifiers, and it is from those writings that weapons such as this are springing. Small items of use to Fluxlords are being parcelled out to secure their complete cooperation, but most of it they are keeping for themselves. I daresay the Seven would like to get their hands on those books as much as we would. But. like Matson’s shotgun, science is proving more powerful than sorcery.”
“Then they must be attacked and stopped at once,” Krupe put in. “They must be contained or eliminated.”
Mervyn stared at him. “How? The leaders keep to Anchor, where we are powerless, and they are so paranoid and secretive that they are nearly impossible to infiltrate on a high level. What forces can stop them, when they have weapons that in an instant can return an entire army to its Flux components? They are driven and they are ruthless. Bakha was determined to resist them, and it did so to its last ounce of strength. It cost them fully ninety percent of their population. Anchor Logh, or New Eden as they call it, no longer has a population problem. Half of it now lives in Bakha. Far worse, from our point of view, is that they have the same goal as the others—inter-Anchor communications. And they are unencumbered by the Church’s restrictions on research. And they barter just enough with unscrupulous Fluxlords to get what they need by magic. Above all, they are pragmatists.”
“But at the cost of some of their best minds,” MacDonna pointed out, “considering what they do to their women.”
“Quite so,” Mervyn agreed, “but that is far less a handicap if you have the blueprints for what you need set out in front of you, lacking only the industrial capability to create what you need, Somehow, when they’re ready, the Seven will be able to talk their way through to that Gate. Bet on it. The south is even now being handled for the Seven by Zelligman Ivan, one of the best. Like any good snake, he can manage to wiggle through the smallest of cracks. Right now he’s thinking of ways to get himself in close to the New Eden leadership. Not inside, but enough to ask a favor when needed.”
“But this is terrible!” Talanane exclaimed. “What you are saying is that the doom we have so long fought is not only coming but is inevitable!”
“Not inevitable. Nothing is inevitable until it is accomplished and proven so by hindsight. What I am saying is that we have been badly finessed, outmaneuvered, and outthought. The true danger is not imminent. I would say it is years away, perhaps many years. Finally, though, conditions that have always been right for us are turning right for them. It had to happen, sooner or later. In a way, it’s our fault, for the old system served us well and we helped destabilize it. Perhaps not. If indeed the former Queen of Heaven is Haldayne’s sister, they already had control of the old Church. Perhaps we made it harder, not easier.”
There was an almost collective sigh of resignation. “Then what can we do?” Krupe asked hesitantly.
“We can forget about the other clusters, the ones totally under control, except for what we’re doing now, and suggest to the Church that it strengthen its guard at the temples. We should concentrate our own efforts on securing the center, for if we hold just one Gate we hold them all. Pool our forces. Four of us on the western cluster— Anchors Qwantzee, Chahleh, Gorgh, and Ecksreh, four others on the eastern center—Anchors Tezgroph, Yonkeh, Abhel and Doltah. I don’t care if we have to sit, one on top of each temple entrance itself. Plan it out among you. But one must be held at all cost. They can move, but they cannot sustain a move for very long.”
“And you?” MacDonna asked him. “Where will you be?”
“I’ll be down there with Zelligman, watching him and everything else like a hawk. And if Anchor Logh starts talking even the most idiotic nonsense to Anchor Bakha, you all will be the second to know.” His mind was already very much focused on Zelligman Ivan, wondering just what the man was up to now. . . .
3
A LITTLE FAVOR
They never had a name for the small Fluxland Mervyn had created for them north of Anchor Logh, but they never needed one. To Cass it was just “home,” and to Spirit— well, names wouldn’t mean much to Spirit.
It was a pretty place, a garden with a nice stream and waterfall and plenty of flowers and fresh fruit and vegetables growing wild. Spirit wouldn’t eat cooked food, but little Jeffy had to have some, even though he stayed on his mother’s breast for a very long time.
Spirit was a tall, beautiful, slender woman with long auburn hair and a creamy tan complexion. She lived more or less in a world of her own, unable to speak or understand anyone, unable to use or make use of any human-made tools or artifacts. While Coydt van Haas had originally used the kidnapping and spell on Spirit as a way to hurt Cass, and to divert her from his bigger plans until it was too late to stop him, the spell had been broken once, while Coydt was turning their home of Anchor Logh into a male sex fantasy. But she had been so revolted by her old friends’ and family’s acquiescence to this weird new order of things that she had chosen once again and for all time to return to what she’d been in Flux.
And the Soul Rider continued in her. The strange energy creature lived in some kind of symbiotic relationship with its host, and could only be perceived by powerful wizards like Cass and Mervyn, and then only as a doubled aura.
Spirit was an eternal child, but she had a child. Jeffron, who early on needed his grandmother’s care. Cass felt useful and secure during that period, after forty years of stress in which she had almost, but not quite, revolutionized World. But she found her patience short and thin, and soon had to depend on those people Mervyn had sent— strange half-animal creatures of Flux and his imagination, creatures who’d once been human—to handle the routine chores.
Little Jeffy was a tiger and a delight, too, but it was clear that this Fluxland, so perfect for his mother, was not a place where he could grow and develop and learn. Ultimately, Mervyn suggested sending the boy to school in an Anchor up north, with later training part-time in Globbus. the Fluxland which trained and developed half the wizards of World. Cass had to agree. For Jeffy had the power, as his parents and grandmother had had before him. and only time would tell how strong he might become. He would be home for frequent visits, of course.
Spirit was sad at this, but seemed to understand why it had to be, and overall took it better than her pragmatic mother. For Cass, the boy’s departure simply left her with nothing to fill the days and nights: with no purpose at all.
She brooded. She loved Spirit more than anything, but her daughter’s condition made it impossible to get close to her, and was a constant reminder to her of her past.
Cass had been depressed most of her life, but action and events had always served to divert her mind. Now there was nothing, and she sank into a total gloom. Although she was famous over all the world, she considered herself worse than a failure, and made a good case for that judgment. She’d failed at romance, she’d done worse than fail as a parent—she’d exposed her child to the condition she was now in—and her actions had cost so many lives, eventually including the life of her father, the one human being she’d loved above all others. She had led an army that had taken half the planet, something no one else had ever dreamed of doing, yet the Empire stalled and collapsed in ruins when she could no longer lead it, and the old and new Church had reconciled in a way that might have been more honest but was certainly no more progressive.
She’d wanted to travel World, not conquer it, as a girl, but that was next to impossible now. There wasn’t much fun in seeing the remains of what she’d built, in finding out that the changes had, after all, been mostly cosmetic. She felt as if she belonged nowhere, a ball adrift after plowing through a perfectly ordered display. Her failure at romance was the one thing she felt desperately.
She took to having long, elaborate fantasies in the gardens, lying there naked and half-dreaming. She was fifty but looked twenty-five, and she had had sex only once in her life. Not that she couldn’t have it now, for she was a powerful wizard and all the binding spells limiting her were gone. Yet she feared failure and rejection more than ever, and feared hurting anyone else.
She imagined herself as a voluptuous sex bomb, and knew that she could change herself into that image at any time, but she didn’t have the guts to do so. She imagined herself as a man, and thought that had possibilities. She’d always been a tomboy, always looked like a boy, dressed like a boy, and did a man’s job, and she was proud of that. She’d spent so much time acting as a boy she just about thought of herself as one. She liked the perfect female form, such as Spirit’s, but it just wasn’t her, and what attracted her in the men she did find attractive was an aura of strength, of competence, of being in control. Few men she’d met fit that description, and certainly if she took on a male form that quality, to her mind, would be lacking as well. She’d never liked living lies, yet she saw her whole life that way and wasn’t about to create another.
Because she’d conquered half a world, creating and running a Fluxland, which she could learn to do through Mervyn, didn’t really appeal to her, either. The trouble was, the way her fantasies were, it’d wind up being too much like Coydt’s version of Anchor Logh.
She was tempted by drugs, but was immune to them. Yet she did drink, quite a lot. It was pleasant to be drunk and know that one could banish an upset stomach and a hangover with a wave of the hand. She visited Mervyn’s Fluxland of Pericles and found in its vast and ancient library many spells for exciting the pleasure centers, and these helped. They stopped her brooding, anyway.
Mervyn kept trying to get her interested in something— the Codex she’d begun to assemble of all the ancient writings, politics, and teaching at Globbus—but nothing really appealed to her after a while. She just drifted aimlessly, wallowing in her guilt and self-pity, feeling her life was over and wasted but unable to bring herself to terminate it.
She thought often of Suzl, made over by binding spell into a gorgeous sex object, and wondered who’d gotten the better of the deal. Coydt had cursed Suzl to everlasting slavery, it was true, but no worse a one than citizens of most Fluxlands endured. And there were compensations. She’d been cursed to eternal beauty, to eternal sex appeal, and, most mercifully, to ignorance so that she would be happy. She had pitied Suzl for that, but Coydt had cursed Cass as well by removing from her every binding spell, setting her aimlessly adrift and showing the lie of all she had built up. One was free, and powerful, the other weak and a slave—-and who was the happier?
Damn Coydt van Haas! He had worked such exquisite, such perfect evil upon World and then died so that he paid nothing for those deeds. He was at peace, and his victims continued to suffer.
And yet, Cass was still wanted. The Church would richly reward anyone who got rid of her. Its leaders feared her return as a renewed and this time perhaps fatal blow to the social structure. All the wizards she’d defeated who still survived wanted her—boiled, fried, or any other way—as did relatives of those thousands killed in her useless wars. None of this worried her. Between Mervyn’s powers and her own, home was secure. One could not even find it without an invitation, for no strings led to or from it. And she was a powerful wizard in Flux and a formidable opponent with gun or knife or sword in Anchor.
Yet Coydt had beaten her, and broken her self-confidence forever. She could never be sure anymore just who was the stronger, and that made her reluctant to use her powers.
She had lost all track of time, for it wasn’t relevant. Time was measured only in the growth of Jeffron, who now visited less and less frequently. He was a strapping one hundred eighty-two centimeters tall, lean, and muscular now, with coal-black hair and his mother’s green eyes. He was smart and powerful, but seemed rather aimless and impetuous, the sort of young man who knows he looks good and can get whatever he wants, but hasn’t decided what yet; willing to try almost anything once, but never satisfied. She loved him, and worried about him, but feared to give him any advice or direction. Who was she to screw up yet another life?
One day Mervyn sent word that a stringer named Sondra wished to meet both Cass and Spirit. Cass wasn’t used to visitors and wondered what new trick Mervyn had up his sleeve to pry her from her seclusion, but he explained that Jeff had had enough of learning for a while and wanted to see the world. Sondra was willing to take him along as a wizard-dugger, and she had a long route in the northern Flux, far from Anchor. Cass decided she did very much want to meet this person.
When she arrived. Sondra proved to be a shock. She was stunningly beautiful, and the silver hair and eyebrows against the chocolate skin was even more stunning. Irreverently. Cass wondered if Sondra’s pubic hairs were also silver, and finally decided they had to be. Flux magic had been used to color-coordinate horse and rider; even the saddle and butt of her shotgun were black embossed with silver.
Cass, who usually went nude, had dressed for the occasion in a rumpled shirt, faded jeans with holes in them, and a very old and worn pair of boots. She felt overawed and inadequate. This was no stringer like those she’d seen before—most of the female stringers were flat and bald— and she couldn’t resist the comment.
“You are a wizard, I see.”
Sondra smiled and nodded, dismounting and letting her horse graze. “Yes. Mervyn says I blew my chance at greatness by going with the Guild, but I’m strong enough for my needs.”
I’ll bet you are, honey. Cass thought jealously, but aloud she said. “Well, I’m very strong and it didn’t get me anywhere. I can see why Jeff would be eager to ride your strings, though.”
The stringer laughed. “I like the effect. People remember me, and it’s good for business. A little intimidating, too, I hope. If you knew what I really looked like, or the horse, either, you’d wonder why I ever left home.”
It was a nice comment, although Cass didn’t really believe it. Except maybe about the horse. Still, Sondra might be good for Jeff. Might teach him some humility, too, if she knew her stringers. Sondra had the same inner strength she admired in men, a toughness and resourcefulness that shone through any disguise. She knew she could come to like, even admire, Sondra, if she weren’t so damned awesomely beautiful.
“Mervyn says that your routes are all way up north, past Anchor. How’d you happen to meet Jeff?”
“It was a set-up. I was brushing up on some technique at Globbus and Mervyn spotted me and suggested it. I took pains to look Jeff up—apparently he’d been talking about going out on a train lately anyway—and I liked him. If he learns some self-control, instead of going off half cocked at everything, he’s going to be quite a man.”
That was the right thing to say to a grandmother.
“Well, I can’t see any way of preventing him from doing anything he wants to do. What is he, now? Seventeen?”
Sondra looked surprised. “Twenty.”
Cass felt ancient. “Mind if I ask how old you are?”
“Thirty-four, and I don’t mind a bit. But I’ve been riding string since shortly after Jeff was born. It’s still a dangerous profession, but less so for a full wizard. Most of the stringers are false wizards, you know.”
Cass nodded. False wizards could conjure up anything as convincingly as a true wizard could—only it wasn’t real. Most stringers didn’t need the full power; there were just enough like Sondra to make most folks nervous attacking any stringer at all. “Uh—you say you’re from up north. You ever run into an old retired stringer named Matson?”
“He’s my father,” Sondra said softly.
Cass’s mouth dropped. “You’re the little girl with the talent who was interested in the Guild?”
“I suppose that’s how he’d have said it. That’s why I’m here, really. Spirit is, after all, my half-sister, and I’ve heard a lot about you that doesn’t make the rounds of history or gossip.”
“I’ll bet,” she said sourly, recovering somewhat from her surprise. “So Jeffs actually your half-nephew, or something like that. Does he know?”
“No. I’m saving it for when he tries to put the make on me the first time on the trail. But if you think I should—”
“No, no! It’s perfect! It’ll take him down three pegs! Come on—I’ll find Spirit, and then we’ll talk a while.”
They spent the day just talking and roaming around the small garden. Spirit didn’t know who the stranger was, but was obviously as impressed by her appearance as Cass had been. Sondra was distressed by the woman’s spell-enforced condition—although Spirit seemed happy enough—and she examined the spell. She had been doing some work with more advanced sorcercy, but this one was a beauty, so complex and riddled with traps that she could well understand why no one had broken it. No one but one.
For Suzl, supercharged briefly by the energy flowing directly out of the Hellgate, had managed somehow to do it, aided by the mysterious creature that guarded the gate. But no one else had ever been able to achieve that energy level, and no one else had ever directly contacted one of the mysterious spirits—and Suzl hadn’t known why.
Sondra felt relaxed and with family, but she was difficult to get to know or understand, as were so many stringers. She loved her work, that was clear, and was very good at it.
“You never think of settling down, having kids?” Cass asked her.
“No, not really. This may sound a little cruel or selfish, but I don’t want the stuff that comes with kids. I was never very good with them, and they tie you down for years and limit your freedom. Some people are cut out for it and some aren’t. I’m surprised you never found somebody else and had more, though. Seems to me you could just pick a good-looking wizard and have at it.”
“No, I don’t think so. Not now, anyway. I have to admit that there’s a temptation to try and replace some of the lives I’ve cost, maybe to really experience the joys and pains of raising a child, but I can’t bring myself to take that kind of responsibility anymore. We’re totally different, Sondra, but in one way we’re the same—we’re wizards, different from other people. Wizards don’t get sick, they never die of natural causes, and they live until some accident or attack kills them. Lite’s not the same with us.”
“I know. That’s probably why there are so few wizard children. We once did as much of a trace as we could on Mom’s family, and found she was related to most of the best-known wizards on World. They’re mostly related, too, in one way or another. There’s probably no more than fifty or a hundred families that have it.”
“Not me—I was an Anchor girl.”
“But you have it in the blood somewhere. It’s passed down, sometimes full, sometimes diluted, sometimes skipping a generation or two, but it’s there.”
Cass walked her back to the garden entrance, where the great horse still grazed. Sondra hugged her and mounted the horse, and Cass walked with them to the Fluxland border, which would open only to Cass or Mervyn or a few trusted aides of Pericles from either side. Cass walked through the barrier and into the void, and Sondra followed.
“You take care of him, Sondra—and yourself, too!”
“Don’t worry—and thanks. I’ll be back.” And with that, the strange, dark, beautiful woman rode off into the void.
Cass sighed and watched her vanish, then turned to the garden once more.
She felt a sudden, tremendous shock and jolt, then collapsed in a heap.
Sounds were deadened in the void, but Sondra heard the sharp crack of some kind of weapon and immediately turned and rushed back, drawing her shotgun at the same time.
They were on her in a moment—horrid, drooling, yowling creatures of a dugger cult. She pushed them away and continued, and when others jumped up she fired both barrels of hard shot into the throng.
She didn’t see Cass anywhere. Had she been somehow killed or taken, or had she made it back inside? Sondra halted, and her great horse reared on its hind legs and came down again. Now she charged straight at the densest part of the group, and before her swept a fierce wall of flame that caught those who could not retreat. There was another sudden loud crack, and a blue-white ray lashed out and missed her and her horse by several meters. She turned in the direction from which the ray had come and saw an ugly dugger dressed in tattered furs and jewelry made from human bones fumbling with a large device on a tripod.
She sent out a line of force that struck the projector and caused the dugger using it to cry out and fall back. She was about to close on the thing and make it tell what this was all about when she was suddenly struck by nausea and dizziness. She reined up short and looked back and saw immediately what was happening.
The Fluxland was dissolving!
She abandoned all thought of the duggers for the moment and stared at the phenomenon. A Fluxland was just a thought, a tiny world created out of a wizard’s imagination and held together by the force of that will. Mervyn had created this place, but it was modified and fine-tuned by Cass, and now she knew that Cass was either dead or so nullified that not the tiniest thought or will concerning this Fluxland remained. Mervyn’s structure should still have held, but it was under some sort of psychic assault from outside as well, taking advantage of Cass’ incapacity.
She couldn’t tell exactly where the assault was coming from, but she knew in an instant that its power was more than a match for hers. The beautiful setting was visible now; the trees, plants, and flowers seemed to be dissolving, like a watercolor in the rain.
She thought of Spirit, alone and with no substantial power, and headed into the decomposing mess.
She found the bodies, eventually, of several of Mervyn’s people, but of Spirit or Cass there was no trace. Angry at whoever had done this, knowing that she had to track them down now and make them pay, she nonetheless set off for Pericles. Not only had they harmed kin, but the only way they could have found the place was by following her there. Well, they’d made an enemy who would give her life to apprehend them, but who was smart enough to know when she needed reinforcements.
4
WELCOME TO HAPPINESS
The men stood around the still, small body of the woman and examined it as if it were some sort of specimen. One was Zelligman Ivan, ever his dapper self, while a second was a tall, beefy-looking man with a thick black moustache and the uniform of an officer in the New Eden forces. Looming over the figures was the black cubical shape of a full-blown Flux amplifier.
“Something is troubling you, old comrade,” Ivan noted. “You stare at her as if she will suddenly rise and strike you down.”
“She looks so tiny, so frail, so—vulnerable.” the other man noted. “Not at all like one who toppled the old Church and gave us a real run for our money.”
“Not to mention beating you in a head-to-head fight.” Ivan retorted. “I fail to see why she makes such an impression. You have met before.”
“Long ago and before we knew what we had,” the big man pointed out. “She is the only one who ever bested me.”
“And now you wish revenge?”
“No, no. That’s not it. I have an innate respect for power. For those who have it and those who have the guts to use it. In a sense, that’s us lying there, Zelligman. Somehow—I just don’t know how to put it so you’d understand—it seems wrong to do this, particularly this way. To lose a fair fight is one thing, but there’s something in this business that threatens us as well. These machines make us obsolete. Anyone with the tiniest bit of the power can best the strongest of us with one of those.”
And Ivan did understand. World was a rough and brutal place, but it was based on power—power inherited and the skill and will to develop and use it. There was a certain honor and comfort in the system despite that, one which the amplifiers violated.
The little wizard sighed. “World as we know it is in its final days anyway, Gifford. You know that. New Eden is our tool and our weapon. Don’t despair so much yet, my friend. It will take great knowledge, skill, and finesse to do what must be done here. This is using a cannon to trim a gnat’s wings without killing it.”
What they were attempting was in fact that sort of operation, and it had never been tried before. Ivan mounted the console command chair of the amplifier and trained the beam focus to its narrowest point, then concentrated on the still figure as Gifford Haldayne stood behind him looking nervous.
The first problem was the removal and memory storage of the spells Cass had on her. Many of these were protective in nature and self-imposed; others were placed there by ones with skills perhaps equal to or superior to Ivan’s own, such as Mervyn. The amplifier certainly helped, but while the spells were far clearer and easier for him to read and understand, it required intense concentration, since the amplifier quite literally gave him a million times more details and information than he needed. It was simply not designed for this close work.
Ultimately, though, he sighed, sat back, and sipped a drink. “She is now devoid of spells of protections,” he told Haldayne. “It would have been impossible to do without this machine. Impossible. They were that good. Now we can go in and, I hope, make the very small fine tuning adjustments required.”
“I don’t see why we just can’t turn her into a Fluxgirl and be done with it,” Haldayne groused.
“Subtlety was never your strong suit,” Ivan said impatiently. “She is more than the sum of her parts. She is a symbol of strength and a role model. She must believe that everything that happens, every choice she makes from now on, is a free one, for that is the only way to convince others as well. The political shocks from it will then be enormous, as opposed to the heavy-handed way you propose in which she’ll simply be a casualty and therefore a martyr.”
“I still don’t see how you can do it. We have never understood her, and these things can only go so far. You’re not even a woman. How can you make those little turns in her mind?”
“I won’t. She will do it for me.” He sighed and put the helmet back on. Talk to me, he whispered to her through the medium of Flux. Tell me your regrets, your fears, your inner angers and desires.
It took several hours, but the pattern fell into place with greater ease than he’d expected. She felt tremendous guilt for those who’d died in her name, and some large resentment for the Nine who forced her into that position. She had a curious love-hate reaction to Matson, whom she at once loved and wanted dearly and yet could never forgive for walking away. Matson’s image was greatly intermixed with her near-worship of her late father, and some of the attributes she found most attractive in Matson were really those of a father-figure.
It was, in fact, long and complex, but really rather easy. It was far more difficult to replace all the spells he’d removed exactly so, so that no one, absolutely no one, could tell that anything had been done to her at all.
Cass did not come to until they were well within the Anchor gates. When she awoke, she found herself in the back of a wagon, bound with handcuffs and light, thin, but very secure leg irons. She was stark naked, but that didn’t bother her nearly as much as the restraints.
She was able to turn a bit and look out the back of the wagon. With the hand and leg restraints, escape was out of the question, so they’d decided to give her a view. She realized with a shock that she wasn’t just in any Anchor, but in Anchor Logh—or what had been Anchor Logh. Now it was New Eden, a land she associated with fanaticism, slavery, and terror. It seemed almost odd to her that it still looked tranquil and pastoral.
A man came back, seeing that she was awake, and sat down beside her. He was a big, gruff-looking man of apparent middle age, thick but gray hair, a well worn face that spoke of great trials in his life yet seemed to have in it a hint of softness, even kindness. His eyebrows were almost as thick as his drooping moustache; the brows remained black, but the moustache was tinged with gray at the ends. His eyes were a deep brown, and they held compassion, not the steely fanaticism she expected to see. He wore a uniform of shiny black with no insignia.
“Welcome home,” he said casually. He reached back and undid the gag, slipping it off, then offered her some water, which she took. Finally, she said, “So this is Anchor Logh!”
“New Eden. You wouldn’t recognize it now that it’s been so changed.”
“I’ve seen enough—out the back.”
He nodded. “There are three divisions of labor here, as we like to say. The men administer, plan, take all the responsibility. The bulk of the women live communally in sisterhoods, performing the basic work that makes things go. Some women, however, are special, and serve more intimate purposes. Don’t worry about yourself—you are in a very special category.”
She didn’t like that. “I found the system repulsive at the start, and I don’t find the refined version any better.”
“Huh! Listen to the High and Mighty one! Women made the old Church and the old order, and it stagnated and strangled people. Me, I was once a sergeant of a palace guard in Flux, run by a woman wizard who believed she was the center of all creation. Women did all the bossing there, and men did all the dirty work. Me and my men did all the guarding and enforcement, but under women officers who also commanded us in other ways. You could be castrated if you didn’t perform to their satisfaction, on the walls or in the bed. They loved it. because we had all that strength but could only use it at their direction because of that old bitch’s magic. You were around then, building your high and mighty empire, but you thought Makasur was just fine. You even stayed over there a couple of nights and said what a really fine place it was. You remember that?”
She felt a little sick. “No, I don’t. There were so many places. . . .”
“Yeah. But it’s damn strange to take that moral tone when you saw the same thing happening to men and thought it was a wonderful place.”
“I—I didn’t know.” She was irritated at being placed on the defensive when she was in such a position, but her guilt at what she’d justified to herself as expedient always haunted her after. She had no doubt that the man spoke the truth, for there were hundreds of variations on Makasur in the campaigns. “But does doing it to others, to innocents, out of revenge make it right? Or does it justify such places in your mind?”