She left an hour later on horseback, thinking about what he’d said and about the future. She accepted his moralizing as a cleansing of his own conscience rather than any reflection on her, but he had made one strong point. She had failed and so caused a disaster of unprecedented proportions and consequences. A good military officer knew what happened when you did that, even if it wasn’t your fault. It was your command, so you take the fall. She was most certainly retired.
She still had trouble believing that Singh was hunting for her to do her harm, but she knew that word of her role and the resultant blame had gone all over the void by this time, and she was never in the world’s most popular job. Worse, she’d been in the same general area for quite some time amid a communications command post staffed by many who probably felt like Ryan, and this group could not be far away if Mike had offered them jobs.
Suzuki she rejected out of hand. She knew how much power the head of that church had; she’d helped with that Holy Book thing herself. If a Mike Ryan, on top, could turn on her, then Suzuki was a sure bet to do the same. What could she be anyway? A temple Warden? A glorified security guard? The Anchor Guard was all male; that had been part of the division of power.
Her inbred paranoia began playing tricks on her mind. Was that a shape over there? Were those muffled hoofbeats coming from somewhere close? Had Ryan really given her a head start, or arranged her execution?
She halted, dismounted, and felt the power of the grid. She was sure she was being followed. If not by them, then by some of Ryan’s people, spying on her and reporting her position to her would-be assassins. It’s what she would do in reversed circumstances. There was no time to really prepare for this now. She had to become invisible to them—fast.
She felt sudden twinges of panic. The void seemed to be closing in on her, filled with menacing shapes. What to do? What to do? Change of size and perhaps race was mandatory. It barely mattered to her so long as she was healthy and in a permanently youthful state. Still, she hesitated. Something was wrong. While she thought about it she enacted a small program changing her horse from a black to a roan, and the saddle to a basic model. No sense in being betrayed by that. But what was wrong with a complete body change? Something Mike Ryan had said.
“You can’t change the way you are. . . ” ..
She would still act the same, like the same things, do things in much the same way, see the world the same and react to it that way. What was that over there? They would know that, too, and if Singh were their leader, he’d spot her if she were in the body of a ten-year-old boy and so would some others close to her for decades. Ryan, too, for that matter.
“You can’t change the way you are. . . “…
Well, why couldn’t you? Suzuki and she had done it a thousand times to other people. She couldn’t, of course, because Ryan assumed that she would never wish to change anything basic and really couldn’t order it subconsciously when push came to shove. It was because she liked herself pretty much the way she was. She didn’t have any fantasies to draw on.
She knew now that they were out there, closing in. She knew she had very little time, and she tried hard to suppress her nerves and think clearly. If you didn’t think clearly, you made mistakes, and this shit was like dealing with the devil. You had to be dead certain of the wording of the contract to get what you thought you were getting.
Loopholes . . . Maybe that was it. Could you pose a specific problem clearly to the computer and command it to solve it with a program? Was that possible? Maybe, if a program already existed that would fill the requirement. Wording, though, had to be careful, considering how much discretion the computer would have. She didn’t want to be turned into one of those wimps she’d sent back to the Bedouins.
She felt a disturbance along the grid power line and she knew then for certain that someone was coming. She had no doubt of their intent. It was now or never. Survival or a fight right here, her one gun and powers against how many of them? She drew the Flux to her. So long as she retained her power, she could correct or fine-tune anything later. Security had to be willing to endure the unthinkable. She would order a complete change even though she didn’t want to. She had the will to do so. It was necessary. Carefully, she framed the command string. It was somewhat mathematical and in a precise command structure, but basically this is what it was:
Command: I wish to be altered so completely that no one will ever even suspect now or in the future my past or identity, yet I wish to retain my freedom of action, memories and self-identity, and my sensitivity powers. Run!
The command passed to the nearest computer, which passed it on to the next, which just happened to be Seventeen, which passed back a program that met the requirements.
Brenda Coydt felt every cell of her being tingle, and there was a momentary disruption of her corporal self, then she was back once more. Back, but she still felt very strange. Her body tingled. She felt turned on, and every movement only added to it.
She looked down at herself and saw that she’d changed physically a great deal. Huge breasts, tiny waist, nice hips, gorgeous legs. Her hair was very long, almost ass-long and thick. She had a vaguely dark Oriental complexion with no mars or marks. She was stark naked.
She walked over to the horse and saw by comparison that she was much shorter than she had been. She began to fumble on tiptoes for the maps in the saddlebag, finally getting them out. She looked through them and discovered that she couldn’t make any sense of them at all, not even the little words. She’d been rendered illiterate and something had been done to her spatial perceptions. She tried to figure out where she was and where she wanted to go to from the grid map and got hopelessly frustrated and confused and abandoned it in less than two minutes. She sat down on the Flux floor and for the first time since she was a little child she felt tears in her eyes.
Finally, she got hold of herself and tried to think it out. She knew who she was and what she’d done. Well, she had the power. She tested it out, bringing it up and thinking, hard, I want a red apple.
The Flux swirled, and an apple appeared before her on the Flux floor. She picked it up and started to munch on it, then stopped and frowned. What else had she wanted to do? Mirror! she commanded, and a thin sheet with high reflectivity appeared before her, showing her for the first time her full form. It was one that was familiar.
Kitten! she thought. It made me Kitten! As a transitory program, of course, unlike the original, and also one with Flux power. Seventeen had been the one with an apparent sense of humor. But this wouldn’t do. Wouldn’t do at all. I want to read and write! she commanded, but nothing happened. The maps remained as enigmatic as ever. Why would it give her an apple and a mirror but not those things back?
And suddenly she knew why. The things she’d asked for were stock programs keyed to individual words or needs. God-gun stuff. She was asking for a change in a very complex program, and that required orders and statements to be made in a precise mathematical way.
She shook her head. What was she thinking about anyway? Something was there, something important. Something about reading. Why would she want to read? She again stared at herself in the mirror and began to masturbate. It felt so good, she didn’t want to stop for a long time.
A corner of her resisted. This was too good a disguise. She had fantasies like she never believed possible, and she’d experienced an intensity just with herself that was beyond any normal human to know. She knew that if she didn’t soon find somebody powerful enough to bring her out of it she wouldn’t want to. She was everything she always detested in women and her body made her love it.
A Signals patrol found her soon, and was amazed. “What’s your name, and how’d you get out here like that, honey?” the corporal, a big, good-looking fellow asked her.
Can’t tell them the story. “My name’s—Candy,” she said sweetly in a high, sexy voice. “I don’t remember how I come to be here. I really don’t remember nothin’ much at all.”
They’d seen cases of powerful enforced transformations and assumed that she’d encountered an independent Sensitive with a real hot lust and no room for excess baggage. “Well, get up on your horse and we’ll take you in to civilization,” he told her. “It’ll be a-ways though.”
For ten days in the void she had to suppress everything about herself, her knowledge of Flux and Anchor, and, of course, Coydt, and let the body take command, and she willingly gave it a workout with all who were interested. By the time they reached one of the new big pockets, she had forgotten what it was like to be anyone else. Still, way back in her mind, she felt ashamed to be this way and knew she’d get it changed sometime. Still, whom could she trust? The place was crowded with Moslems and Hindus and even some Sikhs, and some of them, including the man who had created the place, were former Security personnel from Anchor Luck.
Over the next few months she was examined by experts, who she fooled very well. They determined her high Flux potential, but as she was three months pregnant, they decided behind her back that they needed children with power here in Flux more than they needed another Sensitive.
In three years she had three kids and was four months pregnant with another. Many thought she was Kitten, expelled, somehow, from Anchor when the master reprogramming ran. In ten years she’d slept with thousands of men and hundreds of women and she had eleven kids and she was pregnant. And nobody ever, ever suspected that Brenda Coydt was at last doing something positive for her troops.
“Then our two vacancies being filled, we must proceed to more long-term plans,” said Rembrandt van Haas. He neither looked nor sounded like the director, but he certainly still acted like him.
“We—the five originals anyway—are all wanted by everyone. For a while we must build our own individual niches and bide our time until the storm passes and things settle down. Each of us will take a region, the one we always supervised, and create our own strongholds there in Flux. We all have our new identities, and if we stick to them and don’t slip up, we’ll just blend in with the rest. The current confusion is our ally and our protection. I suggest we leave this pocket and meet here annually for the nonce on or about this date. We have already created this little land as a repository of our very important papers, and our small staff, a few from each of our people, will reside here, cataloging it and also passing information along between us. For now, we act independently and through middlemen.
“Let us never forget, though, that we seven are the Board of Directors of the New Eden Project. This is our place, cruelly wrested from us and put beyond mortal help from this side. We are agreed that the only hope for those poor devils in Anchor and those under the thrall of the military in the void can only be helped by reestablishing contact with the outside. We have now only a few scraps of the enigmatic codes we need, but the rest is there, somewhere. I knew Tom well enough to be certain of that. I—”
We are the spirits of Flux and Anchor. . . . ….
“What was that?” interrupted Carlotta Schwartzman, one of the most powerful of them.
They all frowned, having heard something whisper, but they dismissed it.
“As I was saying,” van Haas continued, “we must establish ourselves as respectable Sensitives with responsible lands in the void. We must ingratiate ourselves with Signals and anyone else we might need or who might cause problems. We must gain power, wealth, and influence in vast amounts so that we can track down, retrieve, and perhaps one day solve the riddle of the Gates. We must find the modules containing the program listings for important machinery that might be needed to accomplish our aim. There are those among us who are certain that alternate means of powering even big amps and god guns can be found if we have all the details and schematics. Our technological knowledge and our heritage and mission must never die, even if we do. It may be a century or two, or even more before we accomplish anything. Perhaps our children will have to do it. But we must never lose sight that ours is the ultimate moral mission. We must not fail
We are the spirits of Flux and Anchor. . . .
They all stopped and looked around, but again there was nothing.
“No immediate moral qualms or petty personal goals should ever come before the mission. Many may have to die in order to save millions. Do whatever you will, but I will lie, cheat, steal, even murder to get what must be gotten, and I will always be there to help any of you.”
“That’s pretty strong,” Sir Kenneth noted uncomfortably.
“It must be, Ken! It must! Never has such a vital mission fallen to so few and faced such incredible odds. One hesitation might lose a vital piece of the puzzle. So you don’t kill someone, or you don’t transform and co-opt them, or you don’t get the guard drunk or bribe him somehow and so the one vital piece is lost and the suppression and enslavement of millions continues because you let that one man go. No, commitment is all that’s required. If I will give my life to see this through, I can see no reason to spare another’s.”
“Point taken,” Korda admitted uncomfortably. “Remember, I knew this would come to a bad end before we left Titan.”
“But you came anyway, and that implies an acceptance of responsibility.”
“All right, all right . . .”
“If we’re agreed on this, we’ll adjourn to our areas and meet again next year unless help is needed in between. Then use this station. Good-bye, my friends. You are the hope of the people who were betrayed while in our care. Their only hope.”
As they walked out and went their separate ways, though, each seemed to hear some voice in their heads, distant, whispering, coming from everywhere and nowhere, or, perhaps, the grid.
We are the spirits of Flux and Anchor.
We are the guardians of humankind.
We are the mirrors of your souls. . . .