“All right,” Matson responded, prepared for this. “Nobody knows it yet, and nobody else should until after, but we’re gonna make a swap. Suzl for the kids.”
“I thought as much from that business last night. O.K., but then what? The projector won’t be anywhere close to the swap point and you know it.”
“Yeah, but Suzl will have to be. She’s their wizard. Right now, we know absolutely nothing. Suzl is my key to finding things out, and she doesn’t even know it. Hopefully, she won’t know it.”
“They’ll expect strings on her and cut them,” he pointed out.
“Not the kind I’m arranging for. They’re special, far outside the range of human perception. They’ll run a check for strings, of course, but they won’t be able to see, hear, or sense these. Nobody can unless they know the exact nature of the energy line and the frequencies involved. Basically, you have to be personally tuned to them when they’re fixed. The odds against finding them otherwise are about a trillion-to-one shot.”
“So we just follow it to the band and the projector and hit them hard and fast.”
Matson sighed. “Major, I don’t know how much time you spent in Flux, if any, but that’s bullshit. The odds are they’re inside a big Fluxland, so if you march in with troops you’ll be committing an act of war. Even if those wizards are diverted with a war, they’ll notice this and they’ll chew any army of yours to pieces with a few gestures. But even if you could get permission or be ignored, it wouldn’t matter. With the shield they already have to have with that thing and Suzl’s power to boot, they’ll just project your army into a ton of horse manure.”
“What will you do, then?”
“Track them. Track them and test them and wait for an opening while building up our own strength. There’s nothing else to do.”
Verdugo thought it over. “I’ve had some experience in Flux, but not like you. I agree, though, that if they can figure out how to work the thing, a frontal assault would be impossible and containment would be a better bet. But what makes you think they’ll move at all? They can project.”
“New Eden is their biggest threat, so they’ll want to put some distance between it and themselves as soon as they can. They’ll fight a rear action but they need more than they have. Specifically, they’re gonna need to deal with somebody with real technical expertise they can talk to and trust. They need more machines and more wizards and they won’t have a good crack at them using the projector. The projector’s bait. Once lured or kidnapped or whatever, then they can be converted. When the individuals are exposed, we can deal with them, nibble at their numbers. If we get an opening to go after them, we’ll take it. Otherwise, it’s follow and nibble until they have to come out to take us on.”
“I can put any number of forces at your command for that.”
“No, no. You still aren’t thinking things through, Major. It must be a very small band. Very small. If they ever get our grid location, it’s curtains. You can’t conceal an army, even one on the move. Until we’re ready, they must never suspect that they’re being trailed. They have to think it’s a lot of different forces, both local and from other interested parties—and there will be plenty of those. But they won’t have strings to follow. We will.”
“Then—who are you taking?”
“Depends on who shows up. The parents are out. They’re good people but I don’t want somebody with a direct emotional motive involved. Sondra is close to Suzl, but she’s a strong wizard and a hell of a stringer. She goes. Spirit, too, if she gets here. In some ways she’s even closer to Suzl, but she once used her own mother as a weapon when it was practical to do so, and nobody is more at home in Flux. I don’t know her daughter by Mervyn at all, but she’s supposed to be the strongest wizard World’s ever seen.”
“Two daughters and a granddaughter. No men?” Clearly his background was showing through.
“Well, I been considering one. Young Rondell was damned good back at the ranch. He hasn’t learned to think dirty yet, but he’s excellent covering your ass. Frankly, Major, I hadn’t thought about most men for this because of the nature of the opposition. No man except maybe Borg Habib is ever going to get through that shield for very good reasons. But the more power they get, the more power-drunk they’ll get. They’ll get cocky and start feeling invulnerable. That’s when the mistakes start. Mervyn got that way. So did Coydt van Haas. Both of ’em were strong enough to take on a big amp head on, and they’re both stone cold dead. Patience and opportunism got ’em, and that’s why I’ll get these people in the end.”
“They’ll never buy that here, you know,” Verdugo noted. “Just to get all your players, particularly Suzl, out and where you want them you’ll need help. They’re not going to allow that unless New Eden is in, too.”
Matson stared at him. “Just what are you proposing, Major?”
“I want in. I want to go along, as New Eden’s representative. I have a little power, I can read strings, and I’m good in a fight. I can also get laser pistols and if need be a hand amp.”
Matson lit a cigar, leaned back, and sighed. “Major, it’s a fate worse than death if I take you. Not for us—for you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“All your life you been raised with one view of women. The enemy is female and you’ll consistently underestimate them just like everybody did here. You just can’t think of them the right way. It’s against your breeding.”
“I can adjust. I saw the bodies, too, remember.”
“Yeah, but that’s only surface. For pragmatic purposes and in foreign territory you might be able to think of some women as equals, but that’s not the whole problem. You’re gonna be in close contact with three women out there on the trail, women who are not at all like the girls of New Eden. They’re smart, savvy, and they have enormous power. You’ll have a hard time maintaining them in your mind as equals, and that would be a mistake. They’re superior. Superior to you, to me, to most of World. All of ’em have good reason to really hate and detest New Eden. The first time you come on to one of ’em, even a little, the kind of power you’d unleash against yourself would be beyond belief. Your ego won’t stand it, Major. They’ll squash you like a bug and feel nothing about doing it.”
“I think I can handle myself appropriately,” the major responded coolly. “I’m willing to risk it. It’s my neck, anyway.”
Matson sighed. “O.K., then, Major. But it’s just you. Any tricks, any other New Edenities stalking us, anything like that, and you’ll wish to God you were dead, and so will those following or tracking us. Understand?”
He nodded. “I understand.”
“All right, then—how do you propose to control a mob of angry wizards?”
“Simple. Let them all in.”
“Huh?”
“Let them all in. Here, they’re just ordinary people. No Flux powers, no special status. We let them in, and then we only let your party out until you’re far away.”
Matson gave a low chuckle. “Major, I still ain’t sure of this, but you might just work out.”
Spirit arrived later on that morning, looking radiant as always, and Morgaine came a bit after midday. Matson had been warned that his granddaughter was strange, but he wasn’t quite prepared for Morgaine.
She stood almost a hundred and eighty-five centimeters, about as tall as Matson himself. She had a thick, hard body that was more masculine than feminine, perhaps ninety kilograms of pure muscle. Her breasts were firm and very hard, more resembling male pectorals than female extensions. Her face had a curious bisexuality about it as well. It was a young face, with smooth skin and no facial hair, and her rich brown hair was cut in a short but feminine style, but it could also have been the face of a boy of perhaps fifteen. Her voice was a low alto that almost, but not quite, cut into the male half-octave. She wore faded brown leather boots, equally worn blue denim trousers, and a plaid button-down work shirt, and she looked and moved more like a teenage lumberjack than a mature woman.
“That isn’t her self-image, that’s the way she grew up,” Spirit told her father. “She’s really strong, too. Physically, as well as in Flux power. I’m not sure what she got from me, other than a little in the nose and lips. She’s sure got her father’s genius and talent for numbers and spells, though.”
Matson kept staring and wondering if this wasn’t the kind of vision Ayesha might have for her own wizards. “Uh—how do I approach her?”
Spirit laughed. “Just treat her the same way you treat me. Don’t worry. No matter what her looks, she’s a woman because she wants to be one.” She looked back over at her daughter. “Morgaine! Your grandfather’s too shy to say hello!”
The big woman grinned and came over to them, then stopped when she faced Matson. Then she, too, hesitated. Faced with a living legend she’d never really known, she, too, was unsure of how to approach him. Feeling foolish, she finally said, “You know, this is pretty ridiculous. One of us is going to have to stop being scared of the other or we’ll be here forever.”
Matson gave a big laugh and threw his arms around her, and she did the same, and the wall seemed to vanish with the gesture. Finally he let go and stepped back. “I think it’s about time we got to know each other better,” he said seriously. “Let’s round up Sondra, get some good stuff to drink, and move to a more quiet part of this dump.”
Matson had taken a larger room with a parlor, and he took them back there after ordering from one of the bargirls. They settled down while waiting for Sondra to arrive.
“Well,” Matson said in a light tone, “I guess you don’t have many problems in New Eden.”
Morgaine chuckled. “Personally, no. I’d still like to wipe this dung heap off the face of World, though. I can’t see how anybody put up with it all those years.”
Her grandfather shrugged. “It’s no worse than hundreds of Fluxlands and better than some that used to be in the old days. It’s only unnerving to us because of its size and because it’s Anchor. I been around too long and seen too much, Granddaughter, to get worked up about these things. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that all the Anchors were matriarchies who ruled with iron fists and every year ramrodded a bunch of poor kids into slavery in Flux. I don’t much remember many protests about it, or even much concern. It was just a little less bad, or maybe a little less obviously bad, so everybody just took it for granted. The only real wonder about New Eden or something equally bad was that it didn’t come sooner. Seems like in those days we took oppression for granted and the only thing anybody really got upset about was change. Now we got both.”
Morgaine stared at him a minute, then said, “I heard you were a cynic but I hadn’t realized how much. I wasn’t born back then, but everything I’ve been told says that the old Anchor system wasn’t oppression at all.”
“Well, now, you got two disadvantages,” he told her. “You weren’t there, and you’re a real strong wizard. Oppression is only oppression when you’re in the group being oppressed. I hear tell there’s a pretty big Fluxland up north that doesn’t let men in at all, and there’s others where men are in subordinate roles all the time. I been in a few like that in my time and I didn’t feel any more comfortable there than you all do here, but I never heard any women yelling that those systems were unfair, except maybe on an academic level. Me, I’d rather die than be under any of those systems, but that’s just me. I don’t get worked up over how insane human beings are. I can’t. Everything we’ve learned says that history’s the story of one group knocking over another.”
“There were free societies in history,” the young wizard argued. “I’ve read many of my father’s records and those that have come out since the Invasion. My father named his Fluxland Pericles after the earliest known free society back on the Mother World.”
Matson chuckled, but paused as the drinks arrived and he signed the bill. Then he settled back down. “I read some of those things, too. Those folks of old Pericles or whatever it was called had an odd idea of freedom. A small percent of ’em were free, voted, and owned everything and had all the rights. The rest of the people were slaves, bought and sold like the kids of Anchor used to be bought and sold, and were nothing more than property. Seems to me that when you have slave owners writing about how free and democratic everything is you make my point. . . .
“What about you?” he continued. “If you gave up all your power and extra rights as a wizard and Fluxlord and moved to an Anchor where you had to work every day for some company for work credits to buy what you needed and had one vote out of millions in running things, I think you’d give anything for power and the Fluxland back. When you can honestly do that, without kidding yourself, then I’ll take you seriously. Until then, we got business— and here’s our other partner in family crime now.”
Sondra entered, and there were hugs and greetings all around.
Spirit had kept quiet until now. She knew that Matson was hard to take sometimes and she also knew that Morgaine, while powerful and skilled, had the arrogance such power brings and an impulsiveness that was sometimes hard to control. She was also as bullheaded in her own way as her grandfather.
Matson sat back and looked at all three women. They were a contrast in many ways: the tall, slender, athletic Spirit with her dark, exotic looks; the imposing and quite differently exotic Sondra, Spirit’s half-sister but looking more like her mother; and Morgaine, the strange, powerful mannish woman with the smooth, innocent face of youth although she was actually closing in on half a century. They all had his blood in them, though, and the three possessed enough Flux powers among them to level a small Fluxland.
“You all know this is going to be a long one, away from family and friends, present company excepted,” he said seriously. “Sondra already knows most of the details and has made her arrangements. I’d like the two of you along as well, if you’re willing.” Quickly he sketched in the facts as he knew them—on Habib and Ayesha, on the device that was stolen, and on the twin threats from the raiders and New Eden itself. They all listened attentively, expressions growing more grim as he spoke.