Ayesha made her way over to Borg Habib, who kissed her and put his arm around her. “We have an extra dividend, baby,” he said with amusement. “Mervyn and Spirit’s little girl. A big-shot wizard like them, too.”
Ayesha smiled and looked at Morgaine, and the perfect brows rose. “This is a girl?” she asked in mock wonderment. “She looks like one of those New Eden tree cutters to me.” Her voice was high but soft and sultry, an unnatural voice that was a throaty, sexy whisper. Everyone chuckled at her line.
“I’m going to see about preparations for the move,” Habib told her. “I leave it all in your hands. You wanted her, you got her, she’s yours to play with.” And, with another kiss and squeeze, he left them.
A palatable lessening of tension was in the room at that point, and Ayesha made her way to the throne-like chair and lounged upon it, adjusting her hair instinctively to make it possible. Clearly no one liked Habib; he was there only because Ayesha needed him, and his own ego prevented him from seeing just how precarious his own position was.
Ayesha looked at Suzl, whose tiny form was still standing stiffly looking straight ahead. She had not witnessed any of the proceedings up to now, the drug still being in full force. The strange woman nodded to Baldy.
“Suzl,” the bald dugger said, “you will now be able to see and hear Ayesha, the woman before you. Suzl, when I say both your names together, you will no longer be subject to me, but only to Ayesha, and you will hear and obey all that she says as you did me. Suzl—Ayesha.”
A strange look came into Ayesha’s shining eyes. “Suzl—at last we are together again. How I’ve dreamed of this! Do you know who I am and who I was?”
“Yes,” Suzl responded woodenly.
Ayesha’s eyebrows rose in some surprise. “Very clever. But, then, you were always such a clever girl. For a while, I didn’t understand why this had happened to me. Then I learned, and for a longer while I hated you for it. Then, I discovered, some things were better. I could think again, beyond my next fuck. I could take my old knowledge and act on it. I was made over again into someone’s fantasy, but I could think and act beyond it. I am your fantasy girl, aren’t I, Suzl?”
“Yes,” the drugged woman responded. The response startled Morgaine, who, while she’d been briefed on the theory of Ayesha’s origins, hadn’t taken it to its logical conclusions.
“I no longer even wish to be anything but who and what I am. It was not a spell, but a—revelation, as it were. I had lived the other side, and the mere thought of how we saw things back in New Eden revolted me. I look at women and I wonder what, save one thing, any woman sees in men at all. They are ugly, dull brutes. I began to think of other ways, and, thanks to dear, stupid Borg, I got the means.” Ayesha turned suddenly to Morgaine. “Why do you want to look like a man? If you wanted to be a man, you had the power to make yourself one.”
The wizard, fascinated by the creature on the chair, was startled when things turned to her. “I look the way my genes commanded. If I need to look like someone different, I do, but this form serves me well.”
“You wizards! You get so wrapped up in things you stop being human. Tell me—what do you think of our little group?”
“It disgusts me. I can’t tell in any way that it’s superior to New Eden, which also disgusts me.”
Ayesha shrugged, and even that gesture was sensual and suggestive. “The girls have been raised with a vision. They are quite smart and well-skilled. Some were prisoners that we—converted—to our way of seeing things. Some were original Fluxgirls, who joined us rather than remain in New Eden. Most, however, are family. I can have only daughters, for which I am thankful, but I have had a lot of them.”
Morgaine gasped. That was why so many of them looked so similar! Her daughters—how many? Allowing for those who would still be children it was still thirty years to produce girls who’d be adults now. How many would that be? Forty?
“Regimental whores were barren,” Ayesha noted, “but Suzl, sweet Suzl, fixed that, too. I am never totally free of my—needs—but when I am pregnant I need them less and can be free to think better, clearer. Sex is like an addictive drug to me. I must have it to keep from agony, and it dominates me. Pregnancy frees me somewhat from that. The products are raised to think my way and do what I can not do. We can do a lot together.”
The queen bee, Morgaine thought, unaware that she hadn’t been the first to think of the analogy. Ayesha could barely walk outside; she was dependent on sex and limited even from reading and writing. She was a least-common-denominator Fluxgirl; dependent on her daughters and servants for almost everything, unable to function by herself, cook a meal, or do almost anything other than have sex— and think. She had turned her deficits into assets, and was quite possibly the most brilliant psychopath on World.
“May I ask—what you intend to do with us?”
Ayesha smiled. “We use the weapons fashioned by the enemy against them. For poor, dear, sweet Suzl there are other things as well. We are against New Eden for a reason, and we have some of their devices and the knowledge to use them. One we will use to prepare Suzl for her destiny. The other we will use to learn all we can about you, and then we will decide. We must move soon, impenetrable shield or not. There is no time to waste on this. Gillian—remove them to the chambers.”
The bald one smiled evilly, then took both captives out. They had been dismissed by the queen.
Henri Weiz had been a master psychologist and sociologist. He had studied the old records and the ancient histories that Coydt van Haas had assembled, and he had put those ideas into action in New Eden. Deprivation, conditioning by pain and pleasure, reward and punishment, using techniques both sophisticated and ancient. He had helped to program the Fluxgirl programs, and the fact that New Eden was still the same after disengagement was a tribute to his genius. Had he not fallen into disfavor, been court-martialed, and condemned to being a regimental whore, he would probably have run the place and it would have had no chance of defeat.
Like all converts, Weiz had been a total believer in the New Eden credo and system. He had been born in Flux, in a Fluxland where males were considered the laborers, too dull and dense for education and real authority, muscle where brain was in the woman. He had, however, a mind that would not be kept down, and he managed to teach himself to read and write by playing the clown with the girls. They never took him seriously and never realized that they were re-teaching him their lessons.
As a young teen, he’d been one of several loaned out to another Fluxland in some sort of deal as a stablehand. Although also run by a woman, this one thinking of herself as a goddess, men had more authority there and learning was not discouraged. He always had a talent for using people, making them do voluntarily whatever he wanted them to, and he used it with a vengeance and managed to remain in the other Fluxland as a favorite to a district chief when the job was done. When a small war broke out between his wizard and another, as they often did, he became a clerk to a fighting headquarters and learned still more, while meeting other men from other places that were looking for just such men as he. They had taken him to meet Coydt van Haas, the embodiment of all his dreams for what men should be like, and he had embraced van Haas enthusiastically.
He had gotten this far by an instinctive feel for shaping other people’s behavior, and now he wanted to quantify it, understand it, see if it had wider, uses. Van Haas encouraged him through records, assistants, experts when needed, and through animal and human experimentation, while Adam Tilghman gave him all the moral justification for everything he did.
He had transformed an Anchor into New Eden’s vision without more than passing use of Flux. Coupling his ideas with Flux, he had transformed a subcontinent. But his ambition had defeated him. To become one of the leaders, to reach the top echelon of New Eden society, he needed at least one turn in combat. The very system that had fed and nurtured him had turned against him then. He’d been tried and convicted of cowardice, and sentenced to become one of his own creations.
At first she had been angry when she’d discovered that instead of being freed, she’d been made more extreme and immune to alterations in Flux, but after a while she had realized that it was not the terrible fate that it seemed. The bulk of freed Fluxgirls, thanks to the Weiz system, remained the same in spite of this liberation. Had she remained, she would have been sucked in as well. Had she left, freed as they had been, she would have been at the mercy of the big wizards who had corrupt alliances and debts to Borg. Now, this way, she was in control and immune to much of the actions against her. She had been a sex slave, and she had hated it, but she’d had no choice to be otherwise, and it had cost any vestiges of faith in the New Eden way of things.
Weiz had been a fanatical convert because he needed a vision. Now, that vision shattered, she had swung the other way. New Eden was the epitome of evil. She fell back to her origins. The woman was superior, was the natural leader. Men were the cause of World’s misery, not women. As a boy, he’d always wished he’d been born female, with access to the future and the learning that his sisters had. Now a divine providence had righted this wrong. Ayesha the Whore would find alternatives to men, and with the same diabolical skills that had created the Fluxgirl, she would impose a new humanity.
New Eden had been remarkably easy to penetrate, partly because of its own weaknesses and partly because both she and Borg had known it so well. The cream of New Eden’s leadership had vanished in the civil war and Invasion; the leadership now, even in high positions, had been filled, in the main, by middle-level mediocrities, many of which they had known. Patience, and the ability to change some of the girls into apparent Fluxgirls, had paid off. Major figures, looking for deals and corruption and things from Borg that would come from distant Fluxlands and Anchors and enhance their powers, were lured to clandestine meetings just outside the borders, where their outlooks could be changed. They didn’t stop being what they were, and they were not aware that they were in any way acting for an opposition cause, but they were fully controlled from outside.
The violent raids had given the girls practice in warfare; invaluable experience no Borg Habib could build into training. They had also distanced Habib from the idea of a political movement. In a sense, the raids were less threatening if they were by brutal bandits rather than by a well-organized political and military operation. Habib himself remained blissfully ignorant of larger motives; it simply never occurred to him that while he could treat Ayesha as he wished, his daughters were not so malleable and they had power. What could be done to New Eden officials could be done to him, but he never once considered that idea. His New Eden ego saw himself as the great leader of an all-female bandit army existing for its own sake.
The Flux chambers had been developed by New Eden internal security to deal with powerful wizards, but they were used as a shortcut for all sorts of things. The ones in Logh Center operated because of a direct line to the pure Flux under the Institute. Raw Flux was required for them to work. They were basically nothing more than small cubicles with a conductive seat and floor. One was strapped in, and then a program was fed from a control center using a device based on the small hand-held amps. Initially, insufficient Flux was provided for any wizard to use it, but was driven in with maximum force. Once a “foothold” had been established with the subject, more could be introduced to do exactly what the operator, whether wizard or program module, wanted.
Ayesha had taught her daughters well. Both captives were placed in the chambers just inside New Eden so that the only Flux was that in the chambers, and then they were probed to the depths of their souls. Suzl was compliant, easy to access; Morgaine fought it as best she could, but she had no Flux to work with other than the small amount turned against her, and it was insufficient to do anything at all. The Flux ran from the grid to the control boxes and then inside; any counter-command, however, wasn’t allowed out but was rather trapped at the box. It was insidious, and no one, no matter how powerful, could fight it.
Suzl was an open book. The dugger operator, skilled at probing so many New Edenites and converting so many captives to the family’s way, had little trouble. Morgaine was a different story. Little beyond the surface was really known about her, and she fought them every step of the way.
Still, eventually, they got a handle on her. Memories of her as a small child, growing up fatherless in Freehold, without the grounding or kinship to the other children, always feeling that she was somehow different. This feeling was encouraged by her mother, who Morgaine saw as stern, demanding, and driven. Spirit would have been shocked by the view, although she had no way of getting outside perspective. There was love there, certainly, between mother and daughter, but there were several barriers that just would not give way. Nothing could conceal the fact that Spirit had gone through with the childbirth out of a sense of moral obligation and not because she’d wanted a child, and nothing could conceal the fact that although Spirit loved Morgaine, she also considered her daughter a millstone around her neck, one keeping her from the freedom and adventure she craved.
There was also the ghost of Mervyn. He’d died before she was born, and so she knew only the mythological wizard: all-powerful, all-wise, devoted entirely to books and learning. Mervyn, of course, had never really loved anyone; Morgaine was less a product of intimacy than an intellectual wish to preserve a bit of himself and his power just in case, and it had taken extraordinary magic to get him even to that point.
Morgaine was not her father, although she’d tried to be. She could not be cold and unemotional as he had been, and she was the product of a different time and different circumstances. Nor had she any more control of herself than Suzl now had. She thought her huge size and mannish appearance and mannerisms were genetic; she really believed it. But the traits had developed as a teen, as her powers grew, and were less an inheritance than a curse. Her assigned role demanded she be independent, free of human attachments. She had made herself both imposing and unattractive to insulate her from worldly temptations, as Mervyn had taken on the persona of an elderly man. They were shocked to discover that she’d had only one sexual episode, that in her early twenties, and out of sheer curiosity. It had not been pleasurable but surprisingly ho-hum, and since then she had suppressed all sexual desires, sexual feelings, or what her father had called the “animal urges.” She had become a neuter, although, deep down, where she couldn’t consciously reach, it was all there, like a coiled spring, making her uncomfortable and somehow less than right.
Any human mind can be broken; any human being can be conditioned to do and say and act in any manner the conditioner wishes. The trick was that few can be permanently conditioned if any of their old selves are to be saved and used. Morgaine was useful to them if she retained her full powers and her vast knowledge of Flux. They fed her the visions, let her see what being a Fluxwife was like, let her experience the same nightmarish vision of a New Eden victory that they had fed Suzl after drugging her water, and she was horrified, and revolted, but they could not provide an alternative to her that she could accept. A vision of a world of femininity, of a world where men were obsolete and abolished, where the finest would be encouraged, presided over by benign queen bees, was not something she could accept, either. She could be forced to, of course, but she could never be trusted to retain that compulsion. Morgaine could be broken, but she could not be effectively and confidently turned.