“When I saw you in the pocket, you all looked very dugger. You have sufficient power to change that. Why don’t you?”
“Each of us is committed to this to the death. Each of us takes upon herself a mark to distinguish herself from all the others. It is the way we choose to do things, that’s all. If we succeed, we will accept our new permanent forms with joy and abandon these.”
It didn’t make a lot of sense to Suzl, and she suspected that some of it might have to do with Ayesha not wishing unmarked beauty other than herself around her, but it didn’t bother her. She could not see them as they were; they were all the same to her.
“My other question is, How are we supposed to succeed? It is a grand vision, but New Eden will have more of these built and tested, many more. We do not have much time.”
“We head north, to an area in the great northern gap, where help awaits. There, experts who share our vision will be able to study and evaluate this unit and, perhaps, manage to duplicate it in Flux. That is our goal. Some of them worked on one of the northern ships and came very close, but always failed. This may be the difference, tell them the one thing they missed that New Eden did not. Up there we will be secure enough that we might well afford to translate the projector and send it to the computers for analysis. We can not afford to do this now, because when it was tried with one of the Invader ships it produced no results. There were things inside that simply were outside the computers’ abilities to understand. Now New Eden has built one on their principles, but out of our materials, by human hands.”
Suzl nodded. It was a good plan, and it just might work. “I worry about just who these people might be, though. They might only pretend to the vision for a chance to steal the machine.”
“You, we hope, can insure their good faith,” replied Gillian.
She began to wonder about that, and made it a project to find out just how far she herself could go.
As for herself, she was being honest with Gillian. It was a crazy situation, but after years of being dead she felt alive again, whole and with a purpose in her life. She had come, essentially, not caring if she lived or died and expecting massive revenge. Instead, she found the price worth it.
Ayesha was, unquestionably, crazy, but considering what sort of background and situations she’d been through it was only to be expected. Yet in spite of the fact that she claimed to have buried Weiz in her mind, there was a lot of the original left—a surprising amount, in fact. When she’d been married to him she’d considered him a manipulator with a lot of ambition but she hadn’t really taken him seriously. Now, with a clear mind, Suzl was able to view the strange personality with perspective.
There was no question that Ayesha trusted her, far more than the rest of them did, and Suzl appreciated that. During the domestic part of her day, Suzl was totally dependent on Ayesha and the attendants. On the move, setting up and tearing down all the time, there was no way for a blind person to get oriented, so she was essentially led around on a leash. Ayesha liked personal contact; there was a considerable amount of just feeling and nuzzling, even just sitting and eating or listening to Ayesha’s wild fantasies and dreams. Suzl, in fact, enjoyed it; the part of her that craved some permanence and dependency was well-fed by it, and both of them had voracious sexual appetites that only each other could really fill.
And yet, Suzl was far from helpless. She was in the void, a full wizard, and what she’d forgotten or let lapse from lack of practice seemed to quickly come back as if it had never left. She was unpolished; she’d be no match for a powerful Fluxlord or scholarly wizard with centuries of training and research, but she was damned powerful in her own right. If she wished, she could transform this camp into a Fluxland and all its people into anything she wanted, even without the projector. In the end, she was really in charge at all times.
The projector made that power nearly absolute. It was not an amplifier; it was, however, a device for taking what you had and focusing it anywhere. Its range was far greater than she’d suspected, so it was an extension of her mind and inner eye, and it allowed you to do tricks that you really couldn’t do without it, such as literally cut someone off from access to Flux power. The human mind just couldn’t fine-tune that well, whereas the projector mapped it all out for you, in little numbered squares, and allowed, essentially, magic by the numbers.
She had co-opted the leadership. All these people were hers now, and she was absolute, as absolute as she wanted to be. And, the beauty of it was, with her not-very-mobile body, her animal needs, and her blindness, not a single one of them—perhaps not even Ayesha—really knew it.
They had been traveling in Flux for four days, keeping well behind the raiders but always watching them. Suzl’s string stood out bright and clear and made it easy to track them, and the last thing any of them wanted was for their quarry to know that they were even being tracked.
There were, however, disturbing signs.
“The shield’s now on all the time,” Sondra reported. “Somehow they’ve worked out a way of moving that thing while it’s still turned on.”
“Suzl can’t sit up there all the time,” Morgaine noted. “Is there a difference in its quality from time to time?” She felt frustrated that she couldn’t get up there and see for herself.
Sondra nodded. “Some, but it’s pretty solid no matter what. There have been a couple of times when it weakens and even flickers for a second, so you can almost see inside, but they’re very short.”
Matson thought a moment. “The changing of the guard. It’s the first flaw in their system. Not a big opening, but it’s something.”
They all looked at him.
“The only wizard they have who could maintain a permanent shield of any substance without that projector is Suzl, and Ayesha made Suzl sort of like herself. It takes a certain measure of concentration to maintain an effective shield. In a military operation, we set up a number of strong wizards at different points around it so the wizard maintaining it has to think of many threats at once. Then you make a random thrust with what power you have in one area and the shield’s pushed back and forces can advance. While the wizard is repairing the damage at that point and coping with the invaders, you do it again somewhere else. The result is that the shield contracts.”
“That’s elementary,” Sondra noted. “What’s that have to do with this?”
Matson sighed. “Suzl is a first-rate wizard, but she’s also in a body that’s a creature of her passions. Morgaine, I’m going to make your mother uncomfortable but you’re our best source on this. When you’re screwing, could you ever with your old control maintain a shield?”
Morgaine’s face brightened, and her mouth opened in surprise. “No! I don’t believe I could! Your mind just lets go and everything goes into one single purpose.”
“Uh huh. And Suzl and Ayesha are the same way, only because they’re literally made for each other, they go at it for hours on end, I bet.”
“You don’t think too clearly for a time after, either,” Morgaine noted, seeing the implications. She was in a unique position to see both sides of it. “That means that for at least one, maybe two, guard shifts, it’s only one of them maintaining the shield with no help available from Suzl.” She stopped a moment. “But one of them was more than able to keep a shield too strong for me, so what’s the point?”
“The point is, the shield changes. We have to determine Suzl’s shift, and work around it. The odds are she goes out first, clear-headed and in control. After she’s off, she’ll be with Ayesha, and then the cycle will start. Give it two hours. The next guard change after that won’t have Suzl available at all.”
Verdugo, who knew a little more about the device than anyone else, nodded. “The big thing is that the projector increases power by making you able to focus on specific locations. The odds are they couldn’t maintain any kind of real shield without it—barring Suzl, of course. For the few seconds it takes for one of the raiders to get off and the other to get on, the shield is effectively down.”
Matson nodded. “Now, don’t get your hopes too high. Even if we could get in, it would still mean we’d have to fight our way to the middle where the thing is. We’d have known locations, and somebody would then be on the projector. We’d be dead ducks before we got ten meters. This crowd will die rather than surrender and won’t hesitate to kill their own to get us.”
It was a big letdown, and he realized it.
“Now, don’t get it wrong,” he told them. “It’s our first break, and it’s something. We know now we can solve entry, at least with a small force, if we can manage to get close enough. One step at a time. This may take quite a while to put together completely. The fact is, now I think for the first time we can solve it and do it. Let’s press on.”
They had been observed off and on for some time by local military units and fanners working in the fields, but because they were certain that their presence had been reported and they had been checked out ahead it didn’t worry them. Still, as they moved north, traffic increased and they were clearly progressing into a defensive zone—-which meant the backside of a Fluxland shield. To proceed now, they would need permission from the Fluxlords of Liberty, and that meant going into town and making direct contact. The raiders, too, had been forced to halt. They might well be able to break through, but they would have been pinned down fighting against the combined forces of wizards for whom they’d have no fixed location. Matson sent Rondell ahead because he wouldn’t be known to likely raiders in town, but he soon returned.
“They want to see all of us,” he told them, “and I don’t like it. I don’t like these people very much, and I don’t trust them at all.”
Matson frowned and stroked his chin, thinking about it. “Any sign of our friends there? They’d stand out sure as we would.”
“No, but that only makes me more uneasy. If they beat us to it, they may have made a deal. They’d have lost less than half a day if they turned and went into the void here, avoiding all this mess. This is a pretty convenient way to filter out anybody chasing them, and they can come out almost anyplace. We couldn’t cover the whole area, particularly in a war zone.”
“It does stink a bit,” Matson agreed, “but it’s no sweet time for Ayesha’s crew, either. You figure the Fluxlords of Liberty know pretty well what they’re toting along and want it just as much as we do. Five strong Fluxlords in their own element could probably crack that shield, and probably the only thing stopping them is that they don’t want the projector damaged. They’re taking a big risk; I say we should, too. Let’s go in.”
There were some doubts and much tension among the group, but they all went along with it, although they had their weapons at the ready and the three full wizards were attuned to any changes in Flux power.
The town was called simply B-21, and it looked like a military fort, with a high wall and sentries patrolling all over the place. It was spartan, not fancy, and was only clearly a town at all when you entered the gates. There were no sexual divisions here; men and women manned the sentry posts, and all wore black leather uniforms with insignia of rank and position. Those with Flux power were the officers, and wore shoulder braid to show that they were higher up. It was impossible to figure out what rank was what, though.
Morgaine, however, stopped the routine, as men and women turned and gaped at her, open-mouthed, some with rather odd and suggestive looks on their faces. Morgaine reveled in the attention and smiled at some of them, causing near-pandemonium.
“It’s promising,” Matson said casually. “They never saw the like of Morgaine before. Think about it.”
The others got the message. If these people had never seen someone like Morgaine, then they hadn’t seen Suzl or Ayesha, either. They pulled up to a large building in the center of town and Verdugo assisted Morgaine down. Dell nodded to the door and said, “This is it.”
The inside was filled with bored clerks and crowded desks, but Morgaine’ entry produced the usual gaping, unbelieving stares. Spirit grew angry, although she wasn’t sure whether it was at the reaction to her daughter or the fact that her daughter was clearly enjoying herself.
“We’re here to see Colonel Parsha,” Dell announced generally, but it produced no real reaction.
Morgaine smiled wickedly. “Can someone show us to the colonel’s office?” she asked sweetly. In an instant, about a dozen people rushed to do just that.
Colonel Parsha proved to be an older, white-haired man with a stiff military demeanor even Morgaine couldn’t ruffle. The wizards could sense that he possessed considerable Flux power and was not a man to be trifled with.
“Why do you all want to pass into the war zone?” he asked them, but clearly, no matter how much he tried to cover it, his eyes kept roving back to Morgaine, who was sitting in a very suggestive way and staring at him, batting her big brown eyes innocently.
Matson saw no reason to make up a cover story, but only as much truth as was necessary would be given. “We’re searching for a band of raiders who kidnapped one of our kin,” he told the colonel. “We lost them for a while but discovered that they had bounced up against the shield near here same as us.”
The colonel nodded. “I’m aware of them. Some of my people have been out to talk with them. Colonel Habib has done many favors for Liberty over the years, and he’s not considered a threat to us. You, on the other hand, have enough wizard power here to threaten the master spells. We’ve been fighting a bloody stalemate with the lords of Hoghland. Like Colonel Habib, we are no friends of New Eden, and you have a major and a young lady obviously from there in your party.”
“I’m not from New Eden!” Morgaine responded. “If you’re half the wizard you seem to be, you can see I’m not in the Fluxgirl mold.”