“Screw the alphabet. I won’t mess with that in any way.”
“You’re sure this can be done?”
“Ninety-nine percent. If anything looks wrong, I’ll stop immediately and restore the nulls. Ready?”
“All right.”
Suzl did the mental adjustments first. She knew those would be tough because there was a deep-down resistance by anyone with power to such tampering, but Jodi tried to make it as easy as possible, particularly when she determined that the spell wasn’t massive, just an insurance of some loyalty. The physical part was really tense, but it went through without any problems, first removing the bind and then replacing it with a far more complex one that also remade Jodi. She was slightly taller, dark complected, with the hair a golden color and the eyes a reddish brown. She was also now, quite clearly, one of them.
She was also amazed.
“How. . . ?” Suzl had just done what the book said was impossible.
“Simple. Think like a Fluxgirl. It takes another old one to do that, I guess. When you counted anything, you counted like a kid, right? On your fingers, just one, two, three, four, five, and so on until you ran out of fingers and toes. I got to twenty once, but then I got lost. When I heard your story and read only ten nulls, I was pretty sure how he did it. And if we ever found the other two, it’ll be exactly the same, I bet.”
Jodi was thunderstruck by the simplicity of it all. It seemed so damned obvious! “All that time, and it was right there under our noses.”
“Sure. We’ll be a good team. You fight better than I do and I think dirtier.”
“But won’t Ayesha feel jealous about me taking such a command?”
“Ayesha, my former husband, is now my wife. She has a wonderful, diabolical mind, but she trapped herself by making me her perfect fantasy lover. She thought by making me look like her she wouldn’t be subject to me, but the bottom-line difference between men and women is the sexual equipment. Everything else flows from that. She is subject to my every wish and whim, and she is incapable of even regretting that fact. Even if she got jealous, there’s little she can do. All of these people, with the exception of our two friends there, are bound to me. Except for me and for Ayesha, you can do the same and should.”
“Fair enough. Uh—this body. It feels, well, very different than I expected. Very natural, very comfortable. I’ve had it for all of three minutes and it feels right, natural somehow. I was a Fluxgirl for seventy years and I can’t remember what I looked like. The spell?”
“Of course. You’ve never taken one on, knowing what you were doing, until now.”
“With the—New Human modification?”
“Sure. Want to try it out? I need somebody close who can service me as a female. Come on, and I’ll give you an experience like you’ve never had before!”
They now had seven wizards, all committed to the same ends, an almost-unheard-of grouping. That was why the Seven and the Nine had been unique. If Krita had any luck with the old boy in the chamber on the apron of Anchor Gorgh, they’d have eight. The weaker would be trained and uplifted by the stronger, and soon they would spread out and convert more and more. All they needed were enough projectors for the wizards they had.
12
PRIORITY CHANGES
It took a few days, but Spirit discovered a way of getting messages out, although it took a bit longer for Dell to bump into them. She was apparently sending code pulses through the grid to a point ten squares beyond the Fluxland boundary, where they were held until someone authorized intersected the square. It was a clever system, suggested in the “hypothetical” discussion on infiltration of the camp by Sondra.
“The messages are choppy, and sometimes cut off and then resume, I guess later, with whole new stuff,” Dell told them, “but you can make some sense out of them.”
Spirit was alive and well, although she’d been singled out from the bulk of the population and placed in a special holding area near the headquarters camp for experimentation. She and some of the others had become suspect when they didn’t get the bisexual modification and wouldn’t take it.
Matson didn’t like the sound of that. “They’ll either mess up her mind or add on to the body spells or both,” he worried.
“I doubt they can do much to her mentally,” Sondra assured him. “They can play with the Eve part all they want, but when the conditionals switch on her accumulated personality and memory file is read back in. They can’t touch it unless they first peel off all those conditionals and can tell them from the binding spell itself, and they’d have to do that without her cooperation. As Eve, she wouldn’t understand or be able to see any of it. As for the physical, anything done to her she can undo at will when she’s Spirit or when she’s out of there. Eve wouldn’t take a binding spell—she wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.”
“O.K., O.K., so call me a worrier. What else does she send?”
“As near as I can make out, they have between seven and nine wizards of their type in the camp—she isn’t really sure how many—plus two outsiders. She says—and this is nuts—that they might be part of the old Seven from some comments one made while in with them.”
Matson thought a moment. “Well, if I’m not dead, no reason they all are, either. It was so confusing that they just pushed all the bodies, junk, and what all into the gate and said the hell with it. There weren’t any positive identifications except for Sligh and Haldayne, who they all knew. Figure it’s a couple of the women. Those New Eden boys wouldn’t pay much attention to the women. I wonder what their game is, though? And what would Suzl have to do with them in any case?”
“Beats me. She also says the only rock-hard shields are on the area of the main camp tent and, she guesses, around the projector. She’s on the shield border and can see through, but the projector’s out of sight. She’s pretty sure they still only have the one, though.”
“Anything on those two groups that set out a few days ago for Gorgh and Ecksreh?”
“I didn’t make a broad sweep, but I guess I could. They each took one of the wizards—one of the Liberty people, I suppose—but the one going to Gorgh looked slow and took some wagons, while the one to Ecksreh looked fast and lean.”
Matson nodded. “Ecksreh’s still a mess and somewhat in civil war, while Gorgh is relatively stable. They’re looking to deal, not fight, with Gorgh, but Ecksreh’s target is people, I bet. They’ll keep snatching and grabbing folks there in small groups, turning them, then using them and others to get more, until somebody gets wise. Then they’ll return. I don’t know what they’ll use for trade with Gorgh, but they probably are interested in some cows, chickens, pigs, and horses—that kind of thing. You tell me it’s a basically agricultural Fluxland. They can always use what they get as prototypes and turn some of the Eves into breeding stock.”
Even Sondra was shocked. “You don’t think they would! Not Suzl!”
“Those airheads might as well be cows, and horses,” Morgaine noted sourly. “They’d be more useful that way than as they are.”
“Come on, Morgaine,” Sondra admonished. “They’re people, too. You’ve been getting real testy lately. You’re beginning to sound like your grandfather.”
“I’m just bored and frustrated. Mom’s down there stuck in a pen like an animal and I’m sitting here making pretty doodles in the void.”
“You wanted along,” Matson reminded her.
“Yeah, and I didn’t regret it. Still don’t. But I’m not doing any good sitting here. To tell you the truth, I been tempted to get down there. Just ride in and say hello. What more could they do to me? At least I’d see what’s going on.”
“Inject some nice brain chemicals into that fixed form of yours so you’ll fall madly, passionately in love with Ayesha or whoever first comes through the door, that’s what,” Sondra told her. “Then you’d sell us out for love and then sit there and make nice wizard babies for the new order.”
“Maybe. I been wondering whether Suzl might not just need somebody level-headed to talk to.”
“Talk? How? With that thing in her mouth like you said? Some conversation!”
She shrugged. “I like to talk, anyway. Besides, you know they couldn’t do any more to me that couldn’t be undone later. They won’t mush my mind if I’m useful and it’s no more risk than Mom took. I’m no threat to them, anyway.”
“To them, none,” Sondra agreed, “but they can pool your power with theirs and use it.” She stopped and thought a minute. “You know, I almost wish for Verdugo back. He kept you nicely occupied, and he could answer one big question. I just got to wondering this minute if those machine-made binding spells recorded the personal combinations as well. They could, you know. If they do, they could remake you any way they wanted.”
“Interesting idea. I’d love to ask them about it.”
Matson seemed thoughtful. “Interesting idea at that. Dell, you get on down to New Eden. I want a full status report from your contacts there before we do anything else. Worst fear estimate and all that. When he gets back, then Sondra, you’ll go to Guildhall. I want to give a complete report in and also make a series of recommendations. If everything ties together, then we’ll make some moves. I think we’ve been standing pat too long with the clock running.”
“Mind if I fly along on your back?” Morgaine asked him. “I think I need a break, even if it’ll be in the New Eden area.”
They were gone for three days, during which a few sporadic additional messages came from Spirit and also during which the Ecksreh band returned. Only forty, plus one of the wizards, had been sent out but almost three hundred rode in, impressing the observers as much as the camp. The Anchor had apparently been wide open to them, and, working fast, they might well have converted a whole damned town. Some had slight Flux powers, and though there were no real wizards among them, suddenly the army ranks down there were above what they had been, and it was certain that new groups would be sent out for more.
There had also been extensive tests of the projector, in which, again, all were surprised at its range. Even New Eden hadn’t expected a range much over the curvature of World, if that, but the sweep extended all the way to Gorgh and almost to Ecksreh, a grid range of an astonishing six-hundred-and-forty-kilometer radius. The limit seemed to be the power supply in the New Eden projector; given a better one, with a larger transformer, it seemed possible to cover the whole planet. That was unnerving, since New Eden now had more time to improve and enlarge just that transformer system if it knew this.
Worse, if they started getting wise over there that somebody was shadowing them, there was no effective camp that wouldn’t be well in range of even a sweep. Matson knew it was time to make a move or move out, and soon.
Spirit’s messages contained less than she would have hoped, due to her relatively confined position. They had been trying to train the Eves to at least perceive and recognize Flux power, but so far they had totally failed. Lately there had been talk of impregnating all of them by major wizards so they could determine whether any Flux power they might have had once would be passed on to children. Suzl had been around once to look at them, and had some means of talking and seemed clearly in charge. That was about it, though.
Morgaine returned with Dell, but her mood was mixed. They had gone into Logh itself while he’d hit on his contacts, and she had certainly more than relieved her tensions with variety, but she wasn’t sure she liked the results. “I didn’t like those people,” she told them, “but I found it harder and harder to keep any sort of control there. Something about being around all those men. … It was like a drug. I hated them and myself for it, but much more and I would have done anything in exchange for being laid. Now I think I really understand what they did to those poor women at the start of it; the original Fluxgirl formula.”
“You have a taste,” Sondra responded understandingly. “Only a taste. You see, you still had enough self-control to break away and come back and talk about it. We didn’t. We literally couldn’t resist. That’s what’s at work down there, in the Fluxland. All that experience, that helplessness, and fear of it coming back. Ayesha certainly, and Suzl as well, if not by spell then because of decades of being like that. No love, just sex as a drug you have to have regularly. Suzl was turning back that way again, and she hated it. Now, over there, surrounded by a whole land of females only, she’s going after the lowest common denominator of that fear. If she can produce a world without men, she thinks, she can beat that beast inside of her. Suzl’s war now isn’t really with New Eden, although they caused it, or against men. It’s against herself.”
Dell had some mixed news from very high sources. “The projectors can’t be really mass-produced,” he told them. “Each one has to be built by hand as an individual piece, then tested and checked and fine-tuned. They feel they’re going to need a dozen just to take on what they still insist on thinking of as Borg Habib’s band.”
“Seems excessive from their own viewpoint,” Matson noted.
“Maybe, but they figure that once they really show what these things can do and that they’re not as helpless in Flux as they appear to be, some of the Fluxlords will gang up on them to stop them. They think a dozen is the minimum necessary to deal not only with the raiders but with the reaction to their use.”
Matson nodded. “All right, I’ll grant ’em that much. When will they have a dozen?”
“They figure about four months from now. After that, things will be going along smoothly enough so they can produce and test one every two weeks. They also have a squad of between thirty and forty strong wizard officers. They’re not sophisticated and they can’t string spells together with the same ease as a world-class trained professional, but what they lack in polish and speed they make up in intensity. These guys are true believers.”
“Four months. . . .” Matson mused. “Morgaine? You decided what you want to do from here on out?”
“I don’t mind telling you that New Eden scared me,” she responded honestly. “Whoever created that binding spell was diabolically clever. If I go into Anchor it won’t take long to have me trapped. If I stay in Flux, I may be even worse, ’cause this just kicked whatever is in my new makeup into high gear. Something in my brain keeps trying to draw from Flux, and so far I’m keeping it in check, but I’ll lose. So I can’t stay in Flux or I don’t know what I’ll turn into, but I can’t go to Anchor ’cause I know what I’ll turn into. They win either way. Either I go down and join them or I’m out of everybody’s hair forever.”