He nodded. “O.K., then. I’d say go on down and hope you keep your sanity up. If we’re lucky, you might be able to influence them, particularly Suzl, to get more of a grip on reality. If not, you’ll be stable until this thing’s through and we can work out some other way around the problem.”
“I’m willing,” she told him. “After all, Mom’s down there, anyway.”
“That’s one of the things we’ll have to take care of first. We’re going to need your permission and cooperation to selectively remove a few facts from your mind. Otherwise they’ll find out and hunt us down and your mom, too.”
“I think I can manage that much,” she assured him.
He turned to other matters. “Dell, you get those coded dispatches from the stringer office for me?”
In the end, they managed only to alter her so that she was absolutely convinced that her mother was at Guildhall, with her grandmother. Matson decided to live with that. “It’s about time we came out of the bushes anyway,” he told them.
Dell took Morgaine down on horseback, bid her goodbye, and sent her into the Fluxland. He then proceeded to the point where Spirit had been sending messages, far to the northwest, to see if there was anything new.
There was, but their names were Gabaye and Tokiabi and they were far too much for him to handle.
They brought Morgaine in through abundant fields of food worked by hordes of identical, naked blond women singing happily as they toiled. She asked for Suzl, but they worked her through the chain of command, starting with a wizard who said her name was Cissy and who was a smaller version of Morgaine herself. Explaining her position now, thanks to the spell, and also her indirect relationship with Suzl, she was passed to a strong wizard named Jodi, who listened critically. Finally, though, they brought her to Suzl in a large and lavishly furnished tent near the center of the Fluxland.
She was somewhat taken aback by Suzl’s method of speech, but her heart also went out to the blind half-woman, half-man who had begun as a victim and was now the leader, and Suzl certainly sympathized with Morgaine’s predicament.
“I’m sorry they had to do that, but you understand why,” the blind leader said in that odd electronic voice.
“Yes, I understand. It was my own fault. The thing is, what can I do about it?”
“Being blind has an odd advantage,” Suzl told her. “I’m not sure if your other senses get better or if you’re just more aware of them, but it is so. In addition to better hearing, for example, I also find I can see Flux and spells and their interrelationships a hundred times more clearly than before. I can see, for example, that they handed you a few variants, but mostly gave you my old Ayesha spell. I think—I know—that I am the only one alive who understands that spell. The difference is that you have wizard power. Your body and your mind are at war, as mine was before coming here, although mine was more self-inflicted, while yours was imposed. Like my old one, your body is winning, but because it is the Ayesha spell it is accelerated by a high factor. Had you remained in New Eden, you would have become a Fluxgirl whore. Because your mind is so advanced, so intelligent, you could not have stood it. It would have broken. You would have become as witless as one of those Eves out there.”
“I suspected that.”
“Only being out in the world with a limited number of men saved you this far. Once you went back into an environment with hordes of good-looking men, however, you were done. A few more days out here, and you would have been unable to resist drawing from Flux, changing your own mind into one better suited for the body, and your body would have run wild. You would become a mindless, physically grotesque nymphomaniac. Only coming back here has saved you, but the process will continue if left unabated. I have a way out for you, but larger things loom. You are Spirit’s child, but you’re not mine. I hardly know you, really.”
“What do you want?”
“What you know. What you have learned. How many are with Matson and what do they have that could threaten us? What are their plans? What do they know about us, and who have they told it to?”
Morgaine gave a fairly detailed account of everything, including Spirit’s own run-in with the gods of the Garden. It was all accurate, as far as she knew, although she assured Suzl that Spirit was safe with Cass. She also told of the news from New Eden—news that was not very welcome.
“Morgaine, we’re going to lose to those bastards,” Suzl said with complete candor. “Oh, we’ll give them a hell of a fight, and maybe take a lot of them with us over a very long time, but we’re doomed to lose. Every time we run a duplication command on the projector we get an exact duplicate. It looks right, feels right, and even down to microscopic examination it is identical, except it won’t make contact with the grid. There is no reason why it shouldn’t work, but it doesn’t. Finally, a few days ago, we took a big risk and had the actual projector read into the computer for analysis while we held everything here without it. The computer held it for hours—you know what hours are to a computer? Then it gave it back, and it still worked, and they made a duplicate—and it didn’t work. You could access the grid from it, but you couldn’t project with it. It was just a damned uncomfortable chair for a wizard.”
“Matson had hoped that the Guild experts, who are at least as smart with machines as New Eden, could figure out the trick.”
“We’ve had experts. Experts so smart they can actually build ships to go to other worlds. Something’s missing. Some basic thing in the enormous library of the master computers just isn’t there. The experts think somebody, sometime, maybe long ago, deliberately blocked access to it, or commanded that it never be released to human beings. The computers, God knows, project their power all the time. Something shuts it down, keeps it from communicating—like a binding spell. Then some bright boys, geniuses probably, in New Eden somehow figured out the key. Deduced it, since they weren’t even in Flux and couldn’t build one. Our geniuses might figure it out, given years, but not in four months. Our spies and allies in New Eden can’t get it for us, except that we know they can’t duplicate it in Flux, either. If so, they’d be on us. Maybe it has to be built in Anchor, programmed in Anchor. I don’t know. But they will have a dozen at the start and one more every two weeks after.”
“But their wizards aren’t as good, as experienced, as yours.”
“So what? They will be, after a while of using them and taking over and turning some of the better wizards out there just like I have. They can afford to go slow, too. Take chunks, consolidate, wait for more defenders to be ready, then take another bite. There’s fifty, maybe sixty million people on this world. Thanks to their size and their real high birth rate, they have maybe twenty percent, one in five, of all the people already, and there’s a couple of asshole Anchors and one big Fluxland already going their way. A whole world of tough, loveless, super-masculine men and meek, servile, ignorant, adoring Fluxgirls, all of whom will breed true. Sometimes I think we should have let the Samish win. We’d all be slaves—sort of remote components of a master computer, I guess—but it would be equal, anyway.”
“There must be a way to counter them,” Morgaine insisted. “There must be. We beat the Samish, we beat the Seven, we beat the old Church—there’s always a way.”
Suzl smiled, but it was a grim smile. “Perhaps. First it’s time for you to choose sides. You fought the binding spells before, but if you don’t or won’t then there’s a place for you here. At least it’ll be the last place to fall. Otherwise, I might as well send you back to New Eden to get a head start on the rest of us.”
“This is a complex binding spell. How could you alter it?”
“Because I have the key. Everybody who goes through the chamber for a binding spell has the entire proceeding recorded. I can read back in those magic numbers—and without even a chamber.”
“And what would you make of me?”
“What you are, only uniform in size with the rest of us. No blocks on literacy or math abilities, so you’d have your full powers restored. And, of course, you would be unable to betray us or to act against us in any way.”
“That’s it? But, tell me—why make all your wizards this way? Why lock them into this form?”
“Commitment. This body, as designed, is good only for unlimited sex. Nothing else. But the conventional spell leaves the mind alone, as yours does not. You see. I can’t command my vision of the new world and expect wizards of training to swallow it. Trapped in this body, however, they have no choice. Only in this environment can your mind take charge, do whatever it is capable of doing. In a conventional environment, Flux or Anchor, with men and women, you would find your physical needs and urges compelling. Once you took my spell you’d still be free— you’d have to be to fully and willfully use your powers. I need minds like yours, Morgaine, but if you take my spell you will either be your own mistress or you will be the mistress of strangers. You all have to act in my behalf or you act against yourselves. You see?”
And she did see, and also understood exactly how clever Suzl really was. It was less of a decision for her than the others, though, because she already had the physical liabilities but without the power and thus true freedom of action.
“All right. I’ll change spells.”
“No tricks. When it begins, you’ll have a rider spell attached. If you don’t accept my spell after clearing your own, you’ll wind up accelerating every process in body and mind. You’ll make Ayesha seem like a plain schoolgirl. And then we’ll deliver you to New Eden.”
“I won’t fight it if you’re being honest with me. Then what?”
“You spent your whole life studying Flux and spells. You know more than the lot of us, except those two evil hags I’m forced to play games with right now. I have many wizards with exceptional powers but no really good training, no knowledge of the tricks. You will train them, and any others that come along, as much as you can in four months. They’ll be all that will be standing between us and New Eden.”
Sondra looked at Dell and sighed. “Well, it’s no binding spell, but it’s too strong for you to break on your own. It’s full of traps and it’ll take experts to unravel. Those two really know their business.”
“It’s damned embarrassing,” Dell muttered. They had taken him in the air and forced him down in a duelling posture. The two of them were far too strong and experienced for him, and had him in a matter of minutes. After that, they’d thrown this spell on him and sent him back with a message. The spell had been designed to embarrass him, and to limit his future effectiveness. Above the waist he was his normal, slightly hairy masculine self; below, however, he now was sexually female and had coming down the longest, sexiest smooth women’s legs ever seen. Worse, he found himself compelled to keep his lower half exposed. Shirt, yes; pants, no. The final insult was that they gave him, immediately, a crampy and bloody period he couldn’t stop with Flux power.
He still had his power, but it could be directed only to others, not to himself. As Sondra said, it was full of traps. He’d merely examined one and suddenly had to fight the urge to put on makeup and high heels. He didn’t want to examine any more.
“They said they only let me go because there was no other good way to send a message out,” he told them. “They really wanted me for my power, but they want somebody else more. They say they detected Spirit’s transmissions, waited at the spot, then traced them back in to her. They’ve got her, that’s for sure. They told me where they found her and it matched what we know. They say they can remove the conditionals, which, inside there, would turn her into an Eve forever. They want a swap, and they’re giving you only twelve hours to do it.”
Matson leaned back and sighed. “What do they want for her?”
“They want you, Matson. For some reason, they want you.”
Instead of being shocked or dismayed, the old stringer legend took out a cigar, lit it, and actually smiled. “So they want me, huh? Well, that’s just right. They figured now that they can’t beat New Eden without me.”
Sondra and Dell both stared at him. “Of all the egomaniacal—you act like you expected this!”
“Daughter, if this hadn’t happened, I might have had to arrange it somehow.”
Sondra started to say something, then stopped. She knew her father very well. “All right—what’s the plan? You’ve been setting this up for some time, anyway. I figured you were starting something when you let Morgaine go down.”
“Well, first of all, I’m not being as egotistical as you think. Habib wasn’t much of an officer—just brute strength and kill anything that moves. You could see that by the way his folks acted in New Eden. They bought some real military background with those three Liberty wizards, and you could see that in the Flux part of the attack on the Garden, but those are all wizards, not street fighters. They lost half their ground troops and the other folks weren’t even shooting back! They know it. That’s partly what the Garden attack was all about. A preliminary test against a strong but not unbeatable foe. They need an experienced line officer, and Suzl only knows of one in the neighborhood. Me.”
“And you’re going to do it?” Dell asked, appalled. “After all this stuff? All those bodies, the mutilations. . . .”
“It’s a rough world, Grandson. Does it really make any difference whether you’re blown apart by an organized army because you were in the way of the battle or by some half-organized mob? Those folks over there aren’t any more evil than the soldiers are. They’re just amateurs. The thing is, they know it, and they know they’ll have to face some damned fine professionals. The enemy is New Eden, boy; always has been.”
“But then why. . . . ?”
“Look, you two. If we needed to, I could tie into the Signals emergency net and call for strength. I’d get every wizard and army unit in the area, however many that is, as quick as they could get here. In two, three days I’d have a hell of an army. In a week, I’d have more power than we’d need to knock them over even with their projector, since their actions with it are now totally predictable. Hell, boy, that shield of theirs moves. That means it’s porous. There’s a dozen colorless, odorless gasses that’ll do anything from put you to sleep to kill you ugly that we could send right through there. If I’d wanted them knocked out, I could have done it at any time.”
Dell’s mouth hung open, but Sondra just nodded. “I wondered why you were letting this go on once they settled in one spot.”
Dell shook his head. “Maybe this spell’s made me worse than I thought. Are you saying you could always take them out?”
“Sure.”
“Then why can’t you take New Eden out?”
Matson sighed. “Grandson, it’s the numbers. Old Adam Tilghman knew that when he took a big risk to make the whole Cluster Anchor. Inside that giant Anchor they got twelve or more million people, sixty percent of them Fluxgirls. You realize that?”