“Even so,” the younger man responded uneasily. “I hope we can make our call.”
3
WAR TROPHIES
Under the long reign of the old Church, there had always been a carnival in each Anchor before the sacrament of the Paring Rite, when excess population had been disposed of ruthlessly by sending children of age into Flux. The old Church, and its cruel rite, were long gone now, and, for a while, so were the carnivals, particularly from austere and fanatical New Eden. Now, however, they were coming back, and to New Eden first of all. The carney people had kept their extended families intact and plied their trades independently in Flux and whatever Anchors were interested, and now they were reestablishing themselves. This was in no small measure due to the Central Command of the Signal Corps, the military arm of the Stringer’s Guild, who had fostered and protected the carney folk all those centuries because they were the best observers of Anchors— changes in various Anchors, changes in leadership and attitude, and changes in economic fortunes, all of which were of importance to the men and women who controlled the trade through Flux.
It had been Rasheed Vishnar’s plan to throw the largest carnival ever on World and to reinaugurate the custom. Vishnar, Chief Judge of the Logh District, was an old-school New Edenite leader, one of the original set of leaders formed by Adam Tilghman in the times after the whole cluster had been turned to Anchor. He was a Tilghman man through and through, and had been placed under arrest when the Seven rebelled—a fact which gave him even greater authority and influence after the defeat of the rebellion and the invaders. He was an unreconstructed True Believer, but he was not an austere sort of man and he genuinely loved people, particularly children.
Vishnar had been the technical boss of Onregon Sligh, the brilliant scientific mind who’d deciphered the ancient records and machinery from Coydt’s own researches, then joined the Seven. Vishnar himself was a scientist, and a good one, although he had nowhere near the intelligence of Sligh, and after purging or “fixing” essential Sligh men through Flux, he continued the scientific research, more administering than actually doing the work himself, since he was first and foremost a political leader.
He was a big man, a hundred eighty-eight centimeters in height and weighing in, with ample girth, at around a hundred thirty-six kilograms. With a round face and short, neatly trimmed full beard, dressed in the black cloth of a church elder, he looked both formidable and comical at the same time.
He had an enormous custom-designed home on the edge of the city, well away from casual traffic, and while most of the scientific research was done in the gleaming old temple in the city center, there was some done out at his place as well, particularly on things that simply couldn’t fit into the Research Institute. His projects had paid great dividends to New Eden and continued to do so as they learned more and more about the old technologies and how to apply or adapt them to New Eden’s requirements, and he was proud of that. He also loved showing off new things to visitors he knew and trusted, almost like a child proudly showing his new toys, and if he wasn’t as up on the principles involved, he was well aware of all the ongoing projects and what they were about. It was because of this, too, that he maintained close ties to the stringers and to friendly forces in Flux, the only New Edenite leader who had no particular fear or dislike of Flux wizards if they were decent folk and respected New Eden’s ways.
His love of children and his almost-childlike glee at his technological toys and things like the carnival made many people see him as something of a big child himself, but that was underestimating him. He had been there since before the start; he had been one of Coydt’s hand-picked leaders, and had overseen the ruthless extermination of opposition in the early days of the takeover.
Still, when the stringers had talked of the old carnivals and the survival of much of the equipment and personnel to run them, his eyes had lit up, and he’d determined to throw the biggest, grandest carnival ever. It would only debut at Logh Center; after its ten-day run, it would move to various parts of New Eden, winding up at the capital itself. Out of gratitude, he’d invited some of the young children from friendly Fluxlands like the Freehold to be his guests at the opening. There had been much debate in the Freehold about sending anyone, particularly children, into New Eden, into a society where sexual differences were enforced from a very early age. The only one who had really wanted to go was, ironically, the oldest person in permanent residence there.
She knew it was wrong to feel this way, but it felt almost like a homecoming. Of all those who lived in Flux, she was probably the only one who viewed New Eden with anything near friendly eyes, and without any fear or real condemnation.
Certainly the place had changed for the better, and not just the technological end of it. The women seemed more at ease, less fearful, and there was a sense of fashion out there as well. The basic system remained, of course, and that system was wrong, but somehow, for her, it felt very—comfortable. Certainly she fit right in out there; outwardly, she remained a Fluxgirl by choice, and after a day here she began to wonder whether or not it was strictly an exterior thing.
I’m the lost oddball that keeps bouncing back home, Suzl thought as she examined herself in the full-length mirror. The woman who looked back at her was short, pert, insufferably cute, and very, very sexy, with huge breasts setting off an otherwise perfect hourglass figure. The woman didn’t look a day over seventeen, dark-complected with black, shoulder-length hair that was styled to flare out in back while ending in bangs in front.
She looked exactly as she had forty-seven years ago when she’d walked out of here after releasing the Guardian and shutting down the master defense system and direct computer accesses. The same as she’d looked for decades before that. Although a powerful wizard in her own right since reassuming control those forty-seven years before, she’d never even bothered to erase the tattoo on her rump that gave her first name and identifying New Eden number, although she’d changed the name to just plain “Suzl.” She’d told herself it was to remind her of what things had been like here once time passed and memories became mixed, and to show the children what it was like, and it had certainly been used for that, but now, physically back, she wasn’t so sure that was really it.
She’d been born and raised under the old system not forty kilometers from the big house in which she now was staying. She’d been short and fat and dumpy, and she’d known it, and she wasn’t much better socially. She liked the company of men, which wasn’t all that often, but she always seemed to fantasize about the really gorgeous girls that were around.
She’d been an indifferent—no, lousy—student, although she’d had a natural aptitude for math and had done well there because she never had to work at it. Books had never appealed to her; she had little interest in learning for its own sake, never had, and she’d never had any ambition, any clear aims or goals for herself. She barely passed most things, and checked off random blocks on the critical aptitude test at the end.
Then had come the Paring Rite, being sold to a stringer and thrown into Flux, and she’d been the only one there who found it something of an adventure. She hadn’t had to make any more decisions or face any more stern lectures about her future, and her fate was out of her hands. She’d wound up getting stuck by a wizard’s misfired spell with a penis, and she’d become a dugger and a freak and had reveled in it. Ultimately, though, she’d been turned into a true dugger, an inhuman monstrosity, with breasts a meter out and a prick almost dragging the ground, and she became a real lost ball. With flux power provided by Spirit and the Guardian she’d regained some normalcy, only to lose it again when she faced down Coydt van Haas. His cruel choice was to become a Fluxgirl or remain a monstrosity forever. She had chosen the Fluxgirl, of course, and had married Captain Weiz, the man who had invented Fluxgirls and the psychological conditioning methods by which New Eden maintained and expanded its control.
Now, she realized, that even with regaining her power and her self-control, she’d never really stopped being one. Once, as a teenager, in an all-too-successful attempt to shock the other girls, she’d opined that she thought the best job in the world was probably being a whore. You had your days free, all your basics provided, and at night people paid to have you lie on your bed, be sexy, and spread your legs and have fun.
Strange, she thought. I haven’t thought about that comment since I was sixteen. Certainly she’d never really wanted to be one or she’d have tried it. All those strange, kinky men night after night. . . .
But what she had been, for forty years, was a Fluxwife. No responsibilities beyond household management, plenty of communal support in child care and rearing, and, because she’d been in the fringes of the upper classes (and ultimately at the top), some free time to just play around and goof off, even have a tumble now and then with women who looked and acted like her childhood fantasies.
She’d fit. For the first time in her life, she’d taken on a role she could do that was not freakish or antisocial. She had chafed under some of the restrictions on dress and freedom of movement and the like, but those were petty carps and she had learned to live with them, and get around them when necessary.
And, when the shutdown came and she’d gone with her younger kids and joined everybody else and their kids at Sondra and Jeff’s Fluxland, Freehold, she’d taken up almost where she’d left off. She practically took over managing the place, supervising the staff, taking on an inordinate amount of time with the rather vast brood. She was better at it and she enjoyed it. Sondra had been forced into the Fluxgirl mold, and while she’d tried to maintain it for the kids’ sake for a while, she really couldn’t. She became interested in outside politics, and in trading, and in raising a herd of fine cows. And Cass—she really suffered. All those years of repression and all that guilt on top of everything just burst through. Matson was restless and she was going nuts, and they finally packed up his and hers and theirs and set off for the place that all good stringers who hadn’t croaked went to retire.
And Spirit—she had a lot of catching up to do. As soon as little Morgaine was toilet trained they were off, coming back now and then but less and less frequently as Morgaine had grown into adulthood and begun the training that would give her her father’s wizard’s legacy.
She could have gone with either of them. She loved Cass more than she loved anyone else in the world, but Cass had Matson and Matson had more wives than he wanted or needed. Suzl knew right along that she just didn’t fit.
Almost as much as she loved Cass, she loved Spirit, but the Spirit she’d loved was not the stunning and adventurous woman of the Invasion and Freehold, but rather the wondering and happy child-woman she had been. This Spirit needed neither wife, nor husband, nor close companion. She needed to be free, and Suzl had understood.
This wasn’t the first time Suzl had had such thoughts. Once she had confided some of these feelings to others, and had gone to see a wizard woman said to be a powerful doctor of the mind.
“Yours is not a complex situation to understand,” the wizard had told her. “It is simply compounded exponentially by your longevity due to your Flux powers. You were always different, an outsider, and you really hated it, but to compensate you reveled in that difference and convinced even yourself that you liked it that way. Deep down, however, you knew the truth. Deep down, you didn’t like yourself at all. It made you reckless, uncaring. You did not fit, so you stopped trying to make yourself fit. You stopped living and started existing, moment to moment, day to day. You measured success by what your friends accomplished, not you. Then came New Eden, and suddenly you were part of the crowd, one of the elite. You conformed for the first time to the social norms of a society, and it was one where little was expected of you. There was neither motivation nor means to resist. You had a place, and you fit in it.”
“You make it sound like I’m a natural-born slave or something,” she’d protested, “it’s wrong the way they treat women there. Women are every bit as smart and capable as men in almost everything, maybe better in some. I’d like to see how a man would take the pain of labor and childbirth, or even twelve hours a day of wild kids with no break and eleven hundred poopy diapers.”
“Yes, but, you see, that’s at the heart of your problem. There’s nothing evil or wrong about being a wife, a mother, or a homemaker. The only evil is that New Eden compels women to accept those roles and no others. Even now, that means little in and of itself on World. Anyone without a great deal of Flux power is compelled to take some sort of role. You have the power to avoid compulsion, and you feel guilty that you aren’t using it to accomplish great things. Well, many with the power squander it or do very evil or foolish things. I rather doubt that the wife/mother/ homemaker role would have been best for you when you were young. Then you would have probably been best as a major authority figure—a commune chief, or perhaps even a priestess in the old Church if you could have taken the indoctrinations. But fate forced you into that role, and it met your needs and requirements. We are also creatures of our environment, our experiences. You were a wife, mother, and homemaker for the majority of your life. That’s what you are.”
The statement had startled and disturbed her. “You, a learned and powerful professional woman, are telling me I’m only cut out to be a wife?”
“Everybody has to be something, and it’s the only something you’ve ever been where everything fit. Everyone can change, of course, but it is one of the curses of Flux power that we change the least once we find a niche. We live too long. Age never faces us in the mirror, and death is always remote. Still, as novice wizards, we are frightened and insecure. All of us. We must find a niche or the power will consume us, destroy us, or make us mad. Once we find it, if we do, it becomes a cocoon in our subconscious mind. We unknowingly weave our own complex spells to reinforce it. Just as Fluxlords get increasingly rigid, so do we. This is why your friends could not remain what they were, power or not, but reverted to the sorts of people they had been. They had previous niches, and they fell back into them as soon as they could.”
“You’re telling me that if I live five hundred years I’m always going to be a Fluxwife because deep down I want to be?”
“In a way. Basically, you’ve been one so long you are beyond really changing the basics. When the Guardian lifted your binding spells, you had the most power anyone has ever had in this region. You changed yourself as little as your conscience and your duty would permit you. And, at shutdown, you walked away from New Eden into Flux, power intact, and you didn’t change any more than that. You told yourself you were free and that you detested the system and the men who made it, yet you did nothing to change your direction. You felt like you should change, take off in new directions, but you had no direction to go and every alternative looked threatening to you. You made excuses to yourself. The children needed you. You were an object lesson. Sondra and Jeff needed you. And all of it might have been true, but it also reinforced that tight niche, that cocoon. You were afraid of becoming the drifting, aimless outsider again. The more you considered alternatives, the tighter the safe and warm cocoon gripped you. The same thing happened to me, only I was a professional woman, a healer. You have so many self-induced spells on you that they can’t be counted, all reinforcing your safety image. So do I. So do Sondra, and Jeff, and the others. You must stop dwelling on what you could have been and accept what you are. You can accept it and find some happiness and comfort, or you can continue to reject it and remain miserable, guilt-ridden, and uncomfortable. But you will still be the same in either case.”
The terrible thing was, it explained so much, particularly about wizards. Why, even after centuries, wizards remained basically the same people, and why most of them feared changes. Why Fluxlands remained constant, and why, after half a century or so, they grew so negligibly.