02. Empires of Flux and Anchor (36 page)

Both officer's mouths fell open in surprise. Finally, the general recovered. "At what price?"

"The empire controls the machines, and the temple becomes a sort of embassy. We need to insure that it's not a free and easy passage to the Hellgate. Beyond the temple, no one leaves or enters without the permission of your government and the empire's. The stringer guild will deal with you at east and west gate. I've seen a thousand Fluxlands, General, and so have most of the others. We'll keep your trade open, and we'll be the intermediaries between the empire and your people. It makes no sense to cost a million lives and make this a wasteland. No sense at all, for either side. They want to keep this contained. If you're here, running the place, they can do so. They do it by co-opting you into the empire. Making it legitimate. Anchor Logh is restored, but has total internal self-government. Everybody benefits and nobody else dies."

"If we could only trust the empire on that," Weiz put in. "But it's a theocracy. How can we trust it?"

"Guarantees can be worked out. You and the Church have both been working with an illusion. The empire isn't the Church; the Church serves the empire. Nine wizards set policy and control everything that it does, and none of them are in the least bit committed to the Church. The war has bled off the surplus population so far, but that won't last forever. Flux will absorb the surplus, though, as it always has in one way or another. The ones with the power, the Nine Who Guard, are really mostly concerned with securing those Hellgates. Secondarily, they went as far as they could in learning. They needed a mechanism to break the control of the wizards, each of whom had some piece of old knowledge that usually meant nothing to them until fitted into the whole. They needed a way to pry the ancient stuff out, and they needed Anchors, with fixed laws, to experiment with what they learned. I think they can spare Anchor Logh."

"It seems reasonable to me," Weiz noted. "But it'll have to be sold to higher-ups, in secret, while everything is contained here."

"Just keep your men on the wall. I'll stop them and explain the conditions there, too. I think the head of the Nine will be among the first through. You sell it to your side; I'll sell it to mine."

"It's a tough job," the general noted. "Still, I agree, for what that's worth, and I'll cooperate so long as there are no tricks. But no empire forces are to cross the wall or extend more than a kilometer in either direction. If they do, it's all off."

"These are hard choices you're handing both sides, Matson," Weiz noted. "You're the only one free and clear in all this. You don't give a damn."

"Life is all hard choices, Captain," the stringer replied. "I've had more than my share. But most folks never get any choices at all, and hard as they are, I'd rather be the one making the decisions."

Weiz stirred. "Did you see a woman in Flux? Short, chubby, kind of cute?"

"Yeah, Suzl's alive. Why? What's she to you?"

"I . . . sort of married her."

Matson chuckled. "On orders, of course."

"Well, yes, on orders. But I find her a little special."

"You can hardly even know her!"

Weiz shrugged. "I'm a gambler."

"Well, we'll see if she is. Do your job first, Captain. The rest is academic if we fail."

It had been kind of imposing, even threatening, to stand in front of a point in Flux and try to talk an invading force into not going into Anchor. Fortunately, the initial shield opening was quite small, and there were few soldiers to work with— and a wizard. The wizard had contained the assault and sent for Mervyn.

Weiz was a glib talker, and it had been a surprisingly easy sell on the Anchor side, although, of course, it would be years before the military government felt safe enough to relax and remove its martial law organization designed mostly to fight a tough war. On the empire's side, there was almost a feeling of relief at Matson's offer. Many of them were appalled at legitimizing such a terrible and repressive sexist regime, but when you had the Fluxlands for an example, the bizarre could be made palatable and the unthinkable allowed. The people of Anchor Logh knew the hard choice. All-out war to the death or the system they had now. Most hardly liked the system, but they were terrified of the alternative. They consoled themselves that such a rigid system would have to bend someday, and slowly reforms would return. They would wait, making a characteristically human decision that none not in their place could comprehend.

They had seen the burned-out and desolate future, and they had decided
no more, no more.
They would accept the system, with faith that it would eventually change from within, if not in their lifetimes, then in their descendants'. Slavery and repression, in the end, only ever existed with the consent of the slaves and the repressed, who preferred their condition to death. On a mass basis, there was no other way for such systems to survive.

Mervyn had called in a whole crew of top wizards to examine the spell on Suzl and found it fully lived up to her expectations. Its traps were based on her own Flux power; automatic spells that would trigger when the one before was touched. Such was the way of curses. They could see the traps, but there were so many of them, and all of them so subtle, that there was no way to disarm them without exploding them, to the detriment of any wizard—and innocent bystander—who tried. Coydt had made good use, too, of the linking spell between Suzl and Spirit, now inoperative. Through that, Coydt had engineered a system which would backfire on Suzl when she disabled the spell, sending it along via the linking spell to Spirit and attaching it to the binding spell. To free Suzl would send the curse intact to Spirit, making her curse even more grotesque.

There was always a chance, of course, that the Soul Rider could work it out, but they wouldn't know until it was tried. As far as the Soul Rider was concerned, Suzl was convinced that her part in all this was done. The Soul Rider had stuck with Spirit. It would not risk her, particularly when Suzl could still use the power through the Soul Rider's spells. From the Soul Rider's point of view, Suzl, as translator and spell receptor, was still just fine the way she now was.

"And the binding spell Coydt handed me?" she asked the spell doctors. "What would it do?"

"He was as good as his word," they replied. "You would remember, but your perspective will have changed. You would see your previous life as a waste, a miserable emptiness. You would see this system of theirs as perhaps not right for others, but just what you've always wanted and needed. Once in place, you would consider it natural and normal. You would know all the rules, and you would embrace them. It would dampen your aggressive streak, and pump up your hormones, and freeze your sexual orientation, and focus your interests on what your new life demanded. There would be no regrets."

"And the body?"

"Physically and emotionally, you would be seventeen or eighteen again and would be somewhat frozen there."

"So it's
this
forever or
that
forever."

"Perhaps not. When we get to really understand the power amplifiers, we can perhaps reform and refocus them. Technology and our knowledge will advance. What one person created, another can surely uncreate one day."

"One day."

Cass was appalled that she was even considering the binding spell. "For whom? A guy who was ordered to marry you and parade you around to draw me in? A man you've known for maybe a day?"

"Or somebody else. What does it matter, Cass? I told you a while back that you just can't relate to what kind of life I've had."

"But you've always been the clever one, the big mouth who'd always point out the truth. You figured out how to reach the Guardian and made it all possible! You've always been the independent free spirit!"

"It was an act, Cass. An act to convince everybody, even myself, that I wasn't a freak, wasn't owned, wasn't property. But I was. The only time I felt really genuine, really free—with Spirit—turns out to be phony as well. My absolute master was the Soul Rider. My mind's been messed with by the wizards of Globbus, by Ravi, by Mervyn, and by the Soul Rider. I'm not even sure what's really
me
anymore."

"But that life back there—treating women as
objects!
Even
you
made fun of it! It's repulsive!"

"Why? Because it's only women and not both who are objects? Who are you kidding, Cass? You're arguing ideology. A place where they oppress and degrade women is bad, but a place where they oppress and degrade
both
men and women, like ninety percent of the Fluxlands, is O.K. or at least acceptable. Sure, I know it's stupid to oppress and retard half the human race, but it's just as stupid to oppress and retard
all
the human race. You know what I've got, Cass? The same old thing I've had ever since they threw me out of Anchor Logh. Never mind the principles and the masses—all I've got is my choice of oppressors."

"Suzl—
live
with it a while. There's a beautiful and private Fluxland waiting for you that you've never seen, and there's a child out there as well, one who now has no parents."

"I'm going to be just
great
raising a child like this. Just
look
at me, Cass!" She paused for a moment. "Are you ready to prove your commitment?"

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Make love to me, Cass. Right here and now. I'm totally turned on, and I'm having to repress the urge to leap on you."

Cass was suddenly taken aback. She looked at the gross breasts, the enormous male organ, the whole sexually misshapen body, and she was revolted. As much as she wanted to prove her points, she knew that there was no way she could possibly do what was asked. No way at all. No spell prevented her, nor any moral qualms—it would have been moral, in a sense, to shut her eyes and allow it for Suzl's sake—but she just couldn't. She just wasn't a self-sacrificing saint anymore, and all she could do was turn, run, and cry it out.

She did not, however, cease her assault on the kind of agreement they were sealing. Finally Mervyn lost his temper and angrily snapped, "What's all right one way is wrong the other, huh?"

She was puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"Coydt recruited his men mostly from Fluxlands ruled by female Fluxlords. Crazy, nasty Fluxlords. Matriarchies, and worse.
They
were the objects there, fighting when told, prevented from any real authority or position, doing the heavy, dirty work. Coydt freed them and fed their lifelong resentments. His system reversed the roles and fed their egos. Some of those Fluxlands—most, in fact—are within the empire. Lands you allowed to continue."

"If it was wrong for it to have been done to them, and it was, then it's just as wrong the other way."

"Human nature seldom operates like that. Even its loftiest principles tend to become excuses for doing what the powerful want to do. In Anchor, crippled and deformed male babies were put to death by the priestesses. Female counterparts were taken to Flux with the aid of stringers, made whole, and returned. They were good children, model students, and virtually all of them went into the priesthood. The argument went that those girls didn't increase the population and they filled the need for priestesses painlessly. Most everyone knew about this and accepted it. Since the mothers of killed male children were convinced the births were stillbirths or that the causes were natural, they took it hard but accepted it. World is a rotten place, but it's what we made it, and we can hardly judge them and not ourselves."

Slowly, Cass was losing whatever faith she had left in human nature and whatever hope she had for the future. It seemed like blow after blow was coming down on her, and she was powerless to change it.

She went to find Matson and found him preparing to leave.

"Where are you going?"                                    

"Home," he answered. "It's all done now, Cass. I beat the odds again, and that's that."

She felt sudden emotional turbulence. "What about me?"

He sighed. "Cass, so long as you were a priestess, it wasn't worth the telling, but I been married more than fifteen years to the same woman, a tough ex-stringer like me. We got three kids of our own, and it looks like my oldest daughter, who's fourteen, is leaning to both the power and to stringing."

She felt shocked, hurt, even somehow
betrayed
by that. She began to tremble with anger and emotion.

He looked at her. "What'd you think? That I was sitting up there pining for you? You made your choice to go one way, and it looked permanent to both of us. You're a good woman, Cass. You'd have made a hell of a stringer and there's no bigger compliment I can give. But I love my wife and I love my kids and they're probably all in a panic that I'm lyin' dead someplace. I have to go back."

It suddenly all burst out in a fury. "I'll
make
you stay!" she screamed at him. "I'm a wizard and I can make you love me and forget all about them!"

He tensed, but kept his self-control. "Yeah, sure. You could make me your pet lover and slave. You been goin' all over this camp telling people how
lousy
it is what they're doin' to women in Anchor Logh. How
immoral
it is. But it isn't immoral if
you
do it to
me,
is it? No, because Coydt was right, and those guys in Anchor are right, aren't they? If you have the power and you want something, you just
take
it and the hell with the others! I could be the star of a whole Fluxland of men worshipping you, couldn't I? It'd be O.K. because it'd be
you
on top and
me
on the bottom, and the hell with me, right? The hell with my family, right? Go ahead— use your damn Flux spells to make me what you want. Then you'll be just like all the rest of 'em, and you'll have no kick coming. Do it now, 'cause if you don't I'm gettin' on that horse over there, picking up Jomo, and goin' home!"

The spells needed came easily to her mind in her hurt and anger. And somewhere, off in a corner of her mind, she heard Coydt's voice whisper,
"Go on! Do it! You got the
power
and that's all you need. I'm not dead. I'll never die. Go on and take him . . . and I'll be
you
next time around."