Charon (31 page)

 
We were rather rudely dropped at the end although we had trained as best we could and been prepared. There was no place for a soarer to take off from around here—not enough elevation on the dunes and no footholds—so it soared in low, stalled almost to a crawl, then dropped us a few meters into the sand. It then rapidly gained altitude until it was a small blot in the sky, and we saw those in the passenger compartment, mostly humans and human-sized creatures, parachute to the ground over a square kilometer or more. Parachuting was not a common art on Charon, but broken legs mended in a few days thanks to the Wardens.

 
We were met by a small group of men and women, all humans, dressed in thick yellow robes and wide-brimmed hats. They were quite efficient at moving about and gathering together the dozen or so humans and changelings that had been deposited by the soarer.

 
"How are you?" Darva asked, concerned.

 
I checked myself. "A little bruised and burned by the sand, but otherwise all right," I told her. "I feel rotten, though, and I need a drink.
You?"

 
"Same here," she responded. "Let's see how we get out of this hole. This place is like something from the worst nightmare. It's hell itself." It was hard to disagree with that, although for her this was the first time she'd ever seen or experienced this sort of climate and desert terrain. But what she considered normal wasn't so nice, either.

 
One of the robed men holding a clipboard quickly checked our names, seemed satisfied, then brought us to a central spot in the sand not in any way distinguishable from any other point in the desert. They looked around, checked something or other, and suddenly we started sinking into the sand.

 
It was an eerie and unnerving sensation, although after the Sight it
was
pretty tame. I held my breath as I sunk to my mouth, then continued down under.

 
For a brief moment my entire body was encased in sand, and I had this horrible feeling of smothering, but it soon passed as I felt cool air hit my feet and hindquarters and I realized we were entering some sort of huge passage. Spitting sand and wiping my eyes, I managed to get hold of myself and look around.

 
What I saw was impressive—a huge hangarlike building, well-lit with very modern industrial lights, with a lot of people running around below apparently working on or servicing a lot of stuff. What struck me most was the machinery—this place could almost be out of the civilized worlds. It was at least as modern as the shuttle—the first time I'd seen such a technological level since arriving at Montlay in what seemed like a lifetime ago.

 
We were standing on some kind of translucent platform on a large pistonlike device that was gradually lowering us from the opening to the huge floor. Looking up, I had to gasp as I saw a huge roof apparently composed entirely of sand with no support whatsoever. How the effect was managed I never did find out, whether by some Warden sorcery or by some sort of force field, but this clearly was why the all-powerful Charonese and their alien allies had never found the place. Hell, I wouldn't be able find it myself again no matter what the inducement

 
As we reached bottom, our greeting party quickly removed then robes and left them on the platform. A glance at them and at many of the personnel around the place showed that, down here, the mode of dress was closer to undress. I wondered how some of our moralistic Unitites were going to take that.

 
Another party arrived to greet us, dressed rather scantily though a couple had on medicallike garb. One of them approached Darva and me. "You are the two with the reversion problem?" she asked clinically.

 
We nodded. "I'm Dr. Yjssim," she continued. "Follow me, please."

 
We followed her across part of the vast work area to a large tunneliike opening and went down it for a hundred meters or more, finally walking into a large, comfortable room that had large pads on the floor and little else.

 
"We're going to start your first treatment right away," she told us. "Otherwise you're going to have problems down here with fresh meat, among other things. Each of you please
sit
on a separate pad."

 
We looked at each other, shrugged, and did as instructed. The doctor stood back, looked at each of us in turn, then touched her temples and seemed to go into a light trance. I was familiar with the technique now, but it still surprised me. Hell, we'd only just arrived.

 
She stood still that way for several minutes, and I could sense her Warden power—her
wa—
reaching out to me. It tingled, sort of, as I suddenly felt myself under the most absolute of microscopes. Darva felt the same. Then the doctor came out of her trance, nodded to herself, and started mumbling into a small recorder I hadn't noticed before.

 
"Limik!" she
called,
and a young man came in also dressed in hospital garb. She wasted no time on amenities. "Six liters number forty," she told him, "for each of them."

 
He nodded, left, and in a short while returned with two large jugs full of a clear liquid. He approached us-— without a flinch or without even staring oddly at us, I noticed with some satisfaction—and handed us each a jug.

 
"Drink all you can," Dr. Yissim instructed us. "It's basically water, which you need badly, with some additives. Drink it all
it
you can."

 
There was absolutely no problem in drinking it all. I seemed to have a bottomless reservoir.

 
"Master Kokul's analysis of the two of you was sent on ahead," she told us as we finished. "He's quite thorough. Now, you'll both start to feel a little sleepy, lethargic, and relaxed. Don't fight it. This is going to be a tricky series. If we don't get this exactly right from the start we could merely accelerate the process, and we don't want that. I realize you're both starved, but I want empty stomachs for now." With that, she turned and walked out of the room.

 
Darva looked over at me, already seeming a bit sleepy.

 
"She's the coldest person I've ever met We might as well be two lumps of mud.
" ,

 
I nodded. "I've met a lot like that. Don't let it worry you. Her
type almost always know
what they're doing. Let's just help it, get into the relaxation mode, and let them do their job."

 
Using some of the concentration and relaxation exercises Tully had taught us, we needed very little time to reach a state of quasi-sleep. We were aware of what was going on, but floating in a cloud of peace and comfort, we just didn't give a damn. In many ways it was like the state I'd been placed into before the old woman had made me a changeling.

 
A wall flicked, and suddenly became transparent. I saw Yissim there, along with two men and three women, all sitting at a console of some sort. They looked at us then at the console; we could see only them.

 
It began. It began without any of the gyrations or mumbo-jumbo everyone before had always used. You could see it, sense it, feel it, as a tremendous concentration of Warden
direction
flowed out from those people behind the partition to us. It was blinding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and within seconds it was in control of my mind. I found myself involuntarily resisting, and a minor fight ensued, made worse because, thanks to Tully, we knew the blocking techniques.

 
Somehow' I managed a slight turn so that I could see Darva, and despite my drugged state I nonetheless had a fascination for what I was seeing, a fascination that was neither shock nor horror nor anything else but just that— fascination. I found I didn't really care. Darva's body was undulating, going through rapid, fluid changes. I knew that my body was probably undergoing the same. Her torso was thickening up, her arms becoming shorter and smaller, and merging into her head, which was also changing, flowing liquidly out, taking a whole different shape.

 
The Wardens in our bodies, aided by the animal foundations of our brains, were fighting the treatment, fighting it effectively by accelerating the change. We were turning into true bunhars—and worse, we were gaining mass in the head and torso as we did so, mass that would be very hard to remove. This then was the loaded gun of the changeling, the reason why it was next to impossible to change back.
Reversion .
. ,

 
I
was aware my vision was changing. It was becoming impossible to focus close in, although I could still see Darva clearly and she could see me. I could see, blurrily, that I had a snout and I realized that my eyes, like hers, must be set much farther apart. It was becoming more and more difficult, though, to think at all. My mind was dying; I knew it, yet, eerily, even as it was lost I experienced less and less a sense of any loss at all.

 
Darva looked completely like a
bunhar
now, and she appeared very natural and normal to me. Only her eyes, set farther apart along that large, toothy snout, still retained a curious human appearance. I had only three awarenesses ... I was hungry, yet sleepy, and there was a female over
there ...

 
The next few days are all but impossible to remember or describe. Basically, we were kept in a large pen with an electrified barrier, and a pool of water; once a day, a large, freshly killed creature was brought somehow into the enclosure and Darva and I devoured it greedily. Eating was followed by a period of strained sleep, in which we were both in this funny place,
then
we'd wake up again in the pen. Both of us were bunhars, and we operated on the most basic animal level and on no other. We had absolutely no sense of time, place, or anything. We were barely self-aware.

 
Slowly, though, we came out of it.
Very, very slowly.
Memory returned first, but it was uncoupled with conscious thought, and thus useless. Finally, we came out of one of the sleep sessions still in the strange room, and for the first time, I could think again.

 
Yissim's voice seemed to float in to us. "If you can understand me, stamp your right foot," she instructed.

 
I turned, looked at Darva, and saw that she was still very much a hundred percent bunhar. But she stamped her right foot-r—and so did I.

 
"Very good," the doctor approved. "Please do not try to talk to me or to each other. You don't have the equipment at the moment, and all you'd produce would be a loud roar. It has been a tricky, delicate operation to say the least. In order literally to save your minds we had to let the process take its course with your conscious selves decoupled. Believe
me,
this was necessary—but radical. You are only the third and fourth individuals we've had to use this procedure on, and we've had one success and one failure. Hopefully we will have two more successes here.

 
"Now," she went on, "we're going to try and bring you back, but it will be a slow, patient process. We have restored your minds, your basic humanity. Bit by bit we will restore the rest. We will be working with you, but you must do it yourselves. Our initial probe shows that we cannot impose the change on you. Were we to try a new series of spells, you would react in such a way as to literally alter your brain. Once your brain modified to the bunhar mode you would be bunhars and we could not restore memory, personality, or sentience. You must learn to control every Warden in your bodies.
Every one.
You must assume total control."

 
What proved most frustrating was that Darva and I could communicate neither with the doctors nor with each other since, I soon discovered, she was totally illiterate—a condition that simply had never occurred to me could happen.

 
If the situation was bizarre to us, it must have been more so to the doctors. Imagine going in every day and giving very elaborate lessons and exercises to a pair of bunhars. Still, I'll give them that much—they never once seemed to blink at the situation or treat us as anything except intelligent adults. I, for one, was more than anxious to do everything until I had it perfect—I had no wish to return to the zoo and the oblivious state of the simple saurian.

 
Still, it was a constant mental fight with those animal impulses. I had to stop myself continually from roaring, charging, or doing other animal things in proper bunhar fashion. I realized that part of my trouble was my concern that Darva might not make it. I wanted both of us to succeed, desperately.

 
The day we concentrated on our larynxes was an exciting one. Each day I was gaining more and more control over my body and my actions—becoming, very definitely, the smartest and most self-controlled bunhar in all history. The spell was a complex one, but it still boiled down to
ordering
the Wardens in our bodies to form a voice mechanism that would work in our very primitive throats. I had no idea what one would look like, or how it would work, but I was like a small child with a new toy when I felt something growing, taking shape far back in my throat, and made my first, rather basic sounds that weren't roars and growls. Still, it was not a human voice, and it came from far back in my throat, independent of my mouth— which couldn't form the words anyway. It couldn't—but this new growth could.