I'll be handling things."
Dorion took Charley over and guided her foot into a stir-
rup. She started to help herself up, when she realized it was a
pretty low and fairly shaky saddle and froze. Then slowly, she
felt under the saddle.
"Dorion—there's no horse under this saddle!" she whis-
pered through clenched teeth.
"Yeah, I know. You get used to these things with real
sorcerers. You think we could make it by riding?"
He hoisted her up, secured her as best he could, then
climbed on in back of her. "Hold on," he warned her. "I
have a sinking feeling that we're going to go very fast and
maybe very high."
"All right," they all heard Boolean's voice as if he were
right next to them, "let's get going here. Hang on and don't
fall off. We've got close to a thousand miles—two thousand
leegs in the local parlance—and with breaks for stretches,
food, and drink, and one sleep, it's going to take us two or
three days to get there. It's going to be very close as it is."
And, with that, the saddles rose straight up in the air, lined
up in his predetermined pattern, and paused there for just a
moment. Boday was muttering very nervously and Dorion
wasn't too thrilled himself. Charley could only imagine the
sight, but she could see just how far down the null was.
Boolean sighed and looked back at Masalur hub spread out
before him. '*It used to be one hell of a town," he muttered,
and suddenly the saddles were off like a streak, back across
tile null, across an unfamiliar colonial boundary, high above
226 Jack L Chalker
the trees and roads, heading back to Tishbaal, back to Covanti,
and, eventually, to Sam.
Dorion held her tightly, but Charley had the distinct feeling
that he was holding on to her just as much for his own sake as
for hers. As for her, her head was still spinning from this
rapid and dramatic turn of events; she hadn't had time to
collect her thoughts and emotions or even catch her breath.
"Dorion—how is it possible? Are these some kind of
saddlelike vehicles or something?" she asked him.
"No, just saddles. They look like ones off army horses."
"Then how—?"
"It's fun to be a sorcerer. Miss Sharkin," Boolean's voice
said to her. "Don't worry—you'll get used to it. Besides, it
beats broomsticks, even if it is the same general principle.*'
Charley had met some magicians, and Yobi, of course, but
she had not until now experienced the real power that these
high ones possessed. Even after all this time in Akahlar, and
with all the demons and charms and spells, somebody who
could do this, apparently with a wave of his hand, was as
shocking and inconceivable to her now as it would have been
on the streets of Albuquerque.
And yet, in many ways, it was power from a man who
seemed both very friendly and ordinary and yet so callous of
lessors, too. He'd lived and done his work in Masalur for
many years; he had to know its people, really like both those
people and the place itself. All that had been destroyed; whether
or not he'd had the power to stop it was not the issue. What
was the point was that he didn't seem very broken up about
the fact that everything and everybody who meant anything to
him in Akahlar had just been totally destroyed, and all he
could do was make light conversation and comment that it
used to be a hell of a town.
Dorion had warned her that Boolean wasn't quite right in
the head, but she couldn't help being disturbed by the man's
reputation on the one hand as a social critic and reformer and
the most vociferous battler of Klittichorn with somebody who
could be like that, and she said so to Dorion, not caring if the
sorcerer could hear her or not. He had given her permission
to speak her mind.
"He's always been nearly impossible to figure out, like the
other Second Rank sorcerers,'* the magician responded. "But
227
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM
he's always hidden a part of himself from even his closest
associates. I think he feels it, though. More than he'd admit."
"No, not more than I'd admit," Boolean responded to
them- It was eerie how, even with the wind rushing by and
them whooshing along at a good clip it sounded like he was
right next to them. "This was the most agonizing time I had
since I learned how to do miracles. When I first wound up
here, I apprenticed in this region and they were all good to
me. I was fascinated by the place and by the possibilities. I
had a lot of close friends there, and there were a lot of good
people rolled over in that mess."
"Well, you knew it was coming," she responded. "You
weren't just not at home when it came by accident. Why
didn't you warn them to get out?"
"To where? If I started any major evacuation or gave them
much warning at all, it would tip Klittichorn that I was on to
him. He'd have come in with everything he had right then
and there and it would have been far worse even than now.
They're in shock, but they're not dead, and a fair number
'" have kept their wits about them. I went back in and sought
^ some of them out—after. Not that easy to do, by the way.
^ They really are absolutely physiologically identical. Fortu-
^ nately, I knew where to go and what names to call. There will
be a ton of mental breakdowns and some suicides and perhaps
other problems we can't imagine, but there are enough folks
there with level heads and strong personalities to pull it
together with hard work. It's better than the alternative."
"Alternative! You sneak out and leave them to be turned
into—whatever it is they are. What we heard about them
makes them total nonsense."
' 'Green French pom queens who have been double exposed
is about the best I can give it," the sorcerer replied, chuck-
ling a bit at the description. "Yes, I agree, a species that is
apparently bom animal and becomes plant doesn't make sense,
and I have no notion as to what the extra set of arms, let
alone breasts, are good for, but we aren't exactly well de-
signed, either. We only make sense because we're the norm
to our own selves against which we measure everybody and
everything else. We could be designed far more efficiently,
HI tell you. But it's only form, and it's not a bad one
considering that many of the results of Changewinds I've seen
228 fack L. Chalker
have looked like refugees from a bad Japanese horror movie.
I expected far worse. I did get as many members of my own
staff out as possible, since I didn't want them to lose their
power, but some volunteered to stay, both because it was
their home and because somebody had to maintain that shield
while I was gone for a sufficient time to convince old Rutanibir
and his flock that I was still home. The rest I couldn't help.
They would have been chewed to pieces in a panic evacua-
tion, and, frankly, the majority are far better off as a new race
than as millions of slaves of the new administration."
She hadn't thought of that. "You said it was better than the
alternative. You mean total slavery?"
"Oh, no- Klittichom's been getting very good at using the
maelstrom effect of the practice Changewinds his princess has
been calling up all over the place. In between the outplanes,
dead center in the storm, it's a calm, almost a sort of vacuum
cleaner effect. She's been quite good at putting it where he
wanted it and he's been very neatly scooping up what he
needed and dropping it down to him here. The effect is hard
to explain, but you have at least experienced it. It's what he
used to pick you up. You remember dropping through the
maelstrom to Akahlar. It's a natural phenomenon of the wind,
which has picked up and dropped a ton of stuff on Akahlar
and the colonies and the lower outplanes over the millennia,
including probably the first Akhbreeds. There's some evi-
dence that nothing is actually native to Akahlar; this is, as I
once told you, the ass end of the universe. Among the things
he's picked up, other than people, are heavy weapons and
ammunition and, among other things, a few thermonuclear
devices."
She was shocked. "You mean atom bombs?"
"They're primitive- They are hydrogen at least. And it
didn't take him long to figure out how to bypass the fail-safe
mechanisms and replace them with his own, either. He didn't
wind up down here with just the shirt on his back, you know.
Among the things that came with him because they were
caught in the same vortex was his portable computer and
much of his current notes and fancy mathematical programs.
That's what's made him a top dog so quickly. Once he
grasped the basic mathematics of magic here, he was able to
build and solve enormous equations with the thing, far beyond
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 229
the abilities of even the greatest mathematical minds here.
Once he had a little experience, he could work out how to do
Just about anything and knock over any big-shot sorcerer who
stood in his way. And, of course, he is a genius, one of ihe
rare true ones. Another Einstein, da Vinci, or Fermi at least."
"Smarter even than you?" she asked him, wondering about
his reaction.
"Oh, my, yes. Certainly. Although I am one of the few
minds capable of not only understanding but using and per-
haps refining his work. I, for example, never dreamed it was
possible to enter the Maelstrom through the weak point after
it had passed, but once I saw that he could, well, I figured out
the way. That relative intellectual position, alas, is why all of
this came to be. In a way, it's all my fault, although 1 have
days when 1 wonder if that is entirely true. Certainly some
basic defects in my character helped shape this crisis. You
see, I'm a very good wizard, my dear. I'm just not a very
good man."
And slowly, as the miles passed far beneath them, Charley
^ teamed what lay behind all this mess, and it was sadder still
^' for being so, well, petty.
%
^
re Lang had been a professor at Princeton at the time; a boy
genius—he'd had his Ph.D. and his voter's card at about the
same time, and had already accomplished a lot by the time he
first met the man who was to become his enemy.
Lang's interests lay in the far edge of theoretical physics;
the kind of pure intellectual activity in which men still sat in
small offices and thought deep thoughts and imagined the
unimaginable and then built mathematical and computer mod-
els to illustrate various principles that, in fact, probably had
no practical application ever, and in which only the mathe-
matics would ever indicate whether or not they were right, or
had wasted their whole lives on a falsehood.
He became particularly attracted to a relatively new field
called Chaos Science, which sought to really explain the
unexplainable. How could a random explosion of dense mat-
ter from the monoblock that created the universe form into
such a useful and beautiful pattern, with its own very com-
fortable natural laws and limitations? Why did the freezing of
230 Jack L. Chalker
water vapor form such complex and beautiful crystalline struc-
tures. and why were no two apparently exactly alike? Order,
often highly complex order, almost always resulted from the
most random events. There had to be a law, or a set of laws,
that explained it, at least to a degree.
Doctor Lang became a leading theoretician of the relatively
new science, and, as such, those also interested in it wanted
to study under him. Among them, and the best of them, was a
young Cambodian refugee born Kieu Lompong, who adopted
the Americanized first name of Roy, a combination he joked
he'd gotten by playing with numerologicat tables. He was
young, intense, brilliant, but with no social life and no out-
side interests and, most of all. Boolean noted, no sense of
humor at all.
Little wonder. As a child, he'd already been to hell, having
seen his parents slowly hacked to death in front of him while
black-clad revolutionary soldiers held him and made him
watch, then put into virtual slavery in the rice paddies where
he had to pretend to be a peasant and disguise his genius at all
costs, for the new rulers killed the whole intellectual class.
He had finally escaped, and his genius had been recognized
in the refugee camp, and he was made one of the exceptions
to be brought to the United States under foster care of distant
relatives who now lived there. His now unshackled brilliance
produced an even greater rise in academic achievement than
had Lang's; he was, under Lang, a Ph.D. candidate at the age
of seventeen.
Under Lang's tutelage, and with access to the big univer-
sity computers, Roy Lompong, in just a few short months,
was able to come out with something that apparently had been
percolating in his head for years: a unifying mathematical
principle, a single equation, in its own area as significant as
Einstein's in his, that unified and revolutionized the whole
chaos science community. The thing was, he was in such a
pure intellectual area that he didn't realize what kind of a
breakthrough he'd made. To him, it was Just a tool to use in
studying specific phenomena. It was a whole new mathemat-
ics that made work in the field really amount to something in
much the same way as Newton had invented calculus just so
he could do the mathematical proofs of the theories he was
interested in. Instantly obvious to Lang, it nonetheless would
WAR OF TOE MAELSTROM 231
never have occurred to him. And yet, only the Princeton
team knew it
"He was so wrapped up in his projects on the creation of
the universe, already with the best minds in the field, and he
simply never got around to publishing it. He'd stopped read-
ing the literature anyway; it was all beneath him, in the same
way that Hemingway wouldn't bother to ever read Doctor
Seuss. But I was his advisor and the head of his doctoral
committee. And it was published, under my name, with Roy
and three others credited with assists, just a few months after
he got his degree and accepted a chair at Cal Tech. I doubt if
he was even aware of the furor the article caused—his head
was always in the clouds. In fact, I think it wasn't until three
years later, when I got the Nobel for it, that it really hit him