to create! Come, big man! Let us see this fortress of evil!"
Sam watched them go, feeling nervous for both of them
and also for what would come after. She felt guilty realizing
that, of all the people here, there was a hierarchy of expend-
ability, and she was the only one absolutely sacred.
Now they could only sit in the volcanic warmth, munch on
a few cookies and some strong drink brought along for this,
and wait. There was something strangely ridiculous about
huddling fur-clad in a cave with these three master sorcerers,
who could restore a town overnight, heal the most, gravely
wounded, make saddles fly, and do all sorts of miracles, all
of whom were also huddling here in furs and looking as
miserable as she felt.
"It's the fat, dear," Etanalon said to her.
"Huh?"
"You feel colder than you ever have. I can see you shiver-
ing like you had a fever even in this relative comfort and
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 301
warmth. You probably know that most people who are native
to cold areas have yellow skins. The yellow is a layer of fat,
even on the thin ones, that provides extra insulation, but fat is
a premium to them. You have fleshed out a bit on the journey
here, but you still eat like a bird because your friend starved
that body and shrunk that stomach to the size of a walnut.
One wonders about young girls' sense of proportion when
they will starve themselves rather than dare be pleasantly and
comfortably plump. In hard times, the fat women survived to
have babies, the thin ones died out. In many societies a bit of
plumpness is considered sexy, but, these days, everyone seems
to want to be a skeleton. I believe that if I were a goddess, I'd
make a new standard for beauty."
Yobi gave one of her cackles. "Imagine you or any of us
as gods and goddesses' I suppose I do somewhat resemble
some of those monstrous idols some societies worship, but
I'm afraid I'd die laughing at prayers to statues of me."
"Admit it. You're here because you think our friend out
there has found the key," Boolean noted, pointed a finger at
her. "For ten thousand years at least sorcerers have tried for
that state, and failed, mostly miserably. The lucky ones died.
Godhood. The ability to summon and direct the forms of
order out of what Chaos sends. Not random, like the
Changewinds, but deliberate. Yet, like the winds, general-
ized, or as specific as the simplest and most direct spell. The
power to right wrongs, change minds, mold and shape civili-
zations, create."
"And destroy," Cromil commented, peeking out from a
fold of Boolean's coat. "You're talking about a man—or
woman—having the power of a god. There's more to being a
god than that. You're afraid Klittichom's going to get the
power- Big deal. Would you really be any better at it—any of
you—or just different? Power doesn't confer wisdom, nor
make you omnipotent. It just makes an ordinary person with
an extraordinary love of power able to exercise it, with all his
or her hang-ups and problems."
"The voice of wisdom from the netherhells," Boolean
commented dryly.
"Figures. We been talking with people like you for thou-
sands of years and nobody really heard anything from us they
didn't want to hear," the familiar retorted.
302
Jack L. Chalker
"I suppose that demons and imps and the like could do
better at it, having all that wisdom and a superior civiliza-
tion," Yobi said sarcastically.
"Of course not. Why do you think they call it the netherhells.
anyway, and why's everybody around here always cursing
somebody to go to Hell? You know what Hell is? It's boring.
that's what it is. Deadly dull. That's why we have to come up
here to have any fun."
Sam shivered and looked around the cave. "Yeah, ain't we
got fun."
"Like, who says this guy would ever be the first one to
reach First Rank, anyway?" the familiar went on, ignoring
the commentary. "All those universes, all those worlds, and
they all got all those gods. Old men in the sky, creatures with
wings, creatures that demand sacrifices and have like eight
arms, fish gods, horse gods, you name it. Jealous gods,
philandering gods, gods who curse men for not being cruel
enough in war in their names—who are looked upon as
ending war and bringing heaven to earth anyway? We've had
ow fill of gods up here. That's why demons are never on
God's side. All the gods are jerks, that's why. So what's one
more jerk in the cosmos?"
Boolean looked down at him, frowning. "I wish I knew
when you were being cynical and making trouble and when
you were telling the truth."
"I think it would be too damn complicated to be a god,"
Sam commented. "Even if you were pure of motive and the
power didn't corrupt you, which it almost surely would. 1
mean, every time I think about somethin' I really would want
to change—hate, envy, greed, jealousy, hunger, war—I can't
figure out how to do it, unless we make everybody every-
where like, well, the Changewind did to Masalur. They're all
absolutely identical, not even sex to cause trouble, in a place
you described to me as a swamp that seemed pretty much the
same. If it's warm all the time and everybody looks the same
there's no need for clothes, or fashion. If they make their own
food inside, somehow, and maybe only need to drink water or
something, then there's no hunger. Probably no government,
neither, since when everybody was the same who would
follow somebody when you couldn't even tell who was who?''
"I have a feeling that Masalurian society is going to be
303
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM
more complicated than you think," Boolean noted, "although,
I must admit, it'll probably complicate itself because their
minds didn't change and they already think differently than
ones bom and raised like that. Still, the one thing that's not
identical is their brains. Their I.Q.s and their aptitudes will be
different. In all the colonies and in all the parallel worlds of
the outplanes not corrupted by the Akhbreed, we find more
cultural similarities than physical ones. Geography, resources,
needs of all kind shape competition which heads to the rest,
and having only one sex doesn't solve that problem if it still
takes two to make a baby. The human need for companion-
ship, closeness, seems overpowering even without the baby
thing. Otherwise homosexuals would never feel jealousy. No,
I'm afraid you're right. The only way to cure the ills of the
human condition, even with godlike powers, is to make peo-
ple inhuman, either machinelike or perhaps incorporeal beings
like the demons and imps, who are so bored they come up
here for their entertainment and often meddle just to cause
trouble and see what results. Still. ..."
"Still, you'd like to have the power and find out," Cromil
finished smugly. "Only if you can't have it, you sure don't
want the good old Homed One to have it, because his vision
of insanity is different than your vision of insanity."
"Enough, imp! You can be sent back home for a very long
time!" Yobi snapped.
Boolean looked over at Sam. "Wouldn't you really take a
crack at it, if you could, though? Be honest."
"Only if I had to," she sighed. "Honestly—power like
mat without the genius to figure out all the angles to using it
. . . well, you'd just be some kind of corrupted power mon-
ger, or you'd be real careful how or if you used it, 'cause you
might not figure all the angles. I think I'm more scared of
what it would do to me, or what I might do to lots of others,
to want it. I got more sense than that."
Boolean shifted uncomfortably in his furs. "I know I'd
always be warm," he muttered. "Still, the puzzle drives me
nuts. I've always been able to do anything Roy has, to
understand or come up with anything he has, after he's
worked it out and told me it's possible. The elements are all
there, like pieces in a puzzle, but they all don't fit. Okay, we
need a Storm Princess because she's immune to the Changewind,
304 Jack L. Chalker
and we need a sorcerer because the Storm Princess's abilities
are natural and couldn't cope with the massive variables
involved in actually shaping reality. And we need power—lots
of power. Lots of Changewinds, not just to knock out or
nullify the other Second Rankers but to feed—what? Storm
Princesses are some kind of power regulators just by their
very existence, temporizers of the Changewinds, safety factors
on each world. But why in hell are they all lesbians? What
can the sex preference have to do with it all? It's insane. Yet
you take that sexual preference thing, the least of it all, and
the magic goes away. Why?"
Not even the one with all the attributes had the answer.
Still, Sam had to wonder. Her? Little Sam Buell? Somehow
protecting her world from the major effects of the Changewinds
depended on her just being alive, living there someplace?
Made no sense at all. And whatever it was, it came natural,
like breathing. It wasn't something you thought about or even
necessarily knew you had.
She had a sudden thought. Wail a minute—this Storm
Princess, the one just over there, wasn't an unconscious
regulator. She had been, but not now. She drew that
Changewind right into downtown Masalur hub! She made it
march round and round until it covered maybe two thirds of
the hub. That's what this was all about, wasn't it? Somebody
who could control the Changewind. deliberate like, not like
breathing.
Like she had done. She'd already done it with regular
storms. She'd banished the Sudogs, called lightning down to
fry a gunman, summoned a great storm in the Kudaan, and
then, in Covanti, she'd stood her ground and actually deflected
a Changewind! She could control the storm like any other,
and was immune from its effects other than getting wind-
blown and wet. But she couldn't speak to the Maelstrom,
which was still just a great storm and not something with
thought and deliberateness. Its effects were random, iike any
storm's; the order that formed from it, bizarre as it might look,
held together, made sense, thanks to those laws Boolean
talked about. The ones concerning how the universes formed
out of one big bang and how snowflakes are so pretty and
intricate. A god could somehow talk to those forces, shape
those laws, so they formed or did what he or she wanted. It
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM
305
would be like giving a mind, a brain, to a Changewind
maelstrom.
All these sorcerers spent half their time doing miracles,
making magic, and none of them believed in magic. It was all
natural laws and math and all that. The whole idea that one
girl in each world was born with these powers and did this
regulation bit. identical girls, they explained simply by noting
that regulatory mechanisms always developed in nature, and
that the results of the laws of chaos didn't necessarily make
sense, they just accomplished what they had to.
"Boolean?" she prompted, and he looked over and raised
his eyebrows. "Who are the Storm Princesses in the world
that aren't human. Akhbreed types, or whatever you want to
call people like you and me? How can there be somebody like
me in worlds where people breathe water or have horns and
tails and all that? Who are their regulators?"
"Huh? They don't have them. Or, if there was a common
ancestor or thread to the Storm Princess mold, they've been
able to mutate or change somehow. That's always been a
mystery, of course. Maybe you don't really have to be physi-
cally identical. Maybe you only have to be physically identi-
cal within the same racial stock. None of the Akhbreed are
native to here, after all. They dropped down in the more
violent maelstroms of the prehistoric past from up around our
area. The others, too, must have regulators of some kind. I
suppose—unless there are other factors so that they don't
need them and we do. Who knows? One can only study the
system that chaos sticks us with, we can't read any master
plan into it. I know of a few attempts in the ancient literature
to find what regulates the others, but they never came to
anything. Still, it's another part of the puzzle, isn't it?"
It was—but not as lightly dismissed as he made it seem. Of
course, who was she to think on this, when big brains like
him couldn't figure it? Still and all, she doubted that those
other universes had Storm Princesses, at least not on Earth.
Maybe someplace else in each big universe humans like them
appeared and with them a Storm Princess. Maybe so. Or
maybe all those other Earths had something that only the
humans lacked.
The little demon said there were lots of gods. Did he mean
it? And, if so, which kind was he talking about? The kind of
306 Jack L. Chalker
God she was dragged to church for, or the kind the ancients
worshiped that looked like a big Buddha with horns, or what?
Or did he see any difference between the worlds of humanity
and those who were something else? What if Cromil was
telling the truth? What if there really were gods? If those
universes had gods. then they wouldn't need Storm Princesses
for protection and regulation and all that, right? They'd go
from the whims of chance to the control and will of their god.
Fifty million monkeys pounding on typewriters would, given
an unlimited amount of time, write the works of Shakespeare.
Her science teacher back in tenth grade had used that as an
example on why the Earth was how it was. The universe was
so big, it just happened, that's all. Boolean's chaos shit in a
nutshell, only her old science teacher hadn't dreamed how big
a place it really was.
So fifty million monkeys, given enough time, would write
Shakespeare. So the universes, given enough time, would—
develop gods?
This was getting too heavy for her and she didn't like
where it was going, but she couldn't really stop. She didn't
have much education, much understanding of things, but
maybe all these folks had too much. Suppose, just suppose,
in each universe, the system said there'd be a god, or many
gods—who knew?—to regulate, to control the Changewinds,
to stabilize things like they were never stable in Akahlar. But
suppose, just suppose, that whatever made gods didn't always