long after things had settled and developed for billions of
years.
The ironic thing was that those who became its masters had
come from worlds where the gods were created by the minds
of men, not the patterns of Chaos. Violent, fierce people
unregulated and untempered by anything above them. In them,
the elements to form the gods did not truly exist, although the
need for them did and took form in ancestral yearnings for
such beings. In their worlds, and perhaps only in their worlds,
the prototypes for the gods continued to be fashioned and
bom as the patterns dictated, but never to understand, never
to unite, never to form the whole that was required. And
there was a reason for this.
They were from the far outplanes, the last of Creation,
where the Changewinds weakened into shadows of them-
selves and their power was greatly diminished. Humankind
multiplied and occupied their Earths, further separating and
making unlikely that the elements, any of the elements, would
ever meet, unite, or comprehend what the patterns urged. For
it was always the female element who sought out and chose
her lovers, and the pattern had gone slightly awry; for the
woman always took their lovers from their complements, not
their opposites, rarely uniting with a male at all and even
rarer with the Changewind.
Yet there was a kind of stability imposed, as even apart the
separate elements maintained an automatic, unconscious regu-
lation, keeping the worst of the Winds at bay, and only when
they died or were removed before the patterns forced another
element to be bom, somewhere, in their world, did the Winds
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 339
have true free reign, producing the improbable elements that
might give the world an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon, or
a Hitler, or, conversely, a Buddha, a Jesus, or a Gandhi.
Only here, in Akahlar, where the magic was real and
accepted and taken for granted, had the line of the female
become institutionalized, mother choosing mate for all the
wrong reasons and bearing another and yet another version of
herself, and using the powers of the Winds while ignorant of
her own place or the meaning of things, believing themselves
goddesses while actually being but an element of the divine.
She looked down upon the ruins of Klittichom's fortress
and saw that there were in fact survivors down there, survi-
vors whom She recognized and identified. She reached out a
spectral hand to them and created for them an avenue and an
ice bridge to safety beyond. She was about to do more but
She felt a sharp and painful disturbance within Her, one She
did not fully comprehend, being above pain now, or so she
had thought. The survivors would get out; she would have to
come back to them later.
At the speed of light she was at its source, a great, horrible
explosion sending horrible thunder and searing fire outwards
over a vast radius, obliterating, even atomizing, much of
what its blast touched. She dampened it, pulled it upward,
kept it from doing further harm, but now there was a second,
and She knew what She was facing.
Too late on the first. She froze the second as it was
forming its mushroom shape, suspending it there, then went
methodically from hub to hub, pulling the power of the
Winds to render the other bombs useless junk. Only then did
She return to the first, and discover that there were in fact
limits to Her powers. Even this universe was vast, and She
was but the Goddess of Akahlar. She could not roll back
time, but She could undo much of its effects.
Frightened people, frightened armies, frozen in the vision
of that second bomb, were now unfrozen; the great, irregular
mushroom shape stopped billowing upwards and instead seemed
to them to solidify. On a shaky, bent foundation stem the
structure could not stand; it toppled over and fragmented as it
hit the ground over hundreds of square miles, burying me hub
and its defenders and attackers knee-deep in chunks of true
mushroom.
340 Jack L. Chalker
For the first hub there was less hope; it was already a
blackened plane, with the bare charred remnants of what had
once been a great kingdom and great seat of empire. There
she could do some things; within limits even raise the dead,
as tittle was truly impossible now, but she could not spin it
back, could not take that explosion back, and far too much of
it had gone. Better now to simply contain the damage and
limit its effects to what had already occurred, spinning the
dust and radiation outward into the netherhells between the
outplanes where they would hardly be noticed. Let this bumed,
dead hub become then a place of pilgrimage, a grim reminder
to the millions who survived through the bravery of a few as
to what great power can really do, and what price might be
paid for turning one's back on evil.
For they could have stopped this; the high and mighty
Akhbreed sorcerers in their towers and in their lairs, but they
had chosen to believe what they wanted to believe and to
compromise with evil, succumb to evil, or turn their eyes,
ears, and brains away from it, and ignore it until it was too
late. They had shown how weak and fallible their power was,
how they misunderstood the fullness of their charge to protect
their people. They had let their sense of power replace their
common sense, and so had failed both their people and
themselves, and now they sat smug and fat in their castles,
congratulating themselves that all was now well and that
someone had done for them at great sacrifice what just a few
of them could have done with no sacrifice required at all.
She reached down to them, as they sat in their towers as
before, ignorant of just what horrors they and their people had
been spared, and touched them with the breeze they could not
control, the one power to which they were subject. The office
of Chief Sorcerer was herein abolished; now they were re-
vealed by their loss of power as just the pitiful old men and
women, frail and scared and very ordinary, as they always
were, but now stripped of their cloaks of invincibility and
forced to appear with their minute souls bared to their people.
The shield came down. There would never again be shields
to keep subject populations separate and in check, coordi-
nated by the masters of the hubs. She knew that this would
cause much death and suffering, that the wars would now
rage for a while, and that the Akhbreed and the most militant
341
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM
of the colonials would be a long time finding a peace, but
they would be forced eventually to an accommodation, for
they needed each other, and the vast majority of colonial
races understood that as well. If the Akhbreed would let
them, some of those races would fight at its side in the
defense of a broader, freer organization, less kingdom than
interdependent commonwealth. The Akhbreed who refused
alliance would die, or be overthrown by those who saw
survival and the future as overwhelming prejudice.
She cried for those who would die and those who would
never leam, and most of all for the innocents caught between,
but this was the sort of hard decision that her other half
could make and the only long-term solution. She would be
able to help, to guide them, to perhaps minimize the appalling
losses, but the War of the Maelstrom might take a generation
to sort out the world of Akahlar.
When She had time to leam all Her powers and Her limits,
to study what could be done and how best to do it, some
provision might be made for the innocents. Nor was She still
naive enough to believe that the system She envisioned for
Akahlar would evolve on its own. Something would have to
be done to give them a guide, a nudge in the right direction.
Prophets and teachers might be quite useful to develop here,
and perhaps a book to guide them and give them the plan.
For a moment, She wondered if this was the way it always
worked out, that others suddenly thrust into Her position had
not done much the same.
But there had to be one place of safety, one point of
shining sanity upon Akahlar, if only as an example. A holy
city within a centralized hub, perhaps, to train those not only
of the Akhbreed but also of the natives to cany the message
and the plan, safe from wars and revolutions and barbarism,
so that no matter how ugly things got there was one source
for putting it right.
Masaiur! Astride the equator, near the center of the great-
est kingdoms. Masalur, who had known both the horrors of
war and subjugation and the wrench of the winds; who had an
almost unique core population that remained intact, a bridge
between the opposites, between the changelings and the whole,
between the rebels and the Akhbreed, between the male and
the female, and whose old government had allowed, however
342 Jack L. Chalker
reluctantly, the experiments with native self-government and
self-sufficiency and whose colonial populations as a result
had, in the main, eschewed the fight and caused Klittichom to
have to import dissident armies to help.
Its magically charged hub, with its swampy core and its
large and strange population, surrounded by a ring of Akhbreed,
would be a holy place. In this hub, the weapons would not
work, the spells would not hold, and judgments might be
rendered directly by Her until such time as a new form of
government could evolve, a multiracial government, to teach
and give example to the world.
This kind of responsibility had been the sort that Her
feminine half had been fearful of and had not wanted; that her
male half had wanted above all else but with no clear direc-
tion as to what he wanted that power for. Now he would
provide the drive, the joy of power, and she, through whom it
must be filtered and accommodation reached, would tempo-
rize and shape and guide it. Together, the three in one, the
male, the female, and the Wind, might well make something
worthwhile, something great. And if She could not banish the
horrors of the world and the darkest parts of the human soul,
then at least She might provide justice.
Lonely figures, like tiny dots against a sea of white, crawl-
ing, clawing their way forward, yet freezing, without a place
to go. . . .
Other creatures, strange and hideous yet impervious to the
cold, clawing around the edges of what remained of Klittichom's
redoubt.
Two in particular drew Her interest; the others could claw
and mew and stalk each other through eternity on that ice for
all she cared, and dream only of what might have been.
She reached psychic fingers down to them, to the two
strange figures back on the ice and to the tiny dots fighting
their losing battle against the elements, knowing, at least,
what to do with them. But she held them suspended, for a
brief moment, in the netherworld between the ticks of the
clock. She had something else to do first, one last obligation,
one last, personal bit of housekeeping, before She withdrew
to oversee her grand design, knowing that in the times to
come She could no longer afford such personal attachments,
that the greater good would come first.
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM
343
There was a sound, like the gentle tinkling of bells in the
breeze, that woke Charley up. She sat up in the bed, frown-
ing, for it was quite dark and the snores around told her that
she alone had heard what it was and come awake.
For a moment she thought it was just the child, now
perhaps only days from being bom—and that would be a
relief She hadn't slept too well these past couple of weeks as
it was because of that.
Something formed in front of her bed, out of the darkness;
a shimmering mass, and two strange figures, semi-transparent,
superimposed over a seething mass of clouds formed there.
The vision made no intellectual sense; the smaller figure
superimposed on the larger seemed paradoxically to be the
greater. A small, yet increasingly familiar feminine form,
atop a larger, more imposing, father figure.
"We had to come back, for just this once," the female
figure said.
She frowned, unsure whether she was dreaming this or
what. The others apparently heard nothing and slept on.
"Sam?" she said, hesitantly, "Is that you?"
"It is and it isn't," the figure replied. "Once I was Sam,
and he was Boolean, but it is becoming harder and harder
with each passing moment to tell one from the other. Our
time is short, and full integration of my three parts proceeds
at a pace even I can barely comprehend, so this is the last
time this will be possible."
"Sam—what happened to you? Up there . . . ?"
"I can't explain. The results will be apparent to you all in
the days and years to come. Let it suffice that Klittichom is
dead, and while there may well be others like him in the ages
to come, none wilt ever again pose the kind of threat he did.
The others will be returned here shortly; they can give you as
much as any person can about what happened. This last visit
is for me alone, for the sake of what has gone before."
There was a sudden blurring of the images, and me figure
struggled to come back and retain full focus and form.
"The time is shorter than I thought," the Sam figure told
her. "We must go."
"Go? Go where? Sam—where are you? What happened to
344 Jack L. Chalker
you? Will I see you again?" And where'a you get that
vocabulary?
"I can't explain and it makes no difference anyway. You
were always bright; you will be able to figure out a tittle of it-
The rest you will simply not believe. It doesn't matter. Only
false gods are dependent upon belief. That's none of your
concern. I came here just to see you this last time, and to tell
you a few things about your own self.''
"What? What's this all about, Sam?"
"The child is no longer a Storm Princess, just a beautiful
little baby girl who will need love. The position of Storm
Princess has been abolished. It is redundant. Love her, Char-
ley. Think of her as your own."
"Uh—yeah, okay, Sam. But. ..."
"You have a lot of potential, Charley, that you either
threw away or had thrown away. You have a second chance
now. Tell me, would you rather go home, now? Have the