05. Children of Flux and Anchor (43 page)

He nodded. "Wasn't much problem finding the projectors. Those damned things can't move but two kilometers an hour and they make a noise so bad it even carries in the void a ways. We'd have grown old following them all the way up to that hideout, but fortunately there was a quicker way, as Sondra quickly figured." He looked over at the small figure sitting there staring worshipfully at him. "Isn't that right, Ming, honey? You told me all about it, didn't you?"

"Whatever you desire, my love, I will give to you," she replied dreamily.

"Stand up, take off all your clothes, and squat," he said amiably.

"Matson!"
Cass huffed, but he just shrugged sheepishly and watched Ming Tokiabi, last surviving member of the feared Seven Who Came Before, the little dragon of evil, strip naked and squat for the folks without even thinking about it.

"That's just fine, honey. Just sit back down and be quiet and relax now," he told her, and she did so. He turned to Cass. "Come on! It's what she planned for the others. Who knows how many folks got stuck this way in Anchor alone by her potions? Besides, I never had a pet before, let alone a master wizard."

Cass was not fully mollified. "I think we got her a good binding spell," she suggested. "She's still her old self; it's just that her priorities have all shifted to you. She's fully capable of weaving love spells on you, remember."

"Good point," he agreed. "I also want to make sure this shift stays permanent. I know
she
believes the drug's permanent, but I'm not going to take chances."

"Incredible," Morgaine commented. "She knows it's a drug making her feel and think this way, yet she doesn't fight it, expel it, or resist it in any way."

"She doesn't want to. She'll never want to. That's the point of giving it to wizards. Give it to a wizard while they're in Anchor, say, and they're yours forever. That sort of thing is one way the Seven got so powerful in the first place."

Sondra looked over at Cass. "I'm sorry I had to call you in to risk your life at the last moment," she said apologetically. "I just had an emergency on my hands and no other way clear to handle it in the time available."

"That's O.K. I don't enjoy killing people and God knows I have enough blood on my hands already, but
those
kind
need
killing. Otherwise they will kill and enslave many others who are innocent. She was so terribly confused it was almost funny. Like almost all wizards, she'd gotten so she relied on nothing else in Flux, particularly in a crisis situation. She kept using that power to search and search, and even when she caught a glimpse of me getting into position she checked it with her power and found nothing and believed that more than her eyes. Poor thing! I'm the only person in Flux totally immune to spells. Those computers looked hard, but they just couldn't see me."

"What about your clothes and gun, though?" Suzl asked her old friend. "Why don't they show up?"

"They're not Flux-made. Nothing I have on or with me is made from Flux. It's all Anchor manufacture. We were pretty careful about that ever since Matson got the idea that this sort of thing might come up."

Suzl shook her head and gave an electronic sigh. "Ayesha. In the end, it all came down to Ayesha after all. In one way, Sondra, I'm glad you fooled me. Although I'd have been mad as shit if I'd found out, it means it actually
was
all done by women. That's something New Eden can
never
quite
live down. By the way—how'd you set up this rescue party, anyway?"

"It was easy. All the liberated Anchors still have their stringer offices. I worked it out in Logh Center. Got the equipment, sent messages to and from Matson and Freehold, all that. Jeff even came through disguised as a stringer. It had been a
long
time. By that time, you trusted me completely. Me—as I said, I just had this gut feeling about it all. I
knew
they'd try something—I just didn't know what. So I had Matson, Cass, some strong Guild wizards, and the like brought down close to the New Harmony belt, and had the whole Freehold gang standing by as well. Dad promised Dell right at the start he could be there at the end. He was one of the wizards that bitch shot down, but he's O.K. He got racked up pretty bad, but not so bad he couldn't heal himself."

"Your mom's over in Freehold sweating," Matson told Morgaine.

"How is she? All right?"

"Well, considering she's gonna spend the rest of her life as a stark-naked blue-eyed blond girl who can't even tell a lie, pretty damned good. Of course, she almost had a heart attack when she went riding into the void to meet Sondra and met me instead. Threw a fit, too, when she found out the plot, but considering how she'd sneaked off in there in the first place all on her own and almost screwed up the whole operation, she couldn't yell but so much."

Matson sighed. "Well, as far as we're concerned, that about wraps it up. Suzl's got her bevy of beauties enclosing New Eden, we'll finally close out that dagger of van Haas's creation and get its secrets—and keep them out of the hands of New Eden and other nasty parties in the process—and Sondra gets some glory for upholding the family tradition."

"Some!  I
conquered
New Eden! You went and lived there! And I blew hell out of Gabaye and turned Tokiabi single-handed!"

"Yeah, that's true," he agreed. "But it was my idea to put you in there in the first place."

She tossed a glass of water at him. Ming instantly threw a spell that suspended the water in midair and then sent it back to the glass.

"See?" he noted. "She's gonna be right handy!"

"And that leaves only Ayesha," Sondra noted. "What will you do to her?"

"I—need her. After all this, it's almost impossible to explain, but I do. I intend to move back home to Anchor Logh, as I said. Maybe sooner than I intended. The child is due—my child. I'm a creature of habit. I'll work out enough sign language to get by, and she'll otherwise have set duties and a set routine. I can write for anyone else, although not for her, of course. It's nice I won't need her eyes, but I'll still need her."

"But—she tried to kill us all! At the last minute she almost undid all our work!" Morgaine objected.

"I know. In a way, though, she's just as much a victim of things as I am, or old Logh. Ming prepared two injections—one for each of us. Ming got one. I have the other. I doubt if it would work on Ayesha in Flux, but I'm positive it will stick in Anchor. It may be an artificial love, but it's more than I ever had and about as much as I'm likely to get. We'll keep her confined here until she has the child. I don't trust any drug with a child in the womb. After that, we'll go in, and she'll get the injection. It smacks a little bit of New Eden, I know, but it's simple justice and it will work out best for both of us."

"I sometimes wonder," Sondra said, "if we really kicked down New Eden or just bought us some time. It's still a vast country and they will rebuild, perhaps meaner and nastier than before. Whole new generations will be taught about the 'tribulations' and how they'll reclaim the World someday."

"There'll always be a New Eden, Daughter." Matson told her. "If not the one we know, then something else. That's why the fight has to continue, and why the righteous always have to be on guard. It represents the worst in us, as do the Coydts and the Chuas. Once it was Cass's turn, then Suzl's and mine, and this time it was yours. We win against impossible odds simply because we can't afford to lose. We don't have the luxury of losing, like they do, only to come back later."

"Do you think, with all that stuff they'll pick up from the van Haas hideout, that they'll learn how to go again to the stars?" Cass asked, half musing. "I wonder if other human colonies still exist down the line? I wonder if they're any better, or worse, than us."

"I doubt we'll be trying that anytime soon," Matson replied. "We aren't fit company for the rest until we learn how to live with ourselves. Still, one day, it'll happen. They'll come here or we'll go there. I just hope that when it happens both sides will greet each other as long-lost brothers and sisters and not as enemies. Did the righteous win out there, or are they some new New Eden with some even-worse crazy system? To tell you the truth, I'm not anxious to find out. Still, if it comes, I wouldn't mind being there to know the answer."

16

SOUL RIDER'S SONG

Every once in a while, Spirit liked to get away to the void. The eerie space between everything else was an object of fear to most people, those without the power or those with not enough power to feel confident, but it was always her element. She thought it must be her stringer ancestry, although at the moment she really wasn't truly genetically linked to her father or her mother. In fact, with the Garden long destroyed and the Eves now New Humans, looking a variety of different ways and working for a number of different wizards in the fragmented New Harmony setup, she was quite possibly unique.

She had always been that way, and it was something that never really had disturbed her. Her own mother had been forced to give her to distant relatives to raise, and for the child's protection had also remade her into a totally different image. She hadn't even known who her parents were until she was in mortal danger, and Matson only learned of her existence after the damage had been done. She often wondered what kind of an upbringing she'd have had if Matson had known from the start. She would have lived with his first wife and their two kids and had Sondra as a real sister from the start. She would probably have wound up in the Guild, in fact, as Sondra had.

But she hadn't, and Coydt had cast such a spell on her it could not be broken for decades. She had been cursed to roam the world, naked and alone, unable to communicate with anyone or anything except for some signs and gestures, unable to stand being in an enclosure and not knowing how to use the simplest tool. Yet, during all those years, she had never really wanted for anything that seemed important to her. She could find hours of joy watching birds soar, feeling the rain on her skin, studying the intricacies of a leaf, or watching the crazy random dance of the particles in Flux flash and whirl. And when Suzl was a monstrous creature, she had been incapable of seeing anything there but the person trapped inside, the kindness and love that was evident.

Most people lost their ability to see things like that. Almost all. She had lost it, too, when suddenly wrenched back into the world and put to work as a computer interface in the invasion. The Soul Riders had been clever, and the Guardians, too. They didn't want people to direct them; they wanted people ignorant enough to let them do what they wanted. Yet all their big weapons and battle defenses had really failed, in the end. It had been a big man in black with a bunch of cigars who couldn't tell a spell from a recipe who'd told them how to win it.

Nor could she know how, when it ended, she was to suddenly become a responsible adult, and a mother at that. She suddenly had a huge family, but they were all pretty much strangers. Her mother and she had gotten to be friends, but it was not a mother-daughter relationship. How could it have been? And Matson—well, he insisted on being Dad, and he'd been the one who'd come after Coydt because of the damage the man had done to a daughter he'd never known, but it was hard to get really close to Matson. Sondra was the only one who ever could get close, and that was because she'd grown up with him and idolized him and emulated him—in the end. to an extreme.

But she'd had Morgaine, with no idea how to be a mother, only the conviction that, no matter what, she wouldn't abandon her baby for any reason as Cass had abandoned her. She'd seen Morgaine as the last of the Hallers and heir to the legacy, which she was, but the real problem was that she saw Morgaine as replacing Mervyn. She'd never asked Mervyn whether he was happy with his role, or if he would have chosen it again. He was the closest thing to a father figure she'd had. So Morgaine had been raised and taught and trained with much of what was really human repressed.

Morgaine
did
have her father's power, and his aptitude for spells and research, but she wasn't Mervyn. She had only her mother, and she'd become a repressed mannish hulk to keep her mother happy.

But Spirit hadn't been happy. She loved Morgaine, because Morgaine was all she really had, but she held onto her child, suffocating her. That insane New Harmony spell had been a liberating thing for the young wizard; she had been at last freed to be her own self, to let herself go, and if her mother was shocked, well, it was the spell, you know.

It had taken the Garden spell to bring Spirit back around. She'd gone back to the Garden not merely as a spy, but mostly, she realized now, because she knew she'd lost Morgaine and she had nothing else. She had been very, very stupid. She hadn't lost Morgaine: she'd found her, and herself as well. She just hadn't been mature enough to realize it. She had forgotten what it was like to wonder, and imagine, and see only the insides of people.

Neither she nor Morgaine were children anymore, but both had discovered, or in her case rediscovered, a bit of the basics. Well, now, here she was again, stark-naked in the void, although this time on a horse at least, and able to communicate. She couldn't lie, cheat, steal, or kill, but she didn't miss those abilities. She had been cramped by the discovery that if she found somebody attractive and then discovered they were either married or in a long-term relationship with someone else they immediately became asexual to her. Worse, she had to ask. She owned nothing; what she had owned she'd given away, and even the horse and blanket were borrowed. What little she needed she could make from Flux.

Morgaine had settled in and was, if anything, more powerful and more productive than ever, even with three kids all of whom, regardless of the fathers, seemed to be genetically identical to herself and to each other. They would not, however, have binding spells as they gained power. They would have choices.