Operation Chaos

by Poul Anderson

  "Could and did." I ground out the cigaret, wishing it were Maledicto's face. "How else could it lay a spell on you?"

  "And you?Steve?Steve, I love you. Nobody else but you."

  "Well, you better rev up the carpet," I sighed. "Fly to, oh, I imagine Guaymas is the nearest town big enough to have an exorcist on the police force. Report this and ask for protection. Because if I remember my demonology, it can follow you anywhere, once you've come under its influence."

  "But nothing happened!" She cried that as if I were striking her: which, in a sense, I was.

  "No, there wasn't time. Then. And, of course, you'd have been able to bounce any demon off with a purely secular spell, if you'd possessed your witch-powers. But those are gone. Until you relearn them, you'll need an exorcist guard, every hour of the day you aren't in a church. Unless-" I rose too.

  "What?" She caught me with cold frantic hands. I shook her off, blinded by the double hurt to my manhood, that Maledicto had whipped me in fight and almost seduced my bride. "Steve, what are you thinking?"

  "Why, that I might get rid of him myself."

  "You can't! You're no warlock, and he's a demon!"

  "I'm a werewolf. It may be a fair match." I shuffled into the bathroom, where I began to dress my wounds. They were superficial, except for swollen knuckles. She tried to help, but I gestured her away from me.

  I knew I wasn't rational. Too much pain and fury filled me. I had some vague idea of going to the,, Fortaleza, whither Maledicto had presumably returned. In wolf-shape, I'd be as fast and strong as he. Of, course, I dare not bite . . . but if I could switch to human as occasion warranted, use the unarmed combat techniques I'd learned in the Army . . . The plan was as hopeless as any men ever coughed forth, but my own demon was driving me.

  Ginny sensed it: that much witchcraft remained to her, if it was not simply inborn. She was quite pale in the unmerciful glare of the saintelmo, she shivered and gulped, but after a while she nodded. "If you must. We'll go together."

  "No!" the roar burst from my gullet. "Be off to Guaymas, I said! Haven't I troubles enough? Let me alone till I can decide if I want you back!"

  Another instant she stared at me. May I never again see such eyes. Then she fled.

  I went out on the patio and became a wolf. The demon stench was thick on the air. I followed it over the mountainside.

  XVI

  THE EARTH WAS a dazzle of moonlight. My nose caught smells of dust, sage, cactus, kelp, and salt more remotely; my ears heard a bat's sonar squeak, the terrified stuttering of a jackrabbit; my pelt tingled with sensations for which men have no words. I felt my human torture no longer. The lupine brain could only hold clean, murderous carnivore thoughts. It was like being reborn. I understand that some psychiatrists have gotten good results by turning their patients temporarily into animals.

  Presently the old watchtower lifted its corroded outline across the moon. Every nerve abristle for attack, I entered what had been a gateway. The courtyard lay empty around me. Sand had blown in during, the centuries, weeds thrust between the flagstones, a shard of paving jutted here and there. Near the center, was a heap which had been a building. Cellars lay underneath. I'd explored them a trifle, once, not deeply enough to come on the lair of the incubus.

  I bayed my challenge.

  It rustled in the tower door. A white form step out. My heart made one leap, and I crouched back. I thought wildly, Could I slash his jugular on the first bite, it wouldn't matter if I swallowed that drug-blood, he would be dead . . .

  Laughter ran around me on soft little feet. She made another stride outward, so that she could stand under a cataract of moonlight, impossibly white against the black moldering walls. "Good even, fair youth," she said. "I had not hoped for this fortune."

  Her scent entered my lungs and my veins. I growled, and it turned into a whine. I wagged the stump of my tail. She came to me and scratched me behind the ears. I licked her arm; the taste was dizzying. Somewhere in a thunderful wilderness, I thought it was no use remaining lupine. The currents of change ran through me. I stood up a man.

  She was as tall and ripplesome as Amaris, and she had the same strange pointed face and eyes that fluoresced under the moon. But the pale hair fell past her waist in a cloud, and she wore a gown obviously woven by stingy spiders, on a figure that- Oh, well, I won't try to describe it. I suppose half the fun was simply in the way it moved.

  "Cybelita . . . I presume?" I managed to husk.

  "And thou art Steven." A slender hand fell upon mine and lingered. "Ah, welcome!"

  I wet my lips. "Er . . . is your brother at home?"

  She swayed closer. "What matters that?"

  "I . . . uh . . ." I thought crazily that one can't politely explain one's business with a lady's brother as being to kill him. And after all, well, anyhow- "Look here," I blurted. "You, he, you've got to leave us alone!"

  Cybelita smiled yieldingly. "Ah, thy grief is mine, Steven. And yet, canst thou not find it in thy heart to pity us? Knowest thou what damnation in truth consists of? To be a creature in whom the elements exist unblent-Fire of lust, Air of impulse, Water of wantonness, and the dark might of Earth to be of such a nature, yet doomed to sink like a rat in these ruins, and howl to empty skies, and hunger and hunger for three hundred years! If thou wert starving, and two folk passing by spread a feast, wouldst thou not take such few crumbs as they could well are?"

  I croaked something about the analogic fallacy.

  "Tis not malignancy," she pleaded. She drew close, her arms reached to my shoulders and her bosom nudged mine. " 'Tis need which forces us. And after all, Steven, ye mortals are not perfect either. Were ye saints with never an impure thought, no demon could venture near. We are drawn by that in ye which is akin to ourselves."

  "Uh, well, yes," I choked. "You have two points there . . . a point, I mean. Yes."

  Cybelita laughed anew. "But la, sweet youth! Here I stand in moonlight, embracing the most beautiful unclothed lad in this world?"

  "Oh, my God!" I remembered that my outfit was a pair of skivvies. Since she didn't shrink away, my exclamation must not have counted as a prayer.

  "?and discourse on metaphysic! Nays now thou'rt a-flush." Cybelita pirouetted from me. I'd not have the advantage of thee. That's not true friendship. Let us be alike in garb." She snapped her fingers and the gown vanished. Not that it made any big difference, except morally, and by then morals seemed irrelevant.

  "And now, come, come, my darling. My wolf, thou'rt my first loop-garou-had I suspected so new a wonder, no time would have been wasted on the woman. Come!" She threw herself against me. I don't know exactly what made me respond to her kiss. It was like being caught in a rose-colored cyclone.

  Somehow I found a last resting place in the fragments of my willpower. "No! I have a wife!"

  Cybelita laughed less pleasantly. "Ha! Where thinkest thou Amaris has been since the moment thou left the wench alone?"

  I made one garroted sound.

  "Tis happened now," she purred. "What's done can ne'er be undone. Blame not thy wife. She is but mortal. Shouldst thou be more?"

  I previewed Purgatory for about a minute. Then, hardly aware what was happening, I snatched Cybelita to me. My kisses broke her lips a little and I tasted the demon blood. "Come," she crooned, "my lover, my lover, bear me to the tower . . ."

  I picked her up and started across the courtyard.

  "Steve!"

  Ginny's scream was a knife driven through me.

  I dropped my burden. Cybelita landed on her lovely tokus and said a most unlovely word. I gaped at Ginny. She crouched on our Persian carpet, it hovered over the broken gateway, her red hair tumbled past her bare shoulders and I knew, in that moment when I had already lost her to Amaris (for it could nevermore be the same between us two), that she was all I would ever want.

  Cybelita rose. She looked bleached in the moonlight. I had no further desire for her. To hell with her.

  To hell itself with her.

>   She sneered toward Ginny, turned back and opened her arms to me. I said: "Defend yourself!" and became a wolf.

  Cybelita skipped back from my lunge. I heard Ginny cry out again, as if from another existence. My whole attention was on the succubus. Cybelita's body pulsed, grayed suddenly she was a wolf too. She grinned shamelessly at me and her femaleness hit me like a club.

  I didn't take the offer. I went for her throat. We rolled over and fought. She was tough, but hadn't been trained in combat lycanthropy. I know the judo breaks for my animal-shape, too. I got under her jaws and clamped my teeth where I wanted them.

  The demon blood was sweet and horrible to taste. But this time it couldn't rouse my wishes. The powers in me of Love, for my wife; and Hate, for the thing I fought, were too strong. Or, if you insist on outmoded terms, my glands were supplying enough testosterone and adrenalin to swamp whatever hormone was in that ichor.

  I killed her.

  In the last fragmented second, I heard-not with my ears-the shriek of the foul spirit within. I felt? not with my nerves?the space-time turbulence as it struggled to change the mathematical form of its Schrodinger function?thus fleeing to the Low Continuum where it belonged and leaving me with the exchange mass. But my fangs had been too quick and savage. The body perished and the soulless demon was no more.

  I lay by the wolf corpse, gasping. It writhed horribly through shapes of woman, man, horned and tailed satanoid. When its last cohesive forces were spent, it puffed away in gas.

  Piece by tattered piece, my wits returned. I lay across Ginny's dear lap. Moonlight poured cool over us, under friendly stars, down to a castle which was nothing but piled stones. Ginny laughed and wept and held me close.

  I became a man again and drew her to me. "It's okay, darling," I breathed. "Everything's okay. I finished her. I'll get Amaris next."

  "What?" Her wet face lifted from my breast to my lips. "Don't you n-n-n-know? You have!"

  "Huh?"

  "Yes. Some of my education c-c-came back to me . . . after you'd gone." She drew a shaking brew "Incubi and succubi are identical. They change sex as . . . as . . . indicated.... Amaris and that hussy were the same!"

  "You mean she didn't-he didn't you didn't-" I let out a yell which registered on seismographs in Baja California. And yet that noise was the most fervent prayer of thanks which Our Father had ever gotten from me.

  Not that I hadn't been prepared to forgive my dearest, having had experience of the demon's power. But learning that there wasn't anything which needed to be forgiven was like a mountain off my back.

  "Steve!" cried Ginny. "I love you too, but my ribs aren't made of iron!"

  I climbed to my feet. "It's done with," I whispered, incredulous. In a moment: "More than done with. We actually came out ahead of the game."

  "How's that?" she asked, still timid but with a sunrise in her eyes.

  "Well," I said, "I guess we've had a useful lesson in humility. Neither of us turns out to own a more decorous subconscious mind than the average person."

  An instant's chill possessed me. I thought: No average persons would have come as near falling as we did ... on the second night after their wedding! Nor would we ourselves. More than the resources of a petty demon was marshaled against us. More than chance brought us to its haunts. Something else wanted us destroyed.

  I believe, now, that that Force was still at hand, watching. It could not strike at us directly. No new agents of temptation were near, and we were fire-tempered against them anyway. It could not again use our latent suspicions and jealousies to turn us on each other; we were as purged of those as common mortals can be.

  But did it, in its time-abiding craftiness, withdraw the last evil influences from around and within us?did it free us of aches and weariness?and itself depart?

  I don't know. I do know that suddenly the night was splendor, and my love for Ginny rose in a wave that left no room in me for anything else, and when many days later I remembered that encounter on the sea cliff, it was as vague to me as the former ones and I dismissed it with the same casual half-joke: "Funny how a honk on the conk always gives me that particular hallucination."

  There in the courtyard, I looked upon her, drew her to me, and said-my throat so full of unshed tears that the words came hoarse- "In what counts, darling, I learned how you do care for me. You followed me here, not knowing what might be waiting, when I'd told you to run for safety . . .

  Her tousled head rubbed my shoulder. "I, learned likewise about you, Steve. It's a good feeling."

  We walked onto the carpet. "Home, James," I said. After a pause, when James was airborne: "Uh, I suppose you're dead tired."

  "Well, actually not. I'm too keyed up yet . . . no, by gosh, I'm too happy." She squeezed my hand. "But you, poor dear-"

  "I feel fine," I grinned. "We can sleep late tomorrow. "

  "Mister Matuchek! What are you thinking?"

  "The same as you, Mrs. Matuchek."

  I imagine she blushed in the moonlight. "So I see. Very good, sir."

  Which turned out to be a prophecy.

  XVIII

  AFTER WE RETURNED to our apartment we took summer jobs, quitting when classes reopened in fall. Like most newlyweds, we ran into budgetary difficulties: nothing too serious, but we had to sell the carpet, for instance, when Ginny got pregnant. Otherwise, that first couple of married years, we lived unspectacular lives, except when we were alone together.

  And then a nurse led me to the bed where my darling lay. Always fair-hued, she was white after her battle, and the beautiful bones stood sharply in her face. But her hair was fire across the pillow, and though the lids drooped on her eyes, that green had never shone brighter.

  I bent and kissed her, as gently as I could. "Hi, there," she whispered.

  "How are you?" was the foolish single thing that came to me to say.

  "Fine." She regarded me for a moment before, abruptly, she grinned. "But you look as if couvade might be a good idea."

  As a matter of fact, some obstetricians do put the father to bed when a child is being born. Our doctor followed majority opinion in claiming that I'd give my wife the maximum possible sympathetic help by just sweating it out in the waiting room. I'd studied the subject frantically enough, these past months, to become somewhat of an authority. A first birth for a tall slim girl like Ginny was bound to be difficult. She took the prospect with her usual coolness, unbending only to the extent of casting runes to foretell the sex of the child, and that only so we wouldn't be caught flat-footed for a name.

  "How do you like your daughter?" she asked me.

  "Gorgeous," I said.

  "Liar, she chuckled. "The man never lived who wasn't horrified when they told him he'd sired that wrinkled blob of red protoplasm." Her hand reached for mine. "But she will be lovely, Steve. She can't help being. It's so lovely between us."

  I told myself that I would not bawl right in front of the mothers in this room. The nurse saved me with a crisp: "I think we had better let your wife rest, Mr. Matuchek. And Dr. Ashman would like to finish things so he can go home."

  He was waiting for me in the naming office. When I had passed through the soundproof door, the nurse , sealed it behind me with wax and a davidstar. This t was an up-to-date hospital where they took every care. Thomas Ashman was a grizzled, craggy six-footer with =' a relaxed manner, at present a bit droopy from weariness. I saw that beneath the impressive zodiacal traceries on his surgical gown, he'd been wearing white duck pants and a tee shirt-besides his amulet, of .~ course.

  We shook hands. "Everything's good," he assured: me. "I've gotten the lab report. You understand that, with no therianthropes on the maternal side, none of your children will ever be a natural werewolf. But: since this one has inherited the complete recessive, gene complex from you, she'll take transformation spells quite easily. A definite advantage, especially if she goes in for a thaumaturgic career like her mother. It does mean, however, that certain things should be guarded against. She'll be more sub
ject to paranatural influences than most people are."

  I nodded. Ginny and I had certainly had an undue share of adventures we didn't want.

  "Marry her off right," Ashman joked, "and you'll have werewolf grandchildren."

  "If she takes after her old lady," I said, "Lord help any poor boy we tried to force on her!" I felt as idiotic as I sounded. "Look, Doctor, we're both tired. Let's make out the birth certificates and turn in."

  "Sure." He sat down at the desk. The parchments were already inscribed with parental names, place and date, and the file number they bore in common. "What're you calling her?"

  "Valeria."

  "Yes, I suppose your wife would pick something like that. Her idea, wasn't it? Any middle name?"

  "Uh . . . Mary. My decision-for my own mother-" I realized I was babbling again.

  "Good thought. She can take refuge in it if she doesn't like the fancy monicker. Though I suspect she will." He typed out the information, signed, gave me the document, and dropped the carbon in an out box. Rather more ceremoniously, he laid down the primary certificate that bore her fingerprints. "And the true name?"

  "Victrix."

  "Hm?"

  "Ginny always liked it. Valeria Victrix. The last Roman legion in Britain." The last that stood against Chaos, she had said in one of her rare wholly serious moments.

  Ashman shrugged. "Well, it isn't as if the kid's going to use it."

  "I hope she never has to!"

  "That'd imply a bad emergency," he agreed. "But don't fret. I see too many young husbands, shaken up by what they've undergone, be knocked for a loop at the grim possibilities they have to face now. Really, though, this is nothing more, than another sensible precaution, like a vaccination."

  "I know," I said. "Wish they'd had the idea when I was born." It isn't likely that anyone will try nymic tricks against an ordinary peaceful citizen, but you've seen how my career has gotten turbulent every once in a while, and maintaining the counterspells is a bloody nuisance-not always reliable, either. Medical science is one of the few areas where I'll admit that genuine progress gets made.