They set up a camp back out of the weather in an old lava tube. The outside was freezing and nasty, but heat radiated from the walls within the tube, creating a frozen waterfall where it broke to the outside and some level of comfort within.
Crim surveyed the tube. "Comfortable, but I feel very vulnerable in here," he commented. "If anybody discovers we're here, they could just magically turn the lava back on, or even give us a wall of water, and we'd be through."
"That kind of magic is always telegraphed," Yobi assured him. "We have enough to prevent that sort of thing, so relax. More important is the two of you and whether you can really handle those flying saddles without one or another of us propping you up. You'll have to go in low and be very unobtrusive."
"Will he not see the spell that makes the saddles fly?" Boday asked her worriedly.
"Probably not. It's too minor a spell and there are probably thousands around a place like that. It would be drowned out by the weight of all those already laid on, much as a whisper is drowned by the roar of a crowd. Take care, though. If any of the sentinels that are almost certain to be guarding the place spot you, then all bets are off."
Crim looked a bit nervous. "You sure we can do this and be back before sunset? I don't want Kira to come out under these conditions."
"I fear we will be deprived of poor Kira's company, but for perhaps an hour or so, if that," Boolean told him. "It is late spring here and we're close to the Arctic Circle if not slightly past it. If we are, we won't meet her at all, for this time of year the sun does not set there. Were we in the Antarctic, we wouldn't see you. Cheer up, my friends. We may be in the jaws of death, but at least for now we are absolutely safe from vampires."
Crim and Boday did a bit of practice flying around the peaks and valleys near the cave and both decided that they were pretty confident.
"It'll take you about a half hour to get there," Boolean told them, "and spend only as much time as you absolutely need to get the feel of the place, its tangible defenses, looks, and the like. If you are not back here within three hours we will have to assume that you were seen, possibly captured, and we will go immediately. Understand? Boday. I'll expect you to be able to sketch it when we get back, with Crim's memory as a check. Temporarily, you'll have to be a realist. Accuracy counts. The odds are, when we go in, we'll only get the one shot. Either we go all the way, or that's it."
She shrugged. "Boday is great at all art. She will do what you wish and better that you dream!"
Sam hugged her. "Take care, now. If we're all gonna die in this, don't you be the first."
Boday laughed. "The Gods of Chaos have woven our destinies too tightly! Boday has suffered too much to die now before she achieves immortality through the works she has yet 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 expendability, 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 shivering like you had a fever even in this relative comfort and 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, generalized, or as specific as the simplest and most direct spell. The power to right wrongs, change minds, mold and shape civilizations, 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 nether-hells," Boolean commented dryly.
"Figures. We been talking with people like you for thousands of years and nobody really heard anything from us they didn't want to hear," the familiar retorted.
"I suppose that demons and imps and the like could do better at it, having all that wisdom and a superior civilization," Yobi said sarcastically.
"Of course not. Why do you think they call it the nether-hells. 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 own 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. I 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 everywhere 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 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 th
an ones born 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 out-planes 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 companionship, 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 people 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 Horned 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 that without the genius to figure out all the angles to using it… well, you'd just be some kind of corrupted power monger, 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, 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 Sundogs, 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 windblown 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, like 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 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 physically identical. Maybe you only have to be physically identical 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 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 work. It worked most of the time but not all the time, particularly when you got way out, where the rest of the humans were. Suppose all the things needed to make a god just never got together, or never got together right there? So they just kept floatin' around, never comin' together….
My god! All the holy wars and all the church singin' and all the Hallelujahs and monks and missionaries….
All for different gods created out of need or out of some visions from other universes or maybe out of folks' minds 'cause they knew they ought'a have at least one. All for nothing? And her mom joining that real fundamentalist sect and even gettin' divorced from Daddy 'cause he thought they was phonies and all that. All for nothing? And her science teacher was right that there was no god, just natural laws, but he was wrong, too. Most people had gods, but we don't!
It was such an emotionally unnerving concept that she said nothing about it, didn't even want to bring it up to the others. Maybe it wasn't true exactly. But, somehow, deep down, she thought it had to be at least part of the answer. And old Klittichom had figured it, and he'd spent all that time getting together all the things needed to make a god of the Akhbreed, and that was what he was planning to do….
Damn! What sacrilege! What a horrible, horrible thing to even think. But she couldn't stop thinking it, even though it made her feel sick and empty inside. Did all Akhbreed lack one, or just some? Oh, jeez….
She just couldn't be right. Even if she somehow pushed her own emotions and beliefs aside for the sake of argument, she knew she had to be wrong. I mean, these people here like Boolean Professor Longare all big brains who been studyin' this their whole lives. I never even got to graduate from high school with my C average and I didn't have the brains for college, anyways. This is crazy thinkin', me pretendin' I got more brains than I got, that's all.
She wouldn't say nothing to the others; no use in getting laughed at.
Crim and Boday were back in a little over two hours, looking frozen to death. The sorcerers risked a bit of magic to warm them and soothe frostbitten areas, and they were soon able to talk about what they had seen and what they had not—
Changewinds 03 - War of the Maelstrom Page 35
