Charon: A Dragon at the Gate

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Drink all you can,” Dr. Yissim instructed us. “It’s basically water, which you need badly, with some additives. Drink it all it you can.”

  There was absolutely no problem in drinking it all. I seemed to have a bottomless reservoir.

  “Master Kokul’s analysis of the two of you was sent on ahead,” she told us as we finished. “He’s quite thorough. Now, you’ll both start to feel a little sleepy, lethargic, and relaxed. Don’t fight it. This is going to be a tricky series. If we don’t get this exactly right from the start we could merely accelerate the process, and we don’t want that. I realize you’re both starved, but I want empty stomachs for now.” With that, she turned and walked out of the room.

  Darva looked over at me, already seeming a bit sleepy.

  “She’s the coldest person I’ve ever met We might as well be two lumps of mud.” ,

  I nodded. “I’ve met a lot like that. Don’t let it worry you. Her type almost always know what they’re doing. Let’s just help it, get into the relaxation mode, and let them do their job.”

  Using some of the concentration and relaxation exercises Tully had taught us, we needed very little time to reach a state of quasi-sleep. We were aware of what was going on, but floating in a cloud of peace and comfort, we just didn’t give a damn. In many ways it was like the state I’d been placed into before the old woman had made me a changeling.

  A wall flicked, and suddenly became transparent. I saw Yissim there, along with two men and three women, all sitting at a console of some sort. They looked at us then at the console; we could see only them.

  It began. It began without any of the gyrations or mumbo-jumbo everyone before had always used. You could see it, sense it, feel it, as a tremendous concentration of Warden direction flowed out from those people behind the partition to us. It was blinding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and within seconds it was in control of my mind. I found myself involuntarily resisting, and a minor fight ensued, made worse because, thanks to Tully, we knew the blocking techniques.

  Somehow’ I managed a slight turn so that I could see Darva, and despite my drugged state I nonetheless had a fascination for what I was seeing, a fascination that was neither shock nor horror nor anything else but just that—fascination. I found I didn’t really care. Darva’s body was undulating, going through rapid, fluid changes. I knew that my body was probably undergoing the same. Her torso was thickening up, her arms becoming shorter and smaller, and merging into her head, which was also changing, flowing liquidly out, taking a whole different shape.

  The Wardens in our bodies, aided by the animal foundations of our brains, were fighting the treatment, fighting it effectively by accelerating the change. We were turning into true bunhars—and worse, we were gaining mass in the head and torso as we did so, mass that would be very hard to remove. This then was the loaded gun of the changeling, the reason why it was next to impossible to change back. Reversion ,

  I was aware my vision was changing. It was becoming impossible to focus close in, although I could still see Darva clearly and she could see me. I could see, blurrily, that I had a snout and I realized that my eyes, like hers, must be set much farther apart. It was becoming more and more difficult, though, to think at all. My mind was dying; I knew it, yet, eerily, even as it was lost I experienced less and less a sense of any loss at all.

  Darva looked completely like a bunhar now, and she appeared very natural and normal to me. Only her eyes, set farther apart along that large, toothy snout, still retained a curious human appearance. I had only three awarenesses … I was hungry, yet sleepy, and there was a female over there …

  The next few days are all but impossible to remember or describe. Basically, we were kept in a large pen with an electrified barrier, and a pool of water; once a day, a large, freshly killed creature was brought somehow into the enclosure and Darva and I devoured it greedily. Eating was followed by a period of strained sleep, in which we were both in this funny place, then we’d wake up again in the pen. Both of us were bunhars, and we operated on the most basic animal level and on no other. We had absolutely no sense of time, place, or anything. We were barely self-aware.

  Slowly, though, we came out of it. Very, very slowly. Memory returned first, but it was uncoupled with conscious thought, and thus useless. Finally, we came out of one of the sleep sessions still in the strange room, and for the first time, I could think again.

  Yissim’s voice seemed to float in to us. “If you can understand me, stamp your right foot,” she instructed.

  I turned, looked at Darva, and saw that she was still very much a hundred percent bunhar. But she stamped her right foot-r—and so did I.

  “Very good,” the doctor approved. “Please do not try to talk to me or to each other. You don’t have the equipment at the moment, and all you’d produce would be a loud roar. It has been a tricky, delicate operation to say the least. In order literally to save your minds we had to let the process take its course with your conscious selves decoupled. Believe me, this was necessary—but radical. You are only the third and fourth individuals we’ve had to use this procedure on, and we’ve had one success and one failure. Hopefully we will have two more successes here.

  “Now,” she went on, “we’re going to try and bring you back, but it will be a slow, patient process. We have restored your minds, your basic humanity. Bit by bit we will restore the rest. We will be working with you, but you must do it yourselves. Our initial probe shows that we cannot impose the change on you. Were we to try a new series of spells, you would react in such a way as to literally alter your brain. Once your brain modified to the bunhar mode you would be bunhars and we could not restore memory, personality, or sentience. You must learn to control every Warden in your bodies. Every one. You must assume total control.”

  What proved most frustrating was that Darva and I could communicate neither with the doctors nor with each other since, I soon discovered, she was totally illiterate—a condition that simply had never occurred to me could happen.

  If the situation was bizarre to us, it must have been more so to the doctors. Imagine going in every day and giving very elaborate lessons and exercises to a pair of bunhars. Still, I’ll give them that much—they never once seemed to blink at the situation or treat us as anything except intelligent adults. I, for one, was more than anxious to do everything until I had it perfect—I had no wish to return to the zoo and the oblivious state of the simple saurian.

  Still, it was a constant mental fight with those animal impulses. I had to stop myself continually from roaring, charging, or doing other animal things in proper bunhar fashion. I realized that part of my trouble was my concern that Darva might not make it. I wanted both of us to succeed, desperately.

  The day we concentrated on our larynxes was an exciting one. Each day I was gaining more and more control over my body and my actions—becoming, very definitely, the smartest and most self-controlled bunhar in all history. The spell was a complex one, but it still boiled down to ordering the Wardens in our bodies to form a voice mechanism that would work in our very primitive throats. I had no idea what one would look like, or how it would work, but I was like a small child with a new toy when I felt something growing, taking shape far back in my throat, and made my first, rather basic sounds that weren’t roars and growls. Still, it was not a human voice, and it came from far back in my throat, independent of my mouth—which couldn’t form the words anyway. It couldn’t—but this new growth could.

  Darva, I heard with excitement, managed it also, although the sound was more like a deep belching sound than -anything else. We were stopped there and given a chance to practice. We managed in an amazingly short time to form crude words and sentences. It was a breakthrough, and one that said we were on the way. But how long would the rest take?

  I discovered in talking that Darva had had a much rougher fight with her animal self than I, and was still having trouble. Dr. Yissim now knew this too, and in a separate session one day told me,
“If we are to bring her all the way back, we may have to do another radical procedure.”

  “Of what sort?” I rasped, my new voice sounding odd—and yet appropriate to a bunhar, if bunhars could talk—even to me.

  “You are now far enough down the line to control a great deal of your body. The wa is powerful and controlled in you. But if we were to remove you from lab conditions, both of you would quickly revert, simply because you are so far along. She would change much before you. You might even fight it off, but I doubt if she could. You need reinforcement and the only reinforcement around comes from each other. It’s called a wa connection, and it may be her only hope—but only you can decide on it.”

  “There is danger then.”

  She nodded. “You know bow the wa is really one, how it is in total communication with all other wa” “Yes.”

  “But your consciousness contains the wa and directs it, and this is a method by which the wa of one consciousness is transmitted to the other and then stabilized. A permanent link is established.”

  “You mean our minds would merge?” “No. The wa is directed by thought; it is not thought itself. No, your bodies would merge, on the wa, or metaphysical, level. Anything done to one, with the aid of the other, could be easily duplicated in the other body. Her mind would give you the little extra push you would need not merely to control, but to direct the wa in your body. And conversely, your having achieved this, the process could be easily reversed. However, such a toted link, similar to casting a changeling spell but far more elaborate, has a drawback. If forged effectively enough to work on this level, it cannot be broken. The wa of one would be the wa of both. If you progress to the next stage of wa training, it could give you enormous power. Enormous. But you would be absolutely identical. Even an injury to one would be felt by the other.”

  “And the danger?”

  “If her wa instincts overwhelm you, she could drag you down with her.”

  “And if this is not done?”

  “Then we might well, over a long period, bring you back—but she would be lost. She simply doesn’t have the mental training you seem to have.”

  “Then let’s do it,” I told her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Wa Considers You One

  I had seen very little of Koril’s redoubt since our arrival, for obvious reasons, but clearly several things were going on here that I would never have anticipated or even believed from my previous experience on Charon. Gone was the mumbo-jumbo, except for some general references to spells that seemed to be here more words of convenience than words implying some mystique. Down here was a thoroughly professional and scientific base where crisp, well-trained professionals examined and stretched their knowledge of the Warden organisms’ powers and peculiarities almost to the limit. The technology, though, that supported it was basically from Cerberus, the only one of the four Warden worlds where efficient and modern industrial production was possible. This place remained in operation because of its unique below-ground desert location. Koril had surveyed and picked the one point on Charon that would allow such material and facilities to work and duplicated the precise conditions here.

  Obviously the place hadn’t just been thrown together in the last five years since he had been deposed. This was a far longer and more ambitious project than could have been assembled by some rebel, no matter how powerful he was, and it had to be sustained by clandestine traffic even between the Warden worlds. This refuge had been set up and outfitted in the years Koril was Lord of the Diamond, and somebody—certainly not the Four Lords—continued to supply it with spare parts.

  The computers used here were hardly the equal of anything in the Confederacy—they were, in fact, incredibly primitive—but they were certainly better than the calculators and abacuses that I had used as Town Accountant.

  The level of instruction we were given indicated an enormous amount of progress on understanding the Warden organism’s mechanisms, even if the bottom line of knowing where their power and information came from remained a mystery. It was like gravity—centuries after gravity was first truly identified and quantified it was still not at all understood. Those who didn’t understand what it was had discovered every effect and use of gravity despite their basic ignorance of just what really caused it.

  The exercises were serious, complex and required an enormous amount of knowledge of a large number of disciplines in order to use them effectively. That, in fact, was why the most powerful users were either former prisoners from the Confederacy or natives trained as apts when they were very, very young. In my business, it was absolutely vital to know as much as possible—and at least a little about everything—and this gave me an enormous advantage in the training. Darva, on the other hand, had virtually no education and only limited experience with human behavior outside her own local group; that was the hang-up. My own mind control techniques and self-hypnotic abilities were crucial to the process, and my understanding of basic human behavior, particularly my own, gave me the advantage. But the spell that had made me a changeling was an imitative spell. I was locked into the spell originally used on Darva, and so the weaknesses in it, her weaknesses, were repeated in me. She could not control her wa, and so her wa was hell-bent on taking the path of least resistance. And what her wa did, mine duplicated, since her half-trained great grandmother had taken the short cut of linking my spell to hers. This was no matter of waving your hands and making chairs appear or disappear; I was dealing with a complex psychological and biological science involving the spin-off effects of a tiny organism that had no counterpart in human experience beyond the Warden Diamond.

  Darva and I were led through as much basic training and instruction as we could take. She had to be “cured” before I could be, but I was the only one that could master the stuff well enough to do the job—and it was a job you really had to do for yourself. It was not simply a matter of removing the original spell either. That might have worked in the early stages, but things had gone too far. The Wardens themselves, freed from any spell, would just hurl us back into the animal world without restraint, dragging me with her.

  I was certainly well enough advanced after two months to do the job, although I was also aware that mastering principles and exploring the potential to the utmost were two very different things. I could cast a spell, even produce a changeling—do just about everything Korman and his apts had demonstrated plus a lot more—but it might be years of experimentation and practice before I had it all mastered. I could read Isil’s spell very easily—and the copy in myself—and even see where and how it was unraveling in the wrong direction. I even thought it was possible for me to break free myself, to sever my connection to Darva—but that would mean abandoning her. How funny! My old self wouldn’t have hesitated a moment—she had been useful and good company, but she was no longer necessary to me. The old me would have discarded her at this point and concentrated on total mastery of the wa and the fabrication of a new, fine body. Logically that was the only course that made any sense.

  And yet, I couldn’t abandon her. I simply could not do it. I admit I agonized over the decision, but not because it was a hard one to make. What it would mean, though, was that I would be compromising my own mission—if, in fact, I still wanted to have one. It seemed equally logical that my best interests lay in the future course of Charon, not in the direction of the Confederacy—although, here, the two might be close. Aeolia Matuze must go, of course, and if Morah represented the aliens then he too must go. But did it have to be me who did it? From the looks of the place, Koril was more formidable than I could ever be.

  That, of course, was the ultimate reason for my decision. My first loyalty was to myself, and I wanted Darva saved. If that somewhat compromised the rest—well, so be it I was only part of a team here, and I had to wonder why the Confederacy ,even bothered to send me to a place like Charon, with so well-prepared and equipped a rebel organization. Unless Koril too was not exactly what he seemed?

  I ha
d carried out the procedures so often in practice that when we came down to the real thing there seemed nothing to it. The staff, Yissim and the others, seemed amazed at my rapid progress. I discovered that there was a relative rating system for sorcs, I being the strongest they had seen (such as Koril and Month), to V. Lower ratings were apts—VI to X. Tully Kokul, whom I hadn’t seen nor heard from since that time on the beach, was a IV or V; Korman was a II. Normally, anyone could become a X with nominal training; apt VI was generally assumed to take one to two years for someone from Outside, like me, who had the necessary mental control, and perhaps ten years for a native raised as an apt from childhood. After VI it wasn’t a matter of learning the procedure, but learning how to understand and use it, developing mental control, confidence, and accumulating knowledge to expand your range of influences. It had been barely three months since I’d begun training in Kokul’s tent, and the staff easily rated me a V. Of course, the fact that I had nothing else to do, no distractions, the top instructors, and that mastering it was a matter of life or death—literally—for both Darva and myself had a lot to do with the speed, as did my own breeding, experience, and practice as an agent

  What I was going to do was, from my point of view, absurdly simple. I mentioned that the Warden sense was like open lines of energy, a communications net of infinite complexity, from me to everything around me. I was going to send complex prearranged messages—commands—to Darva’s mind, to her controlling Wardens who were at the heart of our predicament I was then going to direct her self-repair, point by point and area by area. In this I was aided by the redoubt’s computer visualizations, which did a lot of the difficult preparatory work for me. It was a measure of the difference between, say, Morah and myself, that I couldn’t have gone this far without the computer aids—everyone felt sure that he could.