She laughed, seemingly delighted with his explanation.
“How clever of you! I’ll bet the reception room’s a mess.”
“It’ll need a little more than mere redecorating,” he
agreed. “At least I’m happy now you got those paintings
out of there.”
Darva shook her head wonderingly. “They’re talking like they’re old buddies! Wasn’t he here to kill her?”
“Perhaps,” Morah replied. “But they were married for twenty-seven years.”
Both Darva’s and my own mouth flew open but no sound came out.
“… two left alive down there,” Koril was saying. “They’re in worse shape than I am. They’re backstage, but I told them not to come up just yet.”
Matuze looked satisfied. “Tell me, Toolie—why now? I thought you’d be stuck forever down there in your desert hideaway, particularly with all those delicious toys we allowed to get through.”
That startled the sorcerer. “Allowed?” She smiled sweetly. “Toolie! Who knows you better than I do? Do you really think you could have gotten all that stuff from offworld all this time without our help? It was far cheaper and easier to keep you occupied at what you love best than to try any all-out fight. In a few more months’ time, your return would have been academic anyway. Our delicious little war is well underway.”
Koril looked absolutely devastated by the obvious truth of what she was telling him. He had as much as admitted his failings to me. I now more than suspected that Dumonia had caught onto the plot and that had been why he’d finally decided to push. But Koril wasn’t about to mention the Cerberan, I’ll give him that.
“It has to do with evil, Aeolia. Evil.”
She laughed. “Evil? What in the world are you talking about?”
And, once more, he repeated the words that seemed to have haunted him since they were first uttered by the hapless Jatik.
She listened intently, but without any obvious reaction. Finally, when he’d completed his story, she said, “That’s the most utter and complete nonsense I’ve ever heard! They’re—odd—I admit, but they’re not evil. What is evil, anyway, except somebody’s arbitrary idea of what’s wrong? Isn’t that what you fought the Confederacy about? Aren’t our ideas evil by everyone else’s standards? Do you feel evil, Toolie? I don’t.”
But Koril did not reply. Slowly he seemed to stiffen, then relax. The wineglass dropped from his fingers and bounced on the rug, spilling a little of the remainder.
Toolie?” she inquired sweetly. Toolie?” Getting no response, she stood up and went over to him, then bent down and examined him carefully. Satisfied, she nodded and looked around the empty room.
“Morah!” she snapped, her tone suddenly cold and imperious. “I know you’re spying around here someplace! Clean up this mess and get this garbage out of my living room!”
“She poisoned him!” Darva gasped. “All this way and he lets her poison him!”
“No,” I told her. “He surrendered. When he got all the way up here he just couldn’t do it—and she knew it. She sure knew him, all right!”
Darva just shook her head sadly. “So simple. So powerful, so smart a man.”
“Oddly enough, those are exactly the qualities in humans that are worth preserving,” Morah added enigmatically. “You’ll see. But—wait. The play isn’t over yet.”
Aeolia Matuze was up and striding around the room like a mad woman. “Morah! Somebody! Attend met It will be necessary to arrange the executions of those below and those troops who failed me! Where the hell is everybody?”
“Here.” A cold, female voice came from behind her. She whirled and looked very surprised and not the least bit annoyed.
“Who the hell are you?” Aeolia Matuze snapped.
“We’re the new Queen of Charon,” Zala/Kira replied as she shot Aeolia Matuze three times. The Lord of Charon toppled and fell, a look of total surprise and bewilderment frozen forever on her face.
I looked at Morah. “She expected you to guard her.”
He nodded. “She never could get it through her head who I worked for,” he replied, as we watched the woman we both knew walk over, check Koril first, then Aeolia Matuze.
Yatek Morah sighed and turned away from the window. We did the same. “What now?” I asked him.
He smiled. “That depends on you. The remainder of Koril’s surviving Class I’s will pretty well fill out the Synod.”
Darva turned and pointed back at the glass. “But she’s not qualified to run Charon! Zala’s a helpless wimp and Kira’s a mechanized assassin!”
“I’m aware of that,” Morah replied. “Think of this, Lacoch. You’re the Confederacy’s assassin. Don’t bother to deny it. Nobody else in your batch showed any real promise. I arranged that whole sideshow at Bourget on that assumption.” He made a backhanded gesture at the glass. “Her type is now obsolete. It has served its purpose. I’ve called the few surviving ones to the Diamond. The robots are better, more reliable, and harder to kill.”
“Koril thought you wanted to be Supreme Lord of all the Diamond,” I told him.
“That ambition had crossed my mind when I had my agents on Takanna keep a small version of this bioagent project going many years ago,” he admitted. “However, that prospect no longer interests me. It has become rather—small. Petty, even. No longer worth going after. It has been so for quite some time.”
“And Zala?”
He chuckled. “That’s up to you. Kira is extremely good at what she does, but that’s ah she does. Zala—well, she trusts you. And she’ll need the help of a lot of people she trusts to put things back together and get the government straightened out once more. You’re an assassin. She’s an assassin. It will be interesting to see who, in the end, is the better.”
“You’re offering me a shot at being Lord of Charon,” I said, a little in awe of the possibilities. I tinned to Darva. “Remember those dreams we had? Of changing things for the better, of a virgin continent for the changelings?”
She looked at me strangely. “You mean you’d do it? But it’d be on his terms and at his pleasure.”
I turned to Morah. “From what I’ve seen I could have a very brief tenure myself.”
“She was power-mad, you know. She was about to proclaim herself Supreme Goddess of a new, true, and only religion. She was no longer rational enough to do what she was supposed to do—run Charon. As for me and my employers, we frankly don’t care how the humans run each other on Charon. Our motives—but no, that must wait. I know from reports from Lilith that you carry within you, perhaps still, a sort of organic transmitter. You will eliminate it, or I will. Then, I think, you can be told the whole story. Then you can make your own decisions. For now I must go and tend to our new queen.”
For a while we just stood there, not saying anything to one another. Finally Darva asked, “Well? After all this, you’re gonna do it? Or what?”
I smiled and kissed her, then looked back at the glass. Zala was there now, not Kira, and she was doing a happy little dance between the bodies. I stared at her, not quite knowing what to do next.
Finally I sighed and said, “Well, I’m of two minds about this …”
EPILOGUE
The man in the chair came out of it slowly. He lifted the probes from his head and pushed the apparatus away, but just sat there for a while, as if in a daze.
“Are you all right?” the computer asked him, sounding genuinely concerned.
“Yeah, as good as I’ll ever be again, I guess. It gets worse and worse. Now I’m considering joining the enemy!”
“Differing circumstances, an additional year in an alien environment under trapped conditions—it is not totally unexpected. They are not you. They are different people.”
The man chuckled mirthlessly. “Maybe. Maybe. At any rate—you saw and heard?”
“It is obvious. Do you wish to file a report and make a recommendation now?”
The man seemed startled. “Huh? No. Of
course not! Some pieces are still missing, and while I’m pretty sure I know what is going on I’m still not at all sure how to stop it.”
“Time is of the essence now,” the computer reminded him. “You heard Matuze. A matter of months. That means they are probably all in place even now.”
“And we’ve yet to find the aliens. We’ve yet to see what one looks like. We’ve yet to determine their defensive force and how near it is. Pretty near, I’d guess.”
“I believe you do not wish to act,” the computer responded. “You know why the aliens are here, their interest in the Warden Diamond specifically, the method by which the Confederacy is to be attacked and just about when—there is more than enough evidence to act.”
“Evidence! Deduction! Not a shred of real evidence!”
“Considering the extreme circumstances and the consistency of the deductions on three worlds now, I’d say you were more than justified.”
“No!” the man protested. “I want to be absolutely certain! There are millions of lives at stake here!”
“In the Warden Diamond. But there are thousands of times that at stake elsewhere.”
“It’s not as easy as you make it seem. That’s why they just don’t let you make the decisions. We still have some time. And maybe we can figure out some way so nobody has to die.”
“You have changed,” the computer chided. “I feel obligated to make an emergency summary report. You will add your conclusions.”
“Not yet. All right—look. Let me get to the ship’s library and labs for a day or so. I also want to check out communications. I have a strong feeling I can track the alien fleet.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re just stalling. You have become assimilated with your counterparts.”
“Three days. Even you will have to admit that three days won’t hurt anything. Besides, the solution is so outrageous they wouldn’t believe it now anyway. Even you must admit that much.”
The computer actually hesitated a moment. Finally it said, “All right Three days. What can you possibly expect to turn up in three days?”
“Just watch. And I’ll want to run Medusa before we finish up.”
“But Medusa is not complete.”
“Makes no difference. Medusa’s the key to it all. Be ready when I return.”
He walked back, showered, dressed, then approached the security door that both interlocked him to and isolated him from the giant picket ship. He pressed the identplate; the door refused to open. Angrily, he turned and yelled at the empty air, “All right! Let me out, you bastard! We had an agreement!”
“Do you really know what you’re going to do, or are you just grasping at straws?” the computer’s disembodied voice asked him.
“Look—am I a prisoner or the agent in charge?” he shot back angrily.
“You will come back?”
”Of course I will! Where the hell am I going to run?”
“What are you planning?”
‘I’m—oh, let’s just say I’m of two minds about it right now.”
“Well …”
“Would I lie to you?”
There was a second pause, and then the door opened.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JACK L. CHALKER was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 17, 1944, but was raised and has spent most of his life in Baltimore, Maryland. He learned to read almost from the moment of entering school, and by working odd jobs had amassed a large book collection by the time he was in junior high school, a collection now too large for containment in his quarters. Science fiction, history, and geography all fascinated him early on, interests that continue.
Chalker joined the Washington Science Fiction Association in 1958 and began publishing an amateur SF journal, Mirage, in 1960. After high school he decided to be a trial lawyer, but money problems and the lack of a firm caused him to switch to teaching. He holds bachelor degrees in history and English, and an M.L.A. from the Johns Hopkins University. He taught history and geography in the Baltimore public schools between 1966 and 1978, and now makes his living as a free-lance writer. Additionally, out of the amateur journals he founded a publishing house, The Mirage Press, Ltd., devoted to nonfiction and bibliographic works on science fiction and fantasy. This company has produced more than twenty books in the last nine years. His hobbies include esoteric audio, travel, working on science-fiction convention committees, and guest lecturing on SF to institutions such as the Smithsonian. He is an active conservationist and National Parks supporter, and he has an intensive love of ferryboats, with the avowed goal of riding every ferry in the world. In fact, in 1978 he was married to Eva Whitley on an ancient ferryboat in midriver. They live in the Catoctin Mountain region of western Maryland with their son, David.
Table of Contents
From the back cover
Title Page
MAP
A Del Rey Book
Dedication
PROLOGUE: A Time for Reflection
CHAPTER ONE: Rebirth
CHAPTER TWO: Transportation and Exposure
CHAPTER THREE: Orientation
CHAPTER FOUR: Interviews and Placement
CHAPTER FIVE: A Plot, a Deal, and a Potion
CHAPTER SIX: The High Road to Bourget
CHAPTER SEVEN: Settling In
CHAPTER EIGHT: All Hell Breaks Loose
CHAPTER NINE: Changeling
CHAPTER TEN: Decision at the Pinnacles
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Koril’s Redoubt
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Wa Considers You One
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Kira
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Forced Decisions
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A Walk in the Dark
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Twists and Turns
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charon: A Dragon at the Gate Page 30
