When The Changewinds Blow

by Jack L. Chalker

  They wound up outside, then walked across the parking lot to the theater entrance. Sam bought two tickets to the newest Disney cartoon, knowing that for the late show there'd be very few people there and none they would know. Not with a "G" rating.

  Sam was right. There were like a dozen people in there for the Wednesday late show. They took seats on a side aisle near the back, away from the rest. Sam put her arm around Charley. "Just act like we don't care about the movie, which we don't," she said. "Nobody ever notices much about a boy and a girl makin' out in the back of a theater."

  "Okay, I'll play along," Charley whispered back, "but what the hell is this all about? Why'd you run? Where you been? Everybody's worried sick. ..."

  "Long story," Sam responded. "I'll tell you as much as I can. Some of it'll sound crazy and maybe I am, but it's damned real."

  It hadn't been all that sudden, only the final act. For months, almost since moving out west, she had been having strange experiences. First it was the dreams-lots of them, long and elaborate, sometimes several nights in a row with no break, and always involving the same things although never quite the same.

  Charley knew about the dreams. The most frequent one involved the demon and Sam, who was always driving a red sports car around a twisting mountain road along a coast, "although Sam couldn't drive and they were hundreds of miles from any coast.

  It always began with a dark figure, sitting alone in a comfortable-looking room that none the less resembled more a medieval castle than anything modern. There was a low fire in the fireplace and a few goblets about, but everything was indistinct, as if in a dream. She saw his form, but not really his face, masked in shadow, but it was a strange form of a fairly large man in flowing robes and wearing what might have been a helmet with two large, crooked horns emerging from each side. She saw him, though, not as a vision, or a completed scene, but as if she were there as well, sitting opposite him in a chair of her own, looking at his dark form with her own eyes. Somehow, she was aware that the goblet near her on a small table had until recently contained some kind of drug, and that the dark figure's mysterious, hazy, dark presence was partly due to that.

  Suddenly there was a rumble and crackling, more like an electrical short circuit than anything else, but it seemed to overwhelm them, to carry them, not physically but mentally, through a dizzying, blinding, multicolored ride like an out of control carousel, although the dark form in the chair was still there, silhouetted against the swirling maelstrom.

  And then there had been darkness, with scenes illuminated now by flashes of lightning and accompanying clashes of thunder, and a view from a great height down to a frothing ocean below beating itself against black rocks, and a low range of mountains forming a jagged and serpentine coastline, and, in the distance, two small lights approaching along that coast. They were not the storm, but they were of and with the storm, and they moved swiftly inland to a point where storm and lights must meet.

  And now she saw herself driving that red sports car, but not from the point of view of the driver. Rather, she saw herself from the height during the flashes of lightning, and now they were nearly on top of it, and the dark, horned figure whispered fearsomely in a tone that somehow still cut through the noise of storm and surf, "Now! I was correct. The equations are perfectly in balance. She is the one we seek and she sleeps in the stupors of over indulgence. Minimum resistance, maximum

  WHEN THE CHANGEWINDS BLOW 11

  flow, calculated odds of success in the ninety-plus percen-tile. . . . Now!"

  And from the cloud a great bolt of lightning shot out, and while it struck just ahead and on the ocean side of the road the car suddenly slammed on its brakes and spun, aided by the sudden rain, and . . .

  All then was blackness.

  That had been the first of them, repeated many tunes with little or no variation, but it had not been the last. At first she put them down as mere fantasies, as nightmares, maybe, or possibly even a sign of a good imagination, but then the dreams progressed and she began to see a pattern both in when the dreams came and in their progression.

  Always in the night. Always when thunderstorms approached and then raged around her.

  But during this season of the year she felt she'd almost licked it. No thunderstorms, no really bad dreams. Not until last Thursday night, when this freak warm front had moved in and clashed with the very chilly winter air and set off a rare winter one.

  Charley frowned. "I don't remember a thunderstorm last Thursday."

  "It was real early in the morning. Like two or three. You'd sleep through an atomic bomb anyway. You can check it in the papers, though. We had it-and I had another real mean one."

  "You mean you're running from a dream?"

  "Not-exactly."

  She had awakened to the sound and fury of the freak storm, and lay there, eyes wide open, feeling wide awake and afraid to go back to sleep, but even though the storm raged and she was fully conscious, through the thunder, through the roar of rain and hail on the roof and the rattling of windows by heavy winds, the voices intruded and the room seemed to fade. It was also quite dark, but she was seeing through another's eyes, a visitor without influence or control; an interloper who should not have been there, wherever "there" was.

  It was the hall of a medieval-tike castle, damp and somewhat dark, illuminated by torches and by a fire in the great fireplace. She sat in a large, lushly upholstered chair at the head of a long table, an elegant if greasy and overcooked meal in front of her. She knew it was a woman's body, and probably royalty; long, feminine arms reached out for food and wine, with long, delicate fingers unblemished by any sign of work or wear, with crimson, perfectly trimmed and shaped nails so long they could not have withstood doing anything serious. There were others at the table. A large man with a full beard and shoulder-length hair, stocky and rough but dressed in fine clothing including a cape. Several others, mostly rough-looking men, some accompanied by young women dressed in satin and gold, were also there-and a few others.

  One was a tiny, gnarled man who must have been no more than three feet high, dressed in gray and brown with a rich black beard that seemed to go down almost to his feet, sitting there on a very high stool to be at equal height to the others. Another wore a crimson cloak and hood but seemed to have a frog-like snout extending from it and two round, yellow eyes that never blinked but, cat-like, reflected the torchlight. Yet another had a long, distorted, puffy kind of face, huge round blue eyes, and a rhinoceros-like horn rising up from the center of his forehead, and a woman whose hairless head seemed covered by a bony gray plate and whose arms ended not in hands but in claw-like mandibles. There may have been more, _ but the onlooker did not focus on them but rather on eating.

  Finally the hairy man closest to her asked, "Highness, has the problem of the simulacra been disposed of?"

  From behind her a voice, that voice, responded, "My Lord Klewa, we all know that nothing is certain except that the unthinkable must be thought, but there was little danger. So far we have found only a very few in all our months of searching that even slightly posed a danger and we are dealing with each in turn. The odds of that ever being a factor were always slim-the enemy would have to find a simulacrum and somehow transport before we could find and destroy them, and we had the only model for such loci searching anyway. You have no idea how many levels up we have gone and continue to go. Just when we believe it is no longer possible my storms find another, but so far away. . . . Even so, I shall deal with each.

  "If you wish certainties, then kill yourself ," the strange one continued, "for that will produce a certainty in this world, at least. If you desire minimum risk, we have gone far further in that regard then anyone could imagine. But risk there will always be, and should be, for gain without risk would make a prize meaningless. So vast is our enterprise that we risk disrupting the fragile fabric of our reality and might cause the changewinds to increase and turn on us as well, but consider the goals and the alternatives. Be at ease."r />
  And then she spoke, with a voice not unlike her own voice, strangely deep, although the tongue was strange and musical and not at all like English or any other language she had known, and the tone was softer, gentler, maybe sexier than she'd ever used.

  "My Lord, why these questions now? You know my talents, and you know the skills of Protector Klittichorn. None of you entered into this alliance blindly, and our ideals and goals are of the highest order. The small brains who blindly struck down your own son to preserve their evil statist values would also have at me. We unite and triumph or die, or we do nothing and thus only die ever so slowly but no less certainly. But if we die, let it not be from faint hearts when all goes well. Speak your mind freely here, for we are equals at this table."

  "Equals, aye, except for him," muttered the gnome-like man in a surprisingly deep, gruff voice. "We would follow you and your ideals to the death. My Lady, but not to deliver ourselves into the hands of another oppressor."

  "The Protector is a brilliant man who has the same dreams as we," she responded. "I have complete confidence in him, and, of course, there is no real chance of true victory without his tremendous skills. I regret that he has not the pleasing personality of court and politics, but I do not doubt his motives. He has always served me faithfully and well, and if you have any doubts then you must discard them. All of us must trust one another and give our bond; it is the only true thing of value between us."

  Suddenly the scene began to fade, jumping in and out, becoming disjointed and impossible to follow, .like hearing three seconds out of every ten in a conversation. Another voice seemed to be cutting out the connection, with intermittent words here and there in a totally different tone and appearing to come from much farther away.

  . . . bee . . . kow . . . low . . . bap . . .

  There was a sudden dizziness, first one way, then the other, as if someone were tuning a radio and she was the dial. It stopped almost as quickly as it began, and again there was a sense of contact with someone or something far away, but with a difference. This time she was lying there in the dark, fully aware of herself and her surroundings, her skin tingling oddly, and there was a sense that now the situation was reversed and that someone, or something, was looking at her or through her to the room beyond.

  "There is darkness. She is awake and her eyes are open but there is darkness." There was a sudden slight tickling sensation as if cobwebs had been run up and down her body. "Hmmm . . . Nothing really wrong. I was afraid for a moment she was blind or something."

  "It's nighttime, you idiot, and she's in bed in a trance," came another voice.

  "Who are you?" she called aloud to the voice in her head. "What do you want with me?"

  The voice either did not or could not hear, and ignored her. It was inside her head, yet distanced. A man's voice, but not any of the men at the court dinner she had witnessed. Someone new, someone different, almost clinical-sounding, like some of her doctors. More interesting, if a bit more frightening, the words were certainly American English.

  "I have her construct now. It is identical in every detail-. Astonishing. There must not be one point of similarity in background or origin yet there is an identical genetic code.'' A sigh. "Too late. The storm is passing and the lock of hair is not sufficient for more. But-does he know of her? He must-the storms are passing through and she's next. Still alive, Cromil! The first one we've found before he's killed her!"

  "The one in the red car was barely dead," the other noted optimistically. "At least we're catching up."

  The man ignored the comment. "Too late to do more now, damn it! Time for preparations. We must not let him kill her if we can. In our hands, she would be a great weapon. One test, no more. It already fades. . . ."

  Suddenly, eerily, she was entirely back in the room, the storm already going away, her senses abnormally keen and sharp.

  And then someone began to run his fingers through her hair!

  It was terrifying, horrible. She wanted to scream, but dared not. The sensation faded in a moment but it was some time before she could move, dared to sit up, to turn-and find no one there.

  Charley didn't know what to believe but she could understand her friend's tenor. "Jeez! That's why you looked like hell and were so shook up at school Friday."

  Sam nodded. "Yeah-but what could I do? You were goin' away for the weekend, and my mom would have all kinds of pop psychology bullshit. I mean, I didn't have any proof or nothin'. Hell, maybe I was nuts. I didn't know. But when we got out of school, well, something else happened. Just comin' out the door, kids all around, I thought I saw this big guy out of the corner of my eye, all black and stuff, maybe ten feet away. I turned, but there was nobody there. I got spooked. I got on the bus and sat up front, almost behind Miss Everett. I was lookin' out, and I know it's nuts, but I saw him again. Out of the corner of my eye, like before-standin' on the street In a crowd. But when I looked around, he was gone."

  "Just nerves."

  "Yeah, that's what I told myself, but then I looked up for some reason straight into the rear view mirror. You know what I mean-shows the aisle and seats? And he was there, sittin' in the back, and he didn't disappear. I turned, and there was nothin' where he should'a been but empty seats. I turned back to the mirror and there he was."

  "What-what did he look like?" Like, was this a loony tune or was this strait jacket city?

  "He-he didn't have any real features. He was all black, kinda like a cardboard cutout of black paper, but he moved. He breathed. He was alive! And, I mean, I had to get off that bus. I walked the last three blocks, and when the bus passed I kinda saw him on it still. I got into the house, I didn't know what to do, but I knew it'd be dark in an hour and Mom wouldn't be home for three. Besides, they'd got me in my own room in my own bed. All she'd do would be to get me off to the funny farm where I'd be cooped up, and I figured he'd find me easy there. I looked out the front windows and I saw him, across the street, by the mailbox, just standin' there. I didn't know what he was doin', but I figured he was either just keepin' an eye on me for somebody else or he was waitin' til dark and I just wasn't gonna give him no chance. I panicked. I stuffed one of Mom's overnight bags with whatever I could find quick, grabbed the cash card, and got out the cellar window and out through the backyard. I snuck six blocks to Central Avenue, hit the automatic teller-I forgot you couldn't get much from one- and then caught the bus to the mall. I knew I'd given him the slip-no sign of him, not in the mirror of the bus, not anywhere. All I wanted was to shake him-and I did."

  She blew a hundred and ten bucks on the boy's denims and shoes and another forty in the Hair Palace, a unisex hair salon. "I told them it was for a school play," she said. "That I had to look like a boy 'cause the role was a girl pretending to be a boy. The glasses were fifteen bucks. Plain lenses. I washed the stuff at the little coin-op at the motel over on Figuroa. I finally dumped most everything I brought with me in the dumpster. Then I started hidin' out here in the mall. There's all sorts of places if you really want to, and don't mind gettin' locked in. They got a couple of security guards but they're easy to dodge and they only go to midnight, eight on Sundays, then they just lock up tight and go. The water fountains work and the employee rest rooms in the mall security area ain't never locked. Durin' the day I been hustlin'. You know-carrying groceries to cars down at the Food Mart, helpin' little old ladies with shit, that kind of thing. I been doin' maybe twenty, thirty bucks a day in tips."

  "And, like nobody's recognized you?"

  She grinned. "Nope. I even been real close to some of the' gang from school, mostly by accident-no use in pushin' things-and they never gave me a glance. You'd be surprised how many kids are around durin' school days, too. Nobody ever says nothin' unless they're at the arcade or like that. And everybody's been treat in' me like a boy. I even use the men's room. I always wondered what a urinal looks like. No wonder they can be in and out so fast. Only thing wrong is the mice." She shivered. "You'd think a classy place like this would
n't have things like them hiding around. At least they should get a cat or something. And I'm dying for a shower!"

  Charley stared at Sam in the darkness as an evil cartoon cat was chortling over plans to do in a very strange-looking duck in France or someplace on the screen. "You nuts? You gone stark raving mad? Sam, you can't keep going on like this! Your mom's probably worried sick by now, the cops are all over looking for you, and sooner or later somebody's gonna notice."

  The fugitive sighed. "I know. I know. But I can't go home yet-I'll never feel real comfortable there again, and what if this character doesn't care who he hurts? I know it sounds nuts, like spook city, but it's for real. When I get out of this and have some breathing time I'll call Mom and tell her I'm okay. It won't stop her worryin' but at least she'll know I'm not kidnapped or dead or somethin'." She paused, sensing that it wasn't getting through. "Charley-I'm scared. I've never been more scared in my whole life. I'm-doing this-'cause I don't know what else to do."

  "Sam-you just gotta come home. You just gotta. You're not cut out for this. Sooner or later somebody's gonna find you out anyway, or somebody else will spot you for what you are and you'll wind up in some strange city all doped up and turnin' tricks or somethin' like that. Jesus, there must be a hundred rapes a year just in this town! This ain't TV and you're no karate queen!"

  "I made out so far. It's different when they think you're a boy. I found out how different just around here. But-you think I like this? I never thought ahead. I had to run and hide. Whoever it is, though-they haven't found me here. Not yet, anyway."