Jack Chalker - Empires of Flux & Anchor

Sister Kasdi sighed. “Maybe you’re right. It’s funny—you’re maybe the only one I can tell this to, but I have doubts. Lots of doubts all the time. I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I wonder if all this is real or just some false wizardry, self-delusion. Is this really the Holy Mother’s will, or am I just another Fluxlord with too big ambitions kidding myself along? I don’t know. When you have this kind of power, both political and Flux, it’s impossible to tell your own delusions from what’s real. You know, sometimes I envy Spirit. No worries, no cares, no responsibilities. And I get the idea she knows what’s true and real far better than I.”

“You’re better than you think you are,” Suzl told her. “The old boy is right about one thing, though. You left yourself nothing but work and worry and responsibility. No fun, no vacations, no way to just let loose and relax. I couldn’t have stood it this long, but if you don’t figure out a way to take a breather, it’ll eventually crack even you. All that’s bottled up inside of you with no way to get out. If it becomes too much, it’ll explode.”

“I know, I know. If you think of an answer to it all, let me know. In the meantime—take good care of her, Suzl.”

“That’s one worry you shouldn’t have.”

The big, hairy, muscular man was playing cards in the Gotron Saloon in Anchor Fhaxtrod when a younger man came in and caught his eye. The big man played out his hand, and won, then excused himself from the game and went into a back room with the newcomer.

“Well?”

“Not much. As near as we can figure out, there was no way that wound didn’t mean nearly instant death. Nobody on the scene had any doubts at all. Still, when the stringers sorted out their dead, his body wasn’t there. It was never found, although that’s not unusual. There was that tremendous spell from the girl and a lot of confusion and there are always a lot of missing.”

“And Jomo?”

“He showed up in Globbus a couple of weeks later and got all the survivors together, paid ’em off and disbanded it. Most of the other duggers signed on with other trains, but he didn’t. Stayed in Globbus for several months, then went up north in the wild, settled down, and got a job as a bouncer in a saloon in Tregia, one of those dugger’s haven Fluxlands. He’s real smart about some things, almost retarded in others, kind of like a good trained animal. Real faithful to his boss, but not any boss will do. I’m convinced, though, that he couldn’t possibly have thought up anything like this. Everybody thinks that he thinks it’s really Matson, so he’s back on the job.”

Coydt van Haaz scratched his chin a moment. “So somebody changed themselves into Matson, somebody who knew him well enough to impersonate him eighteen years later so exactly that he can fool even somebody close to Matson like Jomo, then hunts up the big dugger and goes gunning for me. I don’t buy it, Yorek. It doesn’t ring true. Still, if Matson had somehow lived, where’s he been all these years? He’s a false wizard—he has no real powers. Can somebody like that just up and give up the stringer trade that was his life, leave all that credit wealth behind, and, even transformed by somebody with power, just take up another life and not betray himself all that time? Even if he could, he’s too in touch with today. He knows the present stringer codes and exactly which people to talk to and where they are. That’s not somebody even the stringers consider long dead. Either way, none of it fits.”

“Except that if it is Matson, his reappearance now makes sense. Spirit was his daughter, too, although he told Gilly he only learned about her when we hit. He’ll live by the stringer code and try and nail you. And if he fails, another will come with two to avenge, then three—well, you know the route.”

Coydt nodded. “I can take anybody head-on in Anchor or Flux, but I don’t want to get backshot by some jerk I can’t even see while walking down an alley or across a street. If this operation wasn’t going along, I’d lay the bait, face it down, then change into new people for Anchor, but it’s important that the others be able to reach me in a hurry. This is damned inconvenient, Yorek. Old Saint Kasdi I figured on, but not some masquerading killer stalking me in Anchor. We’re just going to have to tighten up our guard and keep doing it the way we planned, that’s all. But the first man who works for me who botches the job and doesn’t get killed protecting me will wish he had been killed. You spread the word. Within a year it won’t matter who’s stalking who.”

“You’ve got the best covering you. It won’t be easy for him, whoever he is. In the meantime, we’ll keep digging.”

“Dig him out, Yorek. If you do, we’ll have our fun with him in Flux and settle this whole problem.”

The experiment had worked out very well indeed for all concerned except, perhaps, Sister Kasdi. Spirit loved the excitement and animation of the stringer train, the animals and people, and they also took to her. Her picture had made her familiar to almost everyone during the kidnapping episode, and her story and her curse were also common knowledge.

At first people did treat her as something of a freak, and there was a great deal of pity as well, but it soon passed as the novelty wore off and she was simply accepted. It was tougher on the men than the women, for she was beautiful and alluring, but the few who tried to force themselves on her in Flux found that merely touching her when she didn’t want to be touched could produce a painful electric shock. The more someone persisted, the more painful and prolonged the lesson. None persisted for very long.

Spirit seemed endlessly fascinated with the void as well. It looked different to her now, the continuous random sparkles of energy not only beautiful but somehow not at all the random effect that everyone else assumed. There was a structure, an order, to the whole of Flux that seemed suddenly clear to her.

She quickly learned the stringer’s secret and art. The void was no void at all, she found, but an intricate network of crisscrossing lines of weak but permanent energy. Following these “strings” was like following a road, although she didn’t have, and would probably never have, the stringer’s knowledge and skill to be able to read exactly where she was on a string in relation to the next destination and in relation to the whole world. Still, she wondered at the fact that these strings were certainly human-made; yet she could see and understand them in apparent violation of the spell. She could even tell which ones were main strings and which led to water pockets and emergency supply caches, for these strings were coded both by color and by a mathematical structure that not only said what they were but also left a signature of sorts of their maker—and other signatures were overlaid in fascinating complexity atop the primary one.

Every time they progressed along a string, a new, very faint ghost signature was etched into the thousands, perhaps millions of others. She began to realize that in the strings was a record of all who had ever used them, all very minor and very faint but nonetheless present. One could even, on the closest of study, read the exact order in which those string echoes had been laid down and identify a pattern unique to each individual. She, too, left a slight signature as they progressed, a mathematically unique coding. With knowledge of a wizard’s or stringer’s symbol and the sense of time laid out mathematically in the record, she realized she could actually track someone across the void by taking only the freshest trace or retrace their path and tell from whence they had come.