Jack Chalker - Empires of Flux & Anchor

“I can see you weren’t bothered by religion even then.”

“About as much as you or even old Mervyn is. I broke into the local laundry in the city where the temple robes were done, and I stole one that fit. Then I appropriated a pretty good wig and some sandals that basically fit from one of my sisters. And, one day, I just walked right into that temple and back to the living quarters. None of them gave me a second glance. In fact, my only mistake was that I really had no way of knowing where was where in there. I wound up in some office I shouldn’t have been in and got challenged. My falsetto was not all that convincing, I’m afraid, and close-up the deception was quickly unmasked. I almost didn’t mind getting caught then, because of the shock on their faces. I expected to be sent to the local jail, where they’d either cover it up to save embarrassment or make me a local hero to my peers. Instead, I was hauled up before a religious court in the temple that was strictly for priestesses and was presided over by the Sister General herself. I was charged with heresy.”

“Go on,” she encouraged him, interested in spite of herself.

Coydt seemed to enjoy telling the story, as if it was something bottled up inside him that needed to come out. “They were faced with an unprecedented situation, and they resolved it as best their little minds could. They could think of only one way to sponge out the heresy, and they did it. They took me to the temple clinic, filled me with all sorts of chemicals, and then performed agonizingly painful surgery on me. They castrated me, then used the scrotum to create a vagina. By more surgery and drugs, they smoothed my skin, changed my muscle tone, raised my voice half an octave—well, you get the picture. When they finished, months later, I was still very much a man inside, but outside I was an overly large, lunkish woman. Now the temple had not been violated, you see?” His tone grew suddenly bitter and seemed tinged with an insane anger. “ I was fifteen years old!”

“I didn’t even know such a thing was possible in Anchor,” Suzl admitted.

“My parents were told, of course,” he went on, not really hearing her. “My mother said it was divine punishment. My father thought it was funny. Funny !” He struggled to retain control of himself, and finally got it. When he continued his tale, his voice was calm and rational once more, but his story was not.

“Using various hormones and hypnotics, they kept me around for a couple of years as the temple slave. I was property, and that was that. I was still masculine enough to be a pretend man to the horny bitches, too. But the old Sister General retired, and the new one was a real moral type. She told me that it was over, that I had the choice of joining the priesthood or being sold to Flux. Three guesses which one I gladly took, even though I had no idea what was out there. After what they’d done to me, what did I have to fear?”

“Believe it or not, I understand. I’ve had some sexual identity problems myself.”

“When they found out I had some of the power, they sold me to a wizard in Globbus who needed an assistant. He was a rather unpleasant fellow named Voryer, and he heard of my condition and thought it was very funny, too. The first spell he taught me was the binding spell. He said he liked his first lesson to be one his pupils never forgot.”

Slowly, all of Coydt’s clothing faded. He reached up to the side of his face and drew his finger down the side of his beard, and it and the moustache peeled away and fell to the ground. In most ways, his body was male and muscular. He had a tight ass and the sort of hip and other bone structure one would expect. In many ways, he reminded her of Dar, a huge farm boy who’d had a female organ, thanks to a spell, but there was a bit more to Coydt. The breasts were clearly breasts, although they were sized well enough that under a shirt they would just resemble overly large pectorals. Except for his hair, eyebrows, and pubic hair, he had less body hair than did Suzl or Spirit. Suddenly the carefully tailored clothing faded back in, and the false but very convincing beard and moustache jumped up, reformed, and reattached to his face. He looked now quite the normal, handsome man again.

“The voice broke and the breasts shrank when the hormones ran down and the male ones dominated,” he told her. “But you can see what I had become. I learned all I could from the old wizard, and when I had more power than he did, I killed him. For years I plunged into spell research, learning all I could and getting ever stronger. I tried to find a way to break that spell, and I couldn’t. I was a man who felt like a man and loved pretty women, but I couldn’t make love to them. Oh, I could make them think they had a good time, but I couldn’t have it. I hid my problem with cheap love spells, building a reputation as a hot lover. I worked so hard building up my muscles that I became very strong, and I liked to pick fights. I studied with the masters of every physical fighting form, and I mastered every weapon of Anchor and Flux.

“When I was ready, I hired on with a stringer who needed big-time protection, so I could get back into my old home Anchor. I strangled my mother, then cornered and beat the hell out of my father. When he was down and out, I took a knife and made him like me, only a little messier. When he didn’t laugh, I cut out his tongue and blinded him and left him there to bleed to death. One by one, I tracked down every priestess that had been at that temple during those times. All of ’em, including many who’d moved on or retired, who were still alive. Each one of them I could get into Flux I made into obedient whores. Those I couldn’t died, but they all died begging and on their knees. The authorities couldn’t catch me. Oh, not that I wasn’t collared now and then, but they couldn’t hold me. Now I had only this spell to break, and I went looking through all of Flux for the key.

“Eventually I signed on with a wizard named Grymphin, who had one hell of a library from the old days. He was also, it turned out, one of the Seven of that time. He was one hell of a math whiz, though, and he was devoting his life to breaking the codes used by the Hellgates and to stabilize Anchors. We didn’t know about the temple entrances then, not until less than twenty years ago, but he was determined to just walk into a Hellgate, right past the Guardian. Got so fired up convinced he had it one day that he tried it himself.”

“I take it he was wrong.”

“No, he was right. Only I changed one little number in a string that seemed five kilometers long. He got zapped; I won the resulting power struggle. And that’s how I got my present job.”

“But you never found the way to break it.”

“No. But you did. You or somebody. I figured by using that language on Spirit, considering who she was, they’d bend heaven and hell to figure it out. The basic spell is the same. I want to know how it was done. Tell me, and you’ll be fine and so will she. Come on—you don’t owe Saint Bitch anything, either one of you.”

“As a woman in your idea of Anchor?”

“Was it so terrible? Truthfully, now—could you see yourself as Madame Weiz?”

She thought about it, and the horrible truth was that she could. She made no direct reply, though.

“I thought as much. You don’t like to admit it, but my little demonstration was quite effective. Come, now—never mind the philosophical or ideological objections. What is your personal objection to living that way? Just yours?”

She thought a moment. “It’s demeaning.”

“Oh, come. Being the consort to a homosexual stringer is not demeaning? Looking like a bloated sexual nightmare wasn’t demeaning? Only a handful of people are ever truly free in any society, and that’s as much accident as design, even in my case. You’re a survivor, which is a valuable thing to be, but you are not a leader. Being his wife, the mother of his children, a ranking woman because of that and a privileged one as well—you’ll live a better, more satisfying life than you have ever lived. Tell me—have you ever been truly free?”