Jack Chalker - Charon - A Dragon at the Gate

The thing worked by skin contact—don’t ask me how. I’m not one of the tech brains. The system was not as good as a programming, but it allowed them to talk to me, even send me pictures that only I could see and hear.

“By now I hope you’re over the shock of discovering who and what you are.” Krega’s voice came to me, seemingly forming in my brain. It was a shock to realize that not even my jailers could hear or see a thing.

“We have to brief you this way simply because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Oh, don’t worry about it—it’s permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock. Besides, we haven’t the tune to allow you to ‘set in’ completely, as it were. So this will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel that you have an exceptionally difficult assignment.”

I felt the excitement rising within me. The challenge, the challenge…

“Your objective world is Charon, nearest to the sun of the Diamond colonies,” the Commander’s voice continued. “If there is a single place in the universe that will drive sane people mad and insane people to ecstasy, it is Charon. There is no way to adequately explain the effects of being there. You will have to find that out for yourself, and you will receive a thorough orientation briefing from Charon itself after you land.

“The imprint ability of this device is limited,” he continued, “but we can send you one basic thing that may or may not be of use to you on Charon. It is a physical-political map of the entire planet, as complete and up-to-date as we could make it.”

That puzzled me. Why would such a map not be of use? What kind of place was this, anyway? Before I could mull that over further and curse my inability to ask Krega questions, I felt a sharp pain in my back, men a short wave of dizziness and nausea. But when the discomfort cleared, I found the complete map was clearly and indelibly etched in my mind.

Following this came a stream of facts about the place not likely to be too detailed in any indoctrination lecture.

The planet was roughly 42,000 kilometers at the equator—or from pole back to pole, allowing for topographic differences. Like all four Diamond worlds, Charon was basically a ball—highly unusual as planets go, even though everybody, including me, thinks of all major planets as round.

The gravity was roughly .88 norm, so I’d feel a bit lighter and be able to jump further. That would take a slight adjustment in timing, and I made a note to work on that first and foremost Charon was a tad richer in oxygen, not really enough to matter, but it was overloaded with water vapor, which probably accounted for that extra oxygen in the first place.

The planet had a reasonable axial tilt, which normally would have meant strong seasonal changes, but 158,551,000 kilometers out from an F-type star it was basically a choice of hot, hotter, still hotter, and hotter than hell. There were no polar caps—the circulation of warm ocean water prevented it—but there was sometimes ice in the dead of winter in the arctic or antarctic circle regions, so even on a tremendously tropical world you could freeze, but as both polar regions were entirely water, it wasn’t likely you’d ever get there.

Equatorial temperatures were almost at the limit of human endurance: temperatures of sixty degrees centigrade or more had been measured there, along with near-lethal radiation levels for brief periods near the time of the sun’s direct rays. There was sufficient land in the more temperate zones for the mere eleven million or so people who inhabited the place. Not that the temperate zones were all that temperate—in the latitudes with the largest populations temperatures still reached above fifty degrees centigrade at midsummer and rarely fell below twenty-five degrees in the dead of winter—but they were better than that equator. The three major continental land masses, however, were spaced above, on, and just below the equator, thus keeping everybody in the hothouse. A day was about twenty-nine standard hours, not enough of a difference from that to which I was accustomed to be a real factor, and a year was a short 282 Charon days.

Three continents—one not very useful that was mountainous and had large stretches of desert blocked from rain by the landforms; the other two basically tropical rain forests where the rain damn near never stopped. Not a cheery place at all, I reflected, remembering that old Warden had named this his vision of hell. Not far off the mark.

Well, I’d better get used to loving it, I told myself. Short of suicide, I had no way to avoid calling it home.

“Charon is the only one of the Diamond worlds with a female Lord,” Krega continued. “I would not, however, count on your considerable charm to tame Aeolia Matuze. She is something of a political genius, and as hard and cynical as a human can become. At one time she was actually on the Confederacy Council, and it’s a sure bet that a lot of the aliens’ information on our political and military structure came from her. Her crime might best be called an excess of ambition; she skillfully manipulated whole governmental forces and key individuals in the governments and military and was well on the way to pulling off something of a coup d’etat, which would have in effect substituted her for the Council. Don’t laugh—she came very close. Needless to say, she was well enough connected to be sent to the Diamond, where she was fifteen years into the system before taking complete charge only four years ago. It appears that her predecessor actually retired, although we consider this so unlikely that the retirement was almost certainly forced by Matuze. Do not underestimate her! In another age and time we would probably all be worshiping her as a goddess.”

Aeolia Matuze. I remembered her from the distant past and from some of my history indoctrinations. I also vaguely recall that she had died and there had actually been an official period of mourning back when I was still a kid. So now at last I knew the truth about her, and it was fascinating. A formidable opponent indeed. I had to wonder if the aristocratic beauty my mind recalled was still as stunning after nineteen years on Charon.

The rest of the briefing was pretty much routine, and after it was over I simply got off the John and pushed it back into the wall. I heard a flushing sound and, the next time I used it, discovered that my waste wasn’t the only thing flushed. The direct neural transmission had taken less than a minute to transfer all the information they could pack into it. Extremely efficient, the security boys, I told myself. Even my ever-vigilant jailers on the other end of those lenses and mikes would have no idea that I was anybody other than who I was supposed to be.

As to who that was, I’d gotten my first mental picture of myself from the briefing. My impression of myself as small was very true—barely 157 centimeters tall, and a mere 46 kilos. Physically, my mind had to go back to childhood for a really good word— elfin. Small, thin, wiry, with a sharp, stem-looking face set off by ears slightly too large for it and pushed back and a healthy shock of jet-black hair trimmed almost in a pageboy style. I appeared to have little or no body hair and no facial hair beyond the dark, V-shaped eyebrows. The truth was, with some nondescript clothing I would look more like a young girl of eleven or so than the mature twenty-seven-year-old the dossier said I was. Perhaps that had been part of his problem.

For the body was that of Park Lacoch, the Butcher of Bonhomme. I remembered Park’s case from recent press reports—recent to the old me, anyway. He had a real thing about women, and on the frontier he’d been an insidious terror.