Jack Chalker - Songs of the Dancing Gods

The sorcerer looked over at Macore. “And what of you?”

The little thief shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing’s much fun anymore. Stealing’s too easy, I already got a fortune, and the thrill is gone. I been thinking maybe I oughta pack it in.” Seeing their suddenly stricken looks he added, “No! No! I’m not gonna kill myself or anything like that! Relax! I mean take my money and go down south. Find somebody who loves little guys and looks like Mary Ann, or maybe Mahalo McMahon or somebody equally nice, and enjoy life for a change. With my money, even with my looks, attracting the girls won’t be a problem, but attracting the right one will.”

“And what will you do otherwise?” Tiana asked him.

“I thought maybe I’d have myself a big boat. Go out in the southern ocean, fish, laze around. Maybe give tours of the islands if I get bored.”

Marge looked over at him. “Uh-huh. And how long an island tour?”

He smiled sheepishly. “Oh, maybe three hours.”

Marge and Ruddygore walked across the central courtyard in the darkness. The crater was refilling nicely, already up to perhaps ninety percent of its old level, and things were calming down, both there and out in the region of the Devastation.

Sitting on the crater wall, idly swinging a leg back and forth, was the figure of a nymph, four feet tall with dark green hair and exaggeratedly endowed as were all nymphs.

“Hello, Joe,” Ruddygore said. “How are you doing?”

“About as well as can be expected,” the nymph replied in that soft, sexy voice they all had variations of. “It’s still just sinking in, really. It’s hard enough to accept that all my old enemies are dead, even if I did have a hand in it. Accepting this will be a lot harder. Right now it’s okay—I mean, I’ve been a fairy before as a were and kept all my senses and personality and all that and adjusted pretty well, so it’s been good training— but when the sun’s up and it doesn’t go away, or when it’s a new moon and I’m still this way, well, after a while, it’s gonna be hard.”

“Oh, maybe not as hard as you think,” the sorcerer consoled. “You have few physical needs, and you have powers that will come to you over time and will help you when needed. You have your wisdom and your experience. Not only are you unique in having your full self to call upon, you’re also unique in a different way. Your first true tree was the lava tree. It accepted you, probably because of the genuineness of your sacrifice before it. You’re not limited to it or stuck up here, but you are now, with me, a guardian of it, and of its secret. Because you mated with it first, its juices flow within you. It’s as if you ate of it. You’re invulnerable, Joe. Even iron will not hurt you. That’s why the sword could be used and why you could throw it back. You can survive anything, just like this tree.”

The nymph frowned. “You mean I could have picked up Irving and swung it?”

“You could if you could have picked it up, which I doubt. It weighed pretty much the same if not more than you do.”

“There’s that. But that means I’m stuck this way forever.”

He nodded. “In a sense, you’re sort of a minor deity. Other nymphs will sense that, by the way. You can heal them and their trees and groves and lend them power. I think that’s a far better occupation in general than going around slicing people up.” “I never sliced anybody that didn’t deserve slicing!” Joe protested. “But, yeah, it was kinda getting old. But this will get old even faster. I mean, I grew up tough, in a culture where the women had the kids and the guys worked three jobs to support ’em, fought hard, drank hard, drove hard. It’s not just the sex. It might be a kick to be an Amazon. But I’m a four-foot-tall, automatically sexy, pale green bimbo!”

Ruddygore thought a moment, scratching his chin through his beard. “Well, there are minor true deities that rule each of the races of faerie, like Marge’s Earth Mother. They have certain discretionary powers within their realm. Everyone’s a little male and female, opposites in one. The yin and yang, the Oriental philosophers call it. If I asked politely, I might get you shifted over into the male side.”

She looked up at him. “And what’s a male nymph?”

“A satyr.”

“Little guys with goat’s legs and horns who dance around playing these big wide flutes?”

“That’s them. Don’t knock those flutes. We had a real artist among satyrs a few years back. We fed him a lot of Earth tunes, had him record them, got a fellow on Earth to front for him, and sold two million copies of pan flute records on late night television.”

“No.” She sighed. “Maybe I’ll get desperate enough sooner or later to give it a try, but me dancing around with the chipmunks on goat’s feet is an even wilder wrongness than this. At least I look like something here that wasn’t put together by a committee.”

“Your real problem,” Ruddygore said, “isn’t your form or nature, it’s the fact that what you were destined to do is done; it’s over, and while you’re weary of all this and crave some stability, you also have suddenly been deprived of anything left to do.”

“That is pretty much it,” she admitted. “Things haven’t exactly wound up as I imagined them, with me and Ti riding off into the glorious sunset.”

“No, that’s fairy tales. Sagas, on the other hand, are never without cost, and the principals rarely wind up truly happy when the evil is defeated. The constellations are filled with the shapes of creatures and personalities of myths and legends from hundreds of cultures, most of whom, it is alleged, wound up there because they came to unhappy conclusions.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“It would never have worked with you and Tiana. Love does not conquer all and you know it. Ti is best at doing what he is going to be doing. Nobody can do that job as well or as faithfully. But that sort of role drove you insane once before and would again. It’s simply not your element. She would have sacrificed it to remain your slave, but you would have been so guilty at the waste of her considerable talents and skills and intelligence locked in at that level. In the end, both of you would have been miserable.”

“Did you tell her about me? Did she figure it out?”

“No. Sooner or later it might come to Tiana, but we decided that it was your decision. I think you should, though. As a man and hating it, and as an absolute monarch of sorts, she’s going to be very lonely. Just visits and talk—no permanence—would probably help her a great deal.”

“I’ll think about it. I’m just not ready to handle that yet.”

“I understand. But it’s part of the future. And, of course, you have a son.”

Her head shot up. “You think that isn’t the number one thing on my mind? I had this vision, father and son, roaming Husa-quahr, showing him the sights and delights, watching at least the last half of his childhood. Doing things with him—fishing, hunting, all that. But he’s here because his dad’s a big, tough guy, with a sword that cuts through stone, and afraid of nothing at all. What am I gonna do? Walk into Terindell and say, ‘Hi, Irving, I’m back, only I’ve been changed forever into a four-foot-tall, sexy, green nymph girl. Wanna go fishing?’ ”

“He might take it a lot better than his father being dead and him here alone,” Marge put in. “He needs somebody.”

“He might not even be quite as put off as you think,” Ruddy-gore added. “During his last exercise, he was trapped, inevitably, by the Circe, and turned into a pig. He’s restored now, but it’ll be some time before he lives that down. He’s actually adapting quite well to the way things work here now. He’s even showing some magical talents that I was quite unprepared for. From his mother, I suppose. It’s a rather different sort of magic than mine, but he has great potential. Poquah has been giving him instruction in the same way Gorodo is teaching him the fighting skills. He’s going to be somebody someday, Joe. He’s got the talent and the will for it.”