“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
“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.”
8
WONDROUS PATHWAYS
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.
In just the few days of travel to Anchor Logh, she had intuitively and deductively learned more about strings than all but a handful of people ever learned with years of teaching and experience. She could not know this, nor that even the best stringers and wizards could read and sort out only the most recent paths, the rest blending into the original pattern. It was not her degree of Flux power alone that gave her this ability to read, see, sort, interpret, and remember those millions of traces, but also the new internal language and manner in which her brain now processed information.
Anchor was different, yet in some ways the same. A blade of grass was not simply that, but a complex structure built in a specific pattern. She felt as if she could peer into its very makeup, which, in a sense, she could. Each tree, flower, leaf, even a blade of grass was unique and different and those differences were endlessly fascinating to her. Her behavior seemed often odd, unusual, and childlike to those watching her, but it was instead highly intellectual and highly complex. She was seeing in a way they could never see and understanding in a way they could never understand.
Anchor Logh was at once wondrous and painful. Here she had grown up, and here she was well-known. The pity and grief from family and friends was very hard to bear, and she longed for some way to tell them that it was all right, that she would not go back to being one of them even if she could.
She drew crowds in Anchor, of course. Lots of pity mixed with an endless fascination with the bizarre that was a part of human nature. She didn’t mind it from strangers at all, and the children were wonderful, treating her as some sort of magical fairy sprite. She played silly games with them and drew out their laughter and felt well- rewarded.
And yet, the more human she was in the basics of emotion, the less she became in other areas. The psychological changes in her accelerated with the trip, and the journey home had gotten out of her system the one last link to her past. She liked people and enjoyed being with them, but she could no longer in the least understand them. Slowly but systematically, the bits and pieces of what it was like to be one of them were being erased or shut off in her mind. At Hope she had separated herself forever from their form of existence. Now, in Anchor Logh, she crossed the last mental hold to the past. She not only could no longer remember not being as she was; she could no longer even conceive of it. Once she left the farm with Suzl for the gate and Flux once more, she erased the past completely from her mind. All of the human culture into which she’d been born and raised was now irrelevant to her, and what was irrelevant did not exist.
The last link was broken with the return to Hope. The point had been made and proven. Short of her mother using her powers to force her to remain, a prisoner, she would not be contained, and she wasn’t even sure if her mother had the power to restrain her. Kasdi, however, had no intention of doing so. She surrendered to the inevitable and let her daughter go.
For the next few weeks, Spirit stayed with Ravi and Suzl’s stringer train, making stops at three more Fluxlands and one other Anchor that was quite different than Anchor Logh. Everything was different, everything a wonder, but still she began to feel confined. As long as she was under their wing, she was trapped, in a way, in a culture she could no longer understand.
The duggers, of course, treated her as if she were one of their own, which in a very real sense she was, but they, too, were part of a life different from hers. The old Spirit would have found most of them horrible, grotesque, bizarre—but she just found them a new series of unique wonders. Suzl was the biggest shock and wonder, though, since she didn’t seem to be a true dugger at all. Yet, once, when they had set up tents and camped out for two days in a Pocket waiting for the main stringer train to rendezvous with them, she had playfully peered inside Suzl’s tent (although she would never enter it) and seen her in the midst of changing clothes. She’d been bending over, displaying the largest ass Spirit had ever seen, and it was a shock to see those enormous breasts actually touching the floor of the tent. Spirit could not imagine what having that sort of frontage would feel like. Then Suzl had heard her, straightened up and turned around, and she saw the male organ so huge that it almost reached the dugger’s knees. Suzl grinned at the shock on Spirit’s face, and then the girl knew that this was a dugger indeed, in her own way as inhuman as the most deformed of the ones on the train.
Suzl started to reach for her special undergarments needed to manage and work with her enlarged deformities, but then stopped, winked, and came out of the tent just as she was. Ravi was off, and there were only a few duggers about who paid no attention at all. Suzl was so short without the boots that the top of her head barely came up to the nipples on Spirit’s breasts, but there was something in the strange man/woman’s bizarre
