Empires of Flux & Anchor

concrete or rock. She still had hold of Spirit’s hand, and she calmed down as she realized she could breathe. She felt Spirit starting to panic at the closed-in darkness, and didn’t feel very reassuring, but she kept hold of the hand and began to probe. She wished violently to see.

Suddenly the place was bathed in an eerie, unnatural light. Suzl realized then that they were still on the gate, which was in the floor on this side, and that that gate was still, technically, Flux. The light she was seeing was being created by the energy around her.

She looked around frantically, fearing that Coydt and his buddies would be through behind them in a second, and saw a trap door in the ceiling which was not two meters above them. Of course! They had to have some way to get that concrete in!

She stared at it and pushed with her Flux power. It budged, then moved up and out of the way. They went for it, and suddenly the only light was the faint electric light from the opening above. Spirit reached down and, with difficulty, picked Suzl up and pushed her through the opening and to the floor above. Then Suzl strained to pull Spirit up enough to get both elbows on the flooring and hoist herself up. It was an ordeal, with the swollen abdomen, in Anchor.

They caught their breath for a moment, but Suzl could feel Spirit’s claustrophobia returning. They had to find somebody somewhere in this temple. There was not only a lot of news to tell, but somebody also ought to know that it didn’t matter how much junk you heaped on top of that Flux entry—it ignored it.

Coydt had known, she realized.

One of Kasdi’s innovations had been the installation of arrow exit-pointers in every corridor and stairway in every temple. Her whole life had been changed because she’d gotten lost in a temple once, and she’d never forgotten it. Suzl, therefore, was able to just follow the glowing green arrows, thanking heaven that Spirit had not been alone in trying this. The arrows would have meant nothing to her.

They were only part way up when they ran into a priestess in an administrative robe who was far more shocked to bump into them than the other way around. Suzl, in fact, thought she’d lost her mind, because she kept shrieking and making all sorts of weird noises.

She tried to tell the woman who they were and ask where they were, but found she couldn’t. Her mouth just wouldn’t form the words. Now I know how Spirit feels, she grumped, then straightened in shock. It was exactly how Spirit was. And now, as other priestesses scurried up to them, all making nonsense sounds, she realized that there had been a price to pay for all that Flux power.

The Soul Rider knew that it had to communicate directly with her in order to provide what was needed. Not residing in her body, it could not access her thoughts directly and feed what was needed. So they needed a common, transmittable language. Spirit’s nonverbal language. The language of the Soul Rider and the big machine.

That was why she was able to recognize so clearly those machine spells and identities, although none other ever had. That was why she could see the pitiful human attempts at mocking the language commands, commands they called “spells.” That was why the nonverbal link with Spirit was so clear it was almost thought-to-thought, but she’d been unable to understand Coydt and his men.

She had no spells on her but the Soul Rider’s, and she was not limited as Spirit was. Spirit’s spell had to outwardly mimic Coydt’s or else he would never have freed her. So Suzl had no fear of artifacts, no confusion as to signs and tools, any more than any other human. But her mind had been converted to the language of the machines, and that made speaking, understanding, reading, and writing impossible.

She had all that news, all that information, and no way to impart it to anyone. She was not back the way she used to be, but still very much a freak in the human world.

10 KILLING HEROES

By the time help arrived, Suzl was ready to commit mass murder or even suicide. Her temper was calmed only by Spirit, and even she had problems containing her emotional partner.

First they’d tried to keep them in the temple while Spirit was going nuts. Then somebody recognized Spirit and understood that problem, but they all got worried and overly solicitous of the pregnant girl. Then they had problems with Suzl. Word had come of Spirit’s attachment to a stranger dugger, but here was a perfectly normal-looking young woman, totally nude, who didn’t seem able to speak or understand any more than Spirit.

At that point there was sudden fear of an epidemic, as if Suzl was proof that whatever was wrong with Spirit was catching. So they wound up sticking them in a livestock pen that wasn’t private and had been recently used by cows as it was intended to, delivering food to them on trays attached to long sticks.

After a little of that, some wiser heads in the Church decided that it would be a bit hard to explain this sort of condition should Sister Kasdi show up, and they were moved out of town to a small pasture which had few trees but some room. It wasn’t great, but it beat the livestock pen.

She did have time to reflect on the earlier situation, though, and realized that her present form was useful in at least one way. The saddlebag on her horse had contained her registration document and photos as well as all her vitals as a dugger. All of that showed, of course, a deformed creature with massive sexual abnormalities. She was very different looking now, so at least Coydt’s people would be looking for someone who no longer existed. Unfortunately, they would also tie that creature and that name to Spirit, and they were sitting ducks out there if word got around that Spirit was in fact there.

“There” was Anchor Nanzee; that much was clear. It was the easternmost of the cluster that contained Anchor Logh, and Suzl had been there many times with Ravi on the route. It was hard rock and rolling country, with some rugged-looking, tree-covered hills, and it was here that some of the new scientific generation were actually talking of getting electricity from water. How that was possible when water even put out a match Suzl never understood, but after half her life in Flux she didn’t disbelieve anything anymore.

Suzl was also getting more and more frustrated by her inability to communicate and almost envied Spirit’s blithe acceptance. Not long ago she had been the most grotesque of freaks, but fully able to communicate. Now she found that even simple and obvious sign language would tend to bring less understanding than smiles. She thought being a physical freak was in some ways easier to take. Nobody necessarily confused deformity with stupidity, since it was so easily disproved, but mutes, it seemed, were always assumed to be childish or retarded.

Most distressing of all was that Spirit, being in Anchor, now was suffering the pains and discomforts of pregnancy, problems Suzl could sense and almost feel herself, but that she could do nothing about.

It was a real relief when, after four days, Sister Kasdi showed up. By that point they were both very glad to see anybody, but Kasdi was more shocked at Suzl’s appearance now than she had been in Pericles.

Oh, Goddess forgive me! she thought. I’ve given my own daughter to a lesbian relationship and sanctified it with a church marriage! And nobody looking at Spirit could say it wasn’t-consummated either. Of all the Suzls, she felt least comfortable with this one. The fat dugger woman pushing middle age was consistent with her own view of herself and her generation; the spell-deformed creature was horrible, but there was a certain acceptance of it. But here was Suzl, looking like she had looked back in school in Anchor Logh, all cute and chubby and very much all-woman—and apparently nearly worshipped even now by her beautiful and pregnant daughter.

Clearly, something very strange had happened to them on their way to their new home, and it wasn’t anything she could handle there or even at Hope. She got them washed off and cleaned up, then headed for Flux. She decided she could use the huge bird form and somehow carry both of them on her back, so she worked the spell. Suzl watched, saw the spell, made several improvements on it, then did it herself. She knew that Spirit could never ride on her mother’s back, but she might permit herself to be picked up and held by Suzl’s clawlike legs.

When Suzl worked her transformation, Kasdi was even more shocked. Somehow Suzl had Flux power now and the ability to use it. She almost oozed it, in fact—and this was inexplicable. Bowing to the inevitable, she took off and headed back for Pericles.

Suzl found flying tremendous fun, and she was fascinated to see at last the stringer trails she’d followed blindly for so long. From up high they looked like a series of crisscrossing, multicolored carnival lights stretching off