Charon: A Dragon at the Gate

CHAPTER FOUR Interviews and Placement

Over the next few days we got down to learning the basics of the planet through a series of lectures that would normally be very boring—and really were—but which even the most thick-headed of us realized we needed before we took our place in this new society.

The economy of Charon was almost entirely agricultural, a combination of subsistence and plantation farming. The service industries were still very primitive. While little could be brought into the Warden Diamond from Outside—the general term for every place except the Warden system—the planets themselves were not without resources, and material from one world could be shipped and used on others. There were sea creatures that could be caught and eaten that were rich in protein and minerals, and many creatures of the land could also be carefully raised for food. The skins of some of these reptilian creatures were also useful. Shipped to Cerberus, where they apparently had elaborate manufacturing facilities, they could be made into everything from the best waterproof clothing you could find to roofing and insulation materials.

I couldn’t help but wonder about my Lilith counterpart. I myself was having a tough time with this non-technological culture on Charon; I wondered if I would even survive in a world whose denizens were rabidly anti-technological. “I” was probably doing far better on Cerberus and Medusa, both of which had a technological level which, if below what I was used to, was nonetheless closer to my element.

Another export was the woodlike material that made up the rain forests and provided the foundations for Charon’s buildings. Its weather-proofing properties and hardness made it desirable even on worlds that had their own trees.

So they exported a great deal of it to Medusa to pay for raw materials. Medusa controlled the asteroid and moon mining industries. The raw materials were sent to Cerberus where they were made into things they needed and could use under their peculiar conditions. All in all it was a neat and interdependent system.

The political system on Charon was also a good topic, and a most revealing one. I remembered Krega’s comment that Matuze would become a goddess if she could and I was thus not as surprised as the rest.

The vast majority of the eleven million or so inhabitants of Charon were, of course, the workers who were mere citizens. In a nicely feudal arrangement, they worked for Companies—a euphemism for plantations basically—in exchange for which the Companies guaranteed their safety and all their basic needs.

There was a small town at the center of every dozen or so Companies, and the townspeople were also organized, this time into what were called Unions, based on trade, profession, or skill. The political head of each town was, interestingly but logically, the Town Accountant, whose office kept all the books not only on what the town produced or provided but what the Companies owed for those services. Although it was a barter system (until you got to the very top anyway), some money was in circulation—coins, made of some iron alloy. They were a good small currency, since without any significant metals the supply was strictly controlled by trade with Medusa.

In the Companies, the coins were used basically as rewards for exceptional work, so there was very little money there. In the towns, however, each Union had a set wage and a varying scale of who got paid what based on a number of factors; the money was used to buy some necessities—the Unions provided housing—and all luxuries, which weren’t many. The Transportation Union, of course, was planet wide and centered in Honuth; and it used the coins to buy what was needed along the way. Honuth, being the spaceport, was the largest city on Charon—although there was a freight port on the southern continent, a land just now starting to be developed—and greater Hon-uth consisted of maybe five thousand people. The average town was a tenth that size.

Companies and Unions were run by Managers who lived pretty well as long as they produced. The Town Accountants kept tabs on them all, and that tab was forwarded to the Board of Regents which collectively kept track of everything and got the requirements from the towns and Companies and the raw materials and finished products they needed from off-planet The head of the Board of Regents was called the Director, and he was the top government official on Charon. A simple system, one that seemed to work.

However, there was a parallel system as well, and this one was a little bit off the beaten track. It was composed of the small number of men and women who were in command of the Warden organism and its uses. These were the people to watch. As I’d suspected, the political and “magical” ends were not necessarily the same.

At the low end of this parallel system were the apts, the students of the art, who studied under and worked for journeymen magicians, usually referred to as sores, which was short for sorcerers. The sores were represented in every Company and Union and in every Town Accountant’s office, too. They protected the people who had to be protected, enforced the rules and laws, and generally gave advice and consent when asked.

Basically, the magicians and their students were the cops. They reported to a board of Hishops whose responsibilities encompassed whole planetary areas. Collectively this group was known as the Synod.

Interestingly, the Hishops were appointed by the Director, who could hire or fire them at will. I wondered how the hell Matuze could make a firing of somebody that powerful stick—and why the Hishops were in any way obedient to her in the first place—but they were. The reason was something to be found out later. Still, the system confirmed my basic idea that Matuze herself, while probably schooled in those magical arts and reasonably competent, wasn’t the top witch or whatever in terms of magical power.

Sooner or later I’d have to find out just what the Director’s base of power was.

One thing was sure—Matuze had not only all the political power but all the respect and pomp as well. She was almost invariably referred to in ancient royal terms, such as “Her Highness” or even “Her Worship”; but she was nevertheless, the Lord, not the Lady, of the Diamond.

She liked to have her picture everywhere, that was for sure. Four different full-size portraits adorned the lobby. When the rain actually stopped for periods and we had walking tours of the town, I found her likeness almost everywhere, even on many of the corns we were shown—but not all. Older coins showed several men’s faces, different men, and while I was sure she hated them I could see she was practical enough not to go to all the trouble and expense of replacing all the old currency until it was worn out—not when the mint was 160 million kilometers away. All the portraits showed her much the way I remembered her—fairly young, attractive, somewhat aloof and aristocratic. Even though she was from the civilized worlds and conformed to the norm, there was something in that personality that even portraits caught, something that made her stand out. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, if she still really looked that good.

The animal life on Charon was too diverse to keep track of, and was quite strange depending on which of the three continents you were on. Difficult as it was in rain-soaked Honuth to believe, animals existed on the parched central continent for whom rain could be disabling, even deadly. The most important thing, from a survival viewpoint, was that the animals also possess a certain power for magic. It was on a primitive level, of course, but the carnivores, in particular, could quite often make you think they were a tree, a bush, or even a pretty flower, until you came too close. Some of the carrion-eaters in particular could project whole landscapes, disorienting and confusing travelers as well as instinct-driven herbivorous prey, causing bogs to look like rocks or land water.

“In a very real sense,” Garal warned us, “walking along unprotected on Charon in broad daylight in good weather is like walking blindly in pitch-dark night, never knowing what is waiting for you, never knowing what is real and what is not.”

This situation, of course, reinforced the feudal Company system. Nobody dared walk away, nor even travel from town to town, without the protection and abilities of a sore. Charon was a deadly place indeed, well-suited for easy population control and political domination.

But Charon didn’t worry me because in the long run its least common denominators were the same socio-economic factors that supported every world, even the Confederacy itself. Here, you got the training to use the power if you could—the easy way up, like being born to power or position elsewhere. Failing that, you found somebody who did have the power and rode up with that individual, using that person’s power as your own—a slower and more delicate method than the first, but one that worked.

I realized, of course, why we were being kept in this hotel in this rain-soaked town for so long. Our hosts were waiting for the final “set in” of the Warden organism in order to demonstrate its effects—and powers. We were the cream of the criminal crop; we had to be shown explicitly who was boss first.

With one exception, that is. Zala continued to be more and more of an enigma to me. I realized very early on that she had been lying about herself, at least in part—she was never trained to be an accountant or, for that matter, in any similar profession. In just routine conversation and in discussing the briefings it became clear that her counting ability only slightly exceeded the capacity of her fingers and toes; her reading ability was similarly quite basic. That put her well outside any government, business, or scientific areas of expertise. It confined her, in fact, to the lowest job classes, not at all unusual for the frontier but very unusual for one of the civilized worlds.

But lies were the stock in trade of people sent to Charon, so the problem wasn’t that she was lying but that she was a bundle of contradictions. The ego, the sense of self-worth in the job you were born to do, was central to the social fabric of the civilized worlds. Everyone had a job they did well and knew was important, even vital, and something few others could do as well. Sex was casual and recreational There were, of course, no family units and everyone’s egocentrism kept the concept of individualism a core idea. You had a circle of friends certainly, but no dependency on others in a psychological sense. The slogan “Interdependence in work, independence in self* was everywhere and was always being drummed into you.

But not Zala. Zala needed somebody else, and I do mean needed. She latched onto me immediately despite the distinct possibility that I was still a mass murderer of women. I had enjoyed out sexual encounters; she had required, needed them. She was simply incapable of existing, let alone surviving, on her own for very long—and that was an incredible idea for someone like me from the civilized worlds. Timid and passive, she lacked any of the egocentrism I took for granted. I didn’t have any illusions that she’d chosen me because of some innate magnetic charm or superior radiance I gave off. She’d chosen me because I happened to be there, was convenient, and therefore the one.

But once I was chosen, she was totally solicitous of my welfare to the exclusion even of her own, as if she had no thoughts of her own but simply awaited my pleasure. Although her behavior was demeaning in my eyes and bothered me in the extreme, nonetheless I have to admit I got a certain charge from it, since it certainly fed my own ego beyond anything I had come to expect short of service robots.

And yet, and yet… How the hell did somebody like her her ever get to be at all, particularly on the civilized worlds? And why was she sent to the Warden Diamond?

Late in the evening of the fourth day on Charon I decided to confront her. Her response, which was both embarrassed and nervous at being caught in so obvious a lie, did little to answer my basic questions about her.

“I—well, you’re right,” she admitted. “I’m not an administrator. But the rest is true. I am, well, what they call a bio-slot Entertainer, but that isn’t really quite right either. Basically, well, the planetary administrators often have guests from other planets and from the Confederacy itself. There are banquets and entertainments of course for the bigwigs—and I’m part of it. My job is—was—to provide those important people with just about anything they wanted. Keep them happy.”

Now I knew what she meant. I’d seen a number of her type in just such circumstances while working on cases involving business and government bigwigs. The very sameness of the civilized worlds made them pretty dull. When you saw one you saw them all. Even the entertainments, meals and the like were standardized—in the name of equality, of course. It was a perfect and proper system, but there were still men and women in incredibly high places who had to be impressed when they dropped in on your little world, and those in the Entertainer class were the ones to do it They planned and set up banquets that would be unique and offer exotic delicacies. They planned and performed unusual entertainments, including live dancing and even more esoteric demonstrations. And if even sex was boring they could provide really exotic demonstrations there too. So that’s what Zala was—literally programmed and trained and raised to do anything and everything for other people. Cut off from that, she’d naturally latched onto the first person that would make her feel valued—me.

But these facts didn’t explain what she was doing here, or why she had lied.

“As for the lie, well, it seemed better here to be an administrative assistant than an entertainer. They would have just thrown me in some kind of frontier-style brothel and that would have been that. I am not a whore! My profession is a valuable and honorable one—back home.” Big tears started to well up in her eyes, and I found myself somehow on the defensive instead of the attack. She was really good at that.

Still, she stuck to the rest of her story. She was supposedly a genetic illegal, of what kind she hadn’t been told, and she had been shipped here without a clue as to why. Shifting her to the right slot in life had cleared up one of my mysteries, but left her big one still unanswered.

On the afternoon of our fifth day, we got a taste of what was to come on Charon. Some minor tests had been performed without our knowing about them; they proved we were now fully “affiliated”—or seasoned—and ready to face the cold, cruel world. One of the tests, I discovered, involved the excellent soup we’d been served for lunch. Everybody had had some, everybody loved it; the only trouble was there hadn’t been any soup.

At the end of the meal it came as a big shock when Garal stood up and announced, “We will need no service to clear this soup from the table.” He waved his hand, and the soup—bowls, spoon, and tureen—suddenly and abruptly vanished. Even the spots where some had spilled a little on the tablecloth instantly vanished.

Although we’d all been warned to expect this, I’m afraid my jaw dropped as low as any other. The demonstration was incredible—unbelievable. That soup had been as real as my own right hand. And yet, we had all sat there, in reality eating absolutely nothing, and raving about it.

“Now, at last, you see what we mean,” Garal said smugly. “But we need a few more examples just to give you an idea of the range.” He pointed at a young, sandy-haired frontiersman. “You. Float up and over the table and hover there.”

Immediately the startled man rose from his chair, still in a sitting position, floated over to about a meter above the dining table. He grew panicky and started flailing away at the air as we all gaped.

Mogar, the big brute with the single room who was sitting next to the man, reached over to the now empty chair and felt around. His IQ was obviously higher than I’d thought—it’s exactly what I would have done. “Th—he’s not in the chair!” the big man growled in amazement. To prove it, even to himself, he moved down one and sat in the chair.

“Stop thrashing about in the air!” Garal snapped, but the hapless floating man didn’t heed him. Finally Garal, in a disgusted tone, said, “All right then—get down from therel” He snapped his fingers. The man fell into the center of the table with a loud crash, almost knocking it over. Soup wasn’t the only course we’d had, and he got up a little dizzily covered in leftovers.

We were all stunned. Levitation? “I thought you said the magic wasn’t real,” I remarked suspiciously. “If that wasn’t real—what is?”

Garal smiled. “Now you’re getting the true measure of Charon. What is real here? Did that man float up, then fall? Or did he climb up under the impression he was floating and then fall into the food? Do you know?”

“Do you!” somebody grumbled.

He smiled. “In this case, yes, I do. But I don’t always know. You have to be a real master of this always to tell what’s real and what’s not—and usually, even then, there’s somebody around at least as good as you who can fool you. The point is, you can’t trust anybody or anything on Charon. Never.” He snapped his fingers once again, and we all fell smack on our behinds. The chairs we had been sitting in had all abruptly vanished.

Garal laughed. “You see? Real or illusion? Because / will it even / see what you see, perceive it as you perceive it. A perfect check on my own handiwork. Had someone come in who’d never met any of us before while you were sitting eating your soup, that person would have seen you all sitting there eating soup. They would see what you saw, smell what you smelled, the works. Why? Not because I willed the illusion, but because you believed it—and radiated it.”

Zala picked herself up a little painfully and then helped me to my feet. We were all more than a little shaken.

“Enough of these children’s games,” our host proclaimed, “you now know exactly what you’re in for. It’s not really all that bad—nor is it all that easy. Spells and counterspells, mental control and discipline, those are the keys and they aren’t easily learned—and even less easily tamed.”

“Well how do we know what’s real, then?” somebody asked.

He took the question seriously. “There is only one way to survive and prosper on Charon. Only one. You must act as if everything is real—even magic. You have to discard all your notions of the past and live as if you were part of a children’s fairy tale. You’re in a world where magic works. You’re in a world where sorcery, not science, reigns, even though it knows and understands scientific principles. You’re in a world where science, natural law, and even logic and common sense can be suspended at the whim of certain people. It doesn’t matter if we’re dealing with reality or illusion—it doesn’t matter one bit. No matter what it is, it is real to you, and to everyone else. Look—see that pitcher of fruit juice on the table?”

We all looked at it, expecting it to vanish. It did not Instead, Garal concentrated, half shutting his eyes, and pointed to the pitcher.

Slowly the yellow liquid inside seemed to churn, to bubble, to run through with many colors, while smoking and hissing. It was an ugly brew now, and all the more so because we had all drank from that pitcher earlier.

Garal opened his eyes and looked at us seriously. “Now, that pitcher contained one hundred percent nui juice and nothing else. I have just changed the contents into a deadly poison—or have I? You all see and smell the stuff, don’t you?”

We all just murmured assent or nodded. “All right, then. Stand back a bit.” He walked up, carefully lifted the pitcher, and spilled a small drop on the edge of the table. It hissed and bubbled and began eating through the tablecloth and into the finish. Then he replaced the pitcher on the table.

“Now, did I just change that into a deadly acid, or is that still a pitcher of fruit juice?”

“It’s still fruit juice,” somebody said, and reached for it “No! Don’t touch it!” Garal almost yelled; the man hesitated. “Don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter what it really is! It doesn’t matter a bit! You all perceive it as acid—and so for you it is acid. If you got some on you it would burn a hole in you. Why? Because you’d subconsciously tell the Wardens in your own body that it was acid, and your cells and molecules would react accordingly. We believe it’s acid, and so our Wardens tell those in the tablecloth and top that it’s acid, and they, having no sensory apparatus of their own, believe it too, and react accordingly. Don’t you see? Whether it is illusion or not, this is not simple hypnosis.” He waved an arm at the room as a whole. “See all this? It’s not dead. It’s alive! The rocks and trees outside are alive. The table, walls, clothing, everything is alive. Alive with Wardens. And so are you and so am I.

“Wardens don’t think, but they hear what you are thinking and they act accordingly. They broadcast that to all the other Wardens, and those Wardens act accordingly. That is acid because your senses tell your brain it is acid—that’s hypnosis. But your brain tells the Wardens, and the others that it is acid—and that’s not hypnosis. That is acid.”

Tiliar entered from the rear accompanied by a distinguished-looking man, in his forties perhaps, wearing a long black robe adorned with golden and silver threads. He was gray-haired, an unusual sight in one so young, and had a ruddy complexion, as if he’d spent a lot of his time in a hard outdoor climate. Not this climate, though—he certainly was dry enough.

Garal stepped back and bowed slightly in deference to the newcomer. Both he and Tiliar treated the man with respect, the respect of subordinates to the boss.

He stopped and looked around at us, then at the acid still sputtering in the pitcher, and smiled. With no sign of concentration or effort at all, he mumbled a word and pointed to the pitcher, which immediately ceased bubbling and quickly began to transform itself back into fruit juice. Once its normal, healthy yellow color was restored, he walked over to it, picked it up, materialized a glass from somewhere, and poured juice into the glass. He then drank about half and looked satisfied, then put the glass back down on the table.

“My name is Korman,” he introduced himself, his voice a mellow and pleasant baritone with an air of extreme confidence in its tone. “I’m what the locals would call the sore—the town sorcerer. I’m also one of those who sit in the Synod, so I’m here as the official representative of the government of Charon and Her Worship, the Queen Aeola, Lord of the Diamond. Welcome.”

That was a new one. So she was queen now? Could goddess be far behind—or would that be too much even for the Synod?

“My assistants here will be setting up an interview table in the rear while we chat,” he continued, “and I hope I can answer some of your questions.” He paused a moment “Oh, how inconsiderate of me!” He snapped his fingers and the chairs reappeared. In addition to ours, an almost throne like wooden monster appeared at the head of the table. He sat in it.

We all eyed the chairs with some suspicion, which gave Korman some amusement.

“Oh, come, come,” he admonished us, “please have a seat—or has nothing Garal told you sunk in as yet? Face it, you don’t know if the chairs were always there and only seemed to vanish, or whether there never were any chairs. And does it make any difference? These chairs are solid and comfortable. They will support you. You can go completely mad here trying to decide if things like that are real. Accept what your senses tell you. Sit down, please!”

With a shrug, I sat down, and slowly, the others followed suit. Korman was right of course, it made no practical difference whatsoever whether or not the chairs were real. However, I had a pretty good idea they were—Garal just didn’t look like the type to exert himself to actually carry the things out, and they had been real the previous four days.

“That’s better,” the wizard approved. “Now, let’s begin. First of all, none of you are ordinary to us. Oh, I know, it sounds like a political snow job, but I mean it. We have a lot of ordinary people to work the farms and fields. Some of the other worlds of the Diamond waste resources like you, would just throw you together with the peasants and forget about you, but not us. Each of you is here for a reason, each of you has special skills learned Outside that would take years to learn here. We don’t propose to throw away any valuable talents and skills you might have just because you’re new here. We don’t get many Outsiders these days—you’re the first small batch in more than three years—and we don’t propose to have you out there picking fruit if you have something we can use.”

That was something of a relief to me and probably to most of the others at the table. None of us had any desire to be peasants, and we all, for good reasons and bad, had pretty high opinions of ourselves. But Korman’s statement also had an element of insecurity in it, for the challenge was clear—they would make good use of us only if we could show them a talent or skill they needed. What if everything one knew proved obsolete at Charon’s quaint technological level?

“Now,” he went on, “when you arrived here you were told your past was behind you, that no reference to it would be made. That is the stock speech everybody gets on all the Warden worlds, and there is a measure of truth in it. If there is anybody here who does not wish his or her past to be brought up ever again and wants a totally clean start, you are free to tell me now. We will destroy your dossier back there and you will be assigned as an unskilled laborer under any name you wish. That is your right. Anybody?”

People looked at one another, but nobody made a move or said anything. For a moment I thought Zala might, but she just took my hand and squeezed it. Nobody in this group wanted to spend the rest of his life as a melon picker in a swamp.

After a suitable pause, Korman nodded to himself. “Very well then. Your silence is consent to reopen your past—just a little. Now, one at a time I would like to interview each of you. Do not lie to me, for I will know it, I guarantee you. And if I am lied to, I will place a spell of truthfulness on you and keep it there so you will be forever incapable of lying again. You can appreciate how embarrassing that would be.”

Uh-oh. I didn’t like that at all. Still, not lying was not the same thing as telling the truth. If I could fool some of the best machines, I should have little trouble fooling a real person.

“Now, before we begin, are there any general questions you want answered?”

We looked around, mostly at one another. Finally, I decided to be the brave one. “Yeah. How do we get trained in the, ah, magical arts?”

He looked amused. “A good question. Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t. Not right away, certainly—there’s a certain mind-set you have to acquire over time before the training will do you much good. As long as you are in any way concerned with what is real and what is not it’s hopeless. Only when you accept this world and this culture on its own terms can you begin. Your entire lives have been rooted in science, in faith in science, in belief in science and experimental evidence. Empiricism is your cultural bias. But here, where an experiment of any sort will always come out that way I decide it should, that’s not valid. We’ll know when—or if—you’re ready, and so will you.”

Somebody else had a good question. “These things we see that you and the others cause—I know everybody here sees ’em, but what about anybody not from here? Somebody from a different Warden world, maybe. Or a camera.”

“Two questions,” Korman replied, “and two answers. The easy one first, I think. Cameras. Cameras down here will take pictures, and no matter what is actually photographed the picture will be perceived as what was believed to have been photographed. Say I turn you into a uhar. This fellow here then takes your picture. He looks at the picture, and he sees a uhar. He takes the picture to a different town and shows it to somebody else. They see a uhar because you see a uhar, so the question’s moot. Incidentally robotic devices don’t work well down here—the electrical fields and storms of Charon will short out any known power plant I’ve heard of in fairly quick order. The same properties disrupt aerial or satellite surveillance. But even if a robot worked here, it would be nothing more than a guide for the bund, and one you could never fully trust because you wouldn’t know all the questions to ask it.”

“And somebody not from here?” the questioner prompted.

“Well, that’s more complicated. Our Wardens are a mutated strain of the other Wardens. Our Wardens don’t talk to the Wardens of the other three planets, just to those like themselves. So a visitor here from Lilith, say, would see things as they really are. However, on Charon our wishes have a way of partially coming true. A building must be a building, or the winds rush through and the storms will get you. It may not really be as fancy as it looks to us, but it’s a building all the same. Organic matter, however, is a different story. If I turn you into a uhar, as my previous example shows, you’ll believe you’re a uhar. So will the Wardens in your body. Now, we don’t know how they get the information, let alone the energy, but, slowly, the illusion will become the reality. Your cells will change accordingly, or be replaced. The whole complex biochemistry of the uhar is suddenly available to your Wardens. Perhaps they just contact their brethren in a real uhar, I don’t know, but they draw all the information they need, and they draw energy from somewhere outside themselves and convert it to matter as needed; so, over a period of time, you will be a. uhar. Really. And then even our visitor from Lilith will see you as such.”

This was a new, exciting, and yet frightening idea. Transmutation was not something I relished. Still, something very important was involved here. The Wardens could get information, incredibly complex information—more complex and detailed than the best computers—and then act upon it, even converting energy to matter to achieve it I mentally filed the information for future reference.

Korman looked around. “Anything else? No? Well then, let’s begin. I’m sure you are anxious to get out of this place and pick up your lives. We are just as anxious to give this hotel back to its regular patrons, who are none too happy about the arrangement.” He stood up and walked back to his two assistants, who had set up a folding table and placed a stack of thick file folders on it. He walked behind the table, sat down on a folding chair, and picked up the first of the dossiers. “Mojet Kaigh!” he called out.

One of the men in our “group walked nervously over to the table and sat down at another folding chair placed in front They were just slightly too far away to hear them when they talked in low tones, but normal conversation carried sufficiently so that we were all more or less in on the interview.

It was pretty routine really. Name, age, special skills and backgrounds—things like that. Then right in the middle I experienced something odd, as if, somehow, a second or two was lost—sort of edited out. Nobody else seemed to notice it and so I said nothing, but it was eerie nonetheless—either this was something I should know about or it was me, and the latter worried me the most.

The same thing happened during the second and third interviews—a sense of following along, hearing the routine procedure when, blip, there was a sudden slight difference in the scene—people slightly out of position, something like that. The more it happened, the more I became convinced that something not apparent to everyone else was happening.

Interestingly, the occurrence was repeated with each interview except one—Zala’s. I followed what was going on particularly keenly, not only looking for the telltale blackout but also to see how well Korman’s records jibed with Zala’s own version of her life. It was pretty close, I had to admit—and there was no disorientation.

I fidgeted irritably as the boring process continued, although it was not completely without interest. Our big bully upstairs with the private room had been something of a dictator, it appeared, on an off-the-beaten-track frontier world; he had a particular fondness for grotesque maimings and the like. Although this information confirmed the man’s chilling aura, it also reminded me that big, brawny, and nasty did not necessarily mean stupid. Anybody who could pull off a virtual planetary takeover and hold on for almost six years was definitely on the genius side—which is why he was here at all. Aeolia Matuze would love him—but whether he’d play ball with her was something else again.

I was kept for last, and when Korman called my name it was with a great deal of curiosity that I approached the table. Would I too suffer an “edit”?

He was pleasant and businesslike enough, as he had been with the others.

“You are Park Lacoch?”

“I am,” I responded.

“You have no objections to your past being reviewed?”

I hesitated for what I judged was an appropriate length of time, then said, “No, I guess not.”

He nodded. “I understand your apprehension. You are a most colorful character, Lacoch—did you know that?”

“I hardly think that’s the word most people would use.”

He chuckled dryly. “I daresay. Still, you’re in a long line of mass murderers from respected backgrounds. They color human history and make its humdrum aspects more interesting. I gather they solved your basic problem?”

“You could say that. I was in deep psych for quite a long time, you understand. I emerged as what they call sane, but because of my notoriety I could hardly be returned to society.”

“You see what I mean about colorful? Yes, that fits. Also, we could hardly ignore the fact that you’ve shared quarters here with a woman and have now spent a week in a town full of them and you’ve been nothing but civilized to all. Tell me, though, honestly—do you think that any conditions might set you off again, even the most extreme?”

I shrugged. “Who can say? I don’t think so, not any more than you or anybody else. I’m pretty well at peace with myself on that score, so much so I can’t even imagine myself doing such things, though I know I did.”

“What about killing in general? Could you kill someone under any conditions?”

That was pretty easy. “Of course. If somebody was trying to kill me, for example. They didn’t take that route out with me, sir. I wasn’t programmed—I was cured.”

He nodded approvingly, then looked up suddenly and straight at me, eyes wide, almost burning—a hypnotic gaze, an amazing one, but it flared for only a second and then was gone. Korman sighed and relaxed a moment. “There, we’re alone now.”

I jumped. “Huh?” I looked around at—well, nothing. There appeared to be a huge, smooth black wall right in back of me.

It was clearly too routine a thing for him to even be amused by my reaction. “A simple thing. When we return to the real world once more none of your compatriots will even be aware of any gap.”

“So that’s what happened! I noticed the jerkiness.”

“I’m impressed. Almost nobody does, you know. The brain fills in the gap or explains it away. You say you noticed it with others?”

I nodded. “The first time I thought I was going a little crazy, but when it happened again and again I knew something was up.”

“You noticed it with every one of them?”

I smiled, seeing his probe. “All but Zala. You didn’t take her aside like this, I don’t think.”

He nodded approvingly. “You’re quite correct. I don’t think I’ve underestimated you, Lacoch. With training, you might even gain and control the Power yourself. You have demonstrated an abnormally early affinity.”

“I’d like to give it a try,” I told him sincerely—and that was no lie.

“We’ll see. Chance has placed you in a most fortuitous position, Lacoch, and now you show even more interesting abilities. You’ve got a golden opportunity to go far on Charon.”

“Oh? In what way?” I was both curious and a bit suspicious at all this interest. I didn’t like having attention called to myself quite this early in the game.

Korman thought a moment, seeming to wrestle with some question in his mind. Whatever the dilemma, he seemed to resolve it and sighed.

“A little more than five years ago the Lord of Charon was Tulio Koril. He was a wily old rogue, and tremendously powerful. He had little stomach for the routine affairs of state—when one can be a god, how much more do bureaucracy, paperwork, and routine decisions weigh on him?”

“Why did he keep at it, then?”

“A sense of duty, of obligation, mostly. He derived no joy from it, but he saw the potential for terrible abuse in the position and felt that any of his logical successors would be a disaster—his opinion, of course, which has to be balanced against the egomania necessary to get to be Lord in the first place.”

“A Warden man with a sense of duty and obligation?”

“There are many. I fancy myself one, in fact. You are as much an outcast as any of us, yet far more than we, you are the product of the society that cast you out. It is a society that aims overall for the common good, but to achieve that aim it requires all its citizens to take a certain viewpoint that is not necessarily the only one. Many of us are criminals by any lights, of course, but many more are criminal only because we dared take or develop a different viewpoint than the one the Confederacy favors. Throughout man’s dirty history ‘different’ was always equated with evil, when ‘different’ is—well, simply ‘different.’ If their system is perfect, why do they employ detectives, assassins, and, for that matter, how the hell can they produce us!”

It was not a question easily answered, nor profitably responded to at this time. I said nothing.

“When first the Confederacy system was imposed, they set then: assassins to execute those few who would not or could not adapt. That was centuries ago, and many millions of lives ago, and yet the unadapted are still here—and they are still out there killing. You know something, Lacoch? No matter how many they kill, no matter how many they reprogram, no matter what means they develop to control mind and body—we will still exist. Those who would shape history never learn from it, and yet if they did they would see in people like us the greatness of man, why he’s out here among the stars instead of blown away by his own hand back on some dirty fly-speck of a home world. No matter how many enemies tyranny would kill, there is always somebody else. Always.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call the Confederacy a tyranny. Not when compared to the old ways.”

“Well, perhaps not, but there, new ways mask the old. A society that mandates absolutely the way people must think, eat, drink, whom to love—and whether to love—is a tyranny, even if cloaked in gold and tasting of honey.”

“But if the people are happy—”

“The people of the greatest tyrannies are usually happy—or, at least, not unhappy. No tyrant in human history ever governed without the tacit support of the masses, no matter what those masses might say if the tyrant was ever overthrown. Revolutions are made by the few, the elect, those with the imagination and the intellect to penetrate the tyranny and see how things could and should be better. It is a lesson the Confederacy understands full well—that’s why people like Koril and myself are here. And, no matter to what lengths they go, the Confederacy will eventually follow all other human empires and fall, either from external factors or from sheer dry rot. They are staving off the fall, but fall they will, eventually. Some of us would prefer they fall sooner than later.”

“You sound like an embittered philosopher,” I commented.

He shrugged. “Actually, I was a historian. Not one of those official types teaching you all the doctored-up versions of the past you were supposed to learn, but one of the real ones with access to all the facts, doing analyses for the Confederacy. History is a science, you know—although they don’t really let you know that either. The techs are scared to death of it and put it in the same category as literature, as always. That’s why hard science people are the most ignorant of it and so easily led. But, I digress from my point.”

“I find this all fascinating,” I told him truthfully-knowing my enemy was vital—“but you were speaking for some reason of Koril.”

He nodded. “Koril is one of the old school intellectuals. He knows that the Confederacy will fall one day of its own weight and he is content to allow natural forces to do just that, even if it might be centuries in the future. There is another school, though, that believes that a quick and, if need be, violent push to oblivion will, overall, save lives and produce positive results for more people. A man can die in agonizing slowness or nearly instantly—which is more merciful to him? You see the difference in positions?”

I nodded. “Evolution or revolution—an old story. I gather this is behind Koril no longer being Lord?”

“It is. He was an evolution man in power at the wrong time.”

I was becoming more and more interested. “The wrong time? That implies that such a revolution on such a scale is suddenly possible, something I find very hard to believe.”

“About five years ago,” Korman told me, “Marek Kreegan, Lord of Lilith, called a special conference of the Four Lords of the Diamond. We had been contacted, it seems, by an external force that wanted our aid in overthrowing the Confederacy.”

“External force?” I could hardly believe it. A week on Charon and already I was finding out a lot of details I thought I would have to dig out with a sword.

“An alien force. Big. Powerful. Not really more advanced than the Confederacy but unhampered by their ideological restraints, which means they have a lot of stuff we don’t. They are also—by design, we think—far fewer in number than humankind. They have a long history of getting along with other kinds of life forms, but their analysis of the culture and values of the Confederacy said that together we would just out-and-out crush them. They feel they must destroy the Confederacy, but they have no wish to destroy humankind as well.”

“Do you think they could? You just said how small they were compared to us.”

He shook his head sadly from side to side, more in wonder than in reaction to my question. “You see? You make an easy mistake. It’s not numbers that are important. The Confederacy itself could destroy a planet with ten billion on it with one simple device, and do it with perhaps only one man and two robots. Three against ten billion—and who would win?”

“But they’d have to get to all those planets first,” I pointed out.

“Any race smart enough to meet and attempt an alliance with the Four Lords—and pull it off under the noses of the picket ships and the other devices our prison system contains to keep us isolated—and who even so remains virtually unknown to the Confederacy would have few problems doing so.”

I had to admit he had a point there, but I let it pass for the moment. “And the Four Lords went along with the deal?”

He nodded. “Three of them did. Kreegan came up with the master plan; the aliens will provide the technology and access; and the other worlds contribute their power, wealth, and expertise.”

“I assume the one who didn’t was Koril.”

Again he nodded. “That’s the story. He was just flat-out against the plan. He feared the aliens were only using us for a painless conquest which once undertaken, would enable them to enslave or wipe out mankind. In this he was pretty well alone. Of course, emotionally, to be a party to the overthrow of the Confederacy within your lifetime is almost irresistible, but there is an overriding practical reason as well. The Warden worlds that help will share in the rewards, even the spoils. There is very good reason to believe that these aliens are capable of curing, or at least stabilizing, the Warden organism. You understand what that means.”

I nodded. “Escape.”

“More than escape! It means we, personally, will be there to pick up the pieces. Quite an incentive! But, as I said, there is overriding practicality here. Charon is probably the least necessary of all the Warden worlds. Mostly political criminals, wrong thinkers, that type are sent here, and the plot, quite frankly, could proceed without us. Could—and would. We would be isolated, cut off as things proceeded without us. But if anything went wrong, we would be blamed along with the others, even though we took no part. That might result in the Confederacy literally destroying the Warden Diamond. But, if things succeeded, the other three would be on the winning side, with all those IOUs and means of escape, and we would be stuck here, consigned to eternal oblivion. Therefore, since we were not important to the plot, we either joined it and gained or we didn’t and lost whatever the outcome. That was what caused the unprecedented removal of a Lord of the Diamond.”

“This Koril—I gather he didn’t take this lying down?”

“Hardly! It took the entire Synod’s combined power to oust him, and even then he was horrible in his power. He fled, finally, to Gamush, the equatorial continent, where he had already prepared a retreat and headquarters so well hidden none have been able to find it. Consider—a lowly apt in the magical arts could kill you with a glance. One of the village sores could level a castle and transform all the people into trees if he or she felt like it. The combined Synod could make a continent vanish and rearrange the oceans of the world. But that same combined Synod could only oust, not kill, Koril—and cannot locate him now. Does that give you an appreciation of the old man’s power?”

I had seen little but parlor tricks on this world so far, but I could accept his examples at least as comparative allegory. “And he’s still working against you.”

“He is. Not effectively of late, but he is more than dangerous. He retained good friends in high places, and some of his agents even managed to penetrate meetings of the Four Lords themselves. At one point, they got past tight security of kinds you can not imagine to witness a meeting with our alien allies themselves. The spies slipped up before they could do any harm and were all eventually tracked down and killed, but it was a very close call. Koril came within a hair’s breath of killing all Four Lords and two of the aliens as well—and he wasn’t even there! He was still safe down in Gamush.”

It was my turn to push now. “All this is well and good—but, tell me, why are you telling me all this? I would assume it’s far from common knowledge.”

“You’re right. Koril’s fall was pictured publicly as a move to save Charon from, evil ambition. We created, in the minds of the people, a portrait of him as a devil, a demon, a creature of pure powerful evil. It has been quite effective, and even useful—a force of opposition based on fear and power. It keeps the masses in line, and he can be blamed for just about anything that goes wrong.”

“A bogeyman.” So much for tolerating other points of view, I thought to myself.

“Yes, exactly. But a real one who remains a real threat. We would much prefer to have him be merely a myth. He’s used our own propaganda against us too, to attract those unhappy with us in any way, employing the trappings of devil worship and the rest, creating an effective cult of opposition, in both senses of the word ‘cult.’ We can not be truly safe and secure until Koril is destroyed.”

“But I thought you said you had tried that and failed.”

“Well, not exactly. There was no concerted effort to destroy him when he wasn’t already forewarned and forearmed. After all, we didn’t hate him or covet his job—we merely wanted him out because we could not change his mind. Had we foreseen what sort of enemy he would make—but that’s hindsight. We can kill him—if we face him down. But to do that we have to know where he is, where that redoubt is.”

I knew all this was leading somewhere, but it wasn’t clear why I was the one being led there. “What’s all this have to do with me?”

“I’m coming to that. First of all, he has a large minority following in-his demon cult, but they are mostly useless except as information gatherers because they really believe that guff. In the aftermath of his botched assault we pretty well wiped out his effective force. He needs new people—level-headed, unclouded with superstition, and yet with some residual ties to the old values of the Confederacy. People who would be useful commanders of his demonic troops, bring fresh ideas and approaches to him, and take his side against the aliens even if they had no particular love for the Confederacy.”

I began to see. “In other words, newly arrived inmates like me.”

“You’re the most logical. We get few newcomers these days—none of the Wardens get many, and we get the fewest of all. The nature of our atmosphere prevents most clandestine communications, and even blocks basic surveillance of us on the ground by remotes. The Confederacy has agents of one sort or another all over the Warden Diamond, but they are of almost no use here since messages are nearly impossible to get in or out except by spacecraft, which are rigidly monitored. You’re the first small group we’ve gotten since long before Koril was deposed, so you’re an absolute natural for him to approach. And of course there is a different reason as well—the real reason why we got any prisoners this drop. You see, due to the inevitable slip-up, the Confederacy is finally wise to the fact that we and our alien allies are plotting against it. That’s all it knows though, and it’s too little to act upon—and, I think, too late. Still, they are not stupid. They have already sent at least one top assassin to the Warden Diamond—we know that.”

“What!” I felt a cold chill. Was I being led down the garden path to the guillotine? Had my cover been so easily blown?

He nodded. “And while we are sure only of the one, it’s reasonable for us to assume that they would send more.”

“But what for?” I asked, steadying my nerves as best I could. “You just said it would be nearly impossible to get information out. And anybody they’d send here would be stuck, just like us.”

“It is our belief-^-Charon’s, not the Four Lords, I might add—that they will send their best men available to each of the four worlds with the intent of killing each of the Four Lords. Doing this will, they feel, cause some disruption, and the new Lord will be a lot less sure of him or herself and perhaps less disposed toward treason. It is not much of a hope, I admit, but it’s the only logical thing they can do while they try and find the alien enemy first.”

He was uncomfortably close to the mark, and I could only feel I was being toyed with. Something inside kept shouting “He knows! He knowsr’—but my more controlled overmind kept saying that the best way to proceed was to play along, at least for now. “And you think that one of us is a Confederacy fanatic?”

“I know it,” he responded. “I knew it the moment I met the agent face to face.”

He paused for a moment and I braced for the inevitable denouement to our little play.

“The Confederacy’s agent,” he said, “is Zala Embuay.”