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  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  SOUL RIDER III: MASTERS OF FLUX AND ANCHOR

  Copyright © 1985 by Jack L. Chalker

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  First printing: January 1985

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  8-10 West 36 Street

  New York, N.Y. 10018

  ISBN: 0-812-53281-3

  CAN. ED.: 0-812-53282-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Tim Sullivan,

  in the hope and expectation that

  he will hit the big time,

  a giant spectacle with a dash of byap!

  1

  POWER AND INFLUENCE

  If evil looks ordinary, even mundane, until it is too late, then Zelligman Ivan looked more ordinary than most. He was a small, thin man of apparent middle age. with a long, drawn face that had a chin far too large, a beak-like nose, two beady little brown eyes, and short gray hair. His beard was a close-cropped goatee only slightly less gray than his hair, and his thin, short moustache was both small and gray enough to be invisible from any distance. He wore the clothing of a respectable Anchor, a brown corduroy suit and string tie, with faded brown dress boots and a peculiar formal round hat, and he sat on a horse upright and unmoving. Overall, Zelligman Ivan riding through Flux was a comical sight, but there was nothing at all comical about the man himself.

  They watched him come, as only those who live in Flux and are driven mad by it can watch, and they licked their lips. They were mad and they were deadly, but they were not stupid. Stupid people do not last long in Flux. Any man riding alone in Flux could read the strings, the multicolored bands of energy that were the roads through the reddish, crackling nothingness of the void. And anyone riding alone had to be a wizard, for without power you were quickly dead. This, too, they took into account, but again it didn’t bother them severely. There were wizards and there were wizards.

  Ivan had no idea they were there until they struck. Sounds traveled only a short distance in Flux before being smothered, and visibility was always quite limited, as in a thick fog. Suddenly from all around him rose horrible shapes, gigantic shapes that reached upwards of ten meters or more. Growling, drooling, snarling monsters that looked frighteningly real. His horse stopped and reared back in panic, and it took all his effort for a moment to keep from being thrown, but he managed to calm the frightened animal and look around at the threatening horde of hissing and slobbering horrors.

  He smiled.

  Ivan knew that these were mere projections, a false wizard’s convincing and threatening show of his or her own imagination without real threat. He had a rifle in his saddle but did not draw it, instead waiting for the attackers to tire of this and show themselves.

  They moved in on him slowly, warily, but with determination. A dugger cult, he saw, fifteen or twenty of them; all misshapen by their own inner fears. All were naked, howling savages, so deformed that it was impossible to tell their sex or their original looks, save one, who was dressed in tattered hides. That would be the leader. They all left no doubt that their intent was more than to rob; they were quite ready to pounce on him and eat both him and his horse.

  He traced a small circle with his hand, and the advancing creatures stopped. He watched them strain against nothing, an invisible barrier he had simply decreed into existence. Some gave up and turned to retreat, but found an identical barrier to their rear.

  Ivan surveyed them imperiously, then pointed at the leader. “You!” he called out, in a thin, nasal voice that nonetheless had the confident ring of command in it. “Come forward!”

  The leader looked nervous, but realized that he was trapped and had to deal with a new situation. He approached the invisible barrier and seemed almost surprised to see that it gave way for him—but when the others tried to follow, they were stopped cold.

  Close in, the leader showed himself to be a creature with a round, ugly face that had all the right features in distorted positions. The eyes were huge and bulging, and the mouth sagged on one side, revealing sharp, pointed teeth. The leader stopped before Ivan.

  “Can you speak?” the man on the horse asked calmly.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” the cult leader responded. “Gody speak real good.”

  “I’m sure,” Ivan commented aloud, mostly to himself. He noticed that the dugger held a small object in his hands, almost fondling it. “You’re not frightened of me?”

  “Gody fears none!” the creature responded. “Gody true wizard with this!” He held up the object and looked at it, and from it sprang a powerful beam of pure energy, racing straight at the rider.

  Ivan had been prepared for it. He held up his hand and casually deflected the ray; and suddenly, it was gone. Gody looked concerned, then puzzled.

  “I know those toys,” the rider said scornfully, “although goodness knows where you picked one up.” They were, in fact, small Flux power amplifiers created from the models of the huge ones built years ago by his old associate, but they were strictly rationed and carefully controlled. “They are adequate for some things, but they have a weakness.”

  Gody looked down at the little cube, not quite understanding why it didn’t work. Suddenly the top flew off, and a huge number of paper streamers flew out in all directions. The dugger chief yowled in fury.

  “They are just machines,” Ivan explained patiently. “A good wizard has no more trouble with them than with guns and knives.”

  Gody knew when he was licked. “Sorry, sorry, Master. Will not trouble you further… . ”

  Ivan thought for a moment. “You’re not really hungry, if you had that box, so this was just for the principle of it. Tell me do you know this area of Flux well?”

  The dugger looked confused, but at the moment was willing to go along with whatever the wizard said. “Yes, Master. Know from Anchor to Hellgate to Anchor again. Can read strings, can Gody, with… . ” He looked down sadly at the box.

  “I will restore your little toy,” Ivan told him.

  “Oh, thank you, Master! Kind Master!”

  “I will give you even greater power than you have dreamed of. But for this, you must perform a task for me.”

  Gody was very interested now. “Anything, Master! Name it, Gody do!”

  “Very well. Attend me, I will give you powerful spells, and yet another toy. The task I set for you is very dangerous, so you must do it exactly as I say. I will tell you how to capture a powerful wizard. You are to do so, and then take the wizard where I say. I will know when you have done this, and I will give you power.”

  “Tell! Gody and his people will do as you command!”

  “I know you will,” Ivan responded. “My spells will guarantee it. If you serve me well, there are great rewards for you. I may have other tasks for even greater rewards. But if you do this wrong, you and your people will die horribly. You understand?”

  “Gody understand. Master, oh, yes. But—what you doing out here, such powerful wizard?”

  “Fishing,” replied Zelligman Ivan. “And I caught what I was after.”

  2

  DYNAMICS OF DISTURBANCE

  “In the old days, folks knew they were at war as soon as the first attack was launched,” remarked Mervyn, high wizard of World, chairman of the Nine Who Guard. “Now, it seems like we damn near lost the war before we even know we’ve been shot in the back.” He nudged his brown horse a bit to increase the pace.

  His companion was a strikingly beautiful woman, dressed all i
n the black of stringers, and wearing a gunbelt with two large and menacing black revolvers perched one per hip. She was very tall and slim, but a flex of her muscles showed strength in both arms and legs that few men could match. Her skin was a smooth chocolate brown, her eyes large and jet black, her hair and brows a striking silvery white that provided both a startling beauty and a stunning contrast. Unlike most female stringers, she wore her hair long, letting its silver gleam down her back halfway to her very trim waist. Her horse, too, was of the blackest black, but the mane of the large beast was the same silver as her hair. Clearly she was a stringer wizard of some power, and, therefore, one to be avoided by all sane people.

  “Surely it is not as bad as all that,” she responded to the old man’s comments. “Any plot unmasked before it is completed is a failure.”

  “Perhaps. I hope you’re right. But a plot is only a failure when it fails. You’re good, and you’ve got much talent and experience, but I fear you are very young, my dear. I am over seven hundred now. Seven hundred years of fight.”

  She looked at the small, frail-looking man in the green robe and sandals, the wizened bearded face and long, scraggly strands of white hair flanking a bald pate making him look every bit as old as he claimed to be. and shrugged. “A winning fight,” she noted.

  He shrugged. “I can win a thousand times. Ten thousand. They only need to win it all once. I’m getting very old for this, maybe too old.”

  “You only look that way because you like the image,” she taunted. “You could look and feel like anything or anybody you wanted, as can I—and I don’t have half your power over Flux.”

  “Yes you do. In fact, I’d say your potential is as great as anyone’s I have ever known, but that’s true of most genuine wizards. If you can handle the Flux, you can handle it easily and in any way you want. It’s the mind that makes the difference—intelligence, experience, and knowledge, which are the keys to anything. Your mind, for example, keeps you from such totality of control. Not your intelligence, certainly, but the way you see yourself and your place on World. You are content in the Guild and with what it offers; you are not one to sit for ages in study and practice as I have, perfecting your talents. You inherited your looks and your power from your mother, but there is too much of the father in your soul.”

  She chuckled. “He was never more than a false wizard, a conjuror of illusions with no substance. But he feared no wizard and killed the strongest. That tells me more about where real humanity lies than creating my own little world and playing goddess so long that I get to believe my own publicity.”

  He shrugged and changed the subject. “Have you encountered any Soul Riders in your travels?”

  She nodded. “Yes, three in fact. They seem to stick close, one to a cluster, or, perhaps, one to a Hellgate.”

  “No, one to an Anchor. Twenty-eight in all, in fact. Tell me—what did you think of them?”

  “Very little, really. They rode inside wizards of varying types, with no clear preference so far as I could see. The hosts gave off curious double auras, and were difficult to truly focus on with magic, but the wizards did not seem extraordinary or even very ambitious.”

  “Ambition comes when the masters of the Soul Rider command it, and not before. I’ve studied one closely in my cluster the past century, and there is no question that the Soul Rider is as much a tool of something or someone else as the host is of the Soul Rider itself.”

  “I shouldn’t want one, then. Bad enough to have something influencing your life. Worse to know that they, too, are but puppets of yet another. Who? The goddess of the Church, or something greater?”

  “Greater, I think, and lesser as well. The Riders are creatures of pure energy, minds without bodies, that’s for certain. Their number and their deeds are too well ordered and well reasoned to be random, yet they are individualistic enough that I cannot see them as conjured beings. More than once I’ve touched their thoughts, and touched briefly as well the orders from their masters, but it only compounds the mystery. The mathematics of it is both very simple and very complex, as all of the messages consist of only two distinct parts. There is only on and off, open and close, yet the messages are impossibly complex and impossible, too, to translate or decipher.”

  “On and off,” she mused. “Sounds like a machine.”

  “That was my very thought. If machines could think, this is what it would be like. That has driven me to despair, that thought. If the gods are machines, then where are they? Who built them? And to what purpose?”

  “Perhaps to no other purpose than keeping the Hellgates closed,” she suggested.

  “I have thought of that, but it brings up unpleasant implications. If that is their sole purpose, then their mission is to keep us down at all cost, to make certain we do not interfere. We are learning now at a great rate, Sondra. The Codex has given us much, and sooner or later we will find the missing books, those which give the answers to the really big questions. What then? Will they turn on us as the enemy and slap us down to barbarism as they might well have done before?”

  “Don’t worry so much. Those books probably don’t even exist anymore.”

  “They exist,” he said gravely. “Years ago one of the Seven, Coydt van Haas by name, had collected enough of them to do wonders. With them he built the great amplifiers that increased an ordinary wizard’s power a thousandfold. With them he created a demented revenge, and resurrected long-dead beliefs and attitudes. With them he revealed enough to destroy the foundation of a revolution. And that was only a smattering of what those books must contain.”

  “My father killed Coydt almost twenty years ago,” she pointed out. “If they exist, they’re in the hands of the Seven.”

  “No. I know just where they are, and who has them, but it does neither me nor anybody else much good. They are in the hands of the New Eden Brotherhood, and they are hidden and guarded well. Occasionally scraps are fed out to keep their alliance firm with wizards they need, but that’s about all.”

  She made an expression as if smelling a foul odor.

  ”Those maniacs. Why do we stand for it? Half of World would unite to crush them.”

  “Indeed. You find the Brotherhood distasteful, then?” She looked over at him strangely. “Not merely distasteful—repugnant. Do you mean you approve of it? Women treated as subhumans, as animals?”

  “I neither approve nor disapprove, but I wonder how strong your dislike would be if the sexual situation were reversed? No, don’t get so angry—hear me out first. World is dominated by those with the power, both political and Flux power. You said it yourself—wizards who act like gods get to believe they really are. Three out of five of the most powerful wizards are female. I can name you a half a dozen that simply reverse the Brotherhood’s philosophy, but ninety percent specialize in dominating, limiting, and oppressing their populations, although not in sexual ways. Some are more benevolent than others, but all are no more than variations on what the Brotherhood has done, perhaps substituting some other group for women as the oppressed, or being democratic about it and oppressing everyone. Are they as repugnant to you? Or do you even think about them that way?”

  “But the Brotherhood is not in Flux; it’s in Anchor!”

  “And what difference does that make? Not too many generations ago a small cadre of women in the Church decided who among the young population would be sold as slaves in Flux, and carefully and completely controlled everyone left. Their control was more subtle, but no less authoritarian or complete. When it was finally rotting and begged replacement, it was a woman who did it, and the control was no less complete for having nobler motives. The Reformed Church was out to do what it said—reform the existing church to eliminate corruption. It did not question the order of things.”

  “But you have put your finger on an important difference,” she noted. “I agree that Flux is one thing, because either you have the power or you must depend on one that does, but Anchor held at least the possibility of change, of
revolution. When that is taken away, when Flux comes to Anchor, there is no hope.”

  He smiled. “And for two thousand years Anchor was more stable and less revolutionary than Flux. The people of Anchor were very unhappy at the system, yet they endured it and did not question it to any threatening degree. See how easily the newly recombined Church has reestablished authority? The people are not happy, but their religion teaches that unhappiness, pain, and suffering is their lot until they attain Heaven. The women of the Brotherhood are happy and contented with no thoughts of Heaven.”

  “Because they have been brainwashed and Flux-changed into it!”

  “Ah, yes. Yet some people take drugs to chemically induce a happiness they cannot otherwise achieve; others drink to excess for the same reason. Still others throw themselves into religious frenzies in a bout of self-intoxication. All are seeking happiness. But happiness, even Heaven, is the absence of further progress. When one is happy, one wants no more than that, and will spend his life in a search to keep the brain’s pleasure center permanently on. It is the essence of humanity. We learn, we progress, by our unending quest for eternal happiness—yet should we achieve it, it all stops.”

  Sondra shook her head as if to clear it. “You make the world seem ugly and upside down.”

  “The world is ugly, but only viewpoints on it are upside down, not the world itself. All I am saying is that people pursue happiness in order to obtain it, then try to force it on everyone else. That’s the way of things. I do not like the Brotherhood, but I also do not like most of World. That’s why I tend to keep apart from it as much as possible. When I was forced into active long-term participation in it, during the reign of the Empire, I found myself acting just as ugly and ruthless as the other wizards. I didn’t like it.”