Charon: A Dragon at the Gate Read online

  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 wi
th 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.”