Charon: A Dragon at the Gate Read online

  “You see,” she continued after a moment, “Charon is a world out of children’s stories and fairy tales. It is a world where magic works, where sorcs—sorcerers and their spells have devastating effects. And yet it is a world where none of the laws of science are violated.”

  This was a hard concept to digest, and several of our company muttered and shook their heads.

  “I know, I know, it’s hard to accept,” Garal said after a while, “but the more hardheaded of you will quickly grasp the reality. Let me ask you first how you know you’re here. How do you know this place looks like this place, that you look like you and we like us? How do you know it’s raining?”

  “We got wet,” somebody mumbled, and we all laughed.

  “All right, but how do you know you got wet? You—your personality, your memories, the thinking part of you—are really all locked up in the cerebellum and cerebral cortex. Your brain is the only real you that you know—and the brain is totally encased in your skull. It has no way of directly knowing what’s going on at all—it doesn’t even have pain centers. Every single thing you know comes to you, your brain, by remote sensors. Vision. Smell. Taste. Touch. Sound. The five senses. Each transmits information to the brain, and supports the others to tell the brain what’s going on. But what if those five senses were wrong. There are methods of torture—and a lot of psych work, which may be the same thing—that capitalize on this. Sending you false information. There is, in fact, an ancient human religion called voodoo—that might explain it”

  “A practitioner of voodoo,” Tiliar explained, picking up the lecture, “took samples of your fingernails, hair, even shit, and put it on a doll. Then whatever that magician-priest did to the doll was supposed to happen to you. And why has voodoo really survived the space age? Because it works.”

  “Aw, c’mon,” the big man scoffed.

  She nodded seriously. “Yes, it works. But only under two conditions. First, the intended victim must believe that the priest has this power. It doesn’t even have to be strong belief, just a subconscious fear that maybe it does work. And second, the intended victim must be made aware that he or she is being hexed. People have been crippled, physically and mentally, and even killed by this method, as long as those two conditions are met. And it’s easier than you think. Even the most rational-minded have, deep down, a streak of superstition or doubt about unknown powers. The voodoo priests are master psychs, and every visible success reinforces the belief in their powers among others.”

  “Of course the priest doesn’t really do anything,” Garal noted. “They just establish the psychological conditions and you do it to yourself. In a sense, you might say that voodoo is a magic force that violates no known scientific laws.”

  “You mean this is a voodoo world?” I asked jokingly.

  They did not think me at all funny. “In a sense, yes,” the man replied. “But here you can eliminate the variables completely and go a lot further. If you’ll remember, I said that the Warden organisms can communicate, so to speak, with one another, even outside the body they inhabit. But it’s a passive thing. They communicate, but they don’t actually say anything. But, because they are a part of you, they can talk to you as well—and you to them. That’s the trick. How well you can master communication between your own Wardens and others. In a sense, Charon is the ultimate voodoo world where belief and preparation are not really necessary.”

  Tiliar thought a moment. “Look, let’s put it this way. Suppose some powerful person decided to turn you into a uhar—one of those big blue things that pulled the coaches. If he has the power, the training, and the self-control, he contacts the Wardens in your mind through his Wardens. He sends out a message—you are a uhar. Not being trained, or not possessing the mental control needed, or any combination of these things, you have no defense, no way to tell your own Wardens that they are receiving false data. So this idea, that you are a uhar, gets pounded into your brain, much like a forced hypnoprobe. Your senses are fooled, all the information coming into the brain now confirms that you are a four-meter-tall blue lizard—and, from your point of view, you are.”

  I saw Zala shiver slightly and felt some perspective was needed. “So all we are dealing with is a powerful form of hypnotism, the same kind we can achieve with machines, only we’ve dispensed with them to make the contact mind to mind.”

  “Sort of,” Tiliar agreed. “But it doesn’t stop there. Remember, your Wardens are in constant communication with all the other Wardens. Your own perceptions and self-image are ‘broadcasting,’ so to speak, to everyone else. What this means is that if you think you’re a uhar, well then, so will everybody else. Even uhar win perceive you as uhar, since they, too, are Warden affiliated. Every single thing will act as if the command, or spell, is real. And since we depend on our senses for all our information, what we and everybody else perceive as real will be real. The more training and self-control you have in this ability, the more protected you will be and the more vulnerable everyone else will be. It’s that simple.”

  “Needless to say, the better you are at it, the higher you will rise in Charon society,” Garal added.

  I’m not sure any of us really believed what we were being told, but we kept an open mind as it was information on how the place operated. Before I believed in any magic though, I’d have to see it demonstrated myself.

  If this ability took training, it was worth going after. “Just how do we get the training needed to develop this?” I asked our hosts.

  “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t,” Garal replied. “First of all, there’s that self-control, a certain mental ability and attitude-set that you just can’t teach. The fact is, most people can’t handle the discipline involved, or can only handle it to a degree. Needless to say, it’s also not in the best interests of the powers-that-be for everyone to develop this ability, even if they could. It is this way all over. There are few wolves and many sheep, yet the wolf rules the sheep. There are masses of people, nearly countless people, in the Confederacy, yet their entire lives, from their genetic makeup to jobs, location, even how long they will live, are in the hands of a very few. Please don’t expect Charon to be any different.”

  That we could all understand at least. There was a government here, a government headed by the worst kind of power-mad politicians and super-crooks, and they had to preside over a society that was at least five percent as crooked and nasty as they were, or the children and grandchildren of the same sort. Such a government would not willingly share any of its power, nor dare to make it easily available. Still, I reflected, my own self-discipline and mental training and abilities were engineered to be way above the norm, and what an Aeolia Matuze and lesser lights could do, I most certainly could do as well. And there was always somebody ready to beat the system. Unofficial training would be around someplace—if it could be found, and if its price could be met.

  In a way I suspected this might be something of a test We had come to Charon with nothing but our wits; those who could secure the method and means for training and its protection and chance for upward mobility would do so. The rest would join the masses in the endless pool of eternal victims. That was, I felt sure, the challenge they were issuing us here.

  Back in our room, Zala and I talked over what we’d been told the first day.

  “Do you think it’s-for real?” she wanted to know. “Magic, hexes, voodoo—it all sounds so ridiculous!”

  “Ridiculous perhaps, when put in that context, but that’s the context of science. Look, they’re not saying that anybody on Charon can do anything that a good psych with a battery of mechanical devices couldn’t do. Believe me, I know.” And I did know—but not from being on the wrong end of them as she believed.

  “Yes, but that’s with machines and experts …”

  “Machines, yes,” I agreed, “but don’t kid yourself that the experts are any less expert here than back there. There are even psychs sent here—they’re the most imaginative people you can find, but they
go out of their heads more often than those in any other job. No, the only difference here is that everybody carrying his own psych machine around inside of him—an organic machine, but still a gadget, a device.”

  She shivered. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “Well, it’s what you said. Psychs are the people most likely to go nuts, right? I guess it’s because they not only get involved in hundreds of messed-up people’s minds, but then: machines give them a god complex.”

  “That’s pretty fair,” I agreed.

  “Well, what you just said is that we’re on a world of psychs and everybody is under their machines and can’t get disconnected. I mean, if a psych goes nuts back home, there are other psychs and computer monitors and all the rest to catch it, pull the plug, and get him out of you, right?”

  I nodded.

  “But, Park—who’s the monitor here? Who’s around to pull the plug on these people?”

  And that, of course, was the real problem. Loose in a Bedlam with the psychs crazier than the patients, and nobody to pull the plug—and no plug to be pulled. Nobody except … me.

  It hadn’t been a very trying day, but the release of tension added to the fact that none of us had gotten any real exercise for weeks, made it pretty easy to turn in fast. I had a little trouble figuring out how to extinguish the oil lamp in the room without burning myself, but I finally discovered the way the globe was latched. A tiny little cup on a long handle hanging next to the towel rack proved the easiest way to extinguish the light. It was not until days later that I found out that this was exactly what the little cuplike thing was for.

  Despite my near exhaustion, I couldn’t fall asleep right away. I kept thinking about Charon and the challenge it posed. Obviously I could do nothing until I was able to experience this pseudo-magic first hand and get a measure of what I was up against and what I had to learn. After that I’d have to get a job, I supposed, to develop some local contacts, to find out what I needed to know about training and rogue magicians. I would be totally ineffective until I had enough experience and expert instruction to hold my own on this crazy planet. It was entirely possible—likely, in fact—that the top politicians like Matuze weren’t the top powers in magic here. I suspected the skills involved were quite different. But she would be flanked and guarded by the absolute tops, that was for sure; and the only way to her would be right through them. As a top agent, I had no doubt that I could eventually master the art enough to get by the best, but I was pragmatic enough not to think I could get through all of them single-handedly. No, I would need help—local help. The one thing I could be certain of was that a system like this would breed a whole raft of enemies for Matuze, and they’d all be either as criminal or as psychotic as they come—or both. The trick was to find them and organize them.

  “Park?” Her voice came to me in the darkness, through the sound of the omnipresent rain on the roof.

  “Yes, Zala?”

  “Can I … would you mind if I got into your bed? Just for a while?”

  I grinned in the dark. “Not afraid I’ll strangle you or something.”

  She got up and walked over, almost stumbling, and sat on the edge of my bed. “No, I don’t think so. If I really ever thought so I wouldn’t have stayed in here a minute.” She crawled into bed with me and snuggled close. It felt good, oddly comforting, but also a little disconcerting. I wasn’t used to women that much larger than I was. Well, I’d better get used to it.

  “What makes you so sure about me?” I teased, whispering. Still, it was reassuring to have the uncertainty settled so quickly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve always been able to tell things about people.”

  “Things? Like what?”

  “Oh, like the fact that Tiliar and Garal are a couple of hoods who don’t really give a damn about us. Or that that big son of a bitch would enjoy breaking people in two just for fun.”

  “And what can you tell about me?”

  “I—I’m not sure. There’s a hardness in you somewhere, that’s for sure, but you’re no psycho. It’s almost as if, well, if I didn’t know it was impossible I’d say you weren’t Park Lacoch at all but somebody very different, somebody who didn’t belong in that body at all.”

  Her observations was dead on, and my respect for her intuitive abilities, if that’s what it was, went up a hundred notches. Still, a smooth, glib cover was called for.

  “In a way you’re right,” I told her carefully. “I’m not the same man I was all my life. Mentally, I’m the man I should have been all along. I owe them at least that much.

  The old Lacoch’s dead and gone, never to return. He was executed in the psych rooms with my full and hearty cooperation.” That was true enough, although not in the way it sounded.

  “Do you still have any doubts about what you are?” she asked. “I mean, ever think of maybe having the operation?”

  I laughed. “Not anymore,” I told her, and proved it, both to her and to my own satisfaction.

  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 nontechnqlogical culture on Charon; I wondered if I would even survive in a world whose denizens were rabidly antitechnological. “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 planetwide 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 freightport on the southern continent, a land just now starting to be developed—and greater Honuth 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 wen, 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 sorcs, which was short for sorcerers. The sorcs 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.