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.