I could only nod and file the information away—for now. I returned to the immediate subject at hand. “But basically once you’re changed you’re stuck.”
“Fairly much so. It took very little time to remake you, but it’d be a ticklish operation and maybe take a year or more to put you back the way you were. First of all, you’d be destroying the homes of all those billions of extra Wardens, and they have a fair survival instinct. Second, the extra mass has to go somewhere, and in general the only place it can go is back to energy. Do that wrong, or in too much of a hurry, and you get a big flash and bang and you’re dead. Far easier to modify you. In fact I think some modification may be in order. I can tell by looking at both Darva and you that your spell’s become somewhat unraveled, and if that isn’t checked, you’ll have even bigger problems.”
“Huh? How’s that?”
“Well, the situation’s unusual, but I’ve seen it before. Both of you have an abnormally high sensitivity to the wa, and it in turn listens to you. Without control, your subconscious, your animal parts, take over. If the trend isn’t checked or modified, it’ll turn both of you completely into bunhars. Tell me—have you been having any odd, ah, mental problems or urges lately?”
Sheepishly I told him of the hunting experiences in the wild.
He nodded gravely. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that as soon as I can make a complete examination of you. It’ll be tricky for several reasons. They’re your Wardens, and wa will follow what it perceives as the will of its host first and foremost. We work by convincing it that you’re some other way—by convincing you. In these reversions, the mind is the first to go since it’s not only unnecessary to the ultimate goal but often gets in the way. The process is so slow only because it does not occur on the conscious level—and because you’re around other people. If you’d missed us though, and stayed in the wild, the process would have accelerated. In a few months you’d have become a total bunhar, running with herd, and absolutely no different from a natural-born one. You were lucky.”
I shivered. “Tell that to Darva, will you, Tully? That’s what she wanted to do—and I almost caved in.”
The changelings were being moved out in very small groups, usually by ship but occasionally even by air. Koril’s network was far wider and deeper than I’d suspected.
Tully took the time we had there to work with us as much as possible. Our days were spent in a series of exacting and often extremely boring mental exercises, many of which gave us headaches. There were all sorts of effective blocking techniques as well, many based on simple self-hypnosis that I could do in a moment, that kept the growing understanding of the power within us under some sort of control.
The basics were simple. First, you couldn’t make something out of nothing. There had to be Wardens there to work with. Thus, one could not materialize something out of thin air—it just wouldn’t happen. But given something very small, even a rock or pile of sand, you could cause it to grow, multiply, and transform itself. You could not, however, give non-Warden life to something that had no life at the start. You could create a lot of things with simple sand, but you couldn’t make it a living thing. You could, however, reshape it, then direct and motivate it, puppet like, by your own powers of concentration.
Darva was, in many ways, a quicker study than I was, because she was taking up where she’d left off so long before. Tully warned us, though, that there was only a small chance of us growing beyond very powerful apts, since the younger you were the easier the Art was to learn. Still, he had learned it starting at an age not far from mine, and that spurred me on. Koril, in fact, had become perhaps the most powerful and he’d learned it after he was forty.
You would think that the more you practiced a thing the easier it would become, but in fact it became harder as we progressed, since the more ambitious you became the more complex the instructions and the more millions of Wardens had to be contacted.
Finally though, when we’d been there almost four weeks and the company had dwindled to only a handful—meaning we were soon due to depart—Tully admitted he’d taken us as far as he could under these conditions. It was not far enough, of course, but we had far more self-control and power than either of us could have hoped to have had without his help. In point of fact, we were full-fledged, if still minor, apts.
“You’ll be leaving in two days,” Tully told us finally. “Going south, to Gamush, on my recommendation. You should feel nattered—only apts with potential are sent there. You might even meet the big man himself.”
“What about the reversion?” Darva asked nervously.
“Well, you’ve stabilized it. I think we caught it just in tune, in fact. But down in Gamush you’ll get the top professional help you need, extra training, and—who knows?”
“How will we be going?” I asked.
“Well, we’ve been having problems with the ships, of course. Troopers are boarding and searching every one they spot, and they have effective aerial patrols out. We’ve been able to fake a lot—they don’t have much of a list of names, let alone changeling descriptions, but it’s a slow and risky process. No, we’ll get you out by air. Rather direct, I’m afraid, but the best way.”
Tully’s “rather direct” turned out to be an understatement. We were not built for the compartments of a soarer, but a soarer modified and controlled by a sore could be used to transport humans up top—and changelings by having the damned thing swoop down and pick us up in its huge prehensile feet.
Though we were both sedated for the sudden “pick up,” it was still one of the most frightening things I’d ever experienced. Crossing an ocean held in the grip of a great flying creature’s toes is not guaranteed to make anybody comfortable, although, it proved more comfortable than riding in that damned cabin. Not reassuring, though, when you looked down at countless thousands of square kilometers of open ocean and knew that you could be dropped in a moment if the big flying monster had an itch—and nobody would ever know.
Our sense of security was no greater when, several hours flying time later, we crossed the barren coast of Gamush. For one thing, this was the first time I had seen a broken sky and bright sun since landing on Charon. The sky was reddish-orange, with gray clouds, and it looked really strange. The gas layer was thin enough for the real sun of the Warden system to be clearly visible—and it was a real hot one. Since our body temperatures rose or fell to adapt to the outside temperature, I began to worry about just how high that temperature could go in our kind without boiling our blood. It really was that hot, or so it felt—and incredibly dry. Below, orange and brown sand, ridged and duned, stretched as far as the eye could see.
What a world, I remembered thinking. Tropical rain forests north and south and a desert baked almost beyond imagining in the middle.
Still, there were creatures about We could see them flying around; apparently wingless cylinders, but none came close enough for us to get a really good look at them. Somewhere down below, other things also must live, I realized, for those creatures to feed upon. Yet in the whole journey I never saw a single tree, shrub, or animal. Nothing but desolate sand.
We were rather rudely dropped at the end although we had trained as best we could and been prepared. There was no place for a soarer to take off from around here—not enough elevation on the dunes and no footholds—so it soared in low, stalled almost to a crawl, then dropped us a few meters into the sand. It then rapidly gained altitude until it was a small blot in the sky, and we saw those in the passenger compartment, mostly humans and human-sized creatures, parachute to the ground over a square kilometer or more. Parachuting was not a common art on Charon, but broken legs mended in a few days thanks to the Wardens.