We were met by a small group of men and women, all humans, dressed in thick yellow robes and wide-brimmed hats. They were quite efficient at moving about and gathering together the dozen or so humans and changelings that had been deposited by the soarer.
“How are you?” Darva asked, concerned.
I checked myself. “A little bruised and burned by the sand, but otherwise all right,” I told her. “I feel rotten, though, and I need a drink. You?”
“Same here,” she responded. “Let’s see how we get out of this hole. This place is like something from the worst nightmare. It’s hell itself.” It was hard to disagree with that, although for her this was the first time she’d ever seen or experienced this sort of climate and desert terrain. But what she considered normal wasn’t so nice, either.
One of the robed men holding a clipboard quickly checked our names, seemed satisfied, then brought us to a central spot in the sand not in any way distinguishable from any other point in the desert. They looked around, checked something or other, and suddenly we started sinking into the sand.
It was an eerie and unnerving sensation, although after the Sight it was pretty tame. I held my breath as I sunk to my mouth, then continued down under.
For a brief moment my entire body was encased in sand, and I had this horrible feeling of smothering, but it soon passed as I felt cool air hit my feet and hindquarters and I realized we were entering some sort of huge passage. Spitting sand and wiping my eyes, I managed to get hold of myself and look around.
What I saw was impressive—a huge hangar like building, well-lit with very modern industrial lights, with a lot of people running around below apparently working on or servicing a lot of stuff. What struck me most was the machinery—this place could almost be out of the civilized worlds. It was at least as modern as the shuttle—the first time I’d seen such a technological level since arriving at Montlay in what seemed like a lifetime ago.
We were standing on some kind of translucent platform on a large piston like device that was gradually lowering us from the opening to the huge floor. Looking up, I had to gasp as I saw a huge roof apparently composed entirely of sand with no support whatsoever. How the effect was managed I never did find out, whether by some Warden sorcery or by some sort of force field, but this clearly was why the all-powerful Charonese and their alien allies had never found the place. Hell, I wouldn’t be able find it myself again no matter what the inducement.
As we reached bottom, our greeting party quickly removed then robes and left them on the platform. A glance at them and at many of the personnel around the place showed that, down here, the mode of dress was closer to undress. I wondered how some of our moralistic Unitites were going to take that.
Another party arrived to greet us, dressed rather scantily though a couple had on medical like garb. One of them approached Darva and me. “You are the two with the reversion problem?” she asked clinically.
We nodded. “I’m Dr. Yissim,” she continued. “Follow me, please.”
We followed her across part of the vast work area to a large tunnel like opening and went down it for a hundred meters or more, finally walking into a large, comfortable room that had large pads on the floor and little else.
“We’re going to start your first treatment right away,” she told us. “Otherwise you’re going to have problems down here with fresh meat, among other things. Each of you please sit on a separate pad.”
We looked at each other, shrugged, and did as instructed. The doctor stood back, looked at each of us in turn, then touched her temples and seemed to go into a light trance. I was familiar with the technique now, but it still surprised me. Hell, we’d only just arrived.
She stood still that way for several minutes, and I could sense her Warden power—her wa—reaching out to me. It tingled, sort of, as I suddenly felt myself under the most absolute of microscopes. Darva felt the same. Then the doctor came out of her trance, nodded to herself, and started mumbling into a small recorder I hadn’t noticed before.
“Limik!” she called, and a young man came in also dressed in hospital garb. She wasted no time on amenities. “Six liters number forty,” she told him, “for each of them.”
He nodded, left, and in a short while returned with two large jugs full of a clear liquid. He approached us-—without a flinch or without even staring oddly at us, I noticed with some satisfaction—and handed us each a jug.
“Drink all you can,” Dr. Yissim instructed us. “It’s basically water, which you need badly, with some additives. Drink it all it you can.”
There was absolutely no problem in drinking it all. I seemed to have a bottomless reservoir.
“Master Kokul’s analysis of the two of you was sent on ahead,” she told us as we finished. “He’s quite thorough. Now, you’ll both start to feel a little sleepy, lethargic, and relaxed. Don’t fight it. This is going to be a tricky series. If we don’t get this exactly right from the start we could merely accelerate the process, and we don’t want that. I realize you’re both starved, but I want empty stomachs for now.” With that, she turned and walked out of the room.
Darva looked over at me, already seeming a bit sleepy.
“She’s the coldest person I’ve ever met We might as well be two lumps of mud.”
I nodded. “I’ve met a lot like that. Don’t let it worry you. Her type almost always know what they’re doing. Let’s just help it, get into the relaxation mode, and let them do their job.”
Using some of the concentration and relaxation exercises Tully had taught us, we needed very little time to reach a state of quasi-sleep. We were aware of what was going on, but floating in a cloud of peace and comfort, we just didn’t give a damn. In many ways it was like the state I’d been placed into before the old woman had made me a changeling.
A wall flicked, and suddenly became transparent. I saw Yissim there, along with two men and three women, all sitting at a console of some sort. They looked at us then at the console; we could see only them.
It began. It began without any of the gyrations or mumbo-jumbo everyone before had always used. You could see it, sense it, feel it, as a tremendous concentration of Warden direction flowed out from those people behind the partition to us. It was blinding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and within seconds it was in control of my mind. I found myself involuntarily resisting, and a minor fight ensued, made worse because, thanks to Tully, we knew the blocking techniques.
Somehow’ I managed a slight turn so that I could see Darva, and despite my drugged state I nonetheless had a fascination for what I was seeing, a fascination that was neither shock nor horror nor anything else but just that—fascination. I found I didn’t really care. Darva’s body was undulating, going through rapid, fluid changes. I knew that my body was probably undergoing the same. Her torso was thickening up, her arms becoming shorter and smaller, and merging into her head, which was also changing, flowing liquidly out, taking a whole different shape.
The Wardens in our bodies, aided by the animal foundations of our brains, were fighting the treatment, fighting it effectively by accelerating the change. We were turning into true bunhars—and worse, we were gaining mass in the head and torso as we did so, mass that would be very hard to remove. This then was the loaded gun of the changeling, the reason why it was next to impossible to change back. Reversion…