CHAPTER TWELVE
“The Wa Considers You One”
I had seen very little of Koril’s redoubt since our arrival, for obvious reasons, but clearly several things were going on here that I would never have anticipated or even believed from my previous experience on Charon. Gone was the mumbo-jumbo, except for some general references to spells that seemed to be here more words of convenience than words implying some mystique. Down here was a thoroughly professional and scientific base where crisp, well-trained professionals examined and stretched their knowledge of the Warden organisms’ powers and peculiarities almost to the limit. The technology, though, that supported it was basically from Cerberus, the only one of the four Warden worlds where efficient and modern industrial production was possible. This place remained in operation because of its unique below-ground desert location. Koril had surveyed and picked the one point on Charon that would allow such material and facilities to work and duplicated the precise conditions here.
Obviously the place hadn’t just been thrown together in the last five years since he had been deposed. This was a far longer and more ambitious project than could have been assembled by some rebel, no matter how powerful he was, and it had to be sustained by clandestine traffic even between the Warden worlds. This refuge had been set up and outfitted in the years Koril was Lord of the Diamond, and somebody—certainly not the Four Lords—continued to supply it with spare parts.
The computers used here were hardly the equal of anything in the Confederacy—they were, in fact, incredibly primitive—but they were certainly better than the calculators and abacuses that I had used as Town Accountant.
The level of instruction we were given indicated an enormous amount of progress on understanding the Warden organism’s mechanisms, even if the bottom line of knowing where their power and information came from remained a mystery. It was like gravity—centuries after gravity was first truly identified and quantified it was still not at all understood. Those who didn’t understand what it was had discovered every effect and use of gravity despite their basic ignorance of just what really caused it.
The exercises were serious, complex and required an enormous amount of knowledge of a large number of disciplines in order to use them effectively. That, in fact, was why the most powerful users were either former prisoners from the Confederacy or natives trained as apts when they were very, very young. In my business, it was absolutely vital to know as much as possible—and at least a little about everything—and this gave me an enormous advantage in the training. Darva, on the other hand, had virtually no education and only limited experience with human behavior outside her own local group; that was the hang-up. My own mind control techniques and self-hypnotic abilities were crucial to the process, and my understanding of basic human behavior, particularly my own, gave me the advantage. But the spell that had made me a changeling was an imitative spell. I was locked into the spell originally used on Darva, and so the weaknesses in it, her weaknesses, were repeated in me. She could not control her wa, and so her wa was hell-bent on taking the path of least resistance. And what her vca did, mine duplicated, since her half-trained great grandmother had taken the short cut of linking my spell to hers. This was no matter of waving your hands and making chairs appear or disappear; I was dealing with a complex psychological and biological science involving the spin-off effects of a tiny organism that had no counterpart in human experience beyond the Warden Diamond.
Darva and I were led through as much basic training and instruction as we could take. She had to be “cured” before I could be, but I was the only one that could master the stuff well enough to do the job-—and it was a job you really had to do for yourself. It was not simply a matter of removing the original spell either. That might have worked in the early stages, but things had gone too far. The Wardens themselves, freed from any spell, would just hurl us back into the animal world without restraint, dragging me with her.
I was certainly well enough advanced after two months to do the job, although I was also aware that mastering principles and exploring the potential to the utmost were two very different things. I could cast a spell, even produce a changeling—do just about everything Korman and his apts had demonstrated plus a lot more—but it might be years of experimentation and practice before I had it all mastered. I could read Isil’s spell very easily—and the copy in myself—and even see where and how it was unraveling in the wrong direction. I even thought it was possible for me to break free myself, to sever my connection to Darva—but that would mean abandoning her. How funny! My old self wouldn’t have hesitated a moment—she had been useful and good company, but she was no longer necessary to me. The old me would have discarded her at this point and concentrated on total mastery of the wa and the fabrication of a new, fine body. Logically that was the only course that made any sense.
And yet, I couldn’t abandon her. I simply could not do it. I admit I agonized over the decision, but not because it was a hard one to make. What it would mean, though, was that I would be compromising my own mission—if, in fact, I still wanted to have one. It seemed equally logical that my best interests lay in the future course of Charon, not in the direction of the Confederacy—although, here, the two might be close. Aeolia Matuze must go, of course, and if Morah represented the aliens then he too must go. But did it have to be me who did it? From the looks of the place, Koril was more formidable than I could ever be.
That, of course, was the ultimate reason for my decision. My first loyalty was to myself, and I wanted Darva saved. If that somewhat compromised the rest—well, so be it I was only part of a team here, and I had to wonder why the Confederacy, even bothered to send me to a place like Charon, with so well-prepared and equipped a rebel organization. Unless Koril too was not exactly what he seemed?
I bad carried out the procedures so often in practice that when we came down to the real thing there seemed nothing to it. The staff, Yissim and the others, seemed amazed at my rapid progress. I discovered that there was a relative rating system for sores, I being the strongest they had seen (such as Koril and Month), to V. Lower ratings were apts—VI to X. Tully Kokul, whom I hadn’t seen nor heard from since that time on the beach, was a IV or V; Korman was a II. Normally, anyone could become a X with nominal training; apt VI was generally assumed to take one to two years for someone from Outside, like me, who had the necessary mental control, and perhaps ten years for a native raised as an apt from childhood. After VI it wasn’t a matter of learning the procedure, but learning how to understand and use it, developing mental control, confidence, and accumulating knowledge to expand your range of influences. It had been barely three months since I’d begun training in Kokul’s tent, and the staff easily rated me a V. Of course, the fact that I had nothing else to do, no distractions, the top instructors, and that mastering it was a matter of life or death—literally—for both Darva and myself had a lot to do with the speed, as did my own breeding, experience, and practice as an agent.
What I was going to do was, from my point of view, absurdly simple. I mentioned that the Warden sense was like open lines of energy, a communications net of infinite complexity, from me to everything around me. I was going to send complex prearranged messages—commands—to Darva’s mind, to her controlling Wardens who were at the heart of our predicament I was then going to direct her self-repair, point by point and area by area. In this I was aided by the redoubt’s computer visualizations, which did a lot of the difficult preparatory work for me. It was a measure of the difference between, say, Morah and myself, that I couldn’t have gone this far without the computer aids—everyone felt sure that he could.