The Morphodite Read online

  Dedicated to Judith

  Contents

  — 1 — Evening in Symbarapol

  — 2 — Midnight in the Mask Factory

  — 3 — Meetings by Night

  — 4 — Night’s Transition into Day

  — 5 — Tiresio

  — 6 — Marula

  — 7 — Morning in Symbarupol

  — 8 — Marula Nights

  — 9 — Marula: The Far Side of Now

  — 10 — Deserted Cries of the Heart

  — 11 — The City of the Dead

  — 12 — The Knee Hills

  — 13 — Meliosme

  — 14 — Morning in Zolotane

  — 15 — Final Focus

  copyright

  — 1 —

  Evening in Symbarapol

  Symbarupol, in Lisagor, on Oerlikon: 4 Chand 22 Pavilon Cycle 7:

  Two men at their ease relaxed on the terrace of one of the many bland, pastel buildings which composed the city outline, and observed the fall of night over the subtle outlines of Symbarupol. One was still, and watched the scene to the east without gesture or movement, as if completely at rest. The other, shorter and stouter, fidgeted and moved constantly, sometimes looking about the terrace, sometimes staring at the city as if it contained some vital secret. The taller and quieter of the two was silver-haired and distinguished in appearance, with long, thoughtful features which under certain circumstances might be called mournful or dolorous; the other was florid, excitable, and nervous, a worrier.

  The taller man, obviously the senior of the two, seated himself in a chair and continued to muse over the soft outlines of the city, with its ranks of superimposed buildings—offices, factories, dormitories, habitats, all made in the same basic box shape, unadorned by slogans or signs or extraneous stylistic detailing. He liked it. His name was Luto Pternam, and he was the senior member of an organization which provided the guardians of public order with their raw material, and in addition disposed of the recalcitrant.

  His associate was known as Elegro Avaria, and he was Pternam’s confidant, executive secretary, henchman, and general man Friday. Avaria was nervous because he was expecting visitors, and he looked out over the evening-dimming cityscape as if he expected them to materialize at any moment.

  Pternam said, almost idly, “Surely you don’t expect them so soon, or that they’d walk right up the road as if they worked here?”

  Avaria scratched his head, looked again, and shook his head. “No. For a fact, if they come tonight, it’ll be late. Still…”

  “You’re sure about the date?”

  “As sure as anyone could be, dealing with people like those. I spoke with their contact-man, Thersito Burya, when the last arrangements were made. He was definite: the Triumvirate was interested in our proposal and would come in person to investigate. Today, on this very date.”

  Pternam mused, “Odd they wouldn’t send Burya. The files suggest that he does all their contact work. Or perhaps that other fellow, Mostro Ahaltsykh.”

  Avaria corrected his chief respectfully, “Personally, I did not expect Ahaltsykh. What he seems to do is more in the enforcement line: muscle, you know.”

  Pternam answered equably, “I suppose you are right; were I to judge this, I would not wish to agree to anything like this on the judgment of anyone less than you or I, and would probably think long on a recommendation by you alone.”

  Avaria agreed. “Rightly so.”

  Pternam continued, “Still, all three? That’s dangerous work, exposing the three most important heads of an underground that isn’t supposed to exist, all at once, in the same place. Surely they suspect we might have treachery in mind.”

  “Thersito Burya suggested that our proposal was important enough to be worth the risk. They have a replacement Triumvirate in the wings, should we prove false.”

  Pternam thought for a moment, and then said, “Yes, important. I imagine it would be: we offered them something from the very bowels of our organization—a perfect assassin, one that can find the target, select the method, execute the assignment, and then vanish by changing its identity. They have revolutionary zeal, but they can’t produce that.”

  Avaria nodded briskly. “Right! And when they have committed to the thing that we will give them, and he makes his stroke, which you and I know to be a sham, they’ll all pop out of the woodwork, and we’ll have them all, the Change-monger scum, and we…”

  Pternam completed the sentence, “…will be rewarded for the fine work we’ve done; I will move to the Central Group, and you will take my place here.”

  Avaria added, “Might put both of us in it.”

  Pternam smiled into the dim, soft evening light. “They might, at that. Yes, a possibility, Elegro.”

  The light was almost gone. Avaria looked about nervously and said, “It is about time I set out to meet them.”

  Pternam nodded. “Go ahead, then. We will wait for you here. Everything is ready for them.”

  “Including the one we’ve prepared?”

  “Yes. Tiresio is ready. It is all ready. The moment of truth is here.”

  Avaria turned to go. “I suppose you know it will be late.”

  “How could it be otherwise? Go on—it will work out right.”

  Avaria nodded and set out across the terrace resolutely, turning into an alcove and disappearing.

  For a long time Luto Pternam sat and looked out over the city in its evening light—surely something worth striving for. Symbarupol, a city of blocky plain buildings by day, became magic in the light of evening. What seemed by day to be impersonal and abstract became then something soft and lovely beyond words, its colors cyan, magenta, old rose, as the star Gysa sank into the Blue Ocean far to the west, beyond Clisp.

  For all his relaxed manner, he felt inside himself a furious excitement building, the culmination of years of effort. The failures they had had, the making up of a suitable vehicle, even after the parts of the theory had been tested. And then, with the one specimen they had succeeded with, the long and difficult training, which had been as painful for the instructors as it had been for the trainee… All the arts of the assassin, and at the end of it, the loose control they had over it. And the terrifying power of Change the creature had. And the last, convincing it that what he knew to be a crackpot theory was in fact a lost science, that only he, Tiresio, could rediscover… And they gave him some concepts, and turned him loose, and after a time he had said, “I can do it.” Nonsense, of course, but it was of course important that Tiresio believe that he could do it.

  No, this was not a trap for that pitiful Triumvirate: Merigo Lozny, Pericleo Yadom, Porfirio Charodei. Oh, no. Pternam reflected that by the time this had run its course, they would have them all, even to the farthest corners of Lisagor, the Alloyed Land.

  Oerlikon was a planet with a singular history, quite unlike any other’s: it had been discovered by accident, as a ship had dropped out of transitspace for minor repairs in the midst of a desolate region, which, while not as empty as the famous Purlimore Canyon, or the equally well-known B’tween-The-Arms, was indeed devoid of notable features. There, to their astonishment, the crew saw displayed on their instruments a single dwarf star, one planet, and an irregular collection of asteroids and planetesimals. The star, a yellow-orange body, appeared to be exceptionally stable, and the single planet gave all the indications of being habitable. There were no nearby bright stars, and all the known O and B giants were far, far away. The region was populated solely by a thin and scattered collection of G, K and or main-sequence stars, and a few white dwarfs.

  While the ship was making repairs, the crew closed on the isolated little system and took a closer look. The star was smaller than the usual for a habitable system, the single planet orbit
ed at roughly the orbital distance of Venus from Sol. The star they named Gysa, and dutifully noted its position and coordinates. The planet they named, with a small ceremony, Oerlikon. Sometime afterwards, when someone attempted to track down the source of the names, they found that the discovering ship, the Y-42, was a small Longline ship with an under-strength crew, and that apparently “Gysa” had been a legend printed on a shirt belonging to one of the crew, supposedly a sports association somewhere, and that “Oerlikon” had been the brand name of an inexpensive pocket tape machine used to reproduce the popular music of the day. They could recall no other names they had wished to use. And of such incidents are names fixed forever to pieces of real estate such as float about tenantless.

  A gig from the Y-42 landed, and reported that all was well, if a bit bland. The view of the sky was uninspiring and uninteresting: the atmosphere was thick and hazy, and at night what stars could be seen arranged themselves into random patterns which suggested nothing whatsoever even to the most imaginative.

  Oerlikon was moonless, and rotated slowly with a small axial tilt, so that the effect of the seasons was small. Moreover, its orbit about Gysa was astonishingly low in eccentricity. It turned out to have the lowest orbital eccentricity ever recorded for a habitable planet. The day was long, about thirty standard hours. It was also a watery world, with deep, abysmal ocean basins. The landing party observed only two continent-sized masses, one Asia-sized, an irregular oval high up in the subarctic, and a smaller, kite-shaped mass around the curve of the planet to the west, and south, partly temperate, partly tropical. A loose association of islands arcing south from the smaller continent across the equator completed what could be seen of land masses.

  The larger continent they humorously named Tartary, but they found little on it of interest. Glaciation, geologically recent, had polished it flat, and crustal measurements indicated that it was drifting slowly south. For now, and the next million years, it would be cold and barren and cruel.

  The smaller continent was much more interesting. The main part of it was shaped rather like a kite in flight It had low mountains, rivers, and a complete, if rather limited, flora and fauna. The east, north, and western shores were mountainous, although none rose to great heights. In the west, the chains formed an outline of a discus thrower, or javelin hurler, while the eastern ranges formed a concave curve open to the east and trailing off in the islands of the south. An interior range, a spur of the eastern range, enclosed a broad valley that connected with the interior in the north. The rest of the interior was a vast grassy plain. And far in the west, as if hanging off the bent leg of the javelin thrower, a small subcontinent was attached, joined to the mainland by a narrow mountainous isthmus. It seemed pleasant and habitable, and was so reported when the Logline freighter Y-42 reached settled regions again.

  As always the case with a new planet, at first the explorers and settlers came, although Oerlikon attracted no great numbers owing to its isolation and the reluctance of star-captains to make planetfall at such an out-of-the-way place. Once there, these early immigrants were able to see for themselves that there were normal quantities of metals, a biosphere of no great novelty, although some of the forms were odd, and the oceans well-stocked. The large continent, Tartary, was severe in climate and sparse in vegetation, and only the hardiest souls went there, prospectors and herdsmen, hermits and misanthropes, where they built sod huts on the treeless steppes, or erected frowning castles of the native shield granite, and remained to brood under the iron-gray skies.

  Others, more sociable, moved on to the smaller continent, and settled places soon appeared, including a fishing and trading center which grew in the delta of the great river of the interior, and soon became a sprawling, disorderly city, which the locals called Marula, from one of the notable early explorers, Esteban Marula. Oerlikon had a city, and to the northwest of Marula, between the marshy land of the delta and the bones of the hills, even a spaceport of sorts.

  But Oerlikon was not popular, and the immigrants were few, a mere trickle. The land available was not great, the climate bland, in short it was a world too much like the ones they left behind. For a fact, Oerlikon would have remained a bare, underpopulated world, had it not been for a certain sect hearing of it, and deciding that this empty little world and its isolation suited their desires exactly. These were the peoples who later became known as “The Changeless.”

  Who were The Changeless? They gave allegiance to no flag, for they came from every sort of state, principality, crank empire, and gimcrack commonwealth and idealistic union. Nor were they of a single race: every color, hue, and possible physiognomy was represented. Their tongues were Babel, and their home cultures as diverse as fish in the sea. But for all their disunity, they all held one thing in common with a belief that would not die, that the rate of change that was the pace of Time had run out of control, and they knew the present was inferior to the past, and growing more so daily, and they wanted no part of a future they neither understood, liked, nor profited by. And when they heard of Oerlikon, they knew they had found El Dorado, an obscure planet in an obscure region of space, where they could go and let Time pass them by forever.

  And so they came, settled, and many survived; Oerlikon was neither rigorous nor poisonous within the smaller continent, nor on the tropical islands off the southeast cape, which they called the Pilontary Islands. And little by little, they gathered strength, were soon a majority, and the ships began to call less often, and then rarely, and soon not at all, save an occasional tramp trader from the remotest regions. No one went to Oerlikon. And no one left.

  In a sense heavy with irony, which The Changeless neither understood nor appreciated, it was only with the arrival of the Changeless that history can be said to begin on Oerlikon. For, before the arrival of The Changeless, the smaller continent had only known isolated settlements, hunters and prospectors, and leagues of wild lands. But the newcomers, full of boundless zeal, quickly established growing and highly organized enclaves, and slowly excluded the old settlers, who either went further into the wild, or began drifting toward the subcontinent far to the west, or to Marula.

  They ignored the wilds of Tartary as too stern a land, but moved in force onto the smaller continent and the Pilontary Islands. Their growing enclaves became autonomous regions, and developed names.

  Now for some time, the smaller continent had been known as Karshiyaka, which meant, more or less, in Old Turkish, The Opposite Shore. But early on, The Changeless invented their own language to make sense among themselves, and they preferred their own names, some in echoing evocations of places they had once been to, and some in the harsh sounds of the new way of speaking.

  North of the mountains (that formed the arms of the javelin thrower), the lands enclosed by spur ranges became Grayslope, rugged slopes and defiles covered with silvergrass falling to the gray turbulence of the polar seas. East of the thrower’s left arm, there was a still sterner land that they called Severovost. In the west, facing the blue waters of evening, along the right arm and down the trunk was the land Zefaa, from its winds; and from the place where the ranges divided, and formed the legs of the thrower, the right leg became The Serpentine, a narrow isthmus connecting the continent with a smaller land somewhat farther west, called Clisp.

  Between the legs was Zolotane, the land of gold, an arid country. The Delta became Sertsa Solntsa, the “Heart of the Sun,” and the inside of the long point to the southeast became Priboy—“The Surf.” The rest of the peninsula was Zamor, and all the east coast was Tilanque, save a tiny enclave in the northeast, which retained the old name of Karshiyaka for itself.

  And in the interior there were three lands. The strip between the parallel ranges, the hidden land, was Puropaigne. Across the north along the south slopes of the mountains was Akchil, the Dales. And all the rest, so goes the saying, was Crule The Swale.

  Of large cities there were only three: Marula, renamed Marulupol; Symbar, renamed Symbarupol, between Puropaigne an
d The Swale; and in Clisp, Marisol.

  For a time, each area retained some identity, but a powerful process was at work among the stern and relentless Changeless; for one of their main drives was naturally toward orthodoxy and uniformity, and so a gradual pressure upon the old settlers began, and increased, and the more sensitive to it began moving away, drifting out of the old lands and into fringe areas: Clisp, in the far west, arid and mountainous. The tropical Pilontary Islands, where life was too easy to worry about doctrine. And Marula, which had always been a gathering-place for the riffraff of all Karshiyaka. A few hardy souls set up exile regimes in Tartary.

  The impetus for unification emerged from the center—The Swale and Puropaigne, joined shortly by the men of Akchil. Once these areas were cleared, things moved swiftly, and with a small action that wasn’t a war, and wasn’t a coup, but was something of both and of neither, and which the Changeless called “The Rectification,” all Karshiyaka, save only Clisp, became one land, a nation its inhabitants named Lisagor—The Alloyed Land. Then, too, was when they renamed Tartary Makhagor—The Lawless Land. Clisp, free and full of ferment, remained independent for almost two cycles* longer, until it, too, fell, and was renamed, with malice aforethought, Vredamgor—The Conquered Land.

  * Cycles: Time on Oerlikon was computed on an arbitrary calendar which used the ancient Mayan computation as a model. The “Years” thus computed had no relationship with the orbital period of Oerlikon or any other known planet, but instead were an elegant construction of four Prime Factors, twenty-three, eleven, thirteen, and thirty-one, which provided, variously, a Ritual year of 253 days, and a Great Year of 403 days, which cycled together to produce a Cycle of 101,959 days—253 Great Years. Time was counted from the day when Lisagor was proclaimed. The present, within this story-frame, is within the seventh Cycle.