Piers Anthony - Mode 3 - Chaos Mode

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i— CHAPTER 1

CONTACT

TT was the strangest creature Darius had seen. "Uh-oh," he heard Colene say.

The four of them stood by the anchor, gazing out onto the world it showed, and

the thing that hovered in the foreground. The world was ordinary: a gently

rolling countryside, patches of flowering bushes, and trees beyond. In the

distance were blue-gray mountains. He had seen many realities like this. But

the creature was something else.

It was about the size of a calf, maybe the weight of two solid men, and

roughly oval in cross section. At the top was what looked like a stout

elephant's trunk, but it connected to no elephant's head. Instead it seemed to

thicken, and then condense into another trunk pointing the other way. Two or

three projections sprouted from its center, moving sinuously, as if snakes

were poking their heads out of small tunnels. The double trunk might as well

have been the snout of a dragon, ready to belch fire fore and aft.

The main body was odder yet. It was covered with stubby projections and with

holes. Air was being sucked into those holes and evidently blown out below,

because—

Because the thing was floating just above the ground. He stared, but saw no

sign of legs or feet. Yet it did not seem to be magically levitating. Instead

the body was hov-

2 CHAOS MODE

ering on a cushion of air. Its base seemed to be a curtain to enclose that

air, and sections rippled as gusts moved out.

Its mind is blank to me.

Darius became aware of his companions. Beside him on the right stood Seqiro,

the massive horse. He was their most intimate companion, because of his

powerful telepathy. With him, all of them seemed to speak the same language,

and could share feelings directly if they wished to. It was Seqiro who had

spoken—or rather, who had projected his thought.

"It is an alien creature," Darius said. "It will take time to fathom its

mind."

He spoke in his own language, but knew that the others heard it as their own,

because of the linkage. Colene had set out across the Virtual Mode to join

him, and he had set out similarly to join her. They had met more or less in

the center, where they had encountered complications. But she had met the

horse first, and that had turned out to be a wonderfully unifying thing,

because of the ambience of their shared thoughts. Now, with fair luck, they

would resume their trek across the Modes and reach Darius' reality. There they

could settle down to a satisfying existence. If they didn't get stuck along

the way. If they could work out their personal problems. If a thousand likely

things did not happen.

"It's our new anchor person," Colene said. "It has to be, because here we are

facing a new reality, and there it is facing us. So we'd better talk to it

fast, before it decides we're its next meal." She nudged Darius. "Can you do

your thing with it?"

"Transfer?" he asked. He had the ability, in his own reality and in some

others, to drain the emotion from a person, and then to broadcast it to

everyone in the vicinity. That was his job, at home, as the Cyng of Hlahtar.

Or, as Colene put it in her idiomatic thought, King of Laughter. He made

people happy. But he hadn't been able to do it in Julia, the Mode they had

just left. Each reality seemed to

CONTACT 3

have its own mysterious rules of magic, science, or whatever. "I can try. But

who—T

"Not with me!" Colene protested. "I'm full of depression. That thing's

depressing enough, without adding to it."

That was of course her tragedy. Instead of being a vessel of joy, she was a

vessel of dolor. Except when she was close to him; then her love blotted out

the pain. Their shared thoughts revealed it all. It was one of those problems

they had to work out.

"But Nona is the only other human person here," he said.

Colene thought of the way he drew emotion, and he followed her thoughts to

their inevitable conclusion. He had to get as close as possible to the other

person, and that other person was Nona. That was disaster, as Colene saw it.

"Skip that for now," Colene decided. She faced Nona, the fourth member of

their party. "What about you? Can you work your magic here?"

Nona considered. She was verging on eighteen years old, and absolutely

beautiful in face, feature, and mind. Her thick cloud of brown/black hair

framed her head and shoulders and full bosom in a manner that was endlessly

becoming. Darius knew that Colene feared she would never be able to match that

sort of appeal. All this and magic too!

Nona gestured. Nothing happened. She concentrated, her face as lovely when

frowning as when smiling. "My magic has no effect," she reported. "I can not

levitate, or move objects, or transform them to other forms or substances. I

am not in a position to attempt healing, and I am not yet sufficiently adept

at changing my own shape to know whether I can do that here. There does not

seem to be sufficient magic power here for me to draw on."

"How about illusion?" Colene asked.

"Oh, that's not magic," Nona protested innocently. "Anyone can do that."

"Anyone in your Julia set," Colene said wryly. "The rest of us can't."

4 CHAOS MODE

Nona concentrated again. A faint haze appeared above the horse. That was all.

"What about a familiar?" Darius asked. "That's not physical magic."

"But for that I must touch an animal." Colene looked at the monster floating

patiently before them. "Is that an animal?"

"I couldn't touch that!" Nona exclaimed, horrified. "Well, we have a choice,

here," Colene said, exhibiting some of the qualities that made her a much more

significant person in her own right than she believed: intelligence,

initiative, and courage. She was only fourteen, but much like a full woman in

some respects. "This has to be our new anchor person, and it has to have had a

really good reason to latch on to our Virtual Mode. So chances are it's either

a scientist or a felon. We can't shut it out from our Mode. So either we try

to ignore it, or we try to come to terms with it. Me, I'd rather know

something about it before I relax." She nerved herself. "So /'// go touch it.

If it eats me, the rest of you get away from here in a hurry."

Nona smiled ruefully. "I will touch it, Colene. Perhaps I can indeed tame it

as a familiar." She stepped forward. Colene thought to protest, but Seqiro's

thought restrained her. / will work with her, as I have before. Perhaps

together we can relate to it.

Nona's magic and the horse's powerful telepathy. They could indeed work well

together. Seqiro could help Nona without getting in range of the weird

creature. "Thanks, horseface," she said, reverting to one of her immature

facets. The irony was that she appealed to him this way, too. He loved her as

she was, with her internal conflicts and

all.

Nona approached the creature somewhat diffidently. Seqiro suppressed her

natural fear, so that she could be objective. Seqiro could if necessary take

over a person's body, if the person let him, and make him or her do things

impossible to manage alone. Probably he could enable Nona to leap away from

the creature with inhuman speed

CONTACT 5

and strength. If she needed to. So this was not quite as risky a procedure as

it might seem.

The creature quivered on its cushion of air. Two of the upper stalks twisted

to orient on her.

"Eyes!" Colene exclaimed. "It's a BEM!"

"A what?" Darius asked.

"A bug-eyed monster. It's focusing its eyes on Nona."

"Those look more like snail eyes to me," Darius said. But he had to agree that

they were orbs of some sort.

As Nona came close to the thing, they saw that knobs poked out from its rim,

each on a rod, like the antennae of sea denizens. But these didn't look quite

like antennae. They looked like blind terminals, in Colene's imagery. Darius

lacked sufficient experience to understand the nature of the reference, but he

accepted it because he had no better image of his own. He had had some limited

experience with machines, while crossing the realities of the Virtual Mode,

and gathered that this was a machine analogy.

Nona stopped beside the creature. Air from the thing's outflow stirred the

turf by her feet. The stalked knobs reached out farther, wiggling.

Now Darius saw something else. The thing did have eyes. They were on the three

central stalks. They were watching Nona. So it knew she was there. What else

did it know?

Nona slowly reached out. Her left hand came toward one of the knobs.

Suddenly that knob jumped outward on its rod and smacked into her hand. Nona,

still pacified by the horse, did not jerk away. She remained calm, her hand

holding the knob.

Something happened. The ambience of telepathy faded. It was like stepping out

of a warm chamber into the chill air of a barren plain.

Darius looked at Colene. She seemed as concerned as |; he was. She put her

hands to her head, as if something was missing from it. Then they both looked

at Seqiro.

Now the horse was just a horse. Darius noticed how Seqiro, eighteen hands high

at the shoulder, dwarfed the

6 CHAOS MODE

girl, who was only fifteen hands high at the top of her head. But the horse's

brown mane exactly matched Colene's brown hair. They were a matched set in

that respect, and in age: Seqiro was also fourteen. The girl loved horses, and

Seqiro loved girls. Seqiro linked them all, tele-pathically, and liked them

all; he assumed the qualities of whatever mind he was in touch with, borrowing

its intelligence. But Colene was his first love. If there were to come a

crisis, and Seqiro had to choose just one of them to save, she would be the

one.

Colene spoke. This time he heard it in her actual language, without the

translation to his own. Normally the horse relayed the thoughts, and each

person's mind did the rendering, unconsciously; now those thoughts were not

there. But Darius had spent time with Colene in her reality, when they first

met, and had come to learn some of her language. He could translate it,

approximately, when he concentrated.

"Seqiro—are you all right?" she was asking. Or "Are you well?" or "You have

not been harmed?"

"He—all—well," Darius said, picking from his memory of her vocabulary. "He—

help—she." For he was tuning in on the horse, as he might for a drawing of

emotion, and realized that there was no problem. Seqiro was merely devoting

his entire mental energy to the purpose at hand: Nona's rapport with the

creature. It had to be a considerable challenge.

Colene looked back at Nona, and Darius followed her gaze. The woman stood

unmoving, her eyes blank, her hand on the knob. But the creature was moving,

slowly: it was settling to die ground. The swish of air diminished, and then

faded out, as the bony lower fringe of the creature came to rest on the

ground. The three eye stalks retracted until they were mere spots on the

surface.

"Xxxx yyyyyy zzzzz," Colene said, incomprehensibly, amazed. She was using

vocabulary too sophisticated for Darius to decipher. Then, realizing, she

turned back to him. She concentrated visibly, and he felt a faint touch at

CONTACT 7

his mind. She was trying to use her own very limited telepathy.

So he stepped to her, embraced her, and focused his mind on hers, as if he

were about to draw her emotion. But he only touched her awareness, without

taking hold of it. That facilitated the contact, and amplified her projection.

Innocent woman and fantasy horse, she thought. Then, realizing that she was

getting through, but not sufficiently, she clarified the concepts. Young

woman, girl, never done

S€JC~~~~

"Virgin," he said, grasping the concept. Virgin with one-homed horse, she

thought, then spoke the word: "Unicorn." Only virgin can tame unicorn. Nona-He

nodded. Nona, unlike Colene, was a virgin. This suggested a certain mental

innocence. Sometimes only the truly innocent could approach a creature others

knew to be dangerous. Somehow the creature might know, and not harm her. As he

reflected, he picked up more of the background from Colene's reflections. It

seemed that there was a certain ironic humor to the myth: unicorns were

extremely rare. In fact they did not exist at all. The implication was that

human virgins were similarly rare. That concept was tinged with grief and

anger, for Colene herself had found out how a virgin lost her innocence. It

had not been by her choice.

So it was Colene's judgment that Nona was taming the monster. With the help of

all Seqiro's mental power. All he and Colene could do was not interfere. They

would just have to wait for it to happen.

They were, in effect alone. He was holding her close. He brought his head

down. She lifted her face. They kissed.

: Colene had never been strong on subtlety. She grabbed •"on to his shoulders,

heaved herself up within his embrace, 3$:«nd wrapped her legs around his

torso—while holding the '"Muss. She opened her mouth a little and stuck her

tongue

8 CHAOS MODE

through. He was so startled he almost dropped her. She laughed—still without

breaking the kiss.

But he was learning her ways. He slid a hand down to her upper thigh and

tickled it through the cloth of her trousers. She squirmed, but he continued

more vigorously, crossing the buttock, until she had to break the kiss and

grab his hand. "No fair!" she cried, trying to act outraged as he let her

slide down to the ground. He needed no telepathic translation of that

expression. She was still young enough to consider herself duty-bound to react

to tickling, especially in places where it wasn't supposed to be done.

She made as if to punch him in the groin. He made as if to grab her by the

hair. They were feinting, looking for a pretext to kiss again. Colene was

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摘要：

i—CHAPTER1CONTACTTTwasthestrangestcreatureDariushadseen."Uh-oh,"heheardColenesay.Thefourofthemstoodbytheanchor,gazingoutontotheworlditshowed,andthethingthathoveredintheforeground.Theworldwasordinary:agentlyrollingcountryside,patchesoffloweringbushes,andtreesbeyond.Inthedistancewereblue-graymountains...

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Piers Anthony - Mode 3 - Chaos Mode

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