Jack L. Chalker - Dancing Gods 4 - Songs of the Dancers

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songs1.htmSONGS OF THE DANCING GODS

e-book ver.1.0

FOR THE DELPHI WEDNESDAY CROWD:

JANET, MARTHA, BYRON & EILEEN, CHERP,

GARDNER & SUE, PAT, CHUQ, MIKE & ROSA

PAUL. GEORGE, BRANDON, RALPH, EVA (OF COURSE)

AND, OH YEAH, YOU, TOO, RESNICK

TO THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE AND TO THOSE AWAY TOO LONG

JUST AFTER THE START OF THE PAST DECADE, I DECIDED TO write an Epic Fantasy

Novel. It wasn't anything that I came upon either late or cynically; back when I

was a publisher, I published the first three books ever done about swords and

sorcery and I'd read Conan when Conan, let alone Arnold Schwarzenegger, wasn't

cool.

I felt a little out of touch, though, in that genre; I still remembered the old

stuff: Robert E. Howard, the still-going-strong Fritz Leiber, the ubiquitous

Tolkien, and the like, but, aside from a couple of Moorcocks, my contemporary

fantasy education was lacking.

Now, I know that reading the best science fiction of prior generations is an

essential part of education, but if you read only thirty-year-old SF to get an

idea of what was going on, you'd be pretty well out of it. With that thought, I

went out and picked up a dozen or so major fantasies by various writers, who

were now best-sellers and highly acclaimed and had their own groupies, and

settled in to see what heroic fantasy had evolved into, fully expecting the same

kind of revolution I knew had happened in science fiction. I won't mention the

titles or the authors, because it didn't matter.

Before I was halfway through the first one, I had the eerie feeling that,

although it had been written within the last couple of years, by someone far

younger than I, somehow, I'd read it before. When a quick check to the end

showed that it indeed went where I knew it would, I put it down and started

anew.

The names were different, the points of view were shifted, the villain bore a

different name, the hero was perhaps a bit nastier, but, this time, I knew I'd

read it before—in the previous book.

Investigating this phenomenon further, I went through a ton of books, past and

present, and came up with the remarkable discovery that there were really only

two books there, and a hybrid constituting a third. One was an idealized

quasi-medieval universe with its costumes and manners and My Lords and My Ladies

and, somehow, the serfs who held it all together were mere background, unless,

of course, the hero or heroine was raised as one not knowing that he or she was

really Prince or Queen or something of the sort.

The other was Hyborea—whether Howard's Hyborean Age or Smith's Hyperborea, they

were one and the same, focused perhaps on the barbarian adventurers as in Howard

or on the upper class and top sorcerers and upper-class rulers as in Smith. Of

course, the lower classes and thralls were mere background, unless, of course,

the hero or heroine was raised as one without knowing that he or she was really

Prince or Queen or... well, you get the idea.

This led to a research project to determine the truth of the matter. If indeed

there really were only two epic fantasies, all the works being simple variations

on common themes, or even, perhaps, just one, with the setting a choice between

the time of King Lear or the time of Hamlet, then why? Was it that there were

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only two basic settings and a single set of heroic fantasy themes?

Rejecting straight away the cynic's concept that all these books were knockoffs

of the originals, both because I knew so many writers wouldn't stay so bound

otherwise, nor would such a wide audience continue to respond so

enthusiastically to each slight theme and variation of the same book, over and

over, I knew there had to be another reason, and, after much work, I discovered

it, in an improbable place, while doing research in particle physics for another

book.

There was not, as western religion tells us, a single creation, nor a series as

other faiths have it. The single act of creation, the Big Bang, whatever you

like, created not a single universe but many, overlapping but generally

invisible and intangible and, therefore, unknown to one another. Ours is the

Prime Universe, where the great and ultimate fate of all life would be decided

in the epic battle of opposites, of good and evil, of powers of light and

darkness.

In the backwash of this creation, the other worlds trail out, each occupying the

same space but not the same space-time continuum. Because they were not fully

formed, and the Ultimate Engineer was preoccupied with us, they were left for

development to the Lesser Powers—let's call them Angels. The universe closest to

us is the universe of the Lesser Powers. Not quite as dynamic, shaped by Lesser

Powers, it has developed differently.

At the start, both universes, theirs and ours, had as much magic as natural law,

and creatures evolved that were like ours, even human, and partly human, and

some intelligent races that were not human at all. On Earth, the humans became

dominant to the point where they slew the others, out of fear, out of

competition, or out of ignorance, driving the few remnants further and further

underground even as physical law was locked into near immutability. Ultimately

the others, the creatures of magic, of faerie, of centaurs and unicorns, pixies

and leprechauns, passed into the realm of legends and stories, until there are

none left here now who truly understand the magic or know its capabilities, and

even fewer who truly believe. Without belief, the magic bends more to physics,

so that even the powers of Darkness must battle through surrogates and hard

technology in more hidden, mundane fashion.

In Husaquahr, which is the name of that other world, this did not happen.

Natural law exists there, but it is of a more rudimentary and pliable nature

than our own here and now. A master engineer designs a Great Pyramid, a

Stonehenge, that lasts the ages; lesser engineers allow compromises and design

flaws and their work eventually wears away or collapses. A Master Engineer

designed our world; Husaquahr was designed by lesser lights. And from that came

uneasy chaos which lasted for millennia.

An ironclad contract is one drawn up by a great lawyer; the contracts with all

those loopholes are drawn by lesser legal talents. Ultimately, there arose a

very few, a mere handful, of powerful magicians who were also master lawyers.

Together they formed an uneasy but necessary alliance, the Council of Thirteen,

and with their combined powers they began to fill in the loopholes in

Husaquahr's Creation, imposing logic, rules, on all the world, its denizens, its

very stones, and codified these as the Books Of Rules for the guidance and

training of future generations.

Order was imposed, but at the price of stagnancy. Things were as they were in

broad terms because they were mandated to be that way by sorcerers so powerful,

so much closer to Creation, that they were immutable.

Over the great span of time, though, even those great ones passed on, either

through death or transmigration or in ways of which we can not even dream,

leaving only the Rules to reign.

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The Council, however, remained, filled by increasingly lesser individuals,

lacking some of the power and all of the wisdom of the founders. Great

sorcerers, yes, by comparison, but mere wisps of smoke compared to the ones who

had once held their positions. Not, of course, that they thought so; generation

after generation of Councils have worked hard to keep plugging more and more

loopholes, adding on Rule after Rule, binding the whole of the world as tightly

as roles in a never-ending stage Play-The inheritors from the greatest of the

great and the wisest of the wise had evolved, if you want to call it that, into

that most fearsome of the creatures of civilization.

The inheritors of greatness were bureaucrats. Of course, such a horrible fate

could not befall us in our own world. Look at the ones who established the great

nations of the world and those inheritors who run our world now. Right? Beyond

Husaquahr still is another world, a world that did not even have the luxury of a

coherent creation, let alone the great and wise minds to impose order upon it. A

nightmarish world without physical laws at all, a universe of chaos and disorder

so terrifying that none can comprehend it and the few that have been there

neither discuss what they saw nor wish to return. To those of Husaquahr, that is

known as the Land of the Djinn.

These three universes, however, the only ones with anything we might even

comprehend as sentient life, are not connected and are in the main ignorant of

one another, save in our dreams.

Physicists might have many names for it, but to Husaquahr, the barrier between

us and them is simply the Sea of Dreams, for only the dreams of one may

generally pass to the other through that detachment of the soul called sleep.

All of us intercept some of Husaquahr when we sleep, when we dream, whether we

are aware of it or not. Most of us are not aware; a few of us who are too aware

provide incredibly comfortable livings for legions of psychiatrists. A very few

of us awaken with little conscious memory of the impressions we gain from

Husaquahr, but we sit down with pens and pads, or typewriters, or word

processors, and we write out great accounts of the things that happen there and

we call it heroic fiction and we really believe it is. Those of us who do so

have always been around; the storytellers and shamans of ancient times, the

Homers and others of ancient literature, were all such, which is why they have a

certain consistency.

Naturally, since both their world and ours is a world, we intersect different

regions, so the creatures and demons of the East are different than ours, as are

those of the African and the Amerind. But, commonly, our myths, our legends, our

heroic sagas, are dream-linked accounts of that other place. The rest of you,

the audience for these, whether reading or hearing them, respond because there

is a suspension of disbelief induced by your own dream-links as well.

That is why we seem to be reading, and writing, the same book. We are not

writing fiction at all; we are writing subjectively filtered accounts of the

history of this other world.

There is a way through; a physical passageway across the Sea of Dreams. A few

find it by accident, by unnatural convergence of being at just the wrong spot at

the right time, vanishing there and becoming mysterious disappearances here,

lumped with all the mundane, and more evil, fates of the bulk of the

disappeared. A few go through, one way or the other, due to the rare dabbling in

supernatural agencies that still goes on in back rooms and upper-class

conservatories. Only one man, a sorcerer of great power in Husaquahr, can do it

at will, and when and with whom and what he chooses.

He's been around a long time—nobody knows how long, not even the others on the

Council—and he's had many names, both here and there. A decade ago he needed a

hero not so bound by the Rules to combat an army of evil, and he chose, by means

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we will never know, an interstate trucker on the skids, a man in whose veins

flowed the blood of the ancient Apaches, snatching him at the last moment from a

fatal accident on a lonely west Texas highway. With him came an unexpected

addition, a young woman hitchhiker who had education and once had promise, but

whose life was so broken and mangled that she was just looking for a decent

place to commit suicide. Together they battled the forces of Darkness, and

vanquished them—for a time, for even the Rules mandate that no victory is

without costs, nor may good or evil totally triumph.

Their saga was the one that came into my dreams, and which I told in three books

before this one, including their discovery that the longer tney were in

Husaquahr the more they, too, became entrapped and bound by the Rules. Marge,

the once-suicidal young woman, became that most classic of creatures who cross

the Sea of Dreams in stories and legends, a changeling, becoming a beautiful

winged fairy, a Kauri, while Joe, the truck driver, truly became a hero and at

one point a king, marrying the buxom Tiana and ruling in peace, until evil again

reared and threw them out of power and eventually out of bodies, so that Joe

once again became his old trucker self in appearance while Tiana found herself

now in the small but stunning body of what must charitably be called an exotic

dancer. Together with the little Husaquahrian thief who had shared their

adventures, Macore, and the enigmatic adept, the Imir Poquah, they had journeyed

back to Earth to save it from the exiled Dark Baron, who was ready to do Hell's

work upon us.

When we left them, they were victorious, preparing to return across the Sea of

Dreams to Husaquahr, with a new pair as well—the pixie Gimlet, finally finding a

way to the place where there were still more of her kind., and Joe's son Irving,

whom he rescued from a promising career in a Philadelphia street gang. There was

still a villan back in Husaquahr to vanquish, the zombie armies of the evil

Sugasto, now calling himself the Master of the Dead, were still on the march.

But the archvillain whom they had been forced to fight again and again, and

whose evil had even brought them here, Esmilio Boquillas, the Dark Baron, whom

they thought killed, they discovered had used his soul-swapping trick and

entered the body of a third newcomer, the beautiful Mahalo McMahon, high

priestess of the Neo-Primitive Hawaiian Church. The great and good sorcerer,

however, who now called himself Throckmorton P. Ruddygore, was onto him/her. The

Baron was stripped of his true powers and couldn't even switch again without

help of a master magician. Ruddygore intended Boquillas to lead him straight to

Sugasto, whom he was certain he could best in a sorcerous showdown.

If you'd like to renew your acquaintance with this saga, go back and find your

copies of the previous Dancing Gods books and do so. If you don't have them,

you'll be able to get along with just this summary, but you should still go back

and find those first three books, stocked by any good, intelligent, competent

bookseller.

It has been five years for my own dreams to come and sort themselves out into

coherency, for time is different there than here, but now I have it. When we

left, everything looked bright, everything set, and what hadn't been resolved

before was clearly working its way to the end. Joe and Tiana, not looking as

they did when they reigned, were free to travel and enjoy life and show the new

land to Irving. Macore had some minor mental problems due to his sudden exposure

to our culture, but, once back home, he'd straighten out. The saga was drawing

to a close.

Alas, the Books of Rules covered more volumes than the Tax Code; not even a

Ruddygore could remember them all. Still, he should have remembered, that most

basic of Rules governing the ultimate battle between good and evil, for it was

one that had saved all of their necks at one time or another.

Those who are familiar with the past adventures of our band may find the going

here a bit more serious, a bit more adult, than past volumes, perhaps because

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that, too, is a Rule for sagas that are continued by tellers of tales who

inevitably, alas, grow older themselves. But, bear with it; Destiny's threads

are interwoven, and one can not weave a tale until all the threads are in place.

Our tale begins in madness, and descends into humiliation, debauchery, and

degradation, yet all leads to a climax of pure, unabashed lunacy.

All beings whose deeds might alter or affect the course of history, regardless

of side or motive, who are faced with absolute defeat and impending doom, must

always be provided with at least one way out.

-The Books of Rules, III, 351.5

CHAPTER I

ENCOUNTER ON A LONELY ROAD

Epic quests for which circumstances set no deadline shall take at least seven

(7) years, although exceptions may be made in rare circumstances if the quest

just seems like seven years.

—The Books of Rules, XV, 251, 331(c)

SHE WATCHED HIM COME FROM HER HEIGHTS, FROM HER SHADOWS, but then she had lost

sight of him in the gathering gloom. And so she summoned the wind, and whispered

softly to it in the silence.

"Bring him to me," she commanded, as the wind whipped around her and played with

the folds of her cloak. "Find him and bring him to me."

The cold wind wailed a reply, then crept down into the hollows and sped across

the barren hills of Mazra-dum searching for the one tiny figure below in the

wastes and finding him, as a chill wind always could.

The tiny, gray-clad traveler on the weary roan horse looked even smaller against

the majestic background of the badlands landscape, a place of rounded mounds cut

into the land -end colored in dull candy stripes of all the various shades of

rust and decay and where even the thin ribbon of water that snaked through its

bottommost canyons was not clear or even mineral brown, but rather a milky,

alkaline, and poisonous chalk white.

Here and there, the traveler and his long-suffering steed passed dull and slowly

dissolving skeletons of many an animal who had attempted this place before and

failed or, in desperation, had sipped from the white death that was at least

something that moved in this place. The traveler pulled his cowl up to protect

against the chill wind whose eerie moans and shrieks seemed like the trapped and

hopeless cries of the lost souls who had never made it through the route he now

attempted.

Now the trail hit a point where one could go either way, but there was no way to

tell from the ground, hard as steel, which was the right way and which was the

wrong, if there was such, and he stopped a moment, his face coming up from its

weary downward cast. Eyes far older than the years of the traveler scanned the

choices; the face was weathered and lined and covered with a full beard that

obviously had just grown rather than been cultivated and had, for its trouble,

been ignored by its wearer. The beard, like the tangled, shoulder-length hair

revealed when the cowl slipped back, had been black once, but it was now tinged

with gray bought by hard experience, not comfortable old age.

The man frowned, unable to decide which trail led to somewhere fruitful and also

unable to decide at this point if it made much difference which route he chose.

Yet he had not lost hope of attaining his goals; the eyes still burned with a

fire only fanaticism brought, and the soul was still fueled by a singleness of

purpose that said, success or death!

The sun was but an hour from the horizon; already the shadows grew long and the

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