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his eyes?
She'd taken him for granted up to now, hadn't really thought much about him,
but this was worrisome. "I can't seem to make contact with him," she told
Dorion.
"Huh? That means he's out of range. I hope he has enough sense not to get lost
in this territory. He's a familiar he can't survive indefinitely without you."
That worried her. "I never knew there was a range, or that he could survive
without me at all."
"Oh, the contact spell of that sort is basically line of sight.
He could still find you, though the two of you are psychi-
cally linked if he could catch up with you before his psychic energy was
depleted. If he could find someone of the same blood type who was willing, he
could probably survive for a week on his own, maybe longer, but it wouldn't be
the same as if it were you, and he'd draw less and less each time until he
couldn't get enough to keep going. I'm afraid I don't remember much about that
course beyond that, but I do know he'd have trouble finding anybody with any
blood type in this forsaken place. Don't wony he'll be back at the last minute
tomorrow morning as usual."
"Yeah, maybe," she responded, still worried.
He decided to redirect the conversation back to its roots to take her mind off
the cat. "I'm still amazed that you'd consider going with him, even if I
admitted your points. I
don't know if you noticed it, but he has a rather odd effect on you. You stop
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being yourself and just become that vacant-
eyed, empty-headed courtesan."
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"Yeah, I know. 1 can remember all that when I'm me, but
I can't remember me when I'm her, if that makes any sense.
It's actually easier that way. It bothered me at first, but now I
find it, well, sort'a convenient. There's not much conversa-
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 121
tion in this kind of riding, even if I could get into it, and I'm not equipped
for sightseeing, so I'd just be sitting there getting bounced around and
brooding and feelin' sorry for myself and maybe going nuts. Maybe that's what
triggers
Shari around him; I dunno. But Shari, now, she isn't a real person, sort of,
at all. She's got no ego of any kind; she exists only in reaction to somebody
else. Except in the courtesan role, where she's still on a kind of automatic:
she doesn't brood, she doesn't wonder, she doesn't really think at all
she just exists. She doesn't even have any sense of time or place. I tell you
I'm scared to death I been scared to death most of the time since I got here.
Not thinking for all the boring times just makes things more peaceful, that's
all."
"But if you were with him all the time you'd be like that all the time," he
pointed out. "To me, you might as well be dead."
She shrugged. "Maybe. He's not the type to be around all the time, though.
Maybe you're right, though. I'm just not the type to kill myself the old way I
was raised still has hold of me, I guess. Maybe just becoming Shari is a way
out that gets around that. There's a way that only Sam and me know that forces
me to become Shari and just Shari. There's been lots of times when I was
tempted to use it, to solve alt my problems, and nobody could ever know how to
get me back."
He was shocked. "Don't do that! In the name of all the gods, don't even think
of doing that' 1 don't think I ever saw anyone so smart and capable as you,
who had such a low opinion of themself. Besides, what about your friend Sam?
What about all this impending conflict we're trying to avoid?''
"1 no longer care about Storm Princesses and Changewinds and the like. It's
not my fight, Dorion. It's never been my fight. For a while I was a decoy, and
all that did was almost get me carried away by a monster and scared to show my
face in public. Now, well, I heard it being talked about back in
Covanti hub. They know I'm not Sam, so that's it. My one remaining bit of
usefulness to your cause and boss is over already. I can't lift a sword, I
can't see to shoot anybody, and it would take a second and a half for a wizard
to turn me into a toad or something. It's like atomic bombs back home. I was
against them, and scared that one of two old guys could destroy the world in a
flash, but there wasn't anything I could
122
Jack L. Chalker do about it. And I don't think protests and petitions would do
as much here as they did back there, which was nothing."
"And Sam?"
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She sighed. "Don't translate this for Boday since I don't need shit fits right
now by anybody, least of all her but if I
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hadn't been around Boday all the time I wouldn't think of
Sam at all any more, and I don't think of her much anyway.
We were teenagers together, yeah, a million years ago, but my life got shorted
out because I went beyond the call of duty to help her and got sucked here
with her, and since that time we've gone such different ways that I don't
think we have anything except the old times in common any more. It's like
somebody in the neighborhood when you were growing up
they're not a part of your life any more. She got me into this, and since that
time I been ying-yanged around and here I am and I'm stuck. Stuck in this
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