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found that the front hooves were not quite solid; they divided neatly into thirds with some movement possible. I could open to form a gap, then close on an ob-ject.
Not exactly hands, and neither could you grasp everything nor use it much once you had it, but I had some control. I was sure there was a reason
for it.
I got up on all fours. The hind legs seemed firm and sure, and I decided to experiment a little, I kicked off and leaped a good ten meters, but came crashing down, unable yet to steady myself. It hurt, and I felt bruised and a little defeated, so I made sure to take it slow and careful thereafter. This running and jumping trick would take some practice.
I couldn’t walk, but had to hop, and it took a lot of spills before I could do even a slightly fast jog without falling down. But I felt sure I’d have the movements down pat in a couple of days. I had to-il would be the only way I could get around.
I was also conscious of my ears. I could feel them I could feel almost every part of my bodyand I could move them, even independently.
And I heard.
Voices far off in the distance, high-pitched and oddly distorted, but I heard. There were a lot of such soundsalmost a cacophony of noise, impossible to sort out into its individual components.
Everything, I realized, made noises here.
That the ears were a lot more sensitive than my old ones I had no doubt, but why had this been a world of silence before? I considered that. Perhaps the sounds were all too high-pitched for human hearing? I hadn’t really adjusted the suit for anything outside the hu-man spectrum.
It was too dark to see what I looked like, even if I could get all of myself to the pool, so I decided to wait until the next hunger bout before worrying about it. I knew what I was going to look like when I was
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finished; I could only explore the body fully and leam its limitations when it was complete. I practiced running. Still not much of a tail, therefore so much for standing, but I could feel the beginnings back there. It wouldn’t be long before I resembled the herbivores in this respect, too.
Although I had no way of telling time, it took an abnormally long period for the next eating spell to come on. Perhaps, near the end of the process, you started slowing down to normal.
When next I awoke, it was still dark. Strange that I could feel the warm sun on my back as I got up, yet I couldn’t see a thing. Then it hit me:
I was blind.
There was no question about it. I could hear the life teeming around me, hear the rush of the waters off in the distance, hear the wind and the flying things overhead, the insects buzzing about.
But all was darkness.
I stood still on all four legs, trying to get my bear-ings. As tough as it had been to run the evening before, running blind would be impossible. These peo-ple couldn’t be blind, I told myself. I had watched them moving, running, leapingand they built. It must be some kind of change in the optic system, I thought desperately, remembering the strange eyes, like pieces of shiny, polished brown glass, that filled them.
The sounds were enormous; they seemed to flood in, confusing and consuming me. Even so, I could hear … voices.
Yes, voices definitely, but how far off I couldn’t tell. Thin, reedy, high-pitched, but recognizable voices at that.
A crowd of them, all talking at once. It was a mob; there wasn’t much chance that I could pick any one individual out.
I was conscious that the tail was in place now. I could wave it, bend it, make it freeze in any posi-
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tion. It was as long as my body, and bushy. I was conscious of a lot of insects buzzing around me and discovered that the thing was an effective device for brushing them away.
I wondered about the horns. I kneeled down and put my forehead almost to the ground. Yes, they were there, but short, stubby, and, to judge from pressing on them, crooked. Not quite in yet.
One more time, I thought to myself. One more and the job will be done. Once more and I’ll be able to join the group, find out what’s going on, make plans to free myself of this curse.
I stood there, trying to catch any part of the conversations going on around me. The language was familiar, and I did catch a few phrases here and there, but it wasn’t much use.
I wanted to call out to them, but I decided to wait, wait for the final steps of the transformation. It was obvious that the herbivores were deliberately keeping away, but keeping an eye on me, until the process was complete.
Because I was blind and not able to do much of anything, I practiced sitting up on my tail a few times and took spill after spill. Finally I managed it, repeated it, did it a third time.
It produced some interesting sensations once you got the knack. The last thing I’d been thinking about up to now had been sex, but this standing up on hind legs and tail made a forceful point.
As I said, I was extremely aware of every part of my body. Most of us aren’twe’re aware of our various parts only when we use them or abuse them. Not this bodyyou felt every muscle, every nerve, every ap-pendage. This included the penis, which in the four-footed position wasn’t much. Standing, the organ proved to be an extremely long bony tube, straight out, and switched to the ejaculation position automatically. Sex was obviously a stand-up affair here.
I could feel the heat of the sun shift a good deal
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before I started to get the glimmerings of hunger. Eating blind using only your head and mouth is tough, but the starvation imperative, present to this time, was missing. Time, which had raced, now was dragging, and I ate only to get it over with.
I didn’t eat nearly as much this time, nor quite to stuffing, and the process took some time. Even so, when I felt full, that familiar tiredness came on and I knew I was fading out for what might be the last time.
I looked forward to the rest, fearing only that I would wake up blind stilL
29
“You awake yet, young fellow?” a high, mellow voice asked, concerned.
I groaned and stirred a little, forgetting for a mo-ment where and what I was. It was unlike coming down from the other sessions; I felt as if I had really been asleep this time, and I was a little shaky and achy.
I opened my eyes, gasped, and shut them again.
“Oh, my God!” I managed, my voice sounding odd to my ears.
“It takes some getting used to,” the strange voice admitted. “You’ll get the hang of it with practice. Might as well startget to your feet and I’ll help you.”
I used the tail as a side brace and got unsteadily to my four feet. Again I opened my eyes and stared.
Once, as a small child, I had experienced a kaleido-scopeyou turned the thing this way and that and got an ever-changing variety of strange shapes and colors. I’d seen similar effects done electronically by telescreen, too.
What I saw was like that, only infinitely more complexand without clear borders. Some colors flashed and whirled and spun, some stayed put, and there were more shades and hues than I could imagine, a few so odd-looking that I could never have imagined them before. What I saw was a series of fuzzy impressions, though, without form or shape.
“Is this the way you see?” I asked my unknown companion. “Lordi What does it all mean?”
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“It’s actually a better system than the old one,” the other replied. “It’s just that your brain isn’t used to or prepared to accept the different input. Look, want to focus? Turn in my direction now, and feel those horns on your head. Feel them? Good. Now concentrate on them.”
I tried what the other said, and suddenly the world exploded. The colors became sharply outlined as odd, distinct shapes. I could count the blades of grass, see the tiny bugs movingnot as pictures, really. No, it’s hard to explain. Shape, size, texture, distanceall there, yet not optically. It still looked strangely electronic, totally unreal.
The other, nowI focused on him, seeing him in three dimensions yet not seeing him at all. He looked a pale blue, like a negative, though, and while I could literally count his body hairs and see how long each was, he seemed to be drawn on a telescreen which was constantly holding only a brief image and then being completely redrawn.
“No, it’s not seeing,” he commented, reading my wonder and puzzlement. “You’re sending out thousands of tiny pulses per second from those membranes on top of the horns, and these are being returned to your ears and fed to the optic centers of your brain. Move your ears to the side and you’ll see.”
I did as he suggested, and the sharp images faded into color blurs directly in front of me, and new images started forming at the periphery of my vision, with less and less of the color in them. When my ears were rotated as far around as I could manage, the images to either side were uncolored, stark electronic white etched on pure black.
I brought my ears back around, and the colorful imagery returned to focus.
“The eyes are extremely color-sensitive, far into the ultraviolet and infrared,” the creature explained, “but have nothing for definition. That’s provided by the so-nar, which is nondirectional and works for a hundred
The Web of the Chozen
and eighty degrees in front of you. Just turn your ears to catch any part of the signal. That gives shape to the colors, and gives you extremely accurate depth perception. The only cost is in fine detailyou won’t see much in the way of small detail unless you focus strictly on a small area. I probably look a solid blue to you, yet when you stared hard you saw the tiniest hairs on my body to the exclusion of the whole image. You can look close-up or panoramic, but not both.”
“This is incredible,” I managed, and it was. Things looked strangely alien, artificial. Objects faded in and out, outlines were Sometimes clear, sometimes shaky. Interestingly, I could not see the horizon or the sky they remained a dark blank against which the shapes and colors were etched.
“Where’s the horizon?” I asked. “Doesn’t reflect sound. You’ll see everything that you get an echo on; everything else just doesn’t exist. Don’t worryyou’ll get used to it.”
“The grass was blue-green,” I noted. “Now it looks
pink.”
“That’s a food color,” my guide responded. “The colors don’t really correspond to anything you’d have seen with your eyes. Everything pink you eat. There are subtle details you’ll learn as you go along. For example, blue is a male color, green a female one. All sorts of signalsthousands of them. In a few weeks you’ll know most by reflex or experience.”
I shook my head. All of this bothered me. Being an alien was bad enough, but being this alien was more than I could accept. It put additional roadblocks in the way of my ever breaking the bonds that held me, of beating the system. I had the uneasy feeling that this was the purpose of much of the designit met all your basic needs, but severely limited any attempt to break out of the preordained social structure. Those colors
they built habit patterns.
“You’re from the Communard colony, aren’t you?” I asked the man, trying not to dwell too much on dark
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thoughts. I was in a trap, and much needed to be learned if I was ever going to break out.
The man nodded. “Yes, I am George Haspinol, one of the masters for the trip. We divided up the place into districts, tried to get things in at least a rough so-cial organization. It’s worked, after a fashion, although we’ve spread so much now that I have no idea if all the original institutions still exist. We’ve been here a long time.”
“You saw me come in, didn’t you? Why have you waited until now to make contact?”
“Wouldn’t have done much good before. When you stepped out onto Patmos you were already committed, too late to back out. We knew what would happen. You couldn’t have heard us anywayso why bother? After you started changing, your body rate, time rate, and such were so altered that you were out of sync with us. When I saw the horns start, I came over and kept a vigil. Plenty of time for talk now, anyway. That’s the thing we have the most of here.”
“You called the place Patmos,” I noted. “That your name?”
The man’s blue altered slightly to show some emotion. “Of course!” he responded. “You mean you never heard of Patmos? It’s in the Bible.”
I nodded. I knew what the Bible was, but hadn’t ever read it. As I said before, I slept through my history classes.
George interpreted my silence with the perception that made him a master.
“I can see, then, that Christianity’s fallen in the march of civilization,” he said sadly. “Well, it was inevitable. One of the reasons the Communards left.”
“So you were religious, not political,” I responded. “With the name Communard I’d assumed”
“Communism?” he sniffed. “Well, in the purest sense of the term, yes. We shared much of the same philosophy and goals, but differed with them on matters of the spirit. Both dreamed of a world without
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want, violence, or fear, where all would have enough and live in peace and equality forever. It’s just that we could never accept the promise of fundamental change in human nature from within; we felt that a change could only come through God’s grace. Communism is in itself a religion, with holy books, a god figure, prophets galore to interpret him, and a heaven which would come from a sudden, miraculous, scientifically unfounded change in human nature. Our changes, of the spirit, were far more logical and believable, I think.”
I kept looking around, testing out my new vision. It was damned strange in what it did and didn’t give you, and in its flexibility.
“So you came here and got trapped,” I said sourly.
“Depends on how you look at it,” replied the other. “Many of us believe that all of this is God’s will, the only way to attain the paradise which we seek. In a way, they may be rightUtopia means no violence, and none is here. Utopia means no wants or needs, and none are here. There is little pain here, the body heals itself quickly when injured, and death so far has been an isolated phenomenon. Many of us are happy here, and praise God constantly for this life.”
“Hmph!” I snorted. “That’s the trouble with Utopias. When you reduce the ideal world to its basics, you find it fits a herd of cows very well. Is this what man strives for? To be reduced to a bunch of contented, grazing animals? I don’t believe it. That’s why I didn’t stay home and rot on the lifelong dole; I had to explore, to meet and beat challenges wherever they could be found. That’s humanity, / think.”
George shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly if most of civilization is as you say they’d be better off grazing here on the plain. I make no judgments, since it’s all academic anyway. I came to that conclusion long ago, and you will, too, sooner or later. You’re here, like this, and you’re stuck forever whether you want to be or not.”
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“I’ll never accept that,” I told him. “I’d rather die.”
“Lots did try to kill themselves at the start, you know,” he said softly. “It doesn’t work. They won’t al-low it. Go crazy in any way and you get an instant lobotomythere are lots like that out here. As you’ll find out, we’re functional petsproperty.”
“Of whom?” I asked. “Who’s they?”
“Enough tune for that later,” George replied. “All the time in the world. I’m delighted to have somebody fresh and different to talk to. Right now let’s go on up to the town and get you settled in. Can you run with this vision? Just take it as slowly as you can and don’t try pushing it. I’ll pace you, and try to guide you.”
I tried running and found myself sprawling time and again. I couldn’t get used to my new vision because movement caused everything to be even more confusing and disorienting than it seemed before. George moved as effortlessly as a four-legged ballet dancer, and I envied him his grace and balance. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to that point.
But he was always there, always shouting encouragement, and we eventually made it to the edge of the river.
Water was gold, like molten lava that somehow sparkled as it poured over ultraviolet rocks. The village looked different now, too, the buildings a glistening sil-ver as intricately constructed as the most complex spi-derwebs.
“This was the first town site,” George explained. “It could have held the original six hundred easily, and we actually got some prefab stuff up before things started to fall apart. The earliest buildings on the point there are patterned after the ones we built, even the church.”
So that was the building with spires, I thought. A church. I’d seen a couple on various worlds, but this sort of organization came out of ancient history. But, then, these were a people of ancient history, taking centuries to cover what I had covered in months. I was
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as alien to these people as we all were to normal hu-mansfour hundred and seventy years distant.