“Well, you come up here lookin’ for her, and she’s down there and she don’t even want to see you. On the other hand, you pick up another one you didn’t know, didn’t want, and can’t seem to get rid of!”
He nodded and sighed again. “Sure is. Well, thanks for your help. Any way to get some transportation out of this region?”
“Might be able to help. Dunno what your girl out there’s gonna do, though. They don’t like machines, you know. They don’t like much of anything ‘cept maybe each other. Where you goin’? South to Erdom? That’s pretty mean country even if you know it. All desert ‘cept right along the coast.”
“No, I don’t think so. In fact, while I’ll probably get in touch with the embassy just to see where she might be going, it’s not worth chasing her at this point, particularly if she has some reason for avoiding me. I think I’m best off heading east from here. Catch a ship and get on my way. I, too, have some people I promised to look up far from here.”
“Well, it’s up to you, son. I’ll see what I can do about a call in to the foreign ministry, and then we’ll see about gettin’ you a ride east. From this distance it might do you best to go overland by horse rather than go through all that convoluted bunch of roads that’ll take you three hundred kilometers to go fifty.”
He gave a small smile. “And I suppose you might have a horse for sale.”
“Could be. Ain’t got no saddles that’d fit you, though.”
“I can make do with a blanket and a bridle,” he assured the Ambrezan. “Let’s go see what you have.”
They went out and walked back beyond the outbuildings to a large open pasture between the headquarters and the parklike glade where Terry had entered the Well World. Quite a number of good-looking horses were there, and he looked them over.
He picked a strong-looking brown gelding after surveying the herd. “How much?”
“Oh, I reckon a hundred and fifty’ll do it.”
“A hundred and fifty! I’ll walk before I’ll pay a hundred and fifty for a gelding to get me fifty kilometers!”
“No, no, son. I ain’t tryin’ to cheat you. That’s for the two of them.”
Nathan Brazil looked around and saw the girl, now mounted atop a horse without blanket, bridle, or anything else but looking very much at home there. She smiled at him.
He felt like a cross between a sucker and merely a damned fool, but he paid anyway. Hell, otherwise he wouldn’t have put it past her to just steal the damned horse or, worse, try to run along after him. At least he could get most of the money back at the port when he sold the two horses.
Erdom
AT FIRST THERE HAD BEEN THE DIZZYING SENSATION OF FALLING nearly identical to that first hex gate that had brought them all to this strange new world, but then the sensation had abruptly ceased and she had fallen into the deepest sleep she had ever known.
Doctor Lori Ann Sutton awoke feeling groggy, hung over, and a little sick to the stomach, lying on what felt like a bed of warm sand.
She opened her eyes and looked around and saw that it was a bed of warm sand. At least it was sand, and there was an awful lot of it under a mean hot sun that was still low on the horizon. Or was it going down? Who could tell?
She sat up, scratched where the sand had pressed against her side, and immediately felt a terrible sense of wrongness. The whole scene—sand, sky, sun—had all the colors she expected, but there seemed to be even more. She could actually see the heat, and there were darker areas as well.
I’m seeing into the infrared spectrum! she thought won-deringly. And maybe beyond. Maybe, just maybe, in both directions. The entire spectrum?
Suddenly she remembered everything. The gate, the lecture by the polka-dotted dragon, Alama’s-—no, Mavra’s words—and something about becoming some different creature.
She looked down at herself and saw that she was a very different creature, indeed. Her arms were long but very thin and ended in a huge pair of hands that were not human. They had only three fingers, long and thick, and an oppos-able thumb almost as long as the index finger and thicker than any of the others. The nails were huge and thick as well and seemed to run from halfway past the knuckle to beyond the tip. Put together in a relaxed way, they formed almost, well, a kind of supple, softer hoof, the palms fairly hard and thick and a pale brownish color.
Her feet were the same, only the hoof was cloven and seemed oddly shaped on the bottom, something like a horse’s hoof crossed with the foot of a camel.
She was covered in a thick, hidelike skin that was itself almost covered by very short, thick, pastel beige hair that flared out at the ankles and wrists. But that wasn’t the worst of it or the biggest shock.
Between her legs, emerging from a mass of thick, medium-brown pubic hair, was the biggest set of male gen-italia she had ever seen, very dark brown in color and with a leatherlike texture.
She touched it and gave a slight gasp and then just stared down at it for quite some time.
My God! I’m a man! she thought, getting a queasy feeling in her stomach echoed by a strange but not altogether pleasant sensation in the genitals.
It was an oddball fantasy come to life, one she had played with in the past, mostly out of the frustration of having to compete at the top levels of her profession with men and wanting the same power and position they took for granted. But it was only a fantasy, not a serious wish. The reality of the change shook her.
And after all that time with the all-female tribe of the People, she felt an odd sense of aversion. I’m going to miss my breasts! she thought, trying to get a handle on things.
Finally she managed to overcome the tremendous shock to consider the next question. She was male. But a male what! What was beige and hairy and had big hooves and arms apparently evolved from a set of more equinelike forelegs?
The body was very slender and surprisingly supple. The body was a nearly perfect blend of equine and human, strange, yet somehow she thought of the term “erotic” to cover it. Hah! If only Jeff could see me now, with this body and this big a sausage! Of course, he wouldn’t exactly be turned on by the idea, but it would be awfully nice to use these hard hands to slug him.
God! I’m a guy for all of three minutes and already I’m thinking like one! she admonished herself.
The fact was, mentally, where it counted, she was still the same person. Nothing had been changed that she could tell, no knowledge or memories lost, no feelings all that different. But it was as if her mind were now in another’s body, someone whose differences went beyond just gender—way beyond.
While there seemed very little sensation in the rather large feet, the palms proved to have a lot of nerve sensors, and she could get a surprisingly good “feel,” as good as or better than her old hands. I’ll never touch-type again, though, she thought inanely. Not with two fewer fingers, even though the size of the hands and the length of the fingers gave her, if anything, more control.
She still thought of herself as a “she,” and she knew that she probably would have to make a major mental adjustment on that score. Nobody in this new place would know that she’d been a woman most of her life; they’d see her in this man’s body instead.
She felt her face. It seemed human enough—mouth, even with what seemed to be thicker lips and maybe a longer, slightly thicker tongue, but her jaw moved side to side as well as up and down, and the teeth indicated that whatever these people were, they were omnivores, not herbivores as she would have expected. The canines, in fact, seemed a bit larger and sharper than they used to be—and no caps, no missing back tooth!
She had always been farsighted, which was the reason she had been able to survive among the People without her glasses, but vision now seemed perfect, with every little hair easy to pick out even very close up. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen this clearly at all distances.
Nose . . . Well, human, sort of, but there was something odd inside the nostrils, controlled by voluntary muscles. She flexed them and suddenly found her breathing cut off. She relaxed them again very quickly. Protection against blowing sand, perhaps? The eyes felt a little funny, too. She concentrated and found that she had double eyelids that could be independently controlled if she concentrated or would operate as one if she didn’t. The outer lids were essentially what she thought of as “normal”; the inner ones, however, were transparent. They distorted her vision and in fact seemed to filter color so that the world became a study in contrasting grays, but she could see through them.
The ears were definitely not “normal.” They went more back than up and were protected by large pointed lobes, more like a horse’s ears or some similar animal’s. They could, she discovered, be somewhat rotated, raised, or lowered, even independently of one another. There was a shock of bushy hair atop the head, but it didn’t seem to grow long down the back. With some trepidation she pulled one and looked at it. It appeared nearly snow white in color and very long and thick.
Lori had a sudden thought and reached around to her behind. There appeared to be a bit of excess hair at the base of the spine but not the tail she almost expected to find. In a way it was kind of disappointing. She’d always wondered what it would feel like to have a tail.
She looked around, trying to figure out how to get up. Equinelike or not, this wasn’t the body of a four-footed animal, no matter what its ancestors might have been like. It wasn’t as easy as getting up in a human body, it seemed, but she figured it out with a little experimentation. She turned over and used the hands as forefeet and then pushed off, letting her back muscles lift her upright. The true feet were clearly designed for sand; she found no problems with footing at all.
She looked around, wondering where the hell she might go. In doing so, she saw her shadow, and it made an amazing vision to her eyes even though, with the sun not so high, it was distorted and lengthened. Curiously, though, it was only by seeing that shadow that she noticed the horn.
Her hand went up to the top of her head and found it easily, almost centered up there. A twisting, rock-hard spiral going up, not quite straight, to a very wicked point. Although it was hard and almost half a meter long, she had no sensation of it being there at all, not even weight or balance on the head.
A male bipedal unicorn? she wondered to herself. Why would any evolving race keep a horn like that?
For now she could only guess. A weapon perhaps, considering the thinness and fragility of the arms? Or . . . She had an awful thought it might be used in some way involving mating no matter how conventional it seemed.
All right, Lori, you know the basics about what they’ve stuck you with; now what?
Again she scanned the horizon, and this time a curious effect happened. When she concentrated on any far point, it was as if her vision suddenly became telescopic. She could bring her view of the horizon closer, much closer, seeing detail at very great distances indeed. Although there was about a half second’s disorientation when she switched her focus to something more close up, the effect was the neatest thing about this body she’d discovered.
But what good was it to be able to zero in on the distant horizon if there was nothing but sand to be seen?
“Get to a zone gate and tell me where and what you are,” Mavra had said, but how could she do that when there seemed nowhere to go to get anywhere!
Lori continued the horizon pan, stopping and magnifying, trying to see anything. What good was all this if she was going to be stuck, alone and without food or water, in this desert?
She suddenly stopped and zeroed in on a tiny black speck far, far away. She would never even have noticed it without this perfect vision, and she would certainly have never been able to tell that it was more than a dune shadow without the remarkable telescopic abilities. Even with them it was barely discernible, but it seemed to be a dark area of some kind protruding from the desert floor. Rocks? It didn’t seem likely.
Trees! An oasis!
The sun was definitely climbing, and the day was heating up fast. Now was the time to make for any possible haven, and second-guessing was a luxury that she could not afford.
She started off toward the black dot and began to improve on her walking and balancing abilities with almost every step. She did not walk with those feet; she sort of trotted or even galloped, kicking up sand but making very good speed. She also learned rather quickly and a bit painfully that when moving fast, she had to lean a bit forward and keep the hips wide, otherwise that thing down there flapping away would get crunched between the upper calves.
It was getting progressively hotter, and she could actually see the heat both as it came down upon her and as it was first trapped and then radiated back by her body. She wondered just how hot to the touch she was right now.
She began to have trouble seeing. The heat radiation was coloring everything and distorting her sight. It suddenly occurred to her that there was more than one use for those inner lids, and she closed them. Virtually all colors snapped out and the world became a mass of infinite grays, yet the black dots that hadn’t seemed to grow any closer no matter what speed she was making now began to resolve themselves a bit more clearly and did in fact seem to be getting ever so slightly larger.
It was an oasis! That might not mean people, but those were clearly trees of some kind, and trees needed water.
Or at least she hoped that trees here needed water.
She would have expected to become winded after a while and have to rest, particularly in the growing heat, but she found that running across the sands like this gave her a real rush; her chest apparently contained mostly lung, and it went in and out with each giant breath she took. But the rhythm of the breathing and the running was very easy to slip into, and even though it seemed like she’d been running for hours across many, many kilometers, she didn’t feel the least bit tired or winded.
She was definitely hungry and thirsty, though, which only gave her more impetus to reach her goal as quickly as physically possible.