“Next, you will speak only Erdomese to one another, even in private. Language is the primary definer of a culture. You must believe that the Holy Office can determine if you uphold this or not in their examination of you both.”
She wasn’t sure how they could tell, but right now she would agree to anything just to get it done and over with.
“And finally, as soon as practical after the marriage but certainly before you retire for the night, you must consummate the marriage and present her for examination by me the next day. Then, and only then, will I give you the papers. Failure in any one of these may result in the marriage being annulled, and if it is, you will not see her again and may yourself face criminal penalties. Once you are married, you are morally and legally responsible for her and you will be held accountable. Remember, too,” he added, possibly guessing at her ultimate intentions, “that even if you leave our land, you have had your living rebirth. There will be no more change in race, sex, or anything else until you die and are again reborn. There is no running from it. There are no colonies here. You both will be Erdomese and nothing else.”
Well, the monk had sure laid it on the line. “All right, I agree.” Lori said. “I swear it to you here and now.” He hoped he could fulfill the duties he was agreeing to. As a male and an Erdomese, he was still a virgin.
“Very well. I assume you can write in some language?”
“Several. Just not Erdomese—yet.”
“All right, then, I will dictate the contract, and you will write it in the language of your choosing. One copy for you in your language, certified as a true copy by me, and the other in Erdomese for official use. Those, and the marriage contract, will suffice. When do you leave?”
“Well, Posiphar has indicated that he might well go to Aqomb himself for a while and take a rest. If he does, we’ll go with him. The hope is to leave just before dawn the day after tomorrow so that we can hit a small oasis at midday.”
“Very well. Then you will marry tomorrow. I will then be there before you leave the next morning to make my examinations and, if satisfactory, hand you the papers.”
The interview was over. “Thank you, Holy One. I will try to be worthy of your trust,” he said, rising, bowing slightly, and leaving the prayer sanctuary.
He headed for Julian, who was still locked up by decree until the marriage, to tell her the good and the not so good parts of the news.
“I speak in Erdomese,” he said right off, “because one of the conditions was that we speak nothing else to one another, and I do not wish to have anything go wrong.”
“It will be so,” she agreed.
“The reason why you have changed so much in here is that they have been giving you herbs to facilitate the process,” he told her. “They are strong, and the Holy One knows his business. I am commanded to keep you on them until they are gone. He said that to stop them now would cause you to go mad. He also said that they would not change you more than you are now, that it is just to ensure that you remain this way. He also said that an examination by others could tell. Does this bother you?”
“No,” she responded. “It—gives me relief. Now I understand why I have been this way. It helps me. And if it frees me from this place, I will take anything they wish. I know they can probably tell. That is one thing they are experts at here. Getting what they want.”
“Then we do it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!” Julian was excited. “But—I will need more than this! I can’t get married looking and smelling like this!”
Lori grinned. “You look just fine to me, but I’ll speak to Aswam. Most likely his wives and daughters can help you.
He’ll probably try and rob me blind for the service, but until tomorrow he’s stuck with you.”
Julian laughed, the first laugh she’d had since she’d gotten here. “And I will be a good little girl until he has no hold on me. I promise.”
“Um, one more thing. They require that we consummate as soon as possible after marriage.”
“Well, I am ready for that. I would not have it any other way, as I told you before, even though it is another way they hope to hold us here.”
“Huh? Why is that?”
“They hope I will get pregnant, which will restrict us, and that I will have children, which will limit us more. With nations so small and so different, it is unlikely that the others would welcome families as settlers. It does not worry me. One day I might like to have children, but it is not how you do it here that counts. Even births are regulated from on high, so that the nations do not get too many people to support. That is what they told us when we came in here.”
Reminded of that, Lori felt a little more relieved. She didn’t think they had a population problem here at the moment, and she’d seen some babies in her travels, but not a lot of them. The fact that at least by observation it appeared that twins were the norm made the chances even lower.
“That’s supposing that we can do it right to begin with,” she joked.
Julian gave a soft laugh. “That should not be a problem. You know what a woman wants; I know what a man wants. When you consider that, we should be the most perfect couple in all history!”
After Lori left to make the arrangements, Julian had to chuckle at the sudden realization that she was still of two minds. As a human male she’d been divorced with no children; now, as an Erdomese female, she was to be married and could have her own children, and something in her really craved the kind of family life Julian Beard had rarely experienced. Lori might find what he was looking for elsewhere, but she would never again fly a plane, let alone a spacecraft, never again do meaningful research—not with this body and these hands—and, curiously, she didn’t really mind. She’d railed against that knowledge most of all in the beginning, but it no longer seemed to matter now. Oh, she was glad that she’d done those things and had those memories, but at the age of forty Julian Beard, from a broken home and with no wife or family, had accomplished as much or more on his own than his boyhood dreams had ever imagined. She hadn’t realized until now how empty some of the triumphs had been without anyone to share them with.
She wondered if in fact the Well had screwed up or whether, somehow, becoming Julian Beard’s complete opposite—sexually, technologically, and in every other way—wasn’t what was exactly right for her at the moment. Now she was supporting Lori’s show, and it felt comfortable to be in that role and stop fighting. Lori might never understand it, but that, too, was all right.
Husbands never understood their wives, did they?
Julian in fact looked stunning for the tiny wedding, with long golden earrings—a series of squares linked together with chain, hanging down from punctures in the lowest part of the equine ears—a matching necklace, a pinkish glow applied judiciously to her face and upper body, hooves and “fingers” shined to almost a reflective polish, and her hair and tail done up in the traditional style, rising from golden tubes out across her back and up from the rear and then slinkily down to almost the ankles. Aswam’s women had done her up just right, and she had just the body for it.
Lori was stunned by the look. In the dark shed he hadn’t even noticed that Julian’s hair was a sultry light reddish-brown, and the combination now put the other women around to shame.
Somehow, too, he’d expected Julian to be taller. It was true that Lori was very large for an Erdomese male, and he’d gotten used to being higher than everybody else by a few inches, but Julian looked positively tiny beside him, with only that huge mane of hair bringing her up to near his shoulders. She also looked so young, although certainly amply developed.
The wedding was brief and simple, held in a small demonstrator tent on Aswan’s property, with only the tentmaker and his women and Posiphar and his women in attendance. In some ways the oaths taken before the witnesses and priest were everything Lori had hated back on Earth; Julian had to promise to honor, respect, and “obey absolutely” her husband, while Lori was required to swear only that he accepted all responsibilities, morally and legally, for his wife’s welfare. More interestingly, the word “love” was nowhere to be found. That, at least, Lori thought, was not dishonest; he wasn’t in love with Julian, but he did find her incredibly attractive on all levels, and love might come later. Neither, however, really knew the other yet—which was in some ways also consistent with Erdomese tradition.
Then there were fruit drinks and exotic pastries and some of the exotic-sounding Erdomese music from two of his daughters who had some talent in that direction, and that was it. By the heat of midday they were in a guest tent not too far away, the floor of which was covered with the large, varicolored pillows that were the most common furnishings in the nation.
Julian sighed. “Well, now I am Lori-Julian, or Madam Lori. Husband’s name goes first here, but even if you take a dozen more wives I’ll still be the only Madam Lori.”
“I know,” Lori replied, stretching out on the pillows and sighing. “Sorry, I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“You are lucky. I got none at all. I never thought I would ever get married again. And I surely never thought I would be somebody’s wife.”
Lori frowned and looked up at her. “You were married?”
“A disaster. I will tell you about it if you want. We were divorced years ago, and after she remarried, I never saw or heard from her again. You were never married?”
“No. I lived with a string of men off and on, the last one for five years. We had just broken up for good when I got the offer to cover the meteor strike.” He smiled sadly. “Want to know the ultimate irony? I forced the issue. I was closing in on forty, and my biological clock was in screaming mode. The idea of children frightened him to death for some reason. I pressed, he left. Just moved out without a word.” The smile turned to a nasty grin. “How I’d like to see him now!”
Julian chuckled. “Yes, it might be fun to see Holly now, too. I’ve got twice her cleavage in both ways. Useful, too. They actually are ‘jugs,’ you might say, holding water until near the time of birth, when Mother Nature throws a switch inside. You think you have problems. Erdomese gestation is almost a year long, and the little buggers have hooves.” She lay down beside him. “We can get some rest now and do what we must later,” she suggested, “but can you at least satisfy one bit of curiosity I’ve had since I woke up here?”
“Huh? What?”
“Will you take that thing off? I’ve got to know if it really is that big or if those things are falsies.”
Lori shifted around, removed the codpiece, and put it to one side, then rolled back. He’d never seen anybody’s eyes get that big.
“Oh, my! Oh my, oh my . . .”
It proved a lot easier, and a lot better, than either of them had thought it would be.
The land changed considerably as they neared the coast, becoming harder and more like the deserts of the American southwest or the steppes of Kazakhstan than like the Saharalike interior. Water here could be found coming from fissures in the rocks or occasionally in streams around which sprang dramatic vegetation. Because of this, they would often run into wandering herds of amat, twon, or zalj, the Erdom equivalent of the bison, the cow, and the antelope, respectively, and, here and there, signs of mahdag, the elephantine and vicious yaklike creatures of the steppes. Overhead, the fierce pterodactyllike maguid would swoop down in aerial packs; while preferring carrion, maguid were perfectly willing to do their own killing if they were really hungry.
Posiphar had exchanged the sand skis for wooden wheels, and it occasionally took all of them to get it up some of the grades and all of them to keep it from going down some grades ahead of them. Mostly, the daughters pulled it, the others walking beside.
“This place could be beautiful if you knew the rules and what was dangerous and what was not,” Julian noted. “Unfortunately, I do not know those rules, and it seems pretty scary to me.”
“I’ve seen little here that scares me,” Lori assured her. “Nothing I couldn’t take with a spear or arrow, anyway. Mahdag is a different story, but I don’t want to try one of those.”
“There be them who hunt them,” Posiphar remarked. “And them who be offerings of mahdag to the maguid who have tried to hunt them, too. Luckily, they be few and far between, and the ground be shaken long afore they come.”
“Have you ever seen one?” Lori asked him.
“Yes, several times in this district, always from a distance and going the correct way, which is not the same way the mahdag be going. The cursed beasts be a head or more taller than even y’self and weigh a couple of tons or more.”
Lori shook his head in wonder. “What do they eat? It would seem that it would take a lot to satisfy just one of them.”
“Oh, there be a lot more vegetation around on some of these plateaus and mesas than ye’d think,” the old trader told him. “I be not sure anyone has ever had the opportunity to study livin’ ones and survive, but I be certain that they be vegetarians and kill entirely for pleasure.”
The church taught that the mahdag had once been people, evil ones beyond redemption, doomed to wander in the wastes until the end of the world.
The trip had been an uneventful one as usual, and Lori and Julian had pretty well stuck to the bargain. She was even mixing the herbs herself according to the instructions passed on to them. They also practiced some social rules that Lori at least had never even noticed before, although he’d been around Posiphar’s wives and daughters since arriving in Erdom. He should have noticed, though, and he felt bad about his lapse, since most were really designed to keep women in their “place.”