“Well, I for one think we all look just splendid!” Anne Marie announced, missing the point.
The area was a rocky outcropping that wind and rain had worn clean of soil. It was a large tabular rock, cracked in a few places, that ran about twelve meters by nine. There were some raised sections of what looked like the same material along two sides, although nothing that would really conceal them from an interested onlooker. It was, however, barren of grass and didn’t seem to have been staked out by anything else alive, and that was good enough.
“It’s basically a form of sandstone,” Julian noted, “not unlike on Earth. It’s a common pattern. The stuff will eventually erode back to sand—and you can see some of that along the back side there—and probably underlies the whole plain. Basically, this isn’t much different than Erdom, except that this region gets an adequate rainfall that allows the grass to grow and stabilize the rock.”
Mavra nodded. “That’s right. You were a geologist, weren’t you? Okay, let’s get the bedrolls down for us three bipeds. Anne Marie, do you still have the firestarter? I want to check on something.”
“Yes, yes. I believe . . . Half a moment!” With that the centauress turned on her forward hips almost all the way around and fumbled in one of the large packs, then said, “Aha!” She pulled out a long, thin metallic rod and handed it to Mavra.
As the supplies were taken off and the three bedrolls were spread out in the middle of the slab, Mavra went over, picked a strand of the grass, and brought it back to the center of the rock, well away from anything else. She pressed a button on the end of the stick, and from the other end came a tiny jet of flame, which she applied to the grass.
It caught fire but went out as soon as she removed the source of the flame. She tried it two or three times, and each time the result was the same. Satisfied, she tossed the remains of the grass stalk away and put the lighter back in the pack.
“If you don’t mind, what was that about?” Tony asked her.
“Testing fire hazard. Either it’s not long after the rainy season or this soil really holds water well. Maybe both,” Mavra explained. “It also means that the grass is probably just grass. Plus, it shows that the reason for not seeing any sort of fires or fire remains isn’t because it’s too dangerous to build one. And that probably means there aren’t any Gekirs around at the moment, whatever they are.”
“Either that or they just don’t use fire,” Lori noted.
Mavra gave her a look she hoped the Erdomese could see in the darkness. “Don’t kill my optimism too quickly! I was enjoying this,” she said grumpily.
Lori looked around with his night vision from atop the centaur’s back. “I wonder what would be the most logical life-form for a place like this?”
“Either carnivores or omnivores,” Tony guessed. “Probably carnivores. They would have the most stake in managing such a place, and it would explain the lack of any sort of groves or cultivation in such a desirable spot. I would wager that they eat a lot of meat, anyway.”
Lori frowned. “Um, I hate to bring this up, but you Dillians are herbivores, aren’t you? And Erdomese are basically herbivores, too.” He decided not to mention that another staple of the Erdomese diet was almost any form of insect. He realized that that might well put the others off.
“That, I think, was the point,” Mavra commented dryly, deciding not to remind them that she was the only true om-nivore there. She looked around. “We could risk a fire, though, either to ward off our theoretical predators or even to cook something. I’m not going hunting out there, though.”
“Get me down first,” Lori asked. “I’m feeling a little better. Julian—help support me and I’ll see how the ankle is doing.”
She came over as Anne Marie lifted Lori off Tony’s back and gently to the ground, where Julian braced him.
He tried a few steps, and although he continued to put a hand on her shoulder, it was more as a stabilizer than as a full support. “Not too bad,” he said. “It’s still sore, but it feels a lot better. At least I know now that it’s not broken.” He took his hand away from Julian and tried an uncertain step, then reached out with his right hand and pushed on Tony’s side. “Ow! Damn! I think the leg’s going to be fine, but my wrist feels terrible! Shit! And I’m right-handed!”
Julian looked first at his leg, then at his wrist. “There is very slight swelling in the leg, my husband, but as you say, it does not look like much. Perhaps one more day of riding and then you should be able to walk. The wrist, though, looks very bad. It should be in a splint and bandaged.”
Mavra came over to them. “Trouble?”
“His wrist,” Julian told her. “It is bad, and I do not know how bad.”
“Can’t you feel along it for a break?”
“No, she can’t,” Lori told her. “Because our females carry children to term on all fours, they need forelegs, and the way that’s done makes their hand basically a hard, fixed surface and a thick separate segment for grasping. But no fingers as such.”
It disturbed Mavra that she’d barely noticed. “Let me see. Give me your hand, Julian.” She took it and felt it. It was hard and resembled a hoof, but unlike a true hoof, the hand was segmented in two parts, one tapered and rounded and a bit softer inside so that it could be used as a giant thumb against the other, slightly flexible part. When closed, it made a nearly perfect hoof. “That’s awful!” she exclaimed, then immediately felt terrible because she’d said it.
“Oh, it’s not bad once you get used to it,” Julian replied sympathetically, remembering how she had felt when she’d first awakened and seen those strange hands. “You would be surprised what I can do with them. Not as much as true hands, but about as much as, say, mittens would allow. No, the real problem is, since I can use them as forelegs, I have no feeling in them. Having no sense of touch in my hands, I have to be looking at them whenever I am using them. That’s all right for many things, but there is no way I can feel Lori’s wrists.”
“You’d be surprised how much she can do with them,” Lori assured Mavra. “But not this.”
“Well, then, big man, grit those teeth, because I sure can,” the tiny woman replied. She took his right hand, noting how squared off and hard his hands were, even with three distinct and bendable fingers and a fairly prehensile thumb, then felt back to the wrist.
“Augh!” Lori grunted in obvious pain.
Mavra let go and shook her head. “I think you might well have some kind of a fracture there. I didn’t feel any protrusions, though, so it’s not a clean break we can set. Probably some hairline thing or chip. That swelling is pretty bad, though. It’s hard to say how it would heal—I don’t know enough about Erdomese, obviously, to make a guess—but Julian’s right. We’re gonna have to bind it in some kind of splint so it’s immobile and then bandage it. Bandages we got in the pack, and tape, so if we can find something to use as a splint, we’ll be okay. I don’t know what I can give you to treat the inflammation, though. The stuff that would help me might kill you or burn a hole through your stomach.”
“Believe it or not, aspirin,” Lori told her. “It seems aspirin is the number one miracle drug of Erdom. We don’t make it, but I ran into a drug trader on the ship to Itus. One of our biggest imports.”
Mavra sighed. “Well, I have a small tube of aspirin tablets in the pack for my own use. I wish I’d known—or thought to ask. It sure explains why I was able to buy it in the dockside shops! I doubt if there’s more than sixty tablets, though, and you, with your large size and particularly with that break, will need all of it and more. Lie down on the bedroll and I’ll get them.”
With Julian’s help, he managed to get over to the bedroll and sink down on top of it. Mavra came back with the small vial of aspirin and a canteen. “I’d take four of them now if I were you. Damn it! We should have started this as soon as we started out!”
They pried apart the plastic box Mavra had used as a medical kit and were able to form, with the aid of a large knife, a pretty rigid set of splints that were tightly taped to the wrist, lower arm, and hand, then wrapped with a green-colored plastic bandage. When it was done, Lori could not move the wrist at all, and after an initial, intense period of pain, it subsided and he felt some relief. Then it was a matter of waiting for the aspirin to kick in.
Anne Marie came over to them. “I do so hope that does it,” she said, concerned. “I know how it feels.”
Mavra nodded. “What do you want to do about something to eat?”
“Well, the grass smelled all right, so we tried some and it will do. We have to eat an awful lot, you know. While I’d much rather have it processed, baked in breads and cakes and pastries, or steamed with veggies and spices, that seems a teeny bit impractical here. We’ll just graze nearby until we’ve had our fill. As basic as it is, it is ever so much better than those horrid jungle leaves!”
“Okay, but don’t stray too far from camp,” Mavra warned. “You don’t know what’s out there.”
“We’ll be careful. We drank our fill in that stream back in Itus, so water is not a problem. Back as soon as we can. Ta!”
“Are they safe out there alone and unarmed?” Julian asked worriedly.
“Dillians are tougher than they seem, or at least they used to be,” Mavra assured her. “Those hooves can give a hell of a nasty kick, and while their arm strength isn’t close to a male Dillian’s, they’re pretty damned strong compared to us or most others, and I have a feeling that they can twist and move those bodies in ways we can only imagine. And they’re not unarmed, really. They both have the big knives we used on the jungle vines.”
“You have other weapons, I assume?” Lori asked.
“Some. The absolute best weapons for the Well World are knives for close in and crossbows for long shots.”
“Crossbows?”
“Sure. They’re accurate and powerful, and they work anywhere: nontech, semitech, or high-tech. I have some other items, too, but they’re for various special circumstances.”
“I have a saber and scabbard in my pack,” Lori told her. “I was pretty good with it, too, but I’m not sure how well I’d do left-handed.”
“Well, we won’t have to fight a duel with it—1 hope. So long as you can stab something with it, I think it’s better than nothing. You sure aren’t gonna be winning any fist-fights any time soon!” She paused a moment. “What about food for you two? I have a small kerosene-type cooker that’ll work here, or there are loaves in the emergency rations that supposedly give any of us what we need. They taste lousy, but they’re better than raw grass.”
“I could prepare something from the supplies,” Julian suggested, but Lori shook his head.
“No, not tonight. Tonight’s for resting and taking it easy. If Mavra can stand one of those loaves, so can I. I might like it a lot more than she does.”
“Or less. Still, very well, if that is your wish. I could try that grass, but I do not want to leave you alone here.”
“No! Eat one of the loaves, too. We’re heading for the coast, which shouldn’t be that far, right, Mavra?”
“Shouldn’t be. Certainly not a day’s walk.”
“When we are hard up, we will eat grass. Until then we will do what is easiest and most convenient,” he pronounced.
“As you say,” Julian responded, and went to get the rations.
Mavra was a little irritated. Julian had talked about the confusion over Tony and Anne Marie, but at least there were two of them. She began to wonder if there weren’t two Julians as well—the one that led them through a dark jungle safely, reconnoitered the area, and located and approved the campsite and the other one that she now was, subservient, obedient . . . somewhat sickening.
On the other hand, if she had four big tits, hands like claws, arms useless for much lifting and better designed as legs, and if the only hope she had of not being cast adrift as some kind of chattel slave was to keep the one husband who understood her happy enough to keep her around, then maybe she’d be two people, too, no matter how difficult it might be.
She had, after all, been in situations not any better than Julian’s. Ancient Earth wasn’t kind to most women. The way Tony, Anne Marie, and Julian had talked, that was true even now on much of the planet. Chinese peasant women still toiled in the rice paddies; the women in theocracies like the Islamic fundamentalist cultures were kept without rights, voices, or free movement. It was little better in much of sub-Saharan Africa, India, or even a lot of Latin America. In what they called the Third World, eighty percent or more of humankind was largely forgotten or ignored by the feminist crusaders in the industrialized West, most of whom also forgot or never knew that revolutions were often followed by reactions that could leave them worse off than ever. She had seen it happen.
She had lived it.
Time after time the great civilizations, the great ideas, the progress of whole masses of humanity were stopped dead and thrown back, often for longer than generations. Sometimes the darkness lasted many long centuries. Two steps forward and then one back was the norm, or so it seemed, but the darkness could rise and force one back even farther. If, as she’d been told, the status of women in some parts of Earth, let alone so much of it, was different from that in Erdom only by degrees, then the darkness still loomed, waiting to engulf the rest. And that darkness, the darkness of ignorance and slavery that was the dark side of humanity, would be replayed again and again if Nathan Brazil triumphed, even though he himself would have been appalled at that interpretation.
It didn’t have to happen. It certainly didn’t have to happen the same way and to the same people again. The Markovians—she still thought of the Ancient Ones by that name although Jared Markov, after whom they were named, had not yet been born this time around—were wrong in believing that there was a level of perfection attainable by races fighting their way up the evolutionary ladder. They were right to try to understand and fight the flaws, but the result was that the flaws were simply perpetuated.
That, at least, she could change. She might change. But if, and only if, she got into the Well first.
“I’ll take the first watch,” Lori said, breaking Mavra’s reverie. “I slept most of the way here, and I’m fine now.”
Mavra nodded. “All right. Julian and I will try to get some sleep. If the Dillians don’t come back in an hour or so, wake me. If they do, then give me at least four hours. I’ve functioned on that little for days at a time.” She thought a moment. “I don’t want to give you a loaded crossbow with that pair still out there if you’re not experienced in using one. I’ll get your saber so at least you can hit something over the head if it jumps on you, but what I really want is a loud yell. I’ll give you my watch. It’s a windup type, so it works anywhere, too.”
He grinned. “Don’t worry so much. I can see in the dark, remember? I’ve even been keeping track of the centaurs. I’ll be okay.”
“In fact, I should take the next watch, not you, for the same reason,” Julian pointed out. “The nights are long on this world, and it is best that the night guard be those to whom the dark is no barrier.”
“I won’t argue, but are you sure you’re up to it on so little sleep?” Mavra asked her.
“Yes. I do not need a lot of sleep, either. I make it up when I can.”
“Okay, it makes sense to me. If all else fails, we can let you sleep and ride as well.” Mavra yawned. “Me, I’m gonna take advantage of your kind offer.”
“You get to sleep, too,” Lori told Julian. “I’ll be all right.”
“Yes, my husband,” she responded, and lay down on the unoccupied bedroll.
Tony and Anne Marie came back a half hour later. By that time Mavra and Julian were both asleep, and the Dillians tried to make as little noise as possible. They didn’t need bedrolls or much else; like horses, they lay down only when crippled or very ill. Instead, they simply stood, their legs locked and the humanoid torsos bent back somewhat, and went to sleep.
Except for the occasional heavy breathing of the centauresses, it was soon deadly still.
Lori, too, wondered about Julian’s dual nature. He himself felt pretty well adjusted to the Erdomese form and now even to being male. Maybe too adjusted, he had to admit, considering some of his behavior of late, but he felt that he was being pragmatic about things. By Erdomese standards, he thought, he would always be a liberal, always remembering that the females had minds and thoughts and feelings and capabilities most of that society rejected and, hopefully, treating them better than most men there did. On the other hand, in that society any outspoken advocacy was a sure route to losing everything and to punishments including cutting out his tongue, castration, and beheading. For Julian it would mean instant death. With the church and its omnipresent spies and true believers programmed from childhood to believe in it and with the enforced insularity of most of the population from real knowledge of much of the rest of this world, nothing could or would change in Erdom’s society until and unless there was violent mass revolution.
It might well come eventually, but considering how things there were now, it most assuredly would not be in his or Julian’s lifetime. It wasn’t until experiencing a real totalitarian theocracy that he had realized just how hard a revolution could be, battling not only minds but genuine power. Technology, discovery, enlightenment, the scientific revolution—that had started things on Earth, or restarted them. But what kind of science could one develop when a battery would not hold a charge and tended to dissipate in even short transmission? When technology was rigidly and forever limited to water, and wind, and animal and human power? Without mass communication how could anything be organized? When even writing was limited primarily to the church and the hideously complex ideographic language was so complex that even priests were middle-aged before they fully mastered it, how could knowledge be disseminated?”
“Some men do in fact run the world—and you’re not one of them.”
And the price for having a crack at being one of those men who did run Erdom was just too damned high.
Still, he had to admit, it was different being a man in a male-dominated society. The fact was, he was beginning to like this form, even if he didn’t like the culture and chafed at the hex’s technological restrictions. This form was beginning to—no, it did feel natural, normal, comfortable. He never even thought about it anymore. Funny. He’d been born and raised an Earth-human female and had spent almost forty years as one; he’d been an Erdomese male for a matter of a few months, no more. Yet Mavra Chang seemed an ugly, colorless, unattractive . . . alien to him, while Julian was beautiful, desirable. Lori Ann had never been sexually attracted to women no matter how much she fought the male system. Lori the Erdomese couldn’t remember what turned Lori Ann on in a man or see the least attraction there.
Each day it was getting harder and harder to remember what it had been like to be an Earth-human woman. Not the past, not the events of a life, or the people, or the learning and accomplishments, the struggles, losses, and gains, but remembering being the one who had lived it. That person seemed more and more to be someone else, like a character from a movie she’d watched, a movie spanning forty years of a woman’s life.
Was that how it worked? First one got the new body, along with sufficient programming on the brain’s subconscious level to use it without serious trouble, and a bit of suggestion so that one was not frightened or revolted by what one saw or what one might need to eat, but it was still the original person, superimposed on an alien form.
But that form’s brain had to be different from an Earth human’s, if only in subtle but important details. Neural pathways would be wired differently; thoughts would need to be rerouted so that action produced the desired results. If there were subtle differences in the wiring of the hemispheres in male and female human brains, how much more dramatic would that wiring difference be in a totally different species? Add hormones and other chemical differences that would eventually influence development as the mind “settled in,” and one’s old self, one’s memories, one’s very soul, would be reshaped day by day so slowly and subtly that a person might not even notice. But one day that person would be wholly of the other species, as if born to it.
Lori Ann had been playing at being a man, enjoying fooling with the very concept as if it were some kind of masquerade gender-switch game. He wasn’t playing anymore, and he wasn’t even sure when he had stopped. He was a male now. It was one of the basic things that defined him. What flowed from that sense of identity defined his actions and reactions to a host of things both internal and external.
If it had happened to him like this, it almost certainly had happened to Julian. She’d come in months earlier than he had, but her own situation had been so radical a cultural loss that she’d fought like hell against it, while overall, he had to admit to himself that he’d not really fought it in himself at all. Still, by the time he’d met her, she already admitted that she had accepted being female, that it was something that no longer disturbed her. She’d fought not that but the concept that she was property, that she was to be consigned to a base role as if in a medieval harem. It was something Lori Ann would have fought just as hard against.
Maybe those drugs and hypnotic sessions had accelerated the process for both of them; maybe not. But if Julian now felt as normal and natural as an Erdomese female as he did as an Erdomese male, she might also, away from Erdom but still with him, have stopped fighting the rest.
It made sense. He thought of the two Dillians, who seemed so alike outside and so different inside, and knew that they really weren’t. Anne Marie really hadn’t been required to adjust much, but to Tony it must have been as much of a shock to be a female as it had been for Julian initially—although Julian also had the restrictive Erdomese culture to deal with. They’d been here the longest of any of this party. They’d come through the night the meteors fell.
Tony still thought he hadn’t changed inside, partly, Lori suspected, because Anne Marie still saw the old Tony inside the new body because she wanted to see him there. But he had changed. He was different. They had talked for a bit, being so, well, close, during the walk, and since he had the translator Tony could speak Dillian, which was easier. And when she spoke Dillian rather than English, there were only slight differences between her and Anne Marie’s speech patterns. In her normal speech, in her manner, her movements, even many of the things she spoke about, Tony was as feminine as Lori Ann Sutton had ever been. Tony admitted that she’d stopped fighting when she had realized that Anne Marie never noticed any difference. In any event, Tony knew she couldn’t stave it off forever and would have to let go sooner or later. Now she was just playacting being the old Tony; he was as past tense as the old Lori Ann was.
“I feel real pity for your Julian,” Tony had told him. “I would not accept that life. But in Dillia it is different; the practical day-to-day differences in the lives of men and women there are not radical enough to cause alarm, and in the few areas where they are, the benefits of being male are balanced against the benefits of being female. It is not at all like my old culture, nor, perhaps, your old one, either. It would have been nicer, perhaps, and more romantic to have been Anne Marie’s husband rather than her twin sister, but we can no more change that now than we could change ourselves before. This is second best, and we will take it.”