In truth, the old Tony still existed only when she was required to speak English. Other than that, Tony and Anne Marie had each drawn from the other what they had found most valuable and had become, in Dillian terms, very much alike indeed. It was as if they had been born twin sisters, with the exception that Tony would never be able to grow proper roses or be half the cook Anne Marie could be, and Anne Marie would never be able to pilot a jet aircraft and would never be that good at repairing even simple mechanical things. That difference was enough to allow each of them to retain a sense of individuality and a connection with their pasts, and it really was enough.
Lori had asked Tony why, if things were working out so well for them, they’d agreed to undertake a very long and difficult journey over land and sea to meet a strange and mysterious woman they didn’t know.
“Curiosity most of all,” Tony had replied. “A way to see more of this strange and mysterious world than we could any other way. Our passage had, after all, been prepaid, and we verified that every hex had a Zone Gate and from Zone we could be instantly back in Dillia no matter how far in the world we roamed, so return tickets were not a worry, either. And, I admit, timing played some part in our motivation.”
“Timing?”
“Yes. You see, Dillian women ovulate only twice a year, for about a three-week period each time. It is not that they do not do things recreationally, as it were, but it only counts during each of those three-week periods. While we have more control than an animal would, we were told that during that time women of childbearing age get ‘turned on,’ one might say, and stay that way for the duration. I can now tell you that it is indeed true and that it is a whole-body experience, and further that much willpower is required to function even close to normally at that time. Dillians grow up with it and learn to cope with their parents’ help. In Dillia it is the females who almost always seduce the males. We, neither of us, were quite ready for that as yet, I fear, and if we had done it and even one of us had gotten pregnant—no sure thing, because the Well governs population—we would have wound up never traveling.”
Lori could well understand. “Um—do you get periods, too?”
“Twice a year as well, and about ten days long. They are most unpleasant, but we can function feeling awful a lot better than we can function during the arousal stage, I can tell you.”
“I know,” Lori sighed. That was the experience that defined growing up female more than any other, and the lack of it now was one of the best things about being male. He looked back at Anne Marie, the twin of the creature he was riding, and commented, “Too bad you and Julian will both miss shopping for shoes, though.”
Now, as he sat there in the darkness, he tried putting a little weight on the ankle and was pleased to notice that the pain was very mild now. In an emergency he would have no compunctions about getting up and running on it, even if he might still pay for that later. The hand, though, was another story. If anything, he was more right-handed than Lori Ann had ever been; his left hand was useful mostly for support of whatever the right hand was doing. The aspirin had helped; he never remembered it doing this good a job on a human headache and suspected that there was a different biochemistry at work here, for once in his favor.
Not enough, though. It still hurt, and the fingers felt numb, a lot more than could be explained by the splint and bandages. The automated clinic back on the east coast of Itus was a long way away now. He had no idea how far away the next high-tech hex they might reach was or whether they would know how to repair a broken Erdomese there. What if the hand had to come off? There weren’t many prospects for one-handed men in Erdom. He began to feel panic at the thought, and that just made the awareness of the pain worse. He fought it, tried to push it back down, and finally got some self-control back, but he was feeling dizzy and nauseous. Scared, he reached over and shook Julian, who stirred, shook herself awake, then frowned and immediately was up and at his side.
“You have a fever,” she told him in a concerned whisper.
“A very bad one. You are glowing like a camp fire. How long did you let me sleep?” She reached over and picked up the watch. “Five hours.” The remains of the medical kit were on a blanket near them, and she went over and picked up the small vial of aspirin. “Here. Curse these hands!” She managed to get the top off but couldn’t get the pills out. “Give me your hand and I will try and shake them into it.”
Lori nodded, shaking now, and put out his left hand. She shook out a half dozen pills, then scooped up two with the lip of the vial and got him a canteen. He got the pills down, but it would take some time for them to have any effect.
“Lie here beside me, husband,” she told him, “and try to sleep if you can. I will be here and keep watch upon both the camp and you.”
He moaned and shook and thrashed around for the better part of an hour before finally passing into sleep. Julian wasn’t all that certain if he was just sleeping or if the fever had finally put him out, but there was nothing more that could be done.
Julian’s thoughts were mixed but all bad. For one thing, she felt almost helpless in the situation. She could comfort him and check on him and see that he got aspirin until that was gone, and she could cover him, but she could do little more. The biggest frustration was that she knew nothing of Erdomese infections or even whether this kind of fever reaction was normal or terminal. She did assume that if it didn’t break within a day, it was very bad indeed, but then what? Should he be kept cool or, as she’d automatically done, warm under a blanket?
She assumed that growing up Erdomese tended to give one at least a rough idea of these things just as Earth people had a rough idea of human reactions and illnesses simply by growing up human. Maybe they shouldn’t have bandaged the hand. Maybe that cut off air flow or something, although there was no open wound and the bandages were mostly to keep the splint on.
I’m not even a good First Wife here, she thought miserably. A first wife should know what to do.
Of course, if they were back in Erdom, help could have been called. Not here. All that education, that sophisticated background, and what’s it worth? she asked herself.
Nothing. Nothing at all. The revelation struck to the core of her ego and identity. All that Julian Beard had been, all that he’d learned, every scrap of sophisticated knowledge and the numerous skills he’d mastered, were not merely useless now, they were useless period. Sure, in training he’d learned probably the ultimate in first aid, but how much of that applied to Erdomese biology and what good was most of it without the proper instruments and medications on hand? What could she do if she had a decent kit, anyway? Even if she could put a thermometer in his mouth, for how long should it be in and what would be the correct reading? Useless, all useless. Julian Beard was someone trained for other conditions, another time, another world, another life.
Julian of Erdom was furious at Julian Beard for being worse than useless. Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. She had clung to him desperately for so long, even decided at one point to die for him, and he was worthless. She rejected him in her fury. She understood now: this was totally new, a start from scratch, from less than scratch. All the feelings, impulses, inclinations that she’d pushed back for the sake of that precious ego had been not a personal victory but a brick wall. Her past was the wall, a useless thing that had kept her unhappily tied to a world and life and viewpoint no longer relevant. But the old Julian Beard wasn’t there anymore. He was a ghost, an evil spirit that had led her only to this helpless situation.
It was probably too late, but she hated him now, rejected him, cast him out. She felt him go, like something solid and tangible that had been inside her head and heart and now was removed. It felt good, but—what was left?
Erdomese women served their husbands and families and extended families. She had a husband, but neither he nor she had anyone else, even in Erdom. He was all she had, and she felt that she had failed him. She looked down at him as he slept fitfully, and for the first time she looked at him entirely as an Erdomese female. She looked at his cute horn, the gentle strength of his face, and a flood of emotions and self-realizations swept through her, this time unchecked, unfiltered, without thought or inhibition.
She bent down to his face and whispered in his ear, “I love you, Lori. I love you and I need you.”
He didn’t come fully awake, but he seemed to hear, and there was a gentle smile on his face all of a sudden, as if he had banished nightmares for a more pleasant dream.
Julian was not really thinking, just letting her Erdomese body and brain act as they willed, performing actions that she neither knew nor cared made any sense or not. She bent over, raised his head gently, and offered him her lower right breast, one of the water carriers in a nonpregnant female’s anatomy. He took it and began to drink. At first it was a little, as in foreplay, but after a bit he began really sucking and taking it in, even as she was licking his face with her long, thick tongue.
She had no idea how long she kept it up, but it was probably an hour or two before she noticed a dramatic change in him. The fierce glow was gone; there was only a slight residual shimmer, the natural aftereffect of the dangerous condition he’d had.
Lori’s fever had broken.
Julian pulled back, exhausted, dehydrated, but also very, very happy to see and sense the change in him. He was going to be all right!
“We might light a small torch and take at look at that dressing,” said a deep woman’s voice behind her.
She started, turned, and saw Mavra Chang standing there.
“How—how long . . . ?” Julian managed, her voice raspy and dry.
“Pretty much since you started. Somebody had to guard the camp.”
Julian felt suddenly ashamed, as if she’d done something else wrong. “I—I’m sorry. But—he was burning up with fever. I felt his life burning up inside him. I had to do something.” She paused. “I just wish I knew what I did.”
“Don’t apologize. I heard him crying out and thrashing around and knew he had to have something nasty—I don’t think I’ve actually slept soundly since I was aboard a ship in space, and you can’t believe how long ago that was, nor can I. At first I couldn’t figure out what you were doing, though,” she admitted. In fact, although she didn’t say it, what she had first made out in the bright starlight and then watched for a bit seemed pretty damned sick, a kind of prenecrophilia in which one made love to the dying. It took her experience with many alien species and her analytic mind to finally see a method in the apparent madness.
Julian still couldn’t. “Uh—what was I doing?” she asked hesitantly. She felt really rotten herself at the moment.
Mavra smiled. “A long time ago—it seems like I use that term a lot these days—when I was just pushing puberty, I pondered the Universal Sexual Design Question like most everybody else I knew. If most every mother had one baby at a time and multiple births were rare, why did girls get two tits? The answer, of course, is redundancy. Then I saw that Erdomese women had quads, yet Erdomese births are not all that much different in number than Earth-human births. So why four breasts? Wasn’t that taking redundancy to an extreme? Then I was told that the bottom two were water jugs when the system allowed it, and, probably like you, I accepted it as some sort of desert survival thing. I mean, you only need one guy to knock up a lot of females, but a lot of guys can’t produce any more babies with one female than one guy. Made sense. You probably thought the same thing. Probably most Erdomese think that way.”
“Yes? So?”
“I don’t think so anymore. Oh, maybe that’s one reason, but it’s not the main one. I have nothing but the evidence of my own eyes here and the results, but I’ll bet you what you did is done whenever a male is seriously ill. The face licking cools down the head in the only area of the body where your race can perspire to exchange heat. But that water—I don’t think that’s water at all. It’s at body temperature, and the cooling effect is minimal, so what purpose does it serve? Then I remembered the female Uliks from a long time ago. Big, ugly suckers, cross between walruses and giant snakes, with six arms and three pair of breasts. That was bad enough, except that they laid eggs and the young were born with developed stomachs and teeth and were fed dead meat. Which of course brought up the question of why they had any tits, let alone six, when they didn’t nurse their young.'”
“Yes? And?” Julian was exhausted, but she really wanted to know the point of this.
Mavra handed her a canteen. “Drink all of it. I know there’s water over there, and we’ll get some in a few hours. We have several more canteens, anyway.”
Julian took it gratefully and found herself draining the whole canteen in almost a continuous series of gulps. When she was done, Mavra continued.
“See, the only thing you and a Ulik woman have in common is desert. I didn’t think about it, but these ancient farts playing God here long ago weren’t all creative geniuses. They stole a lot from one another. That’s why there are so many humanlike life-forms, and why most races here seem to be themes and variations on other races, plants, animals, birds, bugs—you name it. It’s obvious to me now that the ones working on desert races would peek at each other’s work, steal from each other, even critique one another’s work.”
“The Ulik . . . ?” Julian prompted.
“The Ulik female takes in enough water to float a ship. Once inside her, the amount she doesn’t use, and that’s most of it, is stored in a series of sacs that have what look like breasts as outlets. But each ‘breast’ produces different stuff. There’s a salt and mineral solution in a form that can be handled by the body to replenish what’s lost. Another takes vitamins from food and creates a vitamin solution of sorts. But the bottom pair have a solution that contains universal antibodies of some kind of supercharged type. Viruses, germs, inflammation, you name it. They attack, destroy, then work to help heal what was damaged. The Ulik males are big; the females are enormous, and they don’t travel much, but I tell you the males really treat them right and bring them whatever they want. I thought it wasn’t a bad system, myself.”
Julian gasped. “You mean—my lower set—they’re like those super illness fighters?”
Mavra nodded. “I think so now. No way to be sure, of course. I sure wouldn’t bet my life on it being fact, but I’d bet a good amount of money it was the answer. I think you shot him up with the equivalent of megavitamins, minerals, body salts, antibiotics, you name it. He can’t make that amount on his own, like the male Uliks. In fact, I’ll bet the whole harem thing grew out of that. You’re basically mammals. When you’re pregnant, the body devotes itself entirely to one thing and one thing only, and all this good stuff gets shot into the nursing baby just like Earth-human breast milk transfers antibodies and nutrients well beyond mere food. Tell me—you ever cut yourself? Or had a bad bruise?”
“Yes. When I was being imprisoned, I was chafed and bruised by the chains, and I cut myself once trying to get away.”
“Uh huh. And how long did it take you to recover?”
“I—I hadn’t thought about it. Once I was freed and out of there, I never noticed.”
“Lori injures a lot more easily and heals more slowly. He had some minor cuts and abrasions on him that were scabbed over. You have none, yet you’ve been here longer than he has and have been treated more roughly. Ever know a sick Erdomese female? Or see one scarred and bruised?”
Julian thought a moment. “No, now that I think of it. Oh, some of the old ones showed the wear and tear of their age, but among the younger ones, no. The men, however, all had some kind of cut or bruise, and a lot of them had dueling scars.” The evidence of Mavra’s suppositions was sinking in. “Many of the older women were fat and frumpy and didn’t take great care of themselves, but I don’t remember even one with stretch marks!”
Mavra nodded. “So you see, if this secret really got out and was understood, if they weren’t kept so ignorant that they didn’t even know what caused diseases and infections, the women of Erdom would have a hell of a lot of power over their men. If he tells you he needs you, he means it. I wouldn’t push it too far—I doubt if you’ll grow back a hand if it’s chopped off—but for most basic illnesses and injuries, you women are immune. The men are patsies without your defenses.”
“I—I want to believe that it’s true. But—how did 1 know?”
Mavra shrugged. “When the Well processes somebody, it has to deal with him as an adult. An adult used to being something else. By definition, you can’t have the same lifetime of accumulated experience as somebody who grew up in the new race, so the Well compensates. Biochemically, attitudinally, you name it. The most important parts of what Mama Erdoma teaches her girls, you receive as one-time knowledge, available when needed, like instinct. It was needed. It came out.”
Julian shook her head a little from side to side. “I think you may be right—to a point. That, however, was not all that was needed to bring it forward. Somebody I once was and clung to fiercely and needlessly got in the way, too, and he proved useless. Looking at Lori, I knew that. At that moment, feeling so helpless, something snapped inside me. That old self died completely. Died or was killed. It is strange. I know it was there, was the driving force of my life for so long, but I cannot remember much about it. Tomorrow, when my husband awakens, I will ask him to give me a new name. It is all that is left of my past, and I do not want even the reminder.”
Mavra had seen this before. Going native was the old term for it, one means by which the mind coped with what to many was an impossible situation.
“If I get into the Well first, you aren’t necessarily stuck in that body and role,” Mavra pointed out. “You can be anything, any race, any sex you want, here or on a world out there.”
“No, no,” Julian responded, shaking her head. She knew what Mavra was saying and why, but she did not, could not, understand. “I am an Erdomese woman, I am Lori’s First Wife, and I wish nothing else. If you can do what you say, and have the opportunity, then his decision will tell me my own. Until then there is no decision. Not until Lori decides.”
Mavra shrugged. “Fair enough.” She halted suddenly and looked out beyond Julian to the west. “Dawn is coming. At least we’ll be able to see what we’re dealing with. It may sound crazy, but I’ve had the damnedest feeling that some pretty big and possibly dangerous creatures are out there. They have moved in the dark here, both on the ground and in the air, although they haven’t come near us. That may be caution or fear, or we might just smell awful. I wouldn’t take it at all personally if that last is true. In any event, so far there hasn’t been anything that kills first and sniffs later. In daylight, who knows?”
They let Lori sleep, and Julian was out pretty quickly, too, but the centauresses were up quickly, bright and alert.
Mavra had some coffee brewing atop a small oil-lit stove. Although she still hadn’t reacquired a taste for it after so long, she had decided that caffeine, particularly at the start of a day, was a safety measure.
“Sorry about the lack of tea, but there’s only one pot and the amount of rations was limited,” she told Anne Marie.
“Oh, no bother, dear. When you live with a Brazilian for several years, you really start getting into the habit. A pity we have no milk, though.”
“This is not exactly roughing it,” Mavra warned her. “Not yet.” She looked across at the other centauress. “Where’s Tony going?”
“Where I’ve been, dear. I mean, after all, we did eat rather a lot last night, bland though it was.”
“Oh. Never mind.”
With a mug of coffee in hand and some of the pasty loaf inside her, Mavra got out the field glasses and began to take a look around.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” she said at last. “Those are the weirdest things I’ve seen in a life of seeing weird things. Whoever dreamed up this place wasn’t all that original, but he, she, or it was certainly creative.” She handed the binoculars to Tony. “Take a look.”
Tony did look and had much the same reaction. The fields seemed covered with dense herds of a creature that looked like . . . well, everything.
“These Ancient Ones. I think they drank,” Tony remarked, and handed the glasses to Anne Marie.
What they all saw was a creature about 120 centimeters tall with a head not unlike a giant beaver or great hare. Its ears, however, were two almost circular extensions that stuck out on both sides of the head like flapping plates. From the forehead, two pronglike horns extended either a mere fifteen or twenty centimeters or, on some of the larger ones, a good forty to fifty centimeters.
“Ten to one the short horns are females and the long horns males,” Tony remarked. “Notice how there are far fewer long horns and that they’re rather well spaced in the fields. Each oldster watching out for his wives, most likely, with the shorter ones inside probably sons. Oh, my! Look at them jump!”
Mavra took the glasses and saw immediately what she meant. They did not run, not exactly; they leapt, the larger ones springing free of the tall grass cover. The bodies seemed to be covered in a light, short beige fur, and for a moment they looked like yellowish kangaroos, but in addition to short, tiny arms they had two rather small hoofed front feet and two enormous rear feet that powered the leap and seemed all out of proportion to the rest of the creature. They had short, stubby fanlike tails that, unlike a kangaroo or wallaby, could not support them standing on the rear legs alone, so when still, they were on all fours with the long neck craning their heads up.
“Six limbs,” Annie Marie noted. “Like us!”