She felt uncomfortable inside because walls and barriers blocked not only the irrelevant but the important as well. Enclosures distracted and had to be dealt with. Still, the knowledge base informed her that the object: Mate was subject to environmental weaknesses that no longer plagued her, and it was unthinkable that she would keep him in discomfort when it was possible to do otherwise. The concept of separating from him any more than necessary was simply not allowable. She and he were linked in biophysical and biochemical ways that neither understood but that she realized and accepted. That she had in fact induced the linkage to ensure that he took her with him she no longer even remembered; it was irrelevant. Is mattered; was did not matter and was thus dismissed from the mind unless was was absolutely required for a current action.
And all of is was composed of objects. Mate is. Interactor with Mate is. At that moment those two objects were the only things in her mind. All else was filtered out as irrelevant. She understood nothing that was said; indeed, those very sounds were filtered out as irrelevant. But she felt what Mate felt; every little nuance of feeling was input, to a level he could not have comprehended. These were assimilated and appended to the Mate object’s is, which in turn formed a complete and constantly changing whole object picture in her mind.
The Glathrielian way saw life as a series of assembled objects leading to clearly pictured objectives, the latter simplified to the most basic form. Situation: hunger. Objective: find, consume sufficient food. Her one larger objective since turning Glathrielian had been to accompany now-mate. Having achieved that objective, she’d had no need for another. She understood, however, that Mate had his own objective. Because she lacked any data that the objective affected her in any way she would consider important and lacked any overall further objective of her own, Mate’s objective was in control and she would support him as he required. Just what Mate’s objective was she neither knew nor cared, nor would she care until and unless it affected what she considered important.
Her conscious mind saw no irrelevant external details; it saw other life as a seemingly infinite variety of colors and color mixes and patterns. She saw what was inside rather than what was outside in this circumstance.
Mate’s is was warmth, comfort, interaction with Other; interaction produced in him a range of sensations, none of which were unpleasurable and which included some hope and optimism, which meant that Mate was interacting with Other in pursuit of Mate’s objective. The Other, however, was radiating a very different is that Mate seemed oblivious to. Deceit, dishonesty, coldness, cruelty—danger! These impressions all came to her as they could only when her mind was freed of distractions. She could not interact with the Other, but she could with Mate, both empathically and physically. She knew that Mate was getting the information in the same manner as she was sending it, but while he did not reject it, it seemed only to reinforce his own instinct about the Other; neither did Mate act upon it as she would have.
If she still could think in the old ways, she would have thought to herself, He knows the colonel is a lying, two-faced bastard with ulterior motives, but for now he’s stringing the creature along.
She was uneasy about this only because she lacked any knowledge of what the creature was and how it might be dealt with. With the creatures she’d taken on in the past, she’d been able to absorb sufficient data from Mate to formulate a course of action; in this case, however, Mate didn’t seem to know anything about the damned creature, either, meaning that the only course open if the thing turned dangerous was to run like hell.
For his part, Nathan Brazil was getting a little irritated by the waves of warning coming from the girl. He fervently wished there was some way to tell her, “I know, the guy’s a slimy, dangerous son of a bitch, but I need to know what he’s up to.” Still, she seemed to actually be making an important point. If this creature were to try anything now, he hadn’t the slightest idea how to hurt it or just what it could do to him. He was suddenly so astonished that she had actually managed relevant and intelligent communication with him that he almost fumbled acting on it. Repressing his excitement, at least for the moment, he got control and asked, “By the way, Colonel, I don’t want to sound insulting, but just what the devil are you, anyway? Your race and nationality, I mean. You’re a new species to me.”
That wasn’t quite true, but it must have been eons ago when he’d last encountered such a creature as this, and he just didn’t have anything to go on.
“The nation is called Leeming, sir,” the colonel told him. “At least, that is the way the translators spit it out, and that’s acceptable. And our kind are called Leems, not Leemingites or whatever, which is very close to the actual sound.”
The name, pronounced a bit differently but still close enough, did indeed ring a distant bell. They had no skeletal structure, and the brain case was a rock-hard ball that could move to any part of the fluid body. The outer membrane was thick enough to stop most projectiles, and yet they could control their skin and fluid interior almost down to the cellular level. What they needed, they could quickly create the internal musculature to make. Arm, hand, tentacles, functional eyes, functional mouths and voice mechanisms, ears, even the semblance of a former Brazilian Air Force colonel. They could maintain simple shapes or appendages almost forever but were unable to sustain complex forms for very long, especially when under stress. The Leem were asexual, but two were required to reproduce, each consuming a massive quantity of food and growing to almost one and a half times its normal size, then splitting off that new half, which then joined with a half from the other to produce a whole new being. They ate by secreting an acidic poison that could dissolve virtually any organic life to a puddle of warm goo, which was then absorbed directly through the skin.
Now where the hell did all that come from? Brazil wondered. From the Well data bank was the obvious answer, but it still startled him. The Well had never been so generous or so obvious or so detailed with him before.
The data flowed into Terry from him and were added to her own internal knowledge base. This in turn changed the conscious picture of the Other dramatically, and it startled her. Mate had not known; then, suddenly, there had been a tiny burst of energy and a data stream had come from no specific point into his mind and then secondarily from his mind to hers.
She felt his surprise and initial puzzlement at it, then his comfort of recognition and his surprised pleasure rather than continued bafflement. It was something unexpected, new data that could not now be correlated.
Like her, Mate had a knowledge base that gave important data, but unlike her, the source was external. And while he knew the source, he had not expected the data to be given. There was something very important about that fact beyond its obvious comforting factors and its convenience to Mate, but as yet she could relate it to no objective of hers. But if it was not important to his objective beyond the obvious, and not relevant to hers, but was relevant and important beyond a doubt, then to whose objective did it relate? The priorities were clear: self < family < tribe. Mate + external knowledge base = great power. Family + external knowledge base = great power2. Tribe + external knowledge base = ? ∞?
Such speculation was fruitless and irrelevant to her now and was immediately wiped from her conscious mind as if it had never been considered. What remained was the relevant part: that she had a tribal objective that overruled all other actions, and that was for her and Mate to reach Mate’s objective. Until that was attained, reaching Mate’s objective was the sole motivator of all subsequent actions. And any actions on her part to further that objective were justified.
Without exception.
Cibon, Off the Itus Coast
IT HAD NOT BEEN A PLEASANT VOYAGE FOR THE FORMER JULIAN Beard, although at the time she didn’t realize how unusual the experience was.
The monks of Erdom, pledged to maintain a stable society, had been faced with a pair of Erdomites, one male, one female, from another world, another culture, another race, now in Erdomite bodies but with their old minds and memories. Lori Sutton, once a human female and an astronomy professor as well, was now an Erdomite male through the oddities and occasional sick humor of the Well, two meters tall, strong, fast, an equine humanoid with a horn on his head and a pair of legs that could propel him at up to twenty miles an hour in deep sand. Julian Beard, once a handsome human man, an engineer and a shuttle astronaut, was now a pastel yellow Erdomite female, small, with little upper body strength, with a mane of hair and a matching tail, coping with not one but two pairs of breasts, and with hands that were little more than mittenlike split soft hooves. Both were trapped in a Well World nation where only mechanical energy was allowed, a medieval desert society where females had neither status nor rights, and where education and knowledge were tightly held and controlled by a pervasive church run by Erdomese eunuchs. To the monks these two were the very definition of a pair who just would not culturally fit.
The original plan had been simple: to use one of the monks’ great herbal potions to essentially hypnotize them into being good Erdomites, with a posthypnotic command that each should take the drug every night and then reinforce the hypnotic commands on the other. Only the monks’ failure to command them to forget their pasts and past knowledge and a fortuitous plea for help from Mavra Chang had taken them out of the monks’ clutches before the conditioning could be completed.
Julian had found herself totally submissive, without any sort of aggression or defenses, in a mental state where her whole reason for living was to please her husband and anticipate his wishes. Lori had become the strutting cavalier male, accepting Julian and all Erdomese females as incapable of more than pleasing men, doing household work, and having babies. He associated with other males and treated his wife as some kind of chattel slave without regard for her feelings.
Three days out of Erdom on the voyage north to Itus, they had taken the last of the drug without remembering it. The fourth day out, they went to take it and there was none left; they both went through the commanded ritual anyway, but without the potion they were aware of it and could understand what had been done to them. The effect was even worse because the old dosages had not worn off. When they said them, the statements sounded somewhat reasonable. It was only well after, when they awoke the next morning, that the full significance of it hit them.
The first realization was that they had been badly had by the monks of Erdom. The second was more than a little guilt and shame at having fallen for it.
That morning, in the cabin, they did not speak to one another for quite some time. Finally it was Julian, uncharacteristically, who broke the silence.
“I think for sanity’s sake we should speak to each other in private only in English from now on. I think we both need the mental equivalent of a cold shower, and that’s it. Not to mention the vocabulary.”
“That’s fine with me,” Lori replied softly, not looking directly at Julian. “It seems to me that we’re in enough trouble with those monks that it hardly makes a difference if we break our other promises now.”
“Were you a feminist back in your previous life?” Julian asked. It seemed an odd question for the situation.
“Of a sort, yes. The word had come into disrepute because it was co-opted by radicals with a different agenda from most women, but on the basic issues I was. Something of an activist, in fact.” Although, Lori admitted, I compromised my ideals more than once to get or keep a position.
“Well, now you’re going to find out the truth of one thing they told you and one other thing they didn’t. First, men do control and set the rules in society—at least in the two I know, Earth’s and Erdom’s. Maybe a lot of other places. That’s true. And now you’re a man and have to know the second thing.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“The men who rule? You’re not one of them. You’re stuck with those stupid rules the same as every woman, and you can’t change them much, either.”
“Thanks a lot. After the way I treated you the last four days . . .”
“Think of it as an education, or the start of one,” Julian sighed. “We were trapped. Both of us. But we couldn’t escape because it was built into the society. If we hadn’t agreed on the temple visit, I would have been stuck with that tentmaker and gotten the treatment later, when the local monk got the drugs he needed. If you agreed but then didn’t show up, they’d have sent people looking for us, and in that society it’s pretty hard to hide for very long. And then we’d have been kept in the temple, but instead of just being drugged and hypnotized, we’d have been the subjects for their chemical inquisition. We’d have come out of there with our brains scrubbed so clean that not a trace of Julian Beard or Lori Sutton would have remained.”
Lori shook his head in wonder and sighed. “I wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t passed me that letter. Or if they’d told me to simply forget I was ever anything but an Erdomite and then handed me a letter I couldn’t read.”
“I suspect that this friend of yours paid a handsome bribe to ensure that we’d get the letter. As to the other, remember, they’d never had two people like us before. They couldn’t think of everything that quickly. But we’d have continued to drug and hypnotize each other, and over weeks, months, a year, we’d have had reinforcing visits to the temple so they could correct any problems. Eventually we’d be so steeped in our roles and behavior and so indoctrinated into the religion and culture, nothing else would have been needed. I shouldn’t wonder that my next prescription might have included some mind-dulling chemicals, slowing down my mental processes until I couldn’t keep two thoughts in my head at once or have much long-term memory. I’d just be another of those stupid bubbleheads.”
“You think they’re smart enough to have stuff like that?”
“I think it’s about time we stop thinking of them as ignorant and stupid just because they live in a feudal, primitive society. They are a very old culture. Ancient by Earth standards. I think they know an awful lot about everything that is possible to use in a nontechnical society and even more about keeping things the way they are and under complete control.”
“But—we’re Erdomese! You said it yourself a week ago. We’re Erdomese whether we like it or not. Sooner or later—”
She nodded. “Sooner or later we’ll be back there and even more suspect because we’ve traveled abroad. I hope by then we’ll have figured out some way to beat them.”
“If we survive this, and if this woman’s telling the truth or anything close to it, we might have a crack. The promised reward is ‘anything we want.’ Maybe even out of here, if we wanted it. I take it that you’re not so enamored of being female after the last few days.”
“Not treated like that, I’m not! I don’t mind being the junior partner along for the ride, but I treated my dog better than I got treated by you! And the dog didn’t have to work, either.”
“I—I know. You think I’m proud of that?”
Julian grinned. “I think it’s a lot tougher holding to principle when you’re on the top of the heap instead of on the bottom. But for your information, it’s not the gender I’m upset with, it’s the bottom position and its permanence. Being a culturally correct Erdomese female is the pits, I’ll tell you. If I were forced to go back to that, I’d cheerfully take their stupid pills. Like this I can manage, I think, although there’s still some residual effect from that stuff. Alone in the cabin with just you, I find I can fight it, but out there, among others, particularly other Erdomese on the ship, I’m not so sure I won’t have a relapse.”
“Until we’re well away from Erdomese it might not be so bad to keep to the fiction, anyway,” Lori noted. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of these businessmen traders here didn’t also report back to the temple on just about everything they see and hear. I doubt if they could do anything this far from home, but we are citizens of Erdom, and we can’t hide that fact. They do all their diplomacy in the polar Zone, but it’s as if they have a voice in every one of these hex-shaped countries. We left pretty suddenly. If they decided to trump up some charges against us, we could easily wind up being arrested and sent back through one of those gates right back to Erdom, with the monks waiting for us at the other end. I think it’s best not to relax too much until we have some protection from others who know this place better than we do.”
It was a sobering thought. “Thanks. Just what I needed— more reasons to jump at shadows. Actually, the residue of these past few days is different from what you think I meant. I mean, I know how to play the sniveling little bimbo if I have to. I hate it, but it’s kind of a survival skill. No, it’s not that—it’s the fear.”
“Huh? Fear of what?”
“Of anything. You see, up until we got the treatment, I was playacting. To a certain extent the lifetime and instincts of good old Julian Beard were still there. Spending these days as a ‘pure’ Erdomese woman, though, I didn’t have those old senses to call upon. For the first time I faced the added burden of being a female in a male-dominated society that places women somewhere just above the herd animals or even below them. Without you around as a protector, I was absolutely defenseless. I had to take all the feelies from those merchants, all the guff, and all of a sudden every single one of them looked like a threat. My body was entirely at their mercy, and I needed, required you to stand in their way. I didn’t want to be out of your sight, and if you went off, I got back to this cabin in a hurry and locked myself in, scared to death all the way here. Until now I hadn’t understood why I felt the need to be locked up to be safe. I put it down to the drugs or the body or the changes in me. This brought it home. The old me, the male me, would have explored this ship from stem to stern and never had a second thought. Now, suddenly, I was in the midst of strangers, and I didn’t know friend from foe. I was scared to leave and scared to stay.”
Lori felt a sudden sympathy for Julian. “I think I know what you mean,” he responded. “It explains a lot about how I’m reacting to all this, too. I’ve had a cavalier, adventurous attitude since becoming male and a kind of charge-straight-ahead-and-damn-the-consequences feeling. Until now I was only aware that some sort of burden had been lifted off me but not what it was. It was just that the sort of feeling I had growing up female back home was gone. When I was seventeen, I was raped by my prom date. At the time I felt disgusted, but I never said anything because there was always this feeling somewhere deep down that I’d encouraged him somehow, let him do it—I don’t know. I do know I changed after that. Cut my hair real short, started to be a slob, got fat and stayed that way, just about never used makeup—made myself unattractive in general. I stopped dating for a long time, until after I’d gotten my
Ph.D., really, hung out in women’s studies centers and even socialized with a lesbian group, although I never really wanted to go to bed with them. I did go to bed with men—a lot of them—but they were always men I picked out, and they were mostly nerds who were desperate for any female interest. They were going to love me for me, no frills or compromises, or to hell with them. Don’t get me wrong—I knew I was reacting—but I had a justification for everything. And, surrounded by lots of women I knew and trusted, or by men of my choosing, I managed to keep the fear down. I guess that’s why I took to the all-women tribe so easily. No men to threaten, and women who were not only self-sufficient but actually dangerous.”
“And now we both realize that, just like in physics, nothing is really lost, it’s just transferred,” Julian said with a sigh. “Now I’ve got the burden and yours is gone. About the only thing I can cling to as a real advantage is that this body sure delivers dynamite sex.”
“I guessed as much, considering your responses. And that’s the downside of my change. I can turn on like a light switch, but everything’s concentrated in just one spot. It explains a lot about my previous lovers. I feel a lot less guilt now.”
They had a laugh at that and then went on to more immediate worries.
“What do you know about this Chang woman, anyway?” Julian asked.
“Not a lot. As far as I was concerned, she was the leader and demigoddess of a tribe of primitive rain forest Amazons—literally. Though, mean, and ruthless; that was her reputation among the tribe. Then, suddenly, all this comes about and suddenly she’s claiming to be some immortal from this world. I would have sworn she’d have barely recognized anything beyond Stone Age technology as anything but magic and that she had no experience beyond the jungles, yet here she is, suddenly a different sort of person, comfortable with technology well in advance of our own and writing notes to me in ancient Greek!”
“Yeah, how’d she know you knew Greek?”
“I don’t even know how she’d know I knew German, let alone Greek. Our only common language was that of a Stone Age tribe. I don’t count it because I can’t speak it, and I was surprised that I could read the note at all. She made it pretty basic, though, and it all came back to me. She certainly knows no English, and if she did, it would probably sound more like Shakespeare’s or even Chaucer’s. She’d been in that jungle an awfully long time. It was almost like she was hiding out from the world.”
“From that other fellow with the appropriate name, perhaps. Brazil.”
“Maybe. But I get the feeling it’s not that simple. She’s not just a small woman, she’s tiny. Under five feet, skinny, wiry, but moves like a cat. She also has a confident, brassy voice and manner, but I wonder if that’s just a mask for what we were talking about.”
“Huh?”
“The fear factor.”
“But—she’s immortal, or she says she is. And according to you, the tribe at least believed that any injuries to her, no matter how severe, would heal without scars and that she could even regrow limbs.”
“Yes, she’s beyond some of our most common fears—if it’s all true, anyway. But she still can be badly hurt, and she feels the same pain. I wonder if she also feels the same kind of psychological pain. She’s strong for her size but no match for an average man. Suppose she is immortal and started life on Earth thousands of years ago? The way the Erdomese look at women and women’s rights is about standard for most cultures in human history until fairly recently. I wonder . . . After a few thousand years of being a victim with no end in sight, I might run off to a rain forest and surround myself with cast-off and runaway tribal women, too. I sort of ran away socially for years from just one incident. And this Brazil person—I assume they started out together and they got separated centuries or longer ago. I wonder if that’s not part of the problem.”
“What? That she lost her protection?”
“That she needed his protection in the first place. Her ego is pretty damned strong. There would be only so much protection she could stand before cracking.”
“You think he was abusing her or something?”
“No, I don’t think so. Even in Zone she described him as basically a good person. She would have cast him as the epitome of evil if he’d done anything to her. No, I think it’s more basic than that. Thousands of years in a series of what must have seemed very primitive societies to her, always with that fear factor . . . Suppose he simply never noticed? Suppose he, the immortal male, just couldn’t comprehend it?”
It was something to think about but not something that could be proved one way or the other, not until they actually met this mysterious Brazil—if, indeed, they ever did. This and their mental hangover and associated guilt produced a minute or two of silence.
Finally Julian spoke. “I really don’t understand a lot of this at all. If what we’re being told is correct, much of what I learned about creation, evolution, the birth and death of the universe—it’s all wrong. Yet everything, all the laws of science, seem to be more or less holding in spite of all that, and it doesn’t make any sense. We’ve gone from a solid foundation down through the rabbit hole to Wonderland.”
“Not exactly,” Lori responded. “We don’t know enough to draw any conclusions about the universe at large. There were a lot of theorists in physics who postulated bizarre theories that were at least mathematically possible. White holes, parallel universes, and much more. Even in the Ein-steinian sense we casually accepted gravity bending time itself. This doesn’t show that what we knew was wrong, only that we knew far less than we thought we did. You know the old saw—I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke—that says that a civilization separated by countless years of development from our own would discover and know so much more that its technology would seem like magic to us. I think that’s what’s bugging you—all that work, all that knowledge, and we’re as ignorant of this sort of stuff as the most primitive tribes of Earth are ignorant of our science.”