“Well, several reasons,” Mavra told them. “For one thing, while the Wygon are good folks, we’d be heading up to this point here, the Yaxa-Harbigor border. I don’t know how the Yaxa are now, but I doubt if they’re any nicer or dumber than they were, and they were not people easily tangled with. That route is also mostly overland; we’ve got no flying races in our group and will be walking or riding blind. In fact, this is the first time I ever had this big a party with me and only two races represented! As for water, it damn near broke me getting Anne Marie and Tony here from Dillia, which is not an easy hex to get out of, not to mention the bribes I had to spread around Aqomb to reach the two of you. If all I could get us back to was Zhonzhorp, we’d be as far from any possible goal as we are now and dead broke. I think I can get us a deal to Agon. Not fancy, maybe, but it’s only four days’ sail. We’ll also need supplies before we take off into unknown country. You can’t assume anything about climate, edible food, or much else when you go overland, and in a lot of places you can’t use money even if you have it. I’m not going to go over our exact route now; I’ll wait until we’re well away from here and in a place where I’m not certain I’m being recorded and examined. Any questions I can answer right now?”
“Yeah, one,” Lori said, staring at the map. “What do you need us for, anyway?” Mavra had said more words in one gulp since entering the room than she’d spoken altogether in all that time in the Amazon. Her whole manner was as domineering and pushy as ever, but now it was accompanied by nonstop talking, as if she were making up for all those years of near silence.
“Basically, because it’s between difficult and impossible to get any distance here by traveling only overland,” Mavra responded. “You really have no idea yet. And also because somebody—either hired by Nathan or on their own or a combination of both—definitely doesn’t want me to get up there, or at least not to get there first. If Nathan gets in before I do, the first thing he’ll do is take me out of the Well master system. That’ll mean I’ll be processed just as you were, forced to go through a Well Gate and come out as something else. I’ll also become just another mortal. I know that’s my problem, but it means you guys will be stuck far from even your new homes with nothing to show for it. If, on the other hand, I get in first, I can pretty well call my own tune, and yours as well. You can’t believe what power I can have inside there, and more important, if what I think is true really is true, I may well be able to take some of that power out with me. You can get whatever you want—the race and sex of your choice, riches, power, or, if it turns out that what I suspect is true, you can come with me and travel the whole damned universe.”
“That sounds exciting,” Anne Marie said with typical understatement. “But is it really as dangerous as you make it out to be?”
“There are things worse than death here,” Mavra Chang warned. “Once I was captured and transformed halfway into a donkey. Human torso, donkey legs, ears, and tail. No hands, just legs, and unable to raise my head. Then, getting away like that, I fell into the land of the Wukl, who decided to ‘perfect’ my design. I spent many long years as a fat pig-like creature, always looking down at the ground. And that wasn’t the only experience I had. No, you never know what’s going to get you here, and with every evidence that somebody somewhere is trying to get me, there’s more safety in numbers. Besides, I like the company.”
There were passenger trains across Itus, but the kind of passengers they were designed to carry were built quite differently from the party of travelers. The result was that they had the choice of riding in the Itun equivalent of a boxcar—which looked as if it would easily heat up enough to fry eggs no matter how many hatches were open—or the same equivalent of a flatcar, with some thin but strong metal fencing, a meter or so high, placed around the edges. They chose the latter.
After watching the increasingly boring countryside go by, Lori decided to try to nap; Anne Marie—at least Julian thought it was Anne Marie—went over and spoke to Mavra, and that left Tony down on the other side of the flatcar staring off into space. Hesitantly, Julian made her way over to where the centauress who had said that they had much in common but had otherwise said little was standing. Julian wasn’t really sure how to approach either of them or even if she should, but it was worth a try. Still, she stood there, waiting to be noticed.
For a few moments the centauress continued to stare vacantly to the side, but then she said in that same accented English, “I think you are even more unhappy than I, are you not?”
“I—I’m not sure. You are—Tony? Is that right?”
“Yes. And you are—Julian? Is that right?”
“Julian Beard. Or so I was. Lori-Julian now. I can understand how it can be tough on you, winding up the identical twin of your wife, but I still envy you. I would trade places in a moment, except I couldn’t do that to anybody.”
“Yours is one of those medieval cultures where women are chattel, I gather.”
“Pretty much, yes. Sort of like some of those Middle Eastern societies back on Earth, only worse. This culture is built into the genes. The fight, the aggression just sort of drains out of you. Not all at once, but little by little. I was a hell-raising bitch like they’d never seen when I first woke up there, but over time it began to dribble away. The body chemistry, brain chemistry, whatever, just takes over. It’s not that you like it—even the ones born this way mostly don’t like it—but you just can’t help yourself. I was able to keep a little of my old self, enough for my self-respect, so long as Lori was remembering his own former self and giving me some room, but lately he’s been acting, well, as badly as I think I used to act when I was a teenager. I was a handsome guy—triple-letter athlete, honor student, you name it. The girls used to fall all over themselves trying to get my attention, and I was so macho and so full of myself, I pretty well treated them like toys. I admit it. Even after I got married, I cheated. Hotshot air force officer, poster boy, often away from my family.”
“You were married?”
“Divorced.”
Tony paused. “I see. But this Lori, she was on the other end of such behavior, was she not? Growing up, I mean. And now the tables are turned. Are you Catholic?”
“No. Not much of anything, really, although my parents were Methodists.”
“I was just curious. I have many differences from you and your life, but in one way I find a certain sameness. I feel as if I am in purgatory, that I was not that bad a man, but the angels have found the one way to show me my sins and crumple my pride. Perhaps that is what this is. Purgatorio. Not as Dante imagined it but the same in the essentials. For Anne Marie it is different, because she never even had much chance to sin. For her this is a wondrous fantasy, and she is amused but not overly upset by my own state. One would think it would be more difficult to deal with having four legs and the bottom half of a horse than with changing to a woman, but I am a Latin and I was raised in a culture where this is simply unthinkable. I believe that if it were not for my love of and duty to Anne Marie, I would have killed myself.” He hesitated. “No, that is not true. The nuns did too good a job on me for me to take my life. But I would have left alone and wandered this world until I died, a hermit to my own kind. This now I cannot do, so I must learn to deal with it. In a Latin culture, macho means more than merely what you Americans would call being a ‘male chauvinist pig.’ In fact, it should not even mean that at all. It is a code of behavior, a set of duties and responsibilities for men, a way of thinking and approaching life. Not that there are not millions of womanizers, but I was brought up too well to be one of those. I respected women and loved them, but as a man. Even though we could never have sex, I was never unfaithful to Anne Marie.”
“You could never have sex?”
“She was badly crippled when we met. I was a pilot for Varig, and I was blinded in an accident. At one stroke my passion and livelihood were taken from me forever. It was while recovering in an English hospital that I met Anne Marie. She was so much more battered and broken than I, yet she was not there as a patient but as a giver of care and love. Other than her mind and soul, which shone through anything, even my darkness, the only other thing that worked perfectly on her was her eyes. So, together we became one person. She provided my eyes and my soul, and I provided the body and strength she never had. It was a love beyond anything you might imagine, and sex had virtually nothing to do with it.”
Julian was absolutely amazed at hearing this. “I think that’s an amazing story! My God! And you came through together and wound up the same species and still together, too.”
“I fully admit to never quite believing the whole story until we went through that gateway in the fallen rock,” Tony admitted. “Even then I did not believe that we were truly in another place, on another world. I was not sure that we had not died, except that I was still blind and my knee hurt from falling on that hard floor. Anne Marie almost did die; her wheelchair did not arrive with us, and the shock of being flung onto the floor was almost too much for her. Captain Solomon, as we knew him, led me as I carried her to the place where they gave us comfort and what is, I suppose, the standard briefing. Still I did not quite believe. I thought that it must be some sort of dream or trick, or a hallucination, that we had begun our suicide pact or perhaps that I had gone mad. Still I clung to her, afraid to let go, and they decided we should go through without delay because of her failing state. I thought she was at least unconscious, but just before we leapt, she whispered, ‘Centaurs. There are centaurs here, Tony. I saw one! Hold me tight and leap and think of me and centaurs!’ And I was so desperate that it was all I did think of, down to my core. At that moment, and only at that moment, I found myself believing it, believing all of it, and the thing that I was horribly afraid of was that we would be separated, that we would be separated forever by distance and perhaps by species itself. That we would become monstrous to one another. With all of that in my head, I went forward . . . And I awoke in a forest glade as you see me now.”
The first thing, the very first thing he did, was open his eyes and see. See normally, see perfectly, see as well as he had when he had taken his first pilot’s examination. There were colors and shapes and textures that had been but somewhat blurred and idealized memories.
He could see!
And then he had seen her, stirring, trying to get up, and he’d known instantly who she was although he’d never seen her picture or allowed anyone to describe her. He’d known her hair was blond and her eyes were green, and that had been enough.
He’d thought, wonderingly, that she made the most beautiful centauress in all creation.
He also felt the weight and the difficulty in breathing and orientation and hauled himself up to standing at almost the same moment that she did. Standing on all fours, facing her, looking at her, knowing that his prayers had been answered. They were together and of the same kind!
And then she had stared at him, first in awe, then in wonder, and said, “Tony? That can’t be you, dear, can it?” And she had continued to stare, an expression that was half shock and half bemusement on her pretty face.
“Then—it is true!” he’d responded, his voice sounding very strange to his ears. “Then we are still together! And whole!” He did not care what form they were, human, centaur, crocodile, or swamp rat, only that they were no longer blind or infirm but healthy and still together. Still, he sensed that something was wrong. “What is it, Anne Marie?”
“I’m afraid that we’re a bit more together than either of us thought,” she’d responded hesitantly. “I wish we had a mirror, but, well, look at as much of your new self as you can and be prepared for a bit of a shock.”
“It was the one thing that I, that neither of us, had ever thought about, even considered” Tony continued. “It is still very hard for me. Not for Anne Marie, I don’t believe. Not really. As before, she sees more inside a person than the surface. But for me, and the culture in which I was raised, it is much, much harder. I think it gives the old term ‘soul mates’ a whole new meaning, does it not?”
Julian could think of a lot worse fates, but needing sympathy, she decided not to deny it to another. Still, she really thought he was lacking a lot of perspective. “It could have been much worse. Both of you as females of my race, for example. Or the ultimate fear you mentioned—that you would be of two species monstrous to one another. I of all people understand your shock, but I would trade with you in a moment.”
“Oh, I do not doubt that!” Tony responded. “And I sympathize. Still, hormones can only account for so much of anyone’s behavior, true? Otherwise, why do both of you have minds and wills? Both you and Lori must learn to control your new selves. The real problem is that you see yourself in your husband because you grew up a man, and you see yourself as the equivalent of how you perceived those young girls who threw themselves at you in your youth. Neither of us grew up female. Neither of us has the grounding of experience in the differences that brings, so we do not know how to cope. You yield because you do not know how to defend as she would. I fight when I should yield because my subjective universe was far more rigidly divided sexually than yours by my culture and upbringing. You are in despair because you cannot be her, and you cannot be your old self, and you do not have the experience or tools to be someone new. I—I can accept this. I was, after all, prepared to die with her, and I find some old prejudices crumbling now, the most basic of which is that it really does not feel that much different to be a woman. The problem is not with the body but with the mind, with needing a whole new frame of reference—not just accepting it and living with it myself but accepting the way others now perceive me and react and interact with me.”
“You mean the way men treat you.”
“No, I mean the way all others treat me. The way men look at me even when they are being nice, the very words and approach they take when speaking to me, the way certain conversations are closed to me now. And it is not just the men. The women react differently as well. As I am certain you know, a conversation strictly among women is quite different from one between men or between men and women.”
“You can say that again,” Julian agreed.
“So it is a matter of learning the rules, as it were. But I can no longer be Tony, the old Tony. Not like this. Not even to her. And I do not know how to be anything else, particularly with her. And that is something that I understand and she, not having been male, cannot yet grasp. I can be her—sister, her best friend, but I can no longer be her husband.”
“Maybe. Maybe you’re right. We’ve all got a lot to learn.” She decided that this was enough mutual wallowing for now. What Tony had said was true, but it was damned hard to feel sorry for the centauress when she would sell her soul to be either one of them. “On the other hand, this Mavra Chang is something else, isn’t she? She reminds me of a couple of women astronauts I trained with. Tough, knowledgeable, able to handle almost anything or anyone no matter what her size and sex, but still undeniably feminine.”
“She is indeed someone quite unusual,” Tony agreed. “I can only hope that toughness rubs off on the rest of us.”
“Um, I’m curious,” Julian said cautiously. “Is this what Anne Marie says she looked like? I mean, are you now a clone of her?”
“Clone is a good term,” Tony replied. “We are clones of a sort—they were so amazed at us that they sent us off to a hospital and took samples, which, I believe, were sent out to one of the high-tech lands. I believe the interest was in the fact that we even had the same fingerprints. Even identical twins do not quite have that. We are genetically absolutely identical. Only the personalities and experiences are different, and that makes quite a difference indeed.”
That was fascinating but not the answer to the question. “No, I mean, do you look like she used to? I know you said you didn’t want to have her described, I assume so you could hold a mental picture, but surely she’s said something now.”
“Oh, I see. No, we do not look like she used to. In fact, I can see something of my mother and one of my own sisters in us. I think that somehow, we were designed out of the genetic patterns of her mother and my maternal chromosome. Or so it was theorized. We are a combination of the pattern and look of the best of both of us. As for the horse part, well, I have never seen a horse built quite like this, with such style and grace, as it were, looking at her and thus myself from my old male vantage point, but I am certain that wherever it comes from, it is not in either of our ancestries.”
Julian chuckled, then suddenly realized that it was the first time she had laughed at all on the Well World. Tony had at least a sense of humor about things, and that was what would certainly pull her through to some solution to her own inner conflict. The Erdomese could use something to laugh about, but there had been little to do up to now.
Anne Marie came over to them. “Oh, I’d hoped you two would get along!” she gushed. “Tony has been too much in a shell since all this, haven’t you, dear? I, on the other hand, have been quite excited by it all. I’ve done more and seen more in the past few months than I had ever dreamed to do in a lifetime! I find everything here so frightfully fascinating!”
Julian wondered if that sense of adventure would last if they got into a really bad situation. She couldn’t imagine that Anne Marie could kill a fly willfully and with malice aforethought.
The train ran silently along on a magnetic track, levitating just above the surface. There was no engineer, no crew; the entire process was automated, and each car could be switched in and out at will or become part of a new train at almost every junction. They’d gone through a large number of such junctions, when everything slowed to a crawl and pieces of train were diverted, some were added, some were taken away on spurs or alternate tracks, and a new train was put together. It was a marvel of efficiency and served the hex well.
Now they slowed for one more switching yard and in a matter of minutes watched the long train divide into five separate sections and go off in all directions. There was a slight bump as their own car was joined to other sections old and new, and then everything speeded up once more. It was a few minutes after this that Mavra Chang had the odd feeling that something wasn’t right. At first she couldn’t put her finger on it, and she began to inventory her surroundings to see what it was that was setting off warnings in the danger-sensing area of her brain. The car was the same; the other cars were innocuous enough, and the surroundings looked little different from what they had looked like before. What was the problem?
She was almost ready to dismiss her feeling as being too jumpy when suddenly she had it. The sun!
They had been going generally due west. Now, suddenly, the sun was not behind them as it should have been in late afternoon with the Well World’s west-east rotation, but on their left. They were still going west, but it was now south-southwest. Clearly the car was no longer heading for the port at all. Something, or someone, had ordered them diverted.
“Everybody! Listen up!” she shouted. “Lori, wake up! We’ve got trouble!”
Lori stirred and shook his head to clear it. “Huh? What?”
“They’ve switched us south onto another line,” she told them as they gathered around the tiny woman.
“‘They’?” Lori asked. “Who’s ‘they’?”
“If I knew that for sure, I could deal with them!” Mavra snapped. “Never mind that now. Somebody with influence who definitely doesn’t want me to get up to the Well first, that’s for sure. Anybody here a good judge of land speed? About what speed do you think this car is making now?”
It was Julian who spoke up. “At its maximum, no more than two hundred kilometers an hour,” she stated with a certainty that surprised them. “At average, about one hundred forty.”
“That’s a fair enough estimate,” Mavra responded, impressed.
“You were never in astronaut training.”
“That’s right! I’d forgotten you were a spacer! Okay, and according to this cheap watch I bought months ago, we’ve been going for three and a half hours. That would mean we’re about two-thirds of the way, or were when we were switched. At the angle we’re now traveling, if it stays fairly constant, we’ll still reach the coast, but way, way south of where we want to be. There’s only one decent harbor on the west coast, or so I’m told; the coastal waters are otherwise too shallow. Mostly small towns along there dependent on rail. I’d say that they’re aiming to bring us in down there at one of the small towns on the southwest border, maybe the southernmost one, at or after dusk.”
“But why? That’s the question,” Lori said, frowning.
“That’s easy enough. We miss our ship, we’ve got a long, slow walk up, since we can’t trust the trains anymore, and we’re in the kind of area where we always will stick out like sore thumbs.”
“But we can’t walk, not in this humidity and gravity!” Julian protested. “At least I can’t!”