Wait.
He waited. He had a fairly good idea where he was now. There had been a fortress after all. And Leah had gotten him into it. And if he had not died until she had him within the receival tray of a fullsize robo-doc there was a chance the machine had been able to hypo adrenalin into him to get his heart functioning, while it had fed him bottles of blood plasma from a needle.
Yet that did not explain some of the strange sensations that he had been through. He still felt as if he were Stauffer Davis—and someone else, as if he were not wholly himself.
There was sleep yet again.
And when he woke, he was sitting up, still strapped in the form-changing couch, looking straight into the eyes of a Demosian man, when there never should have been such a creature there. The Demosian men were nonexistent now, destroyed by the war and the sterilizing mustard gas. There were only women remaining, as Matron Salsbury had so pointedly assured him when he had tried to find out where Leah’s husband was,
He opened his mouth to ask how the Demosian came to be there—and the mouth of the alien opened at the same moment. For the first time, Davis realized he was looking into a mirror placed directly opposite him and that the slight, handsome Demosian with the wings folded down the middle of his back was him!
The mirror rose into the ceiling, and Leah was standing behind it, on the platform of the surgical robot, looking worriedly down at him. As the straps let him go, she asked, “It was all right, what I did?’
He was dazed, unable to understand what had happened to him.
“You were dead. You were dead shortly after I found the entrance and dragged you back and inside. Half an hour after you were dead, I got you into the machine. I didn’t think anything could be done then. But what brain cells had deteriorated, the machine rebuilt.”
“I’m not a man any more,” he said.
“You’re a Demosian, yes. The genetic chambers were prepared to deliver a perfectly structure male Demosian for the implantation of your own brain tissue. That was the problem with the Artificial Wombs: they could turn out grown Demosians, male or female, but not with brains that could learn more than enough to understand the basics of even self-care. Morons. If the project couldn’t solve the problem, they were prepared to transplant the brains of our own people—after they were killed by the Conquerors—into new shells, keep using the same warriors over and over. It was also possible to take the brain of a captured Conqueror, wash it clean, implant it in a Demosian form. The resultant hybrid was a … a zombie, a servant for menial tasks that would free good men to fight. If I was to save you, I had to make your body the body of a winged man.”
“But the Demosian machine—your machine—spoke to me in English.”
“It had to be programmed with the Alliance dominant tongues as well as Demosian languages, for it had to be able to communicate with a Conqueror prisoner in order to obtain information and to brainwash him.”
“How long?”
“Three weeks.”
He looked startled.
“It has been lonely,” she said.
“No one . . . ?”
“The search has been given up. The fortress can tap their public communications, so I’ve followed it all in detail. We were killed, they have announced, in the firestorm.”
He burst out laughing, and realized that she had been, even tenser than he when she smiled uncertainly at him. He leaped up, grabbed her, hugged her to him. She no longer seemed quite so tiny, quite so elfin. But, through the perceptions of the Demosian body, she was a hundred times more alluring than she had seemed before. He realized that this was simply because the tactile, visual, auditory receptors of the Demosian body, the nerve clusters that gathered these sensations, were far more sensitive and refined than the like nerves of the grosser human form. But he also liked to think that she was more radiant, also, because they were now separated by fewer differences than ever, were joined by a likeness of flesh that would make physical and emotional intimacy so much deeper and more meaningful.