James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

Then the wall she climbed but couldn’t see began to sing.

Hie sound of a thousand flutes surrounded and enfolded her. They chirped, they tweeted, they trilled up and down three octaves. If any of the flutes played a melody, it was lost amid the chaos of random notes. The volume pulsed louder, reaching a mighty crescendo like a cheering crowd, then it trailed off to near-silence. It roared again, and again faded. Louder, then softer, over and over. The sawing, atonal music stirred something inside Krysty, sending a tickle of excitement rushing from the base of her skull to the base of her spine. Without warning, the fog around her lifted, and everything came into sharp, startling focus.

Not only was the cliff, the net, the wall beneath her alive, but it was in constant, undulating motion.

It was made up of thousands of creatures, their arms and legs laced together, interlinked chains of pale, naked beings. Krysty raised her bare foot to a shoulder and gripped the front of the thigh above, pulling herself higher. She smelled sour sweat from the bald head of the creature upon whose back she climbed, felt the seething animal heat. The brush of skin against skin told her that she, too, was naked. She looked up to see that the tapestry of bodies hung from some indistinct point out of sight overhead. And it wasn’t made of a single sheet of living beings, but many sheets, laid one on top of another, and layers of individual creatures locked as she was now, chest to back, chest to back, chest to back.

From below, a hand closed around her ankle and yanked. Krysty braced herself and lashed out with a savage mule kick. Her heel made solid contact with a face, and the hand released her foot She glanced over her shoulder and saw a white body pinwheeling away from the living wall, and as it did, it crashed into the climbers below, creating a chain reaction, an avalanche. Dozens of white forms were knocked free and sent tumbling thousands of feet before they disappeared into the mist. Their deaths panicked and momentarily froze the hundreds of other pursuers swarming up die web.

Krysty felt a delirious exaltation. No one could stop her. As she climbed higher and higher, the interlinked creatures she passed over became noticeably larger and

stronger-they had to be in order to maintain their position in the chain of bodies.

The strongest of all were at the very top.

They were die most desirable mates.

Mates!

Even as Krysty understood the purpose of her dream-body’s superhuman effort, she felt a strange pull, an arching ache in her groin. She looked down at herself in astonishment. She had no breasts, and she was most definitely a male. A sexually excited male.

Her initial impulse was to laugh aloud.

Prior to her first sexual experience-with Carl Lan-ning, the son of Harmony ville’s blacksmith-Krysty had wondered what it would feel like to have masculine apparatus. Predark shrinks might have diagnosed her as suffering from a mild case of pern’s envy. After that first time with Carl, she was no longer envious-or even curious. Her body had told her, had shown her, mat die Gaia power she possessed, the mutant abilities passed down to her by her mother, Sonja, dwarfed anything that male physiology could ever hope to do.

The man thing jerked upward, seemingly with a will of its own.

Watching it, she felt a tangible sense of loss. Whoever, whatever she was now, she was no longer Krysty Wroth, no longer connected to a long line of highly evolved females. Her Earth Mother power had been replaced by the more obvious-and much less imposing-prod between her legs.

Even as she grieved for her femininity, a passion, an

animal need, swept over her. It was like nothing she’d ever felt before. The body she inhabited knew what it wanted. The body would not be denied.

The body climbed.

She could see a creature moving above her, with small breasts and sturdy thighs and hams. Waves of heat washed over Krysty’s face and down her chest. Unable to control the body, she retreated into herself, drawing as far away from the alien sensations as she could.