People talk wistfully about wanting a change in their lives, generally meaning something like a better job, a new boyfriend, a week on some island resort-anything at all, as long as it is different. I know the sovereign recipe for that. Just slip one of the helmets on your head and tap into the mind of a truly alien being, and you’ll never find anything more different as long as you live. It wasn’t just the sights and smells that were different. My borrowed body interpreted them in ways that were completely foreign to me. There was a pervading stink of rotten fish in the air, powerful enough to make me hold my nose if I’d had one to hold. But I wasn’t disliking it. It was actually making me hungry. My hearing was far better than ever before. Not only could I hear the distant sounds of insects and the lapping of the waves on the shore, I could hear precisely where they were; the frog’s multiple ears were as directional as sonar. I could hear the other alligator-frogs calling to each other-deep baritone hissing, like a dragon’s voice-but that was where the helmet’s capacities ran out. I couldn’t understand a word they said.
Then, flick, the scene changed. I was still in the creature’s body, or in the body of one just like him, but I was in a series of different places, doing a variety of different things. Once my host was teamed with another frog, both of them wearing a kind of harness and pulling something that was heavy-but I couldn’t see what it was-along a marshy dirt road between stands of head-high rushes. Once he and a couple of others were making a lot of noise-singing together or making threats, I couldn’t tell which. Once he was asleep. None of it was very intelligible.
So I called, “Next!”
Frog gone away, blackness all around me. I was looking at another picture. This one was a fat, tentacle-nosed thing the general shape of a hippopotamus, and I knew what it was at once.
I was looking at a Wet One, one of the amphibians that had killed Patrice.
Perhaps, in the interests of scientific curiosity, I should have made the effort to understand what life was like for a Wet One. I didn’t. I wasn’t ready for going into that particular mind. As soon as I saw it I yelled, “Next!”
It took a moment for Pirraghiz to react-surprised, I guess, that I wanted to cut that one so short. But then I felt the faint scrabbling of her talons as she poked at the controller on the side of the helmet, and I had a new bizarre creature to look at.
I kept going through the roster of diverse, but all nonhuman, beings that Pirraghiz had accessed for me. There was a Shelled Person, like the one I had seen in the compound. Very strange, that experience was, because the Shelled Person seemed to see other living things, like the Docs, as luminous, and it had two distinct ranges of odor-detecting senses, one for in the water and one for on land. I tried a thing that looked like a feathered gorilla, with batlike membranes that joined its arms to its body and let it leap and glide for short distances-on, I guess, a planet with a lesser gravity, because I did not think that would work on Earth. Number Five was a four-legged furry thing that made its home in a cave, with its mate and half a dozen young; why the Beloved Leaders had bothered to bug it, I didn’t know, because it certainly didn’t look very civilized to me. Number Six-
Number Six I knew very well.
Bewildered, I took the helmet off my head. It was unexpectedly dark in the room-evidently the sun had set while I was in the helmet-but I could see Pirraghiz. She wasn’t hovering nearby, as I expected; she was over by the window, pulling the drapes back from the light-givers. She turned around questioningly. “I’ve just seen Dopey!” I told her. “The one who died.”
She said comfortably, “Yes, of course. The talker. Did you simply see his image, Dannerman, or did you go on to experience him?”
“Seeing the image was plenty! He was just the way I saw him last, all tattered and beaten up, with that big turkey-gobbler thing of his drooping and all the colors gone. He’s about to die, Pirraghiz, and I don’t want to ‘experience’ any of that!”
“Dannerman, I would not ask you to. I chose that view of the talker on purpose so that it would be easy for you to recognize him. The tapes, however, are from other parts of his life.”
I scowled at her. “What parts?”
“Oh, Dannerman. They are parts that I think will interest you. Why do you not put the helmet on and see?”
So there I was in Dopey’s body. I knew it was so, because his head, the little cathead, was bent to look at the familiar, golden-mesh belly bag he wore. I could feel his little fingers, inside the muff, fiddling with what might have been a kind of keypad.
I wasn’t comfortable in Dopey’s body. His range of vision must have been different from mine, because the colors were odd. I felt odd, too. There was a sort of slow, rhythmic, muscle-flexing sensation at the base of my spine, but in my own body I don’t have any muscles there. Perhaps it had something to do with that scaly peacock plume he carried, I thought, and then he looked up.
I caught my breath. What he was looking at was a screen, and on it were four or five figures-human figures-and the nearest of them was me.
It was something from my own life that I was seeing. There were the five of us-Pat and Rosaleen Artzybachova, Jimmy Lin, General Delasquez and myself, when we had first arrived in Star-lab. We had come there-God, it seemed a century ago-in the hope of finding some kind of extraterrestrial technology that would make us rich, and what we were doing was squabbling over the division of the Beloved Leaders stuff we saw all around us. I remembered it well. I saw us yelling at each other, and I saw Jimmy Lin get hit on the head.
And then I felt Dopey’s little hands scrabbling in his belly bag. There was a bluish flash on the screen. At once, all five of us stopped cold in the middle of the argument. We didn’t fall down. We couldn’t, being in Starlab’s microgravity. But we went limp. We didn’t speak anymore. We began to drift around the space in the orbiter.
Dopey had, somehow, put us all to sleep.
Then he got to work. He glanced back over his shoulder. For the first time I saw that there were two Docs standing immobile behind him, in a cramped little space I had never seen before. They began to move at once.
One of them pushed at a section of wall, which opened before him. The other picked Dopey up and carried him through that hidden door. Dopey’s body felt pleased with itself; I could feel the warmth and sensual pleasure that emanated from the great peacock fan that my own body didn’t have, but Dopey’s did. As we glided down a passage, one mystery was solved. I caught a glimpse of the stenciled sign on the wall we had just come through. It was supposed to be a fuel tank. Dopey had emptied it out and made it into a hidey-hole so he could watch us without being seen.
I think I was in a kind of shock again. What happened next wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but I couldn’t stop watching. Dopey’s Docs methodically lifted all five of us, one by one, and put us into the transit machine. Then, each time, without pause, they lifted us out again and went on to the next one. When we had all been transmitted-and copied!-they went to work on the next stage. One of the Docs held Rosaleen’s unconscious form while the other opened a cupboard on the wall. He took out a coppery object the size and shape of an almond, while the first Doc, talons extended, slashed a litde gash in the back of Rosaleen’s neck.
I had never seen an implant put in before.
I saw it happen to Rosaleen. I saw it happen to Delasquez and Jimmy Lin, and I saw it happen to me.
And I saw it happen to Pat Adcock, the woman I loved. I could see her, unconscious and limp. I could almost touch her, I yearned for her. And when it was all over I took the helmet off my head and stared blindly at the room around me.
Pirraghiz said something to me, but I wasn’t listening. I got up and walked over to the balcony door, slid it open and stepped outside.