by Laer Carroll
She shook her head. This would take some getting used to.
She opened her mouth and, by angling her mirror and head, used the bright sunlight, both ambient and re-directed, to look into her mouth. Not an unusual detail that she could see, though a dentist or a throat doctor might notice something. Especially she saw nothing to do with water breathing. But then if there was a bypass of her belly down there into her lungs it would be further down. However, her sense of her interior told her there was no bypass now.
Last she looked at her hair. It looked perfectly normal. The usual offshore breeze swung the bulk of it as it should, stray hairs flew randomly...
At that thought her hair shifted of its own accord to settle perfectly in place. And she felt her hairs do it.
She stared at a curl of her hair. Why in the world would she grow ten thousand new organs and limbs?
Could they can change color? Maybe to red?
A wash of color flooded her hair. It kept its curls. It gleamed the way it always had, maybe with a little extra sheen.
Could she do black? She could indeed but it took several times as long.
Brown? No problem. Streaks? Not so successful. They were uncoordinated. Maybe with practice. She returned to her normal bright blond ringlets.
Could she lengthen or shorten her hair? Yes, but within limits, at least rapidly. Beyond a couple of inches the stretch or shrink slowed but she knew somehow that she could change her length much more if given a few hours or days.
Change curliness? Mixed results again, some very radical, and quite ugly, as if she'd been on an all-night drunk. She brought her hair back to normal again.
When she could get access to a microscope she could cut off a length and—
Damn! Her hair shrunk tight to her head as if trying to hide!
For a moment she wondered if each hair had a mind of its own but a moment later realized that she herself had reacted to the idea as she would to the idea of amputating one of her arms or legs.
Well, her hair was long enough that with a little careful arrangement she could still look at it through a 'scope viewer. Or arrange for someone else to take photomicrographs. Or maybe her pubic hair —
Which was when she noticed she had none. The hair down there was so light and sparse that she normally didn't notice it at all. Now it was gone.
Maybe for the best. A man might be understandably shaken if her pubic hair began caressing his member!
Sylvia giggled, then broke into helpless laughter at the images evoked.
Well, enough self-examination for now. She needed to retrieve that window protector.
She left the mirror on the front porch table and went around the back of the house. The white fence surrounded a mini-orchard in the back which in turn surrounded a barbecue pit and some plastic lawn chairs. All of this had come with the house and once Sylvia had enjoyed spending time here. But now she couldn't imagine spending time back here, nice as it was, when an entire beach stretched before her.
Past the back fence the low grass became higher and low bushes began to intrude into the margin between the grass and the trees. Perhaps she should go back for some shoes and pants—
But rough leaves and limbs did no worse than tickle her legs and stones and stickers the same for her feet. Which underscored yet again she was no longer human. Maybe a sophisticated machine? No, her body was too complex and flexible for that, unless it had been made by some very advanced aliens.
But why would they do something like this? Well, OK, aliens: alien thinking and motives. But still—it made more sense to her that this was some kind of natural phenomenon. Yeah, that was her prejudice showing. She was after all a scientist.
Toward the end of her trek she was a tad surprised, she'd been thinking so much, to find she'd reached the trees. She looked back a the cottage. Maybe half a football field in distance. And she'd effectively shot-put maybe fifty pounds over her head into the trees maybe another half-field distance!
Jesus Christ. Human muscles just did not have the kind of energy that took.
She looked down at an arm, turned the wrist over and back. Was her wrist bone thicker? The other bones in her arms? Maybe a little. Not much. Her muscles? She squeezed a bicep. It was hard, like a slab of leather, though it was not tensed. Definitely not normal—not that she'd expected normal. Yet it flexed easily and looked little larger (if at all) than it had been.
She shook her head and went deeper into the trees, a mixture of oak and taller palm trees, an old growth, the trees well-separated but providing complete cover from the sun. She found the bars easily. They'd plunged through the tops of two trees before arresting in a third and tumbled to the ground. The mid-trunk of the first tree had been decapitated and hung askew, kept in place by the trees around it.
She hadn't thrown a shot put. She'd fired a cannon into these trees.
She looked at her slender hands. She would never need a gun as long as she could grasp a convenient possible missile. And if they got within arm reach she could just tear them apart. She was a God-damned lethal weapon.
When she reached it the heavy grid of welded-together iron bars seemed to weigh no more than a frying pan and was no more unwieldy to her muscles than a book .
What a neuromuscular system! Earlier she had handled kitchen utensils including a frail coffee cup with delicacy. There was some serious asymptotic scaling of the system's feedback mechanisms.
On the way back to her home she amused herself by throwing the bars into the air. It took some skill not to be thrown off her balance, since it weighed a large fraction of her weight. But her reflexes seemed to be several times faster than human and she had no problems.
Which was yet another of the now-long list of her non-human traits.
It was lunch-time by the time Sylvia reached the house and made an appointment a few days away for repair people to re-attach the bars and repair the walls they were attached to. To her relief she only needed two stuffed sandwiches to satisfy her. Apparently the monster meals earlier had been catching her up to some need. Caused by the energy of shapechanging?
After eating she took care of her mail, just in time for the mailman's arrival. She hurried into a robe so she could see the little round man personally.
"Señorita Cubana Doctora! You're back. Did you have a good trip?"
She made up a lie to explain her absence, answering him in Spanish, which she'd learned in Miami as a child from Cuban playmates. Her accent had softened from the fast choppy Cuban pace but the puertorriqueños still teased her sometimes of being a Cubanista .
"René, how are you? Yes, it was a good trip. You know, school business. Your family?"
"OK. OK. Caramela is teething. Ai! My poor wife. She gets no sleep."
"That's because you are a male chauvinist pig, René. Never caring for children. Sitting back like a big king in your chair at home."
He laughed as he handed her a fat package with a green Post Office acknowledgement card. He found her remark a joke because the truth was exactly the opposite of her accusation, as they both knew she knew. Like most Latin men he was deeply involved in his family and just as likely to feed or soothe a child at night as his wife.
"I knew you'd be back so I kept bringing this. It's for your studies, yes?"
"It is indeed. Thank you very much my friend."
The corrections on her dissertation's third part were few and took only a half hour to complete. She printed it out, then she set beside it the fourth and last part with its numerous Post-It notes and red-ink corrections. She had only two weeks to finish it and mail it and the third part back to her dissertation adviser. She was determined to do it despite this radical interruption. But first she had more exploring to do.
In a bikini she slowly approached the edge of the sea as it came foaming up the sand and sighed back in place. She tentatively buried a toe in water.
She felt no reaction. She took a couple of steps to fully stand in the water as it came up above then dropped b
elow her ankles. Still no change.
Minutes later still nothing. She wished for her feet to change, slowly.
A tickle then a tingle touched her skin. Barely covered by the water she could see her toes begin to lengthen, the nails lengthen more. The nails became fatter, curved a bit, became impressive claws. Webs spun into place between her toes. Then the change stopped, completed.
Sylvia swished a foot back and forth in the water. It had impressive push-power, just as an artificial swim-fin did, but she also had much finer control of it, and she could feel the water with it.
She walked out of the water. The clawed frog feet did not change. She clumped back and forth at the water line to test them out. That way she'd leave no tracks.
She sat down and looked at one foot closely, all her learned and objective professional interest involved. But beneath it she was thrilled. She was seeing close-up parts of a creature totally unknown to science!
It was so totally weird that SHE was the creature.
Further investigation showed that she could change her feet, hands, and teeth at will and control exactly how much or little they manifested. Some changes weren't under her control, at least not yet. The cruel curve of her thumb claws would not change angle or shape though they'd change size.
She swam around but submerged only long enough to be sure she only became a water breather when she willed it. She would not betray herself in a swimming pool or at the beach by involuntarily converting.
Though she was sure, somehow, that she would convert if she started drowning.
Satisfied, Sylvia left the water. She was becoming ever more hungry and concluded that changing was increasing her need for food. She had little at home, between age wastage and her earlier bingeing. It was time for a food run to San Luisita.
She showered and dressed in jeans, tee-shirt, and tennies and hauled her bike out of the tiny tool shed. The front tire was a bit flat again and she topped off both tires with the tire pump. She draped canvas carriers on each side of the bike behind her seat and set off. As she pedaled eastward the bright early-afternoon sunlight slanted a bit in front of her, casting a dark shadow. She reached the road and turned north.
Chapter 3 - San Luis
The day was still warm as Sylvia sped north the three miles or so to San Luis. The way was familiar but a bit boring. Periodically lanes like her own trailed off into the trees westward to the ocean or eastward into Puerto Rico's interior. Several times she saw cars passing in each direction. Occasionally people would wave at her; she was well known around here.
For nearly half her life she'd spent some or all of the summers near this town on Puerto Rico. To some of the locals she was a minor celebrity. She was "their" little professor, another proof that smart people came to P'Rico—or from it, as some people thought she was native to the island. The last summer she'd been astonished to find one of her scholarly papers tacked up on a bulletin board in her favorite restaurant. Which was where she was headed now, hunger gnawing at her gut.
Eager, she increased her speed, gearing up again and again until she was at the top ratio. The sprocket chains and wheels made louder and louder noise as she accelerated. She glanced down at what before had always been a useless speed indicator. She was nearing 80 kilometers per hour! These were racing speeds and she wasn't wearing special slick clothing and her bike wasn't a racer.
It might not be able to take much more stress. She slowed down to a sedate but still ground-eating pace which quickly took her to the outskirts of San Luis. She pulled up on a slight rise that gave her a look down on the city, bathed in early afternoon sunlight. A lot of the city was made of beige adobe with red-brick shingles. She loved the tapestry the houses made, punctuated a few places by taller and more modern buildings, including one tall glass-fronted building.
There were 12,000 inhabitants, most of them in the lower and middle of the economic rungs. san Luis had its slum, though it wasn't as bad as the worst of San Juan, the biggest city of the island, the capital and the main tourist attraction. San Luis also had a small mid- and a tiny upper-class. The newer part of the city had been renovated several years ago and was newly fashionable.
The arms of the bay sheltered a mix of smaller and larger fishing craft, a few cargo craft bound to other parts of the island, and several yachts, one of them fairly big and new. That was the property of a TV movie star who vacationed in Luis whenever he could. She'd attended dinners where he had been, quiet and surrounded by a more outgoing entourage. Tall and with curly brown hair and nice eyes, he had seemed more shy than stand-offish.
She took a deep breath of the off-ocean breeze. It was becoming faster and cooler now. Usually it raised goose-bumps on her legs and arms at this time of day. Not now. Maybe never more. Weremonsters apparently did not get chilled.
She let herself enjoy the sights for a few more minutes, then launched herself down the incline.
Twenty minutes later she pulled up on a busy street at the edge between mild slum and renewed old-town. Across from her was a large restaurant two stories tall with a false third-floor front. A cartoon painting of a white cowboy hat on a yellow-orange background dominated the top third of the building. The letters underneath it said in red-rimmed orange "Lone Star."
Sylvia smiled as she always did at the sight. It was a silly but effective gimmick, what with every other native restaurant in the city tending toward the Caribbean and Cuban and French. She had first come into the Star barely a teen to see if they really had Tex-Mex food. She had eaten it at the University of Texas where her older brother went and fallen in love with the food.
They did indeed though they also had the other kinds of popular island food. Of course, the restaurant's popularity with her was partly that she had fallen in lust with the young Latin waiter who was the owner's oldest son. The next summer they'd had a short but fierce affair that had separated her from her virginity. And the next year after that, the lust behind them, they had effectively become brother and sister and she a daughter of the family.
She chained her bike to a convenient pipe and went in. The interior was large, warm, and scented with spicy food. Cheerfully covered small round and large oval tables filled much of the room. The young Latin woman at the greeter's podium looked up from a menu and her reflexive greeting died on her lips.
"Mamí! Tell Papí! It's Sylly." She pronounced Sylvia's nickname as "see-lee."
Rocio came around the podium and hugged Sylvia fiercely. Then she stood back holding her shoulders at arms' length.
"What do you mean, going off without saying a word?" the young woman said. "We thought you were sick. Or your Mamá was. Or your brothers."
Laughing, Sylvia denied any illness anywhere. "It was urgent business at school. I had to go right away."
Then she had to explain again as her friend Arlen's younger sister yielded to her parents. She had to repeat her excuse several times before it penetrated the several family members' attention who came up to greet her.
By this time at least one of the table of customers was growing impatient. An older man called out from it, wondering if anyone could get service here .
Sylvia acted quickly to forestall Dominick, the owner of the café, who could get testy easily. She advanced to the table, knelt on the floor beside the impatient man, and put a hand on the arm of his suit.
"Please forgive them. My mother was very ill and they thought she might die. Will you forgive them?"
A beautiful young girl pleading with big open eyes is hard for all but the hardest of hearts to resist. This man was not that hard. By the time he got through a confused mingling of apology and self-justification a young waitress and waiter were at his table efficiently dispensing food and drinks to the half-dozen guests there. Sylvia retired with a soft kiss to the man's forehead.
Sylvia was hustled into the kitchen by Mamí and seated at a private table. At a stove Arlen was taking something out. He gave her a sardonic glance before turning back to work. He had not joined the r
est of his family. He knew he would get his time with her later.
"Now what's this about your mother being sick?" Mamí said. She had no trouble with either attention or hearing, so Sylvia knew this was for her son's benefit.
Sylvia laughed. "No one's sick. The University had a big funding change. I had to get there and fill out forms and defend my research. I'm just editing the last part of my dissertation so it was no problem, just a lot of details to hack through."
Mamí nodded and asked after Sylvia's family. Reassured that the world was on even keel she took Sylvia's order and left.
Sylvia enjoyed a couple of hour's of food interrupted by brief visits by family members stealing a minute or two from working the restaurant. She ate three times as much as she usually did, but no one noticed, it was so spread out and family members were in the kitchen for such short times.
At least she thought no one noticed until Arlen took off cook's duties once the evening rush eased. He accompanied her out to her bike and walked with her toward the supermarket a few block's away.
The first thing he said to her was, "Are you pregnant?"
"No!" She laughed. "Whatever gave you that idea?"
"You're eating for two. Or maybe three. You're going to have twins."
She gave him a hefty hip bump. "No I'm not."
"You're TRYING to get fat?"
She stopped, put her hands on her hips. "Does this look fat?"
He surveyed her. "Yes."
That was a jolt. "Really?"
He looked at her closely. "No. But something's different. You're taller by...three inches, maybe. Your hips and shoulders are broader. And you've got more muscles."
She looked down at herself. Her jeans were tighter. And she knew her chest had deepened, so her ribs had grown. But it was hard to judge oneself and she'd been so distracted by other matters.
"I've been body-building pretty hard. Feel this muscle."
She flexed one arm and presented a bicep. She tried to relax it completely but knew she had not succeeded too well.
"Wow. Tight as a drum. That's too tight. Change your discipline."
