"Then they start leaving you in your traded bodies for longer and longer periods, so you can start to learn how to fit into a new body comfortably, how to work with it instead of against it-and also so you can begin to give up the attachment you have to your own body. After all, you may never see it again. You end up being everybody in your training class. Once-after we'd had a chance to get to know each other-they scrambled us around and we had to figure out who was wearing whose body. It was really eye-opening. We discovered a lot about the signals that we project unconsciously. One boy gave himself away because he didn't realize how often he wiped his nose-even when it wasn't running. We always knew which body he was in.
"Anyway, I guess I got cocky. I started to think I could handle anything they threw at me. After all, I'd already experienced so much in the library, I thought I was an expert. God, I was a jerk."
"No!" I said, grinning.
"Oh, yes!" she laughed back. "I was even a bigger jerk than you." She grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes. "Listen to me, Jim-there is an incredible difference between being the recipient of an experience and the author of it. They really set me up to discover that.
"It was my first prolonged solo, although I didn't know it at the time. They just told me I was to take a walk through the woods and smell the flowers. I didn't think anything about it-they had started bouncing all of us around on odd little errands. They never told us the purpose of the assignments until afterward. Sometimes it was a test, sometimes they wanted to record a specific experience, sometimes they wanted to see what we would discover on our own.
"Anyway, you're going to laugh when you hear this. I found myself on a hillside. I was alone. I was wearing a sweat shirt and jeans and tennis shoes. The background feel of the body was different of course, it always is, but this one felt funnier than usual. I had a lower center of gravity and I felt kind of soft. I'd had the opportunities to wear a lot of different bodies by then, so I knew it took a little while to get adjusted, so I didn't think too much about it. I just sort of took it for granted. I assumed they'd given me one of those flabby effeminate little-boy bodies that we used to call capons. I figured they wanted this body exercised and that was the purpose of this assignment. I was so naive.
"So, I started walking. It was a beautiful day. The air smelled of flowers, everywhere. I think I must have been in Hawaii or the Bahamas, or someplace tropical. The closer you get to the equator, the more intense the light is-well, the colors here were just incredibly bright and beautiful.
"The day was hot, a little muggy, and I thought I could smell the sea. And my skin was darker than I was used to-and smoother-so I figured they'd given me a native body. Once, I reached into my shirt to scratch a nipple and I was amazed at how soft and sensitive I was. But I still didn't put it together. Still not yet. To be fair, the body was young-maybe thirteen or fourteenand not all that well developed. In fact, it was quite boyish. But still-you'd think that I, one of the great breast-strokers of our time, would have figured it out, wouldn't you? Well, I didn't. Not from the inside.
"The body was wearing a pack. There was food in the pack, and a canteen, but no mirror or ID card. Nothing to let me know who or what I was. That's part of the training too. You can't take on the identity of the host body. You have to create a new one, your own.
"After a while, I realized I had to pee. There was no one around, so I just unzipped my jeans and reached in-and reached inand felt around and felt around- It was funny, I still hadn't quite figured it out, I thought I was tangled in my underwear. You know how you'll think anything to avoid confronting the truth? I finally got annoyed, I figured there was something wrong with this bodyI yanked down my jeans and my underpants and-just stared at myself I can still remember the feeling of... there's no other word for it-horror. Everything contracted at once. It was like something squeezing me in the balls-except I didn't have any balls! No penis, no nothing! Just hair! I forgot who I was, where I was everything! I felt betrayed! It must have been terribly funny to the monitors. I started feeling around in my crotch looking for myself. I still couldn't quite accept the truth yet. There was all this loose skin-and it was all wet and skwooshy-and it was so sensitiveand then I touched my own clitoris-and I knew-
"I think I yelped in surprise. I can't tell you the shift of identity I experienced, Jim. It wasn't just the body that was female-I was! When I realized it, I nearly came! My nipples came instantly erect, I could feel them hardening against the material of the sweat shirt. My skin flushed. My face got hot. It was an incredible wave of feeling that swept up through me. I felt dizzy. I nearly fell down. It was the most exquisite flash of excitement and discovery and shock. You can't imagine it.
"They hadn't told me on purpose. It was a setup. The point of the exercise was for me to discover the assumptions that I brought to a circumstance. Oh boy, did I feel stupid-and flustered. The physical waves of shock-and pleasure-were still sweeping through my body. That's when I started to cry. It was such a basic mistake! I felt so embarrassed. I'd wanted to be the perfect trainee and instead I'd just demonstrated how pompous and naive and airheaded I really was. The monitors were probably laughing their heads off over me.
"After I stopped crying, I started feeling silly. And after that, I realized that they wouldn't have done this to me if they hadn't had a purpose. So I tried to figure out what the purpose was. I decided they'd wanted to teach me a little humility. Well, they'd certainly done that. Learning how to pee from a squatting position doesn't sound difficult, but if you're not familiar with how the equipment works-well, never mind."
"So what happened?"
She shrugged. "I cleaned myself up and waited for my recall. I thought that now that I'd figured it all out, the exercise was over. Only it wasn't. Nothing happened. They left me waiting. After a while, I figured it out again. They weren't going to recall me. There was something else I had to discover. Are you sure you want to hear the rest of this?"
I said, "If you don't finish this story, I'll kill you."
"Right," she said. "So I took off all my clothes and started examining the body as thoroughly as I could."
"Huh?"
"Well, wouldn't you?"
"Uh-"
I thought about it. "I guess so."
"Of course," she said. "As soon as you're sure it's safe, the first thing you do is explore the most unknown thing in your environment." She added, "But there was something else going on here too. I didn't want to be caught by any more surprises. You see, I'd heard stories about people flunking out during training-"
"I didn't know it was possible to flunk out of the corps," I interrupted.
"It isn't possible. But it happens. What they do is, they put you in `maintenance.' It means they transfer you into some old body that they're not currently using, or have no plans to use, or no need for, and let you stay there. Your job is to maintain it. Right? It puts you out of the way.
"Anyway, we were in that part of our training where we were starting to lose some of our fellows, and they never told us why, so I couldn't help but wonder. I'd had a little run-in with a captain during my training and she'd threatened to send me to a leper colony-or something equally unpleasant. Maybe she'd made good her threat, I didn't know. This could very well be my body for the next umpty-leven years. I'd already made one mistake with it. I didn't want to make any more. I figured I'd better find out exactly who I was-or who I was wearing, that is. You know, Jim, the English language is really inadequate for this kind of discussion."
"You're doing okay," I said. "Go on."
"Well-it was like being a kid again. You know how when you reach a certain age, a certain point in life, you start getting really curious about your body and what it can do. Some of it is sexual, some of it isn't. You explore all your nooks and crannies. You find out what you feel like. You see what parts of you are smooth and what parts are hairy. You touch the places that are sensitive to find out just how sensitive you are. You do a lot of masturbating for a while. Y
ou have to do it. It's part of the job of moving in and getting comfortable and finding out how the body works.
"We'd had that in the training-we'd had to trade bodies and then explore ourselves from the inside. You can't imagine how silly it looks to see a room full of naked men sitting on the floor and playing with themselves, examining their hands, their fingers, their toes, their etceteras. But it's part of the job of developing your sensitivities.
"This was the first time I'd ever really been a female, so I went through the steps as completely and thoroughly as if I had a manual in front of me. I knew I was being really tested now, so I explored that body as if I were going to spend the rest of my life in it. I found out everything I could about what it meant to be a female. I suppose someone who'd grown up in a female body would think most of what I discovered was terribly naive, but I was excited. I felt like I was discovering a new continent. I guess, in a way, I was.
"Of course, I did all that stuff that you see in the movies. I pinched my nipples, I stroked my breasts, I rubbed the insides of my thighs-do you know the inside of a woman's thighs are extraordinarily sensitive? Most men don't. That's why they're such uninspiring lovers. There's a lot you can learn if you just listen to the body.
"It was a remarkable afternoon for me, Jim. My whole sexual identity was destroyed-and rebuilt. You see, always before I'd been a guest at a woman's body, a visitor. Now, I was the ... host. Hostess! I gave myself permission to do everything I'd always been curious about, but too polite to ask. It was like being given a wonderful, delicious toy to play with.
"I spent the whole afternoon playing with myself, Jim. I had a great time. It was terrific. I found out later that almost all men do that the first time they're turned loose in a female body. They can't resist their own curiosity. The women tend to be a little bit shyer their first time in male equipment. You figure it out. But it was an incredible experience, Jim. Do you know that female bodies don't experience orgasm like male bodies? A female orgasm comes in waves-wave after delicious wave that sweep up inside of you. It was incredible. I fell in love with myself five times over." Her face was glowing, her eyes were shining. Even the retelling of the experience had aroused her.
I felt momentarily embarrassed at her-his?-revelations. It wasn't just the information-it was the candor with which he shared it. It was too intimate. I was embarrassed because I was aroused-and fascinated. I wanted to hear every bit of his story. Her story.
"Do you know what they did to me?" she asked.
"What?"
"They left me in that body for three weeks."
"In the forest?"
"In the forest," she said.
FORTY
"THERE WAS an old navy weather station nearby," Tanjy continued. "The Telepathy Corps used it as a retreat. Robots ran everything now, so the human quarters were completely available. It was the perfect place for this kind of exercise. We were on an island somewhere, completely isolated. There were three male bodies and four female bodies besides the one I was wearing. They greeted me as I came up the path.
"They must have been able to recognize that I was a new operator. Before I could even say hi, they led me inside into the main lounge. One wall was painted white and was covered with big black lettering-the ground rules for the retreat. They were very simple. The first one was you couldn't tell who you were. You couldn't tell your name or anything from your past experience. You had to make up a new name for yourself that didn't have any gender attached to it-I used my initials.
"You couldn't say anything that might reveal any past identity you might have held. No personal histories were allowed. Also, you couldn't speculate on the purpose of this assignment, and you couldn't ask other people how long they had been here, or any other question the answer to which would break any of the agreements.
"The point is, you couldn't go around explaining, `This isn't my real body, you know. I'm not really like this.' That's hiding out. That's pretending it isn't really happening to you. You had to be a person in the body you were wearing-nothing else. The only identity you could have was the one you created in this situation-whatever you made up in the here and now. I tell you, it was a very crazy time. I knew I wasn't really a girl, at least not inside-but I had no way of knowing I was a boy either, except by my own say-so. I didn't know what I was for a while. And neither did anyone else, I think. I gave off a lot of conflicting signals; come-hither mixed with bug-off, please-help-me, and I'mall-right-Jack. They were real patient with me though-or else they knew what I was going through.
"Eventually, what I found out was that I had an incredible investment in my sexual identity-and I had to give it up. Not the identity, the investment. I had to stop being a visitor in the body and start being the owner. I had to be a girl, as completely as if it were the only thing in the world I knew."
Abruptly, she shivered. "I still get cold chills thinking about it. It was an adventure. And the others-they were so ... supportive. Because they knew. They were going through it too. I think at least one of the other women had been a man before. I'm pretty sure-because of the way she spoke, the way she taught me how to be a woman, she was almost clinical-and by the way she made love. Oh, yes-there was a lot of lovemaking. A lot." She laughed and added, "There wasn't much else to do on the island. So we played combinations. The first time a man entered me I wept. I still don't know why. It was very intense. He was extraordinarily gentle."
She fell silent, remembering.
I was at a loss for words. I picked up my drink and held it in my hands. I looked at Tanjy, I looked at my glass again. I felt embarrassed-and I felt privileged. I'd never heard a telepath speak so candidly about his or her experiences before. And I felt even a little envious.
She looked up at me with those large Chinese eyes and smiled. The expression on her face was mysterious-as if she were looking at me from far, far away. It gave me a weird feeling of transparency-as if she were reading my mind. As if there were no secrets I could keep from her. I could feel myself stiffening. I wanted to be known-and I was scared of it too.
And then, abruptly, she grinned with Ted's old grin, and I knew it was all right.
"Hey-mix us a couple of Crazy Marys," she said. "I want to get out of this dress." She came back in a red silk robe that was probably illegal in some parts of the world, and sat cross-legged at one end of the couch.
I handed her a drink and parked myself at the opposite end. I wanted to hear the rest of her story.
"It was that willingness to experience that they were looking for," she continued. "That was the whole purpose of the retreat. They were tapping into me. They knew when I had broken through. When they picked me up again, they told me I'd graduated to the next level of my training. I'd demonstrated that I could assimilate. Now I was ready to be trained in assimilation.
"You can't imagine the classes, Jim. We wore the most incredible bodies, different bodies every day, bodies we'd never seen before. The paradox was that it was so we could be trained as beings, not identities. You see, identities and bodies are all tangled up together. You can't detach from one unless you also detach from the other.
"Do you know-no, of course, you couldn't-but after a while, when you know your body is just a transient phenomenon, you realize that bodies are irrelevant. Very quickly, you get detached from the physical universe that way; you lose all identifications and you begin to exist only in an experiential universe-a universe of pure beingness. I mean, the physical stuff is still there, of course, but it doesn't have any significance any more. It's just another piece in the game.
"And then after that, they started making us stay in the assigned bodies for longer and longer periods of time, so we wouldn't get too detached. Sometimes we had bodies as young as six, sometimes as old as seventy. Once I wore a Down's syndrome. Another time, I wore a little-girl body that still wet the bed. Once I was a football player. I felt like I was made out of bricks. They wanted us to know-and appreciate-the operating equipment that the rest of the human
race is ... trapped in. So we could. .. sympathize with their condition.
"Then-and only then-did we start the classes in how to act like a male or a female in different cultures. I was amazed at how much I didn't know about how to be a man. I knew I didn't know how to be a woman-but there's a lot about manliness that most men don't know either. And we don't take the time to learn, because we think we already know it by the mere virtue of having been born male. The roles that we play-including gender-are almost all learned behavior. We make it up. Really! It's all an act, a performance. We had to learn those performances. We had, to learn how to be actors putting on our parts so thoroughly we became them. Just like you mundanes do-except you mundanes don't know you're doing it. That's the trap-and we escaped. We learned how to let go again too, so we could move onto the next identity.
"They told us we would probably change sex so often that we'd eventually lose any identification we had with either gender. And with that we'd also lose whatever investment we might have in a specific sexual identity. They said that ultimately we'd become omnisexual. I think I'm beginning to understand that now. Sex has become a totally different experience."
"I can imagine. .." I started to say.
"No. Unfortunately, you can't. I'm sorry, Jim-I feel like I keep excluding you. But this is beyond imagination."
"Try me," I said.
She sighed and waved a hand in frustration. "What I've experienced, Jim, is so ... incredible, I can't put it into words. It's that different when you don't have an identity attached. See, Jimthat's what I really learned-that I don't have to have an identity!" "I beg your pardon?"
"Normal people need identities. Telepaths don't. We're detached!"
"Uh-" I said. "I'm sorry, Ted. I don't get that."
"Oh." Her mood collapsed. Her effervescence disappeared. "You missed a step along the way, huh?"
"I guess so."
"Sorry." She scratched her head, a very unfeminine gesture. "Um, let's see-I guess I'm going to have to define my terms. Look, Jim," she said patiently, "the problem is the word `identity.'
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