“Sometimes a good cry is something we all need. Holding it in is what eats you up.”
“Yeah?” she responded, sniffling and wiping away tears. “So if you’re so miserable here, how many times have you cried since you got here?”
Lori didn’t answer, but the truth was, not at all. For a man to cry here was to show weakness and lose honor and the respect of both males and females. No matter how much she’d wanted to, she’d held it in as a matter of course. It was another little shock to the system. Maybe I’ve become more of a male than I think…
“I don’t know,” Lori told her. “I still can’t figure out my own self in this. I mean, no offense, but there’s still some of me that’s the human woman I was for most of my life. It won’t go away. I liked men, and I still do. I assume you were pretty much of a straight arrow like me back home, but your orientation seems to be changing to fit what you’ve become.”
“I—I think we fight it because it’s the last real core of what we were,” she suggested, still wiping away tears. “So long as we hold on to that, we’re still something of our old selves. I mean, what defines us—how we grew up, how we related to other people—more than our sex? You let go, you throw that out, and you’re not you anymore. You’re somebody else, somebody with another person’s memories. I think you can cling to it until you die—and there’s certainly got to be gays in most all the cultures here, since we see it in animals, too. With men here, though, it’s easier. You have a little of both male and female in you, so it’s easier to control the physical aspects of the change. I don’t so it was a lot harder to cling to, but I did, until I was put in here for so long. I could either fight that battle or stay sane fighting the others. I let it go. For you, it’s the defining thing. For me, it was in the way, I think. You have more choices, but in the end you’re going to have to decide who and what you want to be, ‘cause you’re going to be an Erdomite man for the rest of your life, just like I’m going to be an Erdomite woman.”
“I think there’s a lot more of Julian Beard in you than you think,” Lori told her. “Otherwise you’d have given up and given in long ago.” She decided she liked Julian—liked her a lot. It was the first time she felt she was really attracted to a female here.
“Maybe. When a female gets close to a male she trusts, she gets these feelings, these urges that are hard to control. I’m feeling them right now, in here, with you. Right now my mind, the one thing I’ve been able to somehow keep, is able to suppress them, but every day I’m here it gets harder and harder to fight, to keep control. I’m slipping more and more.”
“Tell me something. The women here—are they really as dumb as they seem to be?”
That brought a smile to Julian’s still-tearful face. “No, some are quite smart, but they’ve learned to hide it well. Being smart in this culture just means trouble if you’re a woman. They’re pretty ignorant, though, and they don’t know any other system. Sometimes I think of those women in the countries back on Earth that went western and then returned to fundamentalism. They might resent the restrictions, but somehow they’re comforted by the absolutism of the rules and religion. And like I said, security is everything.”
“I just—I dunno—I just had a hunch that might be it,” Lori replied. “It really offended me that they might all be frightened little bimbos. But I forgot to ask the one question I wanted to know more than anything. How did you ever get here in the first place?”
“Stupidity,” Julian Beard replied. “That meteor that came down in the jungle—I was on assignment from NASA to take a look at it. Good publicity, too. Then that news team disappeared and the army took over, and it was weeks before anything serious could be done.”
“Yes, I was one of the team.”
“I thought so. I figured what happened to us happened to you. Anyway, this tough old Brazilian Air Force colonel who was in charge out there was more a politician than a military man. He finally called off the search and bent to pressures to let in researchers, at least a few at a time. Well, the whole world came down on us, or so it seemed, and they wanted pictures and all that for the publicity, and since a number of people had climbed all over that meteor before, we figured it wasn’t any big deal. The colonel and I were asked to pose on top of it for the media; he talked me into it, and you can guess what happened.”
“The hex gate opened, and you both wound up in Zone talking to a polka-dotted dragon.”
“Actually, it was a mean-looking five-foot-tall talking butterfly. You?”
“Too long a story to tell here and now. The first thing we have to do is decide what to do about you.”
“Huh?”
“Look, it may be backward, but we’re here and we’re stuck. That Zone had elaborate computers and all sorts of technology, and I happen to know that a third of the countries here—they call them hexes, after their shape—support high technology, some way in advance of Earth’s. I’m going crazy here, and you want to kill yourself before you lose it all. There’s a seacoast and ports here, believe it or not, and ships that go all sorts of places. We’re both wrong-bodied opposites with a lot of the same background. I’d like to find a place where I could really study that astronomer’s dream of a sky up there. You’d like to get someplace where you could still be an individual and not a harem girl. There’s got to be such a place here somewhere.”
Julian sighed. “You’d have to marry me to take me anywhere here,” she pointed out. “And I have to tell you, I think I’d rather rot in here than have a name-only marriage. Earlier, maybe, but not at the stage I’m at now. I’m a woman now, an Erdomite woman, and I’d go bananas if I wound up a mere housemaid or a nun.”
“Yeah, well, we’re the original odd couple all right, but you’ve just given me the first decent conversation I’ve had since I got here.” She was fighting with herself inside and trying to get the right words out. “I like you, Julian. I like you a lot. If you can accept your fate, I guess, with your help, I can accept mine. Like you, I’m here and I’m stuck this way. I think I might just be able to be a man, maybe the man I always said I wanted to see, with you. Okay. Deal?”
“You’d be responsible for me. And I don’t know, like I said—I don’t know how much of me is left and how much I can keep over time. This having a two-way conversation in English has really helped, but it’s a real fight. It’s like, well, half of me is an old air force jock clinging desperately to his old identity through real contact with a colleague and half of me lusts after your body and would become your slave if you’d just let her attend your needs. No, it’s worse. There’s not even close to fifty percent of Julian Beard left. I don’t know, it sounds crazy, but this contact, this conversation, this hope is actually making the Erdomite part harder to control.”
“Just take it easy,” Lori said soothingly. “I’ll go make the arrangements.” And Posiphar would have to be told that his security was about to leave him.
Julian was already thinking ahead. “We’ll need money for this…”
Lori grinned. “I get the idea that our tentmaker friend out there will pay me handsomely to take you off his hands.”
And he was just the one to get the best deal!
Armowak, Ambreza-Flotish Border
Nathan Brazil had to admit to himself that the Well World was probably the one place in all creation where a good-looking human woman could play Lady Godiva and not fear anything more than if she was overdressed.
He really wasn’t quite certain just what to do with the girl. Clearly she wanted to come along, but she wasn’t an asset on a long trip as she was. It was as if she’d been reborn as a water creature who couldn’t really communicate or travel any distance over land.
Still, he wasn’t sure how to ditch her, either. She certainly had a mind of her own.
She also had something of an appetite. Any time they stopped during their journey, she’d find something edible around and down it. Like nearly all the Glathrielians he’d seen, she was chubby but not fat and appa
rently in excellent condition. He wondered if she wouldn’t start putting on weight if she kept eating like that, but it was a moot point. Things she could eat that were so readily available would be few and far between in many of the hexes he’d have to travel, including Flotish itself, considering that the hex was part of the Gulf of Zinjin and was in fact salt water to near ocean depths.
He was nonetheless still fascinated by her and loath to cast her out. She should not have become a Glathrielian. And since she had, she shouldn’t have retained what was obviously her natural coloration and features. The Well had changed her in many ways, including taking who knew how many years off her age, but the one thing it clearly had not done was change her genetic code.
He wished he could just know her name. He wasn’t sure Glathrielians even used names anymore, but she had one, and no amount of blocking or rewiring of some brain functions would keep her from knowing it. The problem was in finding some way for her to tell it to him.
It was not a problem he could solve on the back of a horse, though, not with her on another horse.
That, too, was a wonder. He’d gotten the impression that the Glathrielians wouldn’t even use a live animal, yet she’d picked her horse, gotten on, and now rode quite comfortably. Another mystery. When they were making speed, she’d go forward and hang on somehow up against the horse’s neck, but she never kicked it to start, never seemed to guide it at all. The horse, though, did just what it was supposed to do every time. Sometimes he thought that the two moved so naturally and effortlessly together that it was as if somehow she and the horse were one.
Terry herself had no more answers beyond her old name, which indeed she did remember, although it was sometimes confusing because of the otherwise nonverbal processes now operating in her mind. Sometimes it seemed like it was Terry; other times, Teysi. She knew that there had been a lot more to the name than either of those once, but those were the defining words she retained.
As for the horse, she was discovering talents she didn’t know she had as she went along. She had gone out back, had realized he was going to ride, and had simply touched a number of horses until one of the animals “clicked” with her in a way she could not explain. When one had and she had mounted it, all she’d had to do was relax and put everything out of her mind except that horse. As Brazil had imagined without believing, she’d become one with it, so that the two bodies, while in physical contact with one another, actually did become as one, operating as easily as one operated one’s arms, legs, and head. Whenever she dismounted and contact was broken, it was as if she’d lost something of herself. The size and power of the animal were exhilarating. Still, she hadn’t the vaguest idea how she did it.
At a stop to get something to eat and drink and give the horses time to do the same, he decided to try another experiment. If that first Glathrielian girl had reacted to him as if he had the plague, how would this one react?
He walked over to her, and she watched him come and stand right in front of her. He smiled, and she returned the smile. They were both almost exactly the same height, his computer-designed leather boots raising him just a bit, but only to match the added height of her thick black hair. Then, casually, he reached out and took her hands in his.
The initial contact was a shock, and the tumble of information that came through was incredibly confusing to her. There was a kindness in him that she found true, almost noble, and still the element of a little boy inside somewhere, either deep down or up front in the bravado that masked his deeper self.
There was also a sadness there, an incredible, deep, painful emptiness that was almost too much to bear. She grieved for anyone who could have that much sorrow within him, yet she admired him, too, for the strength to be able to carry it. It masked, even overwhelmed, the tremendous contradictions she could sense but not grab hold of inside of him.
And yet, deep down, there was something else, something hidden very deep, yet something he was aware of. It was so concealed, so cleverly masked with layer upon layer of pure humanity that it could not be directly seen, only glimpsed ever so briefly, like something seen only in the extreme corner of the eye. That was the heart of the confusion about him. There seemed to be two of him, two totally different creatures so alien to one another that the other would not come in, would not focus. Yet the man she could see, the man of sorrows, was not a mask, not a facade, but one and the same with what was hidden. It made no sense at all.
They had warned her, warned her that something lurked there that she did not want to see and should not and that only the man should be considered. She backed away from it, sensing somehow that what lay hidden was no more dangerous than the man and no less, being one and the same, but that it was somehow beyond her comprehension or ability to cope.
He liked her. That made her feel very good indeed, because she liked him and she wasn’t certain how she was coming across. He wasn’t a particularly handsome man, but he had a tough appearance, and his well-worn face echoed his inner strength and long experience. Even in her past life, she knew that if they’d met, she would have been attracted to him. The fact that she now could see so much of him yet not reach the central mystery of him fascinated her and made him all the more interesting. Sensing that he would never take advantage of her, she felt that at some point she might well be tempted to take advantage of him.
There was little or no sensation or information going in Brazil’s direction, but he did somehow sense both her trust and her attraction to him, whether by some sixth sense or perhaps just from long experience. He did not consider it unusual, since, after all, if he were stuck in her current situation and found just one other human being who knew who and what she was or had been and where she’d come from, he’d probably react the same way. He had no sense that she had learned so much about him, but he had noticed an odd, almost electrical tingling when he’d touched her that was as mysterious as the rest of her. If he didn’t know better, he told himself, he’d swear that she was somehow generating a weak force field of some kind from within herself.
There was still a lot of the old Terry in her, and she found herself getting turned on by the experience. That, right now, would never do, so she gave him a quick kiss and a big smile and broke the contact.
Well, at least she didn’t run away screaming,he thought, although, truth be told, that was the general idea. Whatever the first girl had seen, this one either hadn’t seen it or wasn’t upset about it.
The fact was, he had mixed emotions about the result. On the one hand, to have gotten rid of her would have been in both their best interests; on the other, he had to admit that he liked her spunk and liked having somebody around who, however silent, didn’t look or smell like a giant beaver.
Still, how could he take her along? Once she was on that ship and out to sea, there wouldn’t be any way out for her.
It was almost nightfall by the time they intersected the main road, but by that time the city lights were in view ahead. Coming over the last rise, Armowak was spread before them, and beyond lay the great blackness of the sea.
For Terry, the scene was both pretty and scary. Old reflexes, old inner tensions from her past life resurfaced at the sight of a modern city, and for the first time it really hit home that she was about to be plunged back into modern civilization as a naked savage. Still, there was a certain confidence in that thought, and the kinds of things she’d been raised to fear in such places now had no hold on her. If she had nothing, it could not be stolen, and she doubted that giant beavers and most of whatever else lived in this world had much interest in her body.
Although traffic wasn’t heavy, there were a number of the small personal cars going to and from the city at pretty good speeds, and their Ambrezan drivers seemed oblivious to anything on either side of them. A number of larger vehicles, including tandems and triples, passed as well, showing the importance of the port. She and Brazil kept to the side, well away from the road, and barely drew a glance from any passersby.
&nbs
p; Armowak was Ambreza’s western gateway to the rest of the world. Into it came the imports from other hexes that allowed a measure of variety in Ambrezan markets, products of perhaps hundreds of races. From it went the principal export, tobacco, both processed and “raw,” as well as manufactured items for various trading partners from the computer-controlled and robot-driven factories of the interior. It was a busy, bustling place, a major seaport where great ships called constantly and where many of the races of the Well World mixed in a rare amalgam of shapes, forms, and languages. Here, too, one could buy almost anything with enough money, and here, too, one could lose everything if not careful.
The suburban areas were fairly quiet but well lit; the streets were mostly narrow, except the main highway, and made for pedestrian traffic only, since there was an extensive system of underground moving walkways and transit vehicles to move people quickly around the city. The layout and design of the city were exotic to Terry’s eyes and definitely had an alien cast, yet were basically familiar and logical.
The old city area was along the docks. The port itself ran for a couple of miles, or so it seemed, with large piers, massive warehouses, brick and cobblestone streets, and broad silver-gray strips that proved to be much the same as the railroad tracks used by futuristic vehicles moving freight and supplies to and from the port area.
The services area of the port ran from the opposite side of the main north-south docks for about three blocks before a row of older, seedier-looking office buildings drew a line of demarcation between the actual port and the rest of the city.
There were a few larger ships in, although most of what was there seemed to be coastal steamers, tuglike boats, and even a few of what looked like fishing trawlers. What was fascinating was the odd juxtaposition of technologies between the ships and the shore services: the latter were very modern with magnetic trains and robotic longshoremen, and the ships often had smokestacks and, on the larger ones, two or even three tall sailing masts as well. It was as if ships of the American Civil War era were tying up and being serviced at some twenty-first-century port.
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