“Were you a feminist back in your previous life?” Julian asked. It seemed an odd question for the situation.
“Of a sort, yes. The word had come into disrepute because it was co-opted by radicals with a different agenda from most women, but on the basic issues I was. Something of an activist, in fact.” Although, Lori admitted, I compromised my ideals more than once to get or keep a position.
“Well, now you’re going to find out the truth of one thing they told you and one other thing they didn’t. First, men do control and set the rules in society—at least in the two I know, Earth’s and Erdom’s. Maybe a lot of other places. That’s true. And now you’re a man and have to know the second thing.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“The men who rule? You’re not one of them. You’re stuck with those stupid rules the same as every woman, and you can’t change them much, either.”
“Thanks a lot. After the way I treated you the last four days…”
“Think of it as an education, or the start of one,” Julian sighed. “We were trapped. Both of us. But we couldn’t escape because it was built into the society. If we hadn’t agreed on the temple visit, I would have been stuck with that tentmaker and gotten the treatment later, when the local monk got the drugs he needed. If you agreed but then didn’t show up, they’d have sent people looking for us, and in that society it’s pretty hard to hide for very long. And then we’d have been kept in the temple, but instead of just being drugged and hypnotized, we’d have been the subjects for their chemical inquisition. We’d have come out of there with our brains scrubbed so clean that not a trace of Julian Beard or Lori Sutton would have remained.”
Lori shook his head in wonder and sighed. “I wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t passed me that letter. Or if they’d told me to simply forget I was ever anything but an Erdomite and then handed me a letter I couldn’t read.”
“I suspect that this friend of yours paid a handsome bribe to ensure that we’d get the letter. As to the other, remember, they’d never had two people like us before. They couldn’t think of everything that quickly. But we’d have continued to drug and hypnotize each other, and over weeks, months, a year, we’d have had reinforcing visits to the temple so they could correct any problems. Eventually we’d be so steeped in our roles and behavior and so indoctrinated into the religion and culture, nothing else would have been needed. I shouldn’t wonder that my next prescription might have included some mind-dulling chemicals, slowing down my mental processes until I couldn’t keep two thoughts in my head at once or have much long-term memory. I’d just be another of those stupid bubbleheads.”
“You think they’re smart enough to have stuff like that?”
“I think it’s about time we stop thinking of them as ignorant and stupid just because they live in a feudal, primitive society. They are a very old culture. Ancient by Earth standards. I think they know an awful lot about everything that is possible to use in a nontechnical society and even more about keeping things the way they are and under complete control.”
“But—we’re Erdomese! You said it yourself a week ago. We’re Erdomese whether we like it or not. Sooner or later—”
She nodded. “Sooner or later we’ll be back there and even more suspect because we’ve traveled abroad. I hope by then we’ll have figured out some way to beat them.”
“If we survive this, and if this woman’s telling the truth or anything close to it, we might have a crack. The promised reward is ‘anything we want.’ Maybe even out of here, if we wanted it. I take it that you’re not so enamored of being female after the last few days.”
“Not treated like that, I’m not! I don’t mind being the junior partner along for the ride, but I treated my dog better than I got treated by you! And the dog didn’t have to work, either.”
“I—I know. You think I’m proud of that?”
Julian grinned. “I think it’s a lot tougher holding to principle when you’re on the top of the heap instead of on the bottom. But for your information, it’s not the gender I’m upset with, it’s the bottom position and its permanence. Being a culturally correct Erdomese female is the pits, I’ll tell you. If I were forced to go back to that, I’d cheerfully take their stupid pills. Like this I can manage, I think, although there’s still some residual effect from that stuff. Alone in the cabin with just you, I find I can fight it, but out there, among others, particularly other Erdomese on the ship, I’m not so sure I won’t have a relapse.”
“Until we’re well away from Erdomese it might not be so bad to keep to the fiction, anyway,” Lori noted. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of these businessmen traders here didn’t also report back to the temple on just about everything they see and hear. I doubt if they could do anything this far from home, but we are citizens of Erdom, and we can’t hide that fact. They do all their diplomacy in the polar Zone, but it’s as if they have a voice in every one of these hex-shaped countries. We left pretty suddenly. If they decided to trump up some charges against us, we could easily wind up being arrested and sent back through one of those gates right back to Erdom, with the monks waiting for us at the other end. I think it’s best not to relax too much until we have some protection from others who know this place better than we do.”
It was a sobering thought. “Thanks. Just what I needed—more reasons to jump at shadows. Actually, the residue of these past few days is different from what you think I meant. I mean, I know how to play the sniveling little bimbo if I have to. I hate it, but it’s kind of a survival skill. No, it’s not that—it’s the fear.”
“Huh? Fear of what?”
“Of anything. You see, up until we got the treatment, I was playacting. To a certain extent the lifetime and instincts of good old Julian Beard were still there. Spending these days as a ‘pure’ Erdomese woman, though, I didn’t have those old senses to call upon. For the first time I faced the added burden of being a female in a male-dominated society that places women somewhere just above the herd animals or even below them. Without you around as a protector, I was absolutely defenseless. I had to take all the feelies from those merchants, all the guff, and all of a sudden every single one of them looked like a threat. My body was entirely at their mercy, and I needed, required you to stand in their way. I didn’t want to be out of your sight, and if you went off, I got back to this cabin in a hurry and locked myself in, scared to death all the way here. Until now I hadn’t understood why I felt the need to be locked up to be safe. I put it down to the drugs or the body or the changes in me. This brought it home. The old me, the male me, would have explored this ship from stem to stern and never had a second thought. Now, suddenly, I was in the midst of strangers, and I didn’t know friend from foe. I was scared to leave and scared to stay.”
Lori felt a sudden sympathy for Julian. “I think I know what you mean,” he responded. “It explains a lot about how I’m reacting to all this, too. I’ve had a cavalier, adventurous attitude since becoming male and a kind of charge-straight-ahead-and-damn-the-consequences feeling. Until now I was only aware that some sort of burden had been lifted off me but not what it was. It was just that the sort of feeling I had growing up female back home was gone. When I was seventeen, I was raped by my prom date. At the time I felt disgusted, but I never said anything because there was always this feeling somewhere deep down that I’d encouraged him somehow, let him do it—I don’t know. I do know I changed after that. Cut my hair real short, started to be a slob, got fat and stayed that way, just about never used makeup—made myself unattractive in general. I stopped dating for a long time, until after I’d gotten my Ph.D., really, hung out in women’s studies centers and even socialized with a lesbian group, although I never really wanted to go to bed with them. I did go to bed with men—a lot of them—but they were always men I picked out, and they were mostly nerds who were desperate for any female interest. They were going to love me for me, no frills or compromises, or to hell with them. Don�
��t get me wrong—I knew I was reacting—but I had a justification for everything. And, surrounded by lots of women I knew and trusted, or by men of my choosing, I managed to keep the fear down. I guess that’s why I took to the all-women tribe so easily. No men to threaten, and women who were not only self-sufficient but actually dangerous.”
“And now we both realize that, just like in physics, nothing is really lost, it’s just transferred,” Julian said with a sigh. “Now I’ve got the burden and yours is gone. About the only thing I can cling to as a real advantage is that this body sure delivers dynamite sex.”
“I guessed as much, considering your responses. And that’s the downside of my change. I can turn on like a light switch, but everything’s concentrated in just one spot. It explains a lot about my previous lovers. I feel a lot less guilt now.”
They had a laugh at that and then went on to more immediate worries.
“What do you know about this Chang woman, anyway?” Julian asked.
“Not a lot. As far as I was concerned, she was the leader and demigoddess of a tribe of primitive rain forest Amazons—literally. Though, mean, and ruthless; that was her reputation among the tribe. Then, suddenly, all this comes about and suddenly she’s claiming to be some immortal from this world. I would have sworn she’d have barely recognized anything beyond Stone Age technology as anything but magic and that she had no experience beyond the jungles, yet here she is, suddenly a different sort of person, comfortable with technology well in advance of our own and writing notes to me in ancient Greek!”
“Yeah, how’d she know you knew Greek?”
“I don’t even know how she’d know I knew German, let alone Greek. Our only common language was that of a Stone Age tribe. I don’t count it because I can’t speak it, and I was surprised that I could read the note at all. She made it pretty basic, though, and it all came back to me. She certainly knows no English, and if she did, it would probably sound more like Shakespeare’s or even Chaucer’s. She’d been in that jungle an awfully long time. It was almost like she was hiding out from the world.”
“From that other fellow with the appropriate name, perhaps. Brazil.”
“Maybe. But I get the feeling it’s not that simple. She’s not just a small woman, she’s tiny. Under five feet, skinny, wiry, but moves like a cat. She also has a confident, brassy voice and manner, but I wonder if that’s just a mask for what we were talking about.”
“Huh?”
“The fear factor.”
“But—she’s immortal, or she says she is. And according to you, the tribe at least believed that any injuries to her, no matter how severe, would heal without scars and that she could even regrow limbs.”
“Yes, she’s beyond some of our most common fears—if it’s all true, anyway. But she still can be badly hurt, and she feels the same pain. I wonder if she also feels the same kind of psychological pain. She’s strong for her size but no match for an average man. Suppose she is immortal and started life on Earth thousands of years ago? The way the Erdomese look at women and women’s rights is about standard for most cultures in human history until fairly recently. I wonder… After a few thousand years of being a victim with no end in sight, I might run off to a rain forest and surround myself with cast-off and runaway tribal women, too. I sort of ran away socially for years from just one incident. And this Brazil person—I assume they started out together and they got separated centuries or longer ago. I wonder if that’s not part of the problem.”
“What? That she lost her protection?”
“That she needed his protection in the first place. Her ego is pretty damned strong. There would be only so much protection she could stand before cracking.”
“You think he was abusing her or something?”
“No, I don’t think so. Even in Zone she described him as basically a good person. She would have cast him as the epitome of evil if he’d done anything to her. No, I think it’s more basic than that. Thousands of years in a series of what must have seemed very primitive societies to her, always with that fear factor… Suppose he simply never noticed? Suppose he, the immortal male, just couldn’t comprehend it?”
It was something to think about but not something that could be proved one way or the other, not until they actually met this mysterious Brazil—if, indeed, they ever did. This and their mental hangover and associated guilt produced a minute or two of silence.
Finally Julian spoke. “I really don’t understand a lot of this at all. If what we’re being told is correct, much of what I learned about creation, evolution, the birth and death of the universe—it’s all wrong. Yet everything, all the laws of science, seem to be more or less holding in spite of all that, and it doesn’t make any sense. We’ve gone from a solid foundation down through the rabbit hole to Wonderland.”
“Not exactly,” Lori responded. “We don’t know enough to draw any conclusions about the universe at large. There were a lot of theorists in physics who postulated bizarre theories that were at least mathematically possible. White holes, parallel universes, and much more. Even in the Einsteinian sense we casually accepted gravity bending time itself. This doesn’t show that what we knew was wrong, only that we knew far less than we thought we did. You know the old saw—I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke—that says that a civilization separated by countless years of development from our own would discover and know so much more that its technology would seem like magic to us. I think that’s what’s bugging you—all that work, all that knowledge, and we’re as ignorant of this sort of stuff as the most primitive tribes of Earth are ignorant of our science.”
“It’s that,” Julian admitted, “but it’s more than that, too. We’re not talking here about centuries ahead, or even thousands of years, but millions of years—maybe even more than that. All that time, and look at what they’ve come up with! Stagnant fundamentalism, ignorance, sexism, racism, violence—all the things we were trying to beat. All that knowledge, all that experience—and look at it! It’s not the science that they know, it’s what they don’t have, or don’t use!”
Lori sighed. “I know. Still, I keep telling myself that this isn’t the future, it’s an experimental slide. This is an artificial place, maintained by a computer. The civilizations here aren’t futuristic, they’re by definition stagnant, limited, leftovers after the experiment’s done, left over and forgotten. Their populations are fixed, their capabilities are fixed, they can’t grow, they can’t progress, and they can’t leave. Long ago—very long ago—they adapted to the situation. Some of them went mad, I suspect; some developed religious justifications for all that they had. Others went savage; still others just settled into a static condition where there’s no future beyond the individual’s. A few may have wound up like the People in the Amazon or some of the tribes of Papua New Guinea, where they repudiated all that had been learned, rejected all progress in the same way that we were told that the makers of this world rejected and turned their back on near godhood, equating progress with evil. In many ways this is less a romantic world than a tragic one.”
“Maybe,” Julian said thoughtfully. “But that brings up a nasty little thought for the immediate future. This Mavra Chang is from another age, another time, no matter what her name and appearance. I think we can take that much for granted.”
“She sure knows her way around. And if she’s been here before, and the only way out is through this Well, this control room, then we can assume she has even more knowledge.”
“But knowledge isn’t wisdom,” Julian pointed out. “That’s exactly what we were talking about. If she’s been here before, she’s very, very old. Maybe ‘ancient’ isn’t even a good enough term for her. Never changing, never able to have a decent relationship with other human beings—they age and die in what for her would be a very short time—she’s pretty much an individual example of what these hexes have gone through.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Well, if these hexes, trapped as they are, turned
into the kind of things we’re seeing, what must the effect be on an individual isolated from all around her? Maybe there’s another explanation for why she might have shut herself off from the world, from all progress, in a never-ending primitive tribal group in the middle of nowhere for all those centuries. She created her own hex, a stagnant, never-changing one, just to cope. That doesn’t make her sound very sane, either, does it?”
Lori didn’t like the logic of that. “And if she’s insane, in some sense, anyway, then what does that make this much more ancient Nathan Brazil? Thanks a lot. What you’re saying is that we’re on our way to help an ancient, probably insane demigoddess do battle with an even older and probably madder demigod. Now, that is a way to cheer me up!”
Julian shrugged. “At least it makes the whole problem of Erdom and the monks seem rather trivial, doesn’t it?”
Itus was, if anything, as hot as Erdom but additionally was as humid as Erdom was dry. The air seemed a solid thing, a thick woolen blanket that enveloped one and made one slow, groggy, and exhausted from fighting against it. The gravitation, too, seemed greater; they felt heavy, leaden, and it took effort just to walk. Julian, particularly with the added dead weight of the four breasts, found it next to impossible to walk without support on just her thin equine legs, and dropped to walking on all fours, something that didn’t seem at all unnatural. Lori almost envied her after walking a couple of blocks. Julian did not seem as pleased, but the alternative was next to impossible. And frankly, even standing on all fours, bringing her height down to about a meter plus, she was still on a reasonable level for the natives of this place.
The Ituns were insectoids, large, low, caterpillarlike creatures with dozens of spindly legs emerging from thick hairy coats and faces that seemed to be two huge, bulging oval eyes, and a nasty-looking mouth flanked by intimidating, curved tusks. They seemed to be able to bend and then lock themselves into just about any position they required and, supported by the hind rows of legs, use their many forelegs as individual hands, fingers, or tentacles. Far worse for the newcomers than the eternally nasty faces and fixed vicious expressions, though, was the sight of all that thick hair in the constant heat and humidity. It made them feel even hotter just watching.
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