The Jumper

by Brian H Groover

thousand years ago. I never could pronounce my name as a human, but if I had to, the closest I could come would be Gerleesh. My people, and our world, was called something that sounded roughly like Tarshen.”

  “An alien invasion,” he said, grinning in spite of himself.

  She smiled sadly back. “Actually, I may be the very last of my kind. I was exploring, looking for a home, and I ran into primitive humans. Before I realized how dangerous they were, I was dying.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “My species exists as a combination of corporeal and non-corporeal essences. We are born into biological bodies, just as you, and we grow to maturity in them, just as you do, but at some point–usually much older than I was, after we’ve had time to reproduce–most of us develop the ability to live outside of our bodies, for a brief time, and even to live in the body of another corporeal being.”

  “You mean, you’re a ghost?”

  “Not in the sense humans mean, no, but it’s pretty close. It’s more like what you think of as the spirit inhabiting a body, although that’s a concept I’ve never really been able to define, either. It is possible for me to live in another being’s body, but I can’t live without a body at all. I can manage it, but only for a little bit.”

  He frowned. “How long is a little bit?”

  “A few seconds. Maybe a minute; maybe even two. The energy of a living body is necessary to maintain the energy of my essence.”

  “So, what would happen if you left the body you are in?”

  “I would die, she would die.”

  “Why would she die?”

  “A body cannot live without a spirit,” she said. “If I leave it, this body will have no spirit. It can continue to live, but as a vegetable. The process of leaving destroys much of what is used in the brain to hold and process information. What is left isn’t even alive in any measurable sense. It isn’t pretty. Pretty soon, it will just stop functioning.”

  “That’s why you arrange to have your previous hosts die?”

  “Yes,” she said, sadly. “That’s part of it. The other part is that it is too painful for the family members of the old body. I tried not to have anyone too close to me, by the time my body died, but it was still very hard for them.

  “It was hard for me, too, to see my own children and grandchildren, grieving over my drooling, empty body. I haven’t let that happen for a very long time, now.”

  Jeff was finding it almost impossible to disbelieve her, even though what she was saying was simply unbelievable.

  As she looked through a porthole, across the dark ocean, he sensed a sadness in her that was older and deeper than anything he’d imagined. He barely resisted the urge to put his arms around her.

  Then another thought occurred to him, and the resisting was easier. “What happened to the original spirit, the body’s owner? Can’t you just give the body back to them?”

  She looked up at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “No, Jeff,” she said, “I can’t. When I join with a new body, I join with the spirit already in that body. I am Rachel Cortez. I’m not someone pretending to be her, using her body and memories. Adolfus Crane is still in here, too, as is Gilbert Stevens. Once we are joined, we can never be separated. We leave a body together or not at all.”

  Jeff’s mouth was open, but he had no idea what to think of this.

  Rachel wasn’t done. “That’s not the worst of it, Jeff. I share all the needs and desires of the body and spirit I inhabit.” She shuddered, and said, “I’ll leave that for later, but if I make a bad choice as to the character of a host, I’m stuck with it forever.

  “Anyway, when I take a new body, I make sure the old one dies. It’s just an empty shell, by that time, and leaving it alive causes it pain, and anyone who cared about me/it, more grief. Another reason to kill it off, is that it keeps me from being burned as a witch.”

  “Couldn’t you avoid that, by jumping again?”

  She looked at him, with furious eyes. “Oh, sure! Just kill another innocent person! Great idea, Jeff.”

  She saw the shock on his face, and calmed down. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, Jeff; I just can’t avoid taking a body to live, any more than a mountain lion can avoid hunting to live.”

  Jeff tried to think this through, but got nowhere. “Okay, okay, tell me this. How long are you usually in one body?”

  “That’s a much better question,” she smiled. “How much looking into Mr. Crane’s life did you do, Jeff?”

  “Just his financials. I knew he was old.”

  “Did you find out how old?”

  “I think he was almost a hundred. Ninety eight, or something like that.”

  “Did the coroner examine the body?”

  Jeff thought. “You know, he did, but I don’t remember him talking about him as an old man.”

  “Medically, he wasn’t.”

  “What?”

  “If you ask your coroner how old the body was he examined, he will probably come up with an age in the late thirties or early forties, but with some unusual degenerative issues. In other words, the coroner would say he is probably only thirty-eight to forty-two, but looks prematurely aged, as if he were in his eighties.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Mr. Crane was a recluse. A few years ago, he could have passed for thirty, and did, regularly.”

  Jeff stared. “How old was Mr. Crane?”

  “I never found that one out, since he didn’t know his own age, but I’d say he was in his forties when I took him. Special circumstances.”

  “What kind of circumstances?”

  “He was under sentence of death, and I was already dying, so there wasn’t much time to fool around. An opportunity came to make the switch, so I grabbed it.”

  “And no one noticed, when you collapsed on the floor for a week?”

  “Rats,” she said with a shudder. When he realized what she meant, Jeff shuddered even worse than she did. Then he got hold of himself.

  “Come on,” he said, “no one leaves inmates unwatched for that long.”

  10 Stranger in a Strange Land

  Not now,” she said. “Then, it was common practice. Saved money on food, and labor shoveling out their cells. Just toss the bodies into the public grave once a month. Much easier than feeding them.” She shuddered again.

  “When was that?” he whispered, convinced by the horror on her face.

  “That was, let’s see, in the year of our Lord, thirteen hundred and three.”

  His eyes bugged. “Mr. Crane was over seven hundred years old?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Bull.”

  She shrugged. “It’s true, Jeff. In sixty thousand years, I’ve taken something like one hundred and seventy bodies. That averages to something like three hundred and fifty years each. Most of them lasted nine hundred to a thousand years, but Crane started late, and his body had already had a lot of wear. He deteriorated so rapidly, at the end, I barely had time to arrange the transfer. I didn’t allow for changes in police methods until the very end. Obviously, I blew it.”

  Jeff frowned, trying to think. “I don’t think those numbers add up.”

  She smiled. “I know. In the early days, I jumped a lot. The first person to find me, after my crash, was a curious and brave young hunter. I was very lucky he wasn’t with some tribal groups, or I would have been buried alive. I was dying, and took him just outside my ship, but I think the transition probably took me close to a month, before I fully assimilated his body.

  “After that, it was easier, but I didn’t know customs, language, or even foods, until I learned to accept the human side of myself. I came close to dying fifty or more times, before I developed a stable pattern, and learned how to maintain my youth. It was a very long time before I learned how to fully assimilate the spirit of the body I took.”

  The other humans thought I had magical powers, of course, because I did not grow old, but no one in that society grew old. Disease, accidents,
animals, weather, and infections generally killed them off before they reached their twenties. The rare few who lived to the ripe old age of thirty were the ancient repositories of wisdom.

  “After the first few transitions, which were extremely difficult and dangerous, I managed to make a transition to a woman’s body. It was much harder being a woman because of the way women were treated, but it was easier to recover from the transitions, and I found their bodies more resilient and easier to manage. I could live as a woman for a hundred years before having to jump to another.

  “I went on that way for almost fifty thousand years, gradually learning to keep my hosts alive for hundreds of years at a time.”

  “Always as women?”

  She smiled, “always. There were advantages. For one, men were constantly expected to risk their lives. As a young man, I would be expected to put myself at risk of dying, every day, in both hunting and war. As a young woman, I was a precious commodity, protected, unless the tribe lost a war. If they did, I was booty, handed out as a prize to the conquering warriors, who also protected me.”

  Jeff was open-mouthed at the casual description of the way she was treated.

  She laughed, bitterly. “Modern humans have no idea what life used to be like. I was property, Jeff; fought over and passed about like any property.

  “There were still many advantages, though, if one was particularly beautiful. When I came close to my time of change, I chose the most beautiful girl I could find. Even if I were forced to marry–which usually happened–my husband would die, eventually, leaving me young and healthy, and relatively free.

  “Life as a young man was even harsher. Most men who lived into their twenties had four or more wives, simply because most men didn’t live long enough to reach their twenties. I did not switch back to using men for hosts until people began to build cities. Only then could a man have a career from a young age that didn’t involve a very high probability of dying.

  “I still had lots of close calls, but once I established myself as a man of wealth and power, I could build my power base until I was as safe as anyone could be. I preferred work as a merchant so I was not a threat to the young idiots with their testosterone, but could still defend myself very well with hired soldiers.

  “Once I established that pattern, I only used male hosts from then on. I followed that pattern all the way until I jumped into poor Gilbert. I would have kept him healthy for a thousand years, were it not for you.” She glared at him.

  “Me?” Jeff was jolted by the change in direction. “You’re the one who killed him.”

  “Am I? You and your damned perseverance,” she said, bitterly. “I knew I could not avoid him being discovered by you, eventually. The only chance I had was to jump to another. It should have worked, too, damn you.

  “Once that was decided, though, I only needed to select my new host. Normally, that process involves a long and careful search, but I did not have the time. As I looked around, it occurred to me that I could jump to a woman. I could see in recent decades that women were experiencing a level of freedom unmatched in history, and I wanted to see what the changes were like from their perspective. So, I found a beautiful young woman of the night, determined that she had no family, and paid her to come to my hunting cabin. There, I told her I was into bondage games, and had her tie me up naked and make love to me that way. When I had enjoyed spending myself in her, I took her.

  “That was, I am sorry to say, the most unpleasant awakening I have had in all my years. Gilbert had been dead for two days when I awoke, and I was still lying on top of him.” She shuddered. “I could not wait another second to get myself washed and get out of there, which is why I left all that evidence behind.”

  She shivered again, and huddled against Jeff. Against his better judgment, he put a protective arm about her shoulders.

  “That feels nice,” she said in a small voice. When he turned his head toward her, she lifted her face to his, and they kissed.

  A part of Jeff’s mind was screaming at him that this wasn’t right, and she would eat his soul. He resolutely told it to shut up.

  11 I’ve Never Been Able to Find It

  When Jeff awoke, he was sore, and comfortable, and hungry. He looked down at the hair scattered across his chest, and the sculptor’s dream of a body that was snuggled to his side. After a moment, Rachel lifted her face from his chest, and smiled radiantly at him.

  Despite the early hour, Jeff could not help but smile back at those beautiful brown eyes, his heart beating faster.

  Then the impossibility of the situation came back to him.

  “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

  “Did you mean what you said, last night?”

  He sat up abruptly, and got up. She rolled off him, and sat up, looking hurt.

  “Don’t do that to me!” he said. “I know what you are, now.”

  “No,” she said, softly, “obviously, you don’t.”

  In sudden indecision at the pain in her voice, he said, “what do you mean?”

  She came over to him. “What I am, first and foremost, is a woman. I am Rachel. Everything she was, I am.

  “I had a fairly happy childhood, as Rachel. It’s strange, but I didn’t have the abusive father, or poverty-and-drug stricken family one typically associates with prostitutes. I was a normal and healthy girl with maybe an extra helping of libido who came to the city to find a career as an actress. By the time my money ran out, I had learned that no one wanted to hire me as an actress, but plenty wanted to hire me for other things. I was near starving, and just decided to do what made money for me.

  “I knew it was a bad decision, and I often regretted it, but I never was able to walk away from the money.

  “The thing is,” and Rachel now looked sadder than she had yet, “what I–what she really wanted, more than anything, was to be a mother. She wanted to feel life growing in her, knowing that it was coming from herself, giving birth to a part of herself that could, just possibly, live forever.”

  “So, you’ve never had a child?”

  She looked up at him, then put her arms around him, hugging his bare chest tight. He felt the tears against his chest as she spoke.

  “Oh, no, Jeff, I–well, my bodies–have had hundreds of children. I’ve done my best to raise them all well, and I’d like to think they have done very well, all in all. I’ve raised successful children in every racial group on Earth.”

  The tears were still dripping onto his chest. “Then, why are you so sad?” Jeff said in frustration.

  “Because, Jeff, I am Rachel, but I am also much more than Rachel. I don’t want to take another life, ever. Because there is only one of me, I don’t have a choice.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “My people can support each other. If another Tarshen were here in a human body, the two of us together could keep both our hosts alive almost indefinitely. More than that, we would begin building the songs that are the heritage of my people.” She looked out over the ocean again, and Jeff could sense her overwhelming sadness. “All the glory that we once were is gone, but two could begin building a new heritage.” She sighed, tears still on her cheeks.

  “Part of me wants just what Rachel wants. I want to live in this body, keeping it healthy and young, for the next thousand years. As a woman, I want a man to share my life, to love me, to protect me, and to give me babies. That’s what I want, as a woman.

  “Do you know what I found was the hardest thing about being a woman?”

  He shook his head.

  “Watching the men and children I loved die. Most often it was war, but sometimes it was animals, or disease, or even an infection from a thorn scratch. My man would get sick, and he’d die, and I’d be alone again. The only thing harder was when my children died.”

  She looked up at him. “You don’t have to say so, Jeff. I know you meant it, when you said you loved me.” She put her head against his chest, looking out the porthole again. “I never e
xpected I would love you, too.”

  She sighed, and then looked up at him again. “You know, Jeff, I’ve been on Earth for sixty thousand years, and I lived in my own existence for about a thousand Earth years before that, subjectively. In all that time, there is one thing I’ve always wanted–more than anything else in life, in fact–but I’ve never been able to find it.”

  Jeff was finding it hard to breathe. “What was that?”

  12 Voice from the Grave

  Jeff’s captain was sitting at his desk in despair. He’d lost men before, but never like this. Some kind of sick scheme was being played out.

  He was sure Jeff had fallen to a psychopath. The really frustrating thing about it was that he had come so close, and she had slipped through his fingers.

  None of it made sense. The prostitute had seemed, by all accounts, to be the wrong profile for a serial killer. No one had seemed to be around but Gilbert Stevens, when the old man had died. He hadn’t seemed to be benefitting from the old man’s death, yet money wired from the old man’s offshore account–they couldn’t prove that, but it seemed likely–had been used to buy an old pickup truck and rent a cabin.

  Then Stevens turned up dead, and this prostitute was there when he died. Jeff finally ran her down, and she killed him for it.

  Somewhere, she had to be living high off the old man’s money. That was the only explanation that made sense. His fortune had been close to a billion dollars, before it had vanished.

  Jeff had been gone for almost two weeks, and they had not found a single clue.

  He looked at the drawer where he kept his scotch, and had just decided for the tenth time that morning that he would wait until he got home, when his phone rang.

  “Captain?”

  He knew that voice, and sprang to his feet. “JEFF?”

  “Yeah, Cap, it’s me,” Jeff’s voice said. “I’ll bet you’ve been worried. I’m sorry to take so long to let you know I was okay, but I’ve been sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “Yeah. I caught a virus of some kind, and I was sick to death for better than a week, and out of my head. I’m okay now, though–just a little weak.”

  “Where are you, Jeff?”

  “Hawaii. I’m catching a plane in twenty minutes, and I’ll be touching down in about four hours. I’m bringing Rachel Cortez with me.”

  What the hell? “You apprehended her?”

  “Not exactly. She isn’t a prisoner, but she’s coming with me.”

  The captain’s instincts were sounding off, now. Is this the kind of stuff Jeff was worried about? He sounds like him, but could it be that he isn’t really Jeff?

  “We’ll be waiting for you.”

  13 The Next Jumper

  As soon as Jeff and Rachel got off the plane, they were both taken into custody. Neither of them objected to it, even though it went on for weeks, as they were both questioned extensively, particularly by Jeff’s Captain.

  Sometimes the questioning was of the two of them together, but most of the time it was one or the other of them alone. Jeff told his captain that he wouldn’t object to all the looking they wanted to do, as long as they let them stay together at night and eat decent