Echoes of the Well of Souls (34 page)

"Yes, I know. I was also an assistant professor of astronomy, which does me precious little good in this place."

"You
were
?
I was a shuttle astronaut. A mission specialist. A fancy engineer, really, not a pilot. I'm Julian Beard."

"Then
you're
one of the two men who came through ahead of us! I
knew
you looked familiar when they showed us your picture. Your 'before' picture, that is. I did some work in Houston a few years back, and you were one of the instructors. Lori Ann Sutton."

The name didn't register, but she didn't expect it to. Many such scientists and other types had come through there, and she had only stayed a week. Still, Julian said, "Well, that's a kick in the head and ass. This thing is
really
screwed up. Dropped us in the wrong bodies in a backward land where even if you were allowed to use what you know, what you know doesn't work. Would you believe
nothing
but mechanical energy functions here? Or at least in any controllable way."

"I know. But, while I understand your problems being female in
this
society, how'd you get stuck in
this
fix?"

Julian shook her head in disgust. "You just don't
know.
First you wake up looking like an alternative evolution from a prehistoric horse, then you find you're not only a girl but you've got four breasts and a big tail and hands like pincers. Then you wander into one of these Bedouinlike camps and you're treated like a fresh piece of meat. They didn't
care
about me. They weren't even
interested
in me except as new flesh. Just trying to talk civilly to them gets you a rap in the mouth or worse. Then they decide you're either high-spirited or too smart or both, and they start trying to break you, body and soul. They were just, well,
unspeakable,
barbaric, and while they didn't break me, they pretty much took my soul. I didn't even want to live anymore."

Lori sighed. "I think I can imagine. I'm not so sure I wouldn't have just killed myself."

"That's just the problem! You
can't.
Not really. I tried to figure this out, and even though I'm no biologist, I have a theory. I think, well, in humans, most all males have some female in them. I mean, it's half the chromosomes, right? And every female has some male hormones to one degree or another. Here the male chromosome seems to have all the male hormones. Either that or male hormones have no effect on females. All the male I am, all the maleness I ever had, is in my head, but the female hormones really take

ECHOES OF THE WELL OF SOULS
249

control of behavior. I can't explain it. I can't even tell you what it does to you exactly. It's not like I suddenly woke up a human female. That would be a whole different thing, one you could certainly understand. This is Erdomese, and it's like a hundred times anything in humans, I'm sure. You know the feeling of walking alone on a dark night in a place you don't know well? The kind of nervousness or outright fear that's there?
Everything
becomes like that.
Everywhere.
In sunlight as well as darkness. The insecurity is monstrous, overwhelming. You just can't handle it no matter how hard you try. Like a permanent, unshakable paranoia. You want to be in a group with others, others you
know.
The urge for security dominates you and overrides anything else. Anything odd happens, you freeze solid or you have an irresistible impulse to run and hide. You only feel safe when you're with a big group of women you know or there's a related man around—husband, big brother, father, whatever. For that matter, ever see a wife or daughter talk back or argue with a husband or father here? Most of them just—
can't.
They hate it, but they have to take it."

Lori nodded, having seen all this behavior in the females. "Maybe it's vestigial. Not just a sexual division of responsibilities but a true herd mentality. I think this race evolved, or was made to evolve, from some more primitive herd animals. The whole society seems to rise from those primitive roots. The males were the hunters and guardians of the herd. The horn was a natural weapon. I think that's why males here love this kind of swordplay. And that's why you kept trying to run off into the desert. It fit the pattern and would still be almost certain suicide."

"Yes, that's it. It was my only way out. That and the fact that I was maybe the only woman in this stinking place who could muster up the guts to say 'no' and have enough self-control to mean it. But I couldn't really fight it. All I could do was piss and moan and make the men's lives a little miserable. It would be nothing back home—I wouldn't have had anything to do with a woman who didn't have that kind of spunk—but here it's something the guys just can't handle. So they swapped me off, family to family, and it started all over again. Finally this tentmaker took me to one of their weird priests. I think they're smart and well educated, because he knew what an engineer was and what computers are and a lot more. We talked for quite a while about who I was and where I was from and what my problem was, and I thought maybe things would improve, but they didn't. They got worse."

"He led you on and then pounced, huh?"

"Pretty much. In the end their job is to keep everything just the way it is. Just
knowing
about the outside world isn't the same as
approving
of it. It was his idea to lock me up like this. He said it might take a long time, but I was very young—this body's about fourteen or so—and that eventually, with no stimuli, the biology—he actually called it 'programming'—would take over completely. He's right, too. Since I've been in here my dreams have gotten more and more mixed up and more and more erotic. My memories are becoming more and more confused, and I have trouble remembering what I was like—before. Even the math tables I used to stay sane when they were trying to break me more crudely fail me. Not that I've forgotten them, I just can't keep my mind on them. I also kept trying to always think in English, or sometimes German, but I just can't
concentrate
anymore, and the more my thoughts were Erdomese, the more Erdomese I became. I—I've lost so much already, I don't know how much of me is really left. Here, see? I'm starting to cry, and I just can't stop it. And I don't even feel embarrassed about doing it anymore."

"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."