02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (20 page)

She had, after all, been in situations not any better than Julian's. Ancient Earth wasn't kind to most women. The way Tony, Anne Marie, and Julian had talked, that was true even now on much of the planet. Chinese peasant women still toiled in the rice paddies; the women in theocracies like the Islamic fundamentalist cultures were kept without rights, voices, or free movement. It was little better in much of sub-Saharan Africa, India, or even a lot of Latin America. In what they called the Third World, eighty percent or more of humankind was largely forgotten or ignored by the feminist crusaders in the industrialized West, most of whom also forgot or never knew that revolutions were often followed by reactions that could leave them worse off than ever. She had seen it happen.

She had
lived
it.

Time after time the great civilizations, the great ideas, the progress of whole masses of humanity were stopped dead and thrown back, often for longer than generations. Sometimes the darkness lasted many long centuries. Two steps forward and then one back was the norm, or so it seemed, but the darkness could rise and force one back even farther. If, as she'd been told, the status of women in some parts of Earth, let alone so much of it, was different from that in Erdom only by degrees, then the darkness still loomed, waiting to engulf the rest. And that darkness, the darkness of ignorance and slavery that was the dark side of humanity, would be replayed again and again if Nathan Brazil triumphed, even though he himself would have been appalled at that interpretation.

It didn't have to happen. It certainly didn't have to happen the same way and to the same people again. The Markovians—she still thought of the Ancient Ones by that name although Jared Markov, after whom they were named, had not yet been born this time around—were wrong in believing that there was a level of perfection attainable by races fighting their way up the evolutionary ladder. They were right to try to understand and fight the flaws, but the result was that the flaws were simply perpetuated.

That,
at least, she could change. She
might
change. But if, and only if, she got into the Well first.

"I'll take the first watch," Lori said, breaking Mavra's reverie. "I slept most of the way here, and I'm fine now."

Mavra nodded. "All right. Julian and I will try to get some sleep. If the Dillians don't come back in an hour or so, wake me. If they do, then give me at least four hours. I've functioned on that little for days at a time." She thought a moment. "I don't want to give you a loaded crossbow with that pair still out there if you're not experienced in using one. I'll get your saber so at least you can hit something over the head if it jumps on you, but what I really want is a loud yell. I'll give you my watch. It's a windup type, so it works anywhere, too."

He grinned. "Don't worry so much. I can see in the dark, remember? I've even been keeping track of the centaurs. I'll be okay."

"In fact, I should take the next watch, not you, for the same reason," Julian pointed out. "The nights are long on this world, and it is best that the night guard be those to whom the dark is no barrier."

"I won't argue, but are you sure you're up to it on so little sleep?" Mavra asked her.

"Yes. I do not need a lot of sleep, either. I make it up when I can."

"Okay, it makes sense to me. If all else fails, we can let you sleep and ride as well." Mavra yawned. "Me, I'm gonna take advantage of your kind offer."

"You get to sleep, too," Lori told Julian. "I'll be all right."

"Yes, my husband," she responded, and lay down on the unoccupied bedroll.

Tony and Anne Marie came back a half hour later. By that time Mavra and Julian were both asleep, and the Dillians tried to make as little noise as possible. They didn't need bedrolls or much else; like horses, they lay down only when crippled or very ill. Instead, they simply stood, their legs locked and the humanoid torsos bent back somewhat, and went to sleep.

Except for the occasional heavy breathing of the centauresses, it was soon deadly still.

Lori, too, wondered about Julian's dual nature. He himself felt pretty well adjusted to the Erdomese form and now even to being male. Maybe
too
adjusted, he had to admit, considering some of his behavior of late, but he felt that he was being pragmatic about things. By Erdomese standards, he thought, he would always be a liberal, always remembering that the females had minds and thoughts and feelings and capabilities most of that society rejected and, hopefully, treating them better than most men there did. On the other hand, in
that
society any outspoken advocacy was a sure route to losing everything and to punishments including cutting out his tongue, castration, and beheading. For Julian it would mean instant death. With the church and its omnipresent spies and true believers programmed from childhood to believe in it and with the enforced insularity of most of the population from real knowledge of much of the rest of this world, nothing could or would change in Erdom's society until and unless there was violent mass revolution.

It might well come eventually, but considering how things there were now, it most assuredly would not be in his or Julian's lifetime. It wasn't until experiencing a real totalitarian theocracy that he had realized just how hard a revolution could be, battling not only minds but genuine power. Technology, discovery, enlightenment, the scientific revolution—
that
had started things on Earth, or restarted them. But what kind of science could one develop when a battery would not hold a charge and tended to dissipate in even short transmission? When technology was rigidly and forever limited to water, and wind, and animal and human power? Without mass communication how could anything be organized? When even writing was limited primarily to the church and the hideously complex ideographic language was so complex that even priests were middle-aged before they fully mastered it, how could knowledge be disseminated?"

"Some men do in fact run the world
—
and you're not one of them."

And the price for having a crack at being one of those men who
did
run Erdom was just too damned high.

Still, he had to admit, it
was
different being a man in a male-dominated society. The fact was, he was beginning to
like
this form, even if he didn't like the culture and chafed at the hex's technological restrictions. This form was beginning to—no, it
did
feel natural, normal, comfortable. He never even
thought
about it anymore. Funny. He'd been born and raised an Earth-human female and had spent almost forty years as one; he'd been an Erdomese male for a matter of a few months, no more. Yet Mavra Chang seemed an ugly, colorless, unattractive . . .
alien
to him, while Julian was beautiful, desirable. Lori Ann had never been sexually attracted to women no matter how much she fought the male system. Lori the Erdomese couldn't remember what turned Lori Ann on in a man or see the least attraction there.

Each day it was getting harder and harder to remember what it had been like to be an Earth-human woman. Not the past, not the events of a life, or the people, or the learning and accomplishments, the struggles, losses, and gains, but remembering being the one who had lived it. That person seemed more and more to be someone else, like a character from a movie she'd watched, a movie spanning forty years of a woman's life.

Was that how it worked? First one got the new body, along with sufficient programming on the brain's subconscious level to use it without serious trouble, and a bit of suggestion so that one was not frightened or revolted by what one saw or what one might need to eat, but it was still the original person, superimposed on an alien form.

But that form's brain had to be different from an Earth human's, if only in subtle but important details. Neural pathways would be wired differently; thoughts would need to be rerouted so that action produced the desired results. If there were subtle differences in the wiring of the hemispheres in male and female human brains, how much more dramatic would that wiring difference be in a totally different species? Add hormones and other chemical differences that would eventually influence development as the mind "settled in," and one's old self, one's memories, one's very soul, would be reshaped day by day so slowly and subtly that a person might not even notice. But one day that person would be wholly of the other species, as if born to it.

Lori Ann had been
playing
at being a man, enjoying fooling with the very concept as if it were some kind of masquerade gender-switch game. He wasn't playing anymore, and he wasn't even sure when he had stopped. He was a male now. It was one of the basic things that defined him. What flowed from that sense of identity defined his actions and reactions to a host of things both internal and external.

If it had happened to him like this, it almost certainly had happened to Julian. She'd come in months earlier than he had, but her own situation had been so radical a cultural loss that she'd fought like hell against it, while overall, he had to admit to himself that he'd not really fought it in himself at all. Still, by the time he'd met her, she already admitted that she had accepted being female, that it was something that no longer disturbed her. She'd fought not that but the concept that she was property, that she was to be consigned to a base role as if in a medieval harem. It was something Lori Ann would have fought just as hard against.

Maybe those drugs and hypnotic sessions had accelerated the process for both of them; maybe not. But if Julian now felt as normal and natural as an Erdomese female as he did as an Erdomese male, she might also, away from Erdom but still with him, have stopped fighting the rest.

It made sense. He thought of the two Dillians, who seemed so alike outside and so different inside, and knew that they really weren't. Anne Marie really hadn't been required to adjust much, but to Tony it must have been as much of a shock to be a female as it had been for Julian initially—although Julian also had the restrictive Erdomese culture to deal with. They'd been here the longest of any of this party. They'd come through the night the meteors fell.

Tony still thought he hadn't changed inside, partly, Lori suspected, because Anne Marie still saw the old Tony inside the new body because she wanted to see him there. But he
had
changed. He
was
different. They had talked for a bit, being so, well,
close,
during the walk, and since he had the translator Tony could speak Dillian, which was easier. And when she spoke Dillian rather than English, there were only slight differences between her and Anne Marie's speech patterns. In her normal speech, in her manner, her movements, even many of the things she spoke about, Tony was as feminine as Lori Ann Sutton had ever been. Tony admitted that she'd stopped fighting when she had realized that Anne Marie never noticed any difference. In any event, Tony knew she couldn't stave it off forever and would have to let go sooner or later. Now she was just playacting being the old Tony; he was as past tense as the old Lori Ann was.

"I feel real pity for your Julian," Tony had told him. "I would not accept that life. But in Dillia it is different; the practical day-to-day differences in the lives of men and women there are not radical enough to cause alarm, and in the few areas where they are, the benefits of being male are balanced against the benefits of being female. It is not at all like my old culture, nor, perhaps, your old one, either. It would have been nicer, perhaps, and more romantic to have been Anne Marie's husband rather than her twin sister, but we can no more change that now than we could change ourselves before. This is second best, and we will take it."

In truth, the old Tony still existed only when she was required to speak English. Other than that, Tony and Anne Marie had each drawn from the other what they had found most valuable and had become, in Dillian terms, very much alike indeed. It was as if they had been born twin sisters, with the exception that Tony would never be able to grow proper roses or be half the cook Anne Marie could be, and Anne Marie would never be able to pilot a jet aircraft and would never be that good at repairing even simple mechanical things. That difference was enough to allow each of them to retain a sense of individuality and a connection with their pasts, and it really was enough.

Lori had asked Tony why, if things were working out so well for them, they'd agreed to undertake a very long and difficult journey over land and sea to meet a strange and mysterious woman they didn't know.

"Curiosity most of all," Tony had replied. "A way to see more of this strange and mysterious world than we could any other way. Our passage had, after all, been prepaid, and we verified that every hex had a Zone Gate and from Zone we could be instantly back in Dillia no matter how far in the world we roamed, so return tickets were not a worry, either. And, I admit, timing played some part in our motivation."

"Timing?"

"Yes. You see, Dillian women ovulate only twice a year, for about a three-week period each time. It is not that they do not do things recreationally, as it were, but it only
counts
during each of those three-week periods. While we have more control than an animal would, we were told that during that time women of childbearing age get 'turned on,' one might say, and
stay
that way for the duration. I can now tell you that it is indeed true and that it is a whole-body experience, and further that
much
willpower is required to function even close to normally at that time. Dillians grow up with it and learn to cope with their parents' help. In Dillia it is the females who almost always seduce the males. We, neither of us, were quite ready for that as yet, I fear, and if we had done it and even one of us had gotten pregnant—no sure thing, because the Well governs population—we would have wound up
never
traveling."

Lori could well understand. "Um—do you get periods, too?"