Dark of the Woods

XI

Not just silence: quieter than that.

Not just total blackness: darker.

Not just odorless, antiseptic, clean: much purer than any words.

It was an aching, senseless void, a pit without matter, a pit without nonmatter, without walls or ceiling or floor, without air or wind, without anything the senses could distinguish, a limitless eternal stretch of absolute nothingness…

… and then there was light.

At first, there was an almost intangible brightening of the nothingness. Then the indescribable blackness became pitch. Then just black. Then just dark. The light came by degrees, and in a millennium it was as bright as a moonlit night, though there were no features about him.

He became aware of sounds next.

Clickings…

Whirrings…

The sound of tapes spooling and unspooling…

All the noises of a complex and busy machine doing whatever it was its makers had created it to do. As he thought of the word “machines,” the first concrete concept which had occurred to him in this slow awakening, other solid thoughts and questions arose in his mind.

Where was he? His mind danced over that question, aware that a man who had no idea where he was was either intoxicated or insane or had been abducted by someone, perhaps under drugs. Yes, yes, all the clichés of the historical novel rushed back to him in bulk. But as he considered each of them and rejected them, he found there was no comfort in clichés. Where in the devil was he?

He could feel a chair beneath him. No, not exactly a chair, either. It was more like a plushly padded automatic couch which had now folded — and changed position-elevation to get him into a sitting posture. The thing was so well padded, in fact, that it bordered on the uncomfortable at first, though he found himself rapidly adapting to it

Why couldn't he open his eyes?

Not yet, a smooth voice-tape whispered into the auditory nerves of his head. The words were not heard so much as experienced, and he knew there was a tap directly to his brain.

Where am I? he thought-asked of the machine.

Not yet.

He was still, trying to perceive what else lay about him in this weird world of gray light as soft as mouse fur — and without any form whatsoever. He could feel a fabric restraining belt around his waist, similar straps holding down his hands at the sides of the couch. He wiggled one hand and discovered something in the feeling of it that terrified him like nothing he had ever feared before. It was as if he had willed the hand to move and had discovered it was not his but someone else's hand — but that it had obeyed him and he had been able to feel through it!

Relax, the voice-tape prompted.

He moved the fingers again. He rubbed them back and forth against each other. There was a smooth, quick sensation of flesh on flesh. The problem, the thing that terrified him again, was that it was too smooth andtoo quick. It felt much like the amplified, unreal tactile effects of a senso-theater film wherein everything was somewhat larger and better than life (not because the senso-theaters meant it to be, but because no one had ever been able to approximate true human sensations exactly enough — and patrons would pay more for overcompensation than for inadequacy).

He tried to speak.

He could not.

His face, straining in the normal expression to form the words he wanted to use, felt wrong. It felt like someone else's face.

He felt like screaming.

Whose body am I in? he asked the machine.

Yours.

No!

Yours.

Please. Whose body am I in? It is your body.

Tell me why—

Not yet.

When?

Wait.

He tried to decipher the mystery of his whereabouts by inhaling and savoring the air. But it was antiseptic air, tangy with disinfectants, nothing more. A hospital, then?

We will test now, the voice said.

What do you mean?

Speak.

I can't speak.

Speak.

“Dammit, I can't speak!” he roared, then realized the words had been formed and thrust forth, given birth by vocal cords and tongue and lips and teeth. It seemed, almost, like a miracle.

That is enough, the voice-tape said.

“Where am I? What has been done to me?” He hissed it out in such a tense, shallow whisper that it almost seemed as if he had communicated the thought without using has new-found voice.

The voice…

“This isn't my voice,” he said. The tone was too high, not at all the deep and manly baritone he was accustomed to hear issuing from his own throat.

It is your voice.

“No. I—”

Wait. If it isn't your voice, who are you, and what should your voice sound like?

He realized, with horror, that he not only didn't know who or what had him and where they or them were keeping him, but he was equally ignorant of his own identity. Meekly, he asked, “Who am I?”

I will restore the majority of your memory banks shortly. The nerves to them had been momentarily disconnected. Patience. Wait.

“But—”

The tests come first. After the tests, you will know.

He obliged its requests to move feet, hands, arms. It released his hands and legs of the straps, but only one at a time, so there was no possibility of him jumping and running. Which was unlikely, he thought, considering he was blind and nearly mindless in a world he didn't know. His olfactory nerves were tested with a long series of odors he often did not recognize — not because he couldn't smell them, but because they were not the spices commonly used by citizens of — Of what? He forgot.

Now, a short sleep — the voice-tape began.

“My memory!” he shouted.

But then there was sleep…

Yellow…

What is the color? he was asked.

“Yellow.”

This one?

There was nothing before his eyes, in any direction, but shimmering blue the color of an Earth sky. He named the hue for the machine.

This?

“Purple.”

Is this second blue closer to the shade you have called purple than the first blue — this blue — you saw a moment ago?

He went through the routine for five minutes, growing impatient. But he was afraid to speak for fear he would be punished by further sleep before he learned the answers to the questions that plagued him. When he was finished, the couch settled into a horizontal position, and dozens of instruments of a surgical nature began working about his head. He could feel the brush of them against his skin now and again, though he could not guess what they were doing and could feel no pain. Then, abruptly, he knew who he was and that he had, in the last moments before he had awakened here, been lying in the snow at the base of Tooth Mountain, dying. He had died. He distinctly remembered the passing from the sleep-darkness to that other shade of black, the energiless and eternal night that had been beyond the power of words to describe. He tried to sit up, was held down by the straps.

Wait.

He waited. He had a fairly good idea where he was now. There had been a fortress after all. And Leah had gotten him into it. And if he had not died until she had him within the receival tray of a fullsize robo-doc there was a chance the machine had been able to hypo adrenalin into him to get his heart functioning, while it had fed him bottles of blood plasma from a needle.

Yet that did not explain some of the strange sensations that he had been through. He still felt as if he were Stauffer Davis — and someone else, as if he were not wholly himself.

There was sleep yet again.

And when he woke, he was sitting up, still strapped in the form-changing couch, looking straight into the eyes of a Demosian man, when there never should have been such a creature there. The Demosian men were nonexistent now, destroyed by the war and the sterilizing mustard gas. There were only women remaining, as Matron Salsbury had so pointedly assured him when he had tried to find out where Leah's husband was,

He opened his mouth to ask how the Demosian came to be there — and the mouth of the alien opened at the same moment. For the first time, Davis realized he was looking into a mirror placed directly opposite him and that the slight, handsome Demosian with the wings folded down the middle of his back was him!

The mirror rose into the ceiling, and Leah was standing behind it, on the platform of the surgical robot, looking worriedly down at him. As the straps let him go, she asked, “It was all right, what I did?'

He was dazed, unable to understand what had happened to him.

“You were dead. You were dead shortly after I found the entrance and dragged you back and inside. Half an hour after you were dead, I got you into the machine. I didn't think anything could be done then. But what brain cells had deteriorated, the machine rebuilt.”

“I'm not a man any more,” he said.

“You're a Demosian, yes. The genetic chambers were prepared to deliver a perfectly structure male Demosian for the implantation of your own brain tissue. That was the problem with the Artificial Wombs: they could turn out grown Demosians, male or female, but not with brains that could learn more than enough to understand the basics of even self-care. Morons. If the project couldn't solve the problem, they were prepared to transplant the brains of our own people — after they were killed by the Conquerors — into new shells, keep using the same warriors over and over. It was also possible to take the brain of a captured Conqueror, wash it clean, implant it in a Demosian form. The resultant hybrid was a… a zombie, a servant for menial tasks that would free good men to fight. If I was to save you, I had to make your body the body of a winged man.”

“But the Demosian machine — your machine — spoke to me in English.”

“It had to be programmed with the Alliance dominant tongues as well as Demosian languages, for it had to be able to communicate with a Conqueror prisoner in order to obtain information and to brainwash him.”

“How long?”

“Three weeks.”

He looked startled.

“It has been lonely,” she said.

“No one…?”

“The search has been given up. The fortress can tap their public communications, so I've followed it all in detail. We were killed, they have announced, in the firestorm.”

He burst out laughing, and realized that she had been, even tenser than he when she smiled uncertainly at him. He leaped up, grabbed her, hugged her to him. She no longer seemed quite so tiny, quite so elfin. But, through the perceptions of the Demosian body, she was a hundred times more alluring than she had seemed before. He realized that this was simply because the tactile, visual, auditory receptors of the Demosian body, the nerve clusters that gathered these sensations, were far more sensitive and refined than the like nerves of the grosser human form. But he also liked to think that she was more radiant, also, because they were now separated by fewer differences than ever, were joined by a likeness of flesh that would make physical and emotional intimacy so much deeper and more meaningful.

“You're not mad, then?” she asked.

“Of course not!”

“I'm glad. I've been worried all these days I've waited for the machine to finish its chores with you.”

“Now,” he said, feeling the joy of life bounding in him like the stimulating fingers of some booster drug, “we are not only free and unhunted, but we have the fortress with which to work and plan; we don't have to be barbarians, living without conveniences and without hope. There's so much to study and accomplish that it's hard to know where to start.”

“How about going flying with me for beginners?” she asked.

It took him a moment to realize that she meant flying and was not using a euphemism for lovemaking. He stood, mouth open, and looked down to his now small feet, up his powerful but thin legs, at a body that had been constructed for travel through the air. Carefully, he unfolded his great, blue wings behind him…