Echoes of the Well of Souls

Erdom

At first there had been the dizzying sensation of falling nearly identical to that first hex gate that had brought them all to this strange new world, but then the sensation had abruptly ceased and she had fallen into the deepest sleep she had ever known.

Doctor Lori Ann Sutton awoke feeling groggy, hung over, and a little sick to the stomach, lying on what felt like a bed of warm sand.

She opened her eyes and looked around and saw that it was a bed of warm sand. At least it was sand, and there was an awful lot of it under a mean hot sun that was still low on the horizon. Or was it going down? Who could tell?

She sat up, scratched where the sand had pressed against her side, and immediately felt a terrible sense of wrongness. The whole scene—sand, sky, sun—had all the colors she expected, but there seemed to be even more. She could actually see the heat, and there were darker areas as well.

I’m seeing into the infrared spectrum!she thought won-deringly. And maybe beyond. Maybe, just maybe, in both directions. The entire spectrum?

Suddenly she remembered everything. The gate, the lecture by the polka-dotted dragon, Alama’s—no, Mavra’s words—and something about becoming some different creature.

She looked down at herself and saw that she was a very different creature, indeed. Her arms were long but very thin and ended in a huge pair of hands that were not human. They had only three fingers, long and thick, and an oppos-able thumb almost as long as the index finger and thicker than any of the others. The nails were huge and thick as well and seemed to run from halfway past the knuckle to beyond the tip. Put together in a relaxed way, they formed almost, well, a kind of supple, softer hoof, the palms fairly hard and thick and a pale brownish color.

Her feet were the same, only the hoof was cloven and seemed oddly shaped on the bottom, something like a horse’s hoof crossed with the foot of a camel.

She was covered in a thick, hidelike skin that was itself almost covered by very short, thick, pastel beige hair that flared out at the ankles and wrists. But that wasn’t the worst of it or the biggest shock.

Between her legs, emerging from a mass of thick, medium-brown pubic hair, was the biggest set of male genitalia she had ever seen, very dark brown in color and with a leatherlike texture.

She touched it and gave a slight gasp and then just stared down at it for quite some time.

My God! I’m a man!she thought, getting a queasy feeling in her stomach echoed by a strange but not altogether pleasant sensation in the genitals.

It was an oddball fantasy come to life, one she had played with in the past, mostly out of the frustration of having to compete at the top levels of her profession with men and wanting the same power and position they took for granted. But it was only a fantasy, not a serious wish. The reality of the change shook her.

And after all that time with the all-female tribe of the People, she felt an odd sense of aversion. I’m going to miss my breasts! she thought, trying to get a handle on things.

Finally she managed to overcome the tremendous shock to consider the next question. She was male. But a male what! What was beige and hairy and had big hooves and arms apparently evolved from a set of more equinelike forelegs?

The body was very slender and surprisingly supple. The body was a nearly perfect blend of equine and human, strange, yet somehow she thought of the term “erotic” to cover it. Hah! If only Jeff could see me now, with this body and this big a sausage! Of course, he wouldn’t exactly be turned on by the idea, but it would be awfully nice to use these hard hands to slug him.

God! I’m a guy for all of three minutes and already I’m thinking like one! she admonished herself.

The fact was, mentally, where it counted, she was still the same person. Nothing had been changed that she could tell, no knowledge or memories lost, no feelings all that different. But it was as if her mind were now in another’s body, someone whose differences went beyond just gender— way beyond.

While there seemed very little sensation in the rather large feet, the palms proved to have a lot of nerve sensors, and she could get a surprisingly good “feel,” as good as or better than her old hands. I’llnever touch-type again, though, she thought inanely. Not with two fewer fingers, even though the size of the hands and the length of the fingers gave her, if anything, more control.

She still thought of herself as a “she,” and she knew that she probably would have to make a major mental adjustment on that score. Nobody in this new place would know that she’d been a woman most of her life; they’d see her in this man’s body instead.

She felt her face. It seemed human enough—mouth, even with what seemed to be thicker lips and maybe a longer, slightly thicker tongue, but her jaw moved side to side as well as up and down, and the teeth indicated that whatever these people were, they were omnivores, not herbivores as she would have expected. The canines, in fact, seemed a bit larger and sharper than they used to be—and no caps, no missing back tooth!

She had always been farsighted, which was the reason she had been able to survive among the People without her glasses, but vision now seemed perfect, with every little hair easy to pick out even very close up. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen this clearly at all distances.

Nose… Well, human, sort of, but there was something odd inside the nostrils, controlled by voluntary muscles. She flexed them and suddenly found her breathing cut off. She relaxed them again very quickly. Protection against blowing sand, perhaps? The eyes felt a little funny, too. She concentrated and found that she had double eyelids that could be independently controlled if she concentrated or would operate as one if she didn’t. The outer lids were essentially what she thought of as “normal”; the inner ones, however, were transparent. They distorted her vision and in fact seemed to filter color so that the world became a study in contrasting grays, but she could see through them.

The ears were definitely not “normal.” They went more back than up and were protected by large pointed lobes, more like a horse’s ears or some similar animal’s. They could, she discovered, be somewhat rotated, raised, or lowered, even independently of one another. There was a shock of bushy hair atop the head, but it didn’t seem to grow long down the back. With some trepidation she pulled one and looked at it. It appeared nearly snow white in color and very long and thick.

Lori had a sudden thought and reached around to her behind. There appeared to be a bit of excess hair at the base of the spine but not the tail she almost expected to find. In a way it was kind of disappointing. She’d always wondered what it would feel like to have a tail.

She looked around, trying to figure out how to get up. Equinelike or not, this wasn’t the body of a four-footed animal, no matter what its ancestors might have been like. It wasn’t as easy as getting up in a human body, it seemed, but she figured it out with a little experimentation. She turned over and used the hands as forefeet and then pushed off, letting her back muscles lift her upright. The true feet were clearly designed for sand; she found no problems with footing at all.

She looked around, wondering where the hell she might go. In doing so, she saw her shadow, and it made an amazing vision to her eyes even though, with the sun not so high, it was distorted and lengthened. Curiously, though, it was only by seeing that shadow that she noticed the horn.

Her hand went up to the top of her head and found it easily, almost centered up there. A twisting, rock-hard spiral going up, not quite straight, to a very wicked point. Although it was hard and almost half a meter long, she had no sensation of it being there at all, not even weight or balance on the head.

A male bipedal unicorn? she wondered to herself. Why would any evolving race keep a horn like that?

For now she could only guess. A weapon perhaps, considering the thinness and fragility of the arms? Or… She had an awful thought it might be used in some way involving mating no matter how conventional it seemed.

All right, Lori, you know the basics about what they’ve stuck you with; now what?

Again she scanned the horizon, and this time a curious effect happened. When she concentrated on any far point, it was as if her vision suddenly became telescopic. She could bring her view of the horizon closer, much closer, seeing detail at very great distances indeed. Although there was about a half second’s disorientation when she switched her focus to something more close up, the effect was the neatest thing about this body she’d discovered.

But what good was it to be able to zero in on the distant horizon if there was nothing but sand to be seen?

“Get to a zone gate and tell me where and what you are,”Mavra had said, but how could she do that when there seemed nowhere to go to get anywhere!

Lori continued the horizon pan, stopping and magnifying, trying to see anything. What good was all this if she was going to be stuck, alone and without food or water, in this desert?

She suddenly stopped and zeroed in on a tiny black speck far, far away. She would never even have noticed it without this perfect vision, and she would certainly have never been able to tell that it was more than a dune shadow without the remarkable telescopic abilities. Even with them it was barely discernible, but it seemed to be a dark area of some kind protruding from the desert floor. Rocks? It didn’t seem likely.

Trees! An oasis!

The sun was definitely climbing, and the day was heating up fast. Now was the time to make for any possible haven, and second-guessing was a luxury that she could not afford.

She started off toward the black dot and began to improve on her walking and balancing abilities with almost every step. She did not walk with those feet; she sort of trotted or even galloped, kicking up sand but making very good speed. She also learned rather quickly and a bit painfully that when moving fast, she had to lean a bit forward and keep the hips wide, otherwise that thing down there flapping away would get crunched between the upper calves.

It was getting progressively hotter, and she could actually see the heat both as it came down upon her and as it was first trapped and then radiated back by her body. She wondered just how hot to the touch she was right now.

She began to have trouble seeing. The heat radiation was coloring everything and distorting her sight. It suddenly occurred to her that there was more than one use for those inner lids, and she closed them. Virtually all colors snapped out and the world became a mass of infinite grays, yet the black dots that hadn’t seemed to grow any closer no matter what speed she was making now began to resolve themselves a bit more clearly and did in fact seem to be getting ever so slightly larger.

It was an oasis! That might not mean people, but those were clearly trees of some kind, and trees needed water.

Or at least she hoped that trees here needed water.

She would have expected to become winded after a while and have to rest, particularly in the growing heat, but she found that running across the sands like this gave her a real rush; her chest apparently contained mostly lung, and it went in and out with each giant breath she took. But the rhythm of the breathing and the running was very easy to slip into, and even though it seemed like she’d been running for hours across many, many kilometers, she didn’t feel the least bit tired or winded.

She was definitely hungry and thirsty, though, which only gave her more impetus to reach her goal as quickly as physically possible.

Soon the oasis loomed before her, filling much of her vision, and it was enough of a dark mass that she lifted the inner lids to get the full detail.

The trees weren’t like any she’d ever seen before, but they had a tropical look, with thin and supple trunks rising to layers of oversized palm- or fernlike leaves.

She ran right through the first row and found the area larger than she had expected and the ground inside harder with much exposed white-veined gray rock that produced a “clopping” sound when her feet hit it. She slowed but found that she needed to go up to a tree and put a hand out to fully stop herself without falling over.

It was almost a letdown to stop running, but her chest continued to heave and she continued to gulp in air at the same rhythm until her breathing slowed to a more normal rate.

She looked around, and her ears automatically rotated about a hundred degrees on either side, checking for sounds. There wasn’t much except the rustling of some leaves in the highest part of the trees, apparently in reaction to a slight breeze that didn’t reach the ground.

Her nose, though, brought an overpowering aroma that she recognized immediately, even though she’d never smelled it before— water!

Finding it was as simple as following her nose.

She didn’t hesitate a moment worrying that it might not be good water. It wasn’t any new inner sense that told her anything about it but rather an all-consuming thirst that made it clear that the question was moot. She simply had to have water.

The water was in fact from a spring that bubbled out of the rocks and created an attractive, shaded pool about a dozen meters across. She headed for it, got on all fours, then dropped down and just stuck her face in it and began to suck and lap it in. Her natural nose plugs closed the instant her face hit the water, and she hardly noticed.

It was an eerie sensation, though, because she just drank and drank. She had never drunk this much of anything in her whole life, and long after a human her size would have been satisfied she continued to take it in. She could feel it, cooling down her whole body in stages, coiling around inside her like a living thing, and finally concentrating in her back. There was no telling how much she drank before, unable to take another gulp, she came up out of the water and settled back, lying there on her side. For several minutes she felt bloated but cool, and then, slowly, her body temperature seemed to come back to normal and that bloated feeling subsided.

She wondered where all the water had gone. She didn’t feel like she’d grown some sort of camel’s hump, nor did rolling on her back for a moment reveal one, but clearly this body had areas to store a lot of excess liquid. After a while she forced herself to get up, even though she actually felt sleepy. For one thing, the pool was not totally calm but it did reflect decently and she wanted to get a more complete image of herself. And then it would be prudent to look around. Although Lori the American college teacher wouldn’t have resisted, Bimi of the People knew that it wouldn’t do to just zonk out without checking the lay of the land.

The image of herself in the gently rippling water was both strange and familiar. She’d always had something of a long neck, and she still did; the face, although the same beige or light tan color, contained enough of the old Lori Sutton to be recognizable, although it had a harder, larger, rougher cast. It was, she realized, what her face would have looked like had she been born a man. She’d always had that boyish look to her face, and now it seemed to have firmed up and looked not nearly as bad to her as it had all those times in the mirror.

The lips were thicker by quite a bit and were a dark brown, the nose was a bit larger, the eyes were dark black blobs against a medium brown field, the ears were very equine and larger than she’d thought, and the eyebrows were thick and snow white and rose on either side of the eyes at a slight angle, giving her a slightly exotic look. The big shock of white hair was actually kind of cute. The horn, the same color brown as the skin fur, looked, well, different from what she had imagined. That’s one hell of a phallic symbol, she thought. Jeez! As weird as this body is, it sure would have turned me on!

She tore herself reluctantly away from the self-examination and got up and looked around the rest of the oasis. It was, thankfully, deserted. Not that she wanted to hide out forever, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for others of this kind yet, particularly not as a man.

This was clearly a popular stop. In the sandy soil were traces of great numbers of people—beings like herself, anyway—having moved through here, and probably not long ago, since clearly the winds came through this place and erased many signs as if they’d never been. There was also signs of some sort of civilized behavior as well—holes which clearly were some kind of tent pole supports, a central fire pit with more support holes that might indicate anything from a rotisserie to grates being placed there, and a veritable waste pile of damaged and broken crockery, much of it of fired clay and some of it inlaid with elaborate designs.

The designs were very interesting, since among the more abstract parts were some scenes of what might have been life in this place. The style was almost reminiscent of ancient Egyptian, all in profile and two very flat dimensions yet finely featured. She couldn’t be sure if these were domestic or religious scenes, but a lot could be learned from them.

For one thing, they went in for decoration more than clothes, and that was instructive—not that clothes made a lot of sense out here with this kind of body. Either these beings came in a rainbow of colors or dyed fur in different colors and patterns was popular. So was decorating the horns, some of which were depicted as impossibly long. There was also a fair amount of jewelry on the males and what appeared to be serapelike capes with intricate designs worn over the head but extending down only chest-high and, on some but not all, a kind of highly decorated but very brief codpiece. Males didn’t seem to grow facial hair, but the big clump of hair on top tapered down the back until it vanished completely about three-quarters of the way down in a manelike appearance.

The females were quite different. First, they were all depicted as at least a head shorter than any of the males, although that might be just the male artist’s perspective. They had very soft feminine faces and no horn at all, but they had a huge amount of hair that trailed down their backs.

They also had tails, much like horses’ tails, that were almost mirror images of their hair and seemed to be deliberately styled to be that way and kept up with some kind of stays. They were not brown-furred but rather a soft, pale yellow, and their body hair and tails were a variety of browns, reds, even blonds, as well as black. How much was artificial and how much was “natural” color couldn’t be determined.

They also had two pairs of breasts, one atop the other. It was a very strange sight, but with the erotic equine curves of the body it didn’t look wrong, either. That got Lori to examining her own chest, where, after some effort even with the short hair, she did indeed locate four small nipples.

Did they have that many kids that they needed all that excess capacity? Or did they have a lot of kids and only a few made it past weaning? No, probably not. They didn’t seem big enough to carry more than one or two routinely, any more than human women did. The breasts, which seemed almost “humanlike,” had some of the short pale yellow fur about two-thirds of the way to the nipples but were otherwise all a very light brown.

Some of the decorations simply depicted scenes from some kind of tribal life: guards flanking a particularly decorated male who wore a lot of gold and a bright scrape adorned with a sash, females preparing food in fire pits. The males carried spears, and some seemed to be wearing swords—there was one scene of two males dueling, possibly in sport, the swords thin and rapierlike, with hilts somewhat reminiscent of their horns. There were also scenes that were blatantly erotic, often two or more females with one male, and the sexual attributes depicted made her own rather large endowment seem downright trivial.

Still, aside from the alienness of the people depicted, the scenes for the most part looked right out of some ancient Near Eastern Earth culture. A tribal, nomadic people, but with a sense of art and, from the odd-looking bands around some of the broken pottery, with a form of writing as well.

She was about to abandon her look through the remnants when a large fragment caught her eye and she reached down, picked it up, and frowned. It gave her a sudden chill to look at the scene, the first one she really didn’t like at all.

Their tents, crockery, ornamental stuff, all their goods moved on what seemed to be sledlike devices made to slide through the sand. Several had been depicted open or parked in other scenes, but this scene was of some in motion. She wondered why she hadn’t seen any depictions of domesticated animals, and this was why.

The females were lined up on a series of wooden bars passed through a forward support, and teams of six to ten of them, depending on the size of the desert sled, were clearly pulling them while the males ran with their spears to either side.

The females were the draft animals.

In fact, suddenly flashing back through the other scenes, she realized that whenever work was depicted, it was the females who were doing it. The males might fence or look magnificent or whatever, but never were they shown actually doing anything, except in the erotic ones, of course, when they were doing what men always liked to do.

She felt outraged by the sight as all her old principles came to the fore, and yet she found herself thinking, Thank God I’m not a woman here!

She was ashamed of the thought, yet damn it, the idea of being one of the bosses rather than one of the servants was something of a turn-on. She hated herself for feeling that, too, and tried to get some self-control back. She didn’t know what it was to be as oppressed as these women obviously were, but she knew what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world, and she hoped she wouldn’t descend to that level even if she had to adjust to this society.

She tossed the shard back in the pile, and it landed with a crash and cracked again.

This was too much to handle, coming all at once, she thought. It made the kidnapping and subsequent life among the People seem almost ordinary by comparison. Still, Alam—Mavra—had been right. Without that first experience, she wasn’t sure if she could have handled this one at all.

She looked around, but there was clearly nothing to eat here. There did seem to be some kind of round, green fruit way up atop the trees, but even if it were edible and ripe enough to eat, this body was good for a lot of things, but tree climbing wasn’t one of them. Filled with water, though, she was in no immediate danger of anything more than a growling stomach. She would pick a spot in the shade with some promise of concealment just in case and get the badly needed rest. Then she could think of what to do next.

It was a weird dream, mixing living scenes from the discarded pottery and the race that lived here with scenes of the Amazon and of the university, and at one point she was saying to her department head, “Now that I’m a man, Dr. Avery, you can’t deny me the Holburn Chair and the professorship that goes with it.”

The smell of odd spices and perfumes and the tinkling of bells brought her back to consciousness, but it wasn’t until the sudden thought that she was no longer alone that she stiffened, rolled over, and tensely peered out from the rocks and bushes toward the pool.

It wasn’t a big caravan like those depicted on the shards but, rather, a small party, no more than eight or nine people from the look of it, and one of those sleighlike wagons. Most, maybe all, were females, except for one big fellow reclining on a cushion. He looked, well, old—not really old but well into middle age from the cast and lines in his face and the wear and tear on his skin. He wore a somewhat faded and threadbare scrape of faded red that had an even more faded yellow design too shopworn to matter and one of those codpieces that might at one time have been silvery but now just looked a dirty gray. His horn, either shorter than hers or worn down over time, was wrapped in a kind of turbanlike affair that made it appear that he was wearing a cream-colored pointed hat. Everything about him, from his overall look and manner to the faded remnants of once colorfully decorated skin, looked a bit old and a bit seedy.

So did the sleigh. Clearly it had seen a lot of use in its time and hadn’t been cared for very well of late, but, like its owner, it was serviceable.

Watching the females, seeing them in person for the first time, was an odd experience. All were considerably smaller than either the old man or Lori, and the double pair of breasts on them all seemed quite a bit larger than in the pictures. The hair and the tails were nicely done up so that they were pretty well mirror images of one another, and the effect was quite nice indeed to look at. They all seemed to have a naturally feminine, sexy manner to them, and they would talk or whisper to one another, ears turning and twitching, and occasionally giggle like schoolgirls. Most wore some sort of jewelry—bracelets, necklaces—but little else, although the one at the fire pit had on a thick scrape much longer than the male’s, apparently not a garment but rather protection against heat. There was also something odd about their hands, but she couldn’t make out what it might be.

She wondered just what the hell she should do now. Here was contact, and on a scale she might handle, but damn it, it was scary to be in this situation. Finally realizing that there was nothing else to do, Lori hauled herself onto the top of the rock, assuming a sitting position, and coughed politely.

The effect on the females was startling. They froze like deer in the meadow might have frozen at the first sense of danger. The male moved pretty quickly, though, whirling, grabbing a sword, and actually getting to his feet in a single series of motions.

“Who be you?” the old man called out menacingly in a low voice.

“Please, good sir, put down your sword,” Lori responded, startled at how very, very deep her voice sounded to her ears but also relieved that language, at least, wasn’t going to be a problem. “I sit here with nothing, not even clothes, let alone a weapon.”

“Where’d ye come from?” the old man asked suspiciously, sword still in hand.

“I was already here,” Lori explained. “I—I woke up in the sands near here as I am now.”

“Yesss…? And who dumped ye there, and why?”

“I—I don’t know if this is going to sound crazy to you or not, but I was a different sort of—creature—from another world. I came through what I was told is a hex gate to a place called Zone, and then they forced me through another gate, and I woke up as you see me.”

The old man sniffed, frowned, then put his sword away. “Not another one!” he said in disbelief. “Not in my lifetime, or my father’s, or his father’s lifetime has anyone come though there and been dumped here. Now suddenly yer fallin’ from the skies!”

Lori’s heart skipped a beat. “Another one, you say? You mean I’m not the first?”

“Not if yer what you says you are, anyways. Other was a girl, over in the Hajeb, a couple months ago maybe. Least, that’s what I heard.”

She shook her head. “That means nothing to me. I’m afraid I don’t even know where I am, or what I am, for that matter.” She was disappointed at the time frame. It meant that whoever the girl was, she was from one of the other parties—most likely the woman in the wheelchair, since that was the only female she recalled among the pictures shown to them back in Zone.

The old man chuckled. “Well, sonny, this land be Erdom, in the bottom of the World, and we all be Erdomites first. I be Posiphar of the Makob, a traveling merchant by trade. I buy and sell things, services, whatever be needed between the families and tribes of the Hjolai. I be on me route from oasis to oasis right now, headin’ next fer the camp of Lord Aswab.”

“The names mean nothing to me yet. I’m sorry,” she told him. Guessing that the man’s odd manner of speech was either a regional dialect or just the mark of a less than educated man, she made no attempt to duplicate it. “Uh, I’d like to come down, but I’m not really dressed fit for mixed company, I’m afraid.”

Posiphar chuckled again. “Don’t worry none ‘bout the girls. Ye ain’t got nothin’ they ain’t seen many times afore, I promise ye. Come, come, let me get a look at ye!”

She got down slowly and carefully. Although the body seemed easier to use, more familiar now, she wasn’t about to take any chances with it. She then walked over to him, trying to be as natural as possible.

“Heh! Ye walk like some girl,” the old man commented. “Well, ain’t no nevermind of mine. Yer a big fella, though, I got to say.”

Until now she really hadn’t had anything for comparison, but it was clear that things were pretty much of a human-sized scale, and now, standing in front of the merchant, she found that as he was a head taller than the tallest woman in his party, she was almost that much bigger and taller than he was. Although she’d been by no means short, it was a novel experience to be the biggest and tallest of a group, and she found she liked the sensation.

“Well, son,” the merchant said at last, “maybe ye and me can make a deal here. Ye needs a bit of educatin’ on Erdom, I think.”

“Not to mention food, clothes, and money,” she added.

“Yeah, well, that goes without sayin’, I suppose. As ye might have figured, I ain’t exactly drippin’ with gold and silver and precious gems, but I makes do, I does. Been some banditry about of late—ain’t like the old times, I tell ye. I ain’t no slouch in a fight, but I be gettin’ on and slowed down in spite of meself, and with nobody coverin’ me back, I ain’t been feelin’ too safe of late. Don’t suppose ye be any good with a sword?”

She looked at the sword he’d put down by his side. It wasn’t like a broadsword; in fact, it was more like a saber than anything else. She wasn’t great with a sword, but she’d almost made the fencing team her undergraduate senior year. “I can use one of those if I had to,” she told him. “I might be off balance with it, though. I’m still getting used to this body. But I’m even better with a spear,” she added.

“Hmph! What were ye before? Some kinda hard-shelled twelve-armed insect or somethin’?”

She laughed. “No, nothing like that. In some ways not an extremely different sort than this, but far enough. More— apelike. You know what an ape is?”

“Sure I do! Seen some over in the port cities now and again. See most anything in this world at them docks. Where’d you think I seen them insect things?”

She was startled. “You mean there actually are creatures like that here? Man-sized insects that—think?”

“Sure. You got a whole lot t’ learn, sonny. Um, what is yer name, anyways? One of them impossible-to-say words?”

“Uh, well, it’s Lori. It was, anyway.”

“That’s a good enough nonsense word to serve,” Posiphar responded. “Here ye be linked with yer family and tribal place name. Since ye ain’t got no family or no tribe here, a place name’ll do. It’ll drive everybody else nuts tryin’ to figure out how ye got it, too. How’s Lori of Alkhaz sound as a name?”

“Uh, all right, I guess, but who, what, or where is Alkhaz?”

“Why, this is Alkhaz, of course! Just a transit oasis, not nobody’s in particular. That’s ‘cause the water’s decent here only part of the year. The rest of the time it’s either too muddy or too alkaline for most folks’ tastes. There’s always another that opens up, so it’s no big thing.”

“I’ll accept it, then,” she told him. “And Erdom? Is all of it like this? Desert?”

“Well, a whole lot of it is, anyways. All except right on the coast. A few nice little cities there get some rain and have some hills with trees that keep the rain there to use. Got a decent-sized seacoast, but we’re right smack up against that Zone wall, so the only place where everything piles up is in the southeast, where Erdom and the wall come together. Sand and stuff gets built up by the sea breezes there, and they get a decent amount of weather. Rest of the place, well, the rains just sink into the sands and get swallowed up, and these here underground rivers are the only water.”

“And so it’s just the coast and the rest is like this?”

“Well, there’s some towns around inside, where you got really good springs, of course. Otherwise you couldn’t do the Pilgrimage of the Seven Springs. Got some deep mines over in Jwoba. Them’s gold mines. And Awokabi has the diamonds and so on. Don’t like ‘em much, though. Dirty, smelly, sad little towns where most folks work for nothin’ but food and water and the lords live fat. I like the Hjolai better. Folks be friendly if ye don’t overstay yer welcome, and they knows ye won’t cheat ‘em much, and there still be some honor.”

She looked out at the desert. “How many people live out here, though? What do they live on?”

“Oh, the whole be divided into Holdings, we calls ‘em, each with a pretty fair-sized oasis able to support some number of herd animals and even some farmin’ of a limited type. Each is a hereditary family Holding headed by a lord, and the folks there pretty much work fer him. He in return gives ‘em protection and security. It ain’t a bad system. Hell, half the year the lord’s movin’ ‘round his Holding from oasis to oasis, listenin’ t’ gripes, fixin’ problems. They still think things go both ways out here. The people work for the lord, and the lord tries to help the people with their problems and make life better for ‘em. Most do all right. You gets a bad one now and again, o’ course—stands to reason—but he don’t last long. Most of ‘em, even the best, get knocked off sooner or later by one of their relatives anyways, and if you got the people cheerin’ for it, well, that lord lasts all the shorter, see?”

Lori nodded, but she wasn’t all that thrilled by the system. It sounded like something out of Arabia and a past age of Earth—monarchical tribal families, inheritance by assassination, feudalism. She wasn’t all that sure how much she was going to like this.

“But you’re not working for a lord,” she noted. “Or are you?”

“Haw! Not likely! There be some of us around, kind of like a brotherhood. See, them lords need us, ‘cause they don’t get along with one another nohow, and we be the only ones can walk and talk between with nobody figurin’ we like one side better’n the other. So if one wants t’ send a message to the other, they use traders like me. If their breedin’ stock’s thin and needs freshening, they won’t sell to nobody they won’t even talk to, so they sell to me for a promise that I’ll bring ‘em back what they need. I takes the stock, trades it to another, then bring the trade back, and that settles that. Of course there’s a fee, but we haggles fer it. I been around so long ‘cause I always gives ‘em a good deal. ‘Course, you don’t live as well or as rich as if you try’n jerks ‘em around a bit, but ye keeps yer balls that way. Them lords got a real mean streak if they catch you!”

“I’ll bet,” Lori said glumly, having no trouble imagining Erdomite desert justice. “Uh, you mentioned some deal between us?”

“Sure. Kwaza! Bring me the serpent chest!” he called, and one of the women stopped what she was doing, went over to the sleigh, and started rummaging around. She finally found the chest and brought it over to them.

When she did, Lori could see what had been mystifying her about the females’ hands. They were more hooflike, the three fingers fused together and bending as one, with just enough indentation for flexibility, while the opposing thumb was even wider and broader than the males’ thumbs. The effect reminded her more of claws, but they were too soft and supple for that description to be accurate. It must be more like doing everything wearing mittens, she thought.

When the woman had gone back to her work, Lori asked in a low tone, “Are all females’ hands like that? No independent fingers?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. That’s ‘cause, when they’re well along carryin’ a baby, they got to pretty much walk on all fours and use their arms like the forelegs of an animal unless they be leanin’ on somethin’. Otherwise they couldn’t get around at all for them last two months or so. If the fingers could spread like a man’s, you’d never be able t’ do it. It’d tear yer fingers right off after a while. Don’t believe me, try it sometimes.”

“Hmph! Seems too bad, though. It sure limits what they can do.”

“Not as much as ye think,” Posiphar replied. “There’s an old sayin’, of course, that if women had fingers they’d be dangerous, but actually they got a little over us. You’n me, we get a bad break in the leg, don’t heal, and we’re crippled and in pain fer life, hobblin’ around and no good to nobody. They lose a leg, they can still get around, do most of what they could before. No, the Creator put a lot of thought into us. I seen some races down at the port, they got these big boobs or udders, and fer what? To feed the young for a few months after havin’ kids. And how many kids do most women have, anyways? So they carry them things for life and use ‘em hardly a’tall. Erdomite women, now, when they ain’t sucklin’, they stores water in them. Ye, me, full of water here, couldn’t last more’n eight days without a drink. Women—up to three weeks, and it’s available not only to them from the inside but to anybody else what needs it from the outside. Now, that’s useful!”

She didn’t bother to bring up the fact that there were other, purely pleasurable uses for breasts, but she conceded him his point. Each gender had its strengths and weaknesses for this harsh society and environment, but it was pretty clear that the men were, in every sense of the word, on top here.

The chest, with an exotic winged serpentlike creature carved into it, proved to have various articles of male adornment. Only one of the dozens of codpieces was big enough to fit, and it was a plain, worn black color, but somehow, although it was decidedly uncomfortable and not at all useful for concealment or protection, it made her feel dressed for polite company. She passed on anything else, though, figuring, as it turned out correctly, that anything she might choose to use would be charged to her account. While she had no objection to providing the old trader with some extra protection, she also had no intention of getting so into debt to him that he’d virtually own her.

The food was very spicy and very good, and Lori realized with a start that it had been a very long time since she’d eaten, let alone had a decently cooked meal. The meat seemed similar to lamb but was too salty to tell more, and it was cooked in a large woklike pan together with some kind of very long ricelike grain and a number of green and red vegetables at least one of which was some kind of hot pepper. Out here the drink was water, period.

With more conversation both that night and the next day setting out across the desert, she learned much more about this strange place and its dominant race.

Women were definitely at the very low end of the scale here, as she’d surmised, bound there by religion, tradition, and some definitely chauvinistic attitudes among the males.

Because they were smaller and therefore had smaller brains, Posiphar told her, women were not as intelligent as men and had shorter attention spans, so any education and position was reserved for the males. It was considered a logical as well as practical division, not the least of reasons for this being that females outnumbered males roughly three to one, not only in live births but because they tended to live longer. Because of this, too, polygamy was the norm, although many men had only one wife and some of the richer males had whole harems. The rule was that one could have as many wives as one could support. There was also a law that said if one could no longer support them, one had to find new husbands for them that could.

She was relieved to learn that one of her fears, at least, was unfounded. They did not buy and sell women, or anybody else, either, although the women, without any practical rights at all, were pretty much at the mercy of the exclusively male-dominated system. “Love matches” were simply beyond their comprehension; one married for political reasons, for social reasons, for a dowry, or sometimes because one liked their features and thought that the combination would produce superior children.

Infant mortality was horrendous in the cities and working towns but surprisingly low in the desert and oasis communities. Communicable diseases were rare; the way heat was handled and exchanged in the bodies produced regular temperatures for short periods almost every day that killed ninety-five percent of any viruses or bacteria that might lurk inside. In the cities and working towns it was often the living conditions and other environmental factors that killed the young.

There was almost no chance at social mobility for either men or women, though. Maybe one step up or down, but no more than that. Certain physical features and colorations were unique to certain classes and made it difficult to pass as another in any event. Although it would be a while before she could recognize those differences, Posiphar told her that her body marked her as pretty well in the middle of the scale, suitable for a soldier or merchant or craftsman, but she had no characteristics of the nobility at all.

Erdom itself was, like all hexes, six-sided, but because it abutted the South Zone wall, an impenetrable barrier, its six sides formed a wing shape with a long flat along the ocean to the east rather than a hexagon.

Initially, a newcomer would simply “appear” almost anywhere in a given hex, but once there, the gates were the only way to and from Zone. The gate for Erdom was located near the wall in the far southeast corner, outside the large port city-state of Aqomb, where sat the Sultan of Erdom. The Sultan, in fact, had little practical authority outside his city but was the titular ruler of the entire hex, and, as such, Aqomb was considered the temporal and spiritual capital of Erdom.

Law in Erdom was entirely religious law, not only out of conviction but also out of necessity—the religion and its laws were the only true unifying elements in the primitive “nation” and served as a guarantee of uniformity of social rules and taboos across the hex. A priesthood of monks, all voluntarily castrated and living a totally religious and mostly cloistered life, ran the temples and spent most of the time praying to a series of cosmic gods that looked like some kind of giant six-armed octopuses out of a nightmare. The damper was put on social mobility and even male-female treatment by a strong belief in reincarnation, in which all Erdomites spent endless cycles of death and rebirth in attempts to raise themselves up to the level of their gods. Each soul was born as a lower-class female first, and only a perfect life would result in rebirth as a lower-class male. From that point a soul went up or down the social scale depending on how its life went, first female and then male until it reached the top of male nobility, after which came divination as a monk and, finally, godhood.

The fact that the vast majority of the population were lower-class females was taken as a sign that not too many made it. It was also a rationalization for the whole sociopolitical structure and the treatment of both males and females within each level of the system. It also meant that complainers, chronic troublemakers, and potential enemies could be executed with a clear conscience, since they’d be reborn anyway.

In fact, maiming was considered a far greater punishment, since it meant suffering with the result of transgression instead of having a new chance at a full life. About the only thing one so maimed could become would be a bandit if physically able or a crippled beggar if not. Only males faced maiming; females who ran afoul of religious law were always beheaded.

It was not, however, a strict society overall if one just played the game. Punishment came from rocking the boat; so long as one paid lip service to the system and behaved, it was actually pretty relaxed. It was also pretty dull, which was why the men indulged in a lot of macho posturing, dangerous sports, and even duels.

Lori did wonder about the women. They all looked strong and did much of the drudge work yet were seemingly always cheerful; the talk around the wells and camp site sounded pretty dumb and vapid, and there was never the slightest sign she could find of disobedience or rebellion. Almost without exception, they really did seem as dumb as a box of rocks.

As the days passed, Lori no longer felt any physical strangeness either with her own body or in seeing other Erdomites. In fact, being a member of this race was now so natural for her that even in her dreams of Earth and her previous existence all the people looked like Erdomites. Still, there were problems.

As an astronomer she’d been thrilled and awed by the night sky; the Well World seemed to be in the middle of a globular cluster. But there was nothing familiar to her up there, and even the names meant little. And of course there was the additional restriction of being in a highly limited nontech hex where science was on a rather low level, ignorance even among the educated was fairly high, and much of what she always had taken for granted—great telescopes, computers, and all the rest—simply wouldn’t work. Worse, one good solid look at the written language of Erdom showed that it was pictographic, like Chinese, and not the sort of thing learned easily or quickly. Even though she still could read and write in her Earth languages, they were of little use here except to make memos to herself. In this element she was stripped of her profession and lifelong passion, denied a chance at it again or anything like it, and essentially illiterate—just like much of the population. Education was in the hands of a few teaching monks, and even if she could get into that highest caste, which she could not, the price would be much too high for her even now.

The other problem, though, was her sense of identity. She felt like an Erdomite, true, but she still felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body. Although she was tempted to try out the opposite sexual role, the females just didn’t really appeal to her. The men of her age, on the other hand, seemed powerful, strong, and very, very erotic.

And it was tearing her up.

She liked being around them, liked playing around with them, too. Either her fencing was improving dramatically or most of them weren’t very good at it, because she rarely lost and then usually by not fully concentrating on the mock duel. In fact, by betting on such competitions, she’d actually accumulated some cash—gold and silver coins that were accepted hexwide—and bought her own used sword, hilt, and belt as well as a decent bow and a quiver of bronze-tipped arrows. While she wasn’t a real champion at the latter, she was getting very good at hitting what she aimed at.

The trouble was, she was enjoying being around the young men and sporting with them for all the wrong reasons, and she dared not let on what the real reasons were.

Being on the road with the merchant helped, though. It was tough to form too many attachments when she was three or four days in one place, another few days journeying across the desert, then another three or four days in a new town or camp. She had given up all thought of contacting Mavra by this point; it was far too late, even though such an expedition away from this place would be much to her liking and Mavra could probably use somebody Lori’s size.

Another thing was rubbing her wrong, too, although it was even harder to control. She was finding day by day that she was treating the females—both Posiphar’s two wives and four daughters and those she came in casual contact with—in the same callous manner as the other males. She was much too easily buying into that part of the system, one that went against her whole life and all her beliefs. She felt guilty as hell every time she did it—but always after she did it, and she didn’t stop because of it. It called her entire personal belief system into question. Deep down, had she really craved the absolute sexual equality she’d always thought she wanted, or had she instead subconsciously really just wanted a reversal of the system? If the latter, then she really hadn’t had any ideals, just rationalizations.

Things changed a little when they pulled into a small oasis town in the south. They really didn’t have any business to do there, but it was on the way from Point A to Point B and was a convenient stopover.

She wandered over to the ubiquitous social club all such places had, where the young men hung out between jobs and the transients could relax. It was much like an English pub in atmosphere, although Erdomite desert tribes considered alcohol and most stimulants and depressants stronger than coffee or tea to be evil and did not serve them.

The name always started the questions.

“Lori of Alkhaz. Odd name. Who are the Alkhaz, and where? Never heard of them.”

She’d explain that she was not a native and had come through the Well, and that would elicit what was now becoming a somewhat boring and repetitive set of explanations that nonetheless made the newcomer the center of attention for a while. This time, however, there was a difference.

“You ought to go over and see Aswam the Master Tent-maker, then,” one of the men commented.

“Oh? I have no need for a tent.”

“No, no. He’s the latest recipient of what’s rapidly being called ‘The Girl from All the Hells.’ She’s an emigrant from another world, just like you.”

“Really? Yes, I very much want to speak with her! Where is this tentmaker’s place?”

“I’ll show you. I’m not certain that anybody can do much with her, though. She’s too smart, too aggressive, hates everybody and everything, and they keep her locked up like a prisoner since she won’t behave and nobody’s been able to break her. We think she’s mad. Would you believe that she claims she was once a man! She’s been passed around from family to family for some time, and by the time poor Aswam took a crack at her, there was nobody left to pass her on to when he gave up.”

“My God! I’m surprised she wasn’t executed!”

“I think that’s what she wants, but it would be immoral to punish someone who is mad for behaving like they are mad, you see.”

She did see and quickly had the dwelling of the master tentmaker in sight. She wasn’t sure who or what she expected, but male or female, crazy or sane, it was somebody she could talk to. The fact that the other emigrant claimed to have been a man explained a lot of the behavior. She wouldn’t have much liked being a female in this society, but to have been a man and dropped female into it would be particularly awful.

Although most of the buildings in these permanent settlements were made of dried mud, Aswam, of course, lived in what looked like a tent city. He proved to be a prosperous middle-aged man with many wives and more kids than could be easily counted.

“Ack!”he exclaimed, looking disgusted. “That one! She is a demon!”

“Perhaps, but if she’s from the same place I’m from, as I think she might be, maybe I can do something with her.”

He led Lori to a small mud hut in back of the tents, not much bigger than the outhouse it sat next to. Unlike most buildings in Erdom, though, this one was not open or covered only with a blanket but had an actual lockable door of wood.

“I used to store money and records in here,” the tentmaker grumbled. “Now I am saddled with this dead loss!”

“Why did you take her, then?”

“Ha! The dowry offered was fantastic, or so I thought. More than any pretty girl is worth. But I tell you, she is so much trouble that I now realize that I was taken!”

“Why do you keep her locked up? Is she dangerous?”

“Only to herself. She keeps trying to run off into the Hjolai.”

“You have the keys”

“Yes, here. Go ahead in.”

“What is her name?”

“She calls herself ‘Julian’ or some such foreign name.”

She felt some relief that at least it wasn’t poor Gus. He’d had enough done to him up to now. She had to admit to herself that she was also somewhat disappointed that it wasn’t Juan Campos. Being a female in Erdom was just what that bastard deserved.

“All right. You can leave us. I’ll be responsible.”

Lori turned the key in the lock, opened the door, and went inside the small hut. It was quite dark, with only slits at the top for letting in light, and quite barren. The floor was covered with a local strawlike grass, and on it a female lay on her side, looking up at the newcomer.

There was only one way to try to break the ice. She tried English first. “My name is Lori, and I’m from Earth.”

The effect on the girl was dramatic. She pushed herself to a seated position and looked up at the newcomer. “You’re from Earth!” she responded in the same language and with an American accent. The almost whispery alto voice, however, seemed out of place. “This isn’t just some new trick, is it?”

“No, it’s no trick.”

“Well, where I come from, a guy named Lori would be a little suspect.”

“That’s because the same thing happened to me that happened to you, only in reverse. It’s terrible and ironic, I know, but I was a woman just like you were a man.”

She stared at Lori for a moment, frowning in the gloom, then shook her head sadly. “Crazy. They said when we got here that this Well was some kind of logical computer. So where’s the logic of making me this and you that!”

“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 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.”

“Just take it easy,” Lori said soothingly. “I’ll go make the arrangements.” And Posiphar would have to be told that his security was about to leave him.

Julian was already thinking ahead. “We’ll need money for this…”

Lori grinned. “I get the idea that our tentmaker friend out there will pay me handsomely to take you off his hands.”

And he was just the one to get the best deal!