What’s It Like?

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

When a man switches to a woman’s body, the first thing he does is feel his breasts. The first thing a woman does in a man’s body is pee standing up. There are exceptions, of course, but those are by far the most common reactions. Margaret DeBeau, chief psychologist for the Cognitive Displacement Project, established that in tests not long after they ironed the bugs out of the Tilbey Transfer process.

Of course after their initial solo experimentation the test subjects mated like rabbits, just to see what it felt like from the other side. Margaret wasn’t concerned with that aspect of the trial. Interested, in a prurient sort of way, since she needed both hands to count the years since she had last mated like anything; and amused the first few times the subjects blushingly tried to describe their experience during the debriefing after they’d switched back to their original bodies, but she was hardly surprised. People had always wondered what their partners felt during sex. She would have been interested only if they hadn’t tried it.

The fascinating part of the gender-switching study came when Arthur Brinsley walked into her office a day after they began the extended duration switchover test and said, “Margaret, can I have a little girl-to-girl chat with you?” He was wearing Candi Jenssen’s body, and doing a pretty good job of it. No hesitation when he walked, no trouble sitting down in one of the two chairs beside Margaret’s desk.

She turned away from the window where she had been watching a caterpillar spin its cocoon on a branch just beyond the glass.

“Girl to girl?” she asked lightly. “Going native, are you?”

He giggled. It sounded exactly like Candi’s giggle. Then he blushed just the way Candi did when she caught herself doing something dumb. Something “blonde,” she would say in self-deprecation.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am going native. That’s what I want to talk about.” He leaned forward in his chair, accidentally giving Margaret a generous view of Candi’s breasts. She made a mental note to warn him about that when he was done talking, before he compromised Candi’s modesty to everyone else on the project, but the next thing he said blew that thought straight out of her mind. “I can’t help giggling,” he said. “And preening whenever a man is around. It’s like this insane little hiccup the body does without me.”

While she’d been watching the caterpillar spin, Margaret had been wondering if anything truly interesting would come of this project, or whether she had merely derailed one undistinguished career for another when she’d joined the CDP team. She had gambled that fringe science would provide the reward that clinical psychology never had, and she had to admit it was a lot more exciting to be on the frontier of something for a change, but so far nothing had quite satisfied her longing for—what? She didn’t know. This, however, seemed promising.

First rule of investigation: define the terms. “Preening?” Margaret asked. “Like how?”

“I don’t know, like—” Arthur ran his hand through his hair—Candi’s hair, which came down to her shoulders—then flipped it back with a careless toss of his head. “Like that. And I blink like I’ve got something in my eyes, and I do this silly turn-the-head-sideways thing while I do it.” He acted out a cartoonish parody of a woman on the make.

Margaret laughed out loud at the sight of Candi’s body doing that. Candi tried so hard to overcome the stereotype that went with her California-blonde looks, and there was Arthur trashing all her hard work in a moment.

“You’re telling me it’s hard-wired?”

“Apparently. And…” he hesitated, blushing again. “And I get all gushy and stupid around Huang Lee.”

“Huang Lee? Candi doesn’t even like him.”

“Want to bet?” asked Arthur.

“Sure I—hah. No way.” Margaret remembered Candi’s first week in the lab, back when they were still getting started with the actual hardware. She and Huang were instant partners, spending long hours calibrating the brainwave recorders and the neural overlay masks, and disrupting the entire lab with their constant chatter—until she had realized he was gay. They still worked together after that, but it was much quieter. Huang had come to Margaret a few days later and asked if she thought he had been wrong to tell her, and she’d told him no, stringing Candi along would have been the worse offense, but Candi had still taken it hard.

That was two years ago. Had she secretly harbored the hots for him all this time?

“Is it just him?” she asked, “or do you feel the same way around anyone else?”

“It’s strongest with him, but I’m attracted at least a little bit to practically every man I see.” Arthur giggled again. “Except for Dr. Hayward.”

Hayward was the project leader, an awkward, cadaverous but brilliant man in his sixties. “What’s wrong with him?” Margaret asked anyway, wanting Arthur’s reason, not her own speculation.

“I don’t know,” Arthur said. He absently scratched his right breast, then flinched when he realized what he was doing. “Sorry,” he said. “Bras itch.”

“Tell me about it. So what’s wrong with Hayward? Purely scientific curiosity, of course.”

“Of course.” He leaned back in his chair. “Hell, I don’t know. When I think about it, the whole concept is faintly nauseating no matter who I’m attracted to. There’s just no chemistry between Candi’s body and Hayward, that’s all.”

A loud banging on the door made both of them jump. “Yeow! What? What is it?” Margaret asked.

Candi stuck her head in. She was wearing Arthur’s body. They hadn’t begun three-way swaps yet. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know my own strength.”

“I forgot to warn you how macho I was,” Arthur said, giggling.

“I’ll say. Do you mind if I join you? Or were you discussing something private?”

“Arthur?” Margaret asked.

“No, it’s fine.” He looked over at Candi. “I probably should have gone to you first anyway, but you didn’t answer your pager.”

Candi hung Arthur’s head like a boy caught sneaking a peek up someone’s dress. “I was outside throwing rocks at the mailbox. It’s amazing how good a shot you are.”

Arthur shrugged. “I used to play baseball.”

“Maybe that explains the spitting.” Candi pulled the other office chair over next to Arthur so they could talk in a triangle.

“Spitting?” Arthur said.

“Oh yeah!” Candi laughed Arthur’s deep, throaty laugh, then hawked up a major-league goober. She stopped short of gobbing the carpet with it, made a face, and swallowed instead. “It’s like this insane little hiccup your body does without me.”

Margaret’s eyes widened. “You used the same words Arthur did to describe the way he preens now that he’s in your body.”

“Preens? I don’t preen. Do I?”

Arthur answered her with the same coquettish tilt and flip he had shown Margaret earlier, and as Candi stared at him, horrified, he said “I sure didn’t learn that from anyone else.”

“Oh God.” Candi slumped back in her chair, which creaked ominously under Arthur’s weight. “Did I—do I actually do that?”

Margaret shook her head. “No more than Arthur actually spits.”

“Then how come I do it?” asked Arthur. “Seems to me it’s more of a woman thing than a guy thing.”

Margaret already had a theory, but she didn’t want to bias her test subjects so she asked another question. “Arthur, you were just telling me that you felt some attraction to every man on the project except for Dr. Hayward. Did you notice anything else about that attraction? Any pattern?”

Candi looked at him sharply, but didn’t say anything. They’d agreed ahead of time: no sex except with each other, and with their spouses if the spouses were interested.

Arthur said, “Now that you mention it, I guess I’m attracted to foreigners more than locals. Huang, Abu, Yuri, Lars—like that.”

“How about it, Candi—is that normal for you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t necessarily seek out the exotic, but I don’t avoid it, either.”

“How about the mundane?”

“Look,” she said, a bit exasperated, “I don’t really analyze a man’s position on the strangeness scale, all right? I go out with the interesting ones, that’s all.”

“That’s you speaking. What about your body? For that matter, do you notice anything different now that you’re in Arthur’s body?”

She looked at Margaret for just a second with a frankly appraising look, and then she said, “Well, now that you mention it, you’re apparently not my type. Sorry. You, on the other hand—” she looked at Arthur in her own body “—make my hormones fizz.”

Arthur blushed. Margaret looked from him to Candi, and saw her flush. There was a distinct difference. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils flared; she looked like she might tear off Arthur’s clothes right there in the office if she hadn’t had her own civilized mores to restrain her.

“I think that pretty well proves it,” Margaret said. “Your sex drives are hard-wired. Your psyches apparently modify’ things to some extent, but the basic impulses are straight evolution talking.”

“How do you figure?” Arthur asked. He looked warily at Candi, who shifted uncomfortably in her seat, then gave up and readjusted her pants to accommodate her sudden erection.

“Candi’s body is attracted to foreigners,” Margaret told him. “Young ones at that. The best candidates to give her a healthy baby, since with a foreigner there’s less chance of inbreeding, and someone young can help care for it. And Arthur’s body,” she said to Candi, “likes the young, buxom types for the same reason. Good mother material. You’ve both learned to alter those urges to suit your intellectual tastes, but with the intellect out of the body, that’s what you’re left with.”

Arthur snorted. “But my intellect is right here. How come I’m not still attracted to young, buxom women?”

Margaret steepled her fingers. “Aren’t you? What did you and your wife do last night?”

He grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, but that’s Ellen. We’ve been married for five years.”

“And you still find her attractive, even in Candi’s body. Psyche over instinct. But I think it’s pretty clear that consciousness isn’t completely one or the other.”

Candi laughed. “This is going to piss off a lot of people who were hoping we’d prove once and for all that the intellect is divine.”

It might at that, Margaret thought. The religious right had been nervous about the Tilbey process right from the start, even though on the surface it seemed to vindicate their belief in a soul. The idea that the soul could be recorded bothered them, and the idea that it could be transferred from one body to another scared them silly.

Margaret didn’t particularly care. She was looking for understanding, not affirmation. Let the chips fall where they may; she just wanted to learn what the chips were made of.

And maybe, just a little, she wanted to try a swap of her own. Not with Arthur, or even with Dr. Hayward, who was closer to her own age. Being a man had never interested her. But being young again, and beautiful for the first time…

She didn’t realize she was staring until Arthur said, “What?”

She glanced away. “Arthur,” she said, “protect that body as if it were gold. A lot of people would love to get into Candi’s pants while her guard is down. Not all of them the traditional way.”

He and Candi exchanged a worried look. Then Candi leaned over and buttoned his blouse one notch higher.

They stayed in each other’s bodies for a full week, and in that time they learned quite a bit about their instinctive versus learned behavior patterns. Plus they tried another experiment: Arthur taught Candi’s body how to throw, and she taught his how to play the piano. When they switched back they tried it again, and discovered that some of the learned behavior stayed with the body. Maybe it was just aptitude, but the cellular memory theorists had a field day with it.

So did the press, but Margaret didn’t pay any attention to that. She was already gearing up for the next test: Huang Lee was going to transfer into a chimpanzee.

The technicians kept them both in cages and strapped into chairs. They didn’t know what might happen to either of them, or how much intelligence would make the transfer and how much would stay behind. That was what eveiyone wanted to find out.

So when the lights dimmed and the machines did their zap thing, it took a few seconds to tell that there’d been any change. Then the chimp body flexed a little, groaned, and a slurred voice said, “Wow. Ish ish shtrange.”

“Huang?” Margaret asked. She was standing right beside his cage, with Arthur, Candi, and some of the other techs beside her.

“Yesh.” He strained against the straps, then said, “I shink you can ret me go.”

“Do it,” she said to the technician in the cage with him. While he did that she looked over at Huang’s body. “Dina?” she asked. They’d used a female chimp because she was the friendliest of the lot, and they’d already had experience with gender switching so they didn’t think it would matter much for their first nonhuman study The species differences should completely overwhelm the gender differences as far as uniqueness of the experience went.

Dina nodded. She nodded! Margaret almost dropped her notepad. Dina’s mouth worked for a moment, then she said, “Ah, ah, ah.” She tugged against the straps just as Huang had done, but when she realized she was held down she just settled back into the chair and looked around the lab.

“You’re going to be all right,” Margaret assured her. “This is just for a little while.”

Dina looked at her with an expression that said clear as words, Yeah, right.

“I mean it,” Margaret told her. “This is just a short test.” She wondered how much of that the chimp understood. Dina just blinked at her, so she turned back to Huang and said, “How do you feel?”

“All ri’,” he said. “But shoo, thish plash shtinksh!” He stood, stretched his arms and legs, and twisted around. “Man, I feel like a gymnasht. This body’sh limber.”

“How’s your mental capacity? What’s nine times six?”

“Fifty-four,” he answered immediately.

“Fourteen squared?”

“Ahh… a hundred and… ninety… four? No, ninety-shix.”

“What’s the windspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

“African or European?”

The technicians all looked puzzled even before Huang and Margaret burst into laughter. She hadn’t expected them to get a Monty Python reference, but she knew Huang would—provided the part of him that had watched The Holy Grail with her the previous night had made the transfer.

Huang’s laughter turned into a series of shrieks like Dina made when she was upset. Huang jumped up and down a time or two as well, then he suddenly stopped and said, “Shorry. Got carried away there. There’sh a lot of inshtinctive behavior to fight off.”

“Like what?” Margaret asked.

“Like… I want to throw shit at everything. The real shtuff. I’m pished off just looking at all of you out there on the other shide of the cage. I want room enough to run and climb in, and no people around.”

Margaret nodded. “That’s pretty much what a freshly captured chimp feels, I’m sure.” But Dina had been raised in captivity. If she still felt that way they had a serious ethical dilemma on their hands, but how could they find out how much of her body’s attitude she carried in her mind? That was the important question.

Or was it? Arthur and Candi had proved that the body and the mind worked together to create the whole person. If Dina’s body hated captivity, wasn’t that reason enough to let her go free?

Margaret looked back at her, shoehorned into Huang’s body and strapped to a chair inside a cage, and she suddenly felt ashamed. “Let her go,” she said. When the technician at her side hesitated, she said, “We can’t learn anything with her immobilized like that. She’s calm enough; let her go.”

So they did. And when the last strap came off, Dina rose to her feet, stepped over to the edge of the cage farthest from everyone, lifted her hospital gown, and peed. Standing up.

The first test ended after an hour, but when Huang reported no longterm complications and Dina seemed to settle right back down, they swapped again for longer and longer periods. Margaret had hoped Dina would eventually learn to talk, but aside from learning the names of a few objects she never did pick up the language. Huang tried to describe what it was like in a chimpanzee body, but aside from “furry” and “itchy” and a few other adjectives, no one really understood what he was getting at. They realized pretty quickly that you had to be there yourself to fully comprehend it.

The transfer process worked so smoothly that they tried it on other animals, just to see what would happen. Arthur swapped with a dog—a Saint Bernard puppy—and he said afterward that it had been one of the happiest times in his life. He hadn’t gotten many of the test questions right, and he’d eventually gotten bored with the whole proceedings and had lain down to chew on a rawhide stick, but when he transferred back into his own body he said that was mostly because he didn’t care what Margaret wanted. He was too content with being a puppy.

They couldn’t say for sure how the dog felt about the experience, because it had spent most of its time in Arthur’s body trying to stand up. Arthur said his legs still felt wobbly for hours after he switched back.

And all the while, Margaret wondered: What’s it really like? What subtle differences aren’t the corponauts, as they’d come to call themselves, reporting? How much of what they did report was she misinterpreting?

And how much of the child like delight they exhibited was endemic to the process?

She got her chance at it with a cat. She wasn’t the first—by then the real explorers had worked their way down to mice and lizards and even a cockroach, which according to Candi had turned out to be incredibly pleasant once she got over the idea of what she’d become. Her intellect had felt compressed, she said. Altered to fit the smaller brain, but she couldn’t describe it better than that, nor explain why it hadn’t bothered her. At that, Margaret told Dr. Hayward that she needed a transfer experience of her own if she was ever going to understand what it was like for anyone else, and when he agreed to let her, Candi suggested a cat.

By then they were getting pretty cavalier about the whole proceedings; just strap down, slap the helmets on, and hit the switch. One minute Margaret was looking at the lab’s resident mouser, a yellow-and-white striped domestic shorthair named Isabelle, and the next minute she was the domestic shorthair, only she didn’t feel domestic. She felt wild and sleek and sensual, even in the zippered bag Isabelle had been confined in. Only her head stuck out, but that’s all she needed at first. She looked over at her human body and saw a mountainous bulk of flesh, already slumping in the chair as the anesthetic hit. The technicians had decided to knock out the human bodies during transfer to avoid panic when the lower animals found themselves in an unfamiliar body.

“I’m all right,” she tried to say, but the cat’s mouth and tongue didn’t cooperate and instead of words she got a warbling gurgle that sounded like a tomcat on the prowl. So she blinked her left eye three times, the code for the same thing, and waited for the technicians to let her out of the body bag.

Stretching was divine. She licked a couple of itches, shivering at the feel of sandpaper tongue through smooth fur, then padded across the floor toward Candi, who was taking notes for her. Just walking in that body felt better than anything she had done in years.

“How are you doing?” Candi asked. Her voice boomed.

Margaret tried a meow in response. One for “yes” or “good,” two for “no” or “bad.” They didn’t have a code for “fantastic.”

Candi laid the child’s keyboard they used for animal tests on the floor in front of her and asked, “What’s seven times nine?”

Margaret knew the answer, but it made absolutely no difference to her whether or not she told anyone. Candi’s leg looked warm and inviting, so she leaned up against it, rubbing her cheeks and sides as she arched past.

And then she felt the purr start. Chocolate with orange peel didn’t compare. Nor did winning a lottery. She had once had a multiple orgasm; not even that was as good as purring.

When Candi reached down and scratched her between the ears, she knew that humans had been shortchanged.

She managed to stay in Isabelle’s body for almost three hours, mostly by sucking up to everybody in the lab and begging for more time. The sight of Margaret, aged matron of the psych department, slinking about and jumping into laps like an exotic dancer, was such a shock that nobody knew what to do. But Candi finally picked her up like a limp dishrag and carried her back to the transfer machinery.

“You’ve got to go back,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”

I am home! Margaret wanted to tell her, but she couldn’t get the concept across with Isabelle’s vocal equipment. Besides, she knew what she meant: it was quitting time, there was a weekend coming up, and she was keeping everyone in the lab. So she let Candi stuff her unceremoniously into the body bag, strap the helmet onto her head, and throw the switch.

A lid came down over the world, a blanket of fog and fuzz and muffling cotton. Some of it lifted when the tech neutralized the anesthetic in her system, but she knew that was all she could look forward to.

“Are you all right?” Candi asked, picking up her hand. The touch sent the memory of an electric thrill coursing through her, just the palest ghost of what she’d felt as Isabelle.

“I—as right as I’ll ever be,” she said, knowing Candi would never understand what she meant by that. She took a deep breath. “Wow. That was amazing.”

Candi smiled. “You looked like you were enjoying it.”

“You’ll never know,” Margaret told her.

“No, I suppose—Sure I could. That’s the whole point of this.”

Margaret shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid you’d have to spend at least a decade being me first, to understand the contrast.”

“Ah.” Candi looked at her again, frowning. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”

“Fine,” Margaret told her. She didn’t know whether that was true or not, but there was nothing Candi could do for her even if it wasn’t. Even swapping bodies wouldn’t have cheered her up. After Isabelle, being merely a young California blonde would have been an anticlimax. And besides, any human form would bring with it human feelings and human problems. The other corponauts’ experiences proved that the capacity to feel joy existed in every test subject, no matter how primitive, and a simpler animal made for a more pure experience.

She helped put away the equipment and let Isabelle out of the bag. The cat seemed little worse for her experience; she had probably felt a little disorientation, then had fallen asleep. She might have had some odd dreams, but those probably wouldn’t have registered after she woke up any more than Margaret’s normally did. Margaret reached down to scratch her between the ears, and grew warm as the cat started to purr. She remembered how that felt from the inside.

Isabelle followed her to her office and jumped up on the window sill, looking for birds, but there was no motion in the tree. Even the caterpillar Margaret had watched spin its cocoon was no longer visible. The fuzzy oblong shelter that hung from the underside of a leaf hid the miracle of transformation going on inside.

That’s what I need, she thought. A complete makeover. Rebirth into a younger, more sensuous body. One capable of feeling something again.

She sat down at her desk and leafed through her files. Notes for a paper on gender-specific behavior patterns, recommendations for using the Tilbey Transfer process in psychoanalysis, speculation on why intelligence and “quality of life” seemed to be inversely proportional—as if either quantity could be measured objectively. Even so, she could get a dozen papers out of the data, gain notoriety, maybe even win awards.

Oh joy.

It was nearly dark when she returned to the window, reached out, and snapped off the branch.

Fitting the electrodes onto a cocoon was easier than attaching them to a moving, struggling insect. Margaret was glad of that; she didn’t have the experience the technicians had. Putting the helmet on herself proved hardest, and pulling the chair around so she could reach the switch. But she eventually got it.

She hesitated with her hand on the switch. Sweat beaded her forehead, and not just from the exertion. She didn’t know how long it would take for the metamorphosis to occur, nor how long a butterfly lived once it emerged from the cocoon, nor how her body would handle a weekend in a couch with a caterpillar in control. The caterpillar might actually do OK; it was ready for a transition, after all.

So was she. She would try to return if she could, but some part of her that she was afraid to examine too closely didn’t really care if she made it back. Not after Isabelle.

She had considered shouldering aside the cat again, this time permanently, but she couldn’t subject such a free and happy creature to the trade. Besides, she was an aging, frumpy, depressed woman who knew she ought to seek professional help, but she was still a scientist, and there was another world waiting to be explored.

She threw the switch.

Inside the cocoon, a spark of consciousness blossomed. Margaret was self-aware only in the way that the universe is self-aware through its creations. At the moment she was the universe.

But as time passed she began to understand that there was a boundary, and she felt an undeniable urge to push beyond it. She struggled, became aware of unfamiliar limbs, and learned to control them until she could tear away the threads that held her prisoner. Emergence brought blessed relief; unfurling the wide, flat wings brought joy.

Vision took a moment to comprehend. It was segmented, gridlike. Different than… than what? Than not seeing, apparently.

Cold, sterile machinery, dappled with blinking lights and festooned with wires, stood all around. A mound of pale flesh, incomprehensibly large and ponderous, lolled in a chair nearby. But across the laboratory, beyond the open window, evening sunlight bathed the trees and flowers with its warm, beckoning light, and the scent of nectar and pollen tugged at her as well.

Margaret fanned her wings until they dried completely, then she flapped them harder and lifted into the air. She didn’t need to think about how to do it; instinct guided her motions.

Her wings were works of art. The world around her was an endless sea of delights. The rapture she felt as she fluttered through the air into it all was indescribable.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to try.