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UNDER THE MOONS OF EDEN
Copyright 1996, by Christopher Leeson
(Send notes and comments to cdl25@usa.net)
Chapter 1
*The sly slow hours shall not determinate
The dateless limit of thy dear exile.*
KING RICHARD II
Our outfit, the 54th Battle Group Earth Alliance, was in
transit to Cathara when an Asymmetric search-and-destroy mission
caught us off Ophir. Our light escorts had no firepower like theirs,
and so they had already done a good job of turning our fleet into
slag before the escort commander broadcast the general order for a
cold jump.
A cold jump for hyperspace! You have to be desperate to the
point of suicide to try that. But with our ships going out like
Christmas lights on the day after New Years, the surviving fighters
and freighters flooded their unprepared converters with antimatter,
pushed the button, and hoped for the best. Alas, as the beleaguered
ships blinked out of this spatial continuum -- in some cases
permanently, I fear -- our own was not among them; a disabling shot
had fused our Morrison stabilator and made us the last sitting duck
in a pond full of sharks.
The Asymmetrics -- or Assies as we usually called them -- must
have known that our systems were down because they didn't come
circling back with torpedoes blazing. Our colonel, lieutenant
colonel, and our two senior majors had either gone down with their
own ships or had jumped away, a circumstance which had left me behind
as senior officer present. And unconditional surrender is one hell
of an introduction to independent command.
We knew that the Assies took prisoners; the kicker was that we
didn't know what the enemy did with prisoners once they had them!
There had been no P.O.W. exchanges between belligerents over the
course of the war, and not even the most routine sort of
communication. Capitulation was a hard call, but I made it
understanding that the enemy would gain little from capture of either
the personnel or the basic equipment on board.
The Assies --odd-looking critters -- came on board to shut down
our cannons, confiscate our light weapons, and then to lock our
transport into a tractor beam. A few days of towing through
hyperspace brought us to the destination intended, a new planet in
Assie-space. It didn't look so bad from high orbit: clouds layers,
oceans, and plenty of green-tinged land. In fact, it seemed like a
prime piece of real estate.
This blue-and-green planet had never been seen on any Earther's
chart, so it had no name and the Assies didn't volunteer one. In
fact, our captors didn't talk at all, except to have us pack our gear
into the pods and prepare for a drop. That prospect was better than
a blaster in the back of the head, but the Assies weren't wasting
much time with ceremonial send-offs. We were shoved outside into the
planet's upper atmosphere, and that was it. The aliens, for all we
could tell, just jumped away and forgot about us.
We were abandoned, marooned. Our prison walls were the .9G
gravity of a nameless planet. They had left us with no instructions,
no special equipment, no nothing. We supposed that we had been
deposited on an Assie P.O.W. world and from here on in we were
expected to live or die on our own. We definitely preferred to live
and so got to work setting up. It wasn't too long before the rank
and file got to calling our new home "Klink." Well, why not? With
everything going wrong, a low joke sometimes helps. Had we been able
to seen into the future, we would started out by calling it something
much less polite.
#
Klink was an earth-type world with an ecology of chlorophyll
plants, furry animals, and even flyers that, if you didn't look too
closely, could pass for Terran birds. It has always amazed me to
what degree alien evolution can parallel that of Earth. Of course,
some people say that all the worlds in space originally came off the
palette of the same Artist way back when. But metaphysics was never
my strong suit.
The first temperature reading we took on Klink was 18 degrees
Centigrade. That was disappointingly chilly, but one of the fleet
techs corralled with us was soon able to calculate that we had set
down during the winter season in the northern hemisphere. He
estimated from the axial tilt and the latitude that the climate might
turn out to be something like that of the Upper South in the USA.
That meant we could expect a long warm-to-hot summer, a short, mild
spring and autumn, and a winter of intermediate length in which the
temperature would only occasionally drop below freezing. That didn't
sound too bad, considering.
Klink was orbited by two moons and, as we learned, every thirty-
seven days the pair of them looked like they were about to collide.
In fact, they had only shortly before finished their latest
conjunction when we arrived. We called them Big Boob and Little Boob
because we were a sex-obsessed bunch of S.O.B's. Who could blame us?
Women were nonexistent in our corner of the galaxy. The chances for
sexual recreation aside, we were otherwise pretty well off. As
Captain Montgomery Ames put it, "We've got everything we need for a
party, except the dames."
As I have said, there were no Assie guards to bother us, no camp
administration breathing down our necks, no rules imposed from above.
Weapons-wise we were down to bayonets, knives, and hatchets, but
though we occasionally found the tracks of large animals, and
sometimes sighted them from a distance, the wildlife seemed to be shy
of our human scent and gave us a wide berth. As far as we knew,
Klink had no intelligent life. Therefore the lack of hardware did
not add up to any immediate problem.
More than the confiscated arms, we missed the communicators.
Without them we could hope for no early contact with other human
beings upon Klink -- assuming that other prisoners had actually been
taken. The planet seemed so fertile and the climate so mild that we
wondered why the Assies hadn't developed Klink for themselves instead
of "infesting" it with enemy aliens. Assies and humans liked the
same kind of world, and that's the reason that war had blazed along
the border for a decade. It seemed damnably strange that the Assies
would invade human space, and take large losses in material and life,
even, though they had an unused high-order T-type world right in
their own back yard. It was hard to shake off the suspicion that
there might just be a serpent of some kind hidden in this new Eden of
ours, one just waiting for the chance to bite.
But the soldier wastes his time trying to understand alien
psychology. The welfare of our exiled fraction of the 54th Battle
Group Earth Alliance was the first order of business. Defeat is an
unmanning thing, and so we had to keep our troopers busy to maintain
their morale. A good share of them had had families back home, wives
and even children. The idea of a permanent separation from loved
ones is a bitter pill for a family man, and it's pure poison if you
let him wallow in his loss. For that reason, I had my five captains
and ten lieutenants drive the men hard, especially during those first
few weeks -- exploring, cutting timber, constructing shelters and
latrines, and foraging for a food supply.
We were out of the war, probably for good, but our outfit had
always been first-rate, and I intended to keep it that way. Very few
of the rank and file were career men, and so, by and large, they
didn't like the idea of living the army way for the rest of their
days. I sympathized, but discipline had to be preserved. It was
better to live in a well-ordered organization for the long term than
to degenerate into a pack of bewhiskered, self-pitying bums on a
camp-out.
Our survey had selected a campsite located a couple miles from
our original landing, a slight rise overlooking a fast-running creek
which analyzed pure and so would supply all our needs for water.
Though our men were kept hard at it, the private soldier on a detail
can at least put his shovel down when the sergeant or lieutenant is
out of sight and gripe to his buddies for a few minutes. Even the
officers were able to talk things out with those who shared their
rank, but I was top honcho and had so had to keep mum about my doubts
and grief. Capture had badly shaken all the ranks, I knew, so to
keep everyone else steady, I had to preserve the impression that
someone was in control. That meant acting like I knew all the
answers. The trouble was, I didn't know the half of them.
That was pressure -- and loneliness -- of the worst kind. I
mean, it's the kind that will buckle a man if he doesn't have a
friend with whom he can be honest and up-front. The closest thing I
had to a buddy on Klink was Dr. Sebastian Lowry, the only surgeon who
had been aboard our ship when the Assies took it. Unlike most of my
other officers, Lowry was not a careerist, but had instead been
drafted as warrant officer for the medical corps. Dr. Lowry had
formerly run a civilian practice, and even after spending a year in a
military-medicine academy, no real soldier would ever have mistaken
him for one of their own kind. I think that in some way that made it
easier to achieve a rapport with him. Anyway, Sebastian was a clear-
thinker, and always game for a round of poker.
#
Our encampment of 537 men and officers was hardly up and running
before IT happened for the first time.
The moons over Klink were beginning their next conjunction,
pairing up like a pair of women's knobs, when Pvt. Rick Halder
disappeared. The man had simply been standing in front of the
members of his squad when, at 14:07, he turned into a silhouette of
white light and faded from view, without even leaving a sooty spot
behind. We knew of no weapon that acted on human flesh that way, but
as soon as I received the report I put the battle group on alert and
sent every available man out searching for enemy snipers. Because of
the confusion, it was only a little later that we realized that a
second private, Lionel Olson, was also unaccounted for. No one had
seen him "go," but it seemed likely that he had vanished in the same
bizarre fashion as Halder.
But there was no follow-up attack and a search failed to
identify anything unusual in the vicinity. At sunset, I ordered the
perimeter heavily patrolled, though even I wondered what men armed
with knives might do against well-equipped attacker. Our pickets
were not disturbed during the night and we recommenced the search at
sunup. The morning patrols soon turned up something that we weren't
looking for.
Two women were discovered not far from camp, sleeping side by
side, unconscious but apparently unhurt. Each was about nineteen or
twenty -- a dark-honey blonde and a brunette. Each was wearing
uniforms like ours -- exactly like ours and much too large for them.
You might have thought that our men had found treasure. "Isn't
this an answer to our prayers, Major Breen!" As we followed the two
females back to camp borne along on makeshift stretchers, crowed Sgt.
Gold into my ear, "I only hope that there's plenty more sleeping
beauties where this pair came from."
#
I followed the stretchers into the hospital where Dr. Lowry,
assisted by his young medic, Alan Drew, transferred the newly-arrived
women to the cots. Lowry's first observation was that they appeared
to be anesthetized, not comatose.
I thought back upon Gold's excitement just then. Once Lowry had
brought the girls around, I could foresee all kinds of discipline
problems. We had about five hundred men starved for female
companionship, and only two of the latter to go around. The visitors
would have to be sent home as soon as possible for their own good --
and ours.
"Why don't they wake up? You're sure they're not brain-damaged,
are they, Doc?" I asked.
"When I find out, you'll be the first one I'll tell, Rupe."
"They must be lost colonists from some earlier prisoner drop --"
I conjectured, knowing that the aliens had captured several Terran
outposts during the last ten years, and had evacuated the settlers to
parts unknown.
Just then Lowry opened the brunette's shirt and read the tag
around her neck. "What the -- ?!"
"What is it, Doctor?" asked Drew.
"It says 'Richard Halder!'" Lowry replied, his face a mask of
bewilderment.
I read the tag for myself; it was Halder's all right. "How
in hell did this girl get it?! It should have been vaporized along
with Halder, but here it is. Does that mean that Halder might be
alive, too?"
Lowry had no answer, but just then Drew began searching the
blonde and found a similar tag around her neck. It said "Lionel
Olson."
"You've got to bring them around, Doc," I urged. "We've got to
know what we're up against."
"Then give me some working space, Rupe! I mean it! -- Get out
of here!"
In the infirmary a doctor was god, so I contained my impatience
and left the two men to their work. There was not much I could do
except wait. Because of the crisis I had suspended even the
construction teams. Our men were getting good at carpentry, and
every day we had been packing away some of our modular shelters as
more permanent barracks replaced them. The most useful thing I was
able to do was to send word to the search squads that the missing
men's tags had been found and the troopers might possibly be alive.
We were, I guessed, up against alien kidnappers using matter-to-
energy-to-matter technology. BEM's who had that kind of hardware
would very likely turn out to be tough customers.
But through it all I remained preoccupied by the mystery of the
women, and a strange thought occurred to me. Was this bizarre affair
some sort of exchange, a trade, a couple of "their" people for a
couple of ours? Who would do such a thing, and why? That wasn't any
kind of human thinking -- it was a trade rat's! It could also be an
expression of alien intelligence.
I had not been back in my quarters long before Dr. Lowry burst
in looking like he'd just run at full tilt for a kilometer -- not
just the couple hundred feet from his infirmary. This shaken,
perspiring man was hardly the same steady professional who had thrown
me out of his facility just an hour before. He started jabbering out
a report that made me think that he must have been breathing chemical
vapors. More to confirm that diagnosis than to credit what he was
telling me, I followed Lowry back to the infirmary at the double-
quick.
Once inside the rough-plank structure, I saw that both females
were awake. One, the brunette, was sitting up, but trembling, as if
suffering from shock -- head bent, fists clenched, shoulders quaking.
The other was in a fetal position and seemed even more far gone. I
addressed the brunette:
"Excuse me, Miss --" I began, but stopped myself. What if what
the girl had told Lowry was true? I suddenly realized that I didn't
know how to address the patient. I softened my tone so as not to
frighten her.
"Can you -- can you tell me your name?" I queried.
The girl didn't even raise her head. I lifted her chin with my
fingertips. I had seen expressions like hers on men who had just
been gut-shot. "What's your name?!" I repeated firmly.
Her glance was frantic; she was trying to speak, but the words
wouldn't come.
"That's all right," I coaxed. "Take all the time you need."
"P-Private Halder, sir." she finally answered. "D-Don't you kn-
know me, sir --?! Christ, don't you know me?!"
#
What the girl was trying to tell me was beyond credibility. I
fought against the whole idea until long after the facts could no
longer be denied. I had questioned the young woman who claimed to be
Halder intensely, growing ever more unnerved until she had broken
down and Lowry made me desist. The blonde, for her part, remained
unfit for interrogation. I was trying hard to doubt that the
brunette was Pvt. Rick Halder, but she was absolutely desperate to
convince me otherwise. I went away, still not a believer.
But two more men disappeared that afternoon, and we realized
then that we could be on the brink of a disaster. It was deja vu
when two more girls were found the next morning. Just as we feared,
once able to speak they identified themselves as the missing
soldiers. It was the same story when a fifth and sixth man
disappeared, and the fifth and sixth woman was found.
This thing was a nightmare that we couldn't wake up from. It
defied all rational explanation. Every day the number of affected
personnel grew. For some strange reason none of the transformed men
possessed any memory of the time in which they had been away.
In their strange new female incarnations, the affected soldiers
usually looked about eighteen to twenty, though there was a range of
variation. The age of the original male seemed to be irrelevant;
there appeared to be a fountain of youth on Klink, but not a man of
us would have taken the treatment had we been offered the choice.
According to Dr. Lowry's observations, the transformed men -- the
"transformees," as we were soon calling them -- usually came back in
very good physical condition, with any previously obtained scars and
physical defects removed -- including the last phalanx of the little
finger that Sergeant Pitts had once lost and had now apparently
regrown.
Psychologically the transformees were all suffering. Lowry
thought that this was not a condition deliberately induced into the
victims, nor even the effects of being terrorized during their period
of captivity. Instead he believed that it came from the soldiers'
traumatic loss of identity. Also, it was the nature of males,
especially men accustomed to military life, to be repulsed by the
very idea of effeminacy. It was as though the patients' minds were
interpreting what had happened to them as a profound kind of physical
violation. They were showing what the doctor thought was something
very like post-rape trauma in women.
Lowry had no treatment, not even a theory of a treatment, for
the metamorphosis. As for the trauma, he had nothing to recommend
except a sparing dole of tranquilizers and anti-depressants and the
prescription of rest. Sometimes the transformees' reaction to their
condition was so violent or hysterical that restraint had to be
called for.
There was no more space in the infirmary for them all after the
first few days and so Sebastian farmed his patients out to the huts.
After all, their problem was mental and emotional, not physical.
Nonetheless, both he and Drew worked long hours, calling upon the
new-made women each day and monitoring how they were coming along.
Meanwhile, we were still trying to discover what was responsible
for this incomprehensible phenomenon. Over the next couple weeks we
sent search parties as far out as a hundred kilometers, looking
primarily for aliens. They discovered nothing whatsoever -- nothing
except the dismaying fact that when a group went beyond a certain
vague range from our main body the same unseen powers began to act
upon them also, abducting and transforming searchers exactly as if
they were a separate group which required separate attention.
The men's fear grew daily as the transformation count rose.
Since dispersion only increased our problems, I decided to keep our
men close together. That at least kept the number of sex-changes
down to just two per day while we tried to figure out what was going
on. Whatever lay behind our predicament, it didn't respect
rank. Captain Ames vanished about two weeks after the first
incident, only to reappear the next morning as a hard-bodied young
female with a halo of fluffy blonde hair and a face like an angel.
It occurred to me that his fate was brutally ironic. It had been
Ames who not so long before had said, "We have everything we need for
a party, except the dames." Now we had more "dames" than we wanted -
- and we were getting more every day.
At first none of the stricken soldiers were fit for work. They
spent much of their time in bed, suffering from deep depression,
huddling out of sight, ashamed to be seen, but sometimes wandered
about the camp like somnambulists. Most of the time the transformees
remained quiet and easy to handle, although there was the occasional
fit of whimpering or outbreak of screaming. None of the
rest of us knew how to react and our morale plummeted. Comrades were
becoming unrecognizable strangers and everyone was afraid that he'd
be next. That was the worst of it -- the fear. Sometimes friends
came through for their transformed comrades, but to the majority the
transformees were pariahs.
I saw groups dissolve without a word spoken when a woman,
perhaps not looking where she was going or desperate for
companionship, came near. Fear makes the human animal cruel, alas.
The mere sight of the transformees evoked terror in most soldiers.
The 54th had been a cohesive outfit, its members used to looking out
for one another. They were not able to act that way now and were
deeply ashamed of themselves. All our men, both the transformed and
the others, were taking a heavy mental beating and we didn't have a
clue where it was it all leading. Then something ghastly
happened, something that most of us still carry like an open wound to
this day. Lionel Olson, one of the first two transformees, had been
lodged with Halder in a hut of their own. Olson had never really
become rational and, a couple days after leaving the infirmary, she
opened one of her own arteries with a utility knife and bled to death
before we found her in the morning.
Olson's sudden death hit every one of us like a laser cannon.
What idiots we had been! We should have anticipated the possibility
of suicide. I cursed myself for an incompetent, unthinking fool.
But neither had it occurred to the mystified and harried Dr. Lowry,
and I think that weighed heavily upon him, also.
Despite our regrets, it was too late to help Olson. All we
could do was lay her into a grave and put over it a board explaining
that Lionel Olson had died "a good man, a beloved comrade, and a
soldier of only twenty-six."
After that ordeal we knew what we were up against and every new
transformee was placed under a suicide watch. This was intended to
continue until Lowry felt confident that the soldier's -- the woman's
-- emotional state was no longer life-threatening. This tied up a
lot of people, more each day, and the work on our camp drastically
slowed.
Everyone's nerves were frayed. How long would it be before
there had to be an explosion?
**********
Chapter 2
*But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.*
KING HENRY IV, Part II
I visited Ames in -- her? his? -- hut.
We often found ourselves referring to our miserable comrades as
"hers" and "shes," but guiltily. We did it unconsciously at first,
but couldn't help ourselves, and it finally became too commonplace to
notice. Even so, that instinctive choice of pronouns always reeked
of unintentional insult. It was as if we were telling these
unfortunate soldiers that they were somehow out of the club, that
they didn't fit in anymore, that they had become something different
and apart.
Ames shared a hut with her friend and suicide watcher, Capt.
Philbrick. I found the transformed officer sprawled lifelessly upon
her cot, staring at the ceiling with an expression of inner torment.
She didn't seem to see me at first, and her lips were with a low
murmur, many-times repeated, a one-word question: "Why?"
"Captain Ames," I addressed the traumatized woman carefully.
She blinked, then slowly looked my way, her eyes full of pain --
a real pain, I could tell, but not one of a physical kind. I thought
that I had come prepared emotionally, but despite that I found myself
pitying what was left of the once personable and jocular Montgomery
Ames.
I had no words to offer beyond the blandest inquiry after her
health. Duty and common courtesy had required the call of me, but
what could I say or do to give comfort in circumstances like these?
I was no psychologist, no clergyman. I feared making a misstatement
that might do possible harm. Should I coddle the captain like the
nineteen year-old girl that she resembled, or comport myself with the
kind of reserve that a soldier such as Ames expected of his superior
officer? Should I lie, tell her -- him -- what he -- she -- wanted
to hear -- that she -- he -- would soon be all right, that Lowry was
working on a way to reverse the metamorphosis?
I couldn't sink so low and, anyway, Ames would have had to have
been pretty far gone to believe any such rot. She knew as well as I
did that Dr. Lowry believed the transformations to be genetic, not
surgical. How could we, with our limited means and resources, ever
hope to unscramble a human being's chromosomes? Of course, given a
major medical facility, a good deal could be done cosmetically by
transplanting, by applying hormone therapy, but Lowry possessed
neither the equipment, the pharmaceuticals, nor the training to
attempt anything so sophisticated.
Unless we managed to capture the people or the equipment
responsible and make them or it reverse the process, the transformees
were almost certainly doomed to remain physiological females for --
well, if not for life, for as long as our unknown enemy wanted to
keep them that way.
I excused myself after a few minutes, but kept thinking about
what Ames had said. The captain had not been the first transformee
from whom I had heard that damnable question "Why?" Yet I would have
supposed that their burning question should have been instead, "How?"
#
I tried to visit my transformed officers and N.C.O.'s with some
regularity, all of them in pretty much the same state as Capt. Ames -
- able to shake their heads despondently to direct questions, if
asked insistently enough, but seldom spontaneous or conversational.
For that reason, my visits to Ames and the others degraded into an
ordeal. How could I help them? How should another human being
relate to these unhappy creatures, either as a commander or a
comrade?
Fortunately, over the passing weeks, Lowry confirmed what common
sense had been telling us from the beginning, that the transformees
responded best if not treated differently from others, but were, on
the other hand, accepted as the men they had been -- men who perhaps
were somewhat impaired by stress neuroses and/or physically wounded.
Regard and respect, not pity, seemed to be the best tonic for our
unfortunate mates.
#
Our command staff was still working on the theory of alien
hostility. One idea we floated was that the Assies were subjecting
us to psychological torture to break our spirit. But why so? We
were already their prisoners. If they wanted to break us, they had a
thousand simpler methods to go about it. In fact, they had given no
sign that they were interested in us at all. Or was it to test a new
weapon for use against the Alliance? Not likely. A "sex-change ray"
seemed like a damned fool tool for a military campaign. Even if the
enemy had such a thing, what was the strategic gain? Why not just
kill humans in the tried and true fashion?
At one staff meeting Lieutenant Chih wondered out loud whether
transformation was like counting coup to some alien mind, a practice
which existed among Amerind warriors in frontier days. Some of the
others argued that we weren't in battle. Our attackers were
"counting coup" in a jail cell, the act of a coward, not a hero.
Then there was another idea someone offered, -- that we were
being progressively changed into a population intended to serve some
as-yet-unknown purpose of a presumed hidden master race. The desire
for slaves, perhaps. As women -- demoralized and physically weaker -
- we'd be more easier to handle by overseers. It wasn't long before
some even more unsavory speculations were being made along those
lines. It all sounded like sci-fi porn to me and, anyway, if the
Assies or some indigenous race of Klink were intent upon reducing us
to slavery, why were they returning the "slave girls" to their
friends instead of putting them to work as soon as they were created?
An even more repulsive theory postulated that the Assies or some
other alien race was female-poor and needed breeding stock -- a
theory that Lowry firmly nixed. It was just too far-fetched for his
taste. Moreover, none of the women had been returned pregnant.
Even so, his examinations did turn up something strange -- a
tiny anomalous particle buried in the medulla of each transformee's
brain. What could this tiny bead-in-the-brain mean? I had demanded.
Lowry had no clue and, with his limited equipment and inadequate
staff, he was not going to perform anything like brain surgery upon
physically healthy soldiers.
The only good news that came along in those first few weeks was
that Private First Class Mark Hitchcock, an early transformee, seemed
to be pulling out of her traumatic phase. Undoubtedly, we had to
thank Pvt. Harold Roberts for her rapid progress. Roberts had stayed
by Hitchcock's side night and day through some pretty bad episodes,
and eventually the transformee had begun to respond to TLC. Lowry
was impressed with Roberts' results and made recommendations to other
suicide watchers to try to use the same methods.
But while I knew she was on the mend, Pvt. Hitchcock appeared at
my hut asking for a duty assignment much sooner than I had expected
her to. She still looked somewhat shaken, but Lowry had advised me
that a return to a semi-normal routine might be the best thing to
bring her along to full recovery. A person functions best, he
thought, when he feel himself to be a useful and contributing member
of a team. I couldn't argue with that logic. It was my hope, in
fact, that all the women could very soon be reintegrated into the
life of the camp. If it didn't happen, we would soon become one
large, paralyzed mental ward.
How strange it was to sit there, taking stock of a soldier who
was very familiar to me, but whom I could not recognize by appearance
and hardly by mannerism. To the eye, Mark Hitchcock was a red-hair
girl wearing a uniform ludicrously too large for her. I now
anticipated that clothing would become yet another problem as things
developed. Pvt. Hitchcock had been a big, barrel-chested male. Now
he -- she -- was only some sixty kilos in weight and about l60-l70
centimeters in height. Her sleeves and pantslegs had to be rolled up
to keep them out of the way and she had also needed to bore a new
notch in the middle of her belt to hold her pants up, even given the
added purchase of her transmogrified hips.
I intended to put Hitchcock to work at something light, and K.P.
might have been a logical choice. But Lowry had advised me against
imposing anything that would smack of "housekeeping." He was worried
that the transformees might react negatively to "women's work." So,
instead, I decided to attach the recovering Hitchcock to a foraging
detail. It would give her a good deal of exercise in the open air
but require little heavy exertion of her. On second thought, I added
Roberts to the same group. We didn't know yet how the men would
react to having a transformee working side by side with them, and so
having Roberts on hand to look after his friend made sense.
Hitchcock seemed happy enough with my decision and so I dismissed
her.
Watching her go, I remembered that it had been Hitchcock who had
led Lowry into a disturbing new theory. The transformee had insisted
that she had recognized her face -- her present female face -- in the
mirror.
That seemed impossible. Hitchcock looked nothing like the
thirtyish, prematurely bald, black-bearded man of her former life.
As with most of the transformees, there was not even a family
resemblance between her old shape and her new. Lowry had nonetheless
accepted the unlikely premise as a possibility worth investigating
and encouraged Hitchcock to try to remember everything she could.
Finally the girl was able to say that she had often seen her present
face in her daydreams when she had been a man! What Mark Hitchcock
was telling us, in essence, was that "she" had been changed into
"his" own fantasy girl.
#
Lowry couldn't put much credence in this bizarre notion at
first, but he and young Drew had nonetheless tested the theory, going
around to some of the other transformees equipped with mirrors and
carefully-crafted questions. Many of the women, they found, had
never looked carefully at their own reflection and even now had to be
carefully coaxed before they would do so. To Lowry's and Drew's
surprise, a good many transformees reacted like Hitchcock, claiming
that their faces did indeed look familiar. But one, an Arab-American
named Ulad Jami, was even more specific. She had, to her horror,
found herself looking into a face that she recognized very well
indeed -- the face of a fantasy belly dancer whose undulating image
she -- as a he -- had been assiduously masturbating to since high
school.
Dr. Lowry thought that he was on to something, so he worked out
a theory and ran it by me.
Every heterosexual man, the doctor alleged, harbors the
immensely strong image of a particular woman in his unconscious mind.
This image may be known to him only as a masturbation fantasy or a
daydream lover, but she actually represents the deeply-buried
feminine aspect of his own psychology. She is his intuitive,
emotional side, his "inner woman," so to speak. Psychologists have
long been aware of her existence and have referred to her as the
"anima."
In a healthily-integrated male personality this anima, as
counterpoised to the animus, the inner man, provided the emotional
depth and dimension that a man needed for achieving and maintaining
friendships, for appreciating and loving his mate, for enjoying his
children. In the same way, women possessed an unconscious animus as
a guiding principle in her struggle against odds, in approaching the
world logically, and in striving for long-ranged goals. The anima in
man and the animus in woman gave the two sexes a common ground, a
capacity for sympathy and understanding that prevented them from
reacting to one another as though they were two different alien
races.
In most Earth cultures, masculine logic and feminine emotion
remained in eternal conflict. The more masculine a man was, or
sought to become, the more he instinctively repressed and denied his
anima. By young adulthood a man usually accomplished this to a great
degree. For example, while women seemed able to make new friends
easily over their entire lifetime, males were normally capable of
doing so only in childhood and youth. These were the true friends
whom he carried with him throughout his life, until they were
inevitably attritioned away and he was left pretty much alone at the
end. The adult male, in contrast, though he might acquire new chums,
buddies, comrades, pals along the way, rarely achieved any kind of
deep camaraderie, any bond of trust that would invite him to touch
upon subjects other than the impersonal or superficial. Topics of
regarding hopes, fears, or expectations, remained out-of-bounds.
Women, for their part, often had their own battles with their
animus, but there were fewer social sanctions against a woman
behaving in a masculine manner, hence her reduced psychological
tension. During the short-lived feminist era, in fact, some women
deliberately gave free reign to their harshest animus-inspired
qualities, and for a while society even sanctioned such behavior.
But, alas, an animus-worship that trumped the feminine instinct only
resulted in seriously dysfunctional behavior over time.
Psychologists differed in their recommendations but, within
reasonable limits, it seemed that a little repression of their
incongruous inner nature was actually healthy for both men and women.
Lowry had drifted, but now he got back to his main point. He
thought that a man's anima, though held prisoner in the dark, was
always engaged in a struggle for its free expression. As clever and
seductive as any flesh-and-blood female, the wily anima early on
discovered the one route of escape open to her -- the route of a
man's libido. Instinctively, the male welcomed, even sought out, the
image of Woman, and into this void the anima cleverly flowed. But in
entering into a man's libido, the anima, like any alien intruder, was
forced to blend into the territory lest she be discovered and
expelled.
The inner woman, therefore, would usually incarnate herself as a
fantasy image which the man would cherish, usually that of a young
and sexually-alluring temptress or sweetheart. So strong was this
image, in fact, that males seeking a mate in the real world very
often measured the women they met not, as once commonly believed,
against the standards of his mother, but of his own anima.
I could actually follow Lowry's theory for a short distance. It
was well known that a man possessed a side which, unfortunately, got
in the way of his being a good soldier. One aim of basic training
was to burn off that aspect of his personality. The young man was
put through hell-on-earth, driven past his own imaginary boundaries,
required to be all that he could be -- but only as a male. Whenever
a soldier seemed to be flagging, seemed to be accepting any sort of
personal limit, a bawling drill sergeant, his judgmental father
figure, was johnny-on-the-spot mocking him, calling him a "girl," a
"pussy," a "faggot," or a "woman." That kind of treatment usually
inspired the recruit to redouble his efforts to be a man. But Lowry
was saying that, despite this conditioning, the "inner woman" was
never completely killed off, she was just locked away in the back of
a human unconscious, except for her libido image, which was actually
intensified in compensation.
In the cauldron of the ultra-masculine male psyche, even more so
than in that of the man in the street, the anima was transformed from
what perhaps had originally been a well-rounded persona into a 200-
proof distillation of pure, ferocious, feline sexuality. In this
form, the anima was always up front in a man's psyche, compelling him
to seek her out in the real world -- to find her in women of
immediate and obvious sexuality: strippers, hookers, b-girls.
But while Nature allowed the anima to be transformed, it was
very rarely killed off. In fact, to actually kill her, or even
hermetically seal her away without any possible means of expression,
would be to deal a fatal blow to a man's mental health. The loss of
what amounted to his emotional resources had to produce a troubled
individual, even a madman -- possibly a dangerous one.
I had always taken Lowry's ideas seriously, but I couldn't go
along with him in this case. That my men were trained and hardened
fighters could be taken for granted. They had seen slaughter and
been the agents of it, had watched friends die in their arms and had
taken life with their own hands. Tough and disciplined though they
demonstrably were, none of them were without feelings. Men had their
full complement of emotion, I knew, but it was simply men's emotion.
A male might have sex fantasies, but that didn't mean that he had a
full-blown female persona inside himself. In fact, it probably meant
exactly the opposite.
After Lowry had said his piece, I asked, "What are you really
driving at, Doc?"
As expected, Sebastian didn't have a worked-out theory, just a
wild guess: "If you assume advanced enough genetics, it's not hard
to make a female out of a male. You only have to take away his Y
chromosomes and clone his X chromosomes to replace them, or leave his
Y's where they are, but enhance them to an X status."
I just shook my head. It seemed that the good doctor had now
crawled out upon the limb of pure fantasy. There was much I could
have said to set him right, but preferred not to be harsh; he was
under just as great a strain as I. "Surely there's more going on
than just genetic alteration," I suggested with a tone of calculated
mildness.
"That's true," affirmed Lowry, perhaps not picking up on my
skepticism. "There's also some sort of morphing going on. My theory
is this: Aliens don't necessarily know what human females look like,
so they have to be looking for some sort of pattern to follow. If
these assumed aliens can telepathically tap into a male's mind,
they'll readily isolate a powerful image of a healthy young female.
This is, of course, the subject's own central sex fantasy, or rather
his own anima repressed into acting as one."
I advised Lowry to keep this theory to himself. If word ever
got out that our respected healer believed that the soldiers of the
54th would soon all transform into their own masturbation fantasies,
the morale of bravest of them would break like a strand of dry
spaghetti.
#
The role call of transformees grew steadily with no end in sight
-- two a day, every day. Fortunately, another early transformee,
Marduke, was giving signs of recovery. I put her on Hitchcock's
detail, hoping that the two might provide sympathy and moral support
for one another.
The worst blow of all was the loss of Dr. Lowry. The morning
after his disappearance the stretcher- bearers brought him back in
the shape of a fine- featured, dark-haired woman who was, physically
at least, in her mid- to late- twenties.
I studied Lowry's new face with consternation as she lay
unconscious in the infirmary, tended by Alan Drew. She looked
exactly like the sort of woman that I would have expected a man like
Sebastian to conjure up, assuming that his fantasy theory was true --
not a dame, not a babe, but a lady -- a lady of grace and dignity,
not the hormonal show girl and sex-sim types who were gradually
making our camp look like a girlie revue.
"Anything I can do?" I asked the medic.
"You're needed everywhere, Major Breen," came Drew's slow, heavy
reply. "I'll take care of -- of Dr. Lowry -- and the other one. --
But if you could, sir --"
"Yes?"
"I don't know much about the sergeant's friends. We're going to
need to find a suicide watcher for him -- for her." I nodded and I
looked across at Sgt. Gold on the other cot. It had been Gold who
had once remarked that he hoped that there would be "plenty more"
sleeping beauties where the first two -- Halder and Olson -- had come
from. I hoped that when he -- she -- awakened, that foolish wish
would not add fuel to the furnace of her torment.
No transformation up to that morning had shocked me more than
Lowry's. Perhaps I had unconsciously taken it for granted that our
physician would himself prove immune to the disease, or at least that
he would be the last to succumb. It hadn't happened that way, and
now I was left thinking that if this fate could befall Sebastian
Lowry himself, who in the world could resist it?
No one?
I took stock. Olson's suicide had left 536 men -- persons --
in our encampment. In about two months almost a quarter of our
command had been transformed. In another six months, what?
I refused to look that far ahead.
While I considered our ongoing dilemma, another disaster struck.
Lowry's fate had affected me on a profound personal level, but I had
underestimated the effect that it might have upon others -- those who
had been trusting in our doctor to find an antidote to the
transformations. Our measures had so far prevented any more
transformee suicides, but what we hadn't anticipated was suicide
among the males. Herb Woolenska, a demolitions specialist, had left
his comrades without a word of explanation shortly after Dr. Lowry
was brought back. He had climbed the steep hill overlooking our camp
and, from its highest cliff, had jumped to his death.
I felt again what I had felt when Olson died. But what most
bothered me most this time was that some part of me thought that it
understood Herb Woolenska.
#
We buried Woolenska the next day, and that night I did my best
to block out the image of his grave plot. I had lost men in combat
before, but these suicides bespoke a fundamental failure on my part.
I wished so much that I could talk my troubles to someone, to let out
all that was eating on me, but that had never been possible except,
to a small degree, with Sebastian Lowry. But now he was gone.
Emotionally at least, I was equating Lowry's transformation with
his death. I visited his -- or, as I might as well put it -- her
bedside several times each day, a generosity with my time which I
never had extended to any of the others. Though she had recovered
consciousness quickly, Sebastian seemed to be suffering just like all
the others. Somehow I had expected -- or at least had hoped -- that
the same doctor who had carefully studied the phenomenon of
transformation trauma would prove more resilient against it than
anyone else -- and a little less human.
In the dark of night I found myself trying not to think of
transformees, of women, and especially not of Woman. Woman with a
capital W. From an ideal of beauty and pleasure, I'm sure that to
most men upon Klink Woman had become an image of terror and loathing.
She was the witch, the evil goddess, the Medusa. She was Scylla
reaching out; she was Charybdis swallowing entire crews. She was
every image of fear and degradation that Mankind had ever conceived
of. I could almost wish there was no such thing as a woman in the
entire universe.
Each night the phantasms of my unconscious mind were invariably
transformed into amazing shapes -- and all too often into the shape
of a woman. Not Scylla, not Charybdis, but Another. I didn't know
her name; she existed nowhere except in my own mind and, despite our
close association over the years, I never named her. Or, more
honestly said, I had given her a thousand names, but none that were a
part of her; they were like the names that a script-writer might give
to a character. The Nameless Woman had had many starring roles in my
fantasies: the sexpot in the bustier, the show girl in feathers, the
bar girl with the slit skirt, the barbarian slave with the steel
collar around her neck, awaiting the touch of her master -- who was
himself the symbol of the primordial, conquering male.
She was lovely, this Nameless One. Lithe, light of complexion,
her breasts, full and firm, were the kind of breasts that a man
longed to cup in his hands, to knead with eager fingers. Her narrow
waist curved into bewitching hips and her black hair was ajiggle with
bouncing ringlets. At times she seemed to come so close to me that I
could see deeply into those gleaming aquamarine eyes. If she had
been a vehicle, her motor would have raced, powered by a supercharge
of passion and sexuality. But at other times she was not a machine
at all, but a warm and gentle pet. And in this role she could
transform effortlessly from the bikinied beauty upon the sunlit
beach, to the sultry lover-companion waiting for her man in the ruddy
light of an open fire, greeting him with a brimming champagne glass
held in each hand, her red lips lifted for a kiss, her flesh lightly
perfumed and fragrant.
"Damn it!" I muttered into the stifling darkness. With an
effort of will, I drove the Nameless One away and kept her away by
counting mathematical tables determinedly -- until I dropped off into
a fitful sleep.
I awoke with a headache, but felt disinclined to seek relief in
my bottle of ILW tablets. I could still work even as my head
throbbed and all of us had to go easy on our medical supplies; the
truly sick might be in dire need of them someday.
Crossing the camp after breakfast, a delegation -- a mob, really
-- engulfed me. I demanded to know what was on their minds and it
became clear that Lowry's transformation had shocked them all out of
their wits. They had given up hope of defeating the phenomenon and
were demanding to leave the camp, to escape from whatever it was that
had us in its sights. I tacitly reminded them that our detached
parties had always suffered separate transformations of their own and
even going out a hundred kilometers hadn't helped the situation. I
speculated that it might be a planet-wide phenomenon.
"Maybe not!" shouted a ring leader. "We'll go out a thousand
kilometers! Two thousand! You can stay behind with the women if you
want!"
I analyzed the explosive quality of the soldiers' fear. Terror
could easily turn otherwise sensible men violent and so I maneuvered
to bleed off a little of the pressure before it caused a blow-up.
"Possibly you're right, soldier," I admitted impatiently. "I'll
consider your proposal. It's something we should make the first
order of business at the next staff meeting -- tonight or tomorrow.
But detachment is a major undertaking, and it's going to have
ramifications which you men probably haven't considered so far. We
can't approach such a serious matter in a panic."
They didn't trust me, but neither were they yet willing to call
me a liar to my face. Now that the situation seemed to have calmed
somewhat, I pushed my way through the crowd. I half-expected a blow
from behind, but the men still hadn't worked themselves up to
outright mutiny. Even so, I had no doubt that ugly outcome lay just
around the corner and, unless I played my bad hand very carefully, we
were in for trouble. It wasn't lost upon me that this was the first
serious challenge to my authority so far and knuckling under to it
would go a long way toward ending my capacity to command effectively.
Moreover, I firmly believed that flight would be
counterproductive. Men would be transformed along the trail and what
would a panicky mob of refugees do? Flee on ahead and leave the poor
devils behind, to wake up alone, traumatized and lost? Transformees
needed watching, tending. Had we fallen so low? Was it dog eat dog
now? Devil take the hindmost? Where was the esprit de corps of the
old 54th? How could a band of brothers such as ours start turning
against one another even in circumstances as bad as these?
Given my headache and my gloomy state, I was at much less than
my best when Dr. Lowry paid me a visit.
This was a call that I had not been expecting. It had been only
three days since her transformation, much too soon for a transformee
to throw off her trauma. While Sebastian had lain asleep on her cot,
her face had been relaxed, innocent, my sympathy had gone out to her.
Now those same features were tense and hard.
"How are you, Doc?" I inquired evenly. It was strange to call
this woman "Doc." Despite everything that my mind knew to be true,
my instincts told me that she was a total stranger.
"I'm fine," Lowry informed me in a dead tone. "This shape is
going to take a little getting used to, naturally, but I've got work
to do and I can't worry about it."
"You've been through hell, Doc," I said. "You don't have to do
anything before you're up to it."
"Don't make a fuss, Major!" she fired back, not in a loud manner
but harshly just the same. "A man, a woman. What of it? Two arms,
two legs, a head. There's not all that much difference. The mammae
get in the way, of course, and it's inconvenient having to drop one's
pants just to take a piss, but half the human race gets along that
way, so I guess I can, too."
I wasn't so sure. I thought that the doctor was repressing and
psychologists always said that repression wasn't good. Then again, I
was no psych myself. Wasn't it possible that Lowry was showing the
very resilience that I had been hoping to see from her? Still, I
doubted that to be the case. I even doubted, in an emotional sense,
that my caller was Sebastian. She might still be a competent doctor
-- in fact I prayed that she was -- but I could not convince myself
that this edgy woman had anything to do with the cool and phlegmatic
man I had known for several months and had just begun to know well.
"If you really want to go back to work, you may," I told her.
"Just remember that you doctors always make the worst patients. If
the going gets too hard, don't push it. Knock off and let Drew take
over. The company needs its doctor at h--, uh, his best."
"You can't hurt me with pronouns, Major," she said flatly.
"I'll be all right."
Would she? Strain lines were written into her woman's magazine
features and I detected a neurotic tremble in her eyelids. The
stress bottled up inside the physician betrayed itself at the corners
of her grim mouth.
With misgivings, I consented to her request and my visitor let
herself out. I watched Lowry go, stepping along awkwardly in her
huge shoes and baggy, over-long trousers. What bothered me most was
that my former friend had only addressed me by rank during her visit
and not by name. It put distance between us and distance made
everything harder. But possibly her distance was only a reflection
of my own. I had wanted to help Sebastian, not to hurt her more, but
Lowry was aching, anyone could see that. I doubted that she could
work productively at this point, but then again, work might be the
best therapy for her, just as it had been for Hitchcock and Marduke.
I had to talk to Drew. There was no one else close enough to
Sebastian to give me worthwhile advice.
********
Chapter 3
*Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.*
AS YOU LIKE IT
The medic Alan Drew had had Dr. Lowry's confidence for as long
as I had known him. Drew had also impressed me as being smart and
competent. We threshed out the subject of Dr. Lowry, though it was
only with considerable reluctance that the private would discuss his
immediate superior in such terms.
"I'm worried," he admitted. "She's pretending that she's all
right, but she's -- not."
"Of course Lowry's not all right," I said. "But what do you
think? Can't she can work through this better than -- than most of
the others have? She's a doctor after all."
"I don't know. Maybe she's not so much different from the rest
of us. I'm most concerned that she's bolted her suicide watch. What
exactly is it that you want me to do, sir?"
"Keep an eye on her. If she becomes a danger to herself, or
commits any unacceptable medical blunders, you should be the man who
could best judge that."
"If she suspects that I'm spying it will poison our working
relationship permanently."
"It's not spying; it's evaluation and observation. For now,
just watch her perform, listen to what she says. If she needs moral
support, be there for her. You're good with -- these people. I've
seen you."
"Thank you, Major, but it's no trick to handle transformees.
They're human and they respond best when they're treated that way.
But I had an idea that I wanted to share with Dr. Lowry. It seemed
like the wrong time to broach it with her, though."
"What is it?"
"I'm thinking of a support group."
"A support group? For the transformees? Who'd be in it?"
"There's close to a hundred and thirty transformees now. Some
seem to be settling down and deciding that life goes on. They can
start helping one another."
His proposal made sense. In fact, in a less ambitious way, that
had been my thinking when had I put Hitchcock and Marduke together.
"You may be right, Private," I said. "Any specific recommendations?"
"Margrave and Hitchcock's progress has been very encouraging.
And one or two of the others seems to be shaping up every day. Why
don't we put the most recovered transformees together in a work group
of their own? Have them barracks together, too. They couldn't help
but start talking over things and working through their problems."
"We should take this idea to Lowry," I suggested. "This sort of
thing has to be her call, and unless we relieve her, we can't go over
her head. If she agrees, we'll put the recovering transformees in
with Margrave and Hitchcock, and then transfer them all to some
useful chore."
Working together, we came up with a list of a dozen women who
had ceased to be basket cases, including Halder and Capt. Ames.
"Ames is still having a rough time of it," I said. "It would be
trouble for Hitchock and Marduke if she flew off the handle and
started pulling rank. We'll have to give our unit leaders the
medical authority to keep her in line."
"I agree, sir."
I regarded Drew sourly, unsure whether to reprimand him or not.
I wasn't used to having privates sign off on any of my
recommendations. But neither did I want to wear the proverbial chip
and reprimand him. Drew was practically irreplaceable at the moment,
and dressing him down wouldn't be a good way to kick off our new
project. With my head aching, I let the matter go.
Drew and I did talk the project over with Lowry a little while
later -- and a surreal interview that turned out to be! It was as if
she either didn't understand or didn't care what we were talking
about. Since it was clear that I wanted it done, however, the doctor
simply shrugged and delegated the implementation over to Drew and
psychologically took a powder. That was really the best we could
have expected under the circumstances, though, and so I started
issuing orders.
The women on our list would form a furniture- making detail. My
greatest misgivings concerned Ames. The captain would be expected to
carry out work better suited to an enlisted man while operating under
the supervision of privates. As it turned out, it never had to come
to that.
#
The matter of the unrest was a subject too important to put off.
My staff meeting later that day considered the idea of suppressing
the panicky men by force, but nobody was too keen on that idea. It
would be like bottling up explosives. To keep the matter alive like
an anaerobic bacteria in a corked bottle might swing the majority of
the men over to their side, and then break open more powerful than
ever. And, anyway, if the malcontents weren't allowed to leave by
daylight, they'd probably go anyway, at night. How could we hold so
many if they were determined to go AWOL? We hadn't even built a brig
yet. It had to be a better solution to let the pressure off, to
lance the boil early. Therefore, I was willing to detach the restive
men. I reasoned that once they realized that they couldn't escape
the transformation plague by flight, they would return more
tractable.
I decided to place my senior captain, Ted Crawford, in charge,
assisted by Lt. Morrow. Their orders were to discover whether or not
any geographical limit to the phenomenon existed and, if not, to
persuade the detachees to return.
I summoned the entire muster to an assembly after the noon mess
and recounted the situation as I saw it, reiterating my doubts about
the proposed separation and of my concern for the soldiers who would
be transformed along the march. But, I assured the assembled men
that, if every reasonable precaution were taken to give humane care
for their casualties, I would not oppose the division of the company.
I concluded with: "This is the only detachment we will be
making, men. If you stay, let it be because you really intend to
stick it out and obey the orders of your officers." With a bayonet,
I drew a line in the dirt. "Now, all of you who want to join the
detachment, step across this line now."
The soldiers paused, looked at one another, muttered some low-
toned conversation between themselves. Then, before three minutes
were passed, fifty-three, a tenth of our total number, crossed over.
This included a disproportionate number of fleet techs, which was
perhaps to be expected -- such men not having been completely melded
psychologically into our Battle Group as yet. But it bothered me
that there were so many men whom I knew that were willing to go; it
made me feel like a failure in my role of William B. Travis. It was
sad to think that a handful of dirt-poor Texas sod-busters three
hundred years ago would have shown so much more backbone in the hour
of danger than had dozens of former fire-eaters from the 54th. But
then again, the men of the Alamo were only facing annihilation, not
womanhood.
"All right," I said, "now I'll need some additional ---
personnel -- willing to accompany the detachment as a sort of orderly
corps. It will be your duty to care for new transformees, and, as
long as it remains feasible, to return them to us here."
There was a good turnout of volunteers for this duty, including
Hitchcock, Marduke, and several of the women whom Drew and I had
considered for our proposed detail. I actually couldn't accept as
many willing people as offered themselves. All told, 76 men --
soldiers -- were detached. At my request, Private Drew would lead
the auxiliaries and get them off to a good start. He would remain
with the detachment for as long as possible -- just a few days, we
thought -- then return; the camp needed him too much to allow any
longer absence, not as long as Dr. Lowry was such an uncertain
commodity. Anyway, I was looking forward to Drew's report, since the
more we understood the psychology of this unrest, the better
positioned we would be for dealing with any similar problems in the
future.
If we had a future.
Until dark and through the following day, Crawford and Morrow
were hard at it, overseeing the equipping and the organization of the
detachment. We hoped that the mens' absence would be very temporary
but, in the meantime, the camp could only benefit from the departure
of such a panicky element.
While this was happening, we lost our usual complement of men --
including Lipkin, who, ironically, was going to be one of the
detachees, and -- in what was a heavy blow to our command structure,
Captain Tritcher. Interestingly, Tritcher who had been black,
returned to us as a very fine-boned and pale-skinned elfin blonde.
If it were not for their dog tags, I honestly would not have had a
clue as to which soldier was which. This was the first occasion of a
race change accompanying a sex change and so I asked Lowry for an
opinion, but she proved to be uninterested and unhelpful. I was
pretty sure, though, that Tritcher was the exception that proved the
rule -- that what was happening to us depended upon a man's
psychology, not his physiology.
I regarded Lowry, whom, I thought, had been perfunctory in her
examination of the new transformees. Maybe this was becoming old
stuff to her, or maybe it was more disturbing evidence of her
stressful state.
"You've been through this yourself, Sebastian," I remarked of a
sudden. "Aren't you able to give these men some advice that will
help them along?"
"I don't have any advice for anybody, Major."
So blunt, so cold. I really missed the old Lowry. I made ready
to leave, but just then caught sight of a book of Shakespeare's plays
lying on the table. "Your book, Doctor?"
"No, it's Drew's."
I picked it up. Back in high school and college I had read most
of Shakespeare's plays with great enjoyment. Unfortunately, over my
army career, I would have been much more likely to have been found
reading Clausewitz or Fuller. I opened the volume to a random page
and my glance fell upon a line spoken by Petruccio in "The Taming of
the Shrew:
"I am peremptory as she proud-minded;
And where two raging fires meet together
They do consume the thing that feeds their fury:
Though little fire grows great with little wind,
Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all:
So I to her and so she yields to me;
For I am rough and woo not like a babe."
"Say!" I exclaimed. "Why couldn't we put on a play for the
camp. It might be therapeutic."
"Therapy is my department, Major," Lowry informed me as
nervelessly as a machine. "And that reminds me, when you sent away my
medic, you doubled my work load."
"I thought our people would need him out there. Besides, he'll
probably be back in a few days."
"Will he? Maybe I'll have just another useless, traumatized
woman on my hands."
I put down the book, then left the infirmary without another
word.
#
Each day I noted the names of the vanished men and new
transformees in my log. Every day more names. It was as if we were
a flock of sheep and the farmer was coming for two of us every day
with the gelding knife. I had never felt so helpless in all my life.
We were fighting men, but we couldn't fight this thing. We
absolutely couldn't understand it. We couldn't even run from it,
though we were, futilely, trying to fight, understand, and run all at
the same time.
The departure of the detachment left us a lot of reorganization
to attend to, such as reshuffling the squads and work details.
Demoralized by events, my officers performed as if they were pulling
sledges behind their backs. I wasn't much better off and welcomed
the chance to knock it off at nightfall. After a light supper I
still felt restless, and so went outside, just to pace around under
the light of Klink's twin moons, and in that way try to work off my
depressed state.
The planet was a beautiful one, especially on moonlit nights
like this one -- the aroma of the vegetation, the trilling calls of
the night-flyers, the wind in the trees, and the hundred little
pipes, croaks, and squawks, most of whose makers we still did not
know. At first we had all been too busy to care, and then too
preoccupied. Would we ever enjoy the presence of mind to take
pleasure in the simple things? Maybe when we were all --
I forced that thought out of my mind.
I continued my walk, my ears alert to the evening sounds.
Suddenly I heard something that didn't fit -- and it was coming from
the infirmary. I drifted over in that direction and the closer I
got, the more I believed that I heard sobbing. At first I assumed it
to be either Tritcher or Lipkin, but then remembered that both of
them had been moved out and placed under their suicide watches. So,
who was still in the infirmary and crying up a storm? I poked my
head inside the door. The sound was coming from Lowry's sleeping
room, so I crossed over and put my ear to the door.
Yes, it was a Lowry's sobbing for certain. I also heard her
mutter of just a few distinct words, like, "God" and "please" and
"why?"
There was that damnable question again -- "Why?"
Sebastian was having a bad time of it and that bothered me
tremendously. I nearly knocked, but something stopped me. I didn't
want to get myself involved in something so personal as what the
doctor must be going through. I told myself that I hadn't been asked
to help and, like I have said, I was no psychologist, no clergyman --
and not even very good at such things as a layman. In fact, my every
attempt to give Sebastian support over the last few days had been
rebuffed. What should I do? Offer to hold hands with my old poker
buddy? She'd throw me out in a second!
But there was more to it than that. To give solace, the
comforter has to be at peace within himself. At that moment, I was
empty; I had nothing more to give. And putting thoughts of our
former friendship aside, I couldn't shake the idea that it wasn't
really Lowry behind that door, but someone different, a stranger, to
whom I could feel little real connection.
I don't remember making a decision to go, but the next thing I
knew my legs were carrying me away, stepping so softly that I was
sure that my boots couldn't be heard over my friend's subdued
weeping.
#
I dreamed of Olson's grave again that night. But this time I
saw chiseled into her marker a new name and epitaph. It read,
"Sebastian Lowry, physician. A good man and a good friend."
I awoke in a cold sweat. What had I done? Had I been insane?
The doctor was in no condition to be left alone! I thrust my legs
into my trousers, ran bare-footed to the infirmary, and, not pausing
to knock, shoved open Lowry's door.
She lay there curled up, still fully clothed. On the floor near
the bed lay a syringe. I stared first at it and then at her.
Sebastian didn't move, didn't even seem to be breathing. I scrambled
to my comrade's side and turned her over.
The woman's eyes opened in startlement. "Rupe?!" she gasped," -
- Wha?"
"Are you all right, Doc? I thought --"
The relief! I had thought for an instant that she had been
dead, but didn't dare explain why I would suppose that.
Lowry said nothing for a moment, just resting there on her side,
her eyes closed. Then she whispered, "It started coming out last
night."
"What did?"
"The horror of it. The -- grief, the loss of identity. The
impossibility of facing this by myself."
"I'm sorry," I said, my mouth dry, without bringing out exactly
what I was sorry for.
She shook her head. "I thought I was doing all right, but I
wasn't. I was just numb. When the shock started to wear off, all of
it slammed together, and it almost killed me."
I glanced down at the hypodermic on the floor. "I almost killed
myself," she whispered.
"W-What's in that thing?"
"Dicorahylaminophen. Instant death."
"Doc!"
"I felt so useless. I couldn't help anyone, I couldn't even
help myself." Then she let out a short, bitter laugh. "Also, I
wasn't so keen on being a girl for the rest of my life."
She kept on laughing, skirting the edge of hysteria, I feared,
until she began reciting, "There was a little girl, who had a little
curl, right in the middle of her forehead ....when she was
good....when she was good...." Sebastian closed her eyes.
I took her hand between mine and pressed it reassuringly. Lowry
blinked and looked up at me. "Rupe," she whispered. "I was all
alone last night, more alone than I've ever been. I had such a need
to talk to someone."
I glanced away. I almost asked her why she hadn't talked to me,
but under the circumstances, I didn't have the right.
"I nearly went over to see you," she pressed on, "but it was a
pride thing, I guess. I'd been treating you so badly lately that I
just couldn't stand to eat crow. So that left me with nobody to talk
to except to myself, and the room. I guess I pretty soon realized
that I was really talking to God. So I started telling him that this
was too much for me -- that if he couldn't bring me back, to at least
take away the misery and the pain. He had to, I told Him, because if
He didn't, it was going to kill me and -- and, well, I didn't want to
die." She glanced down at the hypodermic on the floor.
I squeezed her hand. "God or no God, you made it, Doc. You're
a pretty strong S.O.B. and you're going to be all right after this,
aren't you?"
"I don't know. I hope so."
"I'm going to get Mason back to stay with you like before, or
somebody else that you like better, at least until you're yourself
again. It won't be hard to get you someone. You've made a lot of
friends here."
She squeezed my fingers. "And you're the best of them all."
I just sat there, again unable to look into her face.
"There was a voice," Lowry went on.
"An audio hallucination?"
She laughed. Sebastian Lowry had always been a man of faith, I
knew. That fact was not always obvious because he had disliked
sparring with skeptics, and so rarely brought up the subject.
"What did the voice say, Doc?"
"That I had to be brave. That this was the beginning of a new
life for me, and while it was going to be different from what I was
used to, it wasn't going to be bad. The voice called it a rebirth."
"Well, we've called it a lot worse things."
"I guess that part must have been a dream." She had said that
without much conviction.
"Anything else?"
Sebastian suddenly sat up. "Yes. The voice also told me that
there's a reason for what's been happening -- and soon we'll know
what it is."
"Don't worry about voices, Doctor. It wasn't real."
"But you don't understand, Rupe! -- The fear went away as soon
as I heard it."
I could be glad that Lowry was feeling better without giving too
much meaning to her mystical experience. I'll say this, though -- a
dose of religion was lot better than a shot of dicorahylaminophen in
the arm.
Lowry eased herself against me just then, letting her head rest
upon my chest. She seemed so much like any other emotionally-
exhausted woman at that moment that it shocked me a little. I didn't
suppose there was anything sexual about the gesture, but it made me
uncomfortable nonetheless.
The doctor seemed to grow sleepy while I held her and, finally,
I decided that I could ease her back to the pillow and throw a sheet
over her. That peaceful, innocent look, the one which I had seen
before, had come back.
I waited by her bedside a while, watching my friend napping,
thinking, hoping, that Sebastian had met her personal demon and could
now start the climb back. There were so many others who still had so
much farther to go. For me, I had plenty far to go myself before I
could consider myself either the sort of man or the commander that I
had formerly believed myself to be.
#
Rawson and Lt. Chih were found transformed a couple days later,
Rawson looking physiologically like a star-club lap dancer, and Chih
now possessed of that delicate, toy-like beauty which oriental taste
so esteems in its women. I knew a couple of Rawson's friends on
sight and so got their agreement to take turns being her suicide
watch. With a little additional effort, I found someone for Chih,
too. Her new watcher was a transformee whom Chih had stood by
through some bad days and nights, and now she wanted to pay him --
her -- back. This person, Zeev Yadin, seemed highly motivated and so
I risked putting a traumatized soldier in the care of a transformee
for the first time. Very possibly, nursing a buddy would be a better
expenditure of Yadin's time than making furniture.
That afternoon more disappearances, the next morning more women.
It just went on and on. In fact, it was worse now than ever. The
third day after the departure of the detachment, Halder and Ames
returned leading a couple more transformees. These, I soon learned,
had formerly been Stark and Big Bear. They hadn't gotten far before
the curse of Klink had caught up with them.
I had been impressed by Ames' manner when she reappeared. The
captain seemed to have emerged from her sad state of depression.
After Ames' debriefing I let her resume a sort of limited duty. If
she did well, I intended to make her a kind of special officer for
what, in my mind, I was already calling the "women's battalion."
The following day Hardy and Marduke returned with two more
transformees. The next day it was Hitchcock and Roberts with yet
another pair.
Now that both Hitchcock and Marduke were back, I talked to them
about the support-group idea. It meant training the recovering
transformees as carpenters, but Marduke had been on the furniture-
making detail before her transformation and would therefore prove out
a competent instructor. Each was willing to give the idea a try.
Drew and a man named Cotts were the last of the auxiliaries to
return with transformees from Crawford's detachment. They were now
too far out to make the trip back with traumatized transformees
feasible. Drew's report was the last word that we were likely to
have from the detachees anytime soon. It appeared that Crawford and
Morrow were planning to continue along with the remaining group of 59
until it became clear that there was no place to go.
Evenings had become a mere hiatus between daily crises --
afternoon disappearances and morning discoveries. I was suffering
from frequent headaches which Lowry diagnosed as stress-related.
Oftentimes these were accompanied by nausea. I would vomit and then
lay enervated for more than an hour. I was recuperating from one
such debilitating episode when the doctor paid me a call. She seemed
to have something on her mind, which I supposed presaged another
problem.
"What's the trouble, Doc?" I asked with misgivings.
"All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl," she recited
wanly. "I could use a game of cards."
Sebastian was wearing her hair differently, I noticed -- not
just shoved back over her shoulders and neglected as before, but it
was now combed and tied up in a ponytail. Good grooming was a sign
of a positive state of mind, of course, but I wondered why all the
transformees didn't just cut their hair short, as some had.
If this was really just a social call, though, I was glad.
"What's your game?" I asked.
She pulled up a chair beside my desk. "Five card stud."
I took the pack of cards from my footlocker and shuffled them
carefully. We were both reverential in regard to our cards; playing
with makeshifts, as we certainly would have to do in some not-too-
distant future, wouldn't be half so much fun.
"I've missed our poker games, Rupe," Sebastian remarked. Then
she added more pointedly, "I've missed the kind of friendship that we
used to have, too."
"We're still friends!" I reassured her. "If I've done anything
to make you think otherwise -- well, it's only this pressure." I put
the deck down. She cut.
"There's more than that," Lowry said, "but it's to be expected.
I don't look like the same person, don't sound like the same person,
and I'm so knotted up inside that I'm sure I don't even act like the
same person."
"You're the same. You have to be."
"Well, I suppose," she shrugged. "-- Okay, deal 'em out."
We played hand after hand.
After a while, Sebastian got around to talking about the things
that had really bothered her since her transformation. It seemed
strange to be thinking of my old friend as a "she" -- especially now
that Lowry was speaking and behaving a little more like herself --
himself.
"It's that sense of violation that gets you down," she said all
of a sudden, her grimace painful. "I've never been raped, but it's
got to be a lot like this."
"Where do you go from here?" I asked delicately.
She shook her head, causing her ponytail to jiggle. "Well, I
suppose I'll get used to it, eventually. Life goes on. I just
wonder if this planet has any more tricks up its sleeve."
"I sure hope it doesn't," I remarked with heartfelt sincerity.
*******
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