No rest for the weary,he thought glumly, but if he could hold out, it would be very much to his advantage. He didn’t care how far he went or if he went very far at all; if the storm grew no worse and if he maintained his current heading, it would put a lot of water between him and any pursuers. He fully expected to use this wind once it slackened off enough to trust.
For now, though, it was a matter of keeping the damned boat afloat. He watched wave after wave crash into the bow and engulf it and then felt that bizarre sensation only those who had sailed into a large storm knew, that of the deck shifting suddenly both horizontally and vertically at once as the bow came up and broke free to await another wave.
There was a lashing post, and he considered tying himself to the wheel station, but he’d sailed worse-handling craft than this in even rougher weather over thousands of years and countless endless seas. Once he got his sea legs and the rhythm of the ship, he would feel fairly comfortable with it. Still, it would be nice to sit down, strapped to a fixed chair rather than having to stand through the storm for who knew how long. Still, he dared to lock the wheel long enough to slip off the heavy coat he was wearing and noted for the first time that he’d lost his hat somewhere along the way.
Finding himself pretty well soaked anyway, he slipped off his shirt and was just deciding if he could go any farther when the small boat gave a sudden, violent lurch to one side, throwing him to the deck.
“What the—?” he asked himself, getting up and looking around. It was still pretty rough, but it wasn’t that rough. Must have hit a reef or something, he decided, shaking his head and turning back to the wheel.
He suddenly froze, a cold chill going through him to the bone even though it was as hot as ever. He looked around for the girl but found her sitting just behind the mainmast, cross-legged, looking forward at the huge swells exactly as she’d been when he’d locked the wheel. And, yet, and yet…
Wet and crumpled, his hat now sat atop the topmost spoke of the ship’s wheel.
Itus
“I understand that we have something in common,” one of the twin centauresses said to Julian in heavily accented English as they entered the hotel room.
“Yes?” was all Julian could manage, still startled both by the unexpectedly diminutive appearance of Mavra Chang and by the startling if imposing twins who seemed to have stepped out of Fantasia.
“You were a human male, were you not? And so was I. Not so Anne Marie, who was my wife.”
“I’m afraid Tony is having a very difficult time with this,” Anne Marie put in, her voice absolutely identical to the other’s but with a definitely softer and gentler, almost “sweet” tone, while Tony seemed much firmer, almost aristocratic. There were clearly two different personalities inside those mirror-image heads, not to mention the fact that Anne Marie’s accent was very British.
“I will survive the shock,” Tony commented, as if reassuring herself as well as Anne Marie. Tony was in fact looking at the very feminine, pastel-colored, and four-breasted Julian and already seeing how much worse things might have been.
Mavra walked over to Lori and stood looking at him. While she had always projected the feeling of someone much larger, in fact she now barely came up to the middle of his chest, heeled boots and all. She gave a low whistle.
“Man! The Well outdid itself on this batch! The two guys become girls, one of the girls becomes a guy, and the other girl becomes the exact identical twin of her husband. Boy! Talk about screwing around with people’s psyches!”
Lori was as stunned by the twin centauresses as Julian had been. “I thought you said two entries to the same species was just about unheard of,” he said to Mavra. He left unsaid that he was startled to be “hearing” the centauresses in Erdomese in spite of the fact that since Julian could understand them, they were most likely speaking English. Was that, he worried, a price of the translator? That it translated even languages one knew! He wondered for a moment why he hadn’t noticed this with Julian, then realized that they had uncharacteristically spoken only Erdomese to one another since his return the previous afternoon.
Mavra nodded at Lori’s comment about same-species conversions being uncommon. “They are. Sex changes—no, they happen all the time. The reason generally is to maintain the balance in the hex, since you can’t add territory. Dillians—that’s what this pair is—tend to mate only a couple of times a year and have long gestation periods. I know the race well myself. The result is that they often have periods when there are fewer births than normal, so they’re a natural to add to during one of those times, and newcomers are almost always females there because with that long gestation, they’re not necessarily going to increase the population before the Well can balance things out. It would also be most common to be female if you got put in Erdom, as Julian was, since they have a lot more females than males. Lori, I think you were the exception for reasons we discussed. On the other hand, if you had come through first, you’d undoubtedly have been female, and Julian wouldn’t even have wound up Erdomese. Hard to say. For my selfish purposes, anyway, I’m glad it worked out the way it did. Happy to have you both aboard.”
The twins, as it were, were stunning creatures on both the “human” and nonhuman halves. Both stood about 215 centimeters tall, with thick, billowing strawberry blond hair that cascaded from their heads and went down the back like a mane, out of which stuck two very equine ears that seemed to be able to pivot independently of one another, and big green eyes set in an exotically beautiful face that contained elements of classical European but had other influences from many races. The complexion was a golden brown, although it was difficult to determine if it was tanned or naturally that way. The breasts were rather large and seemed designed more to hang down when the torso leaned forward, suggesting that centaur young nursed standing on all fours; otherwise, the figure was close to perfect, going down to a very small waist at the point where the humanoid torso merged into the equine half just about where a horse’s neck would begin, so that the entire humanoid torso seemed to be slightly forward of the main body.
The lower half was not quite horse, either, but rather an equine extension of the torso, clearly having a single, supple backbone that ran from the humanoid shoulders all the way to the tail. The pony like body tapered in just forward of the rear thighs and was covered with short golden hair, ending in a large, bushy tail of the same strawberry blond as the hair on their heads. They were for all that almost supematurally supple; the backbone had to be able to flex effortlessly in almost any direction. They could bend the humanlike torso down so that they were able to actually touch the ground without bending at the knees, turning it almost backward, while swiveling the rear hips around to reach their own tails. It was in form a masterpiece of beauty and functional design.
They were the sexiest-looking creatures Julian had ever seen or imagined, all the more so because, while bipedal, she shared some of the equine look herself. She found herself thinking, Now, that’s the way it should be done!
Lori had much the same reaction and was somewhat amazed and embarrassed to discover that he was becoming turned on just looking at them. He decided he’d better sit down.
The room, which had seemed large, was pretty cramped with the two centaurs inside, but they made do as best they could. “We ordered some coffees and teas,” Julian told them. “It was all we could think of since we did not know the nature or needs of your companions.”