For a few moments the centauress continued to stare vacantly to the side, but then she said in that same accented English, “I think you are even more unhappy than I, are you not?”
“I—I’m not sure. You are—Tony? Is that right?”
“Yes. And you are—Julian? Is that right?”
“Julian Beard. Or so I was. Lori-Julian now. I can understand how it can be tough on you, winding up the identical twin of your wife, but I still envy you. I would trade places in a moment, except I couldn’t do that to anybody.”
“Yours is one of those medieval cultures where women are chattel, I gather.”
“Pretty much, yes. Sort of like some of those Middle Eastern societies back on Earth, only worse. This culture is built into the genes. The fight, the aggression just sort of drains out of you. Not all at once, but little by little. I was a hell-raising bitch like they’d never seen when I first woke up there, but over time it began to dribble away. The body chemistry, brain chemistry, whatever, just takes over. It’s not that you like it—even the ones born this way mostly don’t like it—but you just can’t help yourself. I was able to keep a little of my old self, enough for my self-respect, so long as Lori was remembering his own former self and giving me some room, but lately he’s been acting, well, as badly as I think I used to act when I was a teenager. I was a handsome guy—triple-letter athlete, honor student, you name it. The girls used to fall all over themselves trying to get my attention, and I was so macho and so full of myself, I pretty well treated them like toys. I admit it. Even after I got married, I cheated. Hotshot air force officer, poster boy, often away from my family.”
“You were married?”
“Divorced.”
Tony paused. “I see. But this Lori, she was on the other end of such behavior, was she not? Growing up, I mean. And now the tables are turned. Are you Catholic?”
“No. Not much of anything, really, although my parents were Methodists.”
“I was just curious. I have many differences from you and your life, but in one way I find a certain sameness. I feel as if I am in purgatory, that I was not that bad a man, but the angels have found the one way to show me my sins and crumple my pride. Perhaps that is what this is. Purgatorio. Not as Dante imagined it but the same in the essentials. For Anne Marie it is different, because she never even had much chance to sin. For her this is a wondrous fantasy, and she is amused but not overly upset by my own state. One would think it would be more difficult to deal with having four legs and the bottom half of a horse than with changing to a woman, but I am a Latin and I was raised in a culture where this is simply unthinkable. I believe that if it were not for my love of and duty to Anne Marie, I would have killed myself.” He hesitated. “No, that is not true. The nuns did too good a job on me for me to take my life. But I would have left alone and wandered this world until I died, a hermit to my own kind. This now I cannot do, so I must learn to deal with it. In a Latin culture, macho means more than merely what you Americans would call being a ‘male chauvinist pig.’ In fact, it should not even mean that at all. It is a code of behavior, a set of duties and responsibilities for men, a way of thinking and approaching life. Not that there are not millions of womanizers, but I was brought up too well to be one of those. I respected women and loved them, but as a man. Even though we could never have sex, I was never unfaithful to Anne Marie.”
“You could never have sex?”
“She was badly crippled when we met. I was a pilot for Varig, and I was blinded in an accident. At one stroke my passion and livelihood were taken from me forever. It was while recovering in an English hospital that I met Anne Marie. She was so much more battered and broken than I, yet she was not there as a patient but as a giver of care and love. Other than her mind and soul, which shone through anything, even my darkness, the only other thing that worked perfectly on her was her eyes. So, together we became one person. She provided my eyes and my soul, and I provided the body and strength she never had. It was a love beyond anything you might imagine, and sex had virtually nothing to do with it.”
Julian was absolutely amazed at hearing this. “I think that’s an amazing story! My God! And you came through together and wound up the same species and still together, too.”
“I fully admit to never quite believing the whole story until we went through that gateway in the fallen rock,” Tony admitted. “Even then I did not believe that we were truly in another place, on another world. I was not sure that we had not died, except that I was still blind and my knee hurt from falling on that hard floor. Anne Marie almost did die; her wheelchair did not arrive with us, and the shock of being flung onto the floor was almost too much for her. Captain Solomon, as we knew him, led me as I carried her to the place where they gave us comfort and what is, I suppose, the standard briefing. Still I did not quite believe. I thought that it must be some sort of dream or trick, or a hallucination, that we had begun our suicide pact or perhaps that I had gone mad. Still I clung to her, afraid to let go, and they decided we should go through without delay because of her failing state. I thought she was at least unconscious, but just before we leapt, she whispered, ‘Centaurs. There are centaurs here, Tony. I saw one! Hold me tight and leap and think of me and centaurs!’ And I was so desperate that it was all I did think of, down to my core. At that moment, and only at that moment, I found myself believing it, believing all of it, and the thing that I was horribly afraid of was that we would be separated, that we would be separated forever by distance and perhaps by species itself. That we would become monstrous to one another. With all of that in my head, I went forward… And I awoke in a forest glade as you see me now.”
The first thing, the very first thing he did, was open his eyes and see. See normally, see perfectly, see as well as he had when he had taken his first pilot’s examination. There were colors and shapes and textures that had been but somewhat blurred and idealized memories.
He could see!
And then he had seen her, stirring, trying to get up, and he’d known instantly who she was although he’d never seen her picture or allowed anyone to describe her. He’d known her hair was blond and her eyes were green, and that had been enough.
He’d thought, wonderingly, that she made the most beautiful centauress in all creation.
He also felt the weight and the difficulty in breathing and orientation and hauled himself up to standing at almost the same moment that she did. Standing on all fours, facing her, looking at her, knowing that his prayers had been answered. They were together and of the same kind!
And then she had stared at him, first in awe, then in wonder, and said, “Tony? That can’t beyou, dear, can it?” And she had continued to stare, an expression that was half shock and half bemusement on her pretty face.
“Then—it is true!” he’d responded, his voice sounding very strange to his ears. “Then we are still together! And whole!” He did not care what form they were, human, centaur, crocodile, or swamp rat, only that they were no longer blind or infirm but healthy and still together. Still, he sensed that something was wrong. “What is it, Anne Marie?”