“I’m afraid that we’re a bit more together than either of us thought,” she’d responded hesitantly. “I wish we had a mirror, but, well, look at as much of your new self as you can and be prepared for a bit of a shock.”
“It was the one thing that I, that neither of us, had ever thought about, even considered” Tony continued. “It is still very hard for me. Not for Anne Marie, I don’t believe. Not really. As before, she sees more inside a person than the surface. But for me, and the culture in which I was raised, it is much, much harder. I think it gives the old term ‘soul mates’ a whole new meaning, does it not?”
Julian could think of a lot worse fates, but needing sympathy, she decided not to deny it to another. Still, she really thought he was lacking a lot of perspective. “It could have been much worse. Both of you as females of my race, for example. Or the ultimate fear you mentioned—that you would be of two species monstrous to one another. I of all people understand your shock, but I would trade with you in a moment.”
“Oh, I do not doubt that!” Tony responded. “And I sympathize. Still, hormones can only account for so much of anyone’s behavior, true? Otherwise, why do both of you have minds and wills? Both you and Lori must learn to control your new selves. The real problem is that you see yourself in your husband because you grew up a man, and you see yourself as the equivalent of how you perceived those young girls who threw themselves at you in your youth. Neither of us grew up female. Neither of us has the grounding of experience in the differences that brings, so we do not know how to cope. You yield because you do not know how to defend as she would. I fight when I should yield because my subjective universe was far more rigidly divided sexually than yours by my culture and upbringing. You are in despair because you cannot be her, and you cannot be your old self, and you do not have the experience or tools to be someone new. I—I can accept this. I was, after all, prepared to die with her, and I find some old prejudices crumbling now, the most basic of which is that it really does not feel that much different to be a woman. The problem is not with the body but with the mind, with needing a whole new frame of reference—not just accepting it and living with it myself but accepting the way others now perceive me and react and interact with me.”
“You mean the way men treat you.”
“No, I mean the way all others treat me. The way men look at me even when they are being nice, the very words and approach they take when speaking to me, the way certain conversations are closed to me now. And it is not just the men. The women react differently as well. As I am certain you know, a conversation strictly among women is quite different from one between men or between men and women.”
“You can say that again,” Julian agreed.
“So it is a matter of learning the rules, as it were. But I can no longer be Tony, the old Tony. Not like this. Not even to her. And I do not know how to be anything else, particularly with her. And that is something that I understand and she, not having been male, cannot yet grasp. I can be her—sister, her best friend, but I can no longer be her husband.”
“Maybe. Maybe you’re right. We’ve all got a lot to learn.” She decided that this was enough mutual wallowing for now. What Tony had said was true, but it was damned hard to feel sorry for the centauress when she would sell her soul to be either one of them. “On the other hand, this Mavra Chang is something else, isn’t she? She reminds me of a couple of women astronauts I trained with. Tough, knowledgeable, able to handle almost anything or anyone no matter what her size and sex, but still undeniably feminine.”
“She is indeed someone quite unusual,” Tony agreed. “I can only hope that toughness rubs off on the rest of us.”
“Um, I’m curious,” Julian said cautiously. “Is this what Anne Marie says she looked like? I mean, are you now a clone of her?”
“Clone is a good term,” Tony replied. “We are clones of a sort—they were so amazed at us that they sent us off to a hospital and took samples, which, I believe, were sent out to one of the high-tech lands. I believe the interest was in the fact that we even had the same fingerprints. Even identical twins do not quite have that. We are genetically absolutely identical. Only the personalities and experiences are different, and that makes quite a difference indeed.”
That was fascinating but not the answer to the question. “No, I mean, do you look like she used to? I know you said you didn’t want to have her described, I assume so you could hold a mental picture, but surely she’s said something now.”
“Oh, I see. No, we do not look like she used to. In fact, I can see something of my mother and one of my own sisters in us. I think that somehow, we were designed out of the genetic patterns of her mother and my maternal chromosome. Or so it was theorized. We are a combination of the pattern and look of the best of both of us. As for the horse part, well, I have never seen a horse built quite like this, with such style and grace, as it were, looking at her and thus myself from my old male vantage point, but I am certain that wherever it comes from, it is not in either of our ancestries.”
Julian chuckled, then suddenly realized that it was the first time she had laughed at all on the Well World. Tony had at least a sense of humor about things, and that was what would certainly pull her through to some solution to her own inner conflict. The Erdomese could use something to laugh about, but there had been little to do up to now.
Anne Marie came over to them. “Oh, I’d hoped you two would get along!” she gushed. “Tony has been too much in a shell since all this, haven’t you, dear? I, on the other hand, have been quite excited by it all. I’ve done more and seen more in the past few months than I had ever dreamed to do in a lifetime! I find everything here so frightfully fascinating!”
Julian wondered if that sense of adventure would last if they got into a really bad situation. She couldn’t imagine that Anne Marie could kill a fly willfully and with malice aforethought.
The train ran silently along on a magnetic track, levitating just above the surface. There was no engineer, no crew; the entire process was automated, and each car could be switched in and out at will or become part of a new train at almost every junction. They’d gone through a large number of such junctions, when everything slowed to a crawl and pieces of train were diverted, some were added, some were taken away on spurs or alternate tracks, and a new train was put together. It was a marvel of efficiency and served the hex well.
Now they slowed for one more switching yard and in a matter of minutes watched the long train divide into five separate sections and go off in all directions. There was a slight bump as their own car was joined to other sections old and new, and then everything speeded up once more. It was a few minutes after this that Mavra Chang had the odd feeling that something wasn’t right. At first she couldn’t put her finger on it, and she began to inventory her surroundings to see what it was that was setting off warnings in the danger-sensing area of her brain. The car was the same; the other cars were innocuous enough, and the surroundings looked little different from what they had looked like before. What was the problem?
She was almost ready to dismiss her feeling as being too jumpy when suddenly she had it. The sun!
They had been going generally due west. Now, suddenly, the sun was not behind them as it should have been in late afternoon with the Well World’s west-east rotation, but on their left. They were still going west, but it was now south-southwest. Clearly the car was no longer heading for the port at all. Something, or someone, had ordered them diverted.