Three days out of Erdom on the voyage north to Itus, they had taken the last of the drug without remembering it. The fourth day out, they went to take it and there was none left; they both went through the commanded ritual anyway, but without the potion they were aware of it and could understand what had been done to them. The effect was even worse because the old dosages had not worn off. When they said them, the statements sounded somewhat reasonable. It was only well after, when they awoke the next morning, that the full significance of it hit them.
The first realization was that they had been badly had by the monks of Erdom. The second was more than a little guilt and shame at having fallen for it.
That morning, in the cabin, they did not speak to one another for quite some time. Finally it was Julian, uncharacteristically, who broke the silence.
“I think for sanity’s sake we should speak to each other in private only in English from now on. I think we both need the mental equivalent of a cold shower, and that’s it. Not to mention the vocabulary.”
“That’s fine with me,” Lori replied softly, not looking directly at Julian. “It seems to me that we’re in enough trouble with those monks that it hardly makes a difference if we break our other promises now.”
“Were you a feminist back in your previous life?” Julian asked. It seemed an odd question for the situation.
“Of a sort, yes. The word had come into disrepute because it was co-opted by radicals with a different agenda from most women, but on the basic issues I was. Something of an activist, in fact.” Although, Lori admitted, I compromised my ideals more than once to get or keep a position.
“Well, now you’re going to find out the truth of one thing they told you and one other thing they didn’t. First, men do control and set the rules in society—at least in the two I know, Earth’s and Erdom’s. Maybe a lot of other places. That’s true. And now you’re a man and have to know the second thing.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“The men who rule? You’re not one of them. You’re stuck with those stupid rules the same as every woman, and you can’t change them much, either.”
“Thanks a lot. After the way I treated you the last four days…”
“Think of it as an education, or the start of one,” Julian sighed. “We were trapped. Both of us. But we couldn’t escape because it was built into the society. If we hadn’t agreed on the temple visit, I would have been stuck with that tentmaker and gotten the treatment later, when the local monk got the drugs he needed. If you agreed but then didn’t show up, they’d have sent people looking for us, and in that society it’s pretty hard to hide for very long. And then we’d have been kept in the temple, but instead of just being drugged and hypnotized, we’d have been the subjects for their chemical inquisition. We’d have come out of there with our brains scrubbed so clean that not a trace of Julian Beard or Lori Sutton would have remained.”
Lori shook his head in wonder and sighed. “I wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t passed me that letter. Or if they’d told me to simply forget I was ever anything but an Erdomite and then handed me a letter I couldn’t read.”
“I suspect that this friend of yours paid a handsome bribe to ensure that we’d get the letter. As to the other, remember, they’d never had two people like us before. They couldn’t think of everything that quickly. But we’d have continued to drug and hypnotize each other, and over weeks, months, a year, we’d have had reinforcing visits to the temple so they could correct any problems. Eventually we’d be so steeped in our roles and behavior and so indoctrinated into the religion and culture, nothing else would have been needed. I shouldn’t wonder that my next prescription might have included some mind-dulling chemicals, slowing down my mental processes until I couldn’t keep two thoughts in my head at once or have much long-term memory. I’d just be another of those stupid bubbleheads.”
“You think they’re smart enough to have stuff like that?”
“I think it’s about time we stop thinking of them as ignorant and stupid just because they live in a feudal, primitive society. They are a very old culture. Ancient by Earth standards. I think they know an awful lot about everything that is possible to use in a nontechnical society and even more about keeping things the way they are and under complete control.”
“But—we’re Erdomese! You said it yourself a week ago. We’re Erdomese whether we like it or not. Sooner or later—”
She nodded. “Sooner or later we’ll be back there and even more suspect because we’ve traveled abroad. I hope by then we’ll have figured out some way to beat them.”
“If we survive this, and if this woman’s telling the truth or anything close to it, we might have a crack. The promised reward is ‘anything we want.’ Maybe even out of here, if we wanted it. I take it that you’re not so enamored of being female after the last few days.”
“Not treated like that, I’m not! I don’t mind being the junior partner along for the ride, but I treated my dog better than I got treated by you! And the dog didn’t have to work, either.”
“I—I know. You think I’m proud of that?”
Julian grinned. “I think it’s a lot tougher holding to principle when you’re on the top of the heap instead of on the bottom. But for your information, it’s not the gender I’m upset with, it’s the bottom position and its permanence. Being a culturally correct Erdomese female is the pits, I’ll tell you. If I were forced to go back to that, I’d cheerfully take their stupid pills. Like this I can manage, I think, although there’s still some residual effect from that stuff. Alone in the cabin with just you, I find I can fight it, but out there, among others, particularly other Erdomese on the ship, I’m not so sure I won’t have a relapse.”
“Until we’re well away from Erdomese it might not be so bad to keep to the fiction, anyway,” Lori noted. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of these businessmen traders here didn’t also report back to the temple on just about everything they see and hear. I doubt if they could do anything this far from home, but we are citizens of Erdom, and we can’t hide that fact. They do all their diplomacy in the polar Zone, but it’s as if they have a voice in every one of these hex-shaped countries. We left pretty suddenly. If they decided to trump up some charges against us, we could easily wind up being arrested and sent back through one of those gates right back to Erdom, with the monks waiting for us at the other end. I think it’s best not to relax too much until we have some protection from others who know this place better than we do.”
It was a sobering thought. “Thanks. Just what I needed—more reasons to jump at shadows. Actually, the residue of these past few days is different from what you think I meant. I mean, I know how to play the sniveling little bimbo if I have to. I hate it, but it’s kind of a survival skill. No, it’s not that—it’s the fear.”
“Huh? Fear of what?”
“Of anything. You see, up until we got the treatment, I was playacting. To a certain extent the lifetime and instincts of good old Julian Beard were still there. Spending these days as a ‘pure’ Erdomese woman, though, I didn’t have those old senses to call upon. For the first time I faced the added burden of being a female in a male-dominated society that places women somewhere just above the herd animals or even below them. Without you around as a protector, I was absolutely defenseless. I had to take all the feelies from those merchants, all the guff, and all of a sudden every single one of them looked like a threat. My body was entirely at their mercy, and I needed, required you to stand in their way. I didn’t want to be out of your sight, and if you went off, I got back to this cabin in a hurry and locked myself in, scared to death all the way here. Until now I hadn’t understood why I felt the need to be locked up to be safe. I put it down to the drugs or the body or the changes in me. This brought it home. The old me, the male me, would have explored this ship from stem to stern and never had a second thought. Now, suddenly, I was in the midst of strangers, and I didn’t know friend from foe. I was scared to leave and scared to stay.”