“They are yours any time you want them,” she told the medics. “Now that you have their scans, have you decided what you will do?”
“Well, the Erdomite is not difficult,” Drinh commented.
“He must be castrated!” Like I was… “But he must not die! I wish him to work for us, becoming what he most fears and helping, even promoting our own interest which he hates so much! And the rest of what I asked as well, so he will always be reminded of me.”
“We have not had either of these species before, but they seem to represent no serious challenges. We believe that we can adapt your Erdomite to become a courier for us over possibly difficult terrain. We have noted the lack of proper clotting factor in his blood, but the gland that aids in its production is merely immature, not missing, and so that problem is easily dealt with. Do not worry. He shall be fit to do only what is useful to us, and all that you request be done to him will be a part of it.”
“Perfect! Do it! But what about the other? That one requires very special treatment.”
“There’s not as much to work with,” the master surgeon noted. “Still, the small size and lack of major features and your own requirements make it obvious that the best way to ensure that no one who ever knew her or saw her picture recognizes her is to create from her an animal. It can be a unique animal, since with the countless varieties of the Well World there is nobody who knows them all or will question a convincing appearance. This is what we came up with after much study.” He pushed a few buttons on a console, and a hologram of a figure appeared.
Campos laughed in delight. “Oh, that is wonderful! Perfect! But—can you do such a radical thing?”
“It’s not as radical as it looks. Mostly a matter of adding a lot of fatty body mass, moving the knees, implanting the natural feathers, that sort of thing. Then reinforcing it with a pictin—an artificial virus tailor-made to her and her alone. It will methodically go from cell to cell and manipulate the stock DNA chains that will make the change permanent. Internally there’s not much changed, so she’ll still have to eat what she normally would and such, you understand.”
“That is all right. Appearance is everything. Delicious! And her speaking? She must be able to speak to me, and I to her, but with limits.”
“Much simpler. We will simply remove her translator and replace it with a synthetic one. As you may or may not know, we’ve never successfully created a translator crystal, but we do have ones that are very limited. We can tune this one not only to one language but to the specific harmonics of your translator. When she speaks, it will be instantly translated into a preset, encoded binary sequence which can be received and decoded only by your translator. To anyone else it will sound like meaningless squawks and screeches. Similarly, since that code will be fed to your translator alone, she will understand you as if you were speaking normally no matter what language you use, while all other speech will be picked up by her translator, which will overload trying to decode what isn’t there and produce meaningless random sounds. No one but you will even think that she is a sentient being. Is that satisfactory, madame?”
“Perfect.” Juan Campos sighed. “How long will it be before I can bring her home?”
“Not long. Two, three weeks tops.”
“Do it, then. Do it as quickly as you can, but do it right.”
The Erdomese constitution handled the drug a bit differently but just as effectively from the point of view of the dealers. There was not any massive high but rather a continuous feeling of being just a bit isolated from reality, a “slight buzz” as Lori thought of it. It was when it was withdrawn that its full power and potency revealed itself; the pain, the horrors, the hallucinations were beyond anyone’s endurance. He knew he could not exist without the drug but was not so insulated that he did not hate them for doing it to him. That, and the way they treated him, half the time as some sort of interesting lab specimen and the other half as no better than a slave, he thought, the worst possible existence imaginable.
But that was before he met the duo he began thinking of as Mengele Turtle and Frankenstein’s Slug. He knew by their detached and clinical discussions that they were going to do something more to him, something awful, but he had no way of knowing what.
Then, shortly afterward, the keepers came for him and gave him an injection, and he remembered no more.
The first realization that he was waking up from a sustained anesthetic-induced sleep was an awareness that he was on all fours. That was odd; Erdomese men were never on all fours. He opened his eyes, but they refused to focus very well, as if still mostly asleep, but he reached out and tried to stand—and found that he could not.
His first thought was that they’d taken his fingers, and then he managed to put his head down close to his arms and saw hooves.
Not even the kind of hooves Alowi had—real hooves, like on his feet.
But his feet, too, were on the floor. How could that be without him being at an angle or on his knees? It was as if his legs had been shortened and his hips turned so that he was now a four-legged, four-hoofed beast a mere three and a half feet off the ground!
With a sinking feeling he realized that it was exactly what they had done. He still had his tail, but it was down and dragged on the floor, trailing between his—hind legs.
And with less shock than he might have thought, he realized that the tail was the only thing between those legs, in far too short a time he had gone from female to male to—nothing. There weren’t even any internal muscles there to feel or flex.
You didn’t have to go to med school to figure out Campos, did you?
Still, even with blurry vision, he could see that there was something in back of his—well, forelegs. He not only could see the shapes in a somewhat blurry way, he could feel the dead weight hanging down.
Breasts? Four breasts on a eunuch? What on earth for? Particularly such a large and heavy set, which cleared the floor only by several inches. Sensing something else, a wrongness, he flexed his back a bit so that they did touch the floor, then straightened again. If they had nipples, there was no sensation in them.
He wondered why he hadn’t bled to death during their butchery and then realized what the breasts really were. Not just more Campos humor—they had placed in him, or activated by hormones, the internal engine of the female, the healing factors. No nipples, because whatever function they served they did so for his benefit, and he was one of a kind.
The neck was very long and supple. He could look forward or down, although his vision seemed to be limited to about two feet clearly, three before almost everything was lost. Still, he could see very close, and it almost looked to him as if he had some sort of muzzle on, as if he could see part of his nose and jaw.
Then the door opened, and he smelled Mengele Turtle enter. The doctor—if that was what he could be called—began making a lot of very stupid silly noises at him, until finally he heard, “One… two… three. Ah! I see you can hear me now! Very good! We, of course, removed your translator, among, ah, other things. It has been replaced with an artificial device that interpolates speech both in and out. You can speak, but to be understood you will have to be heard by someone with the same sort of device set to the same frequency. Similarly, you must hear something through the same conditions to understand it. Otherwise, even your native tongue will sound like nothing more than a noise pattern. It is quite useful for couriers such as you will be trained to become. It can’t be removed or bypassed without causing permanent damage to the speech centers of the brain, and it can be reset to any frequency we choose or even reprogrammed with a whole new code by remote control. You see how handy that is. You can convey the most sensitive message, but only one who has both the device and your code and frequency can retrieve it. You, on the other hand, sound like an animal making random noises. If anyone attempts to play random sequences and hits it but does not give the code header, it erases, cutting you off completely. Absolutely secure.”