Lori felt a sudden sympathy for Julian. “I think I know what you mean,” he responded. “It explains a lot about how I’m reacting to all this, too. I’ve had a cavalier, adventurous attitude since becoming male and a kind of charge-straight-ahead-and-damn-the-consequences feeling. Until now I was only aware that some sort of burden had been lifted off me but not what it was. It was just that the sort of feeling I had growing up female back home was gone. When I was seventeen, I was raped by my prom date. At the time I felt disgusted, but I never said anything because there was always this feeling somewhere deep down that I’d encouraged him somehow, let him do it—I don’t know. I do know I changed after that. Cut my hair real short, started to be a slob, got fat and stayed that way, just about never used makeup—made myself unattractive in general. I stopped dating for a long time, until after I’d gotten my Ph.D., really, hung out in women’s studies centers and even socialized with a lesbian group, although I never really wanted to go to bed with them. I did go to bed with men—a lot of them—but they were always men I picked out, and they were mostly nerds who were desperate for any female interest. They were going to love me for me, no frills or compromises, or to hell with them. Don’t get me wrong—I knew I was reacting—but I had a justification for everything. And, surrounded by lots of women I knew and trusted, or by men of my choosing, I managed to keep the fear down. I guess that’s why I took to the all-women tribe so easily. No men to threaten, and women who were not only self-sufficient but actually dangerous.”
“And now we both realize that, just like in physics, nothing is really lost, it’s just transferred,” Julian said with a sigh. “Now I’ve got the burden and yours is gone. About the only thing I can cling to as a real advantage is that this body sure delivers dynamite sex.”
“I guessed as much, considering your responses. And that’s the downside of my change. I can turn on like a light switch, but everything’s concentrated in just one spot. It explains a lot about my previous lovers. I feel a lot less guilt now.”
They had a laugh at that and then went on to more immediate worries.
“What do you know about this Chang woman, anyway?” Julian asked.
“Not a lot. As far as I was concerned, she was the leader and demigoddess of a tribe of primitive rain forest Amazons—literally. Though, mean, and ruthless; that was her reputation among the tribe. Then, suddenly, all this comes about and suddenly she’s claiming to be some immortal from this world. I would have sworn she’d have barely recognized anything beyond Stone Age technology as anything but magic and that she had no experience beyond the jungles, yet here she is, suddenly a different sort of person, comfortable with technology well in advance of our own and writing notes to me in ancient Greek!”
“Yeah, how’d she know you knew Greek?”
“I don’t even know how she’d know I knew German, let alone Greek. Our only common language was that of a Stone Age tribe. I don’t count it because I can’t speak it, and I was surprised that I could read the note at all. She made it pretty basic, though, and it all came back to me. She certainly knows no English, and if she did, it would probably sound more like Shakespeare’s or even Chaucer’s. She’d been in that jungle an awfully long time. It was almost like she was hiding out from the world.”
“From that other fellow with the appropriate name, perhaps. Brazil.”
“Maybe. But I get the feeling it’s not that simple. She’s not just a small woman, she’s tiny. Under five feet, skinny, wiry, but moves like a cat. She also has a confident, brassy voice and manner, but I wonder if that’s just a mask for what we were talking about.”
“Huh?”
“The fear factor.”
“But—she’s immortal, or she says she is. And according to you, the tribe at least believed that any injuries to her, no matter how severe, would heal without scars and that she could even regrow limbs.”
“Yes, she’s beyond some of our most common fears—if it’s all true, anyway. But she still can be badly hurt, and she feels the same pain. I wonder if she also feels the same kind of psychological pain. She’s strong for her size but no match for an average man. Suppose she is immortal and started life on Earth thousands of years ago? The way the Erdomese look at women and women’s rights is about standard for most cultures in human history until fairly recently. I wonder… After a few thousand years of being a victim with no end in sight, I might run off to a rain forest and surround myself with cast-off and runaway tribal women, too. I sort of ran away socially for years from just one incident. And this Brazil person—I assume they started out together and they got separated centuries or longer ago. I wonder if that’s not part of the problem.”
“What? That she lost her protection?”
“That she needed his protection in the first place. Her ego is pretty damned strong. There would be only so much protection she could stand before cracking.”
“You think he was abusing her or something?”
“No, I don’t think so. Even in Zone she described him as basically a good person. She would have cast him as the epitome of evil if he’d done anything to her. No, I think it’s more basic than that. Thousands of years in a series of what must have seemed very primitive societies to her, always with that fear factor… Suppose he simply never noticed? Suppose he, the immortal male, just couldn’t comprehend it?”
It was something to think about but not something that could be proved one way or the other, not until they actually met this mysterious Brazil—if, indeed, they ever did. This and their mental hangover and associated guilt produced a minute or two of silence.
Finally Julian spoke. “I really don’t understand a lot of this at all. If what we’re being told is correct, much of what I learned about creation, evolution, the birth and death of the universe—it’s all wrong. Yet everything, all the laws of science, seem to be more or less holding in spite of all that, and it doesn’t make any sense. We’ve gone from a solid foundation down through the rabbit hole to Wonderland.”
“Not exactly,” Lori responded. “We don’t know enough to draw any conclusions about the universe at large. There were a lot of theorists in physics who postulated bizarre theories that were at least mathematically possible. White holes, parallel universes, and much more. Even in the Einsteinian sense we casually accepted gravity bending time itself. This doesn’t show that what we knew was wrong, only that we knew far less than we thought we did. You know the old saw—I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke—that says that a civilization separated by countless years of development from our own would discover and know so much more that its technology would seem like magic to us. I think that’s what’s bugging you—all that work, all that knowledge, and we’re as ignorant of this sort of stuff as the most primitive tribes of Earth are ignorant of our science.”