03. Gods at the Well of Souls (4 page)

"I-I suppose I understand. At least as much as I could without being you.  Certainly I have undergone something much milder myself. I know how to fly a  747, but the knowledge seems academic now, not personal, even though it was what  I loved more than anything else. Somewhere, near the end of that last long  voyage that left us here, I just suddenly woke up one day and felt absolutely  comfortable and normal, not just as a Dillian but as a woman and a woman with a  twin sister. And it did not even disturb me-I didn't fight it at all. When I  finally admitted this to Anne Marie back in Liliblod, I found that she felt the  same. Since then I haven't even dreamed of the past, although I have had a few  nightmares involving being on a ship at night. Yes, perhaps I can understand, to  a degree at least." 

You have changed more dramatically than that, starting from when we set out, but  it has become a real change since we have been here." 

"Huh? In what ways?" 

"No matter how identical you looked, it was always easy to tell you apart. Anne  Marie was more of a motherly type, and she had many affectations that came out  in how she spoke and even moved. You moved very differently, with a bolder,  prouder manner, a tough, more masculine way of speaking, that sort of thing. If  you bumped yourself, you would curse; Anne Marie would say, 'Oh dear!' or  something equally quaint. As we went along, I began to notice that the two of  you were growing more and more alike. You lost a degree of that masculinity,  began to move in more feminine ways, while Anne Marie seemed to pick up that  part you lost, becoming tougher and more confident. You have added more feminine  words, and she has dropped some of her more obvious old-fashioned quaintness.  You now pay attention to jewelry, cosmetics, hair, that sort of thing, even  though you are hardly doing it for her or for some man. You are doing it for  yourself, and it is exactly why she does it. And then there are the half  conversations." 

Tony was fascinated by this. "The what?" 

"I am sure that neither of you is aware of it, but when you talk to each other,  what must seem like whole complicated dialogues are really often sets of  unconnected half sentences, words, and such, and often you will finish one  another's sentences." 

"I-I never realized-" 

"I did not think you did. Physically you are absolutely identical, I think more  so than any natural identical twins could be. Together, over time, while I have  sorted myself out, you two have been doing the same, only less dramatically,  more slowly and subtly. You are not really Tony anymore, nor is she Anne Marie.  You are someone different, an average of the two. Only the difference in your  knowledge bases keeps you from being almost one individual in two bodies. That  alone will keep you slightly different, which is, I suspect, all to the good.  Everyone should have a little something to make them different. But that is the  extent of it." 

Tony thought about it, not sure if she was pleased with the idea but seeing the  ultimate point, which was the same one Alowi had made about herself: they were  who and what they were. One either accepted that and learned to live with it or  one killed oneself. Period. 

The Well World worked some of the magic; the rest had to be supplied from  inside, from the mind and soul. 

"Make your appointment," Tony told the Erdomese. "But make no rash or  irreversible decisions." 

Doctor Drinh was an Agonese, and after all this time in the province, learning  the language and the culture, Alowi still couldn't tell one from another without  a uniform or badge of rank. He specialized in treating aliens but was a  diagnostician and planner. Others, some so alien that they made Erdomese and  Agonese look like relatives, did the actual work. 

Drinh put the Erdomese profile on the computer, then took samples of blood from  Alowi for comparison, then ran them through a myriad of automated tests and  looked over the results. 

"Well, I can say that your feelings will not get much worse than they are, but  they won't get any better, either. It must make for early marriages and active  honeymoons, at least." He paused. "Sorry if the attempt at humor was offensive." "No, no," she assured him. "It is absolutely correct. Child marriage is the norm  in Erdom." 

"Yes, but you see, in this sort of thing the tension builds up, releasing an  overdose of all sorts of brain chemicals, and it stays pretty well 'on,' as it  were. You seem extremely intelligent and self-controlled, but I would be remiss  if I didn't tell you that if a male of your race, any male, came within your  eyesight, you would become, pardon, a whimpering, begging fool. It is inevitable  with these sorts of readings." 

"I know that. It is why I am here. The odds of me meeting a man of my race while  I am over here are pretty slim, but as you say, I am smart enough to know that I  cannot go home and remain so." 

"Just so, just so," Drinh muttered. "We don't have much on culture here except  those sort of taboo listings so that we don't do anything to someone that would  cause social or mental damage or the like, but I did note that the society is  labeled 'patriarchal.' So what would you like me to do, assuming it is doable?" Alowi sighed. "I-I need it to be damped down. Some way to put it under control  so I can live with it." 

"Well, the most obvious way if you never intend to have children or have any  sexual relations with another of your kind would be to remove the sexual organs.  It is a radical and permanent solution, but it would cause the hormones and  psychochemicals to shut off eventually, and with it all sexual desire." It was a more radical solution than she wanted, but she couldn't quite dismiss  it out of hand. "It is something to think about if all else fails, but I would  rather not. It would change me in other ways, too, would it not?" "Well, I couldn't know, although I can put in for research notes via Zone and  find out. Logic and experience with other races suggest that there would be  complications, yes. With someone of your type, basically mammalian, the breasts  would sag and be encumbrances, you'd probably get extremely fat, there might be  some long-term problems with bone integrity and the like, and your energy levels  would tend to be down, at the very least." 

"I like myself as I am. I think I would rather try going for the one problem  rather than something that radical." 

He shrugged. "Well, there are drugs that might work, but they would have to be  specially formulated for your species-we wouldn't exactly be expected to stock  Erdomese materials-or brought from Erdom via Zone, and either would be expensive  and require that they be taken regularly over decades, judging from your  apparent physical age. If you are wealthy, well connected, and will be in one  spot, like this city, it would work. Otherwise.... And if you came off them,  particularly suddenly and dramatically, your system might go wild. There would  be a danger of losing all control, of becoming little more than an animal in  heat, and how long this would go on until you came back to present levels is  impossible to say." 

Alowi was feeling less and less like she had any way out. 

"There is a third way," the doctor went on, thinking. "Radical and somewhat  costly up front, although possibly not, depending on how much work is actually  involved." 

"Yes?" 

"Before going further, I must tell you that it is not approved medicine.  Strictly experimental, although we have had tremendous successes with it and few  failures. I am quite certain that it would work in your case. It has come out of  our own research work here." 

"Go on." 

"The process is complex, but basically it is rewriting your genetic code, rather  rapidly. Do you understand what that means?" 

She was shocked at the idea that they had such abilities, but she nodded. "Yes,  I do, at least in its implications. Can you really do it?" 

Drinh sat back. "We can do more than you ever dreamed with it. We take only a  few cells, and we alter the code. Then the mathematics of the coding is fed into  tiny semiorganic devices, machines if you will, but on a scale so small, they  could be seen with only the finest microscopes. They replicate themselves with  astonishing speed, enter every cell in your body, and rewrite the code. Then  they die and are passed out in the normal way or allow themselves to be consumed  by the body's defenses. The process is quite rapid. The cells quite literally  become other cells. Major changes can cause a great deal of temporary discomfort  and disorientation, but relatively minor ones such as we are talking about might  well not be noticed, or no more than catching a minor virus at the worst." "You can really do this?" 

"We do it regularly. Of course, there are limits. I could not, for example, turn  you from being an Erdomese into one of my own race. At some point you would be  neither one nor the other, and the stress would kill you. But if you merely  wanted to look like an Agonite, that I could do. Of course, we are talking far  less than that here." 

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Look like an Agonite? The process is  that comprehensive?" 

"Oh, yes." He seemed somewhat uncomfortable all of a sudden, though, as if he'd  already said more than he had intended. 

She had a sudden thought. "You could not turn me into a man, could you? An  Erdomese man?" 

"Alas, no," the doctor sighed, and seemed to relax a bit. "The reverse, yes,  because in your race and many others the male contains only half the genetic  makeup; the other half is female, coming from the mother. But you have two sets  of female genes, so there is nothing there to edit. If you were male, I could  remove the male chromosomes, duplicate the female ones, alter them somewhat, and  recombine them so you would turn into a perfect, fully functioning female. But  the other way-well, one must have something to work with, and your race is even  more peculiar than most bisexual races in that you have no male hormones or male  psychochemicals at all. Disappointed?" 

"No, not really," she answered, realizing that what she was saying was true.  "But what could you do to me?" 

"Oh, a lot of things. The possibilities are vast. To address the immediate  problem, it would be a matter of finding the triggers and dampening them down.  The work is complex because it is subtle, exacting, and challenging. It must be  done just right. If we got it wrong, we might not catch the problem; or it could  throw you off and create violent mood swings, intermittent pain, or even  psychotic episodes. If we had an Erdomese clientele, it might be rather simple,  but as we do not, it would be a matter of trial and possibly error. In fact, let  me put the data into the computer and see what the risks might be." He turned in his chair to a console, and although it had full audio input  capabilities in Agonese, he used a complex keyboard instead. 

All the better to keep trade secrets and control the conversation, she realized. In less than a minute a string of Agonese text came up on the screen, much of it  punctuated with graphic images of things that were beyond her comprehension.  Also, the screen was angled sufficiently to keep her from reading more than bits  and pieces without being obvious. 

Finally he turned back to her. "There are two possibilities that seem just about  equal. Now, understand, I do not mean two different things we might attempt.  Rather, there are two equally possible outcomes to the attempt as postulated.  There is absolutely no way to be positive short of, well, experimentation. We  have no case histories to tell which way it will go." 

She couldn't imagine where he was heading. "Yes?" 

"Well, there is about a three percent chance of serious complications. I tell  you that up front, but that is actually a very small percentage in this kind of  process. There is no risk-free solution. Beyond those unknowables, there is a  better than forty-nine percent chance that it will decouple your mind from your  desires." 

"I beg your pardon. What does that mean, exactly?" 

"Basically, you would be fully capable of performing as a woman, but you would  lack all desire to do so, even in the face of stimulus-response. You would  simply be incapable of arousal. There is a medical term for this, but I do not  know how it would translate. It is physiological frigidity." 

She nodded. "I understand the idea. I would be turned off of sex, as it were."  She thought about it. "Is it- reversible?" 

"I would not recommend attempting a reversal. Changing the changed is always a  hundred times more dangerous, because we would have even less to go on and the  risk of things going terribly wrong would be major. Of course, you could always  take injections or oral hormones to artificially restore it to some degree or  another, but it would be temporary and administered by a clinic like this one,  which could determine and synthesize what was needed." 

"I see." It was in many ways an attractive possibility. "But Doctor, I can add.  You have left almost forty-eight percent unaccounted for." 

"Urn, yes, I was coming to that. The problem is, the same regions of the brain  and the same chemical balances serve more than one function, and without prior  research we can be only so delicate. The nearly equal chance would be to achieve  not a neutral balance but opposition. You would have no arousal or desire to  copulate with males, but you would find yourself attracted to and potentially  aroused by other females. You would not suffer the borderline psychochemically  induced nymphomania that is at the heart of your problem, but you would be  vulnerable, as with most sexual creatures, to stimulus-response." "You mean I would react like a man."