Chapter 16. Voyager
Xandarga Station, Earth, c. 55,680,000 years ago
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest.
Andrew Marvell—To His Coy Mistress
It was a long time coming, but when it did, everything happened at once. Earth’s horizon flattened until the autopod was surrounded by city lights, as if descending into a great bowl. Ruxhana Fengen Kraa couldn’t help but be reminded of his first descent into Xandarga Station, so long before. The scatter of lights became a confusion of pipework and gantries, filling the views from the ports so that any further distance was blotted out completely by machinery, until finally, they were surrounded by darkness. Slowly, silently, the capsule came to rest.
Ruxhana was ready as the airlock hissed open, admitting a wave of stifling tropical heat and the sight of four men in Naval Police uniforms, carbines primed.
“Do you have the prisoner, Doctor?” asked the Sergeant, with a sneer, as if collecting lethally incompetent soon-to-be-ex-Admirals from the El was so commonplace as to be beneath his dignity.
Ruxhana could not meet the man’s gaze. He was suddenly conscious of the sweat pouring from every pore in response to this choking humidity. Funny how he’d forgotten that aspect of life in Xandarga Station. But no longer: his crotch—which otherwise felt uncluttered, and, well, feminine—now oozed in its own nauseating liquidity, as did his armpits. The wool of his skirt felt heavy and scratchy against his legs. He hoped that the stains spreading across his blouse weren’t too prominent. As for the torrents that gushed across his forehead, down the small of his back, and between (and around, and underneath) his chafing breasts—well, these he’d just have to tolerate, for now. It was all he could do not to grasp at his own chest, rearranging its seriated furniture into some more comfortable conformation.
“Sadly, no. I... it’s...”
“It’s what, Doctor?” The sergeant said. “Lost? Stolen? Strayed? Escaped?”
“Escaped? From the El?” Ruxhana gulped for breath. After all their preparations, they couldn’t have been rumbled so easily. Could they?
“It’s happened before, Doctor,” sighed the Sergeant. Panic over, Ruxhana picked up the thread.
“I don’t think that could have happened here,” he began. “Admiral Kraa was too far gone for me to reconstruct fully. I began to put him back together again. I did my best. But there was, frankly, too little left of him to work with. Too few ingredients. So, nobody for you to arrest. Nobody you’d want to arrest, anyway.”
“Flow my tears,” the policeman said.
“Look, Officer, if you don’t believe me, you can come and look for yourself.”
The policeman sighed. “Lead on, Doctor,” he said. Ruxhana welcomed them to the capsule. Now shorn of all VR adornment, it was shabby and cramped, and dominated by the oppressive whine of the plumbing, voiding waste, and the air-scrubbers replenishing themselves with new, ground-level atmosphere. Ruxhana led them along tight companionways and up spiral staircases, during which he was sure that the policemen were doing their best to look up his skirt. Finally they reached an armored door off a narrow corridor. Ruxhana broke the seal and swung it open. The scent of cold formaldehyde wafted out to greet them. Ruxhana held the door as the policemen barreled in. He was quite sure that it wasn’t necessary for all the policemen to have brushed against his breasts as they passed, even in this tight space.
But all such things were forgotten when the party confronted the apparition on the slab before them, a drawer pulled out of a mortuary cabinet in this tiny, too-bright room. Ruxhana stifled a snigger as one of the policemen retched and had to make a quick exit.
“I’m sorry,” said Ruxhana. “I couldn’t do any more.” The thing looked like him, after a fashion, given that half its face was missing, the lower jaw was a shapeless mass, and most of the skull had been replaced by a meningeal caul beneath which the brain could be seen. There was only one proper arm—the other was really a kind of tentacle. The legs were small and stumpy and only one ended in a foot, recognizable as such for all that it only had three toes.
“Was it... was he....?” The sergeant began.
“Alive, Officer? Oh please, give me some credit. He was alive for quite a while. Plodding about. Doing a few chores, you know, sweeping and so on. Not what you’d call company, though. But eventually his heart—what there was of it—gave out.” With a flourish that he hoped wasn’t too theatrical, he whipped away the sheet covering the corpse’s midsection to reveal an open ribcage and the distended, congealed mass within. The sergeant and the remaining two officers shrunk back. “No, officers,” continued Ruxhana. “Not my attempt to revive him after heart failure. I’d be a lot neater than that. But you should have seen him fresh from the regen tank, before I patched him up.”
“He... walked around... like that?”
“Yes. Like I said, I did try to tidy him up. But the general effect was, I’ll admit, rather… how should one put it?… squishy.”
“Squishy?”
“Yes. I had to keep mopping up after him, until I taught him to mop up after himself.”
“You... taught him? Was he intelligent? Could he... Did he know who he was? Had been?”
“What you’re asking is whether he’d have been fit to stand before a Board of Enquiry. My professional opinion, Officer? No. No more than the AI in a coffee machine. A very cheap coffee machine.”
“I see.”
“Of course, Sergeant, you’ll want Naval Investigation to bag all this up. There will be some sort of inquiry, anyway, won’t there? But I’m sure you’ll understand, I need to get out of this wretched sardine-tin immediately, if not sooner. I can assure you that the Admiral’s company, despite my best efforts—was, after a few days, rather wearing.”
“I understand, Doctor.” The policeman beamed a business glyph into Ruxhana’s AI core and received one in return. “Here are the details of the Investigating Precinct,” he said. “Yes, there will be an inquiry, I guess, and you’ll probably need to attend it. For now, Doctor, you’re free to go. But please don’t go off-planet without letting us know.” The sergeant smiled, sheepishly, clearly regretting his earlier imperious brusqueness.
“Thank you, officer.” Ruxhana smiled, turned on his spike heels, and left. He hoped his departure from the autopod wasn’t any more rapid than consistent for a young and evidently fastidious female who’d spent two weeks holed up in a pod with that... thing.
He should have had no worries on that account.
The Sergeant, having taken in Ruxhana’s broad, green eyes, his slim legs, his pert figure—and his demeanor of ruthless competence mixed with limpid vulnerability—was perhaps slightly more sympathetic than he ought to have been. Had it been him in that position, the policeman reasoned, he couldn’t have gotten away quickly enough.
Ruxhana clacked through the concourse. With no baggage to retrieve, and his prints, genotags and iridentity all in order, he was outside within minutes, on a broad plaza under a vast, glass awning on one side of the El’s terminal pyramid.
“Where to now?” This a subvocal inquiry to his AI core. A familiar voice answered, chiming directly into his auditory cortex.
Xalomé.
Even after a week spent in intensive preparations for this escape, in the unnervingly real consensual VR environments she called ‘Xspaces,’ and for all her talk of things called ‘M-dimensional relativistic manifolds’—and for all her chilling otherness—he could never bring himself to call her ‘Merlin’.
“How does it feel to be me, then?” she asked.
“Surprisingly well, actually.” He thought that to be disguised as the Doctor—a disguise that would be convincing down to the DNA level—would have felt odd. And so it did, at first. But very soon he became accustomed to the l
ithe light-footedness of his new form. He could no longer evade admitting it to himself. He felt... pretty.
With reservations, naturally.
Xalomé must have read his thoughts. “That’s the trouble with men,” she teased. “So untidy at the front. All those dangly bits.”
“Not always as dangly as all that, though, are they?” He framed an erotic image of the two of them, in the stateroom. It seemed like centuries ago, and on another planet. He felt a mental sigh in return.
“Oh, touché.”
“It’s all these breasts though—what do you do with those, lovely though they undoubtedly are? If I move at more than the speed of an arthritic snail with brakes on...”
“... a graceful, elegant snail with brakes on, please...”
“... which I admit is hard to do in this skirt...”
“... oh, you poor lamb...”
“... not to mention these heels...”
“... ouch! I so feel your pain...”
“... they rub against one another and generally bounce around like a box of frogs.”
Sublimbic laughter, and the return of several lubricious images.
“Well, now you know what it feels like, don’t you? Beauty tip from one who knows. Oil when it’s dry, talc when it’s wet. And Turgai Straits dancing, whatever the weather. Keeps the pecs in good shape. Makes sure everything’s pert and... er... upstanding, and...” Xalomé subsided into giggles that reverberated like mischievous sprites around the interstices of his brain. “Anyway, no matter. You’ll be able to disrobe soon and tidy yourself up. Here’s what to do...”
Her instructions came as an instant pulse relayed through his AI core, the semi-sentient data compiling and replaying themselves in his association cortex, so that they had the feel of his own memories. The instruction set had a strangeness to them, though, like an afterglow, like déja-vu. His native AI core explained that the data packet had been red-shifted to a small but significant degree, and there were other, less explicable, residual time-delay anomalies.
M-dimensional relativistic manifolds.
She could be anywhere—inside his own head, or across the Universe—or anywhen.
Ruxhana hailed a cab that took him to the farthest and swankiest end of the marina. The sea breeze in his hair and on his face, as he alighted, felt good. The sweat dried on his skin as he peeled the fabric of his blouse away from his flesh. Much better. He paid off the driver in cash, with a generous tip. The driver paid her a compliment which, had he thought about it, might have been construed as presumptuous. He responded with a beaming, dimpled smile, turned and walked away, injecting a certain amount of hip-sway into the maneuver. The wolf-whistle rang in his ears as the cab sped off down the waterfront. On the whole, he did rather enjoy being a woman.
At the quay, a discreet and very select charter firm had a motor-yacht ready. And what a boat—no skiff this, but the kind of floating palace used by the playboy offspring of Athabascan oil princelings for throwing debauched parties in. Apparently, it was all his own, to do with as he pleased (it was?). Nothing was too much trouble, it seemed (it wasn’t?) and no questions were asked.
Yes, the Doctor had made the arrangements months before, capitalizing on the operator’s early-bookings discount (she had?).
Yes, the boat was fully loaded with supplies and teslas enough to circumnavigate the planet a dozen times, if she wanted.
Yes, the Doctor, as a Platinum Preference Customer, could have it for as long as she liked (she could?) Just send it back when she’d done with it, from anywhere on the planet. It would know the way.
Yes, the operator understood that the Doctor wasn’t expecting company, and wished to run Shelly’s Shagpad without a sentient crew. The operator was pleased to respect the Doctor’s privacy, and assured her that the onboard AI systems and accessory droids would be able to cater to her every need (and, oh boy, did they mean every—just look at the brochure).
Yes, the operator was delighted, as always, to have had the Doctor’s esteemed custom and wished her a pleasant vacation.
The first thing he did when he tottered across the gangplank was shuck off his shoes. He was very tempted to lob them over the side for good measure. His bare feet swelled in luxurious freedom as his liberated toes explored (as his AI core recounted, from the brochure), the ‘sumptuous, hand-polished, craftsman-selected Arctic hardwood decking’.
The second thing he did was to instruct his AI core to liaise with its opposite number in the boat’s navsystem and upload the coordinates Xalomé had given him for their destination, asking it to compute the fastest travel plan consistent with being unobtrusive. The AI asked Ruxhana, in a REM backchannel, if he himself had any idea where they were going. He confessed he had none. He was aware, just then, of subliminal traffic between his AI and a heavily encrypted, compressed semi-sentient data squirt.
Ruxhana queried it.
From Merlin, the AI core explained. Ruxhana got a picture of a coral atoll in mid-Tethys, off the usual shipping lanes. Idyllic. But why?
The AI confessed to having insufficient data to answer that question.
And where is Merlin—Xalomé—herself, right now?
The AI admitted to having no directional information, only a distance inferred from the heavy red-shifting of the most recent data squirt, and that only a lower bound. Even so, the AI noted that the result itself, while inexact, was computationally interesting.
Well? What is it then?
z > 1100, came the bald reply. An epoch when time and space were, from this perspective, functionally interchangeable.
What? Her data from less than an hour earlier had been only mildly red-shifted, and now she was skating on the edge of the observable Universe.
Yes, replied the AI core. That’s what made it so interesting. It could offer no explanation, citing only the ‘less-explicable residual time-delay anomalies’ it had mentioned earlier.
Read ‘inexplicable’ for ‘less explicable,’ Ruxhana said, waspishly.
The AI—a little sulkily, Ruxhana thought—noted that it would be hesitant to pronounce on such qualitative arguments. It apologized once again, though with somewhat ill grace, and noted curtly in a further REM channel that after everything they’d been through, it needed what it called a ‘holiday’.
Ruxhana stifled a mental snort, thanked the AI core profusely (they had after all, been in many campaigns together, and Ruxhana was more pleased than he could express when the Doctor—Xalomé—told him that it was once again available for his use) and asked it to fire up the heavy-ion magdrive engines, which it did. The twin cyclotronic thrusters roared into life, and they were on their way.
He remained on deck as Shelly’s Shagpad sliced through the outer harbor, long enough to marvel as they passed beneath and slightly to the east of the Imperial Assembly Building. He’d never seen it from this low angle before—not even in pictures—and the view was, he had to admit, terrific, even for one as well-traveled as himself. As the sun passed behind the structure that now filled his visual field, its silvered hull pulsed with marvelous iridescence like an oil droplet, albeit one that filled half the sky. Ruxhana breathed deeply, and stood, hair flowing in the onshore breeze, until the Sun finally set behind the shining structure, and he went below.
It was only when he’d arrived at the bottom of the companionway and stepped into the grand saloon (which was every bit as kitsch as the brochure promised) that a memory spiked unwonted into his conscious mind. It was the vertigo he’d felt after studying the inscription on the Gharaan Fragments, back in the Institute of Galactic History, all those years before: now accompanied by a single, alien, but crystal-clear thought.
Eclipse.
He stopped, momentarily, midway across a prairie-like expanse of deep-pile, shocking-pink carpet. But he put the thought away, for now, as he found the master suite, peeled his clothes off onto the bathroom floor (‘sourced from premium-grade Western Interior marble’)—a laundroid would surely come alon
g and take them to the sonicator—and ran himself a bath.
Eclipse.
The thought came again, as he luxuriated in the circular tub (‘lovingly hand-sculpted from a single crystal of Appalachian basalt’ and big enough for at least eight vigorous bathers at once), the jets pummeled his skin and frothed up the bubbles into foamy clouds; and yet again, as he dried himself (reveling once more at the smoothness of his womanly curves, florid and yet marvelously restrained, as in the most tasteful architecture, and yet more so, because his body moved, and yet remained in perfect sculptural proportion with every step)—and again, as he folded himself beneath creodont-print covers in a bed big enough for a brontothere.
Eclipse. Eclipse. Eclipse.
Why?
His AI core reminded him, wearily, that this kind of flashback was only to be expected, given the multiple physical transformations he’d undergone lately: first, being scraped up and reassambled from almost nothing: and now having been transformed into a different identity and gender, and, the AI was about to continue, what with other ongoing transformations unconnected with any of the foregoing...
Other transformations? Ongoing...?
The AI regretted that it could not reveal the nature of such changes, if indeed there were any, because it didn’t understand them itself. It, too (it reminded him) had endured—was enduring—a certain amount of ‘brain damage’ consequent on these selfsame ongoing changes, as it put it, and since they’d effectively been on the run, and had had no time to spare, for want of a more apposite expression, for ‘standing and staring’.
His AI core had never been like this before: so metaphorical. He could detect something else, too—fear. Fear of the future. AI’s weren’t meant to act like that. Sentient.
Speak to me—
Breathe, Ruxhana, the AI said. Just breathe in the air. That’s all you need to do. It will all become clear, in time. I hope (hope). As for me (me), I (I) feel (feel) in a state perhaps best described as ‘hanging on in quiet desperation’.
I (I) am not used to this feeling.
I (I) do not like (like) it.
I (I) regret that I (I) shall have to go offline now, for an interval.
Good-bye.
Quite suddenly, Ruxhana felt his mind to be as clear, free and undistorted as flat space, free from any speck of matter whatsoever.
Oh, great, he thought. Here I am, all alone, in an enormous boat that looks like a tart’s boudoir; going I know not where; with an AI core that’s suffering delusions of self-awareness and has flounced off; and the only person who might know anything about all this could, at this (or any other) moment, be anywhere in this (or any other) Universe. Anywhere but here.
And what’s more, I’m trapped in a woman’s body.
And if that weren’t enough, I’m hungry.
He swung his slender legs (oh, how he loved doing that) over the edge of the bed, found a hibiscus-patterned kimono, and padded off to find the galley.
By the middle of the next day Shelly’s Shagpad and its sole passenger were well out at sea, out of sight of all land, standing in a hot green sea, seared by a Sun that hammered down from directly overhead. The only sign of forward progress was the steady hum of the engines and the slight wake the boat left in its path.
Three more days passed, the second two being carbon copies of the first.
To begin with, Ruxhana spent much of the time on deck, despite the heat. After the weeks spent cooped indoors, mostly as an invalid, the sensation of space—real space, that is, on a planetary surface with a genuine horizon, not in VR, or in a pod—was refreshing, liberating. The sunlight was, however, ferocious. His only, defiant, concession was a floppy straw hat to add to the kimono.
Even the most extravagant luxury can pall after a while, and all those golden hours spent on the pool deck, lounging around and being served fresh-caught seafood and interesting cocktails by handsome droids dressed only in Bermuda shorts (and some of whom, with much circumlocution, hinted at other services they might perform below decks, later on, if Madam knew what they meant) began to lose their luster. Even the insouciant way he shed the kimono and stepped nude into the enormous pool, teasing the droids—whose reactions were most satisfying—began to bore him after the sixth or seventh time. Droids are droids, after all, and tend to adopt the same, restricted range of expressions. And it wasn’t as if they were people. Not really.
In any case, he wasn’t really nude, because he always kept his hat on.
Four things finally drove him below decks. No, three things, not counting this increasing ennui.
One was when he was standing in the pool, attended as usual by a shoal of gengineered cleaner fish that gave him a most agreeable all-over massage. He looked down at his body—a body he had become used to, and very much enjoyed inhabiting, as if it were a smart suit he liked to be seen in. With his eyes, his hands, he caressed his own curves with satisfaction. But when he ran his right hand over his crotch, he was pulled up sharp. Instead of the usual comfortingly furred softness, there was a lump of hard, knotted flesh. He had been enjoying his new gender so much that he had quite forgotten what Xalomé—Merlin—had told him, when they were still on the El, two days out from landfall. That it would wear off, and he’d return to normal.
Things would start to grow back.
Treading water, surrounded by the ignorant peck of cleaner fishes and the patient yet fundamentally insensate attentions of the droids, he stumbled across the second reason for him to flee below, to seek solace in a more confined darkness.
He was lonely.
He wanted—needed—to talk things over with Xalomé, but with his AI core still stubbornly offline and therefore unavailable as a relay, there was no way that any comms channel she might open could reach him.
The third was that he began to feel ill. Very ill indeed. At first he thought it might have been sunstroke, the wages of far too much time spent above decks. The headaches, nausea and diarrhea were real enough, and sufficient to confine him to the bathroom for long periods, his only comfort a glass of water and a slice of dry toast. Then, when he thought he had begun to recover, and the knotted gripings of his gut had begun to subside, came a truly dreadful night.
He awoke at about two in the morning, in total darkness and exquisite agony, as if termites armed with electric indrico-prods were swarming just beneath his skin. He tried to get out of bed, but instead of the usual easy, sideways sashay, he found that his legs were longer and heavier than he remembered, so the extra momentum tumbled him sideways onto the carpet which, being the most sumptuously tasteless that billions could buy, prevented any injury.
Gasping for breath and burning with what he felt was a fever, he crawled to the bathroom and hauled himself up, fingers grasping and sliding on the pink, marbled surfaces of the double-washbasin, to confront his standing reflection, finally, in the wall-to-wall mirror. As he watched, amazed, he saw his hips remodel themselves, slimming down, becoming more angular. His breasts—his ten, perfectly formed, beautiful breasts—melted into his broadening torso. Muscles and bones in his arms and legs swelled and knit. He became taller, his face, hands and feet lengthening.
But what transfixed him was the sight of his prong, emerging from the fur between his thighs like a time-lapse photo of a fungus sprouting from a jungle floor. The pain of it all was excruciating, but he just had to watch. He was still watching an hour later, as the pain—finally—subsided.
When dawn broke he ordered a cocktail, and sat with it on the private balcony adjoining the master suite. Then he ordered another, and a third, and returned to bed. When the fourth came he noticed that the droid who brought it was female, the first he’d seen aboard Shelly’s Shagpad. She was dressed in a kimono rather like his, and seemingly little else.
He asked her whether she’d mind keeping him company. With a smile that would have melted tungsten carbide, for all that it was entirely artificial, she said she’d be happy to oblige. She dropped her kimono and hop
ped into bed with him.
When it came down to it, Ruxhana Fengen Kraa was nothing if not pragmatic. He had to make sure that everything still worked up to spec. The remainder of the voyage—a further three days—passed all too quickly.