by Les Petersen
“Ah,” he said, “Flintlock. You fell asleep there for a while. Well, you’ll be pleased to know the wound hadn’t punctured the chest wall. Struck one of your batteries., but there’re fragments of ‘tanium in the wound I can’t get at, and you’ll find a tenderness in the area and the sharp pains when you move. Wouldn’t be surprised if the impact’s done a little damage to the ribs as well.”
Barb grabbed his arm and aimed a finger at me. “His name’s Stromlo, Doc! He’s a pretty boy.”
The Doc looked at me. He did a full body, head to toe observation, looking at the flair of my hips, the thickness of my wrists, the prominence of my Adam’s apple. “Voluntary?”
Well, at least he gave me the benefit of the doubt and I knew he’d understand when none other would. I didn’t feel shame or anger. I shook my head. “No. I didn’t even know it had happened. Someone must have dropped a TJ pill or two into my drink. Too many parties, I suppose.”
He nodded his head. “Nasty trick to play on your friends. Any side effects?”
I shrugged. “A little bit of extra fat, some soreness around my nipples … that’s about all. Oh… I don’t have to shave as often. And lacy underwear has a definite appeal …though come to think of it, I like it before this.”
“Seems like they didn’t shoot off your sense of humour when they blew that hole in your chest.” He gave me a grin and rubbed his stubbly chin. “And the TJ did some good things to you as well. Could do with a dose myself.”
I shook my head a little. “Wouldn’t recommend it. Bra straps are killers.”
He gave me another grin and told me to lie still. “There’s a few shards that have to come out of this wounds and I ain't as steady as I used to be, so you won’t be too much of a pretty boy when its finished.”
I lay back and thought of England while he lifted the bandage back out of the way, then prised something out of me. Barb was looking at us like we were a pair of strange bastards and it might have been true if the facts weren’t even nastier than they seemed.
She was right about me being a pretty boy. I didn’t want to be that way though. It may be all the rage to change sex, but it wasn’t long till Luddite sympathisers began seeding a few party punch bowls with the tablets. It was a standard joke at Luddite get togethers to say “One day a man, the next androgynous. One day a woman, the next day twice the woman”.
Mind you, it wasn’t always accidental. There where the one-timers or uncertain fools who had second thoughts after starting out to make the change and they stopped half way or tried to “back up” the process. Those who tried to take the machos or fems and turn their sex back the way nature intended it, found there were side effects, and they were worse than the cat calling.
I know my own experience was a controlled experiment by Shahn. After I had accused her for weeks of dropping pills in my food, and she had finally admitted what she had done, I still hoped my body would change back., but of course, it didn’t. And after I had plunged into a self-doubt so deep I’d despaired for myself and then risen to find myself again, I stood in the shower and saw how close I had come to losing myself completely. The muscles of my chest and stomach had softened; the bones of my hips had widened. None of the other changes need to be discussed. Some things should be private.
And I didn’t feel any sense of wonder at all. Sometimes Shahn would ask me if I didn’t feel a little different, if being in touch with the feminine side of myself made me more a person than I’d ever been before. I might have gained some of the physical differences, but none of the mental changes. Few who dispute that assertion., but let’s not talk about that.
Finally, Doc finished with me and opened a bag he lifted onto the slab beside me. He might have been trying to act like a naturalist doctor, but I saw enough pharmaceuticals in there to cure the world of the black plague. He wiped something around the wound and puffed some other powder over the area and then wrapped a good linen badge around my chest. “Not a cross-your-heart this one,” he said and he cackled at his own joke. “I’ll run a few blood tests to check you haven’t picked up anything from the river, but other than that you should be ready to go back into the jungle anytime by tomorrow. That’s if you want to.” He was looking at me with large keen eyes and it was as if he was looking into my soul. “You care to explain it?”
“Truth is, Doc, I’m not at all sure I know anything about what is going on.”
He nodded sagely. “I thought you might say something like that. Well, when Sam Hunter gets here we might get a few answers.” He looked at Barb. “Flintlock here can do without the restraints and give him his clothes as well. Don’t want the kids getting curious and asking too many questions. Shotgun’ll look after him.”
Barb was watching me. She looked quite uncertain that the Doc was recommending the right course of action. Even after he had left she stood there staring down at me before finally turning and walking away.
She was replaced by a guy who looked like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and a sumo wrestler. He was at least 6’8” and dressed in a black leather jacket over a torn black T-shirt. Even his jeans were black, but the grass stains made a mockery of his uniform. He wore leather gloves that had the fingertips missing and pulled down on his head was a baseball cap. The insignia had been torn off. I could see immediately why they called him Shotgun: a brace of the weapons was strung across his back. His belt held a row of cartridges. What was most interesting about him was the blazing red beard that wrapped around his face like a mane. He gave me the once over and a small smile. “Bit cold?”
I nodded, knowing my nipples were already giving him the message and the goose bumps on my arms were all standing to attention. He looked around to see if anyone was in ear shot, and then leant over and said very quietly, “You mess anything up here and I won’t just kill you. You understand?”
I knew what he meant and a cold anger drilled through me. “Yeah. I understand.”
“Good. Welcome to Haven.”
He turned his back on me and walked a few paces away. I just lay back and tried to figure out how long it would be before the squad found the pickup that Sansan had organised. I hadn’t had time to ask if she had organised air or surface, but if it was air then the military would soon find the craft circling and the squad would have little problem tracking me from there. Surface craft were a little harder to find, even with the remote beacons they usually carried, but I’d used them often enough for Sansan to conceal them with native mazes. The beacon would report that it was in the centre of Sydney no matter where it really was.
Barb returned five minutes later with my clothes. She dropped them beside the slab and then called out to someone to move the kids back into the compound. After another few minutes the sound of kid’s laughing was gone and only three of us remained out in the open. Barb unbuckled the straps that held me. When I rose to my feet she stood back, beside Shotgun, who was standing like a guardian outside a king’s throne room, his arms folded across his wide chest. He was grinning. I got dressed, feeling eyes watching every move I made.
Surprisingly, my clothes had been washed and smelt of lavender. Everything I’d heard had made the Ferals sound like they believed in the earth so much that they wore as much of it as they could. Still I felt naked not putting on the PAN and the jacket had no batteries in the multiple pockets so it felt as if it would fly from my shoulders. My shirt had a ragged patch over the hole that the bullet had made, about the diameter of my finger. I had expected something much larger., but at least it was repaired. I was clean, dressed, mended. I could have been back to normal, but my boots squelched when I pulled them on. When I looked at them to see what they wanted, Shotgun nodded his head toward the north, where a trail led away into the trees. “That way, mister.”
The trees were gums of some sort–I didn’t have feed coming in from Sansan to tell me exactly what they were, or their botanical name. I felt even more naked when I couldn’t call up the information.
After about five
minutes of walking and right about the time when I felt like I’d fall at any moment from exhaustion, Shotgun told me to stop. My blood pounded in my head and the size of the gong it was belting against got bigger and harder when I stood still. Barb was watching me even closer now, almost leaning forward as if a strong wind was blowing against her. “Sit down, Flintlock,” she said.
I sat. Shotgun walked past me a couple of steps, then took a step off to one side and lifted a small spiky bush away from the ground. Beneath it, under the leaf cover, which he swept clear with one swipe of his boots, was a metal trapdoor. He leant over, pulled it up and gave me a “come here” signal. I rose to my feet and walked over, expecting him to give me a shove into the hole or something. A long hole dropped away from the surface and a ladder ran up one side of it to the surface. He pointed down the hole, raised his eyebrows and said, “Home. Sleep tight.”
Barb was standing off to one side. “There’s even a solar-powered light down there, Mr Stromlo. And a bed to rest in. You go wait there. If Sam isn’t here by eight, I’ll bring some food.”
I did what I’d been told, feeling weaker with each clanking rung I descended. Half way down Shotgun closed the door above and shut out my light. A few moments later I heard something heavy being dragged over the lid and remembered seeing a large boulder a few paces away from the bush. There was no way I would be able to lift it off. I clung to the ladder and steadied my racing heart. After a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could see a faint greenish glow beneath my feet. I fished around with my foot for the next rung and descended toward the light for another couple of minutes until my foot struck solid earth.
The smell of damp woollen blankets filled the air, and something sulphurous. The green glow emanated from a small electric clock sitting on a wooden crate nearby, but the glow did not invade the space before me far enough to make out much more than the first twenty feet or so. I could hear the drip drip drip of water some distance away and I knew from the sound a sizeable room spread out in front of me. I stood for a moment hoping my eyes would adjust to the darkness further, but it was a wasted effort. I stumbled around and tried to find a light switch.
Five minutes later I still hadn’t found the switch, no matter where I clapped my hands or how loud I called out for light, though my knees had found the bed and a few old packing crates. Luckily my hands found the top edge of another ladder that led down to some other place. It smelt like an old latrine. The sound of the dripping water was coming from there as well so I guess that was where the toilet facilities were. The walls and floor were rammed earth, though the roof was concrete beams and plaster. A single light bulb hung just above the bed, but I could find no way to illuminate it.
On top of one of the crates I’d found a water bottle, which, when I took the chance, tasted like plastic, but took the edge off my thirst. I finally gave up looking for the switch, crawled onto the bed and with my head pounding with fatigue, lay down and tried to sleep. My body felt overheated and my chest pounded in rhythm to my head. The room was warm enough so I slipped out of most of my clothes and pulled the blankets over me, imagining a swarm of some infestation consuming my body. Little noise disturbed the bunker, which was what I imagined I’d been confined in; just the plink drip drip of the water in the lower level and the chirrup of the electric clock, which showed it was after five in the evening.
Strangely I felt comfortable where I was. Whoever was chasing me would not find me so far away from a civilised area, nor under fifteen feet or so of soil. For a moment, I lay there listening to my own heart, to the gurgle of my stomach and the various sounds a body makes as it settles. Without the PAN giving me the last reports of the day, or asking for updates to schedules, or running me through a series of personality tests or physical routines I was a little bewildered. Like I’d taken too much Gracelands and was coming down off the powerful high that it induced. The darkness was like a headset that wasn’t quite working right.
I rested one hand against my chest and another under my head and let the memories play around with my mind.
A gentle hand on my face woke me many hours later. It was still dark in the room, but I could see from the light of the clock that Barb was leaning close enough to kiss me and her eyes were closed. She was breathing gently on my face. I felt her body lying along the length of the bed; her hips over mine, her other hand down in my underwear, gently tugging at my manhood. She was completely dressed, though I could feel each of her soft curves and the warmth of her body.
For some reason, it seemed natural, as if she had always been there, as if I’d fallen asleep with her beside me and she was waking me the way we always woke. I dared not move for fear it would be mistaken, or that the gentle pleasure we were sharing was something dark and unnatural. She opened her eyes and just stared at me, looking deep into my eyes while she continued tugging at me a little more with one hand, and running the fingers of her other hand over my face and up my nose to my eyebrows. I felt my flesh stirring and the warm flow of desire building up in my stomach and loins. When she felt the change, she giggled, withdrew her hand and rolled slowly to one side of me, propping her head up with her hand. Her fingers on my face still traced the arch of my eyebrow, then down to my ear and down along my jawbone to my chin.
Stretching out along my side, she lay her head on my shoulder and ran her hand down off my face to my collarbone. I felt her placing the hand gently over the wound and fanning out her fingers. For a moment, we lay there in the soft green light of the electric clock without moving, her hand like a white spider over an even whiter bandage. “Did you sleep well?” she asked.
“Yes.” My voice was a little croaky and my mouth was dry. “Is that the right time?”
She looked at the clock. “Mm, yeah. Eight forty. PM.”
She rolled over me to get off the bed, teasing me by rolling her hips firmly across my erection. “I brought you down some food.”
She reached over to the wall and flicked a switch set into the wall and the room burst into brightness as the light came on. It blinded me for a moment and when I sat up and squinted around the room to see what else was in the space, I saw Shotgun sitting on the crates, his smile like a curled-up snake found under a rock. “Howdy,” he said. He raised an eyebrow at me. “Was that good for you too?”
I looked from him to Barb. She was smiling at me while she opened a cane basket. Hers was a friendly smile. His I couldn’t be sure of. I tried to act naturally. “Very nice, thanks. Do you get a turn with me as well?”
He gave me an even bigger grin and I noticed he had lost a lot of teeth sometime in the past. My guess was someone had punched the lot of them out, or even used some heavy implement like the one I was looking for. “Nah,” he said around a chuckle, “Barb gets to have all the fun. How you feeling?” he pointed to the bandage around my chest.
I didn’t know what the two of them were up to and I guessed they had done it for some reason, possibly just to see if all my parts worked, or maybe for other reasons, which I would rather not think about. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat upright a little more. “Bit of an ache there. Doesn’t feel too bad. Wasn’t expecting a hand maiden to help me heal though.”
Barb handed me a slab of baked bread split down the middle and stuffed with what looked like a salad. I realised I hadn’t eaten for a while and I got stuck into it. Artichoke and sun-dried tomato, cheese and even a touch of honey. While I ate, Barb walked over to stand beside Shotgun and they both watched me, mimicking each other by crossing their arms and frowning. I began wondering at their relationship, but unless they were lovers I couldn’t see any. When I’d finished the sandwich, I wiped my face with the back of my hand and sighed. “Thanks, that was good.”
Shotgun hopped off the crate and began toward the ladder. Barb gave me a shy kind of smile and then told me to get dressed. “Sam Hunter is due to arrive at ten. You had better not go looking like that. If you need to clean up, there’s a rock pool and toilet down t
here. The switch is on the wall near the ladder. And I bought some towels. They’re over there, next to the thermos of coffee. We’ll come back in hour and a half.” She walked toward the ladder and just as she began up toward the surface she gave me another warm smile. I smiled back and reached for my trousers. A few moments later I heard the rock being dragged back over the trapdoor.
I was sitting in the bunker drinking coffee when they moved the boulder off the trapdoor later and called down to me to come up. When I emerged into the night air I found they were holding red-light torches, which made the trees around us looked like they were aflame. I whistled. “Now don’t tell me you two are going to take me dancing?”
Shotgun grinned. “Okay, we won’t tell you that, twinkle toes. But, if you don’t know how to do the Polka, you’d better learn fast.”
“Does a waltz count?” I mimed a few steps. Barb giggled.
Shotgun grinned again. “Only one...two…one…two.”
It took me a moment to catch his pun. He meant for me to march somewhere. “So, what’s happening?”
“You will be interviewed by the Forum. Come on.” They covered over the trapdoor and Barb motioned me to follow her.
With Shotgun dogging my heels, we headed into the darkness, seeing little except a patch of red forest and the blazing white cloud of stars. After about five minutes Shotgun told me to stand still and to close my eyes. When I did he dropped a sack over my head and spun me around a few times. Then leading me with a firm grip on my upper arm, he half-pushed half-dragged me for the next ten minutes and then had me drop on all fours and crawl ahead for another few meters.
“You can stand up now.”
I rose to my feet and the bag was taken off my head.
The room at first seemed as if it was carved into the side of a small hill, with an entrance low and narrow like that of an igloo. Around the walls were a series of sconces, all fluttering with firebrands, the lighting supported by candles on the large table in the middle of the room. From the firelight, I could see the room was large enough to house at least thirty people, though only six men and five women sat around the table at its centre. The walls were all whitewashed and the ceiling had ornately carved panels fixed between the beams that held it all up. In one corner was the edge of a rock wall and I surmised that they had built some sort of meeting house against the stone cliff face. Water was channelled into a small trough near a rear entrance blocked by a wooden door. A fireplace was cut into the rock face as well and two dogs lay next to it on woven mats.