Dark of the Woods

Is this second blue closer to the shade you have called purple than the first blue — this blue — you saw a moment ago?

He went through the routine for five minutes, growing impatient. But he was afraid to speak for fear he would be punished by further sleep before he learned the answers to the questions that plagued him. When he was finished, the couch settled into a horizontal position, and dozens of instruments of a surgical nature began working about his head. He could feel the brush of them against his skin now and again, though he could not guess what they were doing and could feel no pain. Then, abruptly, he knew who he was and that he had, in the last moments before he had awakened here, been lying in the snow at the base of Tooth Mountain, dying. He had died. He distinctly remembered the passing from the sleep-darkness to that other shade of black, the energiless and eternal night that had been beyond the power of words to describe. He tried to sit up, was held down by the straps.

Wait.

He waited. He had a fairly good idea where he was now. There had been a fortress after all. And Leah had gotten him into it. And if he had not died until she had him within the receival tray of a fullsize robo-doc there was a chance the machine had been able to hypo adrenalin into him to get his heart functioning, while it had fed him bottles of blood plasma from a needle.

Yet that did not explain some of the strange sensations that he had been through. He still felt as if he were Stauffer Davis — and someone else, as if he were not wholly himself.

There was sleep yet again.

And when he woke, he was sitting up, still strapped in the form-changing couch, looking straight into the eyes of a Demosian man, when there never should have been such a creature there. The Demosian men were nonexistent now, destroyed by the war and the sterilizing mustard gas. There were only women remaining, as Matron Salsbury had so pointedly assured him when he had tried to find out where Leah's husband was,

He opened his mouth to ask how the Demosian came to be there — and the mouth of the alien opened at the same moment. For the first time, Davis realized he was looking into a mirror placed directly opposite him and that the slight, handsome Demosian with the wings folded down the middle of his back was him!

The mirror rose into the ceiling, and Leah was standing behind it, on the platform of the surgical robot, looking worriedly down at him. As the straps let him go, she asked, “It was all right, what I did?'

He was dazed, unable to understand what had happened to him.

“You were dead. You were dead shortly after I found the entrance and dragged you back and inside. Half an hour after you were dead, I got you into the machine. I didn't think anything could be done then. But what brain cells had deteriorated, the machine rebuilt.”

“I'm not a man any more,” he said.

“You're a Demosian, yes. The genetic chambers were prepared to deliver a perfectly structure male Demosian for the implantation of your own brain tissue. That was the problem with the Artificial Wombs: they could turn out grown Demosians, male or female, but not with brains that could learn more than enough to understand the basics of even self-care. Morons. If the project couldn't solve the problem, they were prepared to transplant the brains of our own people — after they were killed by the Conquerors — into new shells, keep using the same warriors over and over. It was also possible to take the brain of a captured Conqueror, wash it clean, implant it in a Demosian form. The resultant hybrid was a… a zombie, a servant for menial tasks that would free good men to fight. If I was to save you, I had to make your body the body of a winged man.”

“But the Demosian machine — your machine — spoke to me in English.”

“It had to be programmed with the Alliance dominant tongues as well as Demosian languages, for it had to be able to communicate with a Conqueror prisoner in order to obtain information and to brainwash him.”

“How long?”

“Three weeks.”

He looked startled.

“It has been lonely,” she said.

“No one…?”

“The search has been given up. The fortress can tap their public communications, so I've followed it all in detail. We were killed, they have announced, in the firestorm.”

He burst out laughing, and realized that she had been, even tenser than he when she smiled uncertainly at him. He leaped up, grabbed her, hugged her to him. She no longer seemed quite so tiny, quite so elfin. But, through the perceptions of the Demosian body, she was a hundred times more alluring than she had seemed before. He realized that this was simply because the tactile, visual, auditory receptors of the Demosian body, the nerve clusters that gathered these sensations, were far more sensitive and refined than the like nerves of the grosser human form. But he also liked to think that she was more radiant, also, because they were now separated by fewer differences than ever, were joined by a likeness of flesh that would make physical and emotional intimacy so much deeper and more meaningful.

“You're not mad, then?” she asked.

“Of course not!”

“I'm glad. I've been worried all these days I've waited for the machine to finish its chores with you.”

“Now,” he said, feeling the joy of life bounding in him like the stimulating fingers of some booster drug, “we are not only free and unhunted, but we have the fortress with which to work and plan; we don't have to be barbarians, living without conveniences and without hope. There's so much to study and accomplish that it's hard to know where to start.”

“How about going flying with me for beginners?” she asked.

It took him a moment to realize that she meant flying and was not using a euphemism for lovemaking. He stood, mouth open, and looked down to his now small feet, up his powerful but thin legs, at a body that had been constructed for travel through the air. Carefully, he unfolded his great, blue wings behind him…

XII

Davis sat in the richly padded maroon easy chair behind the ornate desk which seemed very large and blocky and Comfortably solid before him but which was, by human standards, a mite too small to do business from. It had been a little more than two weeks now since he had awakened under the hand of the mechanical surgeon in the genetic chambers in the bottom floor of the subterranean fortress and had discovered that he no longer possessed the body of an Earthman, and still he continued to compare the sensations and the time-space judgments he made with those he would have made in the much different human shell he had been born with. More often than not, the Demosian body came out the winner in such comparisons, for it was more compact, more muscular, considering the fine tuning of what muscle it did possess, and quicker than the looming hulk of the old- Stauffer Davis.

He found that, unlike a man of Earth, a Demosian moved in a fluid, catlike manner so natural and rhythmical that he was not aware of his body in any conscious plane. He never tripped over a seam in the floor. He never bent to pick something up and found his stomach in his way. He never cracked head or hips against doorways, never fumbled something he was attempting to pick up. He was one with his environment, as a human could never be, and met and coped with it on a subconscious level that freed his mind for almost continual deep thought on the things he had learned in these past several days.

He turned off the tapeviewer on the desk, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes, letting his mind wander. The tape concerned the operation of the genetic wombs and the theories advanced to explain their inability to produce beings with serviceable brains inside their skulls. He still did not understand two-thirds of the technical language, but he was learning with the aid of sleep-teach machines that fed the data into his own brain at a hundred times the speed he could have learned it under normal classroom circumstances. The theory that most interested him was the one constructed by Dr. Mi'nella — who was now dead, slaughtered in the senseless Alliance takeover of Demos. Mi'nella believed that the problem with the mindlessness of the artificial men did not lie in. the genetic engineering at all, but, instead, in the time-ratio chamber where the untouched fetus was put and — in ten days subjective time — aged twenty years objectively. Thus, Mi'nella argued, they were producing twenty-year-olds