He could be dangerous!”
The first speaker seemed calmer, though with a touch of uncertainty.
“Come on. You’ve seen chimps before. They’re our friends. We couldn’t be luckier, after everything we’ve been through.”
“You call this a chimp?” the other rejoined. “I never spent as much time around ’em as you have, or read as many books, but I bet no chimp ever looked like this!”
That comment, more than anything, spurred Harry to fight harder against the clinging drowsiness.
What’s wrong with the way I look? I’ll match my face against a hairless ape’s, any day!
Of course the voices were human. He recognized the twangy overtones, despite a strange accent.
How did humans get into E Space?
Painful brightness stabbed, the first time he tried cracking his eyelids. A groan escaped Harry’s lips as he raised a heavy forearm over his eyes.
“I—”
His throat felt parched. Almost too scratchy to speak.
“I could use … some water.”
Their reaction surprised him. The higher voice squawked.
“It talks! You see? It can’t be a chimp. Clobber it!”
Harry’s eyes flew open, this time to a world of glare and blurry shadows. Struggling upward, he sensed a pair of nearby figures backing away quickly. Young humans, he perceived — male and female — filthy and disheveled.
“Hey!” he croaked. “What d’you mean I can’t be a—”
Harry stopped suddenly, unable to move further or speak. He could only stare at the arm in front of him. His own arm … covered with sparse fur.
Glossy white fur.
His hair was the color of frost on a windowsill during winter mornings on Horst.
Harry’s chest pounded. Worse, a sharp pain stabbed his spine, just above the buttocks, like a numbed hand or foot coming back to life.
“Watch out,” the young female cried. “It’s gettin’ up!”
Fighting panic, Harry scrambled to his feet, clutching at his body, checking it for wounds, for missing parts. To his great relief, all the important bits seemed still attached. But his eyes roved wildly, out of control, seeking to find out what else was wrong.
White fur … white fur … I … I can live with that … assuming it’s the only thing that’s changed.…
One of the humans reentered his fear-limned field of vision. The male, wearing tattered rags, with several weeks’ stubble on his chin. Mixed up by anxiety and confusion, Harry could only snarl reflexively and back away.
“Hey there,” the youth said in soothing tones. “Take it easy, mister. You asked for water. I’ve got some, in this here canteen.”
There was an object in his hand. It looked like a dirty gourd or pumpkin, stoppered with a cylinder of wood.
What is this, Harry thought. Some sorta joke? Or more E Space mind garbage?
Still retreating across the deck of his battered scout station, he glimpsed through a window that the scenery outside had changed. The vast plain of fuzzy carpet was now yellow, instead of beige, and the mist had grown thicker, obscuring everything except a nearby mound of metal rubble, smoldering as it slowly dissolved into the surrounding greedy strands. He wanted to ask what had happened, how long he had been out, where these humans had come from, and how they had gotten inside his ship. Perhaps he owed them his life. But caught in a flux of near hysteria, it was all he could do right now to keep from screeching at them.
White fur … but that’s not all. Something else is wrong! Those mites did more to me than that, I know it!
Now both humans were in clear view. The female — not much more than a girl — had a nasty scar down one side of her face. She gripped a crowbar, brandishing it like a weapon. The boy held her back, though he too was clearly dismayed and confused by Harry’s appearance.
“We’re not gonna hurt you,” he said. “You saved us from the monsters. We came over and patched your hull for you. Look, my name is Dwer and this is Rety. We’re humans … Earthlings. Can you tell us who — and what — you are?”
Harry wanted to scream. To ask if they were blind! Shouldn’t patrons know their own clients? Even with white fur, a chimp was still—
He felt a sudden tickle behind him. Of course the bulkhead was back there and he could back up no farther. But the sensation came just an instant too soon, in too strange a fashion, as if the wall was brushing an extension of his spine.
My spine.
That was where — the last thing he recalled — a little predatory memoid had attacked and chewed its way into his flesh, filling his mind-body with waves of turmoil and disorientation.
“I mean … you look like you might be some sort of a relative,” the youth went on, babbling nervously. “And you spoke Anglic just now, so maybe …”
Harry wasn’t listening. Nervously, with a rising sense of dread, he groped around behind himself with his left hand, brushing the bulkhead, then moving downward.
Something started rising up to meet the hand. He sensed it clearly. Something that was part of himself.
A snakelike tendril, covered with hair, planted itself assuredly into his palm. It felt as natural as scratching his own ass, or pulling on his thumb.
Oh, he thought, with some relief. It’s just my damned tail.
His mouth went round.
Breath froze in his throat … then whistled out with a long, mournful sigh.
The two humans edged away nervously as the sigh underwent a metamorphosis, transmuting like some eager meme with a mind all its own, turning into coarse, hysterical laughter.
The effect, when he finally got around to examining his reflection calmly, wasn’t half as bad as he had feared. In fact, the white fur seemed rather — well — charismatic.
As for his new appendage, Harry was already resigned to it.
Surely it must have uses, he thought. Though I’m not looking forward to the tailoring bills.
Things could have been much worse, of course. The memoid parasite that invaded his body had been dying, moments after its parent exploded from brief contact with Material Reality. With a final gasp, it must have latched on to some random thought in Harry’s mind, using that to force a quick shift in self-image. In E Space, the way you pictured yourself could sometimes have dramatic effects on who and what you became.
One thing was certain — he could never go to Earth looking like this. To be called a “monkey” would be the last insufferable humiliation.
When I joined the Navigation Institute, I figured it meant I’d probably live the rest of my life apart from my kind. Now I belong to Wer’Q’quinn more than ever.
At his command, the station was now striding alongside the great, shining Avenue, limping at maximum safe speed, retracing its earlier path to pick up the instrument packages and finish this assignment before anything else went wrong.
One good thing about Wer’Q’quinn. The old squid will hardly notice any difference in my looks. All he cares about is getting the job done.
That left him with one more problem.
The young humans.
Apparently, Rety and Dwer had been the “organic cargo” carried by the hapless machine entity. Their little habitat was about to be attacked and torn open by a ravenous meme-raptor when Harry arrived. From their point of view, he was like the proverbial cavalry. A knight from some storybook, galloping to the rescue just in the nick of time.
They later returned the favor, after the final memoid fled the scene, bloated on stolen atoms. After talking
