Horrors of the Dancing Gods

hard to deal with.

^'Well, I might as well see it,' Joe told her. 'I promise I won't turn away or treat you any differently. I wasn't born like this. I was born so different that this form and existence are to me so unhappy that I've been wandering the world trying to discover how to change it, to go back. I'm hardly the one to be turned off by the way anybody looks.'

'But it is just a disguise and a pleasant one to look upon, at that,' Alvi noted. 'You don't have to hide half your body from the world, always fearful that someone will see, will start yelling and pointing out your shame.'

By that point Joe's imagination had already conjured up more horrible things than were likely to be hidden under that baggy dress of Alvi's. Still, she could understand the problem and sympathize. 'Anyone who sees me sees only a simpleton, an oversexed, ignorant, dumb little faerie girl with only one reason to be looked at and one thing on her tiny little mind,' Joe noted. 'At least, with your dresses and cloaks, you could be treated more as a person.'

'It was not the same,' Alvi responded. 'Not only was the fear too great, but the limits were much too restrictive and even dangerous. It wasn't equality from my point of view. It was play equality, that's all.'

Play equality… Hey, chief! You ain't no Injun, are you? We don't serve no Injuns in this here place… Who'd ya kill to get a job drivin' that truck, Geronimo? Yours? Get dutta here! Aita no Injun afford a truck like that… How many times, after all those fights and the hospital time that almost caused him to lose his truck, had Joe tried to 'pass,' to deny his own self-evident heritage? That was why he'd resettled in the East once he could. In the East 'Indians' were exotic, fascinating creatures, like people from Mars; the Easterners had other targets.

'You don't have to playact with me,' Joe said gently, and helped Alvi remove the rather elaborately fastened clothing.

The real problem with halflings was that they made up survivable combinations of creatures with no reason at all for being other than that the mixture, for some reason, worked. Mostly things that would be okay on the proper creature just didn't turn out right or weren't in the right proportions or places on the body or things like that. They were deformed — mutations, sort of — and nobody ever felt comfortable around that sort of unfortunate. Still, in a land where Joe had battled zombie armies, monster carnivorous rabbits, real fire-breathing dragons, and even nastier types and one that had countless thousands of faerie races, demons, and monsters all its own that were 'normal,' how bad could it be?

The answer was not so much bad as very, very bizarre.

Alvi didn't have to go far to lose all illusions of humanity. In fact, she looked decidedly less human and more alien than Joe had ever been as a creature of this land. And it was easy to see why she'd not been terribly put off by being handcuffed. In fact, had that fellow managed to take her prisoner, he might have been in for a very nasty shock.

The head of course was normal: the face of a pretty girl with a nice short hairstyle, thin brows, big brown eyes, the usual, set atop a fairly long neck, nice shoulders, and a pair of medium-sized and fairly firm breasts. Then the fun began.

Just below this was a second set of shoulders, mounted under the first but tapered in just a bit from the top, from which extended two additional arms ending in hands as well and between which were two slightly smaller but otherwise perfect medium-sized and fairly firm breasts.

Just below this was yet a third set of shoulders, again mounted under the first and in just a bit from the second set, with a third set of arms, hands, even breasts, in a threesome that cascaded down in such a way that each succeeding set was perhaps ten percent or so smaller than the set on top and, interestingly, was proportioned so that all three pairs of hands ended at the exact same point on the body. This, however, left room for only a small flat stomach area with no visible navel, and then the whole thing tapered into the hips so narrowly that it all appeared to be on a giant ball joint. The only girl with top measurements thirty-six-thirty-three — thirty and a waist of maybe twenty-two, Joe thought. But the hips really blew it.

Those hips were very wide, supporting two thickly thighed and very nonhuman legs that might have more properly been on a bipedal lizard or perhaps a small dinosaur. That is, the legs were attached to the hips slightly splayed rather than straight down, which was why the hip area looked so wide in the first place, and it was this that had given her clothed figure the appearance of being fat. Extending out from the tailbone and crotch area rearward was a thick, tapered tail in keeping with the lower body but rather stiff-looking for all that and relatively short. In fact, it appeared to be somewhat rigid, although her movement showed that the tail could be brought in against the legs, forming a sort of third appendage between and in the back that wasn't quite long enough to reach the ankles, let alone the ground. This tail was designed as a counterweight, for balance, not support, and to some extent its operation was automatic.

As startling was the patterning of the whole lower area starting just below the small third breast pair. It was as if a gang of mad tattoo artists had beset her, producing a riot of attractive but totally abstract designs and colors over her whole lower body. The skin was quite smooth and had a texture similar to that of her human part; the colors were not dull, either, but bright and vibrant, the design about as complex as could be imagined. Only the underside of the tail, revealed through the opening between the legs, was left au naturel, a somewhat segmented- looking off-white.

There was no hair anywhere except on the head or any obvious sign of female genitalia. If it was there, then it was lost in disguise in that riot of color and shape and form, although Joe reflected that anything fairly small might well be anything but obvious in that riotous yet attractive mass.

'You kept — this — a secret even from part of a household? And from anybody around?'

She nodded. 'It's not as hard as you think, and I was used to it, raised to control it. Growing up, they used to tie my lower arms to my sides all the time so I wouldn't reflexively move them, and my tail got lashed to my leg for the same reason. That was tougher. I always had to walk really slowly and deliberately because I couldn't use it for balance. The hands, too, were a problem, mostly if I lost my balance or something. Your instinct is to use everything you have to break a fall. I spent a lot of time in my quarters, alone or with the two serving maids whose folks had been with the family for generations, just to be free of those despicable straps and my tent dresses. I yearned to be outside like this, free, able to run and stretch and not pretend. But it never happened.'

The tremendous difference in Alvi would have made any sort of medical solution more grotesque than the social one her father had adopted. Still, if a big, ugly Injun truck driver could wind up a nymph, surely there was something that a rich guy like her father could summon up from the magical arts. Joe didn't really know all that those Books of Rules contained — except that it was far too much — but surely in them was one of those universal laws: the rich could buy themselves out of almost anything. She raised the point in more delicate terms.

'It was not even an issue,' Alvi replied. 'There were occasional sorcerers as guests, of course — I told you that my father was friends with many powerful ones. They knew of my condition; it could hardly be hidden from them. I am certain that I was examined, perhaps without my knowledge, on magical levels many times, but nothing was ever done. The few who so much as alluded to it — none of them ever came right out, at least in front of me — suggested that there was some kind of curse, that whatever might be done by magic for me would only make things much, much worse. I never understood it. Many times my father started to tell me— I knew he truly wanted to — but each time something held him back. I was never sure if it was part of the curse or some promise he made, like to my mother, or what, but he couldn't, not even in these last few months on the run.'

'This is beginning to sound very much like a curse,' Joe agreed, considering her story so far. 'Come, though. Get into the pool and wash off the grime. You'll find the water's warm and clean, and the bottom's basically stones.'

In the water Alvi leaned back and enjoyed the warmth and clean feel — and only her neck showed. Joe wasn't very worried; of all the people she'd ever met anywhere, Alvi seemed absolutely drown proof.

'You're not coming in?' Alvi called to her.

'Sorry. My race is very good for showers, even better for being out in the rain, but baths are risky. If I absorb too much water without any sort of drain, I can become heavier than gold. Take your time, though, and enjoy. I've got absolutely nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.'