have in plenty to spare.”
I looked again at what was in my cup. But it still tasted good, and while I was checking it out Pirraghiz saw an opportunity. “I am glad that you are taking an interest in this, Dannerman. Would you like to know more about the other captive species?”
I considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Why not?” I said, meaning, since I was going to be stuck here for the rest of my life, why not find out what that life was going to be like?
Pirraghiz beamed. “That is good, Dannerman. I thought you might feel so, and so I have prepared something for you. Wait one moment.” She disappeared into her own room, and when she came back she was carrying the familiar helmet.
It wasn’t what I had expected. I protested, “I’ve already seen all I need to see of what’s happening back home.”
“Oh, Dannerman,” she sighed. “Do you think it was only your people who were bugged? That is not so. Sentient beings of many, many different species have worn the transmitters, species you have never seen, of kinds you cannot imagine, including some of those who shared captivity with you. I could not find all of those in the records,” she said apologetically, “but I have selected a single individual from eight different species. Some of the species are here, some are not. Later on I can add others if you wish.”
She waited for me to make up my mind. I hefted the helmet for a moment, indecisively. Curiosity won. Gingerly I put it on and pulled down the flaps. I heard Pirraghiz’s voice giving last-minute instructions-“Simply say ‘next’ when you want to go to another subject, Dannerman, and I will make the change for you.” And then the helmet took over.
I was no longer myself. I wasn’t in my chamber in the Horch nest.
I was surrounded by total blackness. There was nothing to be seen, smelled or felt, except that there before me, not two meters away, was an image of a creature that looked like a frog with the mouth of an alligator. Its skin was as fuzzy as a peach, and more or less the same color. On one bony arm it wore a thing like a wristwatch, but that was glowing with a pale blue light, and there were three golden bracelets on the other. It was dressed in tunic and leggings of a shimmery, silky material. It had four large ears on each side of its elongated head, and a cluster of bright pink feathers topping it off-probably a hat or a decoration, I thought, since the feathers didn’t seem to be growing out of the creature’s skull.
It wasn’t moving at all. I figured that out easily enough; what I was looking at was just a picture, showing me what the first species Pirraghiz had selected for my viewing pleasure looked like; and in a moment the blackness winked away.
Now I wasn’t looking at the creature anymore. Now I was that creature. What I was looking at-and smelling and hearing and feeling-was a warm, sunny seaside. Gentle ocean waves were breaking on a pebbly beach, where two or three ungainly-looking catamarans were drawn up. I was sitting-squatting, actually-on the side of another catamaran, eating something that crunched in my jaws and tasted richly of blood. I was not alone. There were two other alligator-frogs just below me on the beach, doing something or other with large nets-repairing them, I supposed. I was looking particularly at one of them, and it was giving me occasional sidelong glances in return. I was conscious of a kind of warm stirring that felt like sexual tension as I looked at-I guess, at her. Unless, of course, that one was male and the body I was inhabiting was female, but I could think of no good way of checking that.
People talk wistfully about wanting a change in their lives, generally meaning something like a better job, a new boyfriend, a week on some island resort-anything at all, as long as it is different. I know the sovereign recipe for that. Just slip one of the helmets on your head and tap into the mind of a truly alien being, and you’ll never find anything more different as long as you live. It wasn’t just the sights and smells that were different. My borrowed body interpreted them in ways that were completely foreign to me. There was a pervading stink of rotten fish in the air, powerful enough to make me hold my nose if I’d had one to hold. But I wasn’t disliking it. It was actually making me hungry. My hearing was far better than ever before. Not only could I hear the distant sounds of insects and the lapping of the waves on the shore, I could hear precisely where they were; the frog’s multiple ears were as directional as sonar. I could hear the other alligator-frogs calling to each other-deep baritone hissing, like a dragon’s voice-but that was where the helmet’s capacities ran out. I couldn’t understand a word they said.
Then, flick, the scene changed. I was still in the creature’s body, or in the body of one just like him, but I was in a series of different places, doing a variety of different things. Once my host was teamed with another frog, both of them wearing a kind of harness and pulling something that was heavy-but I couldn’t see what it was-along a marshy dirt road between stands of head-high rushes. Once he and a couple of others were making a lot of noise- singing together or making threats, I couldn’t tell which. Once he was asleep. None of it was very intelligible.
So I called, “Next!”
Frog gone away, blackness all around me. I was looking at another picture. This one was a fat, tentacle-nosed thing the general shape of a hippopotamus, and I knew what it was at once.
I was looking at a Wet One, one of the amphibians that had killed Patrice.
Perhaps, in the interests of scientific curiosity, I should have made the effort to understand what life was like for a Wet One. I didn’t. I wasn’t ready for going into that particular mind. As soon as I saw it I yelled, “Next!”
It took a moment for Pirraghiz to react-surprised, I guess, that I wanted to cut that one so short. But then I felt the faint scrabbling of her talons as she poked at the controller on the side of the helmet, and I had a new bizarre creature to look at.
I kept going through the roster of diverse, but all nonhuman, beings that Pirraghiz had accessed for me. There was a Shelled Person, like the one I had seen in the compound. Very strange, that experience was, because the Shelled Person seemed to see other living things, like the Docs, as luminous, and it had two distinct ranges of odor-detecting senses, one for in the water and one for on land. I tried a thing that looked like a feathered gorilla, with batlike membranes that joined its arms to its body and let it leap and glide for short distances-on, I guess, a planet with a lesser gravity, because I did not think that would work on Earth. Number Five was a four-legged furry thing that made its home in a cave, with its mate and half a dozen young; why the Beloved Leaders had bothered to bug it, I didn’t know, because it certainly didn’t look very civilized to me. Number Six—
Number Six I knew very well.
Bewildered, I took the helmet off my head. It was unexpectedly dark in the room-evidently the sun had set while I was in the helmet-but I could see Pirraghiz. She wasn’t hovering nearby, as I expected; she was over by the window, pulling the drapes back from the light-givers. She turned around questioningly. “I’ve just seen Dopey!” I told her. “The one who died.”
She said comfortably, “Yes, of course. The talker. Did you simply see his image, Dannerman, or did you go on
