If no one remembers my name, do I really exist?

 

Fantastic Mars
5. Names of Mars

by Erin Halfelven

It took us ten minutes to reach the vicinity of the rooms where Hote and Seejay had stashed the earlier loot they had acquired because Seejay had to approach every intersection alone and check out all the cross-passages.

“Can’t see a thing,” he complained at one point. “It’s really dark down here.”

I traded glances with Trike. Both of us looked at Hote bringing up the rear and apparently peering blindly into the darkness as well. It was dim and gloomy, but I could see pretty well and thought Trike was the same.

“The girl and I can see fine,” Trike volunteered. His accent made almost three syllables out of a word like ‘fine’ but what I noticed was that now he had called me ‘the girl.’

“Crap,” said Seejay. He took time to think about it then announced a change in procedures. “Trike, you keep watch behind mostly, and the girl can come up here to be my eyes.” He made a face that he probably didn’t know I could see quite well.

I didn’t like it either, and my tail wrapped itself around my knees so I couldn’t move. “Eep!” I said.

“Trike?” Seejay asked. “Is she okay?”

“I guess so?” said our giant. “Are you all right?” he asked me directly.

I nodded, feeling a bit too stubborn to speak. My tail had now hobbled my ankles as well as my knees. How long was the damn thing anyway?

“She’s -uh- she’s….” Trike was trying not to laugh at my predicament. “She’s indisposed?” He made it a question.

Seejay turned around. He moved his head back-and-forth and side-to-side to locate me in the darkness. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer. Aware that he probably could see me only in silhouette against the light in the big chamber behind us, I just shrugged. My tail seemed to be trying to tie itself in a knot.

Abruptly and for what reason I could not determine, I burst into tears. Sniffles and sobs turned into quiet whimpers and wails. I felt heartbroken, abandoned, unloved and… nameless?

But I had a name, didn’t I? Even if no one was calling me by it, I had a name. I remembered having a name. But I could not seem to remember what that name had been. I wept. I ached down to the center of my being, to someplace inside that felt bereft. I had a name—and I had lost it!

The game was messing with me again, or something. I wanted to be mad about it, but it frightened me too much. I opened up and let the tears flow, shivering a little, too.

And all the time Hote and Seejay gathered around me and tried to offer comfort while Trike stood sentinel, looking this and that with his darkness-penetrating eyes.

After several, “There, there” and “It’ll be all right” platitudes, Seejay said, “Tell us what’s wrong?”

And suddenly, I could. It poured out. “You guys! First, you started calling me, ‘girl,’ instead of my name, and then you called me ‘the girl,’ and you started talking about me as if I weren’t right there hearing you.”

They looked distressed and mystified and confused, and Trike began leaking tears himself. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he whispered in his soft drawl.

“And now, it’s worse! Even I can’t remember my name. I know I had a name, but I can’t think what it was.”

“Sure you had a name…” began Seejay then he stopped, and his eyes got wide.

“Some kind of magic,” said Hote. “A geas that no one can call you by your name or remember it?”

“A curse,” I whimpered. My tail had unwound itself and hovered near my face where I began using it as a tissue, dabbing at my eyes with the soft furriness, even trying to wad it up in my fist. That caused it to retreat for a moment, pausing to stroke my cheek with the fingerlike extension at the very end.

“It had an ‘o’ in it,” Trike said, trying to be helpful. “Your name had an ‘o’ in it.” That was pretty funny if you thought about it, neither of us could read and wouldn’t know the letter o if we saw it.

“Yonee,” said Hote. “Whatever your name was, we can call you Yonee now.”

“Joanie?” asked Trike.

“No, Yonee,” said Hote, firmly.

“That’s got an O-sound in it,” Trike said, beaming.

“Where did you come up with that?” asked Seejay.

“I don’t know,” admitted Hote. “I think I read it somewhere. But doesn’t she look like someone called Yonee?”

“You mean naked?” said Seejay, he had a little bit of a grin.

As soon as he had said the new name, I stopped crying. I blinked. “Yonee?” I said aloud. It did sound like it fit, even fitting whatever it was inside that made me different.

Seejay nodded. “Much better than Mojo, that wouldn’t fit for a girl.” Then he blinked. “Now we can remember your name?”

“Guys?” said Trike. “I’ve been watching, and the light from the windows in the big room is going. It’s going to get too dark for even my eyes in a little bit.”

“Yonee,” said Seejay, “get up here and help me find the rooms we found before.”

I scurried forward, and Seejay put an arm around me. It didn’t help me think about what we were doing, but it was nice.

“You happy now, Puss?” he whispered to me, burying his face in my hair.

“Puss?” I asked, startled.

He chuckled but didn’t explain. “Just watch out ahead of us. With your caterwauling, I think anyone in the area would already have found us. And the room we’re looking for is a little farther down this corridor and up some stairs.”

My tail worked its way into my hands, and we made much better time even as the dungeon got darker and darker. “If the light goes completely, I don’t think even I will be able to see,” I said.

“Trike might be able to, but no worries. We’re here.”

There was, of course, no door, just a doorway. In fact, I hadn’t seen any doors in any of the hallways we had traveled. Maybe the original builders didn’t believe in privacy? But the room was lighter than the corridor with a single high-up window in the wall that must have faced east. Stars showed in the rectangle fifteen feet above our head giving very poor light but not complete darkness.

It wasn’t a small room, bigger than some apartments I have lived in. There was a bunch of junk stacked against one wall.

“I can’t see a thing, Puss,” said Seejay. “There should be two doors, one on each side.”

“I see them,” I said.

“Go peek inside, make sure we don’t have company we don’t know about.”

I did so. The left-hand room was shown as empty by a tiny sliver of starlight but the right-hand room had no window at all and was dark as the inside of a coffin. “Can’t see anything in here,” I whispered.

Hote and Trike arrived behind us. “Cozy,” the big guy remarked.

Our healer just looked relieved to get out of the corridor.

“Check out the right-hand room,” Seejay told Trike, “after you dump the loot against the wall.”

Trike untangled himself from the luggage then stuck his head into the other room. “Dark,” he reported. “Continued dark until morning. Darker than dark, I mean really dark. But it’s empty.”

“How can you tell, if it's that, uh, dark?” Seejay asked.

Trike made a show of sniffing the air. “All the smells are stale.” He grinned, and his tusks gleamed in the dimness. “Yonee hasn’t been in here, I can tell. Or Hote.”

“I’m going to try to heal myself again,” said our physician, “then I need to sleep. Is it okay if I use this dark room?”

“Sure,” said Seejay. “Yonee and I will take the room on the other side and Trike can have the big center room.”

My eyebrows and tail went up, but my feet were already moving. Try not to look too eager, I told myself. Good grief.

But Seejay called me back before I reached the door. “Yonee, give Trike a heal before you do any resting.” He did grin as he said that. “That way we can start tomorrow with everyone healed up and spells recharged?”

I couldn’t think of a reason not to do that, so I stepped up to our giant friend and put a hand on his arm.

“This ain’t gonna tickle is it?” asked Trike. “You know how Ah hate to be tickled.”

“You better tell her what you want to smell like, too,” said Seejay. “Wildflowers, licorice, cat butt bouquet?”

“Not that last one,” said Trike. “Licorice might be nice, or chocolate?”

I giggled at their clowning and did my routine: crossed eyes, tongue touching the roof of my mouth and silently wishing.

When I looked again, Trike was sniffing his arm. “Caramel peanuts?” he said. “Is someone hungry?” he joked.

He didn’t smell like any kind of food. He smelled like earth, freshly turned over and waiting for rain. It was a good, clean smell.

“We’re probably all a little hungry,” said Seejay. “And will probably get a bit hungrier before we get anything to eat.” Trike’s stomach chose that moment to growl audibly, and we all laughed. I didn’t feel hungry, but obviously, Trike did.

“Puss, wait for me in the bedroom,” Seejay went on. “I want to talk to Trike about a watch schedule.”

This time I did hurry. Bedroom? Oh, boy.

Seejay and I had had characters who got involved before but this was different, we were inhabiting these characters. And as far as we knew, for the rest of our lives. But we weren’t acting like that. In some ways, we were still acting like this was all a game. I didn’t want to think about it.

I went into the side room and looked up at the stars through the tiny window high up on the wall. Was reality just a computer simulation? Was Artie out there somewhere rolling dice? Where would that somewhere be?

Was I really going to make love with Seejay in this very room? Was something somewhere inside me happy about that idea?

I told you I didn’t want to think about it.

Seejay and Trike were working out a watch schedule in the other room. In four hours, Seejay would replace Trike at the only door into our little apartment. Then in four more hours, Seejay would wake Hote to take watch until dawn, unless morning came sooner than that.

They didn’t expect me to take a watch. And how were they going to know when it had been four hours? Seejay probably had a method, I supposed. Looking at the stars maybe.

A stray thought intruded. Did Mars have polestars? Earth has a North Star but no south polestar worth mentioning. I knew Mars had a tilted axis like Earth, so there would be seasons, but I didn’t remember how much the tilt was. It would be sheer coincidence and a spooky one at that if Mars and Earth both pointed at the same polestar.

And wherever here was, this Mars might not be the same as the Mars one orbit out from the Earth I came from. Well, it couldn't be, there was air to breathe, and none of us had noticed the gravity being particularly different. We could have been on Earth somewhere. The Earth where I was a fifty-something roleplayer who liked female characters. What did that say about my sexuality?

What is taking Seejay so long?

Wow, I managed not to think about it for all of maybe half a minute.

I needed another distraction.

My tail had been going this way and that, down, up, feeling of the wall and floor, burrowing into my hair and stroking me on the back of the neck. I didn’t know if I would ever get used to that. The tail, I meant, but now that I thought of it, the hair, too. I hadn’t had long hair since the seventies and never down to my butt. It would be down to my knees if it weren’t so curly.

Better than going bald? Ma-ay-be. I giggled and tossed my hair with my fingers, feeling the curls on my back. Okay yes, I liked having long hair.

The tits were another thing. They seemed very large and…bouncy. The lower gravity of Mars helping out there?

Did this Mars have lower gravity? How would I tell? Send Galileo up a tree to drop an apple on Sir Isaac's head? Were there trees, let alone apples, on Mars?

Did Seejay like my large, bouncy tits? I grinned in the darkness. Actually, I was pretty sure he did.

Was he ever going to finish talking with Trike so we could get to doing what we were surely going to do?

Back to the topic, I was trying to avoid.

This whole thing of being female now. And being attracted to Seejay and knowing he was attracted to me. And being pleased about that, like a treasure I could keep inside me. And wanting to find out what it was really like to make love…to a man?

I’d never been married. Seejay was divorced for the last ten or fifteen years. Hote was married with kids in college. Trike had been married briefly almost forty years ago, but it didn’t take, they’d got it annulled.

Wait. Hote’s wife? Claire was a gem, a gamer’s spouse who was tolerant of her hubby’s hobby. Was she alone now, back on Earth? And how was being separated from her going to affect Hote? He was devoted to Claire and never played the little sexual shenanigan side games that Seejay and I had indulged in for years.

As Mojo, I hadn’t been a virgin, but I had never had a personal relationship with someone of the opposite sex that had lasted as long as my gaming career.

Oh!

Something just tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around so fast I almost fell on my fat little ass. It was, of course, just my tail playing tricks on me. I could feel its amusement percolating up my spine from the pseudo-brain that Artie had said red Martians kept at the base of their tails. Little hooligan, worse than a cat.

“Puss?” Seejay’s voice came from the doorway.

The pet name he’d come up with made me shiver to hear it.

“I’m here,” I said. “And I’m naked.”

He chuckled, stepping forward but obviously not seeing me. “I think you like being naked.” He was carrying a couple bags of clothes, probably so we could use them as pillows on the stone floor.

“Maybe,” I said. “I like it fine right now.” I stepped toward him, my tail waving around my head and I knew when he had spotted me in the darkness. He tossed the bags against the far wall and stepped close to me.

We came together. I ran my hands over his chest. “You, on the other hand, are still dressed.” We were close enough I could smell his male smell, muscles and sweat, body hair and musk. Could he still smell my perfume?

“Hmm,” he said. He took my wrists in his hands and held them off of him. “Yonee, do you want to do this?”

I didn’t resist him holding my arms, but I pushed forward so that my nipples touched his shirt and my face was next to his shoulder. I wanted it with all of me, inside and outside. I wanted it so much it astonished me. “Do I want this? Like a little girl wants a pony for Christmas,” I said.

He laughed. “An unfortunate choice of simile. You don’t know this, but in the face, you look about fourteen in this avatar.”

“Seejay are you going to chicken out on me?” I said, letting a pout creep into my voice on purpose.

“Not exactly, but….” He sighed. “I’ve noticed something.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I’ve noticed that bulge in your pants.”

“You’re why Hote and I had to find clothes soonest, but that wasn’t what I meant.”

“Hmm?”

“Yonee, put your hands behind your back,” he said, letting go of my wrists at the same time.

I put my hands behind my back, giggling a bit.

“Close your eyes,” he said, and I closed my eyes. For some reason, this little game was making me hot. Hot in a specific place inside me. And hotter, just thinking of even having such a place.

“I want you to think back. At any time since we got here have you not done whatever one of us told you to do?”

Damn. There was that thing I didn’t want to think about again.