“Please tell me more about Chris,” Permelia said as she followed me down the stairs to the parking lot.

 

“He’s like us,” I said, “except that he was assigned female at birth. And he was lucky enough to have understanding parents who helped him get HRT in his early teens, before he finished growing… and I understand both the men and women in his family tend to be tall. Anyway, he’s a big guy, and can be scary-looking if you don’t know him. I don’t think anybody will bother us with him escorting us.”

I had to work the next four days. After I showed Permelia how to use the television that night, she apparently spent a good chunk of the next few days in my apartment watching TV and getting a bizarrely biased view of our world, as well as going for walks around my neighborhood, with her guides leading her to interesting sights and away from muggers and violent transphobes. I was so jealous. She also started learning the basics of the English writing system, after seeing Sesame Street and some other children’s public television. We spent the evenings after I got home from work talking about the differences between our worlds.

Victoria came over to pick her up after she taught her last class on Tuesday, and picked her brains about Wurlian vocabulary (which was apparently about 10% less “Latinate” than English, and had no “Greek” loanwords at all) all evening and most of the next morning.

When I went over to Victoria’s apartment (which was in the faculty housing near the university) on Wednesday morning, I found them talking about the word “ghost,” which we’d gone several days apparently misunderstanding. In Wurlian, “ghost” had a much broader meaning than in English – not just the souls of dead people, but nonhuman spirits of various sorts, including what some cultures would call gods.

“It used to have a broader meaning in English, too,” Victoria told me. “Like ‘Holy Ghost’ in the King James Bible, compared to ‘Holy Spirit’ in modern translations.”

“Huh,” I said. “Are you about ready to go, Permelia?”

“I think so, yes.” She looked pretty in one of the nicer dresses we’d bought during our shopping spree, a short-sleeved, ankle-length gown with red roses on a pale yellow background. A lot prettier than I’d looked just a few days into my transition, before hormones or FFS or anything.

I had a fleeting thought that she might be nice to snuggle with, but immediately suppressed it. She was too vulnerable, too dependent on me. It would be horribly wrong to express any romantic interest in her.

“All right, let’s go. I talked to Chris last night; I’ll swing by his house and pick him up on the way.”

“Please tell me more about Chris,” Permelia said as she followed me down the stairs to the parking lot.

“He’s like us,” I said, “except that he was assigned female at birth. And he was lucky enough to have understanding parents who helped him get HRT in his early teens, before he finished growing… and I understand both the men and women in his family tend to be tall. Anyway, he’s a big guy, and can be scary-looking if you don’t know him. I don’t think anybody will bother us with him escorting us.”

“How much did you tell him about me?”

“Just a little. I figured I’d let you tell him more if you want to.”

We drove by the house where Chris lived with his boyfriend Marc and another gay couple I didn’t know as well, and I texted him to say we were out front. He came out and got in the back seat.

“Hi, Jenny,” he said. “Who’s your friend? And where exactly are we going?”

“This is Permelia,” I said. “She’s a baby trans who just started going full-time, like, five minutes after I helped her figure out she was a girl.”

“Whoa!” Chris said with a laugh. “Good for you, girl.”

Permelia smiled and blushed. It was pretty cute.

“Unfortunately, she kind of entered this country unofficially – transitioning back home wasn’t an option – and for various reasons, it’s probably going to be easier to fake permission than to ask forgiveness. We’ve got a lead on someone that does fake IDs and should be fairly safe to deal with, but he’s in kind of a bad neighborhood and I figured we could use a bodyguard.”

I could see Chris flexing in the rear-view mirror as I stopped at a red light. “Everyone always wants me for my muscles and has no use for my scintillating banter,” he lamented.

“I didn’t say we couldn’t use your banter,” I said. “Just that I wouldn’t have asked you to go somewhere this early on your day off if we didn’t need a bodyguard.”

“Good,” he said. “So, Permelia, tell me about yourself. How’d you meet Jenny?”

“My – spirit guides led me to her,” Permelia said, apparently adjusting her terminology after her discussion with Victoria that morning. “I asked them to lead me to a place where I could change into a woman, and a person who could tell me how. They led me to her, but she was busy with work, and I came back after she was done working for the day, and she explained things to me while I ate supper.”

“Huh,” Chris said. I was too busy looking at the road to look at his expression in the mirror, but though he paused to process that for a few seconds, he didn’t cavil at “spirit guides.” “Where are you from?”

“Gannerton in Wurland. It’s a long way from here, in another world. My guides showed me how to get here, but I can’t explain how.”

Chris was silent for another long moment. “Jenny,” he said, “do you believe her?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And how did she prove she’s from another world?”

“Well, she mainly proved that her guides can tell her things she couldn’t otherwise know, and from there I inferred that she’s telling the truth about where she came from.” I told him about the various things I’d seen her find out with the help of her guides. “You’re about to see another piece of evidence,” I said. “A few nights ago, we looked at a map and her guides zoomed in on the address we’re going to today. And then they showed us the name of the guy we’re looking for by leading her to my bookshelf and pointing out a book, a page, and a specific name.”

“I’m… going to have to think about this.”

“No scintillating banter?” I teased.

“The scintillating banter is stunned, but recovers quickly and comes out swinging,” he replied after too long a pause.

“I understand it is hard to believe,” Permelia said. “I did not expect my guides to lead me to another world; I thought they might lead me to a far country in my world, or tell me what I wanted was not possible. And there are many things I have seen here which folk at home would hardly believe if I told them.”

“Like what?”

“Mostly your machines. This car, the phones and laptops and televisions and refrigerators and microwaves… Also some of your customs, although I’ve barely begun to learn about them. And the vast numbers of folk and houses. We’ve traveled so far, so fast, and yet stayed within this huge city and never seen a field or pasture.”

“So what are things like back home?”

Permelia told him about her home, and I learned a few new things that I’d somehow missed in our previous several days of conversation. For instance, with the advice of various spirits, they’d apparently been selectively breeding their livestock and crops for higher yield for a lot longer than we had, and had already learned their lesson about not depending on monoculture crops centuries earlier (relative to when various mechanical inventions came along) than we did. But they didn’t have refrigeration or fast transport, so regional famines and shortages due to bad harvests were still an occasional thing.

We got off the expressway and went just a couple of miles south before we arrived in the neighborhood Permelia’s spirits had pointed out on the map. Things started looking run-down, with a lot of boarded-up windows and graffiti, and more litter than usual (not that any part of the city was completely free of that). We were still a mile or so from our destination when Permelia sat up straighter, straining against her seatbelt, and said, “Turn left here.”

“What?” I put on my signal. “The place your spirits pointed out is straight ahead and a little to the right…”

“There’s trouble ahead. We need to go around.”

I did as she said, turning left at the next side street, and then going a few blocks east before turning right when Permelia’s spirits said to do so. The GPS app kept complaining about “Recalculating route” and I passed my phone to Chris, asking him to turn it off. About that time, we heard loud sounds that Chris thought might be gunshots from the west, probably on the street we’d have been going down if Permelia hadn’t warned me to take a detour.

We wound up taking a long loop around and approaching our destination from the south. “That building there,” Permelia said as we approached a three-story office building with a faded sign out front listing several small businesses.

It didn’t have a parking lot of its own. “Can your spirits tell us where is a safe place to park where my car won’t get vandalized and we won’t get mugged on the way to visit our guaranteed-honest criminal named Mike?”

Permelia nodded and whispered a question. “A little further ahead, and turn left… Stop here.”

I pulled over in one of the marked parking spaces, and we got out, put coins in the meter, and started walking back toward the office building. Permelia’s spirits led us up the stairs to the second floor and an office whose sign read “Millennium Enterprises,” a nicely vague name that told you absolutely nothing about what the business did.

I knocked on the door and a man’s voice said, “Come on in.” I opened and went in. A scruffy-looking guy in a suit with patches at the elbows sat behind a large desk cluttered with papers.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he said, “what can I do for you today?”

“We heard,” I said carefully, “that you could help our friend here.” I gestured at Permelia. “She needs documents to prove her identity, and for certain reasons, can’t get them from the authorities.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What kind of documents are we talking about?”

“Let’s say… proof of legal immigration. And naturalization, if that doesn’t cost too much more. And a state photo ID; she doesn’t drive.”

“And how much examination will they need to hold up under? I’m guessing you don’t just need this to get into bars,” he said to Permelia.

“As much as possible,” I said. “She’s hoping to get a job and healthcare with them.”

“A job, hmm. You want a high school diploma equivalent, or a trade school or university degree, from whatever country she’s from? Or an American degree? How long are we going to say she’s been in this country?”

“Probably not much longer than we need to make the immigration documents plausible.”

“All right…” He made some notes on his computer, then asked Permelia: “Name?”

“Permelia Martford.”

“Can you spell that for me?”

Permelia wasn’t sure, so I spelled it out the way I’d been transliterating it in my head.

“Gender?”

“Female,” she said, and I thought of something. Shit.

“Wait,” I said. I turned to Permelia. “I don’t want to have to misgender you on your documents, but… you want to use these to get treatment. If your name and gender marker are already correct on your immigration documents, but you tell your therapist you couldn’t start transitioning until you came to the U.S., that’s going to raise some red flags.”

“Ah,” Mike said. “I wondered if that might be it. My niece is the same way.” (Thank you, Permelia’s spirits. Not only an honest crook but one with a trans loved one.) “Should I put a different name on the docs?”

Permelia frowned, then said: “…Edmonard.”

“Same last name as before…? Martford, right?”

“Yes, please.”

When Mike asked for her height and weight, we ran into a problem.
“Fifty-four inches. And twenty-four stones, fifteen pebbles.”

“Um, what is that in pounds…?” Mike asked absentmindedly, tapping at his keyboard, before looking up at her in consternation. “Wait a minute. Far be it from me to tell a lady what I think she weighs, but the numbers we put on these documents need to be believable, if not precisely accurate… and there’s no way you’re fifty-four inches tall. That’s… uh…” He tapped at his keyboard. “Four feet six inches tall? Yeah, you’ve got to be at least five-six, probably taller.”

“You’re a couple of inches shorter than me, and I’m five-nine,” I said.

Permelia looked embarrassed. “Uh… maybe an inch back home is different from an inch here?”

Later on, talking it over and comparing things at leisure with Victoria, we found out that some but not all of Wurlian’s words for units of measure were the same as the traditional English units, but the actual values of those units were different, by at least a little, in every case that we thought to check. A Wurlian inch is roughly one and a quarter Imperial inches, and a Wurlian stone is between five and six pounds, compared to fourteen pounds for an English stone. (Until Victoria told me about it, I didn’t realize there was a unit of measure called a “stone.”)

We wound up measuring Permelia’s height with a ruler Mike pulled out of his desk drawer, and using my best guess at her weight, which turned out to be reasonably accurate when we weighed her on my my bathroom scale at home. The rest of the physical description went more smoothly, and then Mike took a series of photos of Permelia for the documents. I advised her to unbraid her hair for the photos, since they were supposed to show a pre-transition “Edmonard.”

“Okay,” Mike said, “what country do we want to say she immigrated from?”

Victoria had said that her accent sounded a bit like certain rural UK dialects, though her vocabulary and grammar were a little closer to American English than any UK dialect. But claiming she was from the UK wouldn’t be plausible, given her blatant ignorance of… basically everything. We’d done some brainstorming over the past few days and decided on a cover story.

“Albanica, if you please,” Permelia said, pausing for a moment while re-braiding her hair.

“Albania,” I corrected. “Or another country in that region?”

He shrugged. “A guy I know can get your data into the ICE computers, no matter what country you’re from. Getting your data into the computers in Albania – that might be trickier. I don’t know offhand if he can do it; haven’t ever tried before. Mostly we deal with people from Latin American countries, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, is there another country in that region where you do know you can backstop an ID?”

“I know we’ve done Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, and I think maybe Ukraine… I’ll have to check with him to get a list of countries he can manage.” He started typing.

“Let me do some checking, too.”

Victoria and I had looked things up and found that nearly all the Albanian immigrants in the U.S. were up north, mostly in New York and Michigan. So the odds of Permelia running into someone who was really from there would be really low, especially if she didn’t tell people where she was “from” if she could help it. I did a similar quick check on my phone to see where in the U.S. immigrants from the countries Mike had mentioned tended to settle, and asked Chris to check some of them. I was pretty satisfied that she wouldn’t be super likely to run into people from Bulgaria around here, but there were a decent number of Romanian-Americans, Chris said, and I couldn’t quickly find an estimate for the number of Serbians, so by the time Mike gave us a more complete list of countries into whose government databases his hacker contacts could insert data, I’d conferred with Permelia and decided on Bulgaria.

Then Mike gave us an estimate for how much the documents Permelia needed would cost. It was over a quarter of the money she’d gotten for her coins, but oh well. Hopefully her spirits would help us find a job she was capable of doing that would have decent insurance. (And then maybe they could help me find something better.) We paid a quarter of it then and agreed to pay the rest when we returned for the finished documents, which Mike said should be finished in less than a week.

“I might not be able to drive her here the day they’re ready,” I said. “It depends on my work schedule. How late are you open?”

“I’m here as late or early as I need to be to meet clients on a given day,” he said. “Just let me know when you’re coming.”

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