The Pairing

Over the next half-year I learned how a lot of devices in Linda’s family’s house worked, modern technologies comparable to things I knew on Earth in my past life. They measured time by the same terms the schools used (which were the same here as in the farm towns), counting the post-term breaks as belonging to the preceding term. It was week 9 of second term that year when my back started opening up, and three weeks later, in the last week of the term, when Linda started her transition.

Once she could no longer feed herself, her family members and I helped feed her, and it was the last day of the term when she had progressed far enough.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked Linda.

“I’m ready,” were the last words she ever said with her body’s mouth.

“Ready,” some of Linda’s family members said.

Linda’s torso was perched on top of a small table with a pillow on it, with her rear legs on the floor and her front legs stuck to the sides of her head in preparation for the pairing. I’d seen a similar arrangement used three times as my sisters paired. The table provided support as our two bodies fused.

I backed up in front of her, looking behind me and aligning our bodies, knowing she had limited movement. Because of the table, she couldn’t push much, but she could do fine alignments while I pushed back against her. Her mother was there and helped steady us as we joined. Linda turned her head and forearms upwards into me as more of her entered my body, until they were all the way inside, and we stopped.

Figuring I could not get any more of her into me, I stopped, and we rested on the table. I felt the process begin almost immediately, as nerves established connections between her brain and mine. Initially, our minds remained separate, but we could send thoughts to each other along the new connections.

“Linda?” I probed across the newly formed connections.

“Tyler!”

“It’s hard to believe this is really happening. It’s one thing to have your mind beamed across the universe into an alien being, and yet another to have your mind actually merge with another.”

“Yeah. But as ethertravelers we were trained to be ready for anything, anything at all. We could have been plants, or ethereal beings that float in space. I know it’s going to be really weird for the guys the others merge with, who don’t even know about ethertraveling.”

“Couldn’t be avoided, though. Cynthia told us just over a week ago her change was starting. She must have already started her pairing. When we are ready to communicate with the world again, she’ll be done.”

“When my head was going into you, there was a scary moment when I realized I couldn’t breathe, and your intestines were getting shoved into my mouth. But I felt the connections start. My blood is linked to your blood now and you are breathing for both of us.”

“The same moment was scary for me when it felt like you were going to eat me from the inside. It shows how much trust there is in pairing people. I know the intestines are supposed to go there. Eventually they have to link up with yours.”

“Of course.”

We had lots of thoughts like this. After the more intense changes started and we weren’t conscious to the world around us, the thoughts were more about our lives, both the ones on this world and those on Earth. Time passed, seemingly slowly, as the connections between our minds got stronger and faster. My mind was reading Linda’s memories, and hers reading mine, as the minds got closer and ceased to be two separate entities. But in no particular order. Linda was going to her high-school prom on Earth. Linda was a toddler here. Linda was taking her test to get into the program. Linda was writing some kind of technical document on Earth. Linda was learning to use the toilet by herself on Earth. And then the same thing here. Linda was signing up to be an ethertraveler. Linda was falling down and skinning her knee as a child on Earth. Linda was here with me right now, reading my memories. An overwhelming mass of Linda’s memories came into my mind, and at the same time I could see a similar amount of my memories were going into hers, and we both passed out.

When we were next aware of the world, there was no boundary between Linda’s mind and Tyler’s. There was simply our mind. We were hungry. There were strange sensations coming from parts of our combined body. Some of those were due to it being different from what we had before. Others were due to changes that were still happening. I could feel both of our hearts beating in sync, all four legs, two arms still developing, and other aspects of both our bodies.

While we were out, Linda’s family had removed the table, and placed buckets at both ends for us to pee and poop into. Not having eaten anything since the pairing, I didn’t actually have anything to eliminate, but I flexed the relevant muscles. I could feel Linda’s anus at my rear end, and Tyler’s penis up front. How did I know it was Linda’s anus, and not Tyler’s? I knew what both of them felt like. It felt like hers. And after a moment I realized it was because Tyler’s was accompanied by his nearby penis, while Linda’s was next to her vulva. And I could feel that part too, though it didn’t feel like much.

I called out for food, and Linda’s mother brought some. She had to feed it to me, because my arms were still undergoing changes and not usable now. This was repeated for the next several days. After that point, my hands were fully formed and I practiced using them to pick things up, including my food, though the arms were still changing and I relearned the arm movements a couple times until the change was complete.

It was a whole day after my first meal as Tyler-Linda before I peed, and two days before I pooped, both using the provided buckets. That first pee was a little weird, because my two bladders hadn’t fully merged yet. So I emptied Tyler’s bladder, and then with a different muscle action, emptied Linda’s bladder into Tyler’s, and then emptied Tyler’s again. By the next time I peed, they were merged and there wasn’t a need for that.

The third day after my first post-pairing meal, I started practicing walking around with all four legs. It was different, walking with what were, compared to what I was used to, essentially four hind legs. It was not the same as the juvenile all-fours method which used the arms as legs. But the fourth day after my meal, I was able to make it to the toilet and pee and poop in the adult way there, using the bowl in different ways for each function, but the same as any other adult here. And by the next day, my changes were complete except for the growth of the third segment of each arm, which took another week to complete.

It wasn’t too hard to get used to my new name, since my combined mind was used to both parts already. The way they named adults here was by concatenating their two names, with the male name first. So Tyler-Linda really was the best way of describing my name now, though of course what people here called me was the concatenation of our names from this world. (As an aside, what distinguishes male and female names here is that male names end with a vowel sound. Just as with many names on Earth, there are male and female versions of some names which add a final vowel, like Carl-Carla, except it’s the male version with the extra vowel. This allows male and female names to be joined smoothly, where two female names might have an awkward consonant cluster in the middle. Tyler-Linda is OK, but try to say a name like Max-Priscilla and you’ll understand.)

There were surnames, too, but not like the ones on Earth, and before long I had to deal with that. Juveniles used matronymic surnames, a prefix that meant “child of” prefixed to just the female part of the name of that person’s mother. This meant that while growing up, Tyler had the same surname as two siblings, and the other two had a surname based on the female part of my father’s name. But surnames were rarely used, mostly only to distinguish two people who had the same name. Linda’s family, on the other hand, had kept the same roles for all their children and they all had the same juvenile surname.

In the farm towns, adults simply didn’t use surnames, and most people only knew their own. In official records, we had our male half’s matronym followed by our female half’s matronym, but most people’s only encounters with such records were when they got paired and when they got married. Surnames didn’t change for marriage, but the official marriage record might say something like John-Catherine O’Kelly O’Bess married Peter-Lisa O’Della O’Catherine, with those being two different Catherines from different generations, of course.

In the city, as it turned out, adults did have surnames, because there were enough people it was likely there was another Tyler-Linda. But rather than try to mash something together from the surnames of the parents, we got to choose our surnames, made of a short phrase based on two or three normal words, usually in forms like “of the green mountains” or “rain-bringer.” Based on the way I found Cynthia during our intro session for the program, the most obviously relevant memory in either Tyler’s or Linda’s history here, I chose the surname Star-seeker. Of course, those words in the language here.

And the record-keeping was online in the city. In my home town, the way this would have worked is when I chose my pairing partner, we’d go over to Town Hall and register that we were going to pair, and when we were successful, we went over there again and told them we did it. Here, when Linda and I chose each other in the program, officials from the program registered us as a prospective pairing couple, and sent Linda a link to use to confirm the pairing was completed. They would have sent me one too, except as a farm town resident, I didn’t have network access, so they just sent it to her. But when I followed the link to confirm, I did see how Tyler was listed as Tyler O’Sarah of Lakeview in the pairing description, to mark him as someone from outside the city, and to tell anyone looking it up they’d have to contact Lakeview to find his birth record.

The next order of business was to contact Cynthia. Well, a brief note to all the kids from our program group, but then a pretty long conversation with Cynthia to find out about her pairing.

“Well, now I’m called David-Cynthia Furless-walker.”

“Heh, I’m Tyler-Linda Star-seeker. I love that we both named ourselves based on our presentations from when we were first applying to the program. But tell me how David took it!”

“Of course, he was absolutely stunned to find out he paired with an alien, and scared at the same time, but he knew there was nothing to do about it but live with it. There’s no unpairing. And now there’s no David, only us. David expected to be merging with a farm girl who, though bright, was naive to the real ways of the world and as a result expected his experience to be guiding our paired self. Instead, it’s Cynthia’s goal that dominates.”

That was of course a way to say building an ether communicator in the language here.

“Tyler and Linda both shared your goal, so there was no shock in our pairing. It was pure planning.”

“And you know we all expect you to lead our group because of that.”

“And I don’t know for sure it will end up that way, but I’m ready to lead by default if that’s necessary.”

“How are you liking your new body? I am loving it. It’s impossible to explain how good it feels to somebody who hasn’t experienced it. We move fast, think fast, are very strong and very agile.”

“I haven’t reached the very agile point yet. Give me another week, I guess! But otherwise, yes to all that.”

We made plans to go see our farm-town families in Lakeview, and David-Cynthia and I spent a few days there, staying together as we visited both families. And I visited David’s family, and David-Cynthia visited Linda’s. It was all very much like something that two of the adults on this world who were going to marry would do, and we hadn’t officially decided that we were, though we knew that our group of four ethertraveling pairs from the program would marry in two couples somehow, and it seemed likely with Tyler and Cynthia’s connection that we would be a couple.

Eventually the others also paired, and they had stories similar to David-Cynthia’s. Both male, non-ethertraveling partners were amazed, and doubted they were getting true memories until immersed in the stream of a lifetime of memories of Earth and ethertraveling.

The four of us all got together once, and communicated online a lot. We wanted to make plans, but what our investigations told us was that we didn’t need much of plans. They had the parts already here. We just had to put them together, remember how it all worked to do it right, and finally to locate Earth. All of us were going to take astronomy in high school or college in order to understand how they measured things in space and to figure out how to locate Earth’s sun, which we knew would have looked like one of many dim, unremarkable stars visible in small telescopes from here.

Communication

We went to high school, and to college, and we all got jobs in Crystal City, not all with the same company. We got together weekends to work on our device. We had already written down all the theory by that point, checked each others’ work, and we’d also located Earth, all before finishing college. It was only a matter of building it.

It only took us one school term to finish the device. It was common for people in the city to get time off work matching school breaks, and we did all have the time off together, so we got together to test the device and locate Earth. This was successful, and we sent the customary short message including the request to stop sending people here. Earth responded, and confirmed they had already paused sending people here to give the ones here a chance to report, and were now stopping entirely based on our request. So then we wrote up and sent our detailed reports.

Earth was shocked to hear of the way people paired here, and one scientist in particular was interested in the evolution that could have led to such a thing. We didn’t get that from farm-town school, but those from the cities did, and we sent them an additional report:

Since ancient times the people here wondered why we paired the way we did, somewhat like a small, common lizard-like creature does, while the other animals didn’t do so. Other animals still reproduce sexually, but without first pairing. The lizards were revered as avatars of the gods in some cultures. Eventually, one other animal was also discovered to pair. As actual science developed here, a lot of the work in biology focused on these two animals.

The second animal discovered to pair is a small monkey-like creature which pairs into a centaur-like form, as we do. They don’t die if they don’t pair, but they never reproduce if they don’t. In the wild they almost always pair, though. They don’t have sexual dimorphism in the pairing; both males and females develop the back hole, and when one enters another, their back-hole closes up to prevent further pairing. Double-male, double-female, and mixed-gender pairs in both combinations are all known to exist commonly in the wild, all in similar proportions. While any two of our paired adults can (apart from sexual disorders) always mate, two random adult paired monkeys have about a 7/8 chance of being able to mate in at least one way, which is almost as good.

The first animal is a smaller lizard-like creature, and their pairing has a number of differences. They don’t have to pair, neither to live nor to reproduce, but they can pair at will once they reach adulthood, and they can pair in larger groups than two. Paired individuals retain the ability to pair with others, sometimes forming long snaky beasts of 8 to 20 individuals. The lizards have been well studied, so their behavior and method of pairing is well known.

When the lizards pair, the opening occurs at the end of their short tails, encompassing the anus. Lizards can open it at will. No preparation is necessary by the partner inserting the head. The pairing isn’t sex-linked, and they can pair in any combination. Only the head is absorbed during the pairing. All the legs are retained, so a group of 2 paired lizards would have 8 legs. A group of ten would have forty legs. Imagine a centipede the size of a garter snake and you have a good idea of the approximate size and structure of such a group.

They don’t have to pair to mate, but when they pair, each segment retains its sexual organs, and can bear or father children separately. It’s possible, in chains of at least 3 lizards, for parts of the chain to mate with other parts. There must be at least one lizard between the two mating to provide enough flexibility in the body to join the organs.

When they pair, they gain in mental ability and strength, while giving up some maneuverability due to the longer body they are permanently stuck with. They seem to understand this instinctively, so they pair when they feel threatened or trapped. For instance, you can make them readily pair by putting two together in a cage. However, they learn, and the 2-unit chains are smart enough to have figured out that pairing didn’t get them any closer to getting out of the cage, so they don’t pair further. If you put many of them in a cage together they will only form pairs.

To get longer chains, you have to put them in situations where the extra length actually helps them. The classic example is the slippery-sided pit. Place several of the lizards in a pit or well with vertical sides which have been lubricated with an oil that prevents the lizards from being able to climb out. They will join up to about 20 individuals in an attempt to get out of the pit by scaling the wall, with the ones remaining on the ground being able to push the others up the wall. If their chain reaches the top then the ones outside the pit will help to pull the other ones up.

The limit of 20 seems to be because there are diminishing returns of the joining, and they cannot push strongly enough to compensate for the extra length and weight after this point. However, one experiment showed that the lizards will sometimes exceed the limit. Especially when joined in longer chains, they show altruistic behavior. If you put three 10-unit chains in a pit that requires two of them to join to get out, once one 20-unit chain gets out, it will lower itself back into the pit and attempt to let the remaining group escape by climbing up its body. If this also doesn’t work, because the backs of the lizards have been greased either intentionally or by falling against the walls while attempting to escape, then they will join with the remaining 10-unit chain to make a chain of 30, which will be able to escape with the front end already out.

Like us, paired groups retain the memories of their constituent individuals. If two individuals were taught different skills and then paired, the pair would know both of the skills, even though each skill was only taught to one of the two, originally.

The fact that paired individuals can learn from each other and become more intelligent than individuals, and keep a mate permanently available, was seen as an evolutionary advantage in support of the theory of evolution, but the fact that lots of other animals didn’t do so, even though it would seem advantageous to do so, was considered evidence against it. But it was generally accepted, and people assumed that there were simply details they didn’t understand which explained the oddities.

In time, with genetics, fossil research, and other techniques, they figured out the evolution chain. The lizards evolved from worms who developed the ability a long time ago, in a form similar to what the lizards use now. Larger forms of the lizards developed to be better adapted to certain habitats, specifically mixed habitats where small forests are scattered among large grasslands, and during this process, based on another evolutionary pressure that is still debated, pairing was reduced to two members only and linked to the activation of reproductive functions. The one place in the world today the monkey-like creatures can still be found is believed to have once had terrain like this, and now it is the other way around, a jungle with numerous small clearings. But at one time these animals covered the entire world, and in harsh climates they evolved to larger forms.

One notable feature of all these creatures is that merged beings are genetic chimeras. Each section retains the genes it had before merging, including relocated tissues such as the arm sections of the females of our people. During pairing, the immune system is put into a state in which it relearns what is acceptable, and the blood, including immune system cells, is shared throughout the combined body. An interesting consequence of this, as applied to the reproductive organs, is that when both parents in a family of our centaur-like beings bear children, if the 4 individuals who paired to form the parents were all unrelated, so are the children born from one mother different from those born from the other. They have neither the same maternal nor the same paternal genes.

The leading theory behind pairing becoming limited to two individuals is that some quality of better developed minds can only support merging two minds at a time, and adding a third drives them insane. They did manage to use a variant of the drug that changes how people merge to create 3-way and 4-way mergers of the monkeys, and they either didn’t survive the additional pairing or committed suicide shortly thereafter. Though perhaps ill-advised, they did try to make 3-way and 4-way pairings of our people using the drug, but it never worked. Even if you get 3 or more bodies arranged with head inserted into back holes, no one body would go on into the next stage of pairing on both ends, and you’d end up with only merged pairs and unmerged singles.

The leading theory about it becoming linked to activation of the reproductive functions is related to survival of the young. In a situation where the added intelligence of pairs was needed to keep the young safe from predators, having unpaired individuals able to generate young they could not protect is a disadvantage.

And the leading theory about pairing becoming mandatory and male-female only is that the larger, paired forms were better adapted for survival during an ice age when food was scarce, and it kept the population in balance. Letting the excess males or excess females die was better for the population. It’s thought that this developed in our immediate ancestors and made the difference between us surviving and related species dying out. The surviving monkey species did so in areas not frozen during the ice age.

Afterward

With our primary mission accomplished, we could focus on another goal: contacting other ethertravelers. The contacts were easy enough; they didn’t have much concept of data privacy here, so we could look up the records of everyone else who entered the program, including in other parts of the world, and what they studied in high school and college. Either by what they’d studied or what they’d written in their profiles, most ethertravelers were pretty obvious to us. It looked like Earth had flooded us with ethertravelers for two Earth years, which ran across parts of three years here, and that was it. So they were all in college or recently finished. But we’d been unusually lucky to get five in one district in one year; most had one or two.

We sent a sort of coded message with one of our TERRA art pieces to the most likely candidate in each program district each year, and to the second-best candidate afterward for the few cases where we didn’t get appropriate responses. Through them we established connections to what we believed were all of the ethertravelers who’d made it here, at least, the ones were trying to achieve their goal and who succeeded in getting into the program. Three other groups had already called home, and we saved the following two years’ classes the work and sent Earth a summary notice of all the ethertravelers we’d located and recruited into our group, and maintained an ongoing dialogue afterward. We set up an organization supposedly dedicated to learning more about the stars, but actually serving more as a contact point for other ethertravelers, and as guardians of our ether communicators.

There was also the obvious thing about the food. There was something specific in the processed food that harmed people here, and they had been so afraid of what was happening that they hadn’t ever bothered to figure it out properly. After some discussion, we decided that this didn’t need to be the work of our group alone, nor should it be. The subject needed to be brought up publicly. Scientists here now have the ability to study what goes on in every bodily process at the molecular level, and the similar ability to study what is in food at the molecular level, and what molecules are produced when it is eaten. It needed to be accepted over a period of time politically that this could be allowed to be studied, and farming could then be allowed to advance to exactly the level of automation which was safe, with checks on the food supply to ensure nobody was cheating and employing more automation and poisoning the food supply.

About three years later, this idea had taken root (no pun intended) and they started the program. They set aside certain small fields to grow test crops on, and hand-built machines based on museum models comparable to what was used during the famine. It took many years, longer than we had expected. There was nothing in the mechanically produced food that wasn’t in ordinary food. It was a matter of degree.

Specifically, the food crops grown here contain certain long-chained structural molecules. Cutting them breaks the chain and leaves loose ends with what Earth chemists would call free radicals. These radicals react with other molecules in the food over time, creating growing quantities of a chemical which is safe in moderate amounts but becomes a poison to us in high amounts. If they had bothered to test the monkeys and lizards that merge, they would have found that all of the animals that merge are vulnerable to this poison. Other groups of animals have developed a greater immunity to the poison.

In food produced the way it is traditionally made here, by the time these levels become dangerous, other modes of breakdown have led to the food appearing to be rotten, and it is discarded and not eaten. In food harvested by mechanized reapers, rather than merely being cut, the long-chained molecules are shattered into many pieces, making about 20 to 30 times the amount of free radicals. This results in the poisons building up before the other processes give the appearance of food being rotten. Chewing the food also breaks the chains in this way, but only minutes pass between the chewing and digestion within the body, not giving enough time for the poisons to build before the food is digested.

Effectively, this meant they had to harvest food by hand. Mechanically reaped food was only safe for about 2 or 3 days, but that time would pass before it was distributed and consumed. Hand-reaped food was safe for 6 to 8 weeks, which allowed for distribution time. They could use mechanical sowing machines, but no reapers. This meant limited changes in the lifestyle of the farming folk.

In artificially produced food, the long chains never built up to the degree they did in natural food. This meant there were more chains with more ends, and the result was comparable to the mechanically reaped food, so it had similarly short lifetimes. But for all food, they now had tests which could determine both the level of poison and the level of free radicals, which could be combined to label food with a lifetime. It became standard to take samples from each batch of food to test and label the batch with a lifetime.

So we did make changes, but less than we hoped for because the problem was actually worse than we hoped. And the people here had a new safeguard against getting poisoned by their food. Once we achieved the better understanding of why the automation famine happened, we let Earth know they could start sending people here again, but in limited numbers. We decided no more than 2000 people worldwide per year would be appropriate.

Completing Our Lives

Only at this point did we get around to really living. Which meant marrying and having kids. Marriage was associated with a bit of a party here, but it wasn’t as big as on Earth. Usually it was just adult family members, which meant 4 pairs of parents, some of the parents’ siblings and parents, and some siblings of the people getting married. For people like us whose families were from different cities and towns, it was common to have separate parties in each town rather than expecting the guests to travel. In this case, adult meant graduated from high school, and it was sometimes the case weddings happened the month after graduation so a younger sibling could be included. But I had missed all Tyler’s siblings’ weddings due to being either too young or away at college; I had attended one wedding of a sibling of Linda’s.

And it was adults-only because the marrying couple was expected to have sex during the event. Apparently the idea was to ensure they understood how; it’s one thing to hear this when you are an unpaired boy or girl, and another to do it after you’ve got a very different body. If they had any trouble, any of their parents would coach them through it. This was practically the only time you ever saw people having sex here. They didn’t have much in the way of porn here. How could they, when nudity was the norm? There was a kind of dance show in which the performers would engage in sex during part of the show, but it wasn’t normal sex; they’d do it in positions the people here normally wouldn’t and most couldn’t. Those shows were available both in the cities and (periodically, when troupes visited) in the towns and were always adults-only, and that was the only kind of porn.

So it was during our weddings that all four of our pairs first had sex in these bodies. Because of the arrangement of the organs, sex was almost always done standing, with one partner directly behind the other. Because of the size of the organs, sex was a more intense experience than with humans; it was also interesting that we experienced male and female sexual excitement separately, to a large degree.

Because of the way kids had to merge, each couple needed to have 4 kids just to maintain the population, so large families, by Earth standards, were the norm, and families who never had kids were almost unheard of. The ethertraveler families from our district’s program chose to alternate bearing children, as Tyler’s parents had done, as opposed to the way Linda’s parents had kept the same roles for all their six children. It was an interesting experience all around.

Being pregnant occasionally put me through some uncomfortable periods, but no more so than with humans. Giving birth was actually pretty easy and almost painless; the bodies here seem better adapted for it. The main sensation was simply one of stretching, and it reminded me of the start of the pairing, but in reverse. I saw David-Cynthia giving birth and I know for a fact she opened up wider than any human woman ever could or would while giving birth. Having a newborn sucking at my teats was wonderful; there was a really satisfying sensation from that, though it wasn’t sexual (or it was yet a third kind of sexual stimulation that didn’t get either set of my genitals going).

We kept our origin secret from our kids. The foundation we established was a bit of a club for the elderly by the time the next generation started coming of age, and that group came with no obligation whatsoever, mostly the people who wanted to live a life as a centaur. But we had some very public TERRA displays which were just art to the natives and symbols of the scientific company that discovered the true cause of the automation famine and ended the exclusion clause, while to ethertravelers they were a beacon that said “come join us, if you like.”