Quarantine Cove

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 3 of 3

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We later figured that it took about three days for everyone in Fleecedale to be affected by the curse. By then, we were no longer all affected by a swap at the same time; it seemed that only about a tenth of us would swap in any given hour, and that the intervals between swaps for any given person were growing more variable; sometimes less than an hour, sometimes a whole day.

Since most of the adult men and older boys had been out in the pastures with the herds, or out in the woods hunting, when the quarantine was set up (along with a few of the adult women), we who were in the village shuffling from body to body found ourselves usually very old or young, and more often female than male. We had our hands full keeping watch over the small children who were in adult bodies at any given moment. There were two women in the village who were pregnant at the time, and I found myself in both their bodies at different times in the first week of the quarantine; and once I was in the body of one of the unborn babies (I couldn’t tell which, obviously), floating in warm darkness. It made me homesick for Moses and our baby.

On the second day, when I was on sentry duty again, in Isabel’s body, I held a shouted conversation with my Pa and Uncle Garrison at a distance of fifty yards, and asked that one of them take a message to Moses and her family in Highmarket. Uncle Garrison left soon after to deliver that message, and to warn people from Bluegate and Songtown away from the Fleecedale road. Most of the herdsmen and hunters camped outside the village left for Bluegate at the same time, leaving a few, including my Pa, waiting there; men would come and go between the camp and Bluegate every couple of days, carrying news and bringing flour from the Bluegate mill.

Gradually, over the first three weeks, the headaches got less and less severe, and almost went away entirely, but the swaps continued with unabated frequency. Or maybe we still have the headaches but just got so used to them that we no longer notice. We sometimes but not always have a mild warning headache for a few minutes before a swap.

By the end of the sixth week, when it was obvious that the curse wasn’t going to end soon, if ever, Pa and most of the other men in the camp decided to throw in their lot with us in the village. We held a town meeting at the stockade, shouting back and forth across a wide gap, discussing Fleecedale’s future. Finally two of the men were sent to Bluegate as messengers, to tell them of our plans and negotiate our hunting territory in the forest around the valley — territory which no one from Bluegate would ever enter, and which no one from Fleecedale could ever leave for as long as the curse lasted. We also set about building a new quarantine fence across the lower end of the valley, taking in all our best pasture land but excluding the last few miles of the road to Bluegate. Many but not all of the men and women who had gone to Bluegate to wait out the quarantine came back, right then or gradually over the next few weeks.

Some of us were glad to have a few dozen more male bodies in the mix, so we could be of our preferred sex more often; but by then I think most of us were starting to get used to femininity — if we did not enjoy it, at least we had stopped complaining about it. We were not yet used to the constant swapping; but by now, of course, we’ve gotten used to that as well, and I suspect that if a sorcerer from Highmarket or Freedom City were to figure out a cure for this curse, some of us might refuse; being of the same age and sex all the time sounds monotonous now, especially to those who have grown up since the quarantine started. And if none of us is strong and healthy all of the time, at least no one has to be weak and helpless all the time either; a cure for this curse would present us with the difficult problem of deciding which of us must live out the rest of their lives in bodies aged, blind, deaf or lame.

We built a storage shed just outside by the quarantine stockade, where we put our fleeces and furs and occasionally other trade goods on the first day of each week. After they’ve sat there for six days people from Bluegate come and retrieve them, and leave flour, vegetables, and other things we need. Once in a while, there are letters there, or even books.

I got a letter yesterday from Moses, with a postscript from my daughter whom I’ve never seen. Moses named her for me. She wanted at first to come and join me in Fleecedale, but I advised her not to, saying this curse is especially bad for children, and her father and brother prevailed on her to stay put. She still talks about coming here when little Toussaint is older, but more and more vaguely and remotely as time goes on — first she was going to wait until Toussaint was ten, and then until she was fifteen, and now she says she will wait until our daughter is married before joining me here. It hurts, but I don’t blame her; and when I’m thinking most clearly, I don’t really want her to come. Not many marriages have lasted through fifteen years of this constant body-shuffling, where you rarely wake up next to the same person you went to bed with. My own parents are one of the few exceptions; Dantas and Beecher are another. I tried for a long while to stay faithful to Moses, but after more than once jumping into a body whose previous occupant had been engaged in amorous commerce with someone, I found I couldn’t always make myself interrupt it. After a while I stopped trying.

The custom has grown up of greeting one another by saying our own names; and also of saying one’s own name as quickly as possible after swapping into another body. My Aunt Harriet invented another way to keep track of who is who. We wear sets of colored threads around our wrists, and each person in Fleecedale of mature mind has their own unique combination of colors. When we swap into another body, we take off some or all of the threads from our wrists and tie on new ones taken from a pocket. I wear green and white threads around my left wrist and blue and red ones around my right, and can recognize Spartacus, for instance, when I see a person of whatever age or sex with two yellow threads around their left wrist, and white and red threads on their right. This aids in immediate recognition, and it is not as easy to use it to falsify one’s identity as you might suppose; we are still few enough that we all know one another’s mannerisms and can identify them, after a few minutes of interaction, in whatever voice and body they are expressed. Yet I fear that the colored thread system is going to break down from a scarcity unique combinations if our population keeps growing, and sooner or later we will no longer all know one another so well as to prevent imposture. Indeed, I’m not sure that our valley can keep supporting us for many years longer, and it is this, more than anything else, which creates a danger of conflict with our neighbors.

In the first years after the curse and the quarantine began, our birth rate rose for an obvious reason; when a woman gets pregnant she knows it is extremely unlikely that she will be the one to have to give birth to the child, and we all know that we’ll have to take turns bearing and nursing children, and risk being the unlucky person in a pregnant body when it is time to give birth, whether we have the enjoyment of begetting the children or not. (I have been lucky so far myself in not suffering the most difficult part of childbirth; though once I experienced the beginnings of labor pains, swapping out well before the birth, and on one memorable occasion I was the baby being born.) The Classic of Trading calls this a “free rider problem”, analogizing it apparently to a large wagon which carries both paying and non-paying passengers. And as no one can now migrate to the cities, or to the sparsely settled land in the north, our population, which my parents tell me was stable at around a hundred to a hundred and ten people for several generations, has increased to over two hundred since the curse began. If our population continues to grow, we will eventually no longer be able to support ourselves by trading meat, furs and fleeces for other food. We can turn some of our pasture land to fields of crops, and cut some of the woods above the valley for the same purpose; but since no one from the farms around Bluegate or Songtown wishes to migrate here, who will teach us how? We will have to learn farming by trial and error. And even then, I fear that we may eventually encroach on our neighbors' homes; what will they do then? Flee to avoid the curse? Attack and hope they can kill us all before the curse affects them?

We are more and more often finding ourselves to be babies, frequently unborn, and we are having to devote more and more of our time and energy to taking care of baby minds in adult bodies. Some of us say that we should stop having children entirely; that as long as we exist, the rest of our civilization is in danger from this curse. I would not go so far as that, but I have a great fear of the day when we can no longer all live in this valley.

One person who believed this way castrated himself in three male bodies before he bled to death in the last one. Or at least we think he did; possibly he swapped out a few moments before the end, and one of the babies or children died in his last body. We are fortunate that this is one of only a handful of violent crimes we’ve had since the quarantine started; we have no effective way to punish such crimes in proportion to their gravity. Imprisonment would be ineffective, exile would injure only our neighbors, and we cannot inflict death without a great risk of killing the wrong person. Whipping is less final, but there is still the risk of punishing the wrong person.

We settled on one year of ostracism as a punishment for Dantas bringing the curse to Fleecedale, and have since used the same punishment for greater periods for one murderer and one person found guilty of rape. All those under sentence of ostracism tried to impersonate other people at one time or another, to evade the sentence, but with limited success; none were skilled enough to disguise their own mannerisms and imitate another’s, once we had sufficient experience to recognize one another in whatever body. They pretended at times to be babies or children, we think, with somewhat greater success.

This curse, as I said before, is in a way hardest on the children, who inhabit many adult bodies of both sexes before they learn to walk or talk, and experience adult desires long before they can know what they mean. I suspect that they learn to walk and talk more quickly than children in other places; though it is impossible to be sure. They have already much experience of hearing speech, and living in bodies well developed enough to walk and talk, at an age when other children are just being born. But the unavoidable inconsistency in their upbringing, being cared for and disciplined as necessary by whatever adult minds (not necessarily in adult bodies) happen to be nearby rather than by a single mother and father, has a deleterious effect; and simply identifying and naming them is a difficult problem, which seems to contribute to their slowness in developing individuality. They do not acquire names until they are old enough (as souls, of course) to have learned to speak, and become identifiable by the distinct patterns of their speech. Yet this same slowness in realizing themselves as individuals gives them also, I think, a ready empathy which many of us who grew up in a single body lack. This empathy gives me my best hope for our future. Our children are accustomed from their earliest years to regard the body they happen to wear at the moment as common property, which they learn to care for as they wish others to care for the bodies that they will wear at various times in the future. Having no proprietary attitude toward their bodies, they think of our houses, food, clothing, books, herds and pastures as common property as well, and care for them with greater diligence than, according to the Classic of Trading, was usual with the common property of the ancients.

I think the inconvenience of being a baby, or a pregnant mother, so often is finally starting to have its effect, though it took many years. Our birth rate has fallen a little from its peak of a few years ago, and if it continues to fall we may be able to live here indefinitely.

So I implore you, take no precipitate action; give us a chance to secure our own quarantine before you decide that your survival requires our destruction.

— Toussaint Foucault

Written at Fleecedale, called Quarantine Cove, in the two hundred and forty-fifth year of our freedom.