The Endless Dance Card : 5 / 7

A Kingdom Ship Story
By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

My first clue about how my life was going to change was when I heard about the pools. There were two pools, two betting pools. Whoever picked the date closest to my entering puberty would win the first pool. Whoever picked the date closest to my official sexual maturity would win the second.

The rules excluded me from betting, and I guess everyone assumed that I knew about the pools, so for a few days, I was the only person onboard who didn’t know about them. It’s not that the pools were secret; it’s just that I was the last person anyone would mention them to.

The pools introduced two new elements to life onboard: one was obvious; the other was somewhat subtle. The first new aspect was that people started sizing me up. Ever since I turned into a girl, people regularly came to look at me, but now they looked at me in a different way. Instead of just glancing at me, they were studying me: looking me up and down, scanning my chest and hips. These weren’t gazes of desire or glances of appreciation -- these were more like clinical assessments.

The second, more subtle element was that suddenly everyone became an expert in the stages of the Tanner scale. That was an aspect that took longer to emerge in conversation, but it definitely influenced the character of the casual analytic appraisals I was subjected to each day.

After maybe two days of noticing the strange new looks I was getting, I finally learned about the pools, quite by accident. One of the engineers rather stupidly spilled the beans. I found out later that he’d broken the rules of the contest by his direct questions, but it didn’t matter: he wouldn’t have won anyway.

The guy asked me flat out, “How are your breasts coming along?” I was of course taken aback and offended, but I answered, “My breasts are as flat as yours, asshole.” The asshole I added mentally, but I felt it was pretty obviously present in my tone. He didn’t pick up on it. He was clearly disappointed with my answer, so he tried a more specific question: “You don’t feel any growth? Like a bump under your nipples, maybe?”

“No,” I said, amping up my level of hostility. He still didn’t get it.

“On either side?”

“No, asshole.” This time I said the word aloud, and miraculously, he got the message.

“Hey, sorry! You don’t need to get all in a huff! I'm just asking on account of the pool!” -- which naturally led me to ask, “What pool?”

He explained the whole thing to me -- as though this contest was the most natural thing in the world. I was stunned, and for a few moments I was left utterly without words. Then I shook my head and asked, “So, the -- uh -- winner… what prize do they get?”

I expected him to give a stupid, joking response, “They win you!” or to give the more likely response, “Nothing!” Instead, he astonished me by saying that the prize for winning the first pool was a bottle of champagne.

“Champagne!” I exclaimed. “And who is putting up *that* prize?”

He shrugged. Then he told me that the winner of the second pool would get two bottles of champagne, two bottles of Barolo, and an “elegant steak dinner for up to four people.”

“What the hell!” I exclaimed. Then after a moment, I asked, “What’s Barolo?”

He shrugged again. “I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of fancy wine.”

“Again, who is providing all that? Where on Earth did they get it? You can’t food-fab that stuff!”

“I dunno,” he responded. “They probably brought it from Earth, like you said. Or maybe the higher-ups can food-fab it. Who can say?”

The conversation really stuck in my craw. I was angry and offended, and that was only the shallow end of my emotional response. My informant, dumb as he was, had enough sensitivity to realize that I was fuming. So he tried to douse the flame while it was only smoldering.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s not about you -- it’s for the ship’s morale, you know? Do you realize, we could go for a thousand years on this ship without a single thing happening? I mean literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Each time I wake up for a new shift, I wonder What wild or interesting or fun thing happened in the last five years while I was asleep? You know? We’re in the middle of fucking outer space, where no one has ever been before, so you’d think that SOMETHING weird or out-of-this-world would happen every couple of days. But I wake up once every five years, and NOTHING! Nothing ever happens here. You are the single biggest event since we left Earth, and I doubt that anything’s going to top you for a long, long time.”

He shrugged a few more times, and moved his hands inarticulately. Then he said, “Try to not get all bent out of shape. Maybe it’s uncomfortable for you to be the center of attention, but can you let the rest of us enjoy the first blip in this monotonous eternity?”

 

---

 

I was so absorbed by the breakthroughs I was making with the profiles that I forgot about the pools and my impending physical changes. What I mean is I never thought about either the pools or my sexual development unless someone else broached the subject. And as I said, it was over a year after my accident before I entered puberty. For that first year, my general feeling (and my fervent wish!) was that puberty would never happen. When it finally began, there wasn’t any fanfare: it was a pretty humdrum event. One morning I woke up with a little lump under my left breast. That was the whole thing. I assumed it was a blocked lymph node or a weirdly placed pimple or some such thing. I expected it to go away after a day or two. Yes, I realize now that it was exactly the event that the not-so-bright engineer had asked me about, and yes, I realize that it was not very bright of me to not know what the little lump was or what it meant, but I didn’t connect it with puberty or being female because it only appeared on one side.

When I went for my medical check-in two days later, the doctor could barely conceal her excitement. “When did this first appear?” she asked me.

I was kind of grumpy. I hadn’t slept well, and the stupid lump had zero importance to me. “I don’t know. Two days ago? Three days ago?”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You’re not sure? Think, Fergusdotter, think!”

Oh, yes -- by the way, as weird as it sounded when the hair stylist first said it, I couldn’t get Fergusdotter out of my head. The name kept banging around in my cranium. At the same time, people kept pestering me to change my name, and making suggestions that I found silly and/or excessively girly. Obviously, the only way to make it stop was to choose a name, any name. Three times I came close: I actually came up with a name, liked it, settled on it, and was just about to make the official change, when some asshole suggested exactly that name to me. By telling me the name -- or any name, really -- they unwittingly took the name out of the running, because I didn’t want someone else to feel that THEY had chosen my name. It got to the point that I couldn’t remember whether I came up with a name or had it suggested to me. So I said to myself, Fuck ‘em. They want me to change my name? Let’s see how they handle this one! and I officially changed my name to Fergusdotter. To my chagrin -- but I have to admit, to my pleasure as well -- it turned out that everybody LOVED the name. No one even tried to give me a nickname. Everyone got it on the first try. Everybody trotted out all four syllables, every chance they got. Some people even went to the trouble of finding me just for the sake of saying my name and telling me how much they loved it.

Well, I liked it, too. In the end, I was glad that my new name didn’t piss anyone off.

Now… back to the lump. “It was two days ago,” I told the doctor. “I’m sure. I noticed it when I first woke up. Is it bad? Is it just a pimple? I tried to squeeze it, but I couldn’t get it to break.”

“Oh, no!” the doctor cried. “Don’t do that! This is it, Fergusdotter! This is thelarche! It’s a breast bud. It’s the first sign of puberty. It’s stage one on the Tanner scale.”

“Mmm,” I mused. “Someone will be very happy.”

The doctor looked up at me, puzzled. “Someone?” she repeated.

“The pool,” I explained. “Somebody just won the first pool.”

Then she got it. “Oh, yes, of course! The pool! Yeah... someone. But what about you? Aren’t you happy?”

I shrugged. “It’s just a bump.”

She laughed. “I have the feeling you’re going to have a nice pair of bumps before long!”

“We’ll see!” I replied. I still didn’t believe that I’d get to the point of having breasts. I had made a lot of headway on the profiles: In fact, I developed a mapping system that builds a holographic image of a person, based on their profile. I’d also been studying the plastic-surgery pod, to see how it executes its changes. Hopefully, I’d be able to incorporate parts of the reset system along with parts of the plastic-surgery pod, and create a new device that could regenerate a person according to the changes I’d make in my mapping system.

My mapping system was nearly bug-free. It rendered people perfectly. I was almost able to use my tool to edit the hologram and to save those changes to a new profile -- depending on what those changes were. I impressed the engineers by (potentially) correcting physical defects. One member of the crew was born with one leg shorter than the other. I managed to make him a new profile where his legs were the same length. There was a lot of discussion about whether we could ethically try the new profile on the man, but for me, the act of creating a new, valid profile was a huge step forward.

There were other, similar successes, but none of them were really visceral. I mean, none of the changes I made went deep into the body. So I found a challenge that really made me struggle and sweat: we have a crew member who donated one of her kidneys back on Earth. I wanted to see if I could replace the missing kidney. The process was much harder than I expected. We all knew that the rejuvenation bed could do some pretty miraculous things, including replacing SMALL missing body parts -- like a finger or toe, or a tooth, or -- most commonly -- lost hair. And it was capable of repairing damaged internal organs if the damage wasn't too extensive, but if something big was missing, like an arm or leg or inner organ, it couldn’t bring them back.

There were two problems: one was the creation of new tissue. I still didn’t understand where the rejuvenation bed got the material to replace a missing finger, for instance. The plastic-surgery pod presented the same mystery: when it built up parts of a missing face, where did it get the bones and other tissue from?

The second problem was aligning the markers. It turned out that the rejuvenation bed and the profiles shared a system of reference called skeletal markers. They weren’t, strictly speaking, based on our skeletons, although I suspect that they began that way. My mapping system could visualize a person’s markers -- I mean, it could create a holographic image of white points and connecting lines. These points and lines sketched out a human body. It was very difficult to work on, and extremely frustrating to edit. In some parts of the body, the concentration of dots and lines is particularly dense, and as a general rule you can’t move one point without affecting a mess of other points.

Really significant changes to a person’s profile required changes to the markers as well, and that could be very tedious. I was trying to automate the process, but before I could do that, I had to understand it better.

One thing I encountered while working on the missing kidney: I had no idea how to set up the markers where the left kidney was supposed to be. The human body isn’t completely symmetric, so I couldn’t just mirror the setup on the right side.

Often the effort of editing the markers would utterly exhaust me, but it was always exciting. Knowing how to work the markers was clearly essential to changing me back.

Each new crew would organize a day so that I could brief its scientists, med personnel, and engineers about my work. Some of the engineers and software folks were so interested, they wanted to come work alongside me, but they couldn’t get clearance from their supervisors. I was hoping that that might change in a few more months, as my breakthroughs continued. I felt a kind of deadline approaching. Maybe it wasn't a deadline. Maybe it was only a dreadline: I was dreading the day when my own crew would wake up and start its turn of duty. In spite of all I achieved, I was afraid that Qurakas would stop my work and shut me down. His words kept echoing in my head -- that what I was doing "was not essential to life or to our mission." That phrase hung like an invisible sword over my head. And of course, it was Qurakas who said that changing me back to my original gender was "not an issue." I definitely had to get this done before he woke up again!

 

---

 

A little over two years after the appearance of the lump under my nipple, I had my first period. It wasn’t as bad as I feared. Luckily, it didn’t catch me completely off guard. The day it happened, I woke up grumpy. Just the act of getting dressed and ready for the day seemed full of complications. Everything was rumpled or tangled or inside-out; I swore that nothing was where I left it; everything smelled funny or tasted funny. I didn’t like any of my clothes. The first thing on my schedule was a full-morning meeting with some of the engineering team. It was all about that block of bad data from my profile. During a recent check, it was found in the navigation system. It was caught soon after it appeared, and only because we were routinely checking for it. That damn data block turned out to be a clever virus that had a way of hiding itself as it propagated from one system to the next. The main reason we’d gotten ahead of it was because it was a very slow-moving cyber-infection.

When we were two hours into the meeting, an engineer named Erasmus raised the question of how exactly the data block arrived in the navigation system. He got stuck on the idea that my sandbox, which still contained copies of all the profiles, was a hotbed for the cyber-infection. Several people contradicted him on that point. Sandboxes were physically separate from every other ship network. There was no way for a virus to leap out of a sandbox. Of course, it didn’t hurt to examine that belief, but the way he talked about it irritated the hell out of me. Luckily, I was able to bite my lip.

Next, Erasmus suggested that the data block might be moving through the power system or radiating via electromagnetic waves. The second idea was silly, but the first one -- propagation through the power system -- was definitely worth exploring.

It took four days to determine that his intuition was correct, and this idea led to the ultimate defeat of the virus.

At the time, though, his comments seriously pissed me off. I managed to keep my cool during the meeting, but once it was over, I had lunch with my mother -- the woman who was my mother at that time. Just to make conversation, she asked how the meeting had gone. That question was enough to light my fuse, and I took off. By a lucky chance, the two of us were dining alone, so no one overheard me. I called Erasmus all sorts of insulting names, belittled his intelligence, and wondered why he was so hostile to me (actually he wasn’t, but that’s how I felt in that moment). After verbally ripping Erasmus to pieces, and complaining about how fucked up everything in general was, I fell quiet. It was embarrassing. I rarely, if ever, let go like that. Also, I didn’t believe a word of what I’d said. “I don’t know why I’m so touchy,” I told my mother. “I’m sorry for unloading on you like that. I really don’t mean any of it.”

“It’s alright,” she said. “I think you’re on your period.”

And so I was. That night, just as I was getting into bed, I felt something wet between my legs, so I ran to the bathroom. Just in time. There was blood. It wasn’t a flood or an explosion; it was messy, but not too messy. I got some small spots on my sheets and pajamas, so I rinsed them quickly in cold water. Although no one had seen any of this, I felt thoroughly embarrassed. I remade my bed and put on fresh pajamas. Then I sat on my bed in silence as the reality of what had just happened sank in. For the first time, I felt the impossibility of my ever changing back to Fergus the man. Sure, my body had changed a lot over the past two years, but to actually experience my first period, and to know that there would be many, many more... I had crossed the Rubicon, whether I wanted to or not.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of my sexual development. I still had plenty of changes to go through; all the rest of the Tanner scale: my hips widening, my breasts getting more round and smooth, my labia fleshing out. Each new development embarrassed me, and reminded me how far I'd gone from where I used to be.

At some point along the way, I had a discussion with one of the engineering leads about my plans. He listened attentively, then told me, “I’m really impressed with the work you’ve done, Fergusdotter. Everyone is. But you do realize that in the end we can’t let you try to reverse-engineer the accident. It's too dangerous. I mean, essentially you’d be taking someone else’s profile and trying to apply it to yourself.”

“That’s what happened the first time,” I pointed out.

“Not exactly,” he replied. “Even though it misread your profile, your body -- as it was -- wasn’t so far off what it turned you into.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m trying to account for that. If I can line up all the markers--”

He shook his head. “Look at yourself, Fergusdotter. By now, you’re distinctly female. You’re already vastly different from the profile they took of you right after the accident. I don’t think you could even apply that profile to yourself any more!”

“I’m working on recovering my original profile,” I explained. “You know that.”

“You’ll probably succeed in that,” he told me, “but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it. It won’t change you back to the original Fergus. Like I said, you’re too far off -- too different -- from any profile that’s ever been taken of you. Even when you get your original profile back, it’s either not going to work at all, or it’s going to fuck you up in some horrible way.”

“You don’t know that,” I pointed out.

“No, I don’t. But I’m pretty confident that those are the most likely possibilities. Think about this: what would happen if you took MY profile and tried to reset it yourself to that?”

I blushed deep red. “It wouldn’t work.”

“Right,” he said. “You ought to think about WHY it wouldn’t work. Maybe -- if you knew then all the things you know now -- you might have had a chance at the outset, before you started developing, but now you’ve deviated too far from the person your profile says you are.”

“Hmmph,” I said. “I wish someone had told me that before I put in all those years of work!”

“Come on, now! You can’t say that! I’m quite sure that you were told from the outset, and reminded many times along the way. I have seen the reports from the other engineering leads, you know. Are you honestly going to tell me that anyone led you to believe that you had any chance of success in reversing what happened to you?”

“No,” I replied, shamefaced.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But remember: your misfortune has saved the lives of the rest of us several times over, and all the work and study you’ve done since then hasn’t gone to waste. Every time we send a bongo ball to Earth, it’s got something from you in it. You know that, right?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re a frikking genius, Fergusdotter. I hope that’s some kind of consolation.”

I nodded. I couldn’t find anything more to say, so the two of us shook hands and walked away. In spite of his compliments and his attempt to build me up, that conversation was the death knell to my efforts to return to who I was. I finished up my work on the mapping program. I completed the documentation I’d been writing about profiles and their use, and that was that. I wasn’t happy, but I knew I’d done all I could.

Then, as a team, and with my knowledge and approval, the engineering team permanently deleted my sandbox. It turned out that Erasmus was not only correct about the virus moving through the power system, he was also right about my sandbox being the virus' breeding ground. It had to go. With it went all the corrupted profiles, including my own. I asked to be the one to 86 it. I typed the commands that obliterated my sandbox. I hit enter. Once they finished, I verified that the sandbox was completely and utterly gone. Then I asked Erasmus to verify my work. He nodded. "It's gone," he said simply. I felt as though I'd witnessed a boat sink into the ocean and disappear.

 

---

 

The med team and the psychs met with me, and together we agreed on a couple of things: (1) they would quit assigning “mothers” to me. I didn’t need the close support any more. (2) I’d continue with weekly psych sessions; (3) My med check-ins would drop to once a month. (4) I’d stay awake until my crew woke up, and then join them in the sleep pods when their three-month shift was done. That would be a little over a year from now.

“The extra time will give your body more time to settle into its current configuration. Then, just before you and your crew go back to sleep, we’ll take a new profile of you, and that will be that.” It was an approach that made sense to me.

Why did I want to continue the psych sessions? I needed to talk about the end of my efforts to change back. I wasn’t sad or angry or frustrated. I did have some feelings I couldn’t name, but overall what I felt was a deep sense of loss.

The business of maturing into a young woman had come along so slowly, I unconsciously got used to it. It blended into the background of my life, for the most part. I began having regular sex with men. (I almost said “other men.”) I found that I liked it, but I wasn’t finding any emotional aspect in it. Given my “celebrity” status, it was easy to find sexual partners. I came to realize that what I most wanted to do was to spend time exploring individual sexual sensations… to stop at some points to just feel that part of the sex act, and not rush on to the orgasm, but I haven’t yet found a man willing to take the time.

I talked with the psychs about all of that, too. It was good to be able to unpack my experiences with them.

Everything went along the way life does, one day after another. Things happened, things didn’t happen. Newly-woken crews came out of their way to meet me. I had to remember that, as old as my situation was to me, it was startling and new to each of them.

At last, we came to the month before my crew would come back online. I found myself getting anxious. These were the people onboard who I knew best, and I’d changed quite a bit since they’d last seen me -- I’d changed inside and out.

I have to say, as a preface to the things that happened when they awoke, was that I wasn’t a particularly attractive girl. I was okay; I was plain, but I was good-looking enough. I didn’t have an amazing figure or a striking face. I was definitely female, but I was no femme fatale.

So, when my crew woke up and I ran into Lt Donaldson, I was pretty surprised by the way he ate me up with his eyes. His eyes roamed over my body with a disconcerting hunger. In fact, he couldn’t take his eyes off me. It was pretty uncomfortable, and downright weird. Whenever I’d talk to him, his eyes would land on my breasts and slide slowly down to my crotch. Whenever I’d walk away from him, I could feel his eyes on my ass. There was something disturbing about it: it wasn’t ordinary lust. There was something else in there, something that I couldn’t identify, like some kind of fetish.

I almost found out what it was in a meeting two weeks after my crew woke up.

Lt Donaldson called me to a small conference room. I sat on one side of a table, and Donaldson sat opposite me. To his left and right were a medical doctor, a psych, a woman I didn’t know, and Qurakas, my team lead. The doctor and the psych were both women, and they were clearly uncomfortable. I figured they were creeped out by Donaldson, who had a feverish look. His eyes seemed ready to pop out of his head. He began by asking me, “Are you familiar with the Idlewild Protocol?”

“Protocol?” I repeated. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I know the name Idlewild, of course, but I don't know of any Idlewild Protocol.”

“Of course you don't,” Donaldson replied. “It’s classified. Highly classified. I’m about to declassify it -- to some extent.” He smiled. “Do you remember, back on Earth, during your training, there was a week of tests to identify Idlewild Candidates?”

“Oh, yes -- how could I forget! They were the most painful tests I ever endured.”

“But you were not found to be an Idlewild Candidate.”

“No, I wasn’t. And they wouldn’t tell us what it meant.”

“I’m about to tell you,” Donaldson replied. “But in order to understand what an Idlewild Candidate is, we need to take a step back and think about what we're all doing here on this ship, out in space. We all know our mission: to find new homes for the human race, and to propagate. It's the ancient directive of go forth and multiply. If you think about it, it’s clear that a ship like this, with this mission like this, doesn’t actually need men at all. You need women and you need sperm. But at the same time, our mission isn’t simply to find new planets and settle them -- it’s also to escape an Earth that’s nearly depleted of resources. That’s the Kingdom Ship project in a nutshell.”

I nodded. Everyone knew that.

“Everyone is meant to go. No one is left behind to languish and die on Earth. All of that is clear.

“Now, Dr Idlewild, the father of the Kingdom Ship project, made many inventions, uncovered many unknown truths... and one of his remarkable discoveries is that there are some men who, under certain circumstances, can turn into women. Those tests you took -- those painful tests -- identified men with this… um, possibility.”

I frowned. “This would have been useful for me to know five years ago. Why are you only telling me this now?”

Qurakas' eyebrows went up at that, and he looked at Donaldson. Did Qurakas have the same question?

Donaldson seemed surprised by my interruption. “Well… obviously... you weren't told because it didn’t apply to you! It still doesn’t apply to you. We just agreed that you weren’t an Idlewild Candidate. It’s in your record, in your file.”

“Right… but this is about changing gender, right? That's what happened to me, and that's what I've been trying to undo. So my question remains: why did you wait until now to tell me this?”

Donaldson held up his hand, palm facing me, to signal me to stop. I wasn’t talking anyway: I was waiting for him to answer, so I just shrugged. After a pause, Donaldson picked up the thread again. “On this ship, we have just over 1500 women, plus thousands of fertilized embryos and a gestation system… so we’re pretty well set as far as propagation is concerned, but once Idlewild found out about the possibility presented by the Idlewild Candidates, he decided it was prudent to develop it as an additional redundancy.”

“And how exactly do these men turn into women?” I asked.

Again, he seemed surprised by my question. “There’s a machine on board that does it,” he replied, as if that was obvious.

”WHAT!?" I shouted. “Are you kidding me? Do you know how hard I’ve been working to change back to who I was? And NOW you tell me that there’s a machine onboard that does what I’ve been trying to do?”

“No, no,” Donaldson said. He seemed more irritated than alarmed by my outburst. “It doesn’t do what you want! It goes the other way: it turns men into women.”

“Maybe I can make it go the other way!”

“No,” Donaldson said. “You’re not listening to me. Your behavior is getting a little out of hand. This isn’t the reason I called this meeting. This is not where I meant to go at all! I have an agenda!”

“I want to see this machine!” I shouted. “How could you keep this a secret from me?”

The psych and the doctor jumped up from their chairs and came around to my side of the table. One of them put her hand on my shoulder. “Look,” the pysch told Donaldson, “You’ve got to give her time to examine this machine. She’s earned the right.”

“That’s not what this meeting is about,” Donaldson insisted.

I was trembling, I was so angry. “Don’t worry,” the doctor whispered to me, “We’ll make sure that you see that machine.”

Donaldson and the psych argued back and forth while the rest of us listened. Donaldson continued to insist that we “stick to the meeting agenda” while the psych insisted that I be given time to examine and study Idlewild’s machine.

After a few minutes of listening to their fruitless argument, Qurakas broke the stalemate by slapping the table with his open hand. The abrupt sound made everyone jump. “This is ridiculous,” he said, and he gazed at Donaldson with open disdain. “If there is a machine onboard that can change a person’s gender, Fergus should have been told about it five years ago, when this first began. If I had been aware of it then, I would have told her -- classified or not. Now that I’m aware of this machine, and have access to it, my team and I will ensure that Fergusdotter has full and free access to it, and any related materials, for as much time as she needs. Anyone who tries to prevent this from happening, will answer to me.”

I almost wanted to cry. Almost.