“Spar! Come on in,” I said. We had all thought my cousin Spartacus was immune to the changing, since he hadn’t caught it when other children did on several occasions when it was going around the village. But it was obvious now that she wasn’t.
Part 1 of 3
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it on any noncommercial site or list. You can also create derivative works, including adaptations to other media, or new stories using the same setting, characters and so forth, as long as you mention and point to the original story.
You have probably heard rumors about Quarantine Cove, about the curse we lie under, and about our strange customs; and perhaps you have heard speculation that we are danger to human civilization and must be destroyed. I do not deny that there is any danger, but I write to say that we in the valley you call Quarantine Cove are aware of it and the more responsible of us are doing our best to abate it — to keep ourselves thoroughly quarantined so that the curse will not spread beyond this valley. I write to plead for more time. A few more years, I think, and we may be able to solve our problems to our neighbors' satisfaction as well as our own.
Since it seems that many false rumors have spread about the nature of our curse and how it began, I think it right to begin by recounting this history. I was born in Fleecedale, later called Quarantine Cove, in the two hundred and tenth year of our freedom. Having a great love for the handful of books to be found in our village, and having no desire to be a herdsman all my life, I left Fleecedale at sixteen years of age and found work in Highmarket with Nabuco the scribe; a year later I married his daughter Moses. The troubles began in the two hundred and thirtieth year of our freedom, in the early summer — I no longer remember the exact date, unfortunately.
We were working in the scriptorium, my father-in-law reading aloud from the Epitome of Huckleberry Finn, and myself, my wife and my brother-in-law all making our copies of it, when there was a knock at the door. I was closer to the door than my brother-in-law, and though my wife was sitting closer still, she was also pregnant; so I got up to go answer the knock.
There was a young woman there, hardly more than a girl; she looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered for a moment if she might be someone I knew from Fleecedale who had grown up a lot since I had seen her last. She was dirty and looked tired; she wore a backpack, a quiver (with only two arrows in it), and a small bow.
“May I help you?” I asked.
“Toussaint, it’s me, Spartacus,” she said.
“Spar! Come on in,” I said. We had all thought my cousin Spartacus was immune to the changing, since he hadn’t caught it when other children did on several occasions when it was going around the village. But it was obvious now that she wasn’t. “Where are your parents?” I asked, looking up and down the street, which wasn’t very busy at that time of day. “How did you get here?”
“I walked,” she said; “I’m running away. Can I stay with you and Moses for a while? And can I have something to eat?”
“Running away?” I asked, leading her into the kitchen. “Why?”
“Pa will hardly speak to me now, and Ma is trying to arrange a marriage for me already. I’m not ready for that.”
“Because of the change? How long ago did it happen?”
“About six weeks. It really messed up Pa’s plans for me, not to mention my plans for me. And Ma was really pushing me to adjust to it all at once. It was easy for her, she changed so young she doesn’t remember being a boy...”
“Most people do,” I said. “I’m really sorry. This has to be really hard for you.”
“You have no idea.”
Actually, I did have more idea than most people; I was almost five when I caught the changing. Still, that’s very different from changing at fifteen.
“Listen, Spar,” I said, getting out some bread and cheese for her, “you’re welcome to stay with us for a while, but I think you should go back home sometime, or at least let your parents know you’re here with us. They’ll be worried about you.”
“Please, don’t make me go back! I’ll just run away somewhere else.”
“I won’t, but I’ll try to talk you into it.”
“That’s fair, if you don’t harp on it all the time. Once a day, maybe? I won’t be useless, I can help out in the scriptorium.”
“Then come on in as soon as you finish eating. I’m going to get back to work.”
When I got back to the scriptorium, there was a pause in the work as I explained about our new guest; but not a long one. Then I picked up a new sheet and started copying again once Nabuco got to the beginning of another section. I would finish copying the last section later. Half an hour later Spar came in and sat down by me; I pointed out where the fresh quills were, and she started trimming one, not very expertly. She started copying from Nabuco’s dictation soon after she had the quill shaped and inked, but when I looked over and saw her approaching the end of a page, I asked her to wait. I would find some cheaper paper later for her to practice on; her penmanship wasn’t up to producing books yet.
When Nabuco got to the end of that epitome, he said we would take a break before starting on the epitomes of Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, which were much shorter — we weren’t sure if it was because the original books had been shorter or because the Founder who wrote the epitomes hadn’t re-read the books as many times and didn’t remember as many details. So Moses and Harriet (her brother, my brother-in-law) took the opportunity to greet Spar and ask her questions. Moses had met Spar when he was a boy, when she came to Fleecedale with me shortly before our marriage to meet my family, but Harriet hadn’t; he had never been to Fleecedale.
“So you just changed a few weeks ago?” he asked. “What was it like?”
“Horrible,” she said. “Fever and chills, and being hungry all the time, and going to the outhouse all the time, until I was too weak to walk that far and had to use the chamber pot; and aches and pains all over...”
“Did you get delirious too?” I asked. “I had vivid fever dreams when I was changing, and I think maybe waking hallucinations too. It’s hard to be sure.”
Spar looked at me. “You remember?”
“I was four, almost five when it happened. I have a few memories from when I was a girl, but I remember the changing itself very clearly indeed. Ma kept coming in every half hour or so to feed me and take out the chamber pot; I kept dozing off into a fever dream for a few minutes and then waking up to peek under the blanket and see how big the boy-thing had gotten.”
Moses shook her head. “I don’t remember it at all,” she said. “I was one and a half. Harriet was just a few months old when she changed, and he barely lived through it.” It was hard on babies, for sure. The rare adults who weren’t truly immune but didn’t catch it as children suffered more trauma from it when they finally got it, but they very rarely died of it, like babies often did. Moses didn’t mention her other baby brother, who didn’t live through his change.
“So what’s it like now?” Harriet asked. “Being a girl? I guess you can compare it to being a boy, can’t you?”
Spar seemed at a loss for words for a minute. “Annoying,” she finally said. “And the most annoying part is being asked that question all the time...”
I could tell that Spar didn’t really want to answer Harriet’s questions, so I asked her questions she could answer more comfortably, about what was going on back in Fleecedale. There had been a trader in the inn two weeks earlier who had recently passed through Fleecedale, but he didn’t have much news about my family, and I was hoping to get more from Spar. I hadn’t been back there since my marriage to Moses.
For several days Spar helped out with various tasks around the scriptorium other than copying books, and studied penmanship with me in the evenings. She got good at sharpening quills and mixing ink a lot faster than at writing, and we delegated those jobs to her. She spent a lot of time with Moses, asking her questions about being a woman that, perhaps, she hadn’t wanted to ask her Ma. I found various pretexts to get Harriet out of the house so Moses and Spar could be alone; I suspected that he was interested in Spar, and that she wasn’t anywhere near ready to have that kind of interest taken in her.
After copying epitomes of classic Earth novels for a few weeks, we turned to copying Wilberforce Ishige’s History of the Revolt. We had been at work for just an hour or two when Nabuco excused himself to go to the outhouse. I started to get up to go read aloud for Moses and Harriet to copy, but Spar got to the lectern first. She read confidently, only rarely hesitating over an archaic word or a difficult proper name. I sat right back down and kept copying, glancing at Moses with a smile. When Nabuco got back, he stood quietly in the back of the room listening, and watching us copy; then he got out another stack of paper, sat next to Harriet, and started copying. Spar kept reading through the passage where Ishige describes the experiments the Masters used to do on their human slaves, and suddenly couldn’t read any further.
“I’ll take over here,” I said, and went to the lectern. “You don’t have to stay and listen,” I said quietly to Spar. She shook her head vigorously, holding back tears, and sat down next to Moses — where I had been. Moses squeezed her hand as I read through the passage about the experiments that were the precursor of the changing sickness. At first the spell wasn’t made contagious; the Masters were apparently just fooling around with human biology, and were surprised at the psychological reactions they got from their slaves when their sex was changed. They remembered that later, during the revolt, when they were inventing diseases to leave behind as revenge on their rebellious slaves.
Eventually, I talked Spar into going back to Fleecedale with me to at least talk to her parents. I wanted to see them too, and my own parents especially; I promised her I would bring her back with me to Highmarket if her parents didn’t seem penitent enough for the way they’d been treating her before she ran away.
I talked with Nabuco and put together a set of books we thought might sell in Fleecedale — mostly short ones, as probably nobody there could afford the long ones. I also brought along Lincoln Quindlen’s Gulliver’s Travels, a new copy I was making, and plenty of blank paper, ink and quills, so I could work on the copy while staying in Fleecedale. (Some think it a travesty of the Epitome of Gulliver’s Travels; it’s true he leaves out the Laputa chapter entirely, and he draws parallels between the Brobdingnagians and our old Masters, which could not have been intended by its ancient author. But I like it, and I never understood the Laputa chapter in the epitome anyway. And I don’t agree with the notion that an expansion should try to reconstruct the Earth novel from vague memories of which the epitome was made; that’s impossible, and the attempts to do so just make the expansions opaque to modern readers.)
We packed the wagon with the books, scribal supplies, several days' worth of food and wine, and our weapons: her bow and some new arrows I’d bought for her, and my short sword, in case of bandits on the road. I promised Moses I would be back long before the baby was due, and kissed her for a long time; then Spar and I hitched up our draftbeast, got into the wagon and set off Fleecedale.
The first few miles of our road were inside the warding spell that protects Highmarket; then we passed the marker stone, and we were outside, with most of a day to travel before we reached the warding around Songtown. We were alert, but nothing untoward happened that day. We slept at an inn in Songtown, and set off the next morning down the much less frequented road toward Fleecedale.
We had gone several miles down this road when we met a man on foot coming the other way.
“Watch out,” he said, “some people have seen a Master skulking around in the waste between the warded places.”
When he had passed us, Spar asked me nervously, “Should we turn back?”
“We should be safe enough,” I said, “we have a warding on the wagon. And probably it wasn’t really a Master those people think they saw. There hasn’t been a verified sighting in decades.”
“Maybe because the people who’ve seen one since then didn’t live to tell anybody?”
There hadn’t been much traffic on this road out of Songtown, but after we had gotten a few miles past the next village, Bluegate, and the farms surrounding it, we met nobody at all for hours. We were going up into the long valley that Fleecedale shares its name with. For strategic reasons the houses and barns of Fleecedale are way back in a cove of the valley, with steep hills around them on three sides, and the warding covers not only the village but the tops of the hills, so if the Masters come back they can’t get close enough that way to look down on it. There’s also a double fence along the hills and across the neck of the cove, to keep out human outlaws. I was whistling, thinking that just a little while after sunset I would see the rest of my family for the first time in almost two years. Spar didn’t look anywhere near so happy, though.
Then a shadowy something came out of the woods beside the road and loomed before us. Our draftbeast stopped in its tracks for a moment, and then fell over — asleep? dead? I wasn’t sure.
Spar drew an arrow and let fly at the Master; a good shot, but it bounced off of some invisible wall. She took aim again, and hit the wall again this time right before the thing’s face.
“Don’t waste any more arrows. Just stay calm,” I told her, “it can’t hurt us as long as we stay in the wagon.”
I was wrong. It couldn’t touch us directly, as it discovered when it advanced on us and suddenly stopped a foot away from the wagon. But it was resourceful. It backed away, picked up a branch fallen from a tree beside the road, and held it for a minute; then the branch burst into flames. It tossed the branch into the wagon. We scrambled to smother the fire and toss the branch out onto the road.
We managed to put out three of those fires, but the Master kept throwing burning branches at us faster than we could handle them. Finally the wagon caught fire, apparently from branches the Master had thrown under the wagon’s wheels, and we scrambled out to make a run for it. I grabbed the bag of books, and Spar grabbed a bag of food.
“If we have to leave the wagon, run back along the road a bit, then duck into the woods,” I had told her a few moments earlier, as I threw out the first burning stick. We started to do that, but we had only run ten or fifteen yards when we suddenly stopped and stood still. Not only could I not move, but I was starting to have a hard time remembering why I wanted to run.
Then the Master came round the burning wagon and stood in front of us again.
The strange thing was that I wasn’t frightened. I was hardly feeling anything. I didn’t expect anything in particular to happen, and for a few minutes nothing did. The Master just stood there, looking at us, I suppose, though with those compound eyes it was impossible to be sure. Then it started waving all of its arms in a complicated series of gestures, and speaking in the old language. I could understand a fair number of the words, but the grammar of it is beyond human capacity; our ancestors learned a simplified version of it when they were captured as slaves, and passed it on to their children even after the revolt, because it was the only language they all had in common. “Commerce... soul.... transmission... colors... confusion...” were some of the words I picked out, or thought I did.
Then it came to a stop, and vanished. There one moment, and not there the next. But it was quite a while before the lethargy left me and I could move again. It wore off for Spar first, and she shook my arm and waved her hands in front of my staring eyes for a minute or two, asking me in increasing panic if I was all right, before I could finally answer her.
“I don’t know if we’re all right yet,” I said. “But we can’t go on to Fleecedale.” The wagon had burned up, badly charring the draftbeast, which was dead now if it wasn’t before; but fortunately the fire hadn’t spread to the woods.
“Why not?”
“I think the Master just put a curse on us. We don’t know what it does yet, and more importantly we don’t know if it’s contagious — like the changing, or the forgetting. We’ve got to go off somewhere by ourselves until we know what happened.”
“Where?”
“What about the hunting lodge up back of the village? Nobody’s using it this time of year, are they?”
“No... I expect not.”
We tried to salvage some more food from the burnt-out wagon, but it was no use. We cleared the wreck and the dead draftbeast from the road, so it wouldn’t be a hazard if anyone came along going fast (not likely in these parts, but not impossible), and then we left the road, walking uphill through the woods.
It took us until after sunset to reach the hunting lodge. Normally nobody used it except in the winter, when they might get caught by sudden snow far from the village. In better weather one would always want to spend the night in range of the the village warding spell. There were six beds, and a cabinet containing two jars of crystallized honey, a box of completely dried-out raisins, and a jar of extra oil for the lamps. We would soon have to start hunting and foraging.
It was so frustrating to be so close to Fleecedale and not be able to tell anyone we were there. I was deeply afraid that the curse the Master put on us might be fatal, but I tried not to let on to Spar. If it was, the best thing we could do for our friends and kinfolks was to stay right here and die alone, and hope that the curse wasn’t still contagious when our bodies were discovered. Maybe better still if we died outside of the lodge, so animals would find and scavenge our bodies before people from Fleecedale did.
“How are we going to find out if this curse is contagious or hereditary or what?” Spar asked me as we put our things away in the cabinet. We had cut up a few fairly straight branches on our way here and were shaping them into arrows.
“We can’t tell, as long as it’s just us. We’ll just have to wait it out. If someone comes along, we’ll try to warn them off from a distance, and if we can’t, we’ll have to make them stay here in quarantine with us. Then if they catch it, we’ll know it’s contagious and we need to stay here until it wears off. And if they don’t, we’ll know it’s probably hereditary — the Masters almost never waste their time cursing just one or two people — and we should avoid having any children.”
Any more children, in my case. Would I ever see my son or daughter, or their mother?
“Depending on what ‘it’ is, I guess...” Spar said. “We still don’t know that.”
We went to bed still not knowing, but we found out first thing next morning.
“As much as I like this Gulliver overall, I think Quindlen made a mistake to have the Houyhnhnms be intelligent draftbeasts.”
“Why?” Spar asked. “Do you think he should have said they were intelligent... what was it in the original? Unicorns?”
Part 2 of 3
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it on any noncommercial site or list. You can also create derivative works, including adaptations to other media, or new stories using the same setting, characters and so forth, as long as you mention and point to the original story.
I woke up in the middle of the night with a headache, and lay there suffering for a while before I finally fell asleep again. When I woke up, early morning summer sunlight coming through the window above my bed, I still had the headache, but I felt something else was wrong too. The colors of everything I was seeing were subtly wrong; the blanket was a much brighter blue than it should be, the wood of the bedpost and the wall was a strange shade of yellow instead of the dark brown of sharpleaf wood, and my hand was almost red. The last part might be an effect of the curse on my hand rather than my eyes, though... I felt strange all over. What else...? Yes, the shape of my hand was wrong too.
I sat up and realized what else was wrong. I was in the second bed from the door, instead of the one closest to the door where I had gone to sleep; and in that bed I saw myself still sleeping. I looked at myself more closely. I was Spar now, apparently. The absence between my legs brought back comforting memories of early childhood, in a way, but the things wobbling around on my chest were a novelty.
“Are you awake?” I asked. He wasn’t, yet, but he woke up soon enough, and like me he noticed something wrong with his color vision a moment before he noticed what else was wrong.
“Your voice sounds high,” he said, “and your face is gone all pale... wait a minute, what...?”
“I think you’re me now, and I’m you. That must be the curse, or the beginning of it. I’m not sure what’s wrong with our vision. My skin doesn’t look pale to me, it looks way too red. And does your head hurt like mine does?”
“I don’t know how bad your head hurts, but I’ve got a headache too. Not so bad I can’t concentrate, but annoying.” He had a radiant expression on his face, despite the headache. “I’m sorry this had to happen to you, Toussaint, but if messed up colors and a mild headache is all that’s wrong with me, I’m about ready to thank that Master.”
“We don’t know that this is all,” I said, annoyed. “This could be just the beginning.”
It was.
We ate some of the bread and cheese we’d brought, with a little of the honey from the cabinet, and then Spar took a bucket he’d found and went down to the brook to get some water. We mixed it with some of our wine — we wanted it to last a while, since we just had one bottle — and drank.
Spar read aloud from Gulliver and I started to work on my copy, but I soon found that my penmanship in this body wasn’t what it should be; better than Spar’s, but not as good as my carefully trained book hand. I gave it up for a while.
“As much as I like this Gulliver overall, I think Quindlen made a mistake to have the Houyhnhnms be intelligent draftbeasts.”
“Why?” Spar asked. “Do you think he should have said they were intelligent... what was it in the original? Unicorns?”
“Horses,” I said. “Unicorns had a horn on the forehead, and they weren’t domesticated like horses. No, I think he was right to use our native animals, rather than a legendary animal like the horse that nobody’s ever seen, but the Founder’s accounts say that horses were beautiful, graceful, cleanly creatures — the most beautiful of domestic animals besides the cat. And nobody would consider a draftbeast beautiful or cleanly.”
“So what do you think he should have used?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the darter or the quintacorn; it’s hard to say. Darters are much smaller than horses are said to have been, and quintacorns have those horns, which horses didn’t. And neither of them is domesticated. We just don’t have any animal here that’s a good match for the horse with all the associations the mention of that animal would suggest to Jonathan Swift or his first readers... But it seems very appropriate to imagine an intelligent darter or quintacorn, while an intelligent draftbeast...”
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
After a while he practiced shooting at a target that someone had set up on a tree near the lodge, but found that he wasn’t as good a shot as before. We spent some time looking for his arrows that went wide.
“The changing made me lose my coordination for a little while — what with my arms and hands changing shape slightly, and having to find a better stance that wouldn’t have the bowstring stinging my right breast — but by the time I ran away I was about as good as I was before. I wonder how long it will take me to get used to your body.”
“Let me try,” I said when we’d found all his arrows but one and had been looking in vain for that last one for a while. He coached me on how to stand so my breasts wouldn’t get in the way of the string, and I let fly at the target. I did manage to hit it with three of five arrows, though I didn’t get near the center. Apparently some of the skills we had learned stayed with the body.
I was about to draw a sixth arrow but the headache was getting worse, and I told Spar I was going to go lie down. He said his head was hurting worse now than when we woke up, too. We gathered up the arrows from the target and beyond it and then went into the lodge.
Lying down didn’t help; the headache got worse and worse, and was excruciating after another half hour. Then suddenly it got a lot better — not gone entirely, but I could think again. And I realized my vision had returned to normal; the ceiling was the right color, as was my hand — which was also a lot hairier; I looked at myself, and at Spar on the other bed. We were back in our own bodies.
“Good for you,” she said. “Is that all, do you think?”
“If it happens twice, it might happen any number of times. I don’t think we should go to Fleecedale until several days have gone by without that happening again. Until the headache has been gone for a while, too.”
We swapped about four or five times a day for the next several days. The next day when we were in our right bodies, we went hunting, and Spar shot a couple of mirrorwings and a bell-ear. I gutted and cleaned them and we had meat with our bread and cheese for a couple of days.
The headache was always there, worst just before we swapped and mildest just afterward. We could more or less use it to gauge when a swap was going to happen, though it didn’t seem to always get equally bad before the swap or equally mild afterward. I copied several more pages from Gulliver’s Travels, always when I was in my own body, Spar slowly reading aloud to me.
I seriously hoped that after a few more days, the headache would end and the swaps would cease, and we could go back to civilization — hopefully in our right bodies. I still felt sorry for Spar, but she was young; I figured she could get used to being a woman easier than Moses could get used to being married to one. But the dice came up showing irrational numbers.
On our third day in the lodge, we were out hunting again, following the tracks of a quintacorn a fairly long way from the lodge, when the headache got worse faster than usual. We gasped and sat down together with our backs to a sharpleaf tree until we swapped again and the headache receded.
“Shall we keep tracking it?” I asked Spar. “I’m getting to be a reasonably good shot in your body, and a quintacorn is a fairly easy target if we can just get in sight of it.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
A while later I was creeping up on the quintacorn from downwind; it was drinking from a pool in one of the brooks that fed into the creek that ran through Fleecedale. I got as close as the cover allowed, drew, and let fly.
The quintacorn leaped in place — I had hit it on the left flank — but then ran off, bleeding. Spar ran up behind me. “After it!” I said.
Spar was running with longer legs than me and soon got way ahead. I kept following the obvious trail at a more relaxed pace. Eventually the quintacorn would lose enough blood to slow down, Spar would catch up with it, and he could dispatch it with the sword — not as good as a spear for this kind of work, but usable.
But I hadn’t gone far when I met someone else.
It was a man almost as old as Nabuco, in filthy clothes that he seemed to have been wearing for a year. He carried a bow longer and more powerful than mine.
“Stay back,” I said, “I’m under a curse. I don’t want you to get it.”
“What’s that?” he said, turning his head. “I’m deaf on that side.” He came closer.
“You don’t want this curse,” I shouted.
“Few things could be worse than what?” he asked. Apparently he was more deaf than not on the other side, too. “Than a girl as pretty as you hunting by herself this far from Fleecedale? There are outlaws around sometimes — you should be more careful —”
“I’m not by myself. Stay back, you could get this curse from me,” I said, and then backed further away.
“Not yourself? What about a first — a first what?”
“Don’t come near me,” I shouted, and turned to run. He was fleeter of foot than I expected a man that old to be, and, like Spar in my body, he had the advantage of longer legs. I still might have outrun him, though, if the headache hadn’t gotten worse suddenly. Before long it was so bad I stumbled to my knees. The man caught up with me and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Are you lost, little girl? Do you need —?”
Suddenly, I was myself again, kneeling beside a dead quintacorn with a bloodied sword lying on the leafy mould at my side. I hastily wiped the sword off, sheathed it and ran as fast as I could back along the trail the quintacorn had followed. What might that man do to Spar?
Not as much as I’d feared, it turned out. I ran up to them a few minutes later to find Spar shouting in his good ear, explaining what had happened to us.
“Here he is now,” she said. “My husband, Toussaint. Toussaint, this is Dantas.”
Interesting lie. Well, if it helped keep his hands off her, it wouldn’t do any harm.
“You’ll have to go into quarantine with us, sir,” I said when I got close enough for him to hear me. “You might have already gotten the curse from us, if it’s contagious. We still don’t know.”
After we repeated the message several times with variations, he agreed, but suggested that we come to his cabin instead of going back to the lodge; he said there was room for us there, and he had plenty of food stocked. Eventually we agreed to go back to the lodge for the books and food there, then go back to butcher the quintacorn, and go to his cabin with the meat.
Before we got to his cabin, which was several miles further from Fleecedale than the lodge, he was already complaining of a headache. It got worse faster than ours did, though it seemed to culminate in something just as bad, and when it receded he was in Spar’s body, Spar was in mine, and I was in his. I was surprised that she didn’t seem bothered by the change. Was she crazy from living out here by himself?
Dantas' cabin was smaller than the lodge, and dirtier, but he did have plenty of food. She fixed us the best meal we’d had since we left Highmarket, and told us about herself. I had to lean close to hear what she said, and I didn’t get it all straight at the time — some of this is what Spar told me later.
She was a native of Fleecedale and had grown up apparently immune, like Spartacus; she didn’t catch the changing curse until she was nineteen years old. By that time she was married and pregnant with her first child. The change caused her to miscarry, and nearly killed her; when he finally recovered, he ran off into the hills and had lived as a hermit ever since. I recognized the name of her husband; old Beecher Timson, whom I’d always thought was a widower. His son Newton — Dantas' son, too — was just a year older than me. I did some math; Dantas wasn’t nearly as old as he — as his original body, which I was wearing — looked; living alone in the woods had taken a hard toll on him.
She seemed pleased by the results of this curse.
“The colors are odd,” she said, as we ate the roasted darter with assorted nuts she had prepared, “but other than that it feels so right. I thought I might get used to being a man after a few years, and be able to go back to civilization, even if I couldn’t face my husband again, but I don’t think I ever did.”
“You’re welcome to it,” said Spar, “for as long as it lasts.”
“You’ve still got the headache, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s not very bad, though.”
“Then we’ll be swapping around again soon,” Spar said. “At least once more, maybe twice, before the end of today. No telling how long this will last.”
We changed again not long before we went to bed; I ended up in Spar’s body again, Spar in Dantas', and Dantas in mine. Dantas made up pallets for us from his extra winter fleeces. We slept fitfully, our sleep interrupted by the headache.
But when I woke up, Spar’s body was gone from the pallet. I was in my own body again for the moment.
“Are you Spar or Dantas?” I asked the old man, who was lying on his bed awake.
“What?” he asked, and sat up. I got up and came closer, and said louder: “Who are you this morning?”
“Spar,” he said. “Where do you reckon Dantas is?”
“She’s probably gone out to pee,” I said. “I need to do that now too.”
But I saw no sign of her anywhere at the outhouse Dantas had shown us yesterday, or anywhere near the cabin. Old Spar came out and used the outhouse after me.
“I’m afraid she’s run off,” I said after he was finished. “She’s come out ahead in the body exchange and wants to get away, maybe see people in Fleecedale she’s been ashamed to go back to before...”
“What are we going to do?” he said.
“I don’t think we can track her. She might have taken any of several routes to Fleecedale. But probably we don’t need to. Whichever one of us ends up in that body next time we swap around can just walk back here.”
“Unless she’s already gotten to Fleecedale by now and exposed other people to the curse... in that case it’s too late to keep it confined to us until it wears off. Maybe we should try to catch up with her? Which route do you think is most likely?”
We headed toward Fleecedale along what I figured would be the most likely route — not the most direct, which would take Dantas to the hills above the village and a steep, difficult descent, but the easiest, which wound around to the east side of the valley, at a spot where there was an easy trail winding along one of the hills south of the village. It was the route hunters most often took when leaving or returning to Fleecedale. The headache worsened as we went, and we had to stop and rest before we were halfway there. This time it was just me and Spar who swapped, leaving Dantas still in Spar’s body, wherever she was. I wondered if maybe the distance between us prevented the curse from working. But after a couple more hours, I found out that it wasn’t so; at least, the few miles between us wasn’t sufficient to stop it. The next time the headache reached its peak and we shuffled, I ended up in Spar’s body; and I wasn’t alone.
I was sitting in a chair in a one-room house; late morning sunlight was coming in through a south window. I’d never been in this house before, but I recognized the man sitting near me in another chair; old Beecher Timson, Dantas’s husband. And sitting on the edge of the bed in the corner was a young man about my age, Beecher’s son Newton.
They looked at me uncertainly; I figured I had shown some startlement when I arrived in this body, or had broken off in mid-sentence.
“Beecher, Newton, this isn’t Dantas, I’m Toussaint Foucault. We just exchanged places and bodies. What did Dantas tell you about what happened?”
Newton was the first to recover from the surprise. “She was saying as how she met you and your wife up in the hills, and you told her you’d had a curse put on you by one of the Masters; and then a while later she ended up in that body there, and the girl in that body was in her old man body... that’s what I understood her to say. But it wasn’t too clear yet.”
“Listen, this curse is contagious, and it keeps working. My cousin and I — not my wife, Dantas got that mixed up from being hard of hearing, that is his old body is hard of hearing — we’d been swapping back and forth for three days when Dantas met us. So when Dantas ended up in this body that wasn’t the end of it. And since she’s been sitting here with you, you’ve probably both got the curse too; and who knows who else she might have talked to on her way into Fleecedale before she got to your house...! We’ve got to put the whole village under quarantine. We can’t let anybody leave, and anybody that was out hunting or pasturing the herds when Dantas arrived we have to warn off. Tell them to go stay in Bluegate until this curse has run its course...”
It took a little more time to convince them. I recounted our experiences in more detail, from the time Spar and I met the Master on the road into the valley, and finally got Newton, at least, to understand what was needed. We left the house and went down to the far edge of the village, by the stockade, and worked our way up from there warning people about the curse. People remembered the last time one of the Masters appeared, when they set loose the forgetting curse, and how the first village where it broke out didn’t quarantine itself well enough; it was burned to the ground by its neighbors a few months later, in revenge, and none of us wanted that to happen to Fleecedale. Our isolated situation was an advantage. We soon got several volunteers with loud, clear voices to man the stockade and warn off the hunters and herdsmen that would be coming back in the next few hours, while Newton and I went around warning people about the curse, — shouting from a distance, and warning them to stay in their houses as long as they could.
I was worried that I was probably spreading the curse more thoroughly within Fleecedale than Dantas had already done, but I didn’t see any other way to get the quarantine in place quickly and surely, and prevent the curse spreading beyond Fleecedale. Before long, we got to my Aunt Harriet and Uncle Garrison’s house, and though I tried shouting at a distance to warn her off, I couldn’t stop Aunt Harriet from rushing out of her house and embracing me.
“Spar!” she cried, “we were so worried! Garrison went to Bluegate and Songtown looking for you...”
“Aunt Harriet, listen, I’m not Spar, I’m Toussaint. We got hit with a new curse by one of the Masters, and I ended up with Spar’s body and she got mine. I’m afraid you probably just picked up the curse too; it’s contagious...”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, bewildered. “Slow down.” So I started over, explaining at length.
“So in a few hours I’m going to start getting a headache and then swap bodies with you?”
“Or with somebody else that’s under the curse. I can’t tell who it will be. And then we’ll keeping shuffling around every few hours, for at least three or four days, I expect; how much longer it’s going to last I don’t know.” The headache was worsening, and though it wasn’t so bad I couldn’t keep talking with her, it probably made me a little incoherent.
“So where’s Spar in your body now? Why did you come back to Fleecedale now if you’ve got this contagious curse?”
“Well, at first we went off in the hills to stay in that old hunting lodge until we knew what we’d been cursed with, and see if we could wait it out there, but then —”
Before I could finish the sentence I was in my own body again, in the woods somewhere with someone in Dantas' body.
“I’m Toussaint. Who are you now?” I asked.
“Spar,” he said. “So you’ve been in Fleecedale in my body? What’s going on now?”
“I was working on getting the village under quarantine. I’m pretty sure Dantas has already set the curse loose there. Did he tell you?”
“He told me she’d been in her old house, talking to her husband and son, and then jumped back here in your body. So, should we go on down there now?”
“Let’s wait a bit. If we start swapping with somebody in Fleecedale other than Dantas, we’ll know the curse is loose there and we might as well go there tomorrow morning. Or whoever ends up in these bodies out here should go in... maybe I should write a note for whoever ends up here?”
We returned to the cabin and ate, and I wrote a note, for whatever good it would do — only about a third of the people in Fleecedale were literate. A few hours after sunset we shuffled again, me in Dantas’s body and Dantas, it turned out, in mine.
“Did your son fill you in on what I was doing in Spar’s body there in town?” I asked him. “Getting the quarantine set up?”
“Yes,” he said, miserably. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Sure enough you weren’t,” I said. “Was Beecher or Newton starting to complain of the headache yet?”
He said something in a sheepish whisper that I had to ask him to repeat.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid both of them have got it...” And Aunt Harriet, too, probably; and how many others?
“I was talking to my Aunt Harriet — Spar’s mother — when we swapped last. What all did she tell you? Was Uncle Garrison out of the village when the quarantine started? What about my Pa, Wilberforce Foucault?”
“She didn’t tell me. First she asked me what I was started to say, and I figured out you had been in the middle of saying something when we swapped; and then I explained we had swapped again, and Newton told me we’d better go warn other people. But we just warned a couple more, then went back to our house and let other people spread the word further. Newton was starting to get the headache then.”
We went to bed not long after that. I woke up the next morning in Beecher’s body in his one-room house.
I took stock. I was lying on a pallet on the floor; Newton’s body was lying on another pallet. Spar’s body was lying on the bed in the corner, and both of them seemed to be still asleep. I got up and went out to pee and to wash my face, and when I returned Spar’s body was sitting up, the person wearing it examining herself with interest.
“I’m Toussaint in this body,” I told her, “who are you this morning?”
“I’m your Aunt Harriet,” she said. “Is this headache ever going to go away? And why are all the colors so bright?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The headache seems to get gradually worse for a few hours, then suddenly better for a while when we swap. And the colors always seem to be a little different in each body; I think everybody’s color vision has always been different, we just didn’t have a way to compare until now. Hopefully the curse will only last a few days, and hopefully we’ll all end up in fairly suitable bodies when it’s all over. But I doubt our luck will suddenly turn so good.”
Our conversation woke the person in Newton’s body, who turned out to be Spar. We filled him in on who was who.
“So there are at least six people afflicted by this curse now,” he said. “Maybe more... is there anything we can do to keep everybody in Fleecedale from getting it?”
“Stay inside as much as we can. Hope the people who haven’t got it yet will do the same.”
Aunt Harriet told us that Uncle Garrison, and my Pa, and the other herdsmen and hunters had been turned away at the stockade last night by the quarantine guards. Most of them had said they wouldn’t go as far as Bluegate; they would camp in the pastures and wait to see how the curse affected their wives and children in Fleecedale first.
“If we can keep this from spreading any further,” I said, “it will be bad, but we can survive it. We all know each other and whatever bodies we end up in when the curse has run its course, we can work things out somehow about who’s married to who and who owns what; just about everybody here knows the same few trades. But if this spreads all over, and we start swapping with people from Songtown and Highmarket and even the coastal towns and sailors at sea, everything will fall apart. Most of us will end up in places where we can’t practice the trade we know and we won’t know how to do what needs doing there, and we’ll almost always be surrounded by strangers... we’ll all be easy prey for the Masters; they could take this world back easily then. I’m sure that’s what they wanted when they put this curse on us.”
“We’ll have to keep it in the family, then,” said Aunt Harriet.
We stayed in the house as our headaches got worse and worse. I wanted so much to go see my Ma and my sisters and other relatives, but they might not have the curse yet and I didn’t want to spread it to them. Next swap, I ended up in Aunt Harriet’s body, alone in her house. The body was hungry, so I cut some bread and cheese and ate, staying indoors. When I jumped again, I was one of the boys standing guard at the stockade gate. I introduced myself to the others on sentry duty: my cousin Patrocinio, a boy little older than Spar, and a fourteen year old girl named Isabel Takenaka, who was as distantly related to me as anybody in Fleecedale could be; we shared only one great-grandparent. Neither of them had swapped with anybody yet, but they were both starting to suffer the headache. I had the thirteen year old body of Pedro Takenaka, Isabel’s brother.
A while later two figures approached the stockade from down the valley. Patrocinio shouted out the quarantine warning, but they kept coming.
“We should let them in,” I told the others, “they’re already under the curse.” It was my body and Dantas' that were approaching, though I had no idea who was inhabiting them.
“How do you know?” Isabel asked me.
“That’s my original body there, the younger guy.”
The men got close and told us, “We’re already under the curse. Can we come in?”
“Come on,” I told them. “Who are you now? I’m Toussaint Foucault. My fellow sentries here have the headache, but they aren’t swapping yet.”
It was, it turned out, Newton in my body and Spar in Dantas'. I told them they should go to Aunt Harriet’s house and stay there, since it was empty except for whoever had her body at the moment.
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.