Pwalu dreamed he was a woman. She was big with child, not long to go before she gave birth. Her wife Qesem was delighted, rubbing her hands over Pwalu’s big belly and chattering on about possible names they could give their baby. The dream was rather vague about how Pwalu had gotten pregnant, if she were still married to Qesem and Qesem was still a normal woman in the dream, but Pwalu felt such joy at the thought of becoming a mother that he didn’t question it as long as the dream lasted.

But it faded away into waking, as dreams must, and the joy of becoming a mother gave way to disappointment as he realized he was still a man, followed by shame and embarrassment: he must be a man, his wife needed him, and he might get her with child any day now. She should be the one to have their babies, not him. He rolled over in bed and indulged himself for a few moments looking at her sleeping form before getting up and beginning the day’s chores. Let her sleep a little longer; she was so beautiful that way.

Of course Qesem, being a farmer’s wife, hardly slept any later than her husband. As he was pumping water from the well, she came out to feed the turchicks and said, “Good morning, Pwalu!”

“Good morning, my beautiful Qesem,” he replied, still pumping.

They met up in the kitchen a little later, having finished the most urgent morning chores and settling down to cook breakfast together.

“I had a wonderfully strange dream,” she said. “I found a piece of ancient technology that would keep the vorpal rabbits out of our garden, and our vegetables grew to enormous sizes that would feed a whole village from one plant. We grew wealthy, sold the farm and moved to town… then I woke up.”

“I had a strange dream too,” Pwalu began to say, and then hesitated. What would Qesem think of his dream? Would she think him unmanly? What if she knew of his wish that he might stumble upon some of the technology that had allowed the ancients to change their bodies from man to woman to man as often as they liked? No, he’d better not. They loved each other as only newlyweds could, but there would be no telling how long that would last if she knew this secret. “…We were going to have a baby,” he finished after an uncomfortably long pause.

“Oh, that’s wonderful. But what was strange about that?”

“…I don’t remember, most of the dream has faded,” he lied. It remained in his mind as one of the most vivid dreams he could remember. Two of the other three had also involved being or becoming a woman somehow, to his lasting shame.

After breakfast, Qesem gathered her things for her trip to the village market, which was held every four days. She had four days’ worth of eggs from their turchicks, a few early glowbulbs, and some butter from the sheep’s milk. After the harvest, which would begin soon, they would travel together to a larger market in a town a few days’ journey away, but for these regular trips to the village market, Qesem often went alone. Pwalu couldn’t help worrying about her, but he couldn’t afford to accompany her every time and lose half the day from working on the farm, even in the interim between sowing and harvest.

“I love you,” Pwalu said, kissing her goodbye. “I’ll see you this afternoon. Don’t stay too long gossiping after you sell your wares, all right?”

She laughed. “No promises. Maswen always has something juicy to share.”

He smiled indulgently. “I’m sure you’ll have fun talking with her, but don’t forget your poor husband, pining away and missing you. And… be careful.”

The road to the village was usually not too dangerous, but they were on the frontier, and the vast untamed forest that had grown up after the War, when no one survived in this part of the world to cultivate the land, was just a short distance away for the first part of her route. Outlaws, natural predators, and ancient bioweapons were all known to inhabit the forest and occasionally venture out to raid the nearby farms, or attack travelers on the road. Pwalu’s farm itself had been part of the forest five years ago; he and his family and some neighbors had cleared the land when he came of age and wanted to have his own farm instead of working the land that would be his brother’s after their father died.

“I’ll be careful. I’ve got my knife and bow, just in case.”

“Goodbye.”

They kissed once again for luck, and she was off. Pwalu watched her go down the road out of sight and then turned to go fetch the hoe and start weeding the glowbulb field.

---

As Pwalu weeded the field and picked a few more glowbulbs that had ripened overnight, his thoughts wandered back to the dream. He tried to tell himself he had more important things to think about, but he could hardly help it; the dream had been one of the most wonderful experiences of the year, in a year where he had courted Qesem and gotten her to agree to marry him. How could he feel this way?

Whatever the reason, he’d felt it for a long time, off and on. It had seemed to start when he was a small boy, and the family had gone to a market town after harvest, staying to enjoy the entertainments after their crops were sold. A storyteller had weaved a tale about life in the ancient world before the War, and mentioned offhand that a certain character liked to change back and forth between man and woman, “which was as easy as falling over in those days.” The storyteller had switched between masculine and feminine forms of the character’s name as the story progressed, but didn’t go into any detail about why they decided to change gender or how they did it. Pwalu couldn’t remember how old he was then, only that he was old enough to know that such ancient technology was rarely found intact anymore and rarely worked as intended when it worked at all. The only ancient technologies that were still around much were those that propagated themselves, like the turchicks or glowbulbs. Or the bioweapons.

It hadn’t kept him from daydreaming, though.

As the sun slowly rolled across the sky and he moved on from the glowbulb field to the potato patch, Pwalu’s obsession over the dream and the feelings of being pregnant slowly gave way to healthier thoughts of his wife and their prospects of having a baby in a more realistic way. Not everyone was able to have children, of course; between his aunts and uncle, all long since married, only one had any children, and his Uncle Tupa’s wife had died after having only one healthy girl and one sickly son who died not long after her. Pwalu’s parents were a rare exception with two sons and a daughter. But Pwalu and Qesem were healthy and Qesem came from a relatively large family, with not only her parents and grandparents having multiple children, but two of her aunts as well. So that boded well for their chances.

The sun was declining toward the horizon and Pwalu was checking the fence between the sheep pasture and the forest for damage when his thoughts of Qesem started to change from fond speculation to worry. Shouldn’t she be back from the village by now? Oh, he should have gone with her. The danger wasn’t great, but for a lone woman, it was more likely to be deadly than for a woman and man together. Of course there were some dangers that would be just as likely to kill them both as to kill her alone, but it couldn’t hurt… he would go with her next time.

He had resolved that before, but always changed his mind regretfully when the time came and he saw how much work there was to do. How much work there always was.

He had just about decided to set out looking for her when she arrived. But there was something wrong, he felt, as he saw her in the distance approaching down the road. She was wearing the same blue dress she’d worn that morning, and the same straw hat she usually wore in sunny weather, and carrying the same baskets she’d taken to market. And when she got closer, he recognized her face… but there was something different.

Her belly. She was pregnant, and looked at least seven months along, probably more. And the lower skirts of her dress were a bit tattered.

He dropped his hoe and ran to meet her.

“What happened?” he called out as soon as he thought he was in earshot. “Did you get caught in a time warp?” Those weren’t as frequent a problem as wolves or bioweapons, but they’d been known to wander out of their usual spots at unpredictable times. Mohammed, who worked for the miller in the village, had popped out of a time warp when Pwalu was a child and had taken over a year to learn modern language and customs. No one knew how long ago he had fallen into a time warp, because the calendar had changed, possibly multiple times over the millennia. And Tekwe, one of the neighbor children that Pwalu had played with as a child, had gotten caught in a time warp when they were ten, and popped out a few minutes later as a middle-aged man.

“I suppose so,” she said. “It was very confusing. I know I’ve been pregnant for almost nine months, and I also remember not being pregnant when I left the farm this morning.”

Nine months! She could have the baby at any time. “We should let the midwife know,” he said, getting close enough to embrace her. Her big belly between them was strange and wonderful and terrifying. The thought of becoming a father within the next few days, instead of at some unknown time in the next year or two if it were possible for them to have children at all, was exhilarating. But he also worried that the time warp would have adverse effects on the baby.

“Yes, let’s do that tomorrow. I’m tired and my feet are feeling a bit swollen.”

“Come on, let’s get you inside and have a lie-down.”

Soon Qesem was lying in their bed, and Pwalu abandoned work on the farm for the last hour of remaining daylight. He cooked supper and brought it to her in bed. As the sun set, he took down the dead glowbulb from the ceiling hook and cracked another one from the bin, impaling it on the hook as it started to shed soft light.

“Tell me all about it,” he said, sitting beside her in bed with a bowl of vegetable soup in his lap. “When did you encounter the time warp? On the way to the village, or on the way home?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I remember going to the village and selling the eggs and glowbulbs and butter. I stopped at the inn and chatted with Maswen for a while – not long, maybe an hour. Then I headed back, and met you on the road near the farm.”

“You said you remember having been pregnant for the last nine months?”

“Yes, I think we must have begotten the little one last winter, when we were cooped up indoors so much because of the snow.” She gave a lascivious wink, and Pwalu’s arousal distracted him for a moment from his questions.

“But you also remember not being pregnant yet when you left the farm this morning – or at least not far along enough to notice, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes, that’s right.”

“Do you remember noticing the contradiction in your memories any time along the road?”

She took a bite of her soup and chewed thoughtfully. “I’m not sure. Yes, I think so. But I don’t remember when, just that it was somewhere near the end of the road.”

They talked it over until they finished eating and couldn’t tease out any clear memory of the time warp, if that was what it was. After a while they turned to possible names for the baby, and plans for the next few days.

“I’ll go over to Shwaki and Seilum’s house tomorrow, and ask Seilum to stay with you while I go to the village and fetch the midwife. Then we’ll see what she says.” Shwaki and Seilum were their nearest neighbors.

“That sounds good, dear. Or maybe I should go with you, and plan to stay with my cousin Fhiulem in the village, so the midwife doesn’t have far to go when I go into labor?”

“I’ll check with Fhiulem and her husband – what’s his name?”

“Tiane.”

“I’ll see if they’re amenable, while I’m there. First I want to hear the midwife’s opinion of whether you should walk that far when you’re this pregnant, or whether we should borrow a cart and ox from Dad to take you there.” They didn’t have a cart or any beast of burden, only the milk-sheep; Pwalu had always depended on his father and brother to help out in getting the harvest to market.

“All right, that makes sense.”

Pwalu took the empty bowls back to the kitchen and washed them, then returned and got into bed with Qesem. They snuggled and murmured about their plans and worries until they fell asleep.

---

The midwife, a middle-aged woman named Kumen, thought Qesem looked perfectly healthy, and indeed about ready to pop. “The baby’s heartbeat isn’t quite as fast as I would like, but that might be a lingering effect of the time warp – I don’t know much about them, just about babies. Labor takes a while, especially the first time, so if you send someone for me when it starts, I should get here in plenty of time for the birth.”

So they passed days in eager anticipation, with Qesem insisting on doing a few of her usual chores and Pwalu doing more than his share to keep her comfortable. But days passed into weeks, and Pwalu got worried again. Premature births were unfortunately common, but overly delayed ones? He’d never heard of such a thing. And neither had Kumen, when he went to see her again. For some reason, though, Qesem didn’t seem worried at all, and dismissed Pwalu’s worries.

“You’re doing the math wrong,” she said with a laugh. “It’s only been nine months, remember? It’s a good thing you’ve got me to keep the books!”

“But Kumen said you looked nine months pregnant when she saw you, and that was a month ago,” he reasoned.

“No, it can’t have been that long ago. And she might have been off by a month.”

Kumen declared herself mystified. “She doesn’t look a bit bigger than she did when I saw her last. If I was wrong about how far along she was, shouldn’t her belly be a little bigger now?”

“You’re the one who knows about pregnancy,” Pwalu protested.

“I was just thinking out loud. I don’t know what’s going on, but if it goes on much longer, you’ll need to consult a scientist.”

“After the harvest, then, if she hasn’t given birth by then.”