By early afternoon on the second day, Gareth had seemingly exhausted all the books on his shelves that he thought might relate to Qesem’s ailment. “Let’s hope the weather breaks soon,” he said. “In the meantime, you can help me finish processing the biofuel harvest. I was working on that when you came.”
“Oh! Of course, you could have mentioned that before. I would have been glad of something to do while I waited for you to consult your books.” Pwalu and Qesem only grew a small patch of biofuel plants, just enough for cooking. Extracting the oil from the fruit wasn’t that hard, but they lived on the edge of a vast forest that made gathering firewood easy, and that was more cost-effective for heating the house in winter. When he followed Gareth into another room he hadn’t been in yet, at the back of the house, he found several baskets of biofuel fruit, a large machine whose purpose he felt he could guess at, and several large barrels.
“The rest of the harvest is out back; I bring in a few baskets at a time to process. Here, I’ll show you.” Gareth opened up a hatch on the top of the machine and dumped in about half a basket’s worth into it. When he closed the hatch and threw a switch, the machine groaned and grumbled, and Pwalu wondered if it was working correctly, but then biofuel started dripping out of the spigot into the barrel placed beside it. That was much easier to use than the press at Shwaki’s farm that Pwalu and Qesem borrowed to process their biofuel, which required strong men to press down on the plate until the fruit was squeezed dry.
About ten minutes later, the groaning stopped and Gareth threw another switch, which opened a door on the side of the machine, revealing the squeezed-dry fruit, which looked much more thoroughly pressed and compacted than Pwalu had ever seen it when processing his family’s own small harvest. They cleaned it out and dumped it into an empty basket, then loaded the next batch of fruit into the press. Then Gareth sent Pwalu out to dump the dried fruit on the compost pile and bring in another basketful of fruit.
The back door opened onto a field of biofuel plants between the house and the nearest ruined buildings. Right by the back wall of the house was a wooden platform ten centimeters high and a large wooden latticework cage containing what looked like hundreds of kilograms of biofuel fruit. Finding the compost pile wasn’t as easy, but following Gareth’s directions, Pwalu soon found it, and returned to the house with a basket full of fruit.
They worked on that as long as the cloudy daylight lasted, and then ate supper by glowbulb.
The next day continued cloudy, and started out much the same, with more than half of the biofuel still to be processed, but after a couple of hours, Gareth’s taciturnity finally seemed to break, and he said, “Well, go on. I know you’ve been wanting to ask questions.”
“Uh,” Pwalu said, suddenly at a loss for words, although he had certainly had a lot of questions about how the press worked and the cooking pot that didn’t seem to take biofuel or wood or anything else, and what was that puddle of goo on the desk? But after a few moments of stammering, what he came out with was, “Is it true that in the old days, people could change their sex whenever they wanted?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them, his face burning with embarrassment, but Gareth didn’t seem to mind.
“Yeah, some people used to do that a lot. Me, I tried it once and decided it wasn’t for me. My spouse Philomena used to switch back and forth once a year, on their birthday, and I knew a person in university who would switch several times a semester.” He looked sad as he mentioned his spouse – not wife? – and Pwalu regretted what he’d said for a different reason, if it had reminded Gareth of unhappy memories.
“Then you really were around back then, like Tiequ says? Did you fall through a time warp?”
“No, we had ways of making people really long-lived, some things doctors did to you while you’re in your mother’s womb, and some they did as you were growing up. I was lucky my family could afford it; it wasn’t cheap when I was young, although toward the end it was getting affordable for the middle class. But most of the people like me were killed in the war, and everyone but me who survived the war got killed in accidents over the next eight centuries. And I was alone for a long time, but eventually your people moved into the region and settled, and I decided to stop being quite so much of a hermit and learn your language. Still not used to being around a lot of people, though.”
For the rest of the day, as Gareth ran the machine and switched out the barrels and Pwalu dumped out the dried fruit and brought in fresh ones, they talked more and more, and Pwalu learned more than he ever thought he would about the old world. And the older world before that, which had been laid low by some kind of enormous natural disaster rather than a war, and the one before that, which was as far back as Gareth’s history knowledge seemed to run. But the worry about Qesem didn’t go away, and every time he stepped outside to dump compost and get more fruit, he looked up at the clouds, hoping for a break.
Finally, when the sun set behind the unbroken clouds, they continued processing fruit until the baskets inside the house were used up, and then went to their supper. Pwalu finally found courage to ask, “About the, uh, the switching sexes. Have you ever found any of that technology that still works?”
Gareth looked at him for a moment, and Pwalu blushed and looked away again. “You want to be a woman?”
“N-not really, I mean I think it would be interesting to try out if I could, but Qesem needs me as her husband –”
“You want to be a woman, you can be a woman. I don’t know of any way you can change your body these days, although maybe I can find something in my books or library that would work with what we’ve got left, but if you want to use a woman’s name and wear women’s clothes, it’s fine with me. Do you want it bad enough to do that even if Qesem doesn’t want to be married to you anymore?”
“No!” Pwalu said, not sure if he was lying or not. He wanted it more than anything at times, but when he thought about it, did he really want it more than for Qesem to keep loving him?
“That’s all right, then.” Gareth chewed silently for a while and then changed the subject.
When Pwalu woke up the next morning and joined Gareth at breakfast, Gareth had a surprise for him.
“I found something that might help,” he said, turning the book he was looking at toward Pwalu and pointing at a drawing of a plant. It looked like some variety of bean?
“Estrogen beans,” Gareth explained. “A few centuries before I was born, before we had the tech to change our bodies back and forth so easily, people born with male bodies that wanted them to be more feminine used to use artificial estrogen. That’s a kind of substance produced by the bodies of women and female vertebrates, and if you give it to a person with a male body, they’ll grow breasts and hips and their skin will get softer. At first they extracted it from mare’s urine, and then they found ways to synthesize it, and then they developed this bean species that’s way higher in estrogen than anything that evolved naturally, as well as producing a drug that makes facial and body hair fall out. Problem is, I don’t know where any of these beans grow; people stopped cultivating them on any large scale after we invented the transformation vats. But you could keep an eye out for them and maybe find them growing wild somewhere. I’ll trace the drawing and you can take it with you for reference.”
“Thank you,” Pwalu said, unable to look Gareth in the eye. Even if he found these beans, could he bring himself to cultivate and eat them if it would mean changing in a way Qesem couldn’t understand or would hate?
After breakfast, they worked on processing the biofuel fruit. There was not much left in the bin out back, enough for maybe ten baskets; they’d be done around midday. They talked about other things and Gareth didn’t bring up the estrogen beans again.
And then, when there was only a little fruit left in the bin, the clouds broke and the sun came out. Pwalu ran back inside to tell Gareth, but he already knew, of course, from looking out the window.
“All right,” he said gruffly, “let’s leave this for the moment. I’ll go start up the computer and tell it to start looking for information on your wife’s problem, and then we’ll come back and process the last couple of baskets.”
So they went to the front room, and Pwalu watched curiously as the puddle of green goo, under the brightening sunlight from the window, slowly turned blue, and then displayed a picture of a mountain landscape. Pwalu had seen paintings of mountains in the town where he sold his cash crops. There was some kind of writing superimposed on the picture. Gareth dipped his fingers into the goo at the edge of the puddle, bringing them up with bits of the goo sticking to them, and then waved his hands around over the puddle, somehow causing the picture to vanish and be replaced by white writing on a black background, as though the puddle had turned into a page of a large book, but in reverse. As Gareth made gestures, the text on the puddle changed again and again, and then, seeming satisfied, Gareth flicked the goo off his fingers into the puddle, where it made momentary ripples in the text that soon smoothed out.
“All right, let’s go process the last fruit while we wait.”
Soon Pwalu brought in the last basket of fruit from the bin, and it didn’t take long to process the baskets that were already in the house. When they returned to the front room, Gareth sat down at the table and read the puddle for a few moments before dipping his fingers in the goo and making gestures again. As the text on the puddle changed again and again, he started to frown, and shook his head.
“Oh, no. Oh, this isn’t good.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Pwalu demanded. “Have you figured it out?”
“Stay here and don’t mess with anything,” Gareth said. “I’m going to go upstairs to my lab and try to synthesize this drug. If it’s not too late, it will help your wife. How long did you say it’s been since this happened to her?”
“Almost three months,” Pwalu said in a hoarse whisper. “Is it too late? What’s wrong? Is the baby going to live?”
“Let’s hope,” Gareth said grimly, and got up and headed for the stairs, leaving Pwalu alone to worry. And try to hope, as Gareth had suggested.
Hours later, as the sun was getting low on the horizon and Pwalu was starting to think about supper, and whether he should interrupt Gareth to ask him how to operate the apparatus in the kitchen, Gareth came down carrying a couple of large jars of some whitish powder. “I mixed up some extra, in case of the worst,” he said. “I’ll have to gather more chemicals to make more than this.”
“What’s going on? You didn’t explain before.”
“I’ll explain on the way. Let’s grab some food that doesn’t need cooking and get going, we can’t lose any time.”
Within minutes, they were walking fast back along the route that Tiequ had made Pwalu memorize. If they were going to go through the woods at night, it must be really urgent. "Back two civilizations before mine – so at least seven thousand three hundred years ago – there were two nations at war. And as nations at war will do, they made bioweapons and deployed them against each other. Some were designed to kill, others to demoralize, or tie up the enemy’s resources taking care of sick or disabled people, or every other cruelty either side could imagine.
“One of the weapons one side made was designed to hit the enemy in their birth rate and their morale. They created little creatures that would lurk stealthily until they saw a chance to attack a woman, and then they’d crawl up her cooch and into her womb and make her look pregnant. And then they’d put out little tendrils through her nervous system into her brain, and make her think she was pregnant, that she’d gotten pregnant naturally.”
Pwalu gave a sob. “And your medicine can force it out of her? Will it hurt her on the way out?”
“The book I found said this drug should work, in most cases. The problem is that after the creature’s been in someone’s womb about three months, give or take a week, it spawns. It makes the woman give birth to more of the creatures, and they go looking for more women. One reference I found in another book said some of them had mutated to attack men as well, but it didn’t give details – I don’t know how it latches onto them. Through the anus into the abdominal cavity, if I had to guess. I hope we’re not dealing with those… I hope the one in your wife hasn’t spawned. We’ll see.”
Pwalu’s mind was reeling. He quickened his pace.
"So these creatures infested about forty percent of the target nation’s women, at their peak, and spread to neighboring countries that weren’t involved in the war – yet. They got involved after that. The affected countries tried a lot of things to get the parasites out of their women; the only thing that sort of worked was C-section, surgery to remove the parasite, but that tended to cause damage to the womb and left the brain tendrils in place so the woman kept thinking she was pregnant even with a flat belly. Finally they came up with this drug that forced the creature to withdraw its tendrils and come out, and over the next hundred or so years they managed to wipe out all the parasites, stopping one outbreak after another after they thought they’d gotten rid of them all.
“As far as I can tell, this is the first infestation anybody’s seen in over seven thousand years. So I’m guessing one of the creatures fell through a time warp during those hundred years when the allies were working on wiping them out, and came out somewhere along your wife’s route home from the village.”
“The time warps were already around back then? How old are they, anyway?”
“Nobody knows, but physicists in my day were pretty sure they weren’t natural, so they were probably created by one of the older civilizations we don’t have good records of. The oldest surviving records don’t mention them, but whether that’s because records from that time are so sparse or because they didn’t exist yet is hard to say.”
The sun was setting as they reached the edge of the city and entered the forest. They cracked a couple of glowbulbs and kept going, reaching the farms at the edge of settled territory not long before midnight. Pwalu was exhausted, but he knew he had to keep going. He put one foot in front of the other, again and again, and found himself stumbling.
“We’ve got to stop here,” Gareth said, also clearly exhausted. “I know the people at this farm; they don’t like me, but they respect me. They’ll give us a place on the floor and some blankets.”
Oh no!!!
Oh jeez that's messed up