Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [51]
She considered what he knew. Universal code, yes—he'd learned that in order to help signal the supply ships in foul weather. If she could manage to regulate her grunting, and if he got the idea, and if he was mentally capable of understanding it, then it might suffice.
A lot of ifs.
She nudged him with her snout and he snorted, more in curiosity than annoyance. Time to begin.
She tried a simple phrase—"We are free"—to see if she could get something across. It was slow going, and she did it endlessly, hoping he'd catch the repetitive pattern.
Several minutes of this passed, and he seemed confused. She was afraid he hadn't gotten it when suddenly his ears twitched.
In truth, Joshi had received far less of a shock than she and so had recovered earlier. He simply did not have her drive or ambition. Now, though, he caught a word after first realizing that she was trying to talk to him. The group for "we" was brief and basic. He picked it up, repeating her grunt-pulses aloud. She became excited, tried it faster, and he followed again, excited himself now.
Now she stopped, and he did, too, a moment later. It was his turn.
"We are pigs," he grunted.
Breakthrough! She would have hugged and kissed him if she could.
"We will go on," she said to him.
He groaned in a more universal code. "What can we do now?" he asked her. "We are pigs."
"Chang pigs," she retorted. "We think. We know. We are still we. If we stay free, we can still make it."
He seemed resigned.
They worked out a short series of sounds for important concepts and practiced them until both had them down. The messages were basic, a few grunts and squeals, but they could signal "stop," "go," "run," "danger," and other basics whenever time would not permit the length of a conversation. A sentence could take close to a minute.
Eventually, Joshi signaled, "I'm hungry."
She sympathized. They were always hungry. But they had reason, and reason said they would wait until eating was less risky. He accepted her logic and decided to sleep instead.
Mavra Chang couldn't, though, not right away. Watching Joshi, thinking the way he was thinking, and knowing her own feelings she realized that there was a split here, a dichotomy that craved resolution in her mind.
Joshi looked normal. She felt hunger as a pig would, felt all of the things a pig would feel. In a way, she realized, this latest transformation had snapped the last bands connecting her to humanity. These past decades she'd clung to her humanity; she had still been human, just a different and unique variety that in an odd way had pleased her. She no longer felt that. For a while she wondered if her new attitude was part of what they had done to her. She doubted it; it wasn't like being hypnoed to accept her new life as a being on all fours. No, it was something else, yet something familiar. Rather, it was like that change when she had stopped thinking of how she would one day regain humanity and had accepted herself as she was, when she stopped thinking as a human woman and started thinking as a Chang female. Once again, her mind was split and she was trying to reconcile the opposing halves. She did not fight it, she let it happen this time.
Pig—all the elements that made up the animal to which she was now akin—struggled with human personality and point of view. What, after all, did she owe humans? What had they done for her? Even in the old days, as one of them, she'd been apart, different, an odd element that felt itself somehow superior to, alien to the "normal" people around her. They hadn't done much for her, only a lot to her. In turn, she had used them, as one would use a tool in completing a task. She had been among them but not of them, always, for as long as she could remember. They had made her an animal; very well. She would be one. A pig or whatever this was. A very smart pig, to be sure, but a pig just the same.
The competing elements inside her mind stopped their warfare. A pig she was and would always be, and it was all right.
* * *
Dusk found them both feeling as if they