The Far Shore of Time

I think I was a big frustration to Pirraghiz. She deserved better. She was my maid, valet, cook, and washerwoman and all-day-long companion. Life with her around was like living in a five-star luxury hotel, with my personal Jeeves to care for all my needs. If she had a life of her own, she didn’t let it interfere with her total attendance on me. She washed and mended my ragged clothes. She tended my chamber pot, whisking it away to be sterilized and cleaned before I had to use it again. She fed me about as well as I had ever been fed in my life-found new ways to improve the preserved swill from Starlab and added to it actual fresh vegetables, salads, soups, little cakes dripping with something like fruit-flavored honey. There was even milk. It didn’t come from an actual cow, of course, because there weren’t any of those within many light-years, but it was a sweetish, butterscotch-colored fluid that came, Pirraghiz said, from the females of one of the other captive species.

That startled me. “Don’t they object when you take their milk away from them?”

She wagged her great head reprovingly. “Don’t be foolish, Dannerman. It is not ‘taken.’ It is bartered. They give us things we do not have, and we give them things of ours in return. These females are well repaid for what they have in plenty to spare.”

I looked again at what was in my cup. But it still tasted good, and while I was checking it out Pirraghiz saw an opportunity. “I am glad that you are taking an interest in this, Dannerman. Would you like to know more about the other captive species?”

I considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Why not?” I said, meaning, since I was going to be stuck here for the rest of my life, why not find out what that life was going to be like?

Pirraghiz beamed. “That is good, Dannerman. I thought you might feel so, and so I have prepared something for you. Wait one moment.” She disappeared into her own room, and when she came back she was carrying the familiar helmet.

It wasn’t what I had expected. I protested, “I’ve already seen all I need to see of what’s happening back home.”

“Oh, Dannerman,” she sighed. “Do you think it was only your people who were bugged? That is not so. Sentient beings of many, many different species have worn the transmitters, species you have never seen, of kinds you cannot imagine, including some of those who shared captivity with you. I could not find all of those in the records,” she said apologetically, “but I have selected a single individual from eight different species. Some of the species are here, some are not. Later on I can add others if you wish.”

She waited for me to make up my mind. I hefted the helmet for a moment, indecisively. Curiosity won. Gingerly I put it on and pulled down the flaps. I heard Pirraghiz’s voice giving last-minute instructions-“Simply say ‘next’ when you want to go to another subject, Dannerman, and I will make the change for you.” And then the helmet took over.

I was no longer myself. I wasn’t in my chamber in the Horch nest.

I was surrounded by total blackness. There was nothing to be seen, smelled or felt, except that there before me, not two meters away, was an image of a creature that looked like a frog with the mouth of an alligator. Its skin was as fuzzy as a peach, and more or less the same color. On one bony arm it wore a thing like a wristwatch, but that was glowing with a pale blue light, and there were three golden bracelets on the other. It was dressed in tunic and leggings of a shimmery, silky material. It had four large ears on each side of its elongated head, and a cluster of bright pink feathers topping it off-probably a hat or a decoration, I thought, since the feathers didn’t seem to be growing out of the creature’s skull.

It wasn’t moving at all. I figured that out easily enough; what I was looking at was just a picture, showing me what the first species Pirraghiz had selected for my viewing pleasure looked like; and in a moment the blackness winked away.

Now I wasn’t looking at the creature anymore. Now I was that creature. What I was looking at-and smelling and hearing and feeling-was a warm, sunny seaside. Gentle ocean waves were breaking on a pebbly beach, where two or three ungainly-looking catamarans were drawn up. I was sitting-squatting, actually-on the side of another catamaran, eating something that crunched in my jaws and tasted richly of blood. I was not alone. There were two other alligator-frogs just below me on the beach, doing something or other with large nets-repairing them, I supposed. I was looking particularly at one of them, and it was giving me occasional sidelong glances in return. I was conscious of a kind of warm stirring that felt like sexual tension as I looked at-I guess, at her. Unless, of course, that one was male and the body I was inhabiting was female, but I could think of no good way of checking that.