VERSION 0.5 dtd 032500

Mrs. Dorman raises Akita dogs, looks after her husband and
small daughter, and writes fiction very well andsince all of
the capable female writers of science fiction can be counted
on one truncated hand, hers is a welcome addition to their
ranks. She brings us here a sense of strangeness, more than a
hint of human warmth, as well as a good strong whiff of alien
chillness.

WHEN I WAS MISS DOW

Sonya Dorman
These hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living
in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live
in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others
plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps
realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous
beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean, also,
being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain.
lobe, we live in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid
chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other
games like most living creatures.
Eventually, we're all dumped into the cell banks and
reproduced once more.
After the explorers comes the colony of miners and scien-
tists. The warden and some of the other elders put on faces to
greet them, agreeing to help with the mining of some ores,
even giving them a koota or two as they become interested in
our racing dogs. They set up their places of life, pop up their
machines, bang-bang, chug-chug; we put on our faces, forms,
smiles and costumes; I am old enough to learn to change my
shape, too.
The Warden says to me, "It's about time you made a
change, yourself. Some of your friends are already working
for these people, bringing home credits and sulfas."
My Uncle (by the Warden's fourth conjunction) made
himself over at the start, being one of the first to realize how
it could profit us.
I protest to the Warden, "I'm educated and trained as a
scholar. You always say I must remain deep in my mathemat-
ics and other studies."
My Uncle says, "You have to do it. There's only one way
for us to get along with them," and he runs his fingers
through his long blonde hair. My Uncle's not an educated
person, but highly placed, politically, and while Captain Dow
is around my Uncle retains this particular shape. The Captain
is shipping out soon, then Uncle will find some other features,
because he's already warned that it's unseemly for him to be
chasing around in the face of a girl after the half-bearded
boys from the space ships. I don't want to do this myself,
wasting so much time, when the fourteen decimals even now
are clicking on my mirrors.
The Warden says, "We have a pattern from a female
botanist, she ought to do for you. But before we put you into
the pattern tank, you'll have to approximate another brain
lobe. They have two."
"I know," I say, sulkily. A botanist. A she!
"Into the tank," the Warden says to me without mercy, and
I am his to use as he believes proper.
I spend four days in the tank absorbing the female Terran
pattern. When I'm released, the Warden tells me, "Your job is
waiting for you. We went to a lot of trouble to arrange it." He
sounds brusque, but perhaps this is because he hasn't con-
joined for a long time. The responsibilities of being Warden
of Mines and Seeds come first, long before any social engage-
ment.
I run my fingers through my brunette curls, and notice my
Uncle is looking critically at me. "Haven't you made yourself
rather old?" he asks.
"Oh, he's all right," the Warden says. "Thirty-three isn't
badly matched to the Doctor, as I understand it."
Dr. Arnold Proctor, the colony's head biologist, is busy
making radiograph pictures (with his primitive X-rays) of
skeletal structures: murger birds, rodents, and our pets and
racers, the kootasdogs to the Terrans, who are fascinated
by them. We breed them primarily for speed and stamina, but
some of them carry a gene for an inherited structural defect
which cripples them and they have to be destroyed before
they are full grown. The Doctor is making a special study of
kootas.
He gets up from his chair when I enter his office. "I'm Miss
Dow, your new assistant," I say, hoping my long fingernails
will stand up to the pressure of punch keys on the computer,
since I haven't had much practise in retaining foreign shapes.
I'm still in uncertain balance between myself and Martha
Dow, who is also myself. But one does not have two lobes for
nothing, I discover.
"Good morning. I'm glad you're here," the Doctor says.
He is a nice, pink man, with silver hair, soft-spoken,
intelligent. I'm pleased, as we work along, to find he doesn't
joke and wisecrack like so many of the Terrans, though I am
sometimes whimsical. I like music and banquets as well as my
studies.
Though absorbed in his work. Dr. Proctor isn't rude to
interrupters. A man of unusual balance, coming as he does
from a culture which sends out scientific parties that are
ninety per cent of one sex, when their species provides them
with two. At first meetings he is dedicated but agreeable, and
I'm charmed.
"Dr. Proctor," I ask him one morning. "Is it possible for
you to radiograph my koota? She's very fine, from the fastest
stock available, and I'd like to breed her."
"Yes, yes, of course," he promises with his quick, often
absent, smile. "By all means. You wish to breed only the
best." It's typical of him to assume we're all as dedicated as
he.
My Uncle's not pleased. "There's nothing wrong with your
koota," he says. "What do you want to X-ray her for?
Suppose he finds something is wrong? You'll be afraid to race
or breed her, and she won't be replaced. Besides, your interest
in her may make him suspicious."
"Suspicious of what?" I ask, but my Uncle won't say, so I
ask him, "Suppose she's bred and her pups are cripples?"
The Warden says, "You're supposed to have your mind on
your work, not on racing. The koota was just to amuse you
when you were younger,"
I lean down and stroke her head, which is beautiful, and
she breathes a deep and gentle breath in response.
"Oh, let him go," my Uncle says wearily. He's getting
disgusted because they didn't intend for me to bury myself in
a laboratory or a computer room, without making more
important contacts. But a scholar is born with a certain
temperament, and has an introspective nature, and as I'm
destined to eventually replace the Warden, naturally I prefer
the life of the mind.
"I must say," my Uncle remarks, "you look the image of a
Terran female. Is the work interesting?"
"Oh, yes, fascinating," I reply, and he snorts at my lie,
since we both know it's dull and routine, and most of the time
is spent working out the connections between my two brain
lobes, which still present me with some difficulty.
My koota bitch is subjected to a pelvic radiograph. After-
wards, I stand on my heels in the small, darkened cubicle,
looking at the film on the viewing screen. There he stands,
too, with his cheekbones emerald in the peculiar light, and his
hair, which is silver in daylight, looks phosphorescent. I resist
this. I am resisting this Doctor with the X-ray eyes who can
examine my marrow with ease. He sees Martha's marrow,
every perfect corpuscle of it.
You can't imagine how comforting it is to be so transpar-
ent. There's no need to pretend, adjust, advance, retreat or
discuss the oddities of my planet. We are looking at the X-ray
film of my prized racer and companion to determine the
soundness of her hip joints, yet I suspect the Doctor, platinum-
green and tall as a tower, is piercing my reality with his
educated gaze. He can see the blood flushing my surfaces. I
don't need to do a thing but stand up straight so the crease of
fat at my waist won't distort my belly button, the center of it
all.
"You see?" he says.
I do see, looking at the film in the darkness where perfec-
tion or disaster may be viewed, and I'm twined in the paradox
which confronts me here. The darker the room, the brighter
the screen and the clearer the picture. Less light! and the truth
becomes more evident. Either the koota is properly jointed
and may be bred without danger of passing the gene on to her
young, or 'she is not properly jointed, and cannot be used.
Less light, more truth! And the Doctor -is green sculpturea
little darker and he would be a bronzebut his natural color
is pink alabaster.
"You see," the Doctor says, and I do try to see. He points
his wax pencil at one hip joint on the film, and says, "A
certain amount of osteo-arthritic build-up is already evident.
The cranial rim is wearing down, she may go lame. She'll
certainly pass the defect on to some of her pups, if she's
bred."
This Koota has been my playmate and friend for a long,
time. She retains a single form, that of koota, full of love and
beautiful speed; she has been a source of pleasure and pride.
Dr. Proctor, of the pewter hair, will discuss the anatomical
defects of the koota in a gentle and cultivated voice. I am
disturbed. There shouldn't be any need to explain the truth,
which is evident. Yet it seems that to comprehend the
exposures, I require a special education. It's said that the
more you have seen, the quicker you are to sort the eternal
verities into one pile and the dismal illusions into another.
How is it that sometimes the Doctor wears a head which
resembles that of a koota, with a splendid muzzle and noble
brow?
Suddenly he gives a little laugh and points the end of the
wax pencil at my navel, announcing: "There. There, it is
essential that the belly button be attached, or you'll bear no
children." Thoughts of offspring had occurred to me. But
weren't we discussing my racer? The radiograph film is still
clipped to the view screen, and upon it, spread-eagled, ap-
pears the bony Rorschach of my koota bitch, her hip joints
expressing doom.
I wish the Doctor would put on the daylight. I come to the
conclusion that there's a limit to how much truth I can
examine, and the more I submit to the conditions necessary
for examining it, the more unhappy I become.
Dr. Proctor is a man of such perfect integrity that he
continues to talk about bones and muscles until I'm ready to
scream for mercy. He has done something that is unusual and
probably prohibited, but he's not aware of it. I mean it must
be prohibited in his culture, where it seems they play on each
other, but not with each other. I am uneasy, fluctuating.
He snaps two switches. Out goes the film and on goes the
sun, making my eyes stream with sensitive and grateful tears,
altfeoHgbhe's so adjusted to these contrasts he doesn't so
much as blink. Floating in the sunshine I've become opaque.
He can't see anything but my surface tensions, and I wonder
what he does in his spare time. A part of me seems to tilt, or
slide.
"There, there, oh dear. Miss Dow," he says, patting my
back, rubbing my shoulder blades. His forearms and fingers
extend gingerly. "You do want to breed only the best, don't
you?" he asks. I begin within me a compulsive ritual of
counting the elements; it's all I can do to keep communica-
tions  open  between  my brain  lobes.  I'm  suffering  from
eclipses: one goes dark, the other lights up, that one goes
dark, the other goes nova.
"There, there," the Doctor says, distressed because I'm
quivering and trying to keep the connections open; I have
never felt clogged before. They may have to put me back into
the pattern tank.
Profoundly disturbed, I lift my face, and he gives me a kiss.
Then I'm all right, balanced again, one lobe composing a
concerto for virtix flute, the other one projecting, "Oh Arnie,
oh Arnie." Yes, I'm okay for the shape I'm in. He's marking
my joints with his wax pencil (the marks of which can be
easily erased from the film surface) and he's mumbling, "It's
essential, oh yes, it's essential."
Finally he says, "I guess all of us colonists are lonely here,"
and I say, "Oh yes, aren't we," before I realize the enormity
of the Warden's manipulations, and what a lot I have to learn.
Evidently the Warden triple-carded me through the Colony
Punch Center as a Terran. I lie and say, "Oh, yes. Yes, yes.
Oh, Arnie, put out the light," for we may find some more
truth.
"Not here," Arnie says, and of course he's right. This is a
room for study, for cataloguing obvious facts, not a place for
carnival. There are not many places for it, I discover with
.surprise. Having lived in glass all my life I expect everyone
'  'else to be as comfortable there as I am but this isn't so.
Just the same we find his quarters, after dark, to be
comfortable and free of embarrassment. You wouldn't think a
dedicated man of his age would be so vigorous, but I find out
he spends his weekends at the recreation center hitting a ball
with his hand. The ball bounces back off a wall and he hits it
and hits it. Though he's given that up now because we're
together on weekends.
"You're more than an old bachelor like me deserves," he
tells me.
"Why are you an old bachelor?" I ask him. I do wonder
why, if it's something not to be.
He tries to explain it to me. "I'm not a young man. I
wouldn't make a good husband, I'm afraid. I like to work
late, to be undisturbed.  In  my leisure time,  I like  to make
wood carvings. Sometimes I go to bed with the sun and
sometimes I'm up working all night. And then children. No.
I'm lucky to be an old bachelor," he says.
Arnie carves kaku wood, which has a brilliant grain and is
soft enough to permit easy carving. He's working on a figure
of a murger bird, whittling lengthwise down the wood so the
grain, wavy, full of flowing, wedge-shaped lines, will represent
the feathers. The lamp light shines on his hair and the crinkle
of his eyelids as he looks down and carves, whittles, turns.
He's absorbed in what he doesn't see there but he's projecting
what he wants to see. It's the reverse of what he must do in
the viewing room. I began to suffer a peculiar pain, located in
the nerve cluster between my lungs. He's not talking to me.
He's not caressing me. He's forgotten I'm here, and like a
false projection,  I'm beginning to  fade.  In  another hour
perhaps the film will become blank. If he doesn't see me, then
am I here?
He's doing just what I do when absorbed in one of my own
projects, and I admire the intensity with which he works: it's
magnificent. Yes, I'm jealous of it. I burn with rage and
jealousy. He has abandoned me to be Martha and I wish I
were myself again, free in shape and single in mind. Not this
sack of mud clinging to another. Yet he's teaching me that it's
good to cling to another. I'm exhausted from strange disci-
plines. Perhaps he's tired, too; I see that sometimes he kneads
the muscles of his stomach with his hands, and closes his eyes.
The Warden sits me down on one of my rare evenings
home, and talks angrily. "You're making a mistake," he says.
"If the Doctor finds out what you are, you'll lose your job
with the colony. Besides, we never supposed you'd have a
liaison with only one man. You were supposed to start with
the Doctor, and go on from there. We need every credit you
can bring in. And by the way, you haven't done well on that
score lately. Is he stingy?"
"Of course he isn't."
"But aH you bring home in credits is your pay."
I can think of no reply. It's true the Warden has a right to
use me in whatever capacity would serve us all best, as I will
use others when I'm a Warden, but he and my Uncle spend
half the credits from my job on sulfadiazole, to which they've
become addicted.
"You've no sense of responsibility," the Warden says.
Perhaps he's coming close to time for conjunction again, and
this makes him more concerned about my stability.
My Uncle says, "Oh, he's young, leave him alone. As long
as he turns over most of those pay credits to us. Though what
he uses the remainder for, I'll never know."
I use it for clothes at the Colony Exchange. Sometimes
Arnie takes me out for an evening, usually to the Laugh Tree
Bar, where the space crews, too, like to relax. "The bar is the
place to find joy babies; young, pretty, planet-born girls who
work at the Colony Punch Center during the day, and spend
their evenings here competing for the attention of the officers.
Sitting  here  with  Arnie,  I  can't  distinguish  a  colonist's
daughter from one of my friends or relatives. They wouldn't
know me, either.
Once, at home, I try to talk with a few of these friends
about my feelings. But I discover that whatever female
patterns they've borrowed are superficial ones; none of them
bother to grow an extra lobe, but merely tuck the Terran
pattern into a corner of their own for handy reference. They
are most of them on sulfas. Hard and shiny toys, they skip
like pebbles over the surface of the colonists' lives.
Then they go home, revert to their own free forms, and
enjoy their mathematics, colors, compositions, and seedings.
"Why me?" I demand of the Warden. "Why two lobes?
Why me?"
"We felt you'd be more efficient," he answers. "And while
you're here, which you seldom are these days, you'd better
revert to other shapes. Your particles may be damaged if you
hold that woman form too long."
Oh, but you don't know, I want to tell him. You don't
know I'll hold it forever. If I'm damaged or dead, you'll put
me into the cell banks, and you'll be amazed, astonished,
terrified, to discover that I come out complete, all Martha. I
can't be changed.
"You little lump of protagon," my Uncle mumbles bitterly.
"You'll neyer amount to anything, you'll never be a Warden.
Have you done any of your own work recently?"
I say, "Yes, I've done some crystal divisions, and re-grown
them in non-established patterns." My Uncle is in a bad
mood, as 'he's kicking sulfa and his nerve tissue is addled. I'm
wise to speak quietly to him, but he still grumbles.
"I can't understand why you like being a two-lobed pack of
giggles. I couldn't wait to get out of it. And you were so dead
against it to begin with."
"Well, I have learned," I start to say, but can't explain what
it is I'm still learning, and close my eyes. Part of it is that on
the line between the darkness and the brightness it's easiest to
float.  I've never  wanted  to  practise  only  easy things.  My
balance is damaged. I never had to balance. It's not a term or
concept that I understand even now, at home, in free form.
Some impress of Martha's pattern lies on my own brain cells.
I suspect it's permanent damage, which gives me joy. That's
what I mean about not understanding it. I am taught to strive
for perfection. How can I be pleased with this, which may be
a catastrophe?
Arnie carves on a breadth of kaku wood, bringing out to
the surface a seascape. Knots become clots of spray, a flaw
becomes wind-blown spume. I want to be Martha. I'd like to
go to the Laugh Tree with Arnie, for a good time, I'd like to
learn to play cards with him.
You see what happens: Arnie is, in his way, like my
original self, and I hate that part of him, since I've given it up
to be Martha. Martha makes him happy, she is chocolate to
his appetite, pillow for his weariness.
I turn for company to my koota. She's the color of
morning, her chest juts out like an axe blade, her ribs spring
up and back like wings, her eyes are large and clear as she
returns my gaze. Yet she's beyond hope; in a little time, she'll
be lame; she cannot race any more, she must not mother a
litter. I turn to her and she gazes back into my eyes, dreaming
of speed and wind on the sandy beaches where she has run.
"Why don't you read some tapes?" Arnie suggests to me,
because I'm restless and I disturb him. The koota lies at my
feet. I read tapes. Every evening in his quarters Arnie carves,
I read tapes, the broken racer lies at my feet. I pass through
Terran history this way. When the clown tumbles into the tub,
I laugh. Terran history is full of clowns and tubs; at first it
seeeas that's all there is, but yon learn to see beneath the
comic costumes.
While I float on the taut line, the horizon between light and
dark, where it's so easy, I begin to sense what is under the
costumes: staggering down the street dead drunk on a sunny
afternoon with everyone laughing at you; hiding under the
veranda because you made blood come out of Pa's face;
kicking a man when he's in the gutter because you've been
kicked and have to pass it on. Tragedy is what one of the
Terrans called being a poet in the body of a cockroach.
"Have you heard the rumor?" Arnie asks, putting down the
whittling tool. "Have you heard that some of the personnel in
Punch Center aren't really humans?"
"Not really?" I ask, putting away the tape. We have no
tragedy. In my species, family relationships are based only on
related gene patterns; they are finally dumped into the family
bank and a new relative is created from the old. It's one form
of ancient history multiplying itself, but it isn't tragic. The
koota, her utility destroyed by a recessive gene, lies sleeping at
my feet. Is this tragedy? But she is a single form, she can't
regenerate a lost limb, or exfoliate brain tissue. She can only
return my gaze with her steadfast and affectionate one.
"What are they, then?" I ask Arnie. "If they're not hu-
man?"
"The story is that the local life forms aren't as we really see
them. They've put on faces, like ours, to deal with us. And
some of them have filtered into personnel."
Filtered! As if I were a virus.
"But they must be harmless," I say. "No harm has come to
anyone."
"We don't know that for a fact," Arnie replies.
"You look tired," I say, and he comes to me, to be soothed,
to be loved in his flesh, his single form, his search for the
truth in the darkness of the viewing cubicle. At present he's
doing studies of murger birds. Their spinal cavities are large,
air-filled ovals, and their bone is extremely porous,  which
permits them to soar to great heights.
The koota no longer races on the wind-blown beaches; she
lies at our feet, looking into the distance. The wall must be
transparent to her eyes, I feel that beyond it she sees clearly
how the racers go, down the long, bright curve of sand in the
morning sun. She sighs, and lays her head down on her
narrow, delicate paws. I look into the distance too: bright
beaches and Amie, carrying me from his ship. But he will not
carry me again.
Arnie says. "I seem to be tired all the time." He puts his
head on my breast. "I don't think the food's agreeing with me,
lately."
"Do you suffer pains?" I ask him, curiously.
"Suffer," he mutters. "What kind of nonsense is that, with
analgesics. No I don't suffer. I just don't feel well."
He's absorbed in murger birds, kaku wood, he descends into
the bottom of the darks and rises up like a rocket across the
horizon into the thin clarity above, while I float. I no
longer dare to breathe. I'm afraid of disturbing everything. I
do not want anything. His head lies gently on my breast and I
will not disturb him.
"Oh. My God," Arnie says, and I know what it's come to,
even before he begins to choke, and his muscles leap although
I hold him in my arms. I know his heart is choking on
massive doses of blood; the brilliance fades from his eyes and
they begin to go dark while I tightly hold him. If he doesn't
see me as he dies, will I be here?
I can feel, under my fingers, how rapidly his skin cools. I
must put him down, here with his carvings and his papers,
and I must go home. But I lift Arnie in my arms, and call the
koota, who gets up rather stiffly. It's long after dark, and I
carry him slowly, carefully, home to what he called a crystal
palace, where the Warden and my Uncle are teaching each
other to play chess with a set some space captain gave them in
exchange for seed crystals. They sit in a bloom of light,
sparkling, their old brains bent over the chessmen,  as I
breathe open the door and carry Arnie in.
First, my Uncle gives me just a glance, but then another
glance, and a hard stare. "Is that the Doctor?" he asks.
I put Arnie down and hold one of his cold hands. "War-
den," I say, on my knees, on eye level with the chessboard
and its carved men. "Warden, can you put him in one of the
banks?"
The Warden turns to look at me, as hard as my Uncle.
"You've become deranged, trying to maintain two lobes," he
says. "You cannot reconstitute or recreate a Terran by our
methods, and you must know it."
"Over the edge, over the edge," my Uncle says, now a
blond, six-foot, hearty male Terran, often at the Laugh Tree
with one of the joy babies. He enjoys life, his own or someone
else's. I have, too, I suppose. Am I fading? I am, really, just
one of Arnie's projections, a form on a screen in his mind. I
am not, really, Martha. Though I tried.
"We can't have him here," the Warden says. "You better
get him out of here. You couldn't explain a corpse like that to
the colonists, if they come looking for him. They'll think we
did something to him. It's nearly time for my next conjunc-
tion, do you want your nephew to arrive in disgrace? The
Uncles will drain his bank."
The Warden gets up and comes over to me. He takes hold
of my dark curls and pulls me to my feet. It hurts my physical
me, which is Martha. God knows Arnie, I'm Martha, it seems
to me. "Take him back to his quarters," the Warden says to
me. "And come back here immediately. I'll try to see you
back to your own pattern, but it may be too late. In part, I
blame myself. If you must know. So I will try."
Yes, yes, I want to say to him; as I was, dedicated, free;
turn me back into myself, I never wanted to be anyone else,
and now I don't know if I am anyone at all. The light's gone
from his eyes and he doesn't see me, or see anything, does he?
I pick him up and breathe the door out, and go back
through the night to his quarters, where the lamp still burns.
I'm going to leave him here, where he belongs. Before I go, I
pick up the small carving of the murger bird, and take it with
me, home to my glass bridge where at the edge of the mirrors
the decimals are still clicking perfectly, clicking out known
facts; an octagon can be reduced, the planet turns at such a
degree on its axis, to see the truth you must have light of
some sort, but to see the light you must have darkness of
some sort. I can no longer float on the horizon between the
two because that horizon has disappeared. I've learned to
descend, and to rise, and descend again.
I'm able to revert without help to my own free form, to
re-absorb the extra brain tissue. The sun comes up and it's
bright. The night comes down and it's dark. I'm becoming
somber, and a brilliant student. Even my Uncle says I'll be a
good Warden when the time comes.
The Warden goes to conjunction; from the cell banks a
nephew is lifted out. The koota lies dreaming of races she has
run in the wind. It is our life, and it goes on, like the life of
other creatures.