Identity Matrix (1982) (6 page)

Still, now we roared onto the dock, turned, and moved slowly towards, then into the great ship. Once inside its massive car deck, the truck went through a series of slow maneuvers, backing up and then going forward, then repeating, again and again, until it was in its proper position and lane. Quickly and professionally the driver jumped out, disconnected the air brakes and lowered the hydraulic coupler, then sped out to pick up the next.

There were people all about in the deck area, both passengers and crew, but I wasn't about to wait to be discovered. I got cautiously down, wincing slightly as I discovered that my knee had been badly skinned, then using the trailer as a shield, looked cautiously around. It was obvious that I would have to cross some open deck to get to the stairway up, but I really wasn't concerned. The purser would still be out on the dock—and only he would know or be likely to remember who came aboard. I decided that the best defense was simply to walk over as if I belonged there legally and naturally and hope I made it. After some hesitancy, I took a deep breath and went for the hatch marked "To Passenger Decks" trying to look as if I belonged.

Whether or not I seemed out of the ordinary, nobody gave me a second glance, and the hardest thing I had to do was bear the burning pain as I walked up those interminable stairs, then pushed back the sliding doors at the top, and walked onto the deck of the ferry. The door hadn't been easy—the latch was very high and I'd had to stand on tip-toe to get at it, then push the door back with all my might. I was reminded once again of my new physical situation.

I walked down the corridor, past closed stateroom doors, heading towards the rear of the ship where I could figure out where everything was. I reached the end of the corridor and found a diagram of the ship, a sort of "you are here"

thing, and again had to strain, as it was fully eighteen inches higher on the wall than the top of my head.

Nerves suddenly started to get the better of me, and I realized now that this was going to be something new, something I hadn't given any thought to until now. I'd made it—but that fact gave me little comfort. Everything I had done up to this point was borne of necessity and desperation, but now I was re-entering society as someone totally different, someone I didn't even know. I was a small, prepubescent Indian girl now to everyone else, and I knew that I would have to
be
that person, act like her, react like her, to be both accepted and incon-spicuous.

I'd ridden the ferry on the way up from Seattle to Juneau, but somehow the ship seemed to have doubled in both size and scale, even though this was a smaller ship. Everything, I was discovering, looked larger than life. Nowhere was this brought home more forcefully to me than when I met my first human beings close up. How much we forget of what it's like to be a child in an adult's world!

How gigantic the ordinary-sized adults look from four feet or less and perhaps sixty plus pounds.

Aft a bit I saw two illuminated plastic signs that said MEN and MEN'S

SHOWERS, and I almost went in until I realized that those signs, which I'd been so condi-tioned to look for, were now the wrong ones for me. I walked back up, crossed through an intersecting corri-dor to the other side of the ship, and went into the women's john.

Although hardly a baby, I was so tiny and thin that I almost slipped into the toilet, and my legs barely touched the floor. Still, the relief was the same—or more so, since there seemed even more pressure now.

I had some problem with the latch to the shower—too high again—but managed to get in and close the door. A dressing room and two stalls. I looked around and found a tiny bit of somebody's leftover soap. Not much, but it would have to do. I undressed and, using the dressing room mirror, looked at my new self for the first time. How thin, frail, almost fragile I looked, with ribs you could count and a waist almost impossibly small. My reddish-brown complexion did a lot to hide the many bruises I had, but the aid was only cosmetic—they told me now constantly that they were there. The scrape from falling from the truck looked and felt nasty, but I'd had worse and it'd stopped bleeding.

It took several tries before I got a good hold on the water handles, but the shower felt good and the soap helped loosen the grime, wilderness pee, blood and whatever else had accumulated, and I felt my new body tingle with the warmth and the spray. I had no shampoo, but my long hair was already wet because I couldn't reach up far enough to adjust the shower nozzle and I rinsed it as best I could.

It wasn't until I was reluctantly through that I real-ized I had no towel, so I had to stand there in the dressing room letting myself drip-dry as good as possi-ble, while wringing my hair out again and again. I hadn't had much hair for a number of years, and never as much as this, and I hadn't really realized just how saturated it could get. As I was doing all this I heard the distant sound of the ship's air horn, felt the slight en-gine tremble accelerate, and realized that we were un-der way.

I got back into my clothes, still slightly wet. They clung, but it wasn't so bad, and all but my hair was dry in minutes. The hair would be a major problem, I real-ized now. Before, I hadn't given much thought to women's long hair, but now I saw that its care and manage-ment was a major skill needing tools.

I remained there a moment, thinking of what I should do next. Get something to eat, certainly, and, if the ship's store was open, maybe pick up a couple of things I'd need. Then head for the lounge and try and get some sleep. I'd need all I could get for the days ahead.

The diagram said there was a cafeteria in the rear upper deck, so that was the first place to go. I went out on deck hoping that the wind would help blow-dry my hair, which currently seemed to resemble a tangled and sticky wet black mop.

It was raw-cold, suddenly, and extremely windy. The wetness of the marine climate was all over and went right through you. Away from the shelter of the moun-tains, the weather was rough even for July. Still, while I was aware that it was cold, made particularly so by the wind, it didn't really affect me as much, while before I'd had to have a sheepskin-lined parka if it dropped to fifty degrees. I recalled seeing pictures once of Eskimos run-ning around in the snow barely clothed, and I recalled that some Oriental skin was colored such because it contained thin layers of insulating fat between the layers of skin. Either my greater tolerance was due to that, or my youth, or a combination of same.

My hair was damp—it would be for hours—but man-ageable, and I knew that a high priority would be a comb. Despite my near starvation level, I headed amid-ship for the ship's store, which wasn't going to be open very much longer.

Once we stopped and loaded at Haines, it'd pack up for the night.

Amidst the piles of souvenirs were several things I needed, although I had some problems with the large number of people crowding into the very small space and the fact that I was so small myself. Still, a cheap shoulder purse with a ferryboat on it, a comb, box of tissues, toothbrush and toothpaste, and some spray-on salve for the skinned area were easy. They also had some kid's sized T-shirts, a head band that might keep my hair manageable and looked very Indian despite the fact that it was stamped "Singapore" on the back, and I looked at jackets, too. Most were adult sizes at highly adult prices, but there were some kid's thin windbreak-ers—again with Alaska tourist symbols—and a blue one that fit. I also picked up a small sewing kit, although I hadn't much idea how to use it, in the hopes of patching the tear in my jeans. The place, after all, was a tourist trap, not a clothing store.

I approached the cash register shyly, because I was feeling very small and very nervous and insecure, but the gray-haired lady just smiled and took all the stuff and totalled it up.

Fifty-seven fifty. Gad. And the three hundred bucks or so had looked like a lot of money…

Still, I had to pay it, and, without saying a word, I gulped and frankly surprised the woman by peeling out the crumpled bills, which she took, handing me the change. I walked out, away from the people, and, head-ing again for the trusty john, I sorted out what I had, put the money and other stuff in the purse, then reluc-tantly removed my original warm, thick ski jacket and left it on a hook, putting on the thinner, cheaper wind-breaker. Finally, I laboriously combed my hair, finding it a real and sometimes painful struggle.

While in the john others would enter, and several times I had an involuntary shock at seeing women enter. It would take some getting used to, both their pres-ence and their casualness once inside. I felt like a peeping torn, but forced myself to ignore it as much as possible. I would have to get used to it—I was one of them, now.

Finally I completed what I could and headed back aft to where I longed to go from the start, the cafeteria. My head was barely level with the lowest shelf, but the sight and smell of food almost overwhelmed me. I felt my stomach almost tie itself in knots. What I wound up with was a cheeseburger—at almost three bucks!—and cocoa (mercifully sixty cents) and I found I couldn't really finish the burger. It wasn't my size; my stomach had gone without food for so long it could only barely recognize it any more. The cocoa, however, went down well and tasted fantastic. Now, relaxed for the first time, I felt totally exhausted and slightly dizzy. The clock, which my tired eyes could barely read, said it was almost midnight, which meant that I'd been without sleep, really, for almost forty-eight hours—and who knew how long before that? Still, I couldn't sleep quite yet. I walked forward on this deck, looking over the general passenger lounges, finding hordes of people sprawled out asleep on the floor, on the couches and in the chairs, some just sprawled, others with air mattresses and, in some cases, sleeping bags. There was an area, too, with a lot of gigantic lounge chairs, reclining types like on first-class long distance airlines, and a few were empty. I hadn't seen anyone who looked even vaguely familiar, and no one who looked in the least interested in me except for a few smiles and patronizing glances, and I decided that I was reasonably safe. It was warm here, and quiet. I climbed into one of the lounge chairs, so large it almost engulfed me, and curled up, intending just to rest for a couple of minutes.

The next thing I knew, the sun was shining brightly through the side windows and it was early afternoon of the next day.

I creaked a little from sleeping curled up in a tight little ball in the big chair, and my head was filled with cobwebs. I had the experience of waking out of the deepest sleep humanly possible and, for a while, it felt as if I hadn't slept at all.

Some of the bruises were still very much there, but the skinned knee, at least, seemed to have scabbed. I made my way back to the cafeteria once more and found, again, that I felt only slightly hungry. How small was my stomach now, I wondered? I got a horribly overpriced bun and some coffee, despite the protestations of a busy-body in line with me that I was too young for the stuff, and went over to a table. The sun had already vanished once again, hidden by clouds and monstrous mountain walls that gave the huge ship very little clearance on either side. The Inside Passage was extremely deep, but very narrow in many parts, and I was startled to see trees on the left side actually tremble as branches brushed against the deck railings.

The bun and coffee positively bloated me, and I dis-covered that my taste had certainly changed. Sweet stuff seemed to taste much sweeter, and satisfied tre-mendously, while the coffee, although waking me up, tasted terribly bitter and more acidic than I'd ever remembered. I thought of complaining, then realized that the coffee was probably perfectly, all right—it was just that I had changed.

And not just taste, either. I'd noticed from the start that color perception was quite different. Oh, red was still red, green was green, and so forth, but they were
different
reds and greens. My big brown eyes definitely saw things a bit differently than my old, weak bluish-gray ones had. Smells, too, seemed sharper, richer, more distinct and in some cases overpowering, yet different, each and every one. A fact that only someone who'd lived in a different body could learn—people's senses were quite different from body to body.

After, I played with my hair, using a couple of pur-chased rubber bands to make a sort of pony tail and fitting the headband. I was determined to change my appearance as much as I could. It had occurred to me from the start that not only the government agents, or whoever they were, might be aboard but the aliens as well. The only people I feared meeting more than the government men were Dan or Charlie—or, perhaps, myself.

That idea unnerved me a bit. I had hardly been happy with that body, but it
was
me, had been me my whole life. To run into it with somebody else inside, somebody not quite human, would be more than I could have stood, I felt sure.

Still, here I was, heading south, out on my own, with a couple hundred bucks and not much else. Where was I going? What was I going to do?

The coffee was acting like a pep pill on me, the caf-feine making me hyperactive, hypersensitive, and a lit-tle jittery. I decided to walk the length and breadth of the ship, to see if I could spot any potential threats, and perhaps, work off this nervous energy. I resolved to stick to cocoa after this, anyway.

The ship was crowded now from many stops, crowded not only by the tourist crowd but also by family groups and lots of young people in rugged clothes who'd been on Alaskan vacations or trips. I stopped by the store again and, despite the prices, blew five bucks on a small red cowgirl's hat with a tie string to keep it on in the wind. It made me look kind of cute, I decided, and it also further changed passing perceptions of me. It was the most I could do to change my looks without help and more resources, and I hoped it would be enough.

I ran into a bunch of kids my physical age and young-er playing in the lounge—tag or hide-and-seek or something like that—and while I declined to play several crowded around, asking me if I were
a real
Indian and ooing and ahing when I told them I sure was. I got away from them fairly quickly, but I felt reasonably satisfied. I'd run into a group of my apparent peers and they hadn't noticed anything more unusual about me than my fine, dark Indian features.