I was aware my vision was changing. It was becoming impossible to focus close in, although I could still see Darva clearly and she could see me. I could see, blurrily, that I had a snout and I realized that my eyes, like hers, must be set much farther apart. It was becoming more and more difficult, though, to think at all. My mind was dying; I knew it, yet, eerily, even as it was lost I experienced less and less a sense of any loss at all.
Darva looked completely like a bunhar now, and she appeared very natural and normal to me. Only her eyes, set farther apart along that large, toothy snout, still retained a curious human appearance. I had only three awarenesses… I was hungry, yet sleepy, and there was a female over there…
The next few days are all but impossible to remember or describe. Basically, we were kept in a large pen with an electrified barrier, and a pool of water; once a day, a large, freshly killed creature was brought somehow into the enclosure and Darva and I devoured it greedily. Eating was followed by a period of strained sleep, in which we were both in this funny place, then we’d wake up again in the pen. Both of us were bunhars, and we operated on the most basic animal level and on no other. We had absolutely no sense of time, place, or anything. We were barely self-aware.
Slowly, though, we came out of it. Very, very slowly. Memory returned first, but it was uncoupled with conscious thought, and thus useless. Finally, we came out of one of the sleep sessions still in the strange room, and for the first time, I could think again.
Yissim’s voice seemed to float in to us. “If you can understand me, stamp your right foot,” she instructed.
I turned, looked at Darva, and saw that she was still very much a hundred percent bunhar. But she stamped her right foot-r—and so did I.
“Very good,” the doctor approved. “Please do not try to talk to me or to each other. You don’t have the equipment at the moment, and all you’d produce would be a loud roar. It has been a tricky, delicate operation to say the least. In order literally to save your minds we had to let the process take its course with your conscious selves decoupled. Believe me, this was necessary—but radical. You are only the third and fourth individuals we’ve had to use this procedure on, and we’ve had one success and one failure. Hopefully we will have two more successes here.
“Now,” she went on, “we’re going to try and bring you back, but it will be a slow, patient process. We have restored your minds, your basic humanity. Bit by bit we will restore the rest. We will be working with you, but you must do it yourselves. Our initial probe shows that we cannot impose the change on you. Were we to try a new series of spells, you would react in such a way as to literally alter your brain. Once your brain modified to the bunhar mode you would be bunhars and we could not restore memory, personality, or sentience. You must learn to control every Warden in your bodies. Every one. You must assume total control.”
What proved most frustrating was that Darva and I could communicate neither with the doctors nor with each other since, I soon discovered, she was totally illiterate—a condition that simply had never occurred to me could happen.
If the situation was bizarre to us, it must have been more so to the doctors. Imagine going in every day and giving very elaborate lessons and exercises to a pair of bunhars. Still, I’ll give them that much—they never once seemed to blink at the situation or treat us as anything except intelligent adults. I, for one, was more than anxious to do everything until I had it perfect—I had no wish to return to the zoo and the oblivious state of the simple saurian.
Still, it was a constant mental fight with those animal impulses. I had to stop myself continually from roaring, charging, or doing other animal things in proper bunhar fashion. I realized that part of my trouble was my concern that Darva might not make it. I wanted both of us to succeed, desperately.
The day we concentrated on our larynxes was an exciting one. Each day I was gaining more and more control over my body and my actions—becoming, very definitely, the smartest and most self-controlled bunhar in all history. The spell was a complex one, but it still boiled down to ordering the Wardens in our bodies to form a voice mechanism that would work in our very primitive throats. I had no idea what one would look like, or how it would work, but I was like a small child with a new toy when I felt something growing, taking shape far back in my throat, and made my first, rather basic sounds that weren’t roars and growls. Still, it was not a human voice, and it came from far back in my throat, independent of my mouth—which couldn’t form the words anyway. It couldn’t—but this new growth could.
Darva, I heard with excitement, managed it also, although the sound was more like a deep belching sound than anything else. We were stopped there and given a chance to practice. We managed in an amazingly short time to form crude words and sentences. It was a breakthrough, and one that said we were on the way. But how long would the rest take?
I discovered in talking that Darva had had a much rougher fight with her animal self than I, and was still having trouble. Dr. Yissim now knew this too, and in a separate session one day told me, “If we are to bring her all the way back, we may have to do another radical procedure.”
“Of what sort?” I rasped, my new voice sounding odd—and yet appropriate to a bunhar, if bunhars could talk—even to me.
“You are now far enough down the line to control a great deal of your body. The wa is powerful and controlled in you. But if we were to remove you from lab conditions, both of you would quickly revert, simply because you are so far along. She would change much before you. You might even fight it off, but I doubt if she could. You need reinforcement and the only reinforcement around comes from each other. It’s called a wa connection, and it may be her only hope—but only you can decide on it.” “There is danger then.”
She nodded. “You know bow the wa is really one, how it is in total communication with all other wa” “Yes.”
“But your consciousness contains the wa and directs it, and this is a method by which the wa of one consciousness is transmitted to the other and then stabilized. A permanent link is established.”
“You mean our minds would merge?” “No. The wa is directed by thought; it is not thought itself. No, your bodies would merge, on the wa, or metaphysical, level. Anything done to one, with the aid of the other, could be easily duplicated in the other body. Her mind would give you the little extra push you would need not merely to control, but to direct the wa in your body. And conversely, your having achieved this, the process could be easily reversed. However, such a toted link, similar to casting a changeling spell but far more elaborate, has a drawback. If forged effectively enough to work on this level, it cannot be broken. The wa of one would be the wa of both. If you progress to the next stage of wa training, it could give you enormous power. Enormous. But you would be absolutely identical. Even an injury to one would be felt by the other.”
“And the danger?”
“If her wa instincts overwhelm you, she could drag you down with her.”
“And if this is not done?”
“Then we might well, over a long period, bring you back—but she would be lost. She simply doesn’t have the mental training you seem to have.” “Then let’s do it,” I told her.