Margaret nodded. “That’s pretty much what a freshly captured chimp feels, I’m sure.” But Dina had been raised in captivity. If she still felt that way they had a serious ethical dilemma on their hands, but how could they find out how much of her body’s attitude she carried in her mind? That was the important question.
Or was it? Arthur and Candi had proved that the body and the mind worked together to create the whole person. If Dina’s body hated captivity, wasn’t that reason enough to let her go free?
Margaret looked back at her, shoehorned into Huang’s body and strapped to a chair inside a cage, and she suddenly felt ashamed. “Let her go,” she said. When the technician at her side hesitated, she said, “We can’t learn anything with her immobilized like that. She’s calm enough; let her go.”
So they did. And when the last strap came off, Dina rose to her feet, stepped over to the edge of the cage farthest from everyone, lifted her hospital gown, and peed. Standing up.
The first test ended after an hour, but when Huang reported no longterm complications and Dina seemed to settle right back down, they swapped again for longer and longer periods. Margaret had hoped Dina would eventually learn to talk, but aside from learning the names of a few objects she never did pick up the language. Huang tried to describe what it was like in a chimpanzee body, but aside from “furry” and “itchy” and a few other adjectives, no one really understood what he was getting at. They realized pretty quickly that you had to be there yourself to fully comprehend it.
The transfer process worked so smoothly that they tried it on other animals, just to see what would happen. Arthur swapped with a dog—a Saint Bernard puppy—and he said afterward that it had been one of the happiest times in his life. He hadn’t gotten many of the test questions right, and he’d eventually gotten bored with the whole proceedings and had lain down to chew on a rawhide stick, but when he transferred back into his own body he said that was mostly because he didn’t care what Margaret wanted. He was too content with being a puppy.
They couldn’t say for sure how the dog felt about the experience, because it had spent most of its time in Arthur’s body trying to stand up. Arthur said his legs still felt wobbly for hours after he switched back.
And all the while, Margaret wondered: What’s it really like? What subtle differences aren’t the corponauts, as they’d come to call themselves, reporting? How much of what they did report was she misinterpreting?
And how much of the child like delight they exhibited was endemic to the process?
She got her chance at it with a cat. She wasn’t the first—by then the real explorers had worked their way down to mice and lizards and even a cockroach, which according to Candi had turned out to be incredibly pleasant once she got over the idea of what she’d become. Her intellect had felt compressed, she said. Altered to fit the smaller brain, but she couldn’t describe it better than that, nor explain why it hadn’t bothered her. At that, Margaret told Dr. Hayward that she needed a transfer experience of her own if she was ever going to understand what it was like for anyone else, and when he agreed to let her, Candi suggested a cat.
By then they were getting pretty cavalier about the whole proceedings; just strap down, slap the helmets on, and hit the switch. One minute Margaret was looking at the lab’s resident mouser, a yellow-and-white striped domestic shorthair named Isabelle, and the next minute she was the domestic shorthair, only she didn’t feel domestic. She felt wild and sleek and sensual, even in the zippered bag Isabelle had been confined in. Only her head stuck out, but that’s all she needed at first. She looked over at her human body and saw a mountainous bulk of flesh, already slumping in the chair as the anesthetic hit. The technicians had decided to knock out the human bodies during transfer to avoid panic when the lower animals found themselves in an unfamiliar body.
“I’m all right,” she tried to say, but the cat’s mouth and tongue didn’t cooperate and instead of words she got a warbling gurgle that sounded like a tomcat on the prowl. So she blinked her left eye three times, the code for the same thing, and waited for the technicians to let her out of the body bag.
Stretching was divine. She licked a couple of itches, shivering at the feel of sandpaper tongue through smooth fur, then padded across the floor toward Candi, who was taking notes for her. Just walking in that body felt better than anything she had done in years.
“How are you doing?” Candi asked. Her voice boomed.
Margaret tried a meow in response. One for “yes” or “good,” two for “no” or “bad.” They didn’t have a code for “fantastic.”
Candi laid the child’s keyboard they used for animal tests on the floor in front of her and asked, “What’s seven times nine?”
Margaret knew the answer, but it made absolutely no difference to her whether or not she told anyone. Candi’s leg looked warm and inviting, so she leaned up against it, rubbing her cheeks and sides as she arched past.
And then she felt the purr start. Chocolate with orange peel didn’t compare. Nor did winning a lottery. She had once had a multiple orgasm; not even that was as good as purring.
When Candi reached down and scratched her between the ears, she knew that humans had been shortchanged.
She managed to stay in Isabelle’s body for almost three hours, mostly by sucking up to everybody in the lab and begging for more time. The sight of Margaret, aged matron of the psych department, slinking about and jumping into laps like an exotic dancer, was such a shock that nobody knew what to do. But Candi finally picked her up like a limp dishrag and carried her back to the transfer machinery.
“You’ve got to go back,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”
I am home! Margaret wanted to tell her, but she couldn’t get the concept across with Isabelle’s vocal equipment. Besides, she knew what she meant: it was quitting time, there was a weekend coming up, and she was keeping everyone in the lab. So she let Candi stuff her unceremoniously into the body bag, strap the helmet onto her head, and throw the switch.
A lid came down over the world, a blanket of fog and fuzz and muffling cotton. Some of it lifted when the tech neutralized the anesthetic in her system, but she knew that was all she could look forward to.
“Are you all right?” Candi asked, picking up her hand. The touch sent the memory of an electric thrill coursing through her, just the palest ghost of what she’d felt as Isabelle.
“I—as right as I’ll ever be,” she said, knowing Candi would never understand what she meant by that. She took a deep breath. “Wow. That was amazing.”
Candi smiled. “You looked like you were enjoying it.”
“You’ll never know,” Margaret told her.
“No, I suppose—Sure I could. That’s the whole point of this.”
Margaret shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid you’d have to spend at least a decade being me first, to understand the contrast.”
“Ah.” Candi looked at her again, frowning. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”
“Fine,” Margaret told her. She didn’t know whether that was true or not, but there was nothing Candi could do for her even if it wasn’t. Even swapping bodies wouldn’t have cheered her up. After Isabelle, being merely a young California blonde would have been an anticlimax. And besides, any human form would bring with it human feelings and human problems. The other corponauts’ experiences proved that the capacity to feel joy existed in every test subject, no matter how primitive, and a simpler animal made for a more pure experience.
She helped put away the equipment and let Isabelle out of the bag. The cat seemed little worse for her experience; she had probably felt a little disorientation, then had fallen asleep. She might have had some odd dreams, but those probably wouldn’t have registered after she woke up any more than Margaret’s normally did. Margaret reached down to scratch her between the ears, and grew warm as the cat started to purr. She remembered how that felt from the inside.