Chapter 2. In which our heroine prepares a light repast

Meanwhile back in the stone age...

What? “What about the penthouse?” you say? Jeez, talk about a one-track mind. Look, I know you’re all ... eager to find out how Majestic Woman responded to her first “Discipline” session. Believe me, I was too. But there are a few more things you’ll have to know about me before the rest of all this will finally start making sense. Okay? I swear we’ll go back to the penthouse soon. Well ... before the end of the chapter at least.

So where was I? Oh yes! The story of... moi. Meanwhile back in the stone age, I was looking down at what I had done, the blood in the water far below, the limp body unresisting as the tug of the churning rapids pulled it off of the rocks. I was horrified by my own acts, by the death I had dealt with my own two ... with Eevan’s own two hands. But I knew there was no turning back now.

I / Eevan ran back to the village, shouting for help.

“Jovan has jumped to his death!” I wailed, falling to my knees and crying. It wasn’t an act. Yes, I was lying about what had happened. But my feelings were my real feelings; I truly was horrified by what I had done.

We found “Jovan” cold and dead, washed ashore perhaps half a mile downstream. I buried “Jovan”, but I in my heart I mourned Eevan even as I became him. I was not the only true mourner. I was touched by how many were grief-stricken at the passing of strange, fey, crippled Jovan. But one mourner surprised me more than all the others.

Even wrapped in my own dark thoughts, I was moved by Navya’s mourning. Cunning though she often was, Navya was guileless in the face of Jovan’s death. She blamed herself. Her grief and her tears were unfeigned and heart-wrenching. Her pain was every bit as real and deep as mine.

We comforted each other. She shared with me her true guilty heart. Guiltily I faked sharing Eevan’s heart with her. For months Eevan had been ready to join with Navya, only needing to work up the courage to tell Jovan. But now Jovan was ready for this joining too.

So I did join with Navya and we had a good life, as long as I did not plumb her avaricious thoughts too deeply. She tried to manipulate me with her “natural talents”; Lady Macbeth had nothing on my Navya. With my talents though it was easy to counter her. I did not become the jealous, spiteful tool of her ambitions that she no doubt would have made the real Eevan.

But this was not a contentious, unhappy joining! She was beautiful, and our sex was wild and satisfying, especially as I learned how to tune my arousal to hers. I loved her, but not like an equal, not like a partner. Centuries, if not millennia, before there were actual “domestic animals”, Navya was my pet.

Oh, we were normal. We were “leading citizens” and good parents. We had many children; some of whom even survived to adulthood. What is that phrase? “Nasty, brutish and short”? Yes, that’s how it was.

My control over Navya was subtle, less “straps and chains” than “invisible fence”. And that control was for her own good too! She did not become the hated imperious hag she would have been if she had had her own way. But make no mistake, I truly controlled Navya. I controlled her simply by outmaneuvering her over and over again, and she was my reluctant, but happy, pet.

None of my children had my talents. In retrospect, many millennia later, I realized that if there was any genetic component to my psychic abilities, it must have been lost to humanity with the death of Jovan’s virgin body. But somehow Jovan’s “mind” and its abilities had transcended Jovan’s “body” which had given birth to those abilities, like a butterfly from a caterpillar.

Now Eevan was the one who seemed to have eldritch powers. Eevan was the one that could see the minds of man and beast. They said that the spirit of Jovan haunted me. That was far too close to the truth for my comfort, so I laughed it off. In point of fact, the laughing was easier for me than it had ever been before. At least some of humor, some of personality, must be chemical, genetic, innate, because it seemed that some of Eevan’s traits: his easy smile, his joking nature, his temper — quick to burn and quick to cool — became mine. It was as if Eevan was haunting me.

As I aged, eventually the day came that I could no longer keep up with the hunting party. I gave up the hunt, but to my surprise that only meant that Navya and I became more the leaders than ever before. Youngsters came to us for training. Adults turned to us for judgment. There was no real “chieftain”, but, with my mind powers and Navya’s ability — finally! — to rein in her spite and ambition for the good of the tribe, we were foremost among the old wise ones. We were busy, and respected, and loved. It was a good life, but it was too short for me. My eyesight was failing. Navya’s joints crippled her whenever the weather changed. And she was no longer the beauty she had been in her youth. Nor was I. My hair and teeth were falling out. I could see that the end was coming, but I knew a way out.

I began to practice body swapping, at first with children, but later with adults. Always careful that “Eevan” was secluded, far from anyone else, when each swap occurred. That way the panicked person in Eevan’s body would go unheard while I enjoyed his or her body.

Amazingly enough, I got away with it. Of course, no one believed the children’s stories, and the adults knew that everyone would think them mad if they told the same stories. Even so, long forgotten tales of “Jovan haunting Eevan” began making their rounds in the village again.

I was soon good enough at it that I could swap with anyone, instantly and painlessly. My plan continued to unfold. I went about choosing my target. Having sampled all of the minds in the village, I settled on Deetga, a strapping young man and a fine hunter. Residing in his body made me feel so alive. He was so strong and swift; his senses, so keen; his wits, so sharp; his passions, so powerful. Living in Eevan’s ancient forty-one-summers-old body felt nothing like that!

Intentionally, I began to play the mad, senile old man. It cost me my stature in the village, but I knew it would save my life. The last of my teeth had rotted out. My hair was white and thin. Navya had died the previous winter, and my bed was cold and lonely. Some nights I felt a twinge in my chest and feared that I would run out of time.

Finally I could wait no longer. I put my plan in motion. For several days I raved that I was really Deetga, and that Eevan had stolen my body. My children cared, but like the others, they stopped listening to their poor mad old father. I recall sensing my youngest daughter, Glissa — my baby at thirteen summers — suffering under the pain of my decline. She wished that I would die. Not so that my misery would end, but so that her embarrassment would end. Yes, she was definitely Navya’s daughter.

In the middle of the fourth night of my madness, I swapped permanently with Deetga. He immediately started screaming out in the dead of night exactly the mad ravings that I had spent days conditioning the entire village to ignore. Deetga couldn’t understand. No one would believe him. His despair pushed Eevan’s already decrepit body into steep decline. Deetga’s mind died in Eevan’s body in less than a month.

But I was alive. And how! Once more I was young and strong, captain of the hunt, lover of the most beautiful woman in the village. That woman was Eevan’s middle daughter, Selka, the spitting image of a young Navya. Yes, it was weird, but how could you really call it incest? I thought this would be the secret to my new life, living, aging, swapping old for new and living again. But after only five years I was unutterably, well, bored. I had done all this before! Even in Deetga’s wonderful young body, there was no particular thrill in doing it again.

I knew there was a bigger world out there, and I wanted to live in it. When we moved seasonally from hunting ground to hunting ground, we often encountered other villages, other nomads, moving just like we did. They had strange names; they made strange crafts; they spoke strange words; sometimes we could not understand these others at all.

Of course, when young Jovan had first met these foreign tribes; he always understood them perfectly. I’m actually certain in retrospect that I must have saved our village from war at least twice. Those foreign tribes were never quite so foreign to me.

Now, out hunting as Deetga, I often felt the presence of hunting parties from some of those other tribes. I began to imagine trading my boring life as Deetga for a new life in a new village.

One day I just did it.

I don’t know what my village thought of the madness that possessed “Deetga”. I don’t know what the poor man whose body I now possessed thought of his fate, trapped now in Deetga’s body. I do know that everyone in my new village thought “Cowmpu” was acting pretty weird for a week or two, until I had read enough language and custom and shared experience from the minds of those around me to pass as “normal”.

But it wasn’t enough. Within a month I was bored again. And so when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped again. And again. And again. I had no sense of geography. I had no sense of ethnicity. I had no sense of direction, of purpose, of time. I wandered and sampled and observed and wandered. I swapped and ate and hunted and fucked and swapped.

At some point — decades? centuries? — after I first left home, I actually became homesick. I tried to find my way back to my tribe in the hill country. But it was hopeless. Which tribe? Which hill country? It’s even possible that I found my home and didn’t realize it. There was no one in any of the tribes that I knew; no one in any of the tribes that remembered a “Deetga”, a “Selka”, an “Eevan”, a “Navya”, a “Jovan”.

You’ve heard it said that “you can’t go home”? Try living several lifetimes away and then try to go home. You literally can’t.

So I gave up. I resumed my wandering with a vengeance. I crossed deserts, jungles, and endless savanna. I think I must have spent the better part of a millennium in Africa before crossing — via the farthest body-swap I had attempted to that date — over the Pillars of Heracles into Europe.

The pale-skinned people amazed me. It was the skin color I remembered from my youth, but I had not seen it in so long that I had assumed my memories of younger days must have been mistaken, a misremembered dream.

Sometime after that, maybe a century later, maybe two, I first encountered what I now call a “cusp”.

I was somewhere east of the Black Sea. Don’t ask me exactly where; no maps, right? I had crossed over the Bosphorus Strait a couple of months before. I’m pretty sure that’s where I was. There’s not another geographic feature anywhere else in Europe that resembles the Bosphorus. There are geologists that say the Strait, and the Black Sea’s connection to the Mediterranean is only about seven or eight thousand years old. They’re wrong. The Bosphorus was there, and I crossed it, well over ten thousand years ago.

In any case, about a month after that crossing I was somewhere east of the Black Sea, when I swapped into a tribe that was doing something truly different. Instead of foraging for fruits and vegetables, they were growing them. I was shocked. This was genius!

They were beyond making tools: hunting tools or digging tools or porting tools, things that helped them acquire food. They were actually making food, right there in their village. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Beans, squash, beets, carrots, berries, all growing right at arm’s length. They still hunted for meat, but everything else, most of their diet really, just required planting, harvesting, and a little bit of maintenance and pest control in between. And since the killed “pests” were edible for the most part, it even lessened their need to hunt!

Look, you’ve lived with the idea of agriculture all your life. You’ve almost certainly never even met someone who didn’t grow up in an environment permeated with crops as the main source of food. You don’t know what this meant, and I can’t even begin to explain the full scope, the full impact, of this invention.

I left the village and came back as a stranger just to ask questions. After all, one of their own asking such questions would seem too weird. I brought meat, most of a side of auroch, as a peace offering. Even so, it was touch and go for a bit. After gaining some trust I tried to find out how they had come up with the idea of planting food. The village chief tried to claim credit for the whole idea, and no one would gainsay him. But in all their minds I could see that they had learned the technique from another village further to the east.

So I swapped my way into that village and started in with the questions right away. So what if they thought me mad? I wasn’t planning to stay. My questions pointed me toward another tribe to the southeast, which led to another and another. Eventually I reached a village where even the grayest heads were puzzled by the very premise of my question. As far as they knew, they had always grown their own food. Nobody had “invented” anything.

And so I realized that I had missed the cusp of a great sweeping change that was sure to overtake all of humanity. “People” were changing. You have to understand that this was actually a somewhat scary thought for me. Places might be different, hot or cold, wet or dry, flat or hilly, with different flora, fauna, skin colors, languages. But where it mattered to me — minds, bodies, social interactions and roles — people were all pretty much the same. What if people changed so much that I could no longer sense their thoughts? What if people changed so much that I couldn’t swap into their bodies?

But fear wasn’t bothering me nearly as much as the other thing on my mind. There was an emotion that I don’t think I had experienced since ... since the day I threw Eevan off the cliff. I was jealous. Here I was, an immortal spirit who had lived for thousands of years, and someone else, one of those short-lived worms that I used for MY needs, had come up with this brilliant, game-changing idea of planting crops. I was the one who had lived fifty lifetimes, experiencing them through thousands of eyes. It should have been me that did this amazing thing.

So I resolved that if I couldn’t be the innovator, at least I would be the perfector. Of course, back then I didn’t have words for all these feelings and ideas, but I knew what I wanted nonetheless. I resolved to swap-travel everywhere that food crops were grown, learn what worked and what didn’t, and then become the ultimate farmer.

Well, I can only say that it seemed like a worthy goal for an immortal body-swapping spirit at the time.

In only twenty years of this exploration, I got my second cusp shock, the one that truly humbled me. Having seen the power of the domestication of food plants, I still didn’t make the leap. But, again, one of those ephemeral humans somehow did. I started encountering villages that had penned up herds of goats. Again, I failed to trace the practice back to its roots. I had somehow missed the genius spark of creation again. But the very idea of animal husbandry, of domesticating herds on the hoof, amazed me.

I simply had to admit, if only to myself, that being immortal did not make me a genius. That even given the idea that flora could be bent to serve mankind, I did not make the leap to see that fauna could be bent the same way.

But that was not the end of my second cusp shock. It went on and on. The more I traveled, the more I saw different ways that different peoples — peoples who obviously had had no contact with each other — had domesticated animals. I found peoples that not only used their goats for food but also milked them to help feed their own babies. I found peoples who had harnessed aurochs and were using their muscle power for carrying heavy burdens. I found peoples who had tamed wolves — almost as partners more than as slaves — fulfilling an amazing variety of purposes: catching pests in the fields, entertaining, protecting and babysitting children, helping with or even leading the hunt.

Every new innovation bewildered and humbled me.

But I steeled myself anyway. I told myself that I would study this phenomenon for as long as it took, hundreds or thousands of years if necessary. There had to be something to know about this wonder that could only be discovered by someone with a much longer perspective than that of a short-lived mortal.

To make a long story short, ultimately I succeeded. After only five hundred years of observation, I could tell that domestic goats were much different than the still-wild goats that were the ancestors of the modern ibex. Domestic goats had become smaller; they had shorter and less threatening horns; those that had been used for milk had changed even further, with the females displaying large distended udders even before giving birth.

And they were well on the way to becoming the voracious eaters that they are known to be today. Garbage disposal on the hoof! A few centuries after that insight I could tell that domestic wolves — dogs — were separating dramatically from their wild forebears, and even dividing into breeds according to how their masters used them.

Some ten thousand years before Darwin I was beginning to formulate a theory of micro-evolution. I could see these animals changing to favor the traits that their human masters wanted most. Of course, I didn’t have all the pieces, and I never did make the leap that Darwin did into macro-evolution. I never did see that mutation and survival advantage could, given an unfathomable amount of time, account for the entire variety of life on earth.

Hey, give me a break! I was just a three-thousand-year-old “cave man”.

So in any case, I had finally made a breakthrough that was beyond the reach of mortals. But it took me more than another century to figure out what to do with that breakthrough. I was living as a farmer on the banks of the Nile, not far from modern-day Luxor, when I was suddenly stricken with a heart attack. Out alone among my herds, I almost died before I found a suitable swap body miles away.

In the wake of my near-death experience my fright was like a wild animal gnawing at my guts. My “immortality” had almost ended right then and there. And I had been riding a twenty-three-year-old healthy body. This was simply not acceptable. I had to have a better pool of bodies to draw upon. And that is when I began my breeding program. I found a large number of isolated villages, in Europe, in Africa, in eastern and southern Asia, and I began to breed them.

My approach was much like that of any man who might want to domesticate a wild animal.

Foremost I cowed them into submitting to my overlord-ship. It wasn’t hard when you could swap grown men and women with helpless children and torture the children into submission. But such methods were brutal and, unfortunately, wasteful. Some of my slave villages were entirely wiped off the face of the earth before they submitted.