"No!" I said, grinning.

"Oh, yes!" she laughed back. "I was even a bigger jerk than you." She grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes. "Listen to me, Jim-there is an incredible difference between being the recipient of an experience and the author of it. They really set me up to discover that.

"It was my first prolonged solo, although I didn't know it at the time. They just told me I was to take a walk through the woods and smell the flowers. I didn't think anything about it-they had started bouncing all of us around on odd little errands. They never told us the purpose of the assignments until afterward. Sometimes it was a test, sometimes they wanted to record a specific experience, sometimes they wanted to see what we would discover on our own.

"Anyway, you're going to laugh when you hear this. I found myself on a hillside. I was alone. I was wearing a sweat shirt and jeans and tennis shoes. The background feel of the body was different of course, it always is, but this one felt funnier than usual. I had a lower center of gravity and I felt kind of soft. I'd had the opportunities to wear a lot of different bodies by then, so I knew it took a little while to get adjusted, so I didn't think too much about it. I just sort of took it for granted. I assumed they'd given me one of those flabby effeminate little-boy bodies that we used to call capons. I figured they wanted this body exercised and that was the purpose of this assignment. I was so naive.

"So, I started walking. It was a beautiful day. The air smelled of flowers, everywhere. I think I must have been in Hawaii or the Bahamas, or someplace tropical. The closer you get to the equator, the more intense the light is-well, the colors here were just incredibly bright and beautiful.

"The day was hot, a little muggy, and I thought I could smell the sea. And my skin was darker than I was used to-and smoother-so I figured they'd given me a native body. Once, I reached into my shirt to scratch a nipple and I was amazed at how soft and sensitive I was. But I still didn't put it together. Still not yet. To be fair, the body was young-maybe thirteen or fourteenand not all that well developed. In fact, it was quite boyish. But still-you'd think that I, one of the great breast-strokers of our time, would have figured it out, wouldn't you? Well, I didn't. Not from the inside.

"The body was wearing a pack. There was food in the pack, and a canteen, but no mirror or ID card. Nothing to let me know who or what I was. That's part of the training too. You can't take on the identity of the host body. You have to create a new one, your own.

"After a while, I realized I had to pee. There was no one around, so I just unzipped my jeans and reached in-and reached inand felt around and felt around- It was funny, I still hadn't quite figured it out, I thought I was tangled in my underwear. You know how you'll think anything to avoid confronting the truth? I finally got annoyed, I figured there was something wrong with this bodyI yanked down my jeans and my underpants and-just stared at myself I can still remember the feeling of... there's no other word for it-horror. Everything contracted at once. It was like something squeezing me in the balls-except I didn't have any balls! No penis, no nothing! Just hair! I forgot who I was, where I was everything! I felt betrayed! It must have been terribly funny to the monitors. I started feeling around in my crotch looking for myself. I still couldn't quite accept the truth yet. There was all this loose skin-and it was all wet and skwooshy-and it was so sensitiveand then I touched my own clitoris-and I knew-

"I think I yelped in surprise. I can't tell you the shift of identity I experienced, Jim. It wasn't just the body that was female-I was! When I realized it, I nearly came! My nipples came instantly erect, I could feel them hardening against the material of the sweat shirt. My skin flushed. My face got hot. It was an incredible wave of feeling that swept up through me. I felt dizzy. I nearly fell down. It was the most exquisite flash of excitement and discovery and shock. You can't imagine it.

"They hadn't told me on purpose. It was a setup. The point of the exercise was for me to discover the assumptions that I brought to a circumstance. Oh boy, did I feel stupid-and flustered. The physical waves of shock-and pleasure-were still sweeping through my body. That's when I started to cry. It was such a basic mistake! I felt so embarrassed. I'd wanted to be the perfect trainee and instead I'd just demonstrated how pompous and naive and airheaded I really was. The monitors were probably laughing their heads off over me.

"After I stopped crying, I started feeling silly. And after that, I realized that they wouldn't have done this to me if they hadn't had a purpose. So I tried to figure out what the purpose was. I decided they'd wanted to teach me a little humility. Well, they'd certainly done that. Learning how to pee from a squatting position doesn't sound difficult, but if you're not familiar with how the equipment works-well, never mind."

"So what happened?"

She shrugged. "I cleaned myself up and waited for my recall. I thought that now that I'd figured it all out, the exercise was over. Only it wasn't. Nothing happened. They left me waiting. After a while, I figured it out again. They weren't going to recall me. There was something else I had to discover. Are you sure you want to hear the rest of this?"

I said, "If you don't finish this story, I'll kill you."

"Right," she said. "So I took off all my clothes and started examining the body as thoroughly as I could."

"Huh?"

"Well, wouldn't you?"

"Uh-"

I thought about it. "I guess so."

"Of course," she said. "As soon as you're sure it's safe, the first thing you do is explore the most unknown thing in your environment." She added, "But there was something else going on here too. I didn't want to be caught by any more surprises. You see, I'd heard stories about people flunking out during training-"

"I didn't know it was possible to flunk out of the corps," I interrupted.

"It isn't possible. But it happens. What they do is, they put you in `maintenance.' It means they transfer you into some old body that they're not currently using, or have no plans to use, or no need for, and let you stay there. Your job is to maintain it. Right? It puts you out of the way.

"Anyway, we were in that part of our training where we were starting to lose some of our fellows, and they never told us why, so I couldn't help but wonder. I'd had a little run-in with a captain during my training and she'd threatened to send me to a leper colony-or something equally unpleasant. Maybe she'd made good her threat, I didn't know. This could very well be my body for the next umpty-leven years. I'd already made one mistake with it. I didn't want to make any more. I figured I'd better find out exactly who I was-or who I was wearing, that is. You know, Jim, the English language is really inadequate for this kind of discussion."

"You're doing okay," I said. "Go on."

"Well-it was like being a kid again. You know how when you reach a certain age, a certain point in life, you start getting really curious about your body and what it can do. Some of it is sexual, some of it isn't. You explore all your nooks and crannies. You find out what you feel like. You see what parts of you are smooth and what parts are hairy. You touch the places that are sensitive to find out just how sensitive you are. You do a lot of masturbating for a while. You have to do it. It's part of the job of moving in and getting comfortable and finding out how the body works.

"We'd had that in the training-we'd had to trade bodies and then explore ourselves from the inside. You can't imagine how silly it looks to see a room full of naked men sitting on the floor and playing with themselves, examining their hands, their fingers, their toes, their etceteras. But it's part of the job of developing your sensitivities.