It was the start of spring in Dillia, the best time of year.  The air was warm, the sun bright and cheerful, although there were a few cool breezes from the direction of the high mountains to the west that felt, sometimes, like gentle silk caresses.

Mavra Chang had stood still for a long time, staring at the reflection in the waters of the stream, one with the birds, small river animals, wind and nearby waterfall sound, one with her own thoughts.  It was not her reflection, of course, but she hadn't expected that after going through the Well - and, yet, she knew it was her reflection, not only as she now was but as she could have been, would have been, had not events in her life taken such a strange turn so long ago.  Not the tiny, slightly built Oriental woman the back-alley surgeons had changed her into, disguising her from her enemies but also erasing all connections with her early childhood and ancestry, but, instead, the way it might have been had her native world not fallen into the hands of the dictatorial technocracy that was the Com in those early days.

Oriental.  That word had lost its meaning many thousands of years before, when mankind spread out to the stars from Old Earth.  A third of mankind perhaps more, had been of one race and they had gone in search of the land Old Earth no longer could give them and the space in which to breathe and live and grow beyond teeming, packed cities and communal farms.  Almost everyone looked a little Oriental after a while, and that had been something of a leveler those purely of the other races of man were very few and far between and tended to stand out in any crowd.  Brazil, of course, and the small, scattered, but hearty band of Jews on many worlds, and the other odd ones bound together for racial survival like the gypsies.  Very few and very rare.

Her face now was an exotic face, a sexy face, not one reflecting the racial mix usual on human planets.  Almost none there had pure golden-blond hair, except by coloring it, nor deep, icy-blue eyes except with lenses.  Without blemish, her skin, too, was very pale, although she knew it would darken with the sun, and her breasts were large, much larger than they had been before, and perfectly formed.  They moved when she moved, and she was somewhat conscious of the fact.

She was not, of course, human; only the face and torso were that, memories of might-have-been.  The human part blended into the equine form perfectly matched to the human body, also covered in shorter hair of golden blond with a tail that was almost white.

Obie had made her a centaur twice now, although she was aware, in the back of her mind, that this time it was for keeps.  She had stood there, thinking after a while, trying to understand the computer's point.  Finally her gaze was drawn from her reflection in the pool upward toward the nearby mountains, cold-looking and purple, wrapped in clouds and capped by snowy peaks that would be a long while melting.  That was not Dillia, she knew, but Gedemondas, mysterious Gedemondas, which only she remembered - and even that memory had now been dimmed by centuries of experience and life.  A strange, mystic, mountain race that had enormous powers yet kept, hermitlike, completely to itself in its mountain rookeries and in its volcanic steam-heated caverns far beneath the placid surface.  Their thought processes were - well, nonhuman, really, was the term, she supposed, when the rest of the Southern hemisphere, at least the parts she had seen, tended to think along more familiar paths, no matter how bizarre their form  and lifestyle.  The Gedemondans had known her and been interested in her once.  Perhaps again?