Read Identity Matrix (1982) for Free Online

just change bodies and identities and slip into the crowd, but they hadn't—until now. Why? Because too many leftover innocents in wrong bodies would be a trail in itself? Because it would blow their existence wide open, causing panic, suspicion, para-noia. They swapped when they had to, not otherwise. They'd swapped with me because the girl had been a dead giveaway. Now they might split up, two men going one way and one the other, probably losing the horses, playing cat and mouse in the rocks, trying to surprise their pursuers, get one or two off by themselves and swap.
    And that left me. First of all, I was no longer who I used to be, possibly forever. My past was gone, everything was gone. Oddly, I felt pangs of regret about that, despite my depression and loneliness, for now, it came home to me, I had lost the one thing I had always had—security. Of course, I could hail the pursuers, those who might understand what had happened to me—but would they? Did they really know or understand the power they were facing? Were they, in fact, a killing party? If so, they'd be looking for an Indian girl and they might shoot first and ask questions later. I couldn't take a chance on it.
    Still, what were the alternatives? I stood up, somewhat unsteadily at first, and felt the sore points on my new body. Miraculously, nothing appeared broken, although I knew I was going to feel the bruises even worse as time went on. I checked the pockets of the jacket and jeans but they were empty, except for one stick of chewing gum. Curious, I thought. Or was it just there from the body's original owner?
    The fact was that I was now, and possibly forever, suddenly female. That seemed at least interesting. It certainly couldn't be worse than I'd been. I loosened the jeans and felt the area around my crotch. How strange, how different it was. I refastened the pants and felt my chest, where, it seemed, two incipient breasts were just beginning to push out slightly.
    I looked at my reddish-brown hand and arm. I was also an Indian, a pureblooded Indian. That didn't really bother me so much, but it did mark me socially. In my old circles it would have been a real plus, but up here—the government controlled a lot of Indian life, and there were certainly people who didn't like Indians.
    Finally I was twelve, perhaps, certainly no more than thirteen. Just edging into the teen years—but there were drawbacks, too. Mentally and culturally I was a thirty--five-year-old associate professor at Hopkins and gradu-ate Ph.D. from Harvard. Goodbye degrees, unless I somehow got the chance and was willing to do all that work again. If I were picked up, I'd look like an Indian escapee from seventh grade. Going through that , at my age, in some Indian orphan asylum—or, worse, being returned to the parents of the original girl—was not something I wanted at all.
    I started looking around to see what else they might have tossed down here. I spotted the tent forty or fifty feet below me, which gave me some hope that they'
    d just tossed everything over in the hopes of disguising the fact that there had been a switch at all. I spotted my pack on another ledge, a little down from me, and, after a pretty precarious climb I managed to reach it. I gener-ally stuck my wallet and other personal things in the pack when sleeping outdoors, both as theft protection and because they were uncomfortable to sleep on. I rummaged around and came up with several things—my spare pair of glasses, for example, which I took out and looked through. My whole head almost was able to fit between the frames, and the world was a horribly blurred, indistinct mess with them. I tossed them away.
    Finally I found it—both my wallet and my checkbook! The wallet contained a little over three hundred dollars in U.S. and Canadian cash, and that was a godsend. The traveler's checks I regretfully had to conclude were worth-less.
    Even though I could sign them—who'd believe that a little Indian-girl