And on the fourth day Tanner woke, properly and completely. Untied, free to move, his mind empty of chymicals.

He sat up, slowly.

His body hurt; it raged in fact. It assaulted him in waves that beat with his heart. His neck, his feet, his eyes, dammit. He saw his new toes and looked away for a moment, a memory of the old horror of the punishment factory come back for a second, till he battened it down and looked again (More pus, he thought, with a shade of humor).

He clenched his new hands. He blinked slowly and saw something translucent slip across his vision before his eyelid came down. He breathed deep into water-bruised lungs and coughed, and it hurt, as the chirurgeon had warned it would.

Tanner, despite the pain and the weakness and the hunger and nervousness, began to smile.

The chirurgeon came in as Tanner grinned and grinned, and grunted to himself, and rubbed himself gently.

"Mr. Sack," he said, and Tanner turned to him and held out his shaking arms as if to grab him, trying to shake his hand. Tanner’s tentacles flexed as well, trying to reach out in echo through the too-thin air. The chirurgeon smiled.

"Congratulations, Mr. Sack," he said. "The procedures were successful. You are now amphibian."

And at that-they couldn’t help themselves and didn’t try-both he and Tanner Sack laughed uproariously, even though it hurt Tanner’s chest, and even though the chirurgeon wasn’t certain what was funny.

When he got home, after hauling himself gingerly through the valleys of Booktown and Garwater, he found Shekel waiting in rooms that had never been so clean.

"Ah now, lad," he said, shy of him. "That’s great what you’ve done, ain’t it?"

Shekel tried to grab him in welcome, but Tanner was too sore and held him back good-naturedly. They talked quietly into the evening. Tanner asked carefully after Angevine. Shekel told Tanner that his reading was improving, and that nothing much had happened, but that it was warmer now, could Tanner feel it?

He could. They crawled south at an almost geologically slow pace, but the tugs and steamers had been dragging them continuously for two weeks now. They were perhaps five hundred miles south of where they had been-they had traveled so far, with a motion so slow it was unnoticed-and the winter was waning as they approached the band of temperate sea and air.

Tanner showed Shekel the additions, the changes to his body, and Shekel winced at their oddness and inflammations, but was fascinated. Tanner told him all the things the chirurgeon had explained.