_Finder_ dream

Had a dream that I waa reading _Finder_ by Carla Speed McNeill. (Well, earlier, I was watching an old Babylon 5 tape, but in the manner of dreams, the experience shifted.) There was a memorable incident where someone was meeting and negotiating with a tribal chief. I don't remember his name, so I'll call him X. X was a very big man, and had his (rather ancient) wife next to him during the meet. After the negotiations were over, and the foreigner had left, X removed the outer layer of his robes to reveal that "he" was actually three slender women!

It seems that, a while back, this tribe had a difficult situation. Tribal law dictates that the chief must be male (mostly due to the neighboring tribes being sexist). The original Chief X, when he died, had three daughters, but no sons. None of the daughters had married (partially due to the fact that any husband might end up Chief, and they didn't see any acceptable candidates in the dating pool). Faced with this conundrum, X's wife managed to convince the tribal Council to accept the legal fiction that X's daughters, collectively, *were* X, and could maintain "his" Chieftan-ship.

That seemed like a nifty enough idea to be worth sharing. I'm not a fiction writer, so if anyone wants to pick it up and run with it, feel free.