Hopscotch

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The Sharetaker recruits kept busy with menial tasks. One woman stroked a spraybrush over a dried blood smear where Teresa had held herself upright the night before.

  Inside the open-structured quarters, Eduard stalked past curious cult members without saying a word. The Sharetakers stared at him, intrigued. They were used to an endlessly changing succession of bodies and identities, but a form as impressive as the Samoan’s was unforgettable.

  One lantern-jawed man stepped in front of him. “Welcome! I can answer questions, if you’d like. Have you come to join our group?”

  Eduard glowered at him, remembering this man as one of the people who had hurled insults at Teresa. “I want to see Rhys.”

  The lantern-jawed man flicked a glance over his shoulder through skeletal arches and halls. “I . . . I think he’s busy.”

  “No problem. I’ll find him myself.”

  Inside an area strewn with rugs and pillows, he found Rhys busily having sex with another Sharetaker. Eduard clenched his fists at his sides. Rhys had wasted no time in choosing his next victim.

  Grunting, sweating, the two thrashed about, oblivious to anyone who might have been watching. Sharetakers were accustomed to being out in the open. The woman rode on top, her head flung back, blond hair tickling her shoulder blades, her mouth open in ecstasy.

  “Which one of you is Rhys?” Eduard demanded, satisfied to see them twitch with surprise.

  The woman slid off the redheaded man. Her eyes were hard and narrow. Without answering, she reached down to look at her man’s face, touching him. After they swapped, the redheaded man sat up, annoyed at the interruption. “I’m Rhys. What the hell do you want?”

  “I’m a friend of Teresa’s.” Eduard balled both fists. Each one looked the size of the abusive man’s head. “Maybe you remember her?”

  Rhys shoved the woman away as he scrambled to his feet. Naked, she fled toward the other Sharetakers. “So? What the hell do you want?”

  In Tanu’s body, Eduard outweighed Rhys by about two hundred pounds and stood a foot taller. “What I want is to beat the shit out of you . . . just like you did to Teresa.”

  Rhys swallowed and backed against an exterior wall. “You’re outnumbered here. The Sharetakers are a group. We stick together.” He put up his fists in a pathetic attempt to defend himself.

  “Just like you all stood by Teresa?”

  Two of the other Sharetakers clenched their fists and took a step forward, but Eduard whirled on them. He knew it had been foolhardy to come here alone, even in Tanu’s massive body. Normally he would have been more calculating . . . but this was for a friend. For Teresa. With one look at the fury on his face, the would-be defenders hesitated, and all their resistance scattered.

  The redheaded man, still naked and sweaty from sex, made a break for it, trying to slip past his attacker. Eduard stuck out one of his muscular arms like a boat oar that tumbled Rhys backward. He then picked the man up by the throat and slammed him against the wall.

  Rhys flailed, kicking out with his bare feet. Eduard punched him in the stomach with more force than he knew he possessed. Rhys coughed an explosive breath, then dropped to the floor. He rolled over, got to his knees, and vomited.

  “Personally, I’ve never had any desire to pick on people smaller than myself,” Eduard said in a low voice, “but you’ve made me reconsider.”

  Rhys tried to crawl away, scuttling on his hands and knees. Eduard kicked him square on the buttocks, which made Rhys skid across the floor on his face and chest.

  “Stop! Help me!” Several Sharetakers hurried forward, looking at their leader, but the large angry Samoan held them at bay.

  “They won’t help you any more than they helped Teresa.” Eduard watched as they scuttled off like rodents. “They’re no good for anything but watching.” He hauled Rhys back to his feet, and the leader’s legs turned to water.

  “What do you want?” His eyes were wide and desperate. “I’ll give you—”

  “You can’t give Teresa her innocence back.” Eduard hauled off and punched him in the face. “Rhys.” Blood sprayed from the leader’s smashed nose and split lip. Not fully aware of his new strength, Eduard held up the redhead and struck again, feeling teeth break and bone crack.

  He shook his hand, then punched a third time. “Rhys. I want to keep saying your name out loud so that I’ll always connect that name with the sound of my fist slamming into your body.” Then Eduard hit him with the other weapon he had. “Or should I say Robertha?”

  Wailing, spitting blood and broken teeth, the redhead collapsed to the floor, shocked to hear the old name. “Did you get tired of sabotage and terrorism? The Beetles know where you are.” Eduard let go of the redhead’s body as if he had soiled his hands.

  “Why did you pick Teresa? Did she give too much? Did you choose the most inoffensive person in your enclave? She is so caring and loving and . . . unsuspecting. A ripe target for someone like you.” He grabbed Rhys’s red hair, pulling his head up. “Or do you just like picking on women?”

  “You don’t understand anything about women.” Rhys/Robertha touched blood on his lips, looked at his finger as if the color frightened him. His words were slurred through a battered mouth. “Not everyone gets the sheltered, naïve life your precious Teresa had.”

  Eduard couldn’t believe the man wanted to have this conversation, now, in his condition. “Teresa has more love to give than you’ll see in your entire life.”

  He couldn’t even articulate how vile he found this person, but he glowered, knowing the Samoan’s wide face and flared nostrils looked intimidating. He took another massive step forward and watched as the leader wet himself, pulling up knees and trying to shrink into a ball of garbage. Eduard let him crawl toward the main room, watching how he moved as if on a carpet of broken glass, how he left a pattern of blood and urine like a slug’s trail on the floor. He followed, one step behind him.

  Finding reserves of energy somewhere, using adrenaline to push back the pain of his injuries, Rhys snatched a small sledgehammer near the wall and swung the wicked club toward Eduard’s knees.

  He saw the blow coming and jumped out of the way. Tanu’s body was large and lumbering, but his muscles were strong, and he skipped just out of the arc of the swing.

  The momentum of Rhys’s unconnected blow made the redheaded man fall sideways. Moving quickly, Eduard stomped hard on the hand that had grasped the hammer. With Tanu’s more than four hundred pounds, his heel shattered all the bones in Rhys’s hand and wrist.

  The redhead screamed.

  Eduard yanked the heavy hammer from the man’s grip. Rhys’s wrist now had the flexibility of a licorice whip.

  Seeing a bloodred haze, Eduard raised the hammer. He thought of how Rhys had broken Teresa’s collarbone with a similar tool, how he had kicked her, cracked her ribs, snapped her wrist. His muscles tensed.

  Rhys looked up at him with the wide eyes of a sheep in a slaughterhouse. One blow to the head with the pointed end of the sledge—

  “You’re not worth the effort. Not in the least.” Instead, Eduard threw the heavy tool across the room, where it left a gouge in the fresh wallboard. He had already won his victory. The great cult leader had been laid bare before his followers, naked in his impotence—and none of the other Sharetakers had bothered to help him. How could the group ever be the same? “If your life was so bad, Robertha, you should have learned to be more compassionate.” Eduard turned his back. “Not how to be a better bully.”

  With bloody fists and the crunch of bone still ringing in his ears, he went back to Teresa, satisfied at last.

  27

  As usual, Garth arrived first at Club Masquerade, newly returned from Hawaii and still shaken from his near-death experience. He had already made an appointment to see his patron, Mordecai Ob, the following day, to describe some of the new plans he’d made, the new inspiration he had found.

  Explosively eager to talk to somebody while he waited for Teresa and Eduard, he t
old the Club’s cybernetic bartender how he had nearly drowned, and how he had found a new quest to experience everybody and everything.

  “Aren’t you being overly ambitious, Garth?” Bernard Rovin’s face asked from the tablescreen.

  “It’s doable.” He wandered over to stare at the Hopscotch Board, which made him dizzy with its possibilities. So many choices! The complex listing of swapportunities and “experiences wanted” gave him a broad starting point for everything he had to do.

  Not long afterward, Eduard came in, leading a bruised and fragile-looking young woman. Garth ran over to greet the two of them, astonished. “Eduard! Teresa? What happened?”

  The injured woman raised a cautioning hand as Garth leaned forward to give her a welcoming hug. “I’m Eduard.”

  Eduard’s home-body spoke up. “And I’m Teresa, for now. We’re taking turns in his body while I heal. We’re splitting the pain between us. It’s really kind of Eduard, don’t you think?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Garth reached out to the hurt woman’s form. “Here, swap with me. You can rest inside my body, if you need to.”

  In a normal situation, Eduard might have brushed aside the offer, but he knew Garth’s gesture came from the heart, and he did not hesitate. They touched temples . . . and Garth suddenly felt every injury Teresa had endured, the contusions, the snapped bones, the bruises. Even with the pain-blocking medication that fuzzed the details, it was all he could do to lift his mending wrist to synch ID patches.

  In the fragile, injured body Garth stumbled over to the nearest table. “All right, Teresa, but if I’m sharing the pain with you—and Eduard—you’d better tell me what happened.”

  Comfortable in the artist’s blond physique, Eduard helped to settle the aching form onto a levitating stool. Teresa propped sharp elbows on the table. Eduard had to do most of the talking, his voice cold, and Garth could see the anger and hurt reflected on Teresa’s face. Every time she heard Rhys’s name mentioned, she flinched as if at the sound of a distant gunshot.

  Garth remembered the BTL raid on the anti-COM terrorists, how he had frozen in panic when young Teresa needed to be rescued. Eduard had saved her that time as well, without thinking, throwing himself into the line of fire to protect her. “Sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me,” Garth said. Again.

  The bartender’s scarred and image-processed face popped up on their tablescreen. “Sounds like you three could use a good drink.”

  Eduard, in Garth’s home-body, sat up, indignant. “Bernard, this was a private conversation.”

  Rovin’s image smiled placatingly. “Part of my job is to listen to the customers’ problems.”

  Eduard marched up to the main bar, behind which the bartender’s organic remnants hid. Garth winced in his chair and mumbled to Teresa, “I don’t know why he thinks he’s going to have a better conversation down there than right here from the screen.”

  “Neither do I,” Rovin’s image said from the table.

  Eduard leaned over the bar to get as close as he could to the sealed door of the control room. Behind there, what remained of the man sat implanted in a mobile life-support system. “All right, Bernard, quid pro quo. Let’s hear your story. How did you get to be this multiplexed, cybernetic hodgepodge?”

  Rovin chuckled from one of the screens in the bar surface. “All right, my friend—it’s a deal. But you head on back to your table, so I can tell you all at the same time . . . and we can have some measure of privacy.”

  When Eduard returned, his small lilt of a smile suggested that his indignation had mostly been an act. Rovin’s image paused as his other “parts” continued to cater to various customers. As soon as he had the multiprocessing sorted out, he began to tell his tale.

  “When I was younger, I used to come in here as a customer, wild in the body-swapping scene. Hopscotching from body to body, having a grand old time. Wasn’t worried about slippage in the least. Never thought anything bad could happen to me.

  “Then, a few years ago I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, flying too close to a terrorist bombing near the flower market. My hovercar crashed in a truly spectacular wreck—or so they tell me. I was unconscious at the time. Some people called me a lucky survivor.”

  “It was spectacular, all right,” Eduard said with a gasp. “A topaz-blue hovercar? I used the distraction to steal a bouquet for Teresa. Daragon felt guilty about it for a month.”

  “Well, I’m glad somebody benefited from my accident.”

  Rovin’s duplicate images on other tablescreens continued talking with customers, taking their orders, making parallel chitchat. His cybernetic arms and hands worked busily mixing drinks.

  “The crash left me a mangled lump. I’d spent all my credits on fast living, and I didn’t have any resources left to lease myself a new body . . . not that I was likely to find anyone willing to swap with me at any price.”

  Eduard brooded, squeezing his fists tighter. “Score another victim for Robertha Chambers, or Rhys. If it’s any consolation, Bernard—” He told Rovin how he had pummeled the renegade terrorist into a bloody lump, since the BTL didn’t seem to care about finding her. “Sometimes you can’t wait for the law. Not when somebody’s hurting you.”

  As he sat at the table, Garth felt the bruises in Teresa’s slender body, the knitting bones, the deep soreness. He couldn’t imagine the flaming agony Rovin had endured. “So what did you do after the accident, Bernard?”

  “Well, I’d known the owner of Club Masquerade, and he made me a proposal, not that I had any choice at that point. I came here to be installed—literally—as the Club’s permanent bartender, linked up to these prosthetics. With multiple arms and eyes, and a lot of concentration, I could watch over the entire Club and all its different rooms, all by myself. Not only did that save the salaries of numerous employees, it also added one more gimmick to this place. You wouldn’t believe how many people come here just to watch me work.”

  “Don’t you feel exploited?” Teresa asked.

  “Exploited? I’m fully recovered, healed inside and out, and content with the fact. Where else would I get an opportunity like this?”

  “Do you ever leave here?” Garth asked. “Ever go outside to see what you’re missing?”

  “I’m not missing anything. I’ve had plenty of experiences already. Here, I can observe a thousand lives from the safety of my own.” Rovin’s image smiled. “I delight in watching other people—like you three.”

  Teresa sat stiffly in Eduard’s body, frowning. “I’d rather have watched a few things, instead of experiencing them myself.”

  “We’ll help you, Teresa.” Garth focused on her again. “Any way we can.”

  She reached over to touch the bruised, waifish body. It would have to be her home-body from now on, since she had lost her original form and had no idea where to look for it. “Oh, I know. And thank you. But sometimes I need to do things for myself.”

  She and Garth and Eduard swapped and swapped again until they were in their own forms once more. Garth felt a pang watching her wince, faced again with her slow-healing pain. Teresa was strong inside, but she wouldn’t hesitate to ask for assistance, if she genuinely needed it. Not from them.

  Eduard stood. “Come on, Teresa. Let’s get you back to my place so you can rest.”

  “I’m tired of being a burden, even on you, Eduard. The sooner I’m on my feet again—and independent—the happier I’ll be.”

  Garth didn’t know what to do. Seeing Teresa’s loss of innocence and good cheer made him want to cry. He had felt her deep bodily ache, but could not so easily feel her heart’s anguish, the dark shame of what had befallen her.

  But he needed to feel it somehow, for the good of his artwork.

  Arms linked, the three friends prepared to leave. For just a moment, in a pause between fixing drinks and making conversation, the cybernetic bartender lifted every one of his mechanical arms around the Club to wave goodbye.

  28

 
The very idea of life and all its unexplored terrain unfolded before him like a treasure map. Garth needed to understand so many obvious things he had never thought about before. Sitting alone in a retro coffee shop and drinking strong espresso, he figured that the best thing would be to compile a list of experiences he wanted to acquire. A formal plan for his artistic growth.

  The List.

  A month earlier, using a frugal amount of the credits Mordecai Ob had given him, Garth had purchased an inexpensive used datapad from a group of Sharetakers selling odds and ends on the street corner. He had gone to visit Teresa, and at the time he’d been hoping to help her, but now he felt guilty about it. The abusive group didn’t deserve his support in any way.

  He sat under the coffee shop’s green awning, sipping from a tiny porcelain cup. He let his thoughts wander, mulling over new ideas, the breadth of what he needed to learn. Possibilities and possibilities.

  Through hopscotching, Garth could actually be different people, from the ugly to the sublime. It was an opportunity the great classical artists had never had. His art had to speak to each man and woman, to all of humanity. Therefore, he must experience every facet of the human condition from the point of view of each individual, not just as an outside observer.

  Nursing his espresso, Garth recorded ideas on the datapad. The magnitude of the task gave him a headache, but he scribed so quickly, adding new ideas, that his fingers were a blur. It was both exciting and overwhelming.

  He would slog through his List one item at a time. He had to comprehend being a man, being a woman. Was there any difference inside, in the heart and the soul, or just societal training from childhood in his home-body? If he could swap genders at will, was he still somehow fundamentally male, or did all the differences ride on the chromosomes and hormone cocktails of the cells?