The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “I used to be beautiful,” she said.

  Been didn’t hesitate. “You still are.”

  “Please.” She pushed a hand at him wearily. “Throw away the script if you’re going to live here.”

  “Am I going to live here?” He stepped around a tumescent panel and pulled up a chair to face her.

  “He said to me, ‘I’ll give you the stars for a wedding present.’ And I was too young to realize that was one of the oldest scripts ever written.”

  “How old are you now?”

  She considered. “A hundred and forty-one? Forty-two? No, forty-one.”

  “And never been recast?”

  “I’m pregnant, Been. I’ve been pregnant for twenty-nine months. That’s all the recasting I can stand for the moment.” She nodded at the meter-wide yellow panel beginning to dribble from the overhead; in an hour they wouldn’t be able to see one another. “And I live here. In this ‘amazing place’ as you say. Tell me that’s not from a script.” She pleaded with the overhead. “Can’t anyone come up with some new lines?”

  In Been’s experience, that was the kind of thing that people going stale said. Ilona was silent for a moment. Then her eyes fluttered shut. But the babyface was awake and watching him. The medallion had slipped on its chain and was resting against Ilona’s left breast.

  “How does it feel to be gay?” said Ilona. Her eyes remained closed.

  “It doesn’t feel like anything at all,” said Been. “I was a little dizzy back at the party, but that’s because I still have sprites swarming me. Zelmet Emsley claims that becoming gay is a pretty subtle recasting. I won’t feel the full effect for months. Or even years.”

  She propped herself up on an elbow. “So did you have an active sex life when you were straight? I’ll bet Zola is a handful and a half.”

  “You’d win that one.”

  “And you?”

  “I didn’t get any complaints.”

  “Means nothing.” Her laugh was bitter; it left a bad taste in Been’s mouth. “Men complain. Women settle.”

  “I’m not sure that’s right,” he said.

  She let her head drop and her eyes shut again. Several long minutes passed. Been was tired too and he was feeling frustrated. He liked watching Ilona drowse but she’d said that Harlen Quellan wanted to speak to him. Where was he?

  “Time?” He raised his voice, hoping to wake her up.

  The lightboard hatch nearest him went into clock mode: 02:31:12, 02:31:13, 02:31:14. It was later than he’d thought.

  The babyface was smiling at him now. Been stood, walked uphill to the couch and leaned close. “Where’s your daddy, baby?”

  “Grrl, goo,” said the babyface.

  He tried to do the math. If Ilona’s baby had been actually born at nine months, that would mean it would be twenty months old now. What could babies do at twenty months? Talk? Walk? But then Zola had said that the baby had been reembodied several times to keep it from being born. What was it thinking there inside her? Other than having been an infant a hundred and thirty-two years ago, Been hadn’t had a lot of experience with babies. He had spent most of the last seventy years subjective ferrying personalities to the Thousand Worlds on slipships.

  “So, Been, you had an active sex life as a heterosexual,” murmured Ilona, her eyes still shut, “and you’re too new at homosexuality for it to have taken. Have I got that right? Is that why you’re staring at my chest?”

  “Ilona!” The clock on the lightboard disappeared and was replaced by an image of Harlen Quellan. “Don’t start.”

  She sat up abruptly, the babyface banging against her belly. “Why? Just because I’m pregnant, I’m not allowed to want sex? It’s almost three years, you bastard.”

  Been thought it cruelly unfair that he had to choose between hearing more about Ilona’s desires and meeting Harlen Quellen. The captain now presented himself, not quite life-sized, on all five of Ilona’s hatches. He appeared to be floating weightlessly in some private corner of his slipship, beyond the sway of artificial gravity. Harlen Quellen could have been fifty, one hundred and fifty, or three hundred and fifty. His skin was smooth and glossy, his hair green as a dream. He wore his dress uniform as if he had been born in it, the silver captain’s bars on his jacket catching the light, his pants with razor creases, dazzling white foot and hand gloves. He’d had his datacord grafted to his coccyx like a tail and it switched back and forth as he spoke. He was too perfect by half in Been’s estimation; nobody real looked that good.

  “I’m sorry that I didn’t make it to your birthday party, Mr. Watanabe, but the press of ship’s business keeps me busy.”

  “Continuously, Captain?” said Been. “For the entire run?”

  He bowed stiffly. “I’m here now, sir.”

  “I was hoping I might talk to you alone, Captain.”

  “But there is no alone on my ship.” He gestured at the cabin expansively. “Every cubic millimeter is under surveillance. The crew must see everywhere always. That’s our job.”

  “I think he means me, Harlen. Go ahead, you two can conspire together.” Ilona heaved herself off the couch. “I need to use the bathroom anyway.”

  Been waited until the hatch to the head slid shut. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Captain.”

  “Yes, Mr. Watanabe,” he said dryly. “Forty-seven messages sent by you, all of them ignored by me. You’ve asked every member of my crew about me. You are now pestering my ex-wife. And you’ve had the goddamned nerve to try to speak to my unborn son.”

  “So it’s a boy then?”

  “Sir, I’ve been observing you for months now. What I’ve noticed is that you are adept at steering conversations just where you want them to go. You flatter, sir, and cajole and you will craft a lie whenever it’s convenient. I have a ship to run and have no time for such diversions, goddamn it, so let me get to the point.” He aimed a long foretoe at Been. “What is the expected rate of gene flow from transgenic corn plants to their wild-type cultivars?”

  Been felt as if there were a rope tightening at his throat. “I beg your pardon?” He choked on the words.

  “How do you use fluorescence quenching to monitor changes in carotenoid levels in living plants?”

  He was suddenly dizzy and knew it had nothing to do with sprites.

  “Of course, agronomy is a vast field,” said the captain. “Maybe these questions are too esoteric. In that case, what is the iron component of the synthetic hydroxyapatites we use in the Nine Ball’s AgCore?”

  Been sagged onto a chair. “What do you want?”

  Harlen Quellan’s image began drifting from the vertical to the horizontal. “Two days ago, you told Zelmet Emsley that you’re no longer sure that you’re a Consensualist. I say that you never were one. Neither are you a goddamned genetic agronomist. Yet when you passed through Immigration on Nonny’s Home, you gave a sworn statement to that effect. It is one thing to lie to these colonists, sir. It is quite another to commit perjury to planetary authorities.”

  “I’ve been on several dozen slipships in my life, Captain, and not one of them had a passenger manifest that could stand close scrutiny.”

  “Several dozen, Mr. Watanabe? Not many agronomists are so well traveled.” Harlen Quellan smiled grimly. “My friend Zelmet ran a scan on your brain while you were in our BioCore. I believe he forgot to ask your permission. My apologies. I assume it would not surprise you to know that you have a mindsync with a capacity of twenty-two exabytes embedded in your cerebrum. Clearly, sir, you are a courier. What information are you carrying to Little Chin?”

  “Personality transplant.”

  “For?”

  Been spread his hands and shrugged.

  “Yes. Discretion would be part of your contract.” Harlen Quellan’s tail lashed impatiently. “Well, this is my fifth run to Chin. I can think of several people there who have both the need and the resources for such a recasting.” He laughed. “Consensualism is for the young and foolish, Mr. Watanabe.
Not for the likes of you and me.” His datacord coiled around something offscreen and he drifted off the lightboard until only his gloved feet showed. “I’ll respect your privacy for now, sir, and that of your client,” he called. “But goddamn it, you had better respect mine as well.”

  “I don’t want to go back to live in my old pod.”

  “So I understand. You can move in with Ilona. I’m ordering it now.” He pushed himself back onto the lightboard. “I take it that was your plan all along?”

  Been could not help but grin.

  “Well, you’ve succeeded, sir.” He saluted Been. “My compliments.”

  “If you have a minute, Captain, there’s a business matter I’d like to discuss.”

  “A minute is what I don’t have just now, Mr. Watanabe.” Harlen Quellan shook his head. “You have already taken too much of my time.”

  “Maybe later then?”

  “Ilona!” Harlan Quellan’s image knocked on the hatch to the head. “Are you all right?”

  Been heard the toilet swoosh.

  “Ilona is difficult enough as it is, sir.” Harlen Quellan wagged his foretoe at Been. “Don’t make my life with her any harder.”

  The hatch slid open. Ilona Quellan curled a hand around the threshold on either side and pulled herself through. “So,” she said, “what did I miss?”

  The common name for Rags, Ilona’s pet spider, was a marbled orbweaver. She was about two centimeters long and ate hapless and wingless fruitflies which Ilona raised in a jar next to her terrarium. Rags had a blindingly orange cephalothorax and black and orange banded legs. Her huge cream-colored abdomen was marked with a black pattern that looked like two faces screaming in pain. The spider reminded Been a little of Ilona herself, with her outsized belly and the babyface hanging around her neck, but he knew better than to remark on this.

  While he couldn’t see his way to doting on Rags quite the way Ilona did, he did become fascinated by the spider’s web-building. She made one almost every day, eating the old one so that she could build anew. In nature, Ilona said, Rags would release a line of her webbing into the wind and wherever it caught she would pull it tight. In the terrarium she walked her first line from one end of the glass to the other. She would cross the center of the horizontal line and spin a web straight down, pulling it into a Y shape. She would then spin many radii of nonsticky structural webbing before finally finishing her structure with spirals of sticky capture silk. Ilona usually dropped live fruitflies directly onto the web for Rags, although sometimes she just let them loose in the terrarium to find their own path to doom. Occasionally when Rags built a particularly beautiful web, Ilona would fetch her pet out of the terrarium and spray the web with some gaily colored fixative, so she could save it to a scrapbook. The next day Rags would get an extra fruitfly.

  Been got his first look at Ilona’s scrapbook four days after he’d moved in. She had been brusque at first, treating Been as if he were some naive colonist. Been wasn’t sure how much Harlen Quellan might have told her about him and he saw no need to reveal his secrets to her unnecessarily. But he made no pretense to belief in Consensualism, and, if she had been paying any attention at all, she would have noticed that many of the colonists had stopped treating Been as one of their own. This was no doubt because Henk Krall had been lobbying to ban Been from the Little Chin consensus once they arrived, for being recast without permission and for other acts of egregious individuality. Of course, only Lars Benzonia himself, founder of Little Chin, could call for a consensus on ostracism, but Krall was busy laying the groundwork.

  Lars Benzonia had first developed the principles of Consensualism while a young man working his way across the Thousand Worlds as an itinerant biographer. It wasn’t until he was hired to write the biography of Gween Renkl, one of the richest women on Nortroon, that he got the chance to put his philosophy into practice. He struck up a friendship with Gween’s son, Acoa Renkl, who stood to inherit his mother’s fortune, but had no idea what to do with it. Lars Benzonia gave Acoa Renkl his mission in life: to help spread the harmony of collective thinking throughout the galaxy. The galaxy had not been overly impressed with Consensualism, however, especially after so many of its elders had gone stale waiting for a consensus to form around their recastings. But a century after Lars Benzonia and Acoa Renkl had first met, there were still enough Consensualists to populate a colony on the world Renkl had bought for his friend.

  On the sixth day, Ilona finally stopped smirking as Been stumbled through her common room in creative discomfort. It was right after he tripped over a panel that had not quite finished melting into the deckscape and crashed into one of her low chairs, crushing it utterly. He rolled off the wreckage, and stared at the eight-centimeter gash in his forearm. His blood was pooling in a deck pocket. She grudgingly went with him to BioCore and remained while Zelmet Emsley painted artificial skin onto the cut. Emsley also took the opportunity to run a DNA scan; he pronounced Been completely homosexual. Been did not know quite what to make of this since living with Ilona had only fueled his secret infatuation.

  Even before he had moved into her spare hutch, Been had observed that Ilona was on edgy terms with the crew, who sided with their captain in the dispute between the Quellens. However, she was very friendly with Emsley. They chatted easily. She made fun of the colonists; he filled her in on the latest ship’s gossip. When he asked after Rags, Been realized that Emsley had one of Rags’s webs framed on the bulkhead behind the intake counter.

  “Is she ready for another Rich?” Emsley’s talking head was grinning.

  Ilona shrugged. “I’m not having any sex, so neither is she.”

  “Rich?” said Been.

  “Zelmet keeps a couple of dozen male orbweavers on ice. I call them all Rich. Every so often we thaw one out and show Rags a good time.”

  “Hmm. I have my doubts as to whether spiders enjoy mating,” said Emsley. “I would imagine that pleasure was reserved for vertebrates.”

  “He keeps her egg cases on ice too. If we make planetfall on a terraformed world, I thaw them out and set them free.”

  “Speaking of reproduction, don’t forget you’re due to have the baby reembodied.” Emsley’s thinking head was simpering at Ilona’s babyface, trying to make it laugh. “You almost put it off too long last time. If you go into labor, my hands are tied.”

  “I know, I know,” she said wearily.

  They parted as they left the BioCore. Ilona wanted to be alone and went off to the VRCore. Been was considering whether to lift down to the library to read up on the life cycle of orbweavers when he ran into Nelly. He accepted her invitation to catch the fourth lunch seating.

  “So do you miss me?” Been rolled a wad of drigi noodles onto his fork.

  “Of course we do, Beenie.” She reached across the table to touch his hand. “We had Sandor in the other night and . . . well . . .” She made a lemon face and laughed. “He tries, he really does. Of course, when we get to Little Chin, things are bound to change. There will be lots of trades and turnover. Some of our pods will probably break up and new ones will form. You’ll find your place.”

  Been let that go by without comment.

  “And pay no attention to Henk Krall.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “If you ask me, he should stop talking about how you got recast and think about doing it himself. Zola claims he’s already half stale.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Your friend was so bad the other night at your birthday party.” She sipped darkmeat broth out of a cup.

  “My friend?”

  “The one with the name. Ydt? He really had us scared, pretending that the colony was going to disband because Lars Benzonia was stale. I was ready to stick my head out of the airlock. I can’t believe you actually practice lying in that meetup.”

  “It’s actually harder to tell the truth.” As soon as he said it, he realized that it was true. Been had been surprising himself lately.

  Nelly laughed. “How’s
it going with Ilona? Zola says she’s all right, but she makes me itch. I mean, it’s not only the captain she’s holding hostage, but it’s her own baby too.”

  “We get along all right, I suppose. I like her, although she’s not the friendliest person I’ve ever roomed with. It’s just that she’s lonely and that’s made her hard.”

  “Well, you’re good company. Cheer her up. Tell her some of your lies.”

  Been had no chance to cheer Ilona up either that day or the next. She seemed preoccupied, absent even when she sprawled across from him in their common room. It wasn’t until late on the eighth day that she appeared on the threshold of his hutch and said that she couldn’t sleep. She was going to the cafeteria to catch the end of the sixth dinner seating. Did he want anything? He saw that it was only 23:12 and said that he’d go with her for a snack.

  “It’s such an old story,” she said. “It’s embarrassing, actually.” Her hands were wrapped around a mug of coffee. The cafeteria was only about a third full at the end of the day and they were sitting alone at a corner table. “When we talked about the pregnancy, I thought it might bring us together. I was feeling like the backup wife.” She made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh. “No, not even.” She counted on her fingers. “Ship first, crew second, passengers third, Ilona a distant fourth.”

  Been gave her a sympathetic groan and dipped his spoon into his salak yogurt.

  “Nobody can force me to have this baby,” she said. “He tried to take me to court on Kenning and they laughed him right onto the street. The law is that the baby is me until it’s born and Harlen Quellan can’t make me do anything to myself.”

  “Why do you always call the baby it? He’s a boy, no?”

  “Of course it’s a boy!” She spoke so fiercely that the babyface woke up and cast its pale blue light onto her hands.

  “We don’t have to talk about this if it upsets you.”

  “It doesn’t, Been; we’re divorced.” She ran a finger around the rim of her cup. “After I was pregnant I found out that he’d been sleeping with Kinder Shwaa. He said it had been over months before, but still. He hired her to replace me in the cafeteria after we got married. The sexy first steward on a slipship. Orgasms in space! Another cliché, straight out of cheap VR comix. I made him fire her.” She stood up. “I’m done here.” She hadn’t drunk any of the coffee.