“Of course they’re alive, Mr. Halliday. That’s why they’re called skins.” My tone was as mild as milk, but I have to confess that I was trying to make him feel like a moron. Why not? It was the ninth skin I’d made for him and the ninth he’d thrown back at me. Usually he said it just didn’t feel right—or laid some spurious charge against its self-cleaning capacity, or its analgesic facility, or whatever—without feeling the need to offer a fuller explanation. His fumbling inarticulacy seemed to me to be adding insult to injury.
“Yeah, I know. They have a biochemistry and a physiology, or they couldn’t do all the kinds of jobs they do. But is a skin only alive the way a house or a chair is alive, or is there something more than that? Is it an organism? Has it got a life of its own?”
“That’s a deep philosophical question, Mr. Halliday,” I said, soberly. “A skin isn’t capable of living long in isolation from a host, of course, but one could say the same about many natural organisms, from viruses to liver-flukes. A skin is entirely benign—all its biological functions are designed to benefit the wearer, so it’s by no means a parasite—but there are some natural species that live in benign association with others.”
“Symbiosis, right?” he was quick to put in, to show off the fruits of his research. “You’re saying that a man and his skin are symbiotes?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Halliday,” I purred, with only the faintest trace of sarcasm. “For the relationship to be symbiotic, the skin would have to benefit too.”
“That’s what I’m trying to get at,” he said, triumphantly. “Is the latest generation of skins alive in the sense that they expect to get something in exchange for what they do for us? Is it possible that skin-technology has now advanced to the point at which the critters are evolving on their own account and getting ambitious?”
“Skins aren’t sentient, Mr. Halliday. Lacking minds, they can hardly entertain ambitions. They’re actually more like organs than commensal organisms. After all, we call them skins precisely because they bond to the skin that nature gave you, in order to perform all the useful tasks that natural selection didn’t equip natural skin to carry out. They can’t reproduce themselves, so they’re not subject to any kind of natural selection, and they can’t evolve the way even synthetic organisms can and do. They’re tailored; the only purposes they have are those built into them by their designers. Stand up now, please, and remain very still.”
“Well, I’m not so sure,” he said. “You might think I’m a little bit crazy, Mr. Stitch-in-Time, but I think that skin you’re stripping off has ideas of its own. I have this definite suspicion that it’s not content to confine its medical functions to domestic cleaning and everyday antibiotics. I think it’s been interfering with my hormones for reasons of its own.”
It was a remarkable allegation, but it was by no means unprecedented. People have always been inclined to deny some of their own emotions, to alienate them as external forces. Since the dawn of consciousness people have been only too ready to deny responsibility with the aid of formulations like, “I couldn’t help it,” “I don’t know what came over me” and—perhaps most revealingly of all—“I fell in love.” It’s only to be expected that skins would become convenient scapegoats for that kind of moral cowardice.
The skin was gracefully sliding away from Ritchie’s upper body, letting his real face and his true colors show through, even in the dim light of the fitting-room. He was stirring a little—fission can be very itchy—but he wasn’t imperiling the integrity of the skin. That was one of his few virtues; he might reject a lot of skins, but he always managed to give them back in good condition.
“What makes you think so, Mr. Halliday?” I asked, offhandedly. I was concentrating on the delicate task of gathering the sloughed skin, but not so intently that I couldn’t keep track of his unfolding story. I figured that it had to be a case of cherchez la femme, and I gave myself a metaphorical pat on the back when he continued.
“I met this girl, see. Not in virtspace or at a metalorgy—on the tram to the Control Tower. I say met, but in the beginning I just saw her. I was on my way to Mars, and I was trying to get into the right frame of mind—I have to do that, you know, it’s not just a matter of logging on and jogging off—but I just couldn’t stop looking at her, and I couldn’t figure out why. Her face wasn’t lit up or anything—she was on her way to work, same as me, so she was masked as Audrey Anon. I mean, there’s no rational explanation for it—no reason at all why I should want to look at her. She could’ve been anybody...only she wasn’t. I didn’t get excited, mind. I’m not one of those guys who get excited at random. But there was something drawing me to her like a magnet.”
The skin was almost off now; he raised his feet one at a time without being asked.
“She was on the tram again that evening,” he went on, “and there again the next day, in the same seat. Obviously a creature of habit, slipping right into a slot, even though it was her first week on the route. I got exactly the same feeling...couldn’t shake it, no matter how hard I tried. Next day, I gave in. As soon as I got on, I went and sat down next to her, and introduced myself. I said we obviously lived and worked close by, with exactly the same shift-commitments. She was surprised—which was only to be expected—but there was something else too, right from the beginning.”
He remained standing there, shivering slightly. The air was warm and still, but everybody shivers when they’re skinless. I gave him a soft sponge to wipe himself down.
“She told me she worked for the 3-V company that owns the studios right across from the Tower,” he said, as he ran the sponge over his torso. “She’d been working from home, splicing live and synthetic footage for ads, but she was doing some kind of complex digitization—I don’t really understand why—and she felt she needed a supercomp-station with better display facilities than she had in the capstack.
“I could tell right away that she wasn’t my type at all. Shy and shallow, locked in real time and local space, straight as straight can be. No money, no class. She wasn’t even physically my type. I mean, a skin can only do so much in shaping a face and a figure. I like tallish women with curves and style; this one was short and skinny—like if she stood sideways she’d almost disappear—and she acted exactly the way you’d expect a 3-V splicer to act, too precise by half, without an ounce of spontaneity—as delicate and tedious as the job. I’m not one of those guys who says that as long as the skins are smooth enough you can fuck your granny and enjoy it; I’m really very picky, a bit of a perfectionist...as you’ve probably noticed from the way I keep changing my skin, waiting for the technology to catch up with my standards.”
I’d turned away briefly, but now I was returning with a fresh skin limply draped across my arms. It wasn’t gossamer-light and he was a big man, but it still weighed less than a medium-sized grapefruit. I began to hang it, very carefully. The texture of his flesh was quite disgusting, but a true professional takes such things in his stride. I made sure I had the skin just so before I triggered the melding process that would complete the job.
“And you think that your skin might have had something to do with this...unusual attraction?” I said, making every effort to sound like a man trying to be civil in the face of appalling provocation. I had to help the skin a little, teasing it with my fingers. I didn’t have to tell him to stand still; he had stopped shivering.
“I know it sounds weird,” he said, “but when a guy clicks with a girl, these days, it isn’t just a matter of him and her, is it? I mean, the contact is skin to skin, and lots of people...well, I don’t know what people get up to in the privacy of their own virtserts, but according to rumor...I mean, nobody really needs a second skin nowadays, do they? Some say that actual fucking is really just a hangover from the olden days, when they made babies the hard way—a habit we’d all have shaken off if only we hadn’t figured out how to extend the habit of living....
“Well, anyhow, we got together. Not just once, either—and I have to say
that I’m normally a once-is-enough kind of guy. I don’t get hung up the way some guys do. Even when I do take a fancy, it usually wears off after a couple of scrimmages. A long-term relationship with an asteroid-miner is one thing, because you can really get inside a gimmick like that, but getting together with a person is just friction, you know...well, maybe you don’t see it that way, being a tailor, but for a guy like me....
“I don’t say that I didn’t have fun with the girl, because I did, and so did she...but after a little while, I got the distinct impression that my skin was having more fun than I was. Does that make any sense?”
It isn’t polite to say no to a question like that. Cold denial is a form of brutality. What I actually said was: “A skin has no sensations of its own, Mr. Halliday. It only has nerve-endings which link up to yours, becoming extensions of your own sensory apparatus. Although it can be stripped away, a skin really is part of you. In fact, it’s more intimately a part of you than many of the organs rough-hewn for you by nature. In the old days, when people wore dead clothes, the outermost layer of their skin was also dead, the underlying flesh being in a constant state of self-renewal; tailored skins aren’t subject to that necessity. For the first time in human history, people are wholly and truly alive, thanks to tailor-made skin. Your skin removes malign chemicals from your blood and pumps benign ones in, so it does help to regulate the balance of your hormones, but there’s no sense in which it can be said to be separate from you, let alone controlling you.”
“I know you’re right,” he said, implying by his tone that he knew no such thing. “After all, you’re the tailor—I’m just the dummy. But I just couldn’t get it out of my head, you know—the idea that it wasn’t me and her so much as my skin and her skin. I don’t say the damn thing was thinking, or that it had any kind of desire...nothing that complicated. It was just that the whole business seemed so peculiar. It really was as if my skin were being drawn to hers, no matter what either of us might have had to say about it if we’d been able to look at it dispassionately. When we got together, at least after the first few times, I began to feel that the whole thing was a little weird, maybe even a little unnatural. I truly believe that it was an internal difference of opinion between me and my skin. I knew there was no future in it, that we had nothing in common, nothing to say to one another, nothing to hold us except the rolling and writhing, but the skin....
“The simple fact is, Mr. Invisible Mender, that I knew I needed fitting out all over again. I had to get out of that relationship, and I just didn’t think I could do it while I was wearing that skin. I really felt, deep down, that unless I could get a complete change, I was all dressed up with nowhere to go. Anyhow, I read this article in the Biotech Bulletin, which says the newest models can work your muscles up to perfect pitch, adding ten kilos and more to the average clean and jerk.”
The average jerk, anyway, I thought—but I didn’t say anything of the kind. Like any good tailor, I knew a cue for sales-talk when I met one, and we all have to make a living. Those of us incapable of magical rapport with the ever-faithful but severely time-lapsed inhabitants of the asteroid belt simply have to hold communion with lesser beings.
“You can move now, Mr. Halliday,” I told him. “This is a very good skin—the best there is. It’ll do everything the Biotech Bulletin says, and more. How does it feel?”
“It feels great,” he confirmed, as he went to look at himself in the mirror—the mirror which he’d been studiously ignoring for the past thirty minutes. “This could be the one. This could be the one that’s really me.”
I could see even then that the colors weren’t right, but that wasn’t the fault of the skin, which was one of my very best. It was the fault of the man inside.
* * * *
I half-expected Sally to come in within a matter of days, but she didn’t. When she didn’t appear in six weeks, I even began to wonder whether Ritchie had continued to see her—which would, in a way, have made sense. I even began to wonder whether I ought to feel guilty about it, although I knew it was silly. After all, I knew perfectly well that it was all in Ritchie’s mind, and that the skin he’d made into a scapegoat had absolutely nothing to do with his peculiar infatuation. In the end, though, the day came when the door opened and in shuffled Sally, in her usual shamefaced fashion.
“I’m terribly sorry about all this,” she said, as I started the slow business of persuading the tenacious molecules to let go, “I really am.”
“That’s all right, Sally,” I said, evenly. “Everyone has the right to shop around until she finds a skin that suits her.”
She was still lying face down at that point, so I couldn’t see her blurry blue eyes. Nor could she see mine.
“It’s one thing to have the right,” she observed, “and quite another to find the money. Especially when I know, deep down, that the problem isn’t with the skins at all. You’re the best tailor in the neighborhood—everybody says so. It’s me that’s all wrong. I don’t know why you bother, just because we had a thing once. It was a long time ago. You really don’t owe me anything.”
She was right; I didn’t. But I do take a pride in my work, and I really did want to find a skin that might solve her problems, if they were in fact soluble.
Even before she started to tell me about it, I’d deduced that Ritchie Halliday had run true to form. Once he’d shed the skin on which he’d fixed the blame, his head had had no difficulty straightening itself out. Sally had hung on for two months, hoping that he might come round, but in the end she’d given up. I didn’t know whether to feel glad or sad about that. After all, I’m a tailor, not a matchmaker. There are no matchmakers any more; the world no longer has any need for them.
“I had to use the on-site facilities on a particularly complicated job,” she told me, as I gently stood her up so that the flaying process could get under way, “so I started going into the studios. I met this man on the tram. He really wasn’t my type—big, brash, plenty of money—but he was rather beautiful. I was astonished that he even noticed me. I was in my working drab, face set like porcelain. Heaven alone knows what drew him to me. He was awfully arrogant, always bragging about the slowness of light-speed being no limitation to his efficiency—he operates remotes way out in space from that tower place across the road from the studios—but there was something cuddly about him that made me want to wrap myself around him. Normally, as you know, I don’t bother much with actual people—after all, when you have virtual partners available at the touch of a button, why bother with all the knees and elbows?—but this was different. For the first time I felt as if I might really be getting close to somebody. We had this rapport...we really connected. I know he felt the same way, at least for a while, but there was something in him that kept wanting to pull back. I guess it must give a person a peculiar outlook on life, spending six hours every day way out in the system, where the sun’s just another star. A person like him doesn’t just operate his machines, the way factory-drivers do; he becomes the mind of each and every one, like the queen of some strange kind of hive, and it just becomes normal to have a reaction time of fifteen or twenty minutes. I don’t think, in his heart of hearts, that he ever wanted to come down to earth. Does that sound crazy?”
“No,” I assured her, as I carefully collected the skin that was falling away from her slender body. “It doesn’t sound crazy at all.”
“While he was with me,” she said, looking down, “I felt completely at home in that skin. For the first time in my life I thought: This is what it’s supposed to be like. This is what a skin is supposed to feel like. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe if I’d been able to hold myself back, just a little, I wouldn’t have forged such a tight link between that feeling of being comfortable and being with him. Because, you see, when he went cold on me, I suddenly didn’t feel at ease in the skin any more. The comfort went when he did.
“He wasn’t unkind, of course—at least, he didn’t mean to be. It was just that he broke it off the sa
me way he did everything else, not very gently. He actually got a new apartment, so that he wouldn’t have to travel on the same tram anymore. Imagine that! Moving expenses are a minor hassle to a man like him; they pay him a lot of money to sort out the problems those space-slugs run into if they’re left to their own devices for too long. He reckons he’ll be the first man on the Jovian moons, you know—maybe the first to go swimming in the Great Red Spot itself. It was understandable, of course. What did he ever see in me in the first place? He has lots of rich friends—he knows actresses whose tapes I’ve spliced and whose images I’ve souped up by enhanced digitization. I’ve never even been to a metalorgy. We really didn’t have anything in common. It’s such a shame that I got to associate feeling at home in my skin with being with him. I know it makes no sense, but I just can’t shake off the feeling. I just can’t go on living in the same skin that he used to fondle, that meant so much to him...while it lasted. It’s as if I can still feel the echo of him while I wear it. Silly, silly, silly.”
“You mustn’t worry about it,” I said, as I gathered up the remnants of the tattered shroud. “If only you didn’t take these things so hard, you’d find it much easier to get along with your skins.”
It wasn’t her fault that there was no hope of recycling the skin as a whole entity; even if she’d stood as still as a statue, it wouldn’t have been any use. Its cells would have to be reduced to blastular innocence, returned to the crucible to reproduce and respecialize before being born yet again.
“I know,” she said. “I’m an atavism. I don’t really belong in the modern world at all. I was made to go naked, or to dress myself in all manner of lifeless paraphernalia.”
“That’s nonsense,” I told her. “You’re a citizen of the twenty-second century, just like everyone else, and you have all the time in the world to find a skin that will make an appropriate interface between your inner self and the world at large. With luck we’ll all have all the time in the world—even tailors who’ve grown old waiting for rejuve technology to hit the jackpot. Skintech is making such rapid progress that even people like me, who feel deeply and uniquely attached to skins we put on half a lifetime ago, will have to shed them or be left high and dry by the great tide of human evolution.”
Once Upon a Future Page 21