Tanith Lee is one of the most accomplished science fiction writers of the past ten years, in both short stories and novels. She's been so prolific and accomplished that even a sample list of her books would be impractical; this story will give an example of why that's true.
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And the first thing you more or less think when you get Back is: God, where's everything gone? (Just as, similarly, when you get Out you more or less think, Hey where's all this coming from?) Neither thought is rational, simply outraged instinct. The same as, coming Back, it seems for a moment stone silent, blind dark and ice cold. It's none of those. It's nothing. In a joking mood, some of us have been known to refer to it, this—what shall I call it? this place—as Sens-D (sensory deprivation). It isn't though, because when your Outward senses—vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch— when they go off, other things come on. The a/fer-senses. Hard to describe. For a time, you reckon them as compensation, stand-ins, like eating, out in the skin world, a cut of sausage when you hankered for a steak. Only in a while it stops being that. It becomes steak. The equivalent senses are just fine, although the only non-technical way I can come up with to express them is in terms of equivalents, alternatives. And time itself is a problem, in here, or down there, or where the hell ever. Yes, it passes. One can judge it. But one rarely does, after the first months. In the first months you're constantly pacing, like some guy looking at his watch: Is it time yet? Is it time now? Then that cools off. Something happens, in here, down there… So that when at last the impulse comes through Time to get up (or Out) you turn lazily, like a fish in a pool (equivalents), and you equivalently say, Oh really? Do I have to?
"Sure, Scay. You do have to. It's in the Company contract. And if I let you lie, there'd be all hell and hereafter to pay H.Q. Not to mention from you, when you finally get Out for keeps."
So I alter-said, in the way the impulse can assimilate and send on, "How long, and what is it?"
"One day. One huge and perfect High Summer day. Forty-two hours. And you got a good one, Scay, listen, a real beauty."
"Male or female?"
"A/ee-male."
"All right. I can about remember being female."
"First female for you for ten years, ah? Exciting."
"Go knit yourself a brain."
Dydoo, who manages the machines, snuffled and whined, which I alter-heard now clearly, as he set up my ride. I tried to pull myself together for the Big Wrench. But you never manage it. Suddenly you are whirling down a tunnel full of fireworks, at the end of which you explode inside a mass of stiff jelly. And there I was, flailing and shrieking, just as we all flail and shriek, in the middle of a support couch in the middle of Transfer.
"Husha hush," said the machines, and gentle firm mechanical arms held me and held me down.
Presently I relapsed panting—yes, panting. Air.
"Look up," said Dydoo. I looked. Things flashed and tickered. "Everything's fine. You can hear me? See me?"
"I can even smell you," I gasped, tears streaming down my face, my heart crashing like surf on the rocks. There was a dull booming pain in my head I cared for about as much as Dydoo cared for my last remark. "Dydoo," I continued, speech not coming easy, "who had this one last? I think they gave it a cranial fracture."
"Nah, nah. 'S all right. Mike tied one on with the wine and brandy-pop. It's pumped full of vitamins and de-tox. Should take about a hundred and fifteen seconds more, and you'll feel just dandy, you rat."
I lay there, waiting for Mike Plir's hangover to go away, and watched, with my borrowed eyes, Dydoo bustling round the shiny bright room. He is either a saint or a masochist (or are they the same?). Since one of us has to oversee these particular machines, he agreed to be it, and so he took the only living quarters permanently available. The most highly developed local fauna is a kind of dog-like creature, spinally adapted for walking upright, like the Terran ape, and with articulated forepaws and jaw. With a little surgery, this nut-brown woolly beast, with its floppy ears and huge soulful eyes, was all ready for work, and thus for Dydoo.
"My, Dydoo," I said, "you look real sweet today. Come on over, I'll give you a bone."
"Shurrup," growled Dydoo. No doubt, these tired old jests get on his furry nerves.
Once my skull stopped booming, I got up and went to look at myself in the unlikely pier-glass at one end of the antiseptic room.
"Well, I remember this one. This used to be Miranda."
There she stood, twenty-five, small, curvy, a little heavy but nice, creamy gold, with long fair hair down to her second cluster of dimples.
"Yeah. Good stuff," said Dydoo, deciding yet again; he doesn't or can't afford to hold a grudge more than a minute.
"How long, I wonder, before I get a go at my own—"
"Now you know it doesn't work like that, Scay. Don't you? Hah?"
"Yes, I know it doesn't. Just lamenting, Dydoo. Tell me, who had me Out last time?"
"Vundar Cope. And he broke off a bit."
"What? Hexos Christ! Which bit?"
"Just kidding," said Dydoo. "If you're worried, I'll take you over to the Store, and let yah look."
"No thanks, for Chrissake. I don't like seeing myself that way."
"Okay. And try to talk like a lady, can't you?"
"Walkies, Dydoo," I snarled. "Fetch!"
"Ah, get salted."
It took me a couple of quivery hours to grow accustomed to being in Miranda's body; correction, Fern. Sub. 68. I bruised my hips a lot, trying to get between and by furniture that was no longer wide enough for me. The scented bath and the lingerie were exciting all right. But not in the right way, I'd been male in the beginning and much of the time after, and I'd had a run of being male for every one of my fifty-one days a year Out for ten, eleven years. That's generally how it's designated, unless an adventurous preference is stated. Stick with what you're used to. But sometimes you must take what you can get. I allowed a while before I left Transfer, to see to a couple of things. The lingerie and the mirrors helped. It was a safe bet, I probably wouldn't be up (to mis-coin a phrase) to any straight sex this holiday. Besides, I didn't know who else was Out, and Dydoo had gotten so grouchy in the end, I hadn't bothered to ask. Normally there are around forty to fifty people in the skin on any given day. Amounts of time vary, depending on how the work programs pan out and the "holiday" schedules have built up. My day, I now recalled, was a free diurnal owing to me from last year, that the Company had never yet made up. Perfect to the letter, our Company. After all, who wants to get sued? Not that anyone who sues ever wins, but it's messy.
I wondered, as the moving ramp carried me out into town, just what Dydoo was getting paid to keep him woofing along in there.
The first body I passed on Mainstreet was Fedalin's, and it gave me the creeps, the way it still sometimes does, because naturally it wasn't Fedalin inside. Whoever was, was giving it a heck of a time. Red-rimmed eyes, drug-smoked irises, shaking hands and faltering feet. To make matters worse, the wreck blew a bleary whistle after Miranda's stacking. I didn't stop to belt him. My lady's stature and her soft fists were of use only in one sort of brawl. I could see, I thought, nor for the first, why the Company rules keep your own personal body in the Store whenever you yourself are Out. It means you never get into your own skin, but then too, there are never any overlaps, during which you might meet yourself on the sidewalk with some other bastard driving. Pandemonium that would be, trying to throttle them, no doubt, for the lack of care they were taking with your precious goods—and only, of course, ending up throttling yourself. In a manner. Although I didn't like looking at my own battered old (thirty-five) skin lying there, in ice, like a fish dummy, in the Store, I had once or twice gone over and compulsively peeked. The second occasion, not only gave me the shivers, but I'd flown into a wow of a rage because someone had taken me Out for a week's leave and put ten pounds on my gut. Obviously, the machines would get that off in a few days. (The same as lesions, black eyes, and stomach ulcers get g
ot rid of. The worst I ever heard tell of was a cancerous lung that required one whole month of cancer-antibodies, which is twice as long as it takes to cure it in a body that's occupied.) But there, even so, you get upset, you can't help it. So it's on the whole better not to go and look, though H.Q. says it's okay for you to go and look—which is to prove to us all our skins are still around in the public lending library. Goddamn it.
The contract says (and we all have a contract) that as soon as the Bank is open for Business (five years it's supposed to be now, but five years ago they said that, too) we all go Back into our own bodies. Or into new improved bodies, or into new improved versions of our old bodies, or—you name it. A real party, and we all get a prize. When it all started, around eighty years ago, that is, once everybody had settled after the initial squalling matches, Violent Scenes, hysteria, etc., some of us got a wild thrill out of the novelty. Pebka-Sol, for example, has it on record always, where possible, to come Out as a lady. And when he finally gets a skin of his own again, that is due to be a lady, also. But Pebka-Sol lost his own skin, the true, masculine one, so he's entitled. I guess we're the lucky ones, me, Fedalin, Miranda, Christof, Haro— those of us that didn't lose anything as a result of the Accident. Except, our rights…
I try to be conscientious, myself, I really do. But handling Miranda was going to be a drag. She's a lot littler than me, or than I'm used to, and her capacity is a lot less. I'm used to drinking fairly hard, but hard was the word it was going to be on her, if I tried that; plus she'd already been doused by some jack, yesterday. I walked into the bar on Mainstreet, the bar we used to hit in gabbling droves long, long ago under the glitter-kissed green dusk, when we were our own men and women. No one was there now, though Fedalin's haunt had just walked him out the door. I dialed a large pink Angel and put it, a sip at a time, into Miranda's insides, to get her accustomed. "Here's not looking at you, kid," I toasted her.
I had that weird feeling I recollect I had when I first scooped a female body from the draw forty odd years ago. Shock and disorientation, firstly. Then a turn-on, racy, kinky, great. I'd got to the stage now of feeling I was on a date, dating Miranda, only I was Miranda. My first lady had been Qwainie, and Qwainie wasn't my type, which in the long run made things easier faster. But Miranda is my type. Oh my yes. (Which is odd in a way as the only woman I ever was really serious with—well, she wasn't like Miranda at all.) So I dialed Miranda another Angel, and we drank it down.
As this was happening, a tall, dark man with a tawny tan, the right weight and nothing forcing steam out of his nose and eyeballs, came into the bar. He dialed a Coalwater, the most lethal beer and alcohol mix in the galaxy (they say); one of my own preferred tipples, and sauntered over.
"Nice day, Scay."
"He knows me," said Miranda's soft cute voice with the slight lisp.
"The way you drink, feller," he said.
I had emptied the glass, and Miranda's ears were faintly ringing. I'd have to wait a while for the girl to catch up.
"Well, if he knows me that well, then I'll hazard on who he is."
"Win, and he'll stand you a Coalwater."
"The lady wouldn't like that. Anyway. Let's try Haro Fielding."
"Hole in one."
"Well, fancy that. They let us Out the same time again."
Haro, whom I thought was in the skin of one of the tech. people whose name I had mislaid, grinned mildly.
"I've been Out a couple of weeks. Tin and irradium traces over south. Due Back In tomorrow noon. You?"
"Forty-two hours."
"Hard bread."
"Yeah."
We stared into our glasses, mine empty, and I wished sweet Miranda would buck up and stop ringing so I could drink some more. Haro's rig had been auspicious, a tall dark man just like Haro"s own body. But he'd treated it with respect. That was Haro Fielding all over, if you see what I mean. A really nice guy, super intelligent, intellectual, all that, and sound, as about nothing but people ever are, and that rarely, let me add. We had been working together on the asti-manganese traces the other side of the Rockies when the Accident happened, back here in town. That was how we two kept our skins. I remember we were down a tunnel scraping away, with the analysis robot-pack clunking about in the debris, when the explosion ripped through the planet's bowels. It was a low, thrumming vibration, where we were, more than a bang. We were both a pair of tall guys, but Haro taller than me, with one of the best brains I ever came across. And he stood up and crashed this brain against the tunnel-ceiling and nearly knocked himself out. "What the F was that?" I asked, after we'd gotten ourselves together. "It sounded," said Haro to me, "like the whole of Base Town just blew up, hit the troposphere, and fell back down again." He wasn't far out.
We made it back through the rock hills in the air-buggy inside twenty minutes. When we came over the top and saw the valley full of red haze and smoke and jets of steam, I was scared as hell. You could hear alarm bells and sirens going, but the smog was too thick to work out what kind of rescue went on and what was just automatic noise and useless. I sat in the driver's seat, gunning the buggy forward, and swearing and half crying. And Haro said, "It's okay."
"Of course it's not bloody okay. Look at it—there's no goddamn thing left—''
"Hey," he said, "calm down."
"Calm down! You're crazy. No, I'm not just shaken up over who may have just died in that soup. I'm pissing myself that if it's all gone, we'll never get off this guck-heeled planet alive."
The point being that planet NX 5 (whereon we are) is sufficient distance from H.Q. that it had taken our team, the "pioneer squad" every expert Company sends in ahead of itself, to explore, to test, to annotate, to break open for the use of Man, had taken us, I started to say, around thirty Terran years to arrive. We'd traveled cryogenically, of course, deep-frozen in our neat little cells, and that was how we'd get back when it was time. Only if Base had blown up, then maybe the ship had blown up, too, plus all the life supports, the S.O.S.'s— every darling thing. Naturally, if reports suddenly stopped coming in, the Company would investigate. But it would take thirty years before anything concrete got here. Though NX 5 is a gallant sight, with its pyramidal rocks rich in hidden ores, its dry forests and cold pastel deserts busy with interesting flora and fauna, and its purling pale lemon skies… it doesn't offer a human much damn anything to get by on. While the quaint doggies that roam the lands, barking and walking upright, joy of the naturalist, had a few times tried to tear some of us to pieces. Marooned without proper supplies, shelter or defense: with nothing—that was a fate and three-quarters.
"We'll be dead in half a month," I said.
"To die—to sleep, no more," Haro muttered, and I began to think the blow on the head had knocked him silly, so it'd be a half month shared with a lunatic at that.
However. We careered down into the smoke, and the first thing, a robot machine came up and ordered us off to a safety point. Events, it seemed, weren't so bad as they looked. Matters were in (metal) hand.
The short High Winter day drew to its end under cover of the murk, and we sat in the swimpool building on the outskirts, which had escaped the blast. Other survivors had come streaming and racketing in. There were about ninety of us crammed round the pool, eating potato chips and nuts and drinking cold coffee, which were all the rations the pool machines, on quarter-power, would give us. Most of the survivors had been away on recon., or various digs, or other stuff, like Haro and me. A handful with minor injuries, caught around the periphery of Base Town, were in the underground medical sanitorium which, situated northside, was unscathed. There were some others, too, a third of the planet away on field studies, who had yet to find out. It seemed that the core in the third quadrant of Base's energy plant had destabilized, gone critical and—wham. The blast was of course "clean," but that was all you could say for it. The third quadrant (Westtown) had gone down a molten crater, and most of the rest of the place had reacted the way a pile of loose bricks might do in a scale 9 ear
thquake. That means, too, people die.
By dawn the next chill day, we had the figures. There had been around five thousand of us on-world, what with the primary team, and the back-up personnel—shipmen, ground crew, service, mechanics and techies. Out of those men and women, one thousand nine hundred and seventy-three were now dead. What we felt and said about that I won't repeat now, there's nothing worse than a bad case of requiemitis.
Some of them were pals, you see. And a couple of them, well. Well, one of them was once practically my wife, only we never made it that far, parted, stayed friends (cliche). Yep. Requiemitis. Let's get on.
Aside from the dead, there were a lot of gruesomely injured down in the San., nearly three thousand of them. While the hospital machineries could keep them out of pain and adequately alive, the mess they were in required one form of surgery only. The form that's discreetly known on Earth as Rebo, and is normally only for the blazing rich. Rebo, or the transfer of the ego, with all its memories, foibles, shining virtues and fascinating defects, from one body (for some reason a wash-out—crippled, pan-cancerous—what you will) to another, is only carried out in extreme cases. And indeed the business was hushed up for years, then said not to work, then said not to be in use. It happened though, that our Very Own Company was one of the sponsors of the most advanced Rebo (re-bodying) techniques. Again, on Earth and the Earth Worlds, there are laws that limit transfer strictly. (And, naturally, there are religious sects who block the Sunday news abhorring the measure.) In our case, though… we were different, weren't we? A heroic advance guard on a remote planet, needed to carry out vital work, etc.; and all that.
Those were the first tidings of comfort and joy; figures of death and injury and rumors of Rebo. It threw us about somewhat. I noticed that the machines started to serve us hot food and alcohol about this juncture. Then Haro and I got plastered to the plaster, and I stopped noticing. The second gospel came on about an hour later.
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