Now, an ego that's transferred, where doth it go? It goeth into another body, natch. Fine. Generally it's a grown body— android—tissue and cells. That can take anything from a trio of months to a year, dependent on format and specifications, and, let it be whispered, on the amount of butter you can spread. Sometimes, too, there have allegedly been transfers into the recently dead bodies of others. (There is supposed to be a gal in Appeline, New Earth, who bought her way into the pumped-out body of a movie star, dead of an overdose. Apocryphal perhaps.) Or even of animals. (There's a poem about that one: Please, God, make of me a panther, A pretty panther, to please me, Pretty please, Hexos or Javeh or Pan, There is no God but the god who can— Make me a panther, please.)
That—I mean, grown androids—is what should have happened here. Approaching three thousand bodies for those that, alive only on support systems, needed them. Trouble was— you guessed it—the tissue banks that would have begun the project were over in Westtown and blown to tomorrow. It would take thirty years to get us some more.
The only facilities they had were the remains of the cryogenic storage (the ship had caught the blast), whole if depleted berths for about two hundred, into which three thousand persons were not going to fit. And another outfit, of which we knew little, but which would act, apparently, as the interim point of the transferral operation, a kind of waiting room between bodies. Mostly, a transfer flashes the subject through that place so fast it's just a nonstop station on the way. Yet, this area, too, was it seemed capable of storing. Storing an ego. And its capacity was unlimited.
Just as requiems can be tedious, rehashing old action replays of panic and mayhem can get one down. So, I'll just spin the outline for those of us who like it in the big bold type.
The Company, who had gotten word of the latest position via the beacon intercom, had a proposition to offer us. And for proposition, read Fact. For we who are Company Persons know we belong to our Company, body and—yes, let's hear it for laughs—soul.
The Company would like us to stay on, and hang in there. This was how: The survivors of the Accident (and isn't that a lovesome name for it?) about one hundred and fifty people of both sexes, would donate their bodies to a common fund. Now, and let me stress this, around one hundred and fifty bodies put out like pairs of pants and dresses for the use of—one deep breath—over three thousand footloose egos. For the life supports would be switched off and the liberated bodiless egos of the mortally wounded taken into the wonderful—what shall I call it?—place—that stored unlimited egos within its unlimited capacity. And into that place also, would go the liberated egos of those whose "skins" had not been damaged, those skins now the property of All. And here in the place we would all live, not crowded, for the disembodied are not crowded, lords and ladies of infinite space, inside a nutshell. Then, when it was our allotted time physically to work or play, Out we would come and get in a body. Not our own. That would hardly be fair, would it?
Make those who had lost their own bodies for good feel jealous. (For that reason, no one gets finally supplied from the Bank or the Store until everyone gets supplied. Suits for all or none at all.) Anyway, there might be a slip-up. Yes, slips-up happen, like cores destabilizing. Gray vibes to meet oneself on the street in thrall to another. And in thirty years the androids would start growing like beautiful orchids in their tanks. And in maybe sixty years (or a bit longer, we're starting from scratch, remember, and not geared in the first place to do it) there'll be suits for all, bodies for everyone. New bodies, old familiar bodies, loved ones, forgotten ones—ah, the compost with it. It stank. And we shrilled and howled and argued and screamed. And we ended up in it to our eyebrows.
I recall wandering in a long drunk, and Haro, tall and dark and tawny, then as now, and drunk as me, said to me: "Calm down, Scay. They may blow it and kill us."
"But I don't want to be killed, pal."
"Nothing to it," said Haro. "Something to look forward to."
"My God, you still remember that," said Haro, draining his Coalwater.
Miranda's ears had stopped dinging.
"Say, Miranda, would you care for another?" I asked her in her own honeyed voice. "Of course I remember, you turkey. Get killed. Boy."
"Although Sens-D. is a sort of death. You realize that, Scay?"
"Yes. Surely. Only I'm not dead in there. In there stops me getting dead. You know, I was thinking, it's funny—" ("You thinking is funny? You're right there," interpolates Haro) ''—You get in a skin and you come Out and you feel wrong, and you feel okay, all at the same moment. And if you stay with the skin a while, weeks, a month at a time, especially if you're working in it—it starts to feel natural. As if you always had it. Or something very like it, even if it isn't like it. Take Miranda here, I could get used to Miranda. Seems unlikely now, but I know from past experience I could, and would. Meanwhile, the—place—that starts to seem alien and frightening all over. So you can hardly stand to go Back there. And now and then, you need their drugs to stop you kicking and screaming on the way to Transfer, as if you were going off to get shot in the skull. And yet—"
"And yet?" said Haro, looking at me quietly with the other man's dark eyes.
"And yet, no one mentions it, but we all know, I suppose. When you come Out, there's the Big Wrench. It's yellow murder coming through into a new body. But when you go Back/n—"
"No Wrench."
"No Wrench. Just like slipping into cool water and drifting there. I know there's sometimes a disorientation—it's cold, I've gone blind—that stuff. But it happens less and less, doesn't it? The last time I went Back. Hell, Haro. It was like gliding out of a lump of lead."
"And how do you feel about working, in Sens-D.?"
I narrowed Miranda's gorgeous sherry eyes. Haro called it by the slang name, always, and I knew Haro. He was doing that just because, to him, "sensory deprivation" meant nothing of the sort, and he'd acknowledged it.
"I work fine down, up, In there. I do. When they started asking us to work that way, assessments, work-ups, lay-outs— the ideas stuff we used to do prowling round a desk—I thought it'd be a farce. But it's—stimulating, right? And then the assimilator passes on what you do, puts it in words Outside. I sometimes wonder how much talent gets lost just fumbling around in the physical after words—"
"And did you know," said Haro, "that some of the best work any of us ever did is coming out of our disembodied egos in Sens-D.?"
I swore. "Ger-eat. That means we'll be stuck in there more and more. If the sweetheart Company found that out, they'll fix our contracts and—"
"But you just said, Scay, it's good In there."
"Devil's advocate. Come on. Where's the Coalwater you promised Miranda?"
He got the drinks and we drank them, and the conversation turned, because Company maneuvers and all the Company Likes and Wants can be disquieting. There have been nights in the skin I have lain and wondered, there, if the Company might not have arranged it all, even the Accident, just to see how we make out, what happens to us, in the place, or in the skin of another guy. Which is crazy, crazy. Sure it is.
Anyhow, Haro was due Back tomorrow, and I had only thirty-seven more hours left.
* * *
Rebuilt, and glamorized to make us happy, once we were stuck here for a century or so, Base Town was a strange sight, white as meringue against NX 5's lemon sky. Made in the beginning for the accommodation, researches and pleasures of a floating population of two thousand, you now seldom saw more than twenty people on the streets at a time. For whom now did the bright lights sparkle, and the musics play, the eateries beckon, the labs invite and the libraries yawn? Who races the freeway, swims the pool? Who rides the carousel? And, baby, ask not for whom the bell tolls. With the desert blowing beyond the dust traps on all sides, and sand-blown craters of the west, the Rockies over there, frowning down, where weird whippy birds go flying in the final spasms of sunset—Base has the look of an elegant surreal ghost town. It's as if everyone has died, aft
er all. The ones you see are only ghosts out for a day in the skin.
A new road goes west, off to that ship the machines are still working on. Haro and I walked out to the road, paused, looked up it into distance, but made no move to do more. Once, years ago, we all went to see what progress they were making on the getting-home stakes. So the road had occasional traffic, some buggy or jetcar puttering or zooming along, like a dragonfly with wings of silver dust. Not any more. Oh they'll get the ship ready in time, it's in the contracts, in time for the new bodies, so we can all go to sleep for thirty years and wake up home in H.Q., which isn't home. Who cares, anyway. What's home, who's home, to hurry for? Thirty years older, sixty years, one hundred and sixty. And we, the Children of the Ice, are the same as always. Live forever, and sell your soul to the Company Store.
"Hey, Haro, what do we do now?"
We discussed possibles. We could take a jeep out into the desert and track a pack of doggies, bring back a lady doggy and give it to Dydoo (who'd not smile). We could swim, eat curry, nap in the Furlough, walkabout, eat pizza, go to a movie. We did those. The film was Jiarmennon, sent out to our photo-tape receptors inside a year of its release on the Earth Worlds, by the kindly Company. A terrific epic, huge screen, come-at-you effects, sound that goes through the back of the cerebellum and ends up cranking the pelvis. One of those marvelous entertainments that exactly combine action, spectacle and profound thought. I admit, some of the profound thought I didn't quite latch on to. But the overall was something plus. Five hours, with intervals. Three other people in the theater. One of them, the one in Fedalin, was asleep or passed out.
When we came forth, the afternoon bloomed full across the town, a primrose sunshade for two suns, and it was sad enough to make you spit.
"Miranda's hormones are starting to pick up. Did she have crying jags, do you know?"
We walked across to the Indoor Jardin, the one place we hadn't yet re-seen. In the ornamental pond, the bright fish live and die and are taken away, and new bred bright fish put in. Maybe it was the last Coalwater taken in the Sand Bar on East, but I, or Miranda's body, began suddenly to weep.
"Goddamn it, Miranda, leave it out, will you? I've only got you for another ten hours, and you do this to me. Quit, Miranda."
"Why does it have to be Miranda who's crying?" said Haro in his damn nice, damn clever way.
"Well who's it look like?"
"Looks like Miranda. Sounds like you, feller."
"Falsetto? Yeah. Well. I didn't cry since—Christ, when did I last?"
"You want me to tell you."
Belligerent, I glared at him through massed wet cilia thick as bushes. "So tell me, tell me, turkey."
"When the core blew, and took Mary with it."
"Ah. Oh, yes. Okay. Shit."
The pain of that, coming back when I hadn't expected it, stopped me crying, the way a kick in the ear can stop hiccups. You preferred the hiccups, all right?
"I'm sorry, Scay," Haro said presently. "But I think you needed to know."
"Know how I felt about—I know. It doesn't help."
"Sometime, it may. You wanted to be with her. And Company red tape on marriage liability got in your way and you both chickened out. But your insides didn't."
"I used to dream about it," I said sullenly. "The Accident. And her, and what it must've—•"
There was a long pause, and the fish, who lived and died, burned there in the pond like votive candles.
"It's over now," said Haro. "It isn't happening to her anymore, except inside your head."
We sat on the stone terrace, and he put his arm over my Miranda's shoulders, and Miranda responded, the length of her spine.
"Miranda," I said, slightly ashamed, "wants you."
"And I notice the guy I'm wearing today fancies the heck out of Miranda."
He turned me, carefully, because I was a woman and he was much larger in build than I, and he kissed me. It was good. It got to me how good it was.
"We've never been in this position before," I muttered, in Miranda's husky voice. "As the space-captain said to the wombat.
"Never been male and female together, I mean." I elaborated, as our hands mutually traveled, and our mouths, and our bodies warmed and melded together like wax, and the flame lights up about the usual way, about the usual part, but, oh brother, not quite. "What I mean is, kid. If you'd tried this on when we were both male, I'd have knocked you into a cocked cuckoo-clock."
"The lady," said Haro, "doth protest too much."
So, I shut up, and we enjoyed it, Haro, Miranda, and I.
The lemon light was going to the acid of limes and the birds were tearing round the sky when we started back along Mainstreet. I hadn't gotten Miranda too drunk, but I had got her well-laid, and that was healthful for her. She had nothing to reproach me with.
"You're not, by any chance, walking me home, Haro Fielding?''
"Nope."
"Well, good. Because, when I see you again, I don't know how I'm going to live this down."
Heck, yes, I could hear myself, even the sentence-constructs were getting to be like Miranda's. That's how you grow used to what you are. I suppose it was inevitable, the other scene, he and me, sometime. Buddies. Yip.
"Don't worry too much about that," said Haro.
I shrugged. "I'll be Back In. I won't be worrying at all. That place is a real de-sexer, too. Genderless we go. And get Out… confused."
"That place," he repeated. "In. All that labor and all that machinery, to keep alive. When all the time, being In is, I'd take a bet, almost what death is."
"You said that already."
"I did, didn't I? So if that's what death is like, where's the difference?"
"The difference is, there's a guaranty on this one. You get there. You go on. Not like—not like Mary, blown into a million grains of sugar."
"Mary's body."
"Okay. Her body. I liked her body."
Haro stopped, looking up over the town at the glowing dying sky.
"Don't fool yourself. You loved Mary, not just Mary's skin. And though Miranda and this guy here were making love, you and I were making it, too."
"Oh now look—I've got nothing against—but I'm not—"
"Forget that. You're missing the doorway and coming in the garbage-shoot with catsup in your hair. What I'm saying is this, and I want you to listen to me, Scay, or you won't understand."
"What do I have to understand, buster? Hah?"
"Just listen. Sens-D. is—Christ, it's a zoo, an enclosure full of egos—of psychic, non-corporeal, unspecified, unclassified, inexplicable and unexplained matter, that persists out of, and detached from, the flesh. Got it?"
"I got it. So?"
"Death, Scay, is being that same psychic, non-corporeal, etc.—etc.—material—only Out of the skin and Out of the box."
"Yes?" I said politely, to see if he'd hit me. He didn't.
"The place, as you call it, is a birdcage. But look up there. That's where the birds want to be. The free wide sky."
I watched the birds in spite of myself. I thought about our extended peculiar lives in the slave gangs of the Company. Of going to sleep on ice. Of sliding into the place. Of days in the skin.
"That's it?" I said eventually. "All you want to tell me?"
"That's it, that's all."
We said our good-byes near the Transfer ramp.
"See you next skin," I said.
And Haro grinned and walked away.
* * *
Dydoo waved an ear at me as I strolled in, "Had a nice day?"
"Divine."
Poor mutt. He'd been smoking, two trays full, and spilling over. I refrained from cracks about dog ends. What a life the man led, held in that overcoat of fur and fume. It was a young specimen that died up on the ridge, and the robots found it, cleaned out the disease, did the articulation surgery, and popped in Dydoo. Sometimes, when he gets crazy-mad enough, he'll bark. I know, I used to help make him. And you know, it isn't really funn
y. Bird-cage. Dog-cage.
I got ready for going Back, and Dydoo gave me my shot. I wasn't bothered today, not fighting or wanting to. I guess I haven't really been like that for years. The anguish, that had also gone, just a sort of melancholy left, almost nostalgia, for something or other. Beyond the high windows, the night was coming, reflecting on instruments and panels and in the pier-glass, till the lights came up.
"You ready now?" Dydoo peered down at me.
"Go on, lick my face, why don't you?"
"And put myself off my nice meaty bone? You should be so honored. Say, Scay? Yah know what I'm coming Out as at the end, the new body? Heh? The Hound of the Baskervilles. And I'm gonna get every last one of you half-eyed creeps and—"
Then the switches went over.
One minute you are here, and then you are—there—
I glided free of the lump of lead into the other world.
Three days later (that's the time they tell me it was) I made history. I spent two hours in my own skin. Yes. My very own battered thirty-five-year-old me. Hey!
My body was due, you see, for someone else, and because of what happened, they dumped me into it first. So they could thump all those questions out at me like a machine-gun. The Big Wrench. Then Dydoo yelping and growling, techies from C Block, some schmode I didn't know yelling, and a whole caboodle full of machines. I couldn't help much, and I didn't. In the end, after all the lie-check tests and print-outs and threats and the apologies for the threats, I reckon they believed me that it was nothing to do with me. And then they left me to calm down in a little cubicle, to get over my own anger and my grief.
He was a knight, Haro Fielding. A good guy. He could have messed it up with muck, that borrowed skin, or thrown it off a rock or into one in a jeep, and smashed it up, unusable. Instead, he donated it, one surplus body, back to the homeless ones, the Rest of Us. All they had to do was fill it up with nice new blood, which is easy with the technology in town here.
He'd gone up into the Rockies, sat down, and opened every important vein. The blood went out like the sea and left the dry beach of Haro lying under the sky, where the searchers found him—it. They searched because he was missing. He hadn't turned up at Transfer next day. They thought they had another battling hysteric on their hands. No use to try transfer now, obviously. The body had been dead long enough the ego and all the other incorporeal etc. were gone. Though the body was there, Haro was not.
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