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specs myself. You never had a chance to practice your craft."
"I remember it quite well, dear boy, and perhaps it was
the will of Allah. I was still learning my art,--please heed
the stress on the word, Hildy--and I probably would have made a
botch of it. But I do recall being quite cross."
"No, Darling, in those days you didn't get cross, you got
pissed-off."
He made a weird sort of smirk, acknowledging the jibe but
not letting the tinkerbell mask slip a millimeter. I glanced
around the suite, and had to stifle a laugh. This was girl
heaven. The walls were mirrors, creating a crowd of Hildys and
Bobbies. Most everything else was pink, and had lace on it. The
lace had lace on it. It was fabulously overdone, but I liked
it. I was in the mood for this sort of thing. I sank gratefully
into a pink and white lacy settee and felt the anxiety wash
away from me. This had been a good idea after all.
A female assistant or whatever entered with a silver
bucket of champagne on ice, set it up near me, poured some into
a tall glass. It was a measure of my alienation from my current
somatotype that I watched these operations with complete
disinterest. A week before . . . well, before Scarpa Island,
however that interval should be measured, I would have been
attracted to the woman. Just at the moment I was effectively
neuter. Robert didn't interest me either. Actually, he probably
wouldn't interest me after the change, simply because he was
not my "type," a word simply dripping with meaning in the age
of gender selection.
Like my host, I am hetero oriented. Which is not to say I
have never engaged in sex with a partner of my current sex;
hasn't everybody? Can anyone remain truly heteroist when they
have been both male and female? I suppose anything's possible,
but I've never encountered it. What I find is that sex for me
is always better when there is a man and a woman involved.
Twice in my life I have met people I wanted to become more
deeply attached to when both of us were of the same sex. In
both cases, one of us Changed.
I don't know how to explain it. I don't believe anyone can
really explain reasons behind their sexual preferences, unless
they're based on prejudice: i.e., this or that practice is
unnatural, against God's law, perverted, disgusting, and so
forth. There's still some of that around, a bit of it in Bob's
old neighborhood, in fact, where he twice had windows smashed
and once had truly repulsive Christian slogans painted over his
sign. But sexual preference seems to be something that happens
to you, not something you elect. The fact is, when I'm a boy
I'm intensely interested in girls, and have little or no
interest in other boys, and vice versa when I'm a girl. I have
friends who are precisely the opposite, who are homo-oriented
in both sexes. So be it. I know people who cover the whole
spectrum between these two positions, from the dedicated males
and females, homo and hetero, to the pan-sexuals who only
require you to be warm and would be willing to overlook it if
you weren't, to the dysfunctionals who aren't happy in either
sex, to the true neuters, who identify with neither sex, have
all external and internal attributes removed and are quite glad
to be shut of the whole confusing, inconvenient, superfluous,
messy business.
As to type, neither Robert or Darling was mine. When
female, I'm not as much concerned with physical beauty in a
partner as when I'm male, though it's only a matter of degree,
since when beauty can be purchased at will it becomes a rather
common and quite unremarkable quality. Rob/Bob's lanky Ichabod
Cranish physique and long narrow physysiognomy didn't set my
girlish heart to beating, but that wouldn't put me off if the
personality traits compensated. They didn't. He was fine as a
buddy, but as a lover he would be entirely too needy. He had
insecurities science has not yet found a name for.
"Did we remember to bring our little specs with us,
Hildy?" he asked. I had, and handed them to him. He leafed
through the pages quickly, sniffed, but not in a judgmental
way, just as if to say he couldn't be bothered with the
technicalities. He handed the genetic specifications to his
aide, and clapped his hands. "Now, let's flutter out of those
charming togs, can't create without a bare bodkin, chop, chop."
I stripped and he took the clothing, looking as though he
wished for sterilized forceps. "Where did you find these
things. Why, it's been years . . . we'll of course have them
cleaned and folded."
"I found them in my closet, and you can donate them to the
poor."
"Hildy, I don't think there is anyone that poor."
"Then throw them away."
"Oh, thank you." He handed the clothing to the woman, who
left the room with them. "That was a truly humanitarian
gesture, old friend, an act that shows a great deal of caring
for the fashion environment."
"If you're grateful," I said, "then you could stop
spreading the pixie dust. We're alone now. This is me,
Darling."
He looked around conspiratorially. All I saw were
thousands upon thousands of Hildy's and a like number of
whoever he was. He sat in a chair facing me and relaxed a
little.
"How about you call me Bobbie? It's not quite so
pretentious as Darling, and not so dreadful and reminiscent as
Robert. And to tell you the truth, Hildy, I'm finding it harder
every day to drop the pose. I'm beginning to wonder if it is a
pose. I haven't got pissed off in years, but I get cross
practically all the time. And there's a big difference, as you
reminded me."
"We all pose, Bobbie. Maybe the old pose wasn't the proper
one for you."
"I'm still hetero, if you were wondering."
"I wasn't, but I'd be astonished if you weren't. Polarity
switches are pretty rare, according to what I've read."
"They happen. There's precious little I don't see in this
business. So how have you been? Still writing trash?"
Before I could answer he started off on the first of a
series of tangents. He thanked me effusively for the good
coverage he'd always had from the Nipple. He must have been
aware that I didn't work on the fashion page, but maybe he
thought I'd put in a good word for him. Seeing as how he was
about to design a new body for me, I saw no reason to
disillusion him.
There were many more things discussed, many glasses of
champagne put away, some aromatic and mildly intoxicating
smokes inhaled. It all kept coming back to Topic A: when were
"they" going to discover he was a fraud?
I was conversant with that feeling myself. It's common to
people who are good at something they have no particular love
for. In fact, it's common among all but the most
self-assured--say, Callie, for instance. Robbie had a bad case
of it, and I could hardly blame him. Not that I thought him an
utter charlatan. I don't have much of an eye for such things,
but from what I gathered he actually was quite talented. But in
the world he inhabited, talent often had very little to do with
anything. Taste is fickle. In the world of design, you're only
as good as your last season. The back alleys and taprooms of
Bedrock are strewn with the still-breathing corpses of people
who used to be somebody. Some of them had shops right here in
the Alley.
After a while I began to be a little alarmed. I knew
Robbie, and I knew he would always be this way, frightened that
the success he'd never really adjusted to because he'd never
understood where it came from would be snatched away from him.
That's just the way he was. But from the amount of time he
seemed willing to spend with me, he was either in deep trouble
or I should feel extremely flattered. I'd counted on having ten
or fifteen minutes with The Master while he penciled in the
broad strokes, then turned me over to aides to do the actual
design work. Didn't he have more important clients waiting
somewhere?
"Saw you on telly," he said, after winding down from his
increasingly tiresome lament. "With that dreadful . . . what's
her name? I forget. More on that incredibly boring David Earth
story. I'm afraid I switched off. I don't care if I never hear
his name again."
"I felt that way three hours into the first day. But you
were fascinated for at least twentyfour hours, you couldn't get
enough news about it."
"Sorry to disappoint you. It was boring."
"I doubt it. Think back to when you first read about it.
You were dying to hear more. It was boring later, after you'd
seen the film three or four times."
He frowned, then nodded. "You're right. My eyes were glued
to the newspad. How did you know?"
"It's true of almost everybody. You in particular. If
everyone's talking about something, you can't afford not to
have an opinion, a snide comment, a worldly sigh . . .
something. To not have heard of it would be unthinkable."
"We're in the same business, aren't we?"
"We're cousins, anyway. Maybe the difference is, in my
business we can afford to run something into the ground. We use
up news. By the time we're through with it, there is nothing
quite so boring as what fascinated you twenty-four hours ago.
Then we move on to the next sensation."
"Whereas I must always watch for that magic moment a few
seconds before something becomes as pass as your taste in
clothing."
"Exactly."
He sighed. "It's wearing me down, Hildy."
"I don't envy you--except for the money."
"Which I am investing most sensibly. No hithrust vacations
to the Uranian moons for me. No summer homes on Mercury.
Strictly blue chips. I'm not going to ever have to scrape for
my air money. What I wonder is, will the hunger for lost
acclaim emaciate my soul?" He raised an eyebrow and gave me a
jaundiced look. "I assume those specs you gave Kiki outline a
plan as stodgy as what you're currently walking around in?"
"Why would you assume that? Would I come here if I wanted
something I could get in any local barber shop? I want Body By
Bobbie."
"But I thought . . ."
"That was female to male. The reverse is a whore of a
different color."
#
I decided to make a note to myself. Send flowers to the
fashion editor of the Nipple. There was no other way to account
for the royal treatment Bobbie lavished on me during the next
four hours. Oh, sure, my money was as good as anyone else's,
and I didn't want to think too hard about the bill for all
this. But neither friendship nor idleness could explain
Bobbie's behavior. I concluded he was looking for a good
review.
Can you call something a quirk when you share it was a
large minority of your fellow citizens? I'm not sure, but
perhaps it is. I've never understood the roots of this
peculiarity, any more than I understand why I don't care to go
to bed with men when I am a man. But the fact is, as a man I am
fairly indifferent to how I look and dress. Clean and neat,
sure, and ugly is something I can certainly do without. But
fashions don't concern me. My wardrobe consists of the sort of
thing Bobbie threw away when I arrived, or worse. I usually put
on shorts, a comfortable shirt, soft shoes, a purse: standard
men's wear, suitable for all but formal occasions. I don't pay
much attention to colors or cut. I ignore make-up completely
and use only the blandest of scents. When I'm feeling festive I
might put on a colorful skirt, more of a sarong, really, and
never fret about the hemline. But most of what I wear wouldn't
have raised eyebrows if I had gone back in time and walked the
streets in the years before sex changing.
The fact is, I feel that while a woman can wear just about
anything, there are whole categories of clothing a man looks
silly in.
Case in point: the body-length, form-fitting gown, the
kind that reaches down to the ankles, maybe with a slit up one
side to the knee. Put it on a man's body and the penis will
produce a flaw in the smooth line unless it is strapped down
tight--and the whole point of wearing something like that, to
my mind, is to feel slinky, not bound up. That particular
garment was designed to show the lines of a woman's body,
curves instead of angles. Another is the plunging neckline,
both the sort that conceal and the kind that push up and
display the breasts. A man can certainly get away with a deep
neckline, but the purpose and the engineering of it are
different.
Before you start your letter to the editor, I know these
are not laws of nature. There's no reason a man can't have
feminine legs, for instance, or breasts, if he wants them. Then
he'd look good in those clothes, to my eye, but precisely
because he had feminine attributes. I am much more of a
traditionalist when it comes to somatotypes. If I have the
breasts and the hips and the legs, I want the whole package.
I'm not a mixer. I feel there are boy things and girl things.
The basic differences in body types are easy to define. The
differences in clothing types is tougher, and the line moves,
but can be summarized by saying that women's clothing is more
apt to emphasize and define secondary sexual characteristics,
and to be more colorful and varied.
And I can name a thousand exceptions through history, from
the court of Louis the Sun King to the chador of Islamic women.
I realize that western women didn't wear pants until the
twentieth century, and men didn't wear skirts-Scotland and the
South Seas notwithstanding--until the twenty-first. I know
about peacocks and parrots and mandrill baboons. When you start
talking about sex and the way you think it should be, you're
bound to get into trouble. There are very few statements you
can make about sex that won't have an exception somewhere.
I guess this is something of a hobby-horse with me. It's
in reaction to the militant unisexers who believe all
gender-identified clothing should be eliminated, that we should
all pick our clothing randomly, and sneer at you publicly when
you dress too feminine or masculine. Or even worse, the
uniformists, those people who want us all to wear formal
job-identified clothing at all times, or a standardized
outfit--wait a minute, I've got one right here, just let me
show you, you'll love it!--usually some drearily practical
People's Jumpsuit with a high neck and lots of pockets, comes
in three bilious colors. Those people would have us all running
about looking like some dreadful twentieth century "futuristic"
film, when they thought the people of 1960 or 2000 would all
want to dress alike, with meter-wide shelves on their shoulders
or plastic bubbles over their heads or togas or the ubiquitous
jumpsuit with no visible zipper, and leave you wondering how
did those people make water. These folks would be amusing if
they didn't introduce legislation every year aimed at making
everyone behave like them.
Or lingerie! What about lingerie? Transvestism didn't die
with sex changing--very little did, because human sexuality is
concerned with what gives us a thrill, not what makes sense-and
some people with male bodies still prefer to dress up in garter
belts and padded bras and short transparent nightgowns. If they
enjoy it that's fine with me. But I've always felt it looks
awful, simply because it clashes. You may say the only thing it
clashes with are my cultural preconceptions, and I'd agree with
you. So what else is fashion? Bobbie could tell you that
tinkering with a cultural icon is something you do at your own
peril, with a few stiff drinks, a brave smile, and a
premonition of disaster, because nine times out of ten it just
doesn't sell.
Which simply means that as many as half my fellow citizens
feel as I do about gender dressing, and if that many feel that
way, how bad can it be?
I rest my case.
#
So I spent a pleasant time fulfilling a genderbased
stereotype: shopping. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
When you get the full treatment from Bobbie, no bodily
detail is too small. The big, gaudy, obvious things were
quickly disposed of. Breasts? What are people wearing this
year, Bobbie? As small as that? Well, let's not get ridiculous,
dear, I'd like to feel a little bounce, all right? Legs? Sort
of . . . you know . . . long. Long enough to reach the ground.
No knobs on the knees, if you please. Trim ankles. Arms? Well,
what can you say about arms? Work your magic, Bobbie. I like a
size five shoe and all my best dresses are nines--and thirty
years out of date, enough time for some of them to be stylish
again-so work around that. Besides, I feel comfortable in a
body that size, and height reductions cost out at nearly two
thousand per centimeter.
Some people spend most of their time on the face. Not me.
I've always preferred to make any facial changes gradually, one
feature at a time, so people can recognize me. I settled on my
basic face fifty years ago, and see no need to change it for
current fashion, beyond a little frill here and there. I told
Bobbie not to change the underlying bone structure at all; I
feel it's suitable for a male or a female countenance. He
suggested a slight fullness to the lips and showed me a new
nose I liked, and I went flat-out trendy with the ears, letting
him give me his latest design. But when I showed up for work
after the Change, everyone would know it was Hildy.
I thought I was through . . . but what about the toes?
Bare feet are quite practical in Luna, and had come back into
vogue, so people will be looking at your toes. The current rage
was to eliminate them entirely as an evolutionary atavism;
Bobbie spent some time trying to sell me on Sockfeet, which
look just like they sound. I guess I'm just a toe person. Or if
you listen to Bobbie, a Cro-Magnon. I spent half an hour on the
toes, and almost as much time on the fingers and hands. There's
nothing I hate like sweaty hands.
I put considerable thought into the contemplation of
navels. With the nipples and the vulva, the navel is the only
punctuation between the chin and the toenails, the only places
for the eye to pause in the smooth sweep of the female form I
was designing. I did not neglect it. Speaking of the vulva, I
once again proved myself a hopeless reactionary. Lately,
otherwise conservative women had been indulging the most
outrageous flights of fancy when it came to labial
architecture, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to
be sure what sex you were looking at without a second glance. I
preferred more modest, compact arrangements. With me, it is
mostly not for public display anyway. I usually wear something
below the waist, some sort of skirt or pants, and I didn't want
to frighten off a lover when I dropped them.
"You won't frighten anyone with that, Hildy," Bobbie said,
looking sourly at the simulation of the genitals I'd just spent
so much time elaborating. "I'd say your main problem here is
boredom."
"It was good enough for Eve."
"I must have missed her last showing. Can't imagine why.
I'm sure it will prove quite useful in the circles you move in,
but are you sure I couldn't interest you in--"
"I'm the one that has to use it, and that's what I want.
Have a heart, Bobbie. I'm an oldfashioned girl. And didn't I
give you a free hand with the skin tones, and the nipples, and
the ears and the shoulderblades and the collarbones and the ass
and those two fetching little dimples in the small of the
back?" I turned at the waist and looked at the full-body
simulation that had replaced one of the mirrors, and chewed on
a knuckle. "Maybe we should take another look at those dimples
. . ."
He talked me out of changing that, and into a slight
alteration of the backs of the hands, and he bitched at me some
more and threw up his hands in disgust at every opportunity,
but I could tell he was basically pleased. And so was I. I
moved around, watching the female I was about to become
duplicate all my movements, and it was good. It was the seventh
hour: time to rest.
And then a strange thing happened to me. I was taken to
the prep room, where the technicians built their mystical
elixirs, and I began to suffer a panic attack. I watched the
thousand and one brews dripping from the synthesizers into the
mixing retorts, cloudy with potential, and my heart started
beating wildly and I began to hyperventilate. I also got angry.
I knew what I was afraid of, and anyone would be angry.
Unless you've chosen the most radical of body make-overs,
very little of modern sex changing involves actual surgery. In
my case, about all the cutting that was planned was the removal
and storage of the male genitalia, and their replacement with a
vagina, cervix, uterus, and set of fallopian tubes and ovaries
which were even then being messengered over from the organ
bank, where they'd reposed since my last Change. There would be
a certain amount of body sculpting, but not much. Most of the
myriad alterations I was about to undergo would be done by the
potions being mixed in the prep room. Those brews contained two
elements: a saline solution, and uncounted trillions of
nanobots.
Some of these cunning little machines were standard, made
from templates used in all male-tofemale sex changes. Some were
customized, cobbled together from parts stolen from microbes
and viruses or from manufactured components, assembled by
Bobbie and assigned a specific and often minute task,
copyrighted, and given snippets of my own genetic code much
like a bloodhound is given an old shoe to establish the scent.
All of them were too small to be seen by the human eye. Some
were barely visible in a good microscope. Many were smaller
than that.
They were assembled by other nanobots at chemical-reaction
speeds, and produced in groups seldom smaller than one million
units. Injected into the bloodstream, they responded to the
conditions they found there, gravitated to their assigned
working sites using the same processes whereby hormones and
enzymes found their way through the corpus, identified the
right spots by using jig-saw-like pieces of these same bodily
regulators as both maps and grapplers, attached themselves, and
began to boogie. The smaller ones penetrated the individual
cell walls and entered the DNA itself, reading the amino acids
like rosary beads, making carefully planned cuts and splices.
The larger ones, the kind with actual motors and manipulators
and transistors, screws, scrapers, memories, arms--what used to
be called microbots when they were first made with the same
technologies that produced primitive integrated circuit
chips--these congregated at specified sites and performed
grosser tasks. The microbots would each be handed a piece of my
genetic code and another piece synthesized by Bobbie, which
functioned like eccentric cams in making the tiny machines do
their particular job. Some would go to my nose, for instance,
and start carving away here, building up there, using my own
body and supplementary nutrients carried in by cargo microbots.
Waste material was picked up in the same way and ferried out of
the body. In this way one could gain or lose weight very
quickly. I myself planned to emerge from the Change fifteen
kilos lighter.
The nanobots labored diligently to make the terrain fit
the map. When it did, when my nose was the shape Bobbie had
intended, they detached themselves and were flushed away,
de-programmed, and bottled to await the next customer.
Nothing new or frightening about that. It was the same
principle used in the over-the-counter pills you can buy to
change the color of your eyes or the kinkiness of your hair
while you sleep. The only difference was the nanobots in the
pills were too cheap to salvage; when they'd done their work
they simply turned themselves off in your kidneys and you
pissed them away. Most of the technology was at least one
hundred years old, some more ancient than that. The hazards
were almost nil, very well-known, and completely in control.
Except I now found I had developed a fear of nanobots.
Considering what the CC had told me about them, I didn't think
it was entirely unfounded.
The other thing that frightened me was even worse. I was
afraid to go to sleep.
Not so much sleep in the normal sense. I had slept well
enough the night before; better than normal, in fact,
considering my exhaustion from the two-day celebrity binge. But
the epic infestation of nanobots I was about to experience
wreaks havoc on the body and the mind. It's not something you
want to be awake for.
Bobbie noticed something was wrong as he took me to the
suspension tank. It was all I could do to hold still while the
techs shoved the various hoses and cables into the
freshly-incised stigmata in my arms and legs and belly. When I
was invited to step into the coffin-sized vat of cool blue
fluid, I almost lost my composure. I stood there gripping the
sides of the vat, knuckles white, with one foot in and the
other not wanting to leave the floor.
"Something the matter?" Bobbie asked, quietly. I saw some
of his helpers were trying not to stare at me.
"Nothing you could do anything about."
"You want to tell me about it? Let me get these people out
of the room."
Did I want to tell him? In a way, I was aching to. I'd
never gotten to tell Callie, and the urge to spill it to
somebody was almost overwhelming.
But this was not the place and certainly not the time, and
Bobbie was most definitely not the person. He would simply find
a way to incorporate it into the continuing Gothic novel that
was The Life Of Robert Darling, with himself the imperiled
heroine. I simply had to get through this myself and talk it
over with someone later.
And suddenly I knew who that someone would be. So get it
over with, Hildy, grit your teeth and step into the tub and let
the soothing fluids lull you into a sleep no more dangerous
than you've had every night for 36 1/2 thousand nights.
The water closed over my face. I gulped it into my
lungs--always a bit unpleasant until all the air is gone--and
looked up into the wavering face of my re-creator, unsure when
and where I would wake up again.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I found Fox deep in the bowels of the Oregon disneyland.
He was engrossed in a blueprint projected on a big horizontal
table at the foot of a machine the size of an interplanetary
liner, which I later learned was the starter motor for a
battery of machines that produced north winds in Oregon.
Machines merely elephantine in size swarmed around the
partially-assembled behemoth, some with human operators, some
working on their own, and there was the usual crowd of
blueuniformed laborers leaning on shovels and perfecting their
spitting techniques.
He glanced up as I came closer, looked me up and down, and
returned to his work. I'd seen a flicker of interest in his
eyes, but no recognition. Then he looked up again, looked
harder, and suddenly smiled.
"Hildy? Is that you?"
I stopped and twirled around for him, flashing a few dozen
of Crazy Bob's Best Patented Incisors and two of the greatest
legs the Master ever designed as my skirt swirled out like a
Dresden figurine. He tossed a light pen on the screen and came
toward me, took my hand and squeezed it. Then he realized what
he was doing, laughed, and hugged me tightly.
"It's been too long," he said. "I saw you on the 'pad the
other day." He gestured at me in a way that said he hadn't
expected what he was seeing now. I shrugged; the body spoke for
itself.
"Reading the Nipple now? I don't believe it."
"You didn't have to read the Nipple to catch your act.
Every time I changed the channel, there you were, boring
everybody to death."
I made no comment. He had surely been as interested at
first as Bobbie and everybody else in Luna, but why bother to
explain that to him? And knowing Fox, he wouldn't admit he
could be as easily seduced by a sensational story as the rest
of his fellow citizens.
"Frankly, I'm glad the idiot's gone. You have no idea the
kind of problems David Earth and his merry band cause in my
line of work."
"It's Saturday," I said, "but your service said you'd be
down here."
"Hell, it's almost Sunday. It's the typical start-up
problems. Look, I'll be through here in a few minutes. Why
don't you stick around, we can go out for dinner, or breakfast,
or something."
"The something sounds interesting."
"Great. If you're thirsty one of these layabouts can scare
up a beer for you; give 'em something to do equal to their
talents." He turned away and hurried back to his work.
The brief sensation caused by my arrival died away; by
that I mean the several dozen men and handful of women who had
transferred their gazes from the far distance to my legs now
returned to the contemplation of infinity.
A sidewalk supervisor unused to the ways of the
construction game might have wondered how anything got done
with so many philosophers and so few people with dirty hands in
evidence. The answer was simply that Fox and three or four
other engineers did all the work that didn't involve lifting
and carrying, and the machines did the rest. Though hundreds of
cubic miles of stone and soil would be moved and shaped before
Oregon was complete, not a spoonful of it would be shifted by
the Hod-carriers Union members, though they were so numerous
one could almost believe they could accomplish it in a few
weeks. No, the shovels they carried were highly polished,
ceremonial badges of profession, as un-sullied by dirt as the
day they were made. Their chief function was safety. If one of
the deep thinkers fell asleep standing up, the shovel handle
could be slotted into an inverted pocket on the worker's union
suit and sometimes prevented that worthy from falling over. Fox
claimed it was the chief cause of onthe-job accidents.
Perhaps I exaggerate. The job guarantee is a civil right
basic to our society, and it is a sad fact that a great many
Lunarians are suited only for the kind of job machines took
over long ago. No matter how much we tinker with genes and
eliminate the actually defective, I think we'll always have the
slow, the unimaginative, the disinterested, the hopeless. What
should we do with them? What we've decided is that everyone who
wants to will be given a job and some sort of badge of
profession to testify to it, and put to some sort of work four
hours a day. If you don't want to work, that's fine, too. No
one starves, and air has been free since before I was born.
It didn't used to be that way. Right after the Invasion if
you didn't pay your air tax, you could be shown to the airlock
without your suit. I like the new way better.
But I'll confess it seems terribly inefficient. I'm
ignorant when it comes to economics, but when I bother to
wonder about such things it seems there must be a less wasteful
way. Then I wonder what these people would do to fill their
already-from my viewpoint--empty lives, and I resolve to stop
wondering. What's the big problem with it, anyway? I suspect
there were people standing around leaning on shovels when the
contract for the first pyramid was signed.
Does it sound terribly intolerant for me to say I don't
understand how they do it? Perhaps they'd think the same of me,
working in a "creative" capacity for an organization I loathe,
at a profession with dubious--at best--claims to integrity.
Maybe these laborers would think me a whore. Maybe I am a
literary whore. But in my defense I can say that journalism, if
I may be permitted to use the term, has not been my only job. I
have done other things, and at that moment felt strongly that I
would be moving on from the Nipple fairly soon.
Most of the men and women around me as I waited for Fox
had never held another job. They were not suited for anything
else. Most were illits, and the opportunities for meaningful
work for such people are few. If they had artistic talent
they'd be using it.
How did they make it through the day? Were these the
people who were contributing to the alarming rise in suicide
the CC reported? Did they get up some morning, pick up the
shovel, think the hell with it, and blow their brains out? I
resolved to ask the CC, when I started speaking to him again.
It just seemed so bleak to me. I studied one man, a
foreman according to one of the many badges pinned to his
denims, a Century Man with the gaudy lapel pin proclaiming he
had spent one hundred years leaning on that shovel. He was
standing near Fox, looking in the general direction of the
blueprint table with an expression I'd last seen on an animal
that was chewing its cud. Did he have hopes and dreams and
fears, or had he used them all up? We've prolonged life to the
point that we don't have a clear idea of when it might end, but
have failed to provide anything new and interesting to do with
that vast vista of years.
Fox put his hand on my shoulder and I realized, with a
shock and a perverse sense of reassurance that I must have
looked like a cud-chewer myself as I thought my deep,
penetrating thoughts. That foreman was probably a fine fellow
to sit around and bullshit with. I'll bet he was a terrific
joke-teller and could throw one hell of a game of darts. Did we
all have to be, to use the traditional expression, rocket
scientists? I know a rocket scientist, and a slimier curmudgeon
you would not care to meet.
"You're looking good," Fox said.
"Thanks. You all done here for now?"
"Until Monday. I hate to be one of those people married to
the job, but if somebody doesn't worry about it this place
won't live up to its potential."
"Still the same Fox." I put my arm around his waist as we
walked toward his trailer, parked in a jumble of idle machines.
He put his hand on my shoulder, but I could tell his thoughts
were still back in the blueprints.
"I guess so. But this is going to be the best disney yet,
Hildy. Mount Hood is finished; all we need is some snow. It's
only one-quarter scale, but it fools the eye from almost any
angle. The Columbia's full and almost up to speed. The gorge is
going to be magnificent. We're going to have a real salmon run.
I've got Douglas Firs twenty meters high. Even when you
force-grow 'em, those babies take some time. Deer, grizzlies .
. . it'll be great."
"How long till completion?" We were passing some bear
pens. The inmates looked out at us with lazy predators' eyes.
"Five years, if it all goes well. Probably seven,
realistically." He held the door to the trailer and followed me
inside. It was utilitarian, overflowing with papers. About the
only personal touch I saw was an antique slide rule mounted
over the gas fireplace. "You want to order something in?
There's a good Japanese place that will deliver here. I had to
train them; this place is tough to find. Or we could go out if
there's something else you'd rather have."
I knew exactly what I wanted, and we wouldn't have to
order out for it. I put my arms around him and kissed him in a
way that almost made up for the forty years we'd been out of
each others' beds. When I drew back for a breath, he was
smiling down at me.
"Is this dress a particular favorite?" he asked. He had
his hand in the neckline, bunching the fabric.
"Would it do me any good to say yes?"
He slowly shook his head, and ripped it off.
#
Lovers of fashion should be relieved to note two things:
the dress was thirty years old and not one of those that was
stylish again, though I had picked it because it flattered the
new me. Bobbie would have gagged to see it, but Fox was more
direct. And second, I had known Fox would destroy it, though
not as a fashion policeman-male or female, Fox was dense about
such things. The main thing one needed to know about Fox was
that--male or female--he liked to dominate. He liked sex to be
rough and urgent and just this side of brutal, and that was
exactly what I was in the mood for. As he gave me one of the
most thorough rogerings of my life I thanked what gods there be
that I had found him during a male period of his life.
Fox was the one I had thought of as I stood nervously on
the brink of Change, and it made perfect sense that I did. He
and I . . . actually, for a time it had been she and I, then he
and I . . . we had been lovers for ten years. I don't know just
why we broke up, or maybe I've forgotten, but we came out of
the parting good friends. Perhaps we simply grew apart, as they
say, though that's always sounded like a facile explanation.
How much growing do you still have to do when one of you is
sixty and the other is fifty-five? But it had been a
comfortable time in my life.
The need to see him had been so urgent I had changed my
plan to do a little shopping on the Platz, thereby doing my
bank balance a big favor. I had rushed home, dressed in the
scoop-necked, knee-length satiny black dress with the ballerina
skirt that currently lay tattered, wrinkled, and getting very
sweaty beneath my naked back, changed my hair color to match
the clothes, sprayed makeup on my eyes and mouth and polish on
my nails, doused myself with Fox's favorite scent, and was back
out the door in three minutes flat. I had taxied to Oregon,
worked my feminine magic on the poor boy and within fifteen
minutes had my knees in the air and my hands gripping his bare
behind, barking like a dog and trying to force him through my
body and into the floor beneath us.
Do you see why ULTRA-Tingle is already in financial
trouble?
Fox usually had that effect on me. Not always quite so
intense, it's true. I was experiencing something politely
called hormone shock, or Change mania, but more often known as
going cunt crazy. One shouldn't expect to undergo such radical
alterations to one's body without a certain upset to the
psyche. With me it's always a heightening of sexual hunger.
Some people simply get irresponsible. I've got a friend who has
to instruct his bank to shut off his line of credit for five
days after a Change, or he'd spend every shilling he had.
What I was spending you can't put in a bank, and there's
no sense in saving it anyway.
#
Afterwards, he ordered a mountain of sushi and tempura and
when it was delivered, fired up the trailer and took us through
a long dark air duct and into Oregon.
Like all disneylands, it was a huge hemispherical bubble,
more or less flat on the bottom, the curved roof painted blue.
The first ones had been only a kilometer or two across, but as
the engineers figured out better ways to support them, the
newer ones were growing with no outer limit in sight. Oregon
was one of the biggest, along with two others currently under
construction: Kansas and Borneo. Fox tried his best not to bore
me with statistics; I simply forget them a few minutes after
hearing them. Suffice it to say the place was very big.
The floor was mostly rock and dirt shaped into hills and
two mountains. The one he'd called Mount Hood was tall and
sharply pointed. The other was truncated and looked unfinished.
"That's going to be a volcano," he said. "Or at least a
good approximation of an active volcano. There was an eruption
in this area in historic times."
"You mean lava and fire and smoke?"
"I wish we could. But the power requirements to melt
enough rock for a worthwhile eruption would bust the budget,
plus any really good volume of smoke would hurt the trees and
wildlife. What it's going to do is vent steam three or four
times a day and shoot sparks at night. Should be real pretty.
The project manager's trying to convince the money people to
fund a yearly ash plume-nothing catastrophic, it actually
benefits the trees. And I'm pretty sure we'll be able to mount
a modest lava flow every ten or twenty years."
"I wish I could see it better. It's pretty dim in here."
The only real light sources were at the scattered tree farms,
dots of bright green in the blasted landscape.
"Let me get the sun turned on." He picked up a mike and
talked to the power section, and a few minutes later the "sun"
flickered and then blazed directly overhead.
"All this will be covered in virgin forest; green as far
as the eye can see. Not at all like your shack in Texas. This
is a wet, cool climate, lots of snow in higher elevations.
Mostly conifers. We're even putting in a grove of sequoias down
in the south part, though we're fudging a bit on that,
geographically speaking."
"Green'd be a lot better than this," I said.
"You'll never be a true West Texan, Hildy," he told me,
and smiled.
He set us down on the Columbia River, at the mouth of the
gorge where it was wider and slower, on a broad, flat sandbar
of an island which was the center of what he called an
ecological testbed. The beach was wide and hard-packed, full of
frozen ripples. Across the river were the advertised pine
trees, but near us there was only estuarine vegetation, the
sort of plants that didn't mind being flooded periodically. It
ran to tall skinny grasses and low, hardy bushes, few taller
than my head. There were some really huge logs half buried in
the sand, bleached gray-white and rubbed smooth and round by
sun, wind, and water. I realized they were artificial, put
there to impress the occasional visitors, who were always
brought here.
We spread out a blanket on the sand and sat there gorging
ourselves on the food. He stuck mostly to the shrimpoid tempura
while I concentrated on the maguro, uni, hamachi, toro, tako
and paper-thin slices of fugu. I dredged each piece in enough
of that wonderful green horseradish to make my nose run and my
ears turn bright red. Then we made love again, slow and tender
for the first hour, unusual for Fox, only getting intense near
the end. We stretched out in the sun and never quite fell
asleep, just lolling like satiated reptiles. At least I hadn't
thought I was asleep until Fox woke me by flipping me over onto
my stomach and entering me without any warning. (No, not that
way. Fox likes to initiate it and he likes it rough, but he's
not into giving pain and I'm not into receiving it.) Anyway,
these things even out. When Fox was a girl she usually forced
herself down on me before she was quite ready. Maybe he thought
all girls liked it that way. I didn't enlighten him, because I
didn't mind it that much and the lovemaking that followed was
always Olympic quality.
And afterwards . . .
There's always an afterwards. Perhaps that's why my ten
years with Fox was the longest relationship I ever had. After
the sex, most of them want to talk to you, and I always had
trouble finding people I wanted to talk to as well as have sex
with. Fox was the exception. So afterwards . . .
I put the remains of my clothing back on. The dress was
severely ripped; I couldn't get it to stay over my left breast,
and there were gaping holes here and there. It suited my mood.
We walked along the river's edge in water that never covered
our feet. I was playing the castaway game. This time I could
pretend to be a rich socialite in the tatters of her fancy
gown, desperately seeking good native help. I trailed my toes
in the water as I walked.
This place was timeless and unreal in a way Scarpa Island
never was. The sun still hung there at high noon. I picked up a
handful of sand and peered at it, and it was just as detailed
as the imaginary sand of my year-long mental environment. It
smelled different. It was riverine sand, not white coral, and
the water was fresh instead of salty, with a different set of
microscopic lifeforms in it. The water was warmer than the
Pacific waters. Hell, it was quite hot in Oregon, into the
lower forties. Something to do with the construction. We had
both dripped sweat all day. I had licked it off his body and
found it quite tasty. Not so much the sweat as the body I
licked it from.
"I remember it quite well, dear boy, and perhaps it was
the will of Allah. I was still learning my art,--please heed
the stress on the word, Hildy--and I probably would have made a
botch of it. But I do recall being quite cross."
"No, Darling, in those days you didn't get cross, you got
pissed-off."
He made a weird sort of smirk, acknowledging the jibe but
not letting the tinkerbell mask slip a millimeter. I glanced
around the suite, and had to stifle a laugh. This was girl
heaven. The walls were mirrors, creating a crowd of Hildys and
Bobbies. Most everything else was pink, and had lace on it. The
lace had lace on it. It was fabulously overdone, but I liked
it. I was in the mood for this sort of thing. I sank gratefully
into a pink and white lacy settee and felt the anxiety wash
away from me. This had been a good idea after all.
A female assistant or whatever entered with a silver
bucket of champagne on ice, set it up near me, poured some into
a tall glass. It was a measure of my alienation from my current
somatotype that I watched these operations with complete
disinterest. A week before . . . well, before Scarpa Island,
however that interval should be measured, I would have been
attracted to the woman. Just at the moment I was effectively
neuter. Robert didn't interest me either. Actually, he probably
wouldn't interest me after the change, simply because he was
not my "type," a word simply dripping with meaning in the age
of gender selection.
Like my host, I am hetero oriented. Which is not to say I
have never engaged in sex with a partner of my current sex;
hasn't everybody? Can anyone remain truly heteroist when they
have been both male and female? I suppose anything's possible,
but I've never encountered it. What I find is that sex for me
is always better when there is a man and a woman involved.
Twice in my life I have met people I wanted to become more
deeply attached to when both of us were of the same sex. In
both cases, one of us Changed.
I don't know how to explain it. I don't believe anyone can
really explain reasons behind their sexual preferences, unless
they're based on prejudice: i.e., this or that practice is
unnatural, against God's law, perverted, disgusting, and so
forth. There's still some of that around, a bit of it in Bob's
old neighborhood, in fact, where he twice had windows smashed
and once had truly repulsive Christian slogans painted over his
sign. But sexual preference seems to be something that happens
to you, not something you elect. The fact is, when I'm a boy
I'm intensely interested in girls, and have little or no
interest in other boys, and vice versa when I'm a girl. I have
friends who are precisely the opposite, who are homo-oriented
in both sexes. So be it. I know people who cover the whole
spectrum between these two positions, from the dedicated males
and females, homo and hetero, to the pan-sexuals who only
require you to be warm and would be willing to overlook it if
you weren't, to the dysfunctionals who aren't happy in either
sex, to the true neuters, who identify with neither sex, have
all external and internal attributes removed and are quite glad
to be shut of the whole confusing, inconvenient, superfluous,
messy business.
As to type, neither Robert or Darling was mine. When
female, I'm not as much concerned with physical beauty in a
partner as when I'm male, though it's only a matter of degree,
since when beauty can be purchased at will it becomes a rather
common and quite unremarkable quality. Rob/Bob's lanky Ichabod
Cranish physique and long narrow physysiognomy didn't set my
girlish heart to beating, but that wouldn't put me off if the
personality traits compensated. They didn't. He was fine as a
buddy, but as a lover he would be entirely too needy. He had
insecurities science has not yet found a name for.
"Did we remember to bring our little specs with us,
Hildy?" he asked. I had, and handed them to him. He leafed
through the pages quickly, sniffed, but not in a judgmental
way, just as if to say he couldn't be bothered with the
technicalities. He handed the genetic specifications to his
aide, and clapped his hands. "Now, let's flutter out of those
charming togs, can't create without a bare bodkin, chop, chop."
I stripped and he took the clothing, looking as though he
wished for sterilized forceps. "Where did you find these
things. Why, it's been years . . . we'll of course have them
cleaned and folded."
"I found them in my closet, and you can donate them to the
poor."
"Hildy, I don't think there is anyone that poor."
"Then throw them away."
"Oh, thank you." He handed the clothing to the woman, who
left the room with them. "That was a truly humanitarian
gesture, old friend, an act that shows a great deal of caring
for the fashion environment."
"If you're grateful," I said, "then you could stop
spreading the pixie dust. We're alone now. This is me,
Darling."
He looked around conspiratorially. All I saw were
thousands upon thousands of Hildy's and a like number of
whoever he was. He sat in a chair facing me and relaxed a
little.
"How about you call me Bobbie? It's not quite so
pretentious as Darling, and not so dreadful and reminiscent as
Robert. And to tell you the truth, Hildy, I'm finding it harder
every day to drop the pose. I'm beginning to wonder if it is a
pose. I haven't got pissed off in years, but I get cross
practically all the time. And there's a big difference, as you
reminded me."
"We all pose, Bobbie. Maybe the old pose wasn't the proper
one for you."
"I'm still hetero, if you were wondering."
"I wasn't, but I'd be astonished if you weren't. Polarity
switches are pretty rare, according to what I've read."
"They happen. There's precious little I don't see in this
business. So how have you been? Still writing trash?"
Before I could answer he started off on the first of a
series of tangents. He thanked me effusively for the good
coverage he'd always had from the Nipple. He must have been
aware that I didn't work on the fashion page, but maybe he
thought I'd put in a good word for him. Seeing as how he was
about to design a new body for me, I saw no reason to
disillusion him.
There were many more things discussed, many glasses of
champagne put away, some aromatic and mildly intoxicating
smokes inhaled. It all kept coming back to Topic A: when were
"they" going to discover he was a fraud?
I was conversant with that feeling myself. It's common to
people who are good at something they have no particular love
for. In fact, it's common among all but the most
self-assured--say, Callie, for instance. Robbie had a bad case
of it, and I could hardly blame him. Not that I thought him an
utter charlatan. I don't have much of an eye for such things,
but from what I gathered he actually was quite talented. But in
the world he inhabited, talent often had very little to do with
anything. Taste is fickle. In the world of design, you're only
as good as your last season. The back alleys and taprooms of
Bedrock are strewn with the still-breathing corpses of people
who used to be somebody. Some of them had shops right here in
the Alley.
After a while I began to be a little alarmed. I knew
Robbie, and I knew he would always be this way, frightened that
the success he'd never really adjusted to because he'd never
understood where it came from would be snatched away from him.
That's just the way he was. But from the amount of time he
seemed willing to spend with me, he was either in deep trouble
or I should feel extremely flattered. I'd counted on having ten
or fifteen minutes with The Master while he penciled in the
broad strokes, then turned me over to aides to do the actual
design work. Didn't he have more important clients waiting
somewhere?
"Saw you on telly," he said, after winding down from his
increasingly tiresome lament. "With that dreadful . . . what's
her name? I forget. More on that incredibly boring David Earth
story. I'm afraid I switched off. I don't care if I never hear
his name again."
"I felt that way three hours into the first day. But you
were fascinated for at least twentyfour hours, you couldn't get
enough news about it."
"Sorry to disappoint you. It was boring."
"I doubt it. Think back to when you first read about it.
You were dying to hear more. It was boring later, after you'd
seen the film three or four times."
He frowned, then nodded. "You're right. My eyes were glued
to the newspad. How did you know?"
"It's true of almost everybody. You in particular. If
everyone's talking about something, you can't afford not to
have an opinion, a snide comment, a worldly sigh . . .
something. To not have heard of it would be unthinkable."
"We're in the same business, aren't we?"
"We're cousins, anyway. Maybe the difference is, in my
business we can afford to run something into the ground. We use
up news. By the time we're through with it, there is nothing
quite so boring as what fascinated you twenty-four hours ago.
Then we move on to the next sensation."
"Whereas I must always watch for that magic moment a few
seconds before something becomes as pass as your taste in
clothing."
"Exactly."
He sighed. "It's wearing me down, Hildy."
"I don't envy you--except for the money."
"Which I am investing most sensibly. No hithrust vacations
to the Uranian moons for me. No summer homes on Mercury.
Strictly blue chips. I'm not going to ever have to scrape for
my air money. What I wonder is, will the hunger for lost
acclaim emaciate my soul?" He raised an eyebrow and gave me a
jaundiced look. "I assume those specs you gave Kiki outline a
plan as stodgy as what you're currently walking around in?"
"Why would you assume that? Would I come here if I wanted
something I could get in any local barber shop? I want Body By
Bobbie."
"But I thought . . ."
"That was female to male. The reverse is a whore of a
different color."
#
I decided to make a note to myself. Send flowers to the
fashion editor of the Nipple. There was no other way to account
for the royal treatment Bobbie lavished on me during the next
four hours. Oh, sure, my money was as good as anyone else's,
and I didn't want to think too hard about the bill for all
this. But neither friendship nor idleness could explain
Bobbie's behavior. I concluded he was looking for a good
review.
Can you call something a quirk when you share it was a
large minority of your fellow citizens? I'm not sure, but
perhaps it is. I've never understood the roots of this
peculiarity, any more than I understand why I don't care to go
to bed with men when I am a man. But the fact is, as a man I am
fairly indifferent to how I look and dress. Clean and neat,
sure, and ugly is something I can certainly do without. But
fashions don't concern me. My wardrobe consists of the sort of
thing Bobbie threw away when I arrived, or worse. I usually put
on shorts, a comfortable shirt, soft shoes, a purse: standard
men's wear, suitable for all but formal occasions. I don't pay
much attention to colors or cut. I ignore make-up completely
and use only the blandest of scents. When I'm feeling festive I
might put on a colorful skirt, more of a sarong, really, and
never fret about the hemline. But most of what I wear wouldn't
have raised eyebrows if I had gone back in time and walked the
streets in the years before sex changing.
The fact is, I feel that while a woman can wear just about
anything, there are whole categories of clothing a man looks
silly in.
Case in point: the body-length, form-fitting gown, the
kind that reaches down to the ankles, maybe with a slit up one
side to the knee. Put it on a man's body and the penis will
produce a flaw in the smooth line unless it is strapped down
tight--and the whole point of wearing something like that, to
my mind, is to feel slinky, not bound up. That particular
garment was designed to show the lines of a woman's body,
curves instead of angles. Another is the plunging neckline,
both the sort that conceal and the kind that push up and
display the breasts. A man can certainly get away with a deep
neckline, but the purpose and the engineering of it are
different.
Before you start your letter to the editor, I know these
are not laws of nature. There's no reason a man can't have
feminine legs, for instance, or breasts, if he wants them. Then
he'd look good in those clothes, to my eye, but precisely
because he had feminine attributes. I am much more of a
traditionalist when it comes to somatotypes. If I have the
breasts and the hips and the legs, I want the whole package.
I'm not a mixer. I feel there are boy things and girl things.
The basic differences in body types are easy to define. The
differences in clothing types is tougher, and the line moves,
but can be summarized by saying that women's clothing is more
apt to emphasize and define secondary sexual characteristics,
and to be more colorful and varied.
And I can name a thousand exceptions through history, from
the court of Louis the Sun King to the chador of Islamic women.
I realize that western women didn't wear pants until the
twentieth century, and men didn't wear skirts-Scotland and the
South Seas notwithstanding--until the twenty-first. I know
about peacocks and parrots and mandrill baboons. When you start
talking about sex and the way you think it should be, you're
bound to get into trouble. There are very few statements you
can make about sex that won't have an exception somewhere.
I guess this is something of a hobby-horse with me. It's
in reaction to the militant unisexers who believe all
gender-identified clothing should be eliminated, that we should
all pick our clothing randomly, and sneer at you publicly when
you dress too feminine or masculine. Or even worse, the
uniformists, those people who want us all to wear formal
job-identified clothing at all times, or a standardized
outfit--wait a minute, I've got one right here, just let me
show you, you'll love it!--usually some drearily practical
People's Jumpsuit with a high neck and lots of pockets, comes
in three bilious colors. Those people would have us all running
about looking like some dreadful twentieth century "futuristic"
film, when they thought the people of 1960 or 2000 would all
want to dress alike, with meter-wide shelves on their shoulders
or plastic bubbles over their heads or togas or the ubiquitous
jumpsuit with no visible zipper, and leave you wondering how
did those people make water. These folks would be amusing if
they didn't introduce legislation every year aimed at making
everyone behave like them.
Or lingerie! What about lingerie? Transvestism didn't die
with sex changing--very little did, because human sexuality is
concerned with what gives us a thrill, not what makes sense-and
some people with male bodies still prefer to dress up in garter
belts and padded bras and short transparent nightgowns. If they
enjoy it that's fine with me. But I've always felt it looks
awful, simply because it clashes. You may say the only thing it
clashes with are my cultural preconceptions, and I'd agree with
you. So what else is fashion? Bobbie could tell you that
tinkering with a cultural icon is something you do at your own
peril, with a few stiff drinks, a brave smile, and a
premonition of disaster, because nine times out of ten it just
doesn't sell.
Which simply means that as many as half my fellow citizens
feel as I do about gender dressing, and if that many feel that
way, how bad can it be?
I rest my case.
#
So I spent a pleasant time fulfilling a genderbased
stereotype: shopping. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
When you get the full treatment from Bobbie, no bodily
detail is too small. The big, gaudy, obvious things were
quickly disposed of. Breasts? What are people wearing this
year, Bobbie? As small as that? Well, let's not get ridiculous,
dear, I'd like to feel a little bounce, all right? Legs? Sort
of . . . you know . . . long. Long enough to reach the ground.
No knobs on the knees, if you please. Trim ankles. Arms? Well,
what can you say about arms? Work your magic, Bobbie. I like a
size five shoe and all my best dresses are nines--and thirty
years out of date, enough time for some of them to be stylish
again-so work around that. Besides, I feel comfortable in a
body that size, and height reductions cost out at nearly two
thousand per centimeter.
Some people spend most of their time on the face. Not me.
I've always preferred to make any facial changes gradually, one
feature at a time, so people can recognize me. I settled on my
basic face fifty years ago, and see no need to change it for
current fashion, beyond a little frill here and there. I told
Bobbie not to change the underlying bone structure at all; I
feel it's suitable for a male or a female countenance. He
suggested a slight fullness to the lips and showed me a new
nose I liked, and I went flat-out trendy with the ears, letting
him give me his latest design. But when I showed up for work
after the Change, everyone would know it was Hildy.
I thought I was through . . . but what about the toes?
Bare feet are quite practical in Luna, and had come back into
vogue, so people will be looking at your toes. The current rage
was to eliminate them entirely as an evolutionary atavism;
Bobbie spent some time trying to sell me on Sockfeet, which
look just like they sound. I guess I'm just a toe person. Or if
you listen to Bobbie, a Cro-Magnon. I spent half an hour on the
toes, and almost as much time on the fingers and hands. There's
nothing I hate like sweaty hands.
I put considerable thought into the contemplation of
navels. With the nipples and the vulva, the navel is the only
punctuation between the chin and the toenails, the only places
for the eye to pause in the smooth sweep of the female form I
was designing. I did not neglect it. Speaking of the vulva, I
once again proved myself a hopeless reactionary. Lately,
otherwise conservative women had been indulging the most
outrageous flights of fancy when it came to labial
architecture, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to
be sure what sex you were looking at without a second glance. I
preferred more modest, compact arrangements. With me, it is
mostly not for public display anyway. I usually wear something
below the waist, some sort of skirt or pants, and I didn't want
to frighten off a lover when I dropped them.
"You won't frighten anyone with that, Hildy," Bobbie said,
looking sourly at the simulation of the genitals I'd just spent
so much time elaborating. "I'd say your main problem here is
boredom."
"It was good enough for Eve."
"I must have missed her last showing. Can't imagine why.
I'm sure it will prove quite useful in the circles you move in,
but are you sure I couldn't interest you in--"
"I'm the one that has to use it, and that's what I want.
Have a heart, Bobbie. I'm an oldfashioned girl. And didn't I
give you a free hand with the skin tones, and the nipples, and
the ears and the shoulderblades and the collarbones and the ass
and those two fetching little dimples in the small of the
back?" I turned at the waist and looked at the full-body
simulation that had replaced one of the mirrors, and chewed on
a knuckle. "Maybe we should take another look at those dimples
. . ."
He talked me out of changing that, and into a slight
alteration of the backs of the hands, and he bitched at me some
more and threw up his hands in disgust at every opportunity,
but I could tell he was basically pleased. And so was I. I
moved around, watching the female I was about to become
duplicate all my movements, and it was good. It was the seventh
hour: time to rest.
And then a strange thing happened to me. I was taken to
the prep room, where the technicians built their mystical
elixirs, and I began to suffer a panic attack. I watched the
thousand and one brews dripping from the synthesizers into the
mixing retorts, cloudy with potential, and my heart started
beating wildly and I began to hyperventilate. I also got angry.
I knew what I was afraid of, and anyone would be angry.
Unless you've chosen the most radical of body make-overs,
very little of modern sex changing involves actual surgery. In
my case, about all the cutting that was planned was the removal
and storage of the male genitalia, and their replacement with a
vagina, cervix, uterus, and set of fallopian tubes and ovaries
which were even then being messengered over from the organ
bank, where they'd reposed since my last Change. There would be
a certain amount of body sculpting, but not much. Most of the
myriad alterations I was about to undergo would be done by the
potions being mixed in the prep room. Those brews contained two
elements: a saline solution, and uncounted trillions of
nanobots.
Some of these cunning little machines were standard, made
from templates used in all male-tofemale sex changes. Some were
customized, cobbled together from parts stolen from microbes
and viruses or from manufactured components, assembled by
Bobbie and assigned a specific and often minute task,
copyrighted, and given snippets of my own genetic code much
like a bloodhound is given an old shoe to establish the scent.
All of them were too small to be seen by the human eye. Some
were barely visible in a good microscope. Many were smaller
than that.
They were assembled by other nanobots at chemical-reaction
speeds, and produced in groups seldom smaller than one million
units. Injected into the bloodstream, they responded to the
conditions they found there, gravitated to their assigned
working sites using the same processes whereby hormones and
enzymes found their way through the corpus, identified the
right spots by using jig-saw-like pieces of these same bodily
regulators as both maps and grapplers, attached themselves, and
began to boogie. The smaller ones penetrated the individual
cell walls and entered the DNA itself, reading the amino acids
like rosary beads, making carefully planned cuts and splices.
The larger ones, the kind with actual motors and manipulators
and transistors, screws, scrapers, memories, arms--what used to
be called microbots when they were first made with the same
technologies that produced primitive integrated circuit
chips--these congregated at specified sites and performed
grosser tasks. The microbots would each be handed a piece of my
genetic code and another piece synthesized by Bobbie, which
functioned like eccentric cams in making the tiny machines do
their particular job. Some would go to my nose, for instance,
and start carving away here, building up there, using my own
body and supplementary nutrients carried in by cargo microbots.
Waste material was picked up in the same way and ferried out of
the body. In this way one could gain or lose weight very
quickly. I myself planned to emerge from the Change fifteen
kilos lighter.
The nanobots labored diligently to make the terrain fit
the map. When it did, when my nose was the shape Bobbie had
intended, they detached themselves and were flushed away,
de-programmed, and bottled to await the next customer.
Nothing new or frightening about that. It was the same
principle used in the over-the-counter pills you can buy to
change the color of your eyes or the kinkiness of your hair
while you sleep. The only difference was the nanobots in the
pills were too cheap to salvage; when they'd done their work
they simply turned themselves off in your kidneys and you
pissed them away. Most of the technology was at least one
hundred years old, some more ancient than that. The hazards
were almost nil, very well-known, and completely in control.
Except I now found I had developed a fear of nanobots.
Considering what the CC had told me about them, I didn't think
it was entirely unfounded.
The other thing that frightened me was even worse. I was
afraid to go to sleep.
Not so much sleep in the normal sense. I had slept well
enough the night before; better than normal, in fact,
considering my exhaustion from the two-day celebrity binge. But
the epic infestation of nanobots I was about to experience
wreaks havoc on the body and the mind. It's not something you
want to be awake for.
Bobbie noticed something was wrong as he took me to the
suspension tank. It was all I could do to hold still while the
techs shoved the various hoses and cables into the
freshly-incised stigmata in my arms and legs and belly. When I
was invited to step into the coffin-sized vat of cool blue
fluid, I almost lost my composure. I stood there gripping the
sides of the vat, knuckles white, with one foot in and the
other not wanting to leave the floor.
"Something the matter?" Bobbie asked, quietly. I saw some
of his helpers were trying not to stare at me.
"Nothing you could do anything about."
"You want to tell me about it? Let me get these people out
of the room."
Did I want to tell him? In a way, I was aching to. I'd
never gotten to tell Callie, and the urge to spill it to
somebody was almost overwhelming.
But this was not the place and certainly not the time, and
Bobbie was most definitely not the person. He would simply find
a way to incorporate it into the continuing Gothic novel that
was The Life Of Robert Darling, with himself the imperiled
heroine. I simply had to get through this myself and talk it
over with someone later.
And suddenly I knew who that someone would be. So get it
over with, Hildy, grit your teeth and step into the tub and let
the soothing fluids lull you into a sleep no more dangerous
than you've had every night for 36 1/2 thousand nights.
The water closed over my face. I gulped it into my
lungs--always a bit unpleasant until all the air is gone--and
looked up into the wavering face of my re-creator, unsure when
and where I would wake up again.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I found Fox deep in the bowels of the Oregon disneyland.
He was engrossed in a blueprint projected on a big horizontal
table at the foot of a machine the size of an interplanetary
liner, which I later learned was the starter motor for a
battery of machines that produced north winds in Oregon.
Machines merely elephantine in size swarmed around the
partially-assembled behemoth, some with human operators, some
working on their own, and there was the usual crowd of
blueuniformed laborers leaning on shovels and perfecting their
spitting techniques.
He glanced up as I came closer, looked me up and down, and
returned to his work. I'd seen a flicker of interest in his
eyes, but no recognition. Then he looked up again, looked
harder, and suddenly smiled.
"Hildy? Is that you?"
I stopped and twirled around for him, flashing a few dozen
of Crazy Bob's Best Patented Incisors and two of the greatest
legs the Master ever designed as my skirt swirled out like a
Dresden figurine. He tossed a light pen on the screen and came
toward me, took my hand and squeezed it. Then he realized what
he was doing, laughed, and hugged me tightly.
"It's been too long," he said. "I saw you on the 'pad the
other day." He gestured at me in a way that said he hadn't
expected what he was seeing now. I shrugged; the body spoke for
itself.
"Reading the Nipple now? I don't believe it."
"You didn't have to read the Nipple to catch your act.
Every time I changed the channel, there you were, boring
everybody to death."
I made no comment. He had surely been as interested at
first as Bobbie and everybody else in Luna, but why bother to
explain that to him? And knowing Fox, he wouldn't admit he
could be as easily seduced by a sensational story as the rest
of his fellow citizens.
"Frankly, I'm glad the idiot's gone. You have no idea the
kind of problems David Earth and his merry band cause in my
line of work."
"It's Saturday," I said, "but your service said you'd be
down here."
"Hell, it's almost Sunday. It's the typical start-up
problems. Look, I'll be through here in a few minutes. Why
don't you stick around, we can go out for dinner, or breakfast,
or something."
"The something sounds interesting."
"Great. If you're thirsty one of these layabouts can scare
up a beer for you; give 'em something to do equal to their
talents." He turned away and hurried back to his work.
The brief sensation caused by my arrival died away; by
that I mean the several dozen men and handful of women who had
transferred their gazes from the far distance to my legs now
returned to the contemplation of infinity.
A sidewalk supervisor unused to the ways of the
construction game might have wondered how anything got done
with so many philosophers and so few people with dirty hands in
evidence. The answer was simply that Fox and three or four
other engineers did all the work that didn't involve lifting
and carrying, and the machines did the rest. Though hundreds of
cubic miles of stone and soil would be moved and shaped before
Oregon was complete, not a spoonful of it would be shifted by
the Hod-carriers Union members, though they were so numerous
one could almost believe they could accomplish it in a few
weeks. No, the shovels they carried were highly polished,
ceremonial badges of profession, as un-sullied by dirt as the
day they were made. Their chief function was safety. If one of
the deep thinkers fell asleep standing up, the shovel handle
could be slotted into an inverted pocket on the worker's union
suit and sometimes prevented that worthy from falling over. Fox
claimed it was the chief cause of onthe-job accidents.
Perhaps I exaggerate. The job guarantee is a civil right
basic to our society, and it is a sad fact that a great many
Lunarians are suited only for the kind of job machines took
over long ago. No matter how much we tinker with genes and
eliminate the actually defective, I think we'll always have the
slow, the unimaginative, the disinterested, the hopeless. What
should we do with them? What we've decided is that everyone who
wants to will be given a job and some sort of badge of
profession to testify to it, and put to some sort of work four
hours a day. If you don't want to work, that's fine, too. No
one starves, and air has been free since before I was born.
It didn't used to be that way. Right after the Invasion if
you didn't pay your air tax, you could be shown to the airlock
without your suit. I like the new way better.
But I'll confess it seems terribly inefficient. I'm
ignorant when it comes to economics, but when I bother to
wonder about such things it seems there must be a less wasteful
way. Then I wonder what these people would do to fill their
already-from my viewpoint--empty lives, and I resolve to stop
wondering. What's the big problem with it, anyway? I suspect
there were people standing around leaning on shovels when the
contract for the first pyramid was signed.
Does it sound terribly intolerant for me to say I don't
understand how they do it? Perhaps they'd think the same of me,
working in a "creative" capacity for an organization I loathe,
at a profession with dubious--at best--claims to integrity.
Maybe these laborers would think me a whore. Maybe I am a
literary whore. But in my defense I can say that journalism, if
I may be permitted to use the term, has not been my only job. I
have done other things, and at that moment felt strongly that I
would be moving on from the Nipple fairly soon.
Most of the men and women around me as I waited for Fox
had never held another job. They were not suited for anything
else. Most were illits, and the opportunities for meaningful
work for such people are few. If they had artistic talent
they'd be using it.
How did they make it through the day? Were these the
people who were contributing to the alarming rise in suicide
the CC reported? Did they get up some morning, pick up the
shovel, think the hell with it, and blow their brains out? I
resolved to ask the CC, when I started speaking to him again.
It just seemed so bleak to me. I studied one man, a
foreman according to one of the many badges pinned to his
denims, a Century Man with the gaudy lapel pin proclaiming he
had spent one hundred years leaning on that shovel. He was
standing near Fox, looking in the general direction of the
blueprint table with an expression I'd last seen on an animal
that was chewing its cud. Did he have hopes and dreams and
fears, or had he used them all up? We've prolonged life to the
point that we don't have a clear idea of when it might end, but
have failed to provide anything new and interesting to do with
that vast vista of years.
Fox put his hand on my shoulder and I realized, with a
shock and a perverse sense of reassurance that I must have
looked like a cud-chewer myself as I thought my deep,
penetrating thoughts. That foreman was probably a fine fellow
to sit around and bullshit with. I'll bet he was a terrific
joke-teller and could throw one hell of a game of darts. Did we
all have to be, to use the traditional expression, rocket
scientists? I know a rocket scientist, and a slimier curmudgeon
you would not care to meet.
"You're looking good," Fox said.
"Thanks. You all done here for now?"
"Until Monday. I hate to be one of those people married to
the job, but if somebody doesn't worry about it this place
won't live up to its potential."
"Still the same Fox." I put my arm around his waist as we
walked toward his trailer, parked in a jumble of idle machines.
He put his hand on my shoulder, but I could tell his thoughts
were still back in the blueprints.
"I guess so. But this is going to be the best disney yet,
Hildy. Mount Hood is finished; all we need is some snow. It's
only one-quarter scale, but it fools the eye from almost any
angle. The Columbia's full and almost up to speed. The gorge is
going to be magnificent. We're going to have a real salmon run.
I've got Douglas Firs twenty meters high. Even when you
force-grow 'em, those babies take some time. Deer, grizzlies .
. . it'll be great."
"How long till completion?" We were passing some bear
pens. The inmates looked out at us with lazy predators' eyes.
"Five years, if it all goes well. Probably seven,
realistically." He held the door to the trailer and followed me
inside. It was utilitarian, overflowing with papers. About the
only personal touch I saw was an antique slide rule mounted
over the gas fireplace. "You want to order something in?
There's a good Japanese place that will deliver here. I had to
train them; this place is tough to find. Or we could go out if
there's something else you'd rather have."
I knew exactly what I wanted, and we wouldn't have to
order out for it. I put my arms around him and kissed him in a
way that almost made up for the forty years we'd been out of
each others' beds. When I drew back for a breath, he was
smiling down at me.
"Is this dress a particular favorite?" he asked. He had
his hand in the neckline, bunching the fabric.
"Would it do me any good to say yes?"
He slowly shook his head, and ripped it off.
#
Lovers of fashion should be relieved to note two things:
the dress was thirty years old and not one of those that was
stylish again, though I had picked it because it flattered the
new me. Bobbie would have gagged to see it, but Fox was more
direct. And second, I had known Fox would destroy it, though
not as a fashion policeman-male or female, Fox was dense about
such things. The main thing one needed to know about Fox was
that--male or female--he liked to dominate. He liked sex to be
rough and urgent and just this side of brutal, and that was
exactly what I was in the mood for. As he gave me one of the
most thorough rogerings of my life I thanked what gods there be
that I had found him during a male period of his life.
Fox was the one I had thought of as I stood nervously on
the brink of Change, and it made perfect sense that I did. He
and I . . . actually, for a time it had been she and I, then he
and I . . . we had been lovers for ten years. I don't know just
why we broke up, or maybe I've forgotten, but we came out of
the parting good friends. Perhaps we simply grew apart, as they
say, though that's always sounded like a facile explanation.
How much growing do you still have to do when one of you is
sixty and the other is fifty-five? But it had been a
comfortable time in my life.
The need to see him had been so urgent I had changed my
plan to do a little shopping on the Platz, thereby doing my
bank balance a big favor. I had rushed home, dressed in the
scoop-necked, knee-length satiny black dress with the ballerina
skirt that currently lay tattered, wrinkled, and getting very
sweaty beneath my naked back, changed my hair color to match
the clothes, sprayed makeup on my eyes and mouth and polish on
my nails, doused myself with Fox's favorite scent, and was back
out the door in three minutes flat. I had taxied to Oregon,
worked my feminine magic on the poor boy and within fifteen
minutes had my knees in the air and my hands gripping his bare
behind, barking like a dog and trying to force him through my
body and into the floor beneath us.
Do you see why ULTRA-Tingle is already in financial
trouble?
Fox usually had that effect on me. Not always quite so
intense, it's true. I was experiencing something politely
called hormone shock, or Change mania, but more often known as
going cunt crazy. One shouldn't expect to undergo such radical
alterations to one's body without a certain upset to the
psyche. With me it's always a heightening of sexual hunger.
Some people simply get irresponsible. I've got a friend who has
to instruct his bank to shut off his line of credit for five
days after a Change, or he'd spend every shilling he had.
What I was spending you can't put in a bank, and there's
no sense in saving it anyway.
#
Afterwards, he ordered a mountain of sushi and tempura and
when it was delivered, fired up the trailer and took us through
a long dark air duct and into Oregon.
Like all disneylands, it was a huge hemispherical bubble,
more or less flat on the bottom, the curved roof painted blue.
The first ones had been only a kilometer or two across, but as
the engineers figured out better ways to support them, the
newer ones were growing with no outer limit in sight. Oregon
was one of the biggest, along with two others currently under
construction: Kansas and Borneo. Fox tried his best not to bore
me with statistics; I simply forget them a few minutes after
hearing them. Suffice it to say the place was very big.
The floor was mostly rock and dirt shaped into hills and
two mountains. The one he'd called Mount Hood was tall and
sharply pointed. The other was truncated and looked unfinished.
"That's going to be a volcano," he said. "Or at least a
good approximation of an active volcano. There was an eruption
in this area in historic times."
"You mean lava and fire and smoke?"
"I wish we could. But the power requirements to melt
enough rock for a worthwhile eruption would bust the budget,
plus any really good volume of smoke would hurt the trees and
wildlife. What it's going to do is vent steam three or four
times a day and shoot sparks at night. Should be real pretty.
The project manager's trying to convince the money people to
fund a yearly ash plume-nothing catastrophic, it actually
benefits the trees. And I'm pretty sure we'll be able to mount
a modest lava flow every ten or twenty years."
"I wish I could see it better. It's pretty dim in here."
The only real light sources were at the scattered tree farms,
dots of bright green in the blasted landscape.
"Let me get the sun turned on." He picked up a mike and
talked to the power section, and a few minutes later the "sun"
flickered and then blazed directly overhead.
"All this will be covered in virgin forest; green as far
as the eye can see. Not at all like your shack in Texas. This
is a wet, cool climate, lots of snow in higher elevations.
Mostly conifers. We're even putting in a grove of sequoias down
in the south part, though we're fudging a bit on that,
geographically speaking."
"Green'd be a lot better than this," I said.
"You'll never be a true West Texan, Hildy," he told me,
and smiled.
He set us down on the Columbia River, at the mouth of the
gorge where it was wider and slower, on a broad, flat sandbar
of an island which was the center of what he called an
ecological testbed. The beach was wide and hard-packed, full of
frozen ripples. Across the river were the advertised pine
trees, but near us there was only estuarine vegetation, the
sort of plants that didn't mind being flooded periodically. It
ran to tall skinny grasses and low, hardy bushes, few taller
than my head. There were some really huge logs half buried in
the sand, bleached gray-white and rubbed smooth and round by
sun, wind, and water. I realized they were artificial, put
there to impress the occasional visitors, who were always
brought here.
We spread out a blanket on the sand and sat there gorging
ourselves on the food. He stuck mostly to the shrimpoid tempura
while I concentrated on the maguro, uni, hamachi, toro, tako
and paper-thin slices of fugu. I dredged each piece in enough
of that wonderful green horseradish to make my nose run and my
ears turn bright red. Then we made love again, slow and tender
for the first hour, unusual for Fox, only getting intense near
the end. We stretched out in the sun and never quite fell
asleep, just lolling like satiated reptiles. At least I hadn't
thought I was asleep until Fox woke me by flipping me over onto
my stomach and entering me without any warning. (No, not that
way. Fox likes to initiate it and he likes it rough, but he's
not into giving pain and I'm not into receiving it.) Anyway,
these things even out. When Fox was a girl she usually forced
herself down on me before she was quite ready. Maybe he thought
all girls liked it that way. I didn't enlighten him, because I
didn't mind it that much and the lovemaking that followed was
always Olympic quality.
And afterwards . . .
There's always an afterwards. Perhaps that's why my ten
years with Fox was the longest relationship I ever had. After
the sex, most of them want to talk to you, and I always had
trouble finding people I wanted to talk to as well as have sex
with. Fox was the exception. So afterwards . . .
I put the remains of my clothing back on. The dress was
severely ripped; I couldn't get it to stay over my left breast,
and there were gaping holes here and there. It suited my mood.
We walked along the river's edge in water that never covered
our feet. I was playing the castaway game. This time I could
pretend to be a rich socialite in the tatters of her fancy
gown, desperately seeking good native help. I trailed my toes
in the water as I walked.
This place was timeless and unreal in a way Scarpa Island
never was. The sun still hung there at high noon. I picked up a
handful of sand and peered at it, and it was just as detailed
as the imaginary sand of my year-long mental environment. It
smelled different. It was riverine sand, not white coral, and
the water was fresh instead of salty, with a different set of
microscopic lifeforms in it. The water was warmer than the
Pacific waters. Hell, it was quite hot in Oregon, into the
lower forties. Something to do with the construction. We had
both dripped sweat all day. I had licked it off his body and
found it quite tasty. Not so much the sweat as the body I
licked it from.