She floated in my direction. My heart popped and missed a beat. Every male eye in the bar-and several female ones as wellswiveled to follow her. She was wearing a silk dress so red they'd have to retire the color after tonight. Just the way she walked was illegal in thirty-seven states. One fellow leaned out so far he nearly fell off his stool.
She stopped directly in front of me. I wondered which of the gods was smiling on me. "Something I can do for you?" I asked.
Her smile grew sweeter. She wet her lips and said, "I was wondering what caliber your gun was ... ?" She touched the barrel suggestively with one exquisite finger.
My mouth went dry. My throat wouldn't work. My tongue was paralyzed. "Uh," I finally said. "Well-uh, properly speaking, it doesn't have a caliber. It fires eleven-grain needles, four thousand per minute. Its focus isn't as precise as the two eighty-" My mouth kept making words-automatically. I was impaled on her smile. She never took her eyes off me. She was fascinated. "Uh-it tends to shred the target, but that's more effective. Against the worms, I mean."
"You have the greenest eyes," she said.
"I do?" I swallowed.
"Mm hmm." She slid onto the stool next to me. Somebody at the end of the bar moaned. I wondered if I were about to pass out from lack of blood to my brain.
The bartender rolled up to her immediately and beeped. "Your order, ma'am?"
She didn't even glance at the robot. She said, "I'll have a ... Pink Butterfly." She held her eyes on me-I was paralyzed by her spell. I wondered if I was drooling on myself.
The robot returned and put something pink and frosty in front of her.
I didn't know what to do, so I just grinned embarrassedly, and said, "You'll pardon me for saying this, but all of the Chinese girls I've met in the past have been extraordinarily... ah, demure. I mean-not quite so ... uh, forward. Are you sure you're Chinese?"
"Chinese?" She blinked in sweet confusion. She flipped open her purse and looked into her mirror. Her eyes went round. "My God-you're right! I am Chinese!" She closed her purse again. "Wow!" she said wonderingly. "Chinese! Wait'll I tell my mom!"
"Your mom? Right. She doesn't know?"
The girl laughed. "Well, how could she? I mean-I just found out myself "
I stared at her. This was too confusing. I felt as if my reality were starting to shred. I said, "I-uh, don't think that... I know what's really going on here, Ms.... ? I mean, maybe-that is, I was just going-"
"No, wait-" She touched my arm to stop me. "I'm sorry, Jim."
"Huh?" I stopped. I looked at her again. "Do I know you?"
She met my puzzled stare with embarrassing directness. "We've met. "
I studied her face. It was almost a perfect oval. She had high cheekbones and bright almond-shaped eyes. Her mouth was wide, but not too wide. Her hair fell to her shoulders like a wave of sheer black silk. I'd never seen her before. I'd have remembered this face. And yet
I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something else going on here. "Who are you?"
She smiled. "If I'm Chinese, I'm supposed to be mysterious. You know, inscrutable. You figure it out." Her smile was impish.
All my alarm bells were ringing now, and I still didn't know why. I said, "What's your name?"
"You can call me Tanjy."
"Tanjy. Is that Chinese?"
"No," she said. "I'm not Chinese."
"You're not? I think you need to look in that mirror again."
"You still haven't figured it out, have you? I'll give you a hint." For just the briefest moment her face went blank, then she was back again. She said, "Do you get it now?"
I pointed at her. "What was that?"
"I was communicating with my terminal."
I frowned. "You're a-?"
"Telepath, yes. Something wrong?"
"Uh, no. You just caught me by surprise-" And then I realized
She said, "You ought to have your face checked. It does the most curious things when you're caught by surprise."
The realization was still sweeping over me. I grabbed her by the shoulders. "You son of a bitch!"
"Hi, Jimbo!" she said broadly.
"I should have known!" My mouth was working like a fish out of water. I managed to make some words with it. "Ted! Tanjy! Theodore Andrew Nathaniel Jackson! You creep!" People were staring at us. I didn't care.
She-he?-grinned at me. "Don't you even kiss an old friend hello?"
"Kiss you? I oughta-" I unclenched my fist. I sputtered helplessly. I didn't know what to say.
"Gee, Jim!" He-she?-twinkled. "You're cute when you're angry!"
THIRTY-NINE
LISTEN, I'M no bigot.
At least, I don't think I am.
But I was raised old-fashioned, so I never held much with people shifting their sexes around-but then again, whatever one or more consenting individuals wanted to do in the privacy of his or her own body was his or her own business. Certainly not mine.
I was able to achieve the enlightenment of that position by dint of an adolescence uncontaminated by any experience other than theoretical. That is, I didn't know anyone who had ever changed sex-or even gender-identity.
It is one thing to hold an enlightened position in a vacuum. It is quite another to be confronted by your ex-best friend wearing a body that can turn parts of men to stone.
I hadn't realized the Telepathy Corps worked like this. "Um-" I couldn't find the words. "This-this is going to require a lot more explaining than usual, Ted."
The way I'd always understood telepathy, it was like having a computer terminal in your head; the same microtechnology that made it possible to graft the artificial nerves in a prosthesis also made it possible to graft a prosthetic lobe into the human brain, a lobe that could be programmed for any multitude of date-processing and communication functions. I'd heard that the new generation of implants made full-sensory transmission possible, but I'd tluougllt it worked like a mental movie screen-like looking through the remotes on a spider.
Ted-Tanjy?-corrected that misperception quickly. "The transmission of experience is total-at least it experiences that way. I think they drop out a lot of the hash at the bottom, because the experience feels somehow cleaner, purer. When you become an operator-like I am-control is also assigned. That's when your soul moves out of your body. It feels just like being here. It's likebeing able to change bodies as often as you change your underwear. Or in your case, even more often."
He-she?-I really was going to have to figure this out-was a kind of courier. Sort of. There really wasn't a word in the language yet. His (her?) job was to gather experience and put it into the telepathy network, where it was recorded and made available to the-again, there was no word -synthesists, the people who experienced the data, assimilated it, and looked for patterns. It was so high-level even Ted/Tanjy didn't understand it. Yet. Perhaps eventually, she said.
Over dinner-well, it would have been stupid to waste the reservations-I asked her, "Where's your own body now?"
"You mean the one you think of as Ted?"
"Yeah. "
"It's in Amsterdam. I think. I'll have to check."
"You're not sure?"
"Jimmy," she explained, "when you get certified, you donate your body to the network. In return you get access to every other body in the network. Pretty soon, you give up the attachment to the body you grew up in. In fact, attachment is considered ... disloyal. That's the closest referent. Um-individualism is disloyal to the massmind in that it makes fragments. Hidden agendas pull the mass off center. Never mind-these are experiences that are beyond your referents. I'm sorry. I'm not used to communicating in such a narrow bandwidth."
"Uh-right."
"Well-" she said, "hard work must agree with you, Jimmy. You look terrific."