"I, uh-wish I could say the same for you, Ted-"
"Tanjy," she corrected.
"Uh, yeah, Tanjy. As a matter of fact, I can. I think I can truthfully say that I've never seen you looking better. Um, didn't they have any male bodies available?"
"Sure. But then you wouldn't have been willing to buy me dinner." She added, "Except for that, gender is really a very arbitrary definition."
"Not to the gendee."
"Not sex," she said. "Gender. Mundanes have trouble with that one, I know. Trust me. Gender is merely a role to play. Like all the other roles. A large part of the telepathy training is about overcoming your gender identification, your age identification, your racial identification-and all the other arbitrary identifications that you've wired up while you've been trapped in a single body. By the way, you'd love the section on personal hygiene. I discovered things I never knew about the female body. And the male."
"That must have been quite a revelation."
She ignored the jibe. "It's part of the basic agreements. You have to leave the body in as good condition as you found it. Proper food, proper exercise, enough rest, and so on." The Chinese girl grinned, but it was Ted's grin on her face. "It also means I'm not allowed to get pregnant or go out with sadists." She looked at me speculatively. "You want to keep that in mind?"
I could feel my face reddening. "I uh, think-that you can trust me," I said.
So, of course-naturally-we ended up back at her place. The body's place. The apartment was furnished with surprising luxury. An indoor garden. A lawn. A pool. An overhanging bedroom. A bed the size of Rhode Island.
"Well, why not?" Ted/Tanjy asked. "Think about it. Money is irrelevant to a telepath. It's difficult-not impossible, but difficult-to take it with you. But you don't become a telepath for the money anyway. All that's left are the local perks and privileges. A silk dress is easier to experience than a thousand caseys." He ran her hands up her body. I stared at the gesture. I'd never seen anyone fondle a woman from the inside.
Ted/Tanjy seemed to keep shifting from male to female. The body remained the same, but the personality inhabiting it was a chameleon, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes neither. It gave me a peculiar double vision. There were moments when I was conscious only of the person, not the body-and there were moments when I was acutely conscious of the body. It was gorgeous. I could have watched it for days. My erection was killing me. I would never wear tight underwear again.
Ted/Tanjy sat the body down on the couch. She left room for me.
I sat down on the chair opposite. "I have to admit-this is still very unnerving."
"I really do understand," she said. "The first time I found myself in a girl's body, I was so caught by surprise, I started to cry."
"You? Really?"
"It happened during my training," she explained. "Mostly, you spend the first part of your training in the body pool. You're always on call. They loan your body out to whoever needs a body to wear. Sometimes you get to ride along, most of the time not. When you can't, that's when they turn you loose in the library. You get to play a lot of recorded experiences. Pretty soon, you start to get a sense of the range of human experience that's available to you. It's mind-stretching, Jim. It really is. You're never quite the same afterward."
"I remember how you were at the bus stop in Denver," I said. "You were a little dazzled."
"That's an understatement, Jim. I was mindfucked. Everybody goes through it. You have to. It's part of the process. Suddenly you find out all kinds of amazing things. You get to look at the same incident from a hundred different points of view and pretty soon you start to get a holographic perspective. Your whole mindset is destroyed and reformed and destroyed, over and over and over-and each time, it's more exhilarating. It's like the first time you learned how to masturbate. It feels so good, you can't help but suspect there has to be something wrong with it, but you sure as hell aren't going to stop. You are definitely not the same person afterward. "
"You certainly weren't," I said. "Not then."
She nodded. "It's one of the very first tests. Becoming a telepath is like running an obstacle course. You have to make it past all the barriers. The first one is to simply find out if you can handle it. I nearly blew it. I almost disappeared into the network. It happens. People get lost, leaving their bodies behind. I was lucky. I came back.
"Somehow, I got past the initial exhilaration. You have to do that on your own. There's no help for that. If you do, that's when your real training starts."
"The real training?"
"Mm hm. They put you in a training class with thirty other men, and you start trading bodies with each other for short periods. This goes on for three or four weeks, and you still return to your own body at the end of each training session. That's so you can begin to appreciate what happens to a body when it's worn by someone who's unfamiliar with it. That teaches you respect for the equipment real fast.
"Then they start leaving you in your traded bodies for longer and longer periods, so you can start to learn how to fit into a new body comfortably, how to work with it instead of against it-and also so you can begin to give up the attachment you have to your own body. After all, you may never see it again. You end up being everybody in your training class. Once-after we'd had a chance to get to know each other-they scrambled us around and we had to figure out who was wearing whose body. It was really eye-opening. We discovered a lot about the signals that we project unconsciously. One boy gave himself away because he didn't realize how often he wiped his nose-even when it wasn't running. We always knew which body he was in.
"Anyway, I guess I got cocky. I started to think I could handle anything they threw at me. After all, I'd already experienced so much in the library, I thought I was an expert. God, I was a jerk."
"No!" I said, grinning.
"Oh, yes!" she laughed back. "I was even a bigger jerk than you." She grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes. "Listen to me, Jim-there is an incredible difference between being the recipient of an experience and the author of it. They really set me up to discover that.
"It was my first prolonged solo, although I didn't know it at the time. They just told me I was to take a walk through the woods and smell the flowers. I didn't think anything about it-they had started bouncing all of us around on odd little errands. They never told us the purpose of the assignments until afterward. Sometimes it was a test, sometimes they wanted to record a specific experience, sometimes they wanted to see what we would discover on our own.
"Anyway, you're going to laugh when you hear this. I found myself on a hillside. I was alone. I was wearing a sweat shirt and jeans and tennis shoes. The background feel of the body was different of course, it always is, but this one felt funnier than usual. I had a lower center of gravity and I felt kind of soft. I'd had the opportunities to wear a lot of different bodies by then, so I knew it took a little while to get adjusted, so I didn't think too much about it. I just sort of took it for granted. I assumed they'd given me one of those flabby effeminate little-boy bodies that we used to call capons. I figured they wanted this body exercised and that was the purpose of this assignment. I was so naive.
"So, I started walking. It was a beautiful day. The air smelled of flowers, everywhere. I think I must have been in Hawaii or the Bahamas, or someplace tropical. The closer you get to the equator, the more intense the light is-well, the colors here were just incredibly bright and beautiful.
"The day was hot, a little muggy, and I thought I could smell the sea. And my skin was darker than I was used to-and smoother-so I figured they'd given me a native body. Once, I reached into my shirt to scratch a nipple and I was amazed at how soft and sensitive I was. But I still didn't put it together. Still not yet. To be fair, the body was young-maybe thirteen or fourteenand not all that well developed. In fact, it was quite boyish. But still-you'd think that I, one of the great breast-strokers of our time, would have figured it out, wouldn't you? Well, I didn't. Not from the inside.