“Just one,” said Ms. Pedersen. “I can understand how difficult it is for a mind to survive implantation. And, of course, I know it is illegal to implant a mind that is over eighty-five. But couldn’t a person—if you call a mind a person—live forever by passing through body after body?”
“Okay, that’s a tough one to explain even if we had a lot of time and you knew a lot of mathematics. Until this century it was believed that senility was a by-product of the physical breakdown of the body. Today we know that a human mind can have roughly one hundred years of experiences before it reaches essential senility, however young the body it occupies. As you know, a few successful leapers have survived implantation after a fifty-year wait. So a leaper might, in theory, still be functioning a thousand years from now. But such an individual’s mind will not be able to encompass any more lived experience than you. When all there is of you is a tape in storage, you aren’t really alive.”
After they had filed out, Germaine Means noticed that the blondhaired girl had remained.
“Hi, I’m Candy Darling,” she cried. “I hope you don’t mind. I thought it would be fun to sneak in on the standard tour. Get the smell of the place.”
“Where’s your VAT?”
Austin Worms declared that basic physical meshing procedures were complete.
Gxxhdt.
Etaoin shrdlu. Mmm.
Anti-M.
Away mooncow Taddy fair fine. Fine again, take. Away, along, alas, alung the orbit-run, from swerve of space to wormhole wiggle, brings us. Start now. Wake.
So hear I am now coming out of nothing like Eros out of Death, knowing only that I was Ismael Forth—stately, muscled well—taping-in, and knowing that I don’t know when I’m waking or where, or where-in. And hoping that it is a dream. But it isn’t. Oh, no, it isn’t. With that goggling piece of munster cheese oumphowing on my eyelids.
And seemingly up through endless levels and configurations that had no words and now no memories. Wake.
“Helow, I’m Candy Darlinz.”
“I am Ismael returned” was what I started to try to reply. After the third attempt it came out better. And the munster cheese had become a blond-haired young girl with piercing blue eyes.
“Your primary implantation was finished yesterday, finally. Everyone thinks you’re a success. Your body is a pip. You’re in the Norbert Wiener Research Hospital in Houston. You have two estates clear through probate. Your friend Peter Strawson has covered your affairs. It’s the first week of April, 2112. You’re alive.”
She stood up and touched my hand.
“You start therapy tomorrow. Now sleep.”
I was already drifting off by the time she had closed the door behind her. I couldn’t even get myself worked up by what I was noticing. My nipples felt as big as grapes. I went out as I worked my way down past the belly button.
The next day I discovered that I had not only lost a penis. I had gained a meter-long prehensile tail. It was hate at first sense.
I had worked my way up to consciousness in slow stages. I had endless flight dreams—walking, running, staggering on, away from sour nameless horror. And brief flashes of sexuality that featured performances by my (former) body.
I really liked my old body. One of my biggest problems, as Dr. Germaine Means was soon to tell me. I could picture clearly how it had looked in the mirrors as I did my stretch and tone work. Just a hair over six foot four. Two hundred and five pounds, well-defined muscles, and just enough fat to be comfortable. A mat of curly red chest hair that made it easy to decide to have my facial hair wiped permanently. It felt good to be a confident and even slightly clumsy giant, looking down on a world of little people.
Oh, I wasn’t a real body builder or anything like that. Just enough exercise to look good—and attractive. I hadn’t in fact been all that good at physical sports. But I had liked my body. It was also a help in the public relations work that I did for IBO.
I was still lying on my back. I felt shrunk. Shrunk. As the warm, muzzy flush of sleep faded, my right hand moved up over my ribs. Ribs. They were thin and they stuck out, as if the skin were sprayed over the bare cage. I felt like a skeleton until I got to the lumps. Bags. Growths. Sacks. Even then part of me realized that they were not at all large for a woman, while most of me felt that they were as big as cantaloupes.
You may have imagined it as a kind of erotic dream. There you are in the hospital bed. You reach and there they are. Apt to the hands, the hardening nipples nestled between index and middle fingers. (Doubtless some men have felt this warm reverie with their hands on real flesh. The women may have felt pinch and itch rather than the imagined sensual flush. I know whereof I speak. I now know a lot of sexuality is like that. Perhaps heterosexuality continues as well as it does because of ignorance each partner is free to invent the feelings of the other.)
But I was quite unable to feel erotic about my new acquisitions. Both ways. My fingers, as I felt them, felt pathology. Two dead cancerous mounds. And from the inside—so to speak—I felt that my flesh had swollen. The sheet made the nipples feel raw. A strange feeding of separation, as if the breast were disconnected, nerveless jelly—and then two points of sensitivity some inches in front of my chest. Dead spots. Rejection. I learned a lot about these.
As my hand moved down I was prepared for the swerve of hip. I couldn’t feel a penis and I did not expect to find one. I did not call it “gash.” Though that term is found occasionally in space-marine slang and often among the small number of male homosexuals of the extreme S&M type (Secretary & Master). I first learned the term a few days later from Dr. Means. She said that traditional male-male pornography revealed typical male illusions about female bodies: a “rich source of information about body-image pathologies.” She was certainly right in pointing out that “gash” was how I felt about it. At first.
I was not only scrawny, I was almost hairless. I felt really naked, naked and defenseless as a baby. Though my skin was several shades less fair—and I passed a scar. I was almost relieved to feel the curly groin hair. Gone. Sticklike legs. But I did feel something between my thighs. And knees. And ankles, by Sol.
At first I thought it was some sort of tube to take my body wastes. But as I felt down between my legs I could tell that it wasn’t covering those areas. It was attached at the end of my spine—or rather it had become the end of my spine, stretching down to my feet. It was my flesh. I didn’t quite intend it—at that point I can’t say that I intended anything, I was so shook—but the damned thing flipped up from the bottom of the bed like a snake, throwing the sheet over my face.
I screamed my head off.
“Cut it off” was what I said after they had given me enough betaorthoamine to stop me flailing about. I said this several times to Dr. Germaine Means, who had directed the rest of them out of the room.
“Look, Sally—I’ll call you that until you select a name yourself—we are not going to cut your tail off. By our calculations such a move would make terminal rejection almost certain. You would die. Several thousand nerves connect your brain with your prehensile tail. A sizable portion of your brain monitors and directs your tail—that part of your brain needs exercise and integration like any other component. We taped the pattern of your mind into your present brain. They have to learn to live together or you get rejection. In brief, you will die.”