Candi looked at him sharply, but didn’t say anything. They’d agreed ahead of time: no sex except with each other, and with their spouses if the spouses were interested.
Arthur said, “Now that you mention it, I guess I’m attracted to foreigners more than locals. Huang, Abu, Yuri, Lars—like that.”
“How about it, Candi—is that normal for you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t necessarily seek out the exotic, but I don’t avoid it, either.”
“How about the mundane?”
“Look,” she said, a bit exasperated, “I don’t really analyze a man’s position on the strangeness scale, all right? I go out with the interesting ones, that’s all.”
“That’s you speaking. What about your body? For that matter, do you notice anything different now that you’re in Arthur’s body?”
She looked at Margaret for just a second with a frankly appraising look, and then she said, “Well, now that you mention it, you’re apparently not my type. Sorry. You, on the other hand—” she looked at Arthur in her own body “—make my hormones fizz.”
Arthur blushed. Margaret looked from him to Candi, and saw her flush. There was a distinct difference. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils flared; she looked like she might tear off Arthur’s clothes right there in the office if she hadn’t had her own civilized mores to restrain her.
“I think that pretty well proves it,” Margaret said. “Your sex drives are hard-wired. Your psyches apparently modify’ things to some extent, but the basic impulses are straight evolution talking.”
“How do you figure?” Arthur asked. He looked warily at Candi, who shifted uncomfortably in her seat, then gave up and readjusted her pants to accommodate her sudden erection.
“Candi’s body is attracted to foreigners,” Margaret told him. “Young ones at that. The best candidates to give her a healthy baby, since with a foreigner there’s less chance of inbreeding, and someone young can help care for it. And Arthur’s body,” she said to Candi, “likes the young, buxom types for the same reason. Good mother material. You’ve both learned to alter those urges to suit your intellectual tastes, but with the intellect out of the body, that’s what you’re left with.”
Arthur snorted. “But my intellect is right here. How come I’m not still attracted to young, buxom women?”
Margaret steepled her fingers. “Aren’t you? What did you and your wife do last night?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, but that’s Ellen. We’ve been married for five years.”
“And you still find her attractive, even in Candi’s body. Psyche over instinct. But I think it’s pretty clear that consciousness isn’t completely one or the other.”
Candi laughed. “This is going to piss off a lot of people who were hoping we’d prove once and for all that the intellect is divine.”
It might at that, Margaret thought. The religious right had been nervous about the Tilbey process right from the start, even though on the surface it seemed to vindicate their belief in a soul. The idea that the soul could be recorded bothered them, and the idea that it could be transferred from one body to another scared them silly.
Margaret didn’t particularly care. She was looking for understanding, not affirmation. Let the chips fall where they may; she just wanted to learn what the chips were made of.
And maybe, just a little, she wanted to try a swap of her own. Not with Arthur, or even with Dr. Hayward, who was closer to her own age. Being a man had never interested her. But being young again, and beautiful for the first time…
She didn’t realize she was staring until Arthur said, “What?”
She glanced away. “Arthur,” she said, “protect that body as if it were gold. A lot of people would love to get into Candi’s pants while her guard is down. Not all of them the traditional way.”
He and Candi exchanged a worried look. Then Candi leaned over and buttoned his blouse one notch higher.
They stayed in each other’s bodies for a full week, and in that time they learned quite a bit about their instinctive versus learned behavior patterns. Plus they tried another experiment: Arthur taught Candi’s body how to throw, and she taught his how to play the piano. When they switched back they tried it again, and discovered that some of the learned behavior stayed with the body. Maybe it was just aptitude, but the cellular memory theorists had a field day with it.
So did the press, but Margaret didn’t pay any attention to that. She was already gearing up for the next test: Huang Lee was going to transfer into a chimpanzee.
The technicians kept them both in cages and strapped into chairs. They didn’t know what might happen to either of them, or how much intelligence would make the transfer and how much would stay behind. That was what eveiyone wanted to find out.
So when the lights dimmed and the machines did their zap thing, it took a few seconds to tell that there’d been any change. Then the chimp body flexed a little, groaned, and a slurred voice said, “Wow. Ish ish shtrange.”
“Huang?” Margaret asked. She was standing right beside his cage, with Arthur, Candi, and some of the other techs beside her.
“Yesh.” He strained against the straps, then said, “I shink you can ret me go.”
“Do it,” she said to the technician in the cage with him. While he did that she looked over at Huang’s body. “Dina?” she asked. They’d used a female chimp because she was the friendliest of the lot, and they’d already had experience with gender switching so they didn’t think it would matter much for their first nonhuman study The species differences should completely overwhelm the gender differences as far as uniqueness of the experience went.
Dina nodded. She nodded! Margaret almost dropped her notepad. Dina’s mouth worked for a moment, then she said, “Ah, ah, ah.” She tugged against the straps just as Huang had done, but when she realized she was held down she just settled back into the chair and looked around the lab.
“You’re going to be all right,” Margaret assured her. “This is just for a little while.”
Dina looked at her with an expression that said clear as words, Yeah, right.
“I mean it,” Margaret told her. “This is just a short test.” She wondered how much of that the chimp understood. Dina just blinked at her, so she turned back to Huang and said, “How do you feel?”
“All ri’,” he said. “But shoo, thish plash shtinksh!” He stood, stretched his arms and legs, and twisted around. “Man, I feel like a gymnasht. This body’sh limber.”
“How’s your mental capacity? What’s nine times six?”
“Fifty-four,” he answered immediately.
“Fourteen squared?”
“Ahh… a hundred and… ninety… four? No, ninety-shix.”
“What’s the windspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
“African or European?”
The technicians all looked puzzled even before Huang and Margaret burst into laughter. She hadn’t expected them to get a Monty Python reference, but she knew Huang would—provided the part of him that had watched The Holy Grail with her the previous night had made the transfer.
Huang’s laughter turned into a series of shrieks like Dina made when she was upset. Huang jumped up and down a time or two as well, then he suddenly stopped and said, “Shorry. Got carried away there. There’sh a lot of inshtinctive behavior to fight off.”
“Like what?” Margaret asked.
“Like… I want to throw shit at everything. The real shtuff. I’m pished off just looking at all of you out there on the other shide of the cage. I want room enough to run and climb in, and no people around.”