Adrift in the Noösphere (11 page)

Polychromatic water glistened and heaved like billows of luscious, nigh-edible acrylics: goldenrod, magenta, periwinkle. A sun like the Google Chrome logo blazed in the sky. The big luminous fish, hefty as barracuda, were swarming ashore to breed, and the human harvesters of L'Almadrava cove were waiting, spears poised.

Several feet offshore, skirt pulled up and tied between her bare, wet, bronzed legs, white blouse pasted to her nubile breasts, her toes gripping the shifting, sucking sands, Jayne hefted her own pole nervously. Her first harvest. She was only sixteen. Would she comport herself well? The future prosperity of the village rested partially on her shoulders.

A rough male hand dropped upon one of those very shoulders now. As if reading her mind, Jaime Brunelli said, “Your stance is bold, little one. But the angle of your spear lacks a certain, ah, utility. I predict impalement of your own delicate foot upon the first thrust. Here, let me adjust your cast.”

Big hairy arms enveloped her, along with the musk of male sweat. Jayne trembled. Jaime Brunelli was one of L'Almadrava's most handsome and desirable bachelors. The fiery way he had danced at the last festival— Jayne found the sea-engendered wetness between her legs taking on new hormonal qualities.

But before she could respond either coquettishly or haughtily to Brunelli's suggestive help, the first battalion of luminous fish were upon them. With a bull-like battle cry, Brunelli disengaged, and Jayne was left on her own.

The first rainbow fish that reached her began to plead for its life, as was the wont of these creatures. It employed a human tongue, but to produce gibberish.

“Beep me the be-bop downlow, sister! Raster the roster! It's a treat to beat my milt on the Missus's eggy strand! Oh, no, don't pierce my male maidenhead!”

Ignoring the siren tones of the fish, using both hands on her hard shaft, Jayne plunged her razored spearhead down and into the fish's back, at just the designated point to sever its spine. Her blow was fine and forceful, and the fish ceased its spasmodic mating dance, beginning a prolonged expiration at her feet like some war captive at the feet of a Roman princess.

“Ai, bonita! I flounder! The word for the world is tuna! Monkey see, sea monkey do!”

Jayne disregarded the pathetic gasps and inane drivel, and continued to stab and slice. Soon, a mound of fishy carcasses surrounded her, putting other victims beyond her reach. Thin fishy sparkling blood threaded the waters in an abattoir's aquarelle. She tried to clamber over the bodies, but only collapsed wearily upon the scaly pile, unaware of time's passing until familiar hands cupped her under her arms (and against her breasts!) and raised her up, totally out of the water.

“My little goddess! Victory is thine! You shined like Venus. No, like Bellona! Your ancestors are grinning in heaven!”

Jayne was suddenly shivering, despite the heat of the day. Instinctively, she wrapped her lithe legs around Brunelli's treetrunk torso and hugged him to her.

He whispered in her ear. “You were made a hunter today, but I will make you a woman tonight!”

It seemed the interval between the end of the catch and the village celebration in the plaza passed in mere seconds, and when Jayne found herself in the fragrant shadow of a lime tree, kissing Jaime Brunelli with fervid languor, she could sense her destiny unfolding. When he raised her fine skirts and stuck two rough fingers up her wet vagina, she came close to fainting. And when he followed that invasion with the whole rushed length of his thick penis, leaping unleashed from his own gaily decorated trews, she finally did indeed lose consciousness of her whole world.

Jay Cornelius's dream left him/her somewhat gentled, filled with an odd combination of waning remorse, waxing resignation and acceptance, dwindling suicidal impulses, and a barely germinating interest in and excitement about her/his personal future, an emotion tender and crushable as the first pale sprout of a maidenhair fern. Additionally, the brute compulsion of a healing, nicely toned body supplemented the blossoming good spirits.
Was
that earlier dream a premonition?

Lying in bed, she/he poked at the still-vivid memory of life in the fishing village, Jayne's piscine conquests and arboreal defloration. Some sense of eternal recurrence lingered, a lineage larger than himself. Life had gone on in such a fashion since the dawn of human history, for men and women alike, each grappling gender playing their part. Who was Jay Cornelius to fight such immemorial rituals? Just because he had involuntarily switched sides in the old competition, he had no solid right to complain. Happened to a limited number of citizens all the time, at their own instigation. Nip and tuck, fold and invert, extrude and stretch, plump and polish....

Of course he spent some time exploring his new body, as the nerve attachments to his brain strengthened, clarified their renewed identity, pulsed from numbness to dulled medicated aches and twinges and at last into a palette of prods, pinches, strokes, soothing, fondlings. Of course his fingers caressed those fabulous boobs, swept down to touch, titillate, enter the exciting, terrifying complex emptiness where his brain gibbered that his penis should be. But it wasn't like the Jayne dream of fervent lusty girlhood. Yes, there were some of those sensations he'd tried to turn into market fodder for the Groper Media empire and his odious boss McKinley, but mostly it was like trying to tickle yourself. His brain literally didn't know if he was coming or going. If he was Arthur or Martha. He took his fingers away from his vagina and sighed.

At that moment, Jay decided firmly and spontaneously on one simple thing, easily within his/her limited grasp. Pronouns. At least she could be a she. Simplify, simplify, for accuracy's sake and ease of conversation. After all, what mattered more, the meaty mass of corpore or the smaller quantity of mens? Even that organic, formerly male brain was now awash in the female chemicals and hormones this body pumped out, laved by a luteal lake.

And so Jay determinedly became Jayne herself. A certain straining tension immediately evanesced.

Over the next few days her concerned handlers, noting the “progress,” let up on the meds and allowed more privileges.

Such as getting attired in loose gray sweats and sitting up in this cheerful, sunny lounge, to receive her first real visitor.

Henry McKinley, togged out even more pavoninely than usual, as if in deference to some imagined girlish heart-flutter susceptibility of his interviewee (Jayne admitted the publisher did carry clothes well), brazened into the lounge with his usual air of bestrider-of-worlds. But Jayne thought to detect, beneath the macho bluster, a layer of nervous uncertainty and ego-failure. Had Henry always radiated this self-denying put-down-ability, or was it something new, engendered by Jayne's unique circumstances?

Oh. My. God. Was this insight a case of feminine intuition coming into play? Faintly suspect. No evident logic. Impossible to spreadsheet. Could be useful, though....

McKinley thrust out something he had carried behind his back. An enormously expensive box of Godiva chocolates. “Take it! Jessie said they were your favorites, even before this titanic fuck-up.”

Jayne felt her mouth watering. Nice to see Jayne's body's tastes conformed to Jay's.

This body. The stranger's eyes she hid behind. Who had the donor really been, in Girly's short extravagant life, her legacy of accomplishments and relatives and friends, of dreams and hopes? For the first time since their mutual tragedy, Jayne resolved to think at least a little less about herself and more about the famous young woman she inhabited. Henry pulled up a chair and sat down, his knees almost touching hers. He leaned forward, intruding into her personal space. What an obvious boor! Still, his interest was flattering.

“So you've been talking to Jessie?”

“Damn straight! Couldn't talk to you, could I, lost in that self-pitying fugue. My god, Jay—”

“Jayne.”

“Whatever. Don't you realize what you almost threw away by vegging out and indulging in Britney-Spears-magnitude hissy-fits like that? You are the number one media sensation of the millennium! Or at least of this year. All the other freaks like you who survived—sorry, I mean ‘lucky beneficiaries of modern medical wizardry'—have proven hideously unsuitable for inspiring the semi-grossed-out adulation by Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccer Mom. Either the bodies were less than optimally hot, or the brains belonged to rat bastards, or both. The worst case was that embezzling bigamist transplanted into the trailer-park mother of seven. Eeeyeuw! But look at you! A smart, sane guy in a smokin' bod!” Henry paused a moment and looked quizzically at Jayne. “You are still sane, aren't you? No, don't answer that! We can work around anything! Where was I? Oh, yeah, so here you are, with the gifts of the fucking gods in your lap—ha, your lap, that's rich!—and you're like, ‘Oh, no, woe is me, I don't have a dick anymore, I miss the old sub-average third leg which I never used anyhow except to dip into the stale wifey once a week tops.'”

Jayne felt a surge of anger at this rude characterization of both her quondam private member and the uses to which it had been put. But then, miraculously, some kind of estrogen-based counter-surge of tolerance and humor overcame the anger, and she smiled.

“Okay, bossman, so I'm incredibly lucky. What about it?”

Henry McKinley held his head as if to prevent it from exploding. “What about it?!? What about it!?! Haven't you been working for me for five years? What did I teach you? Didn't you absorb even a gnat's ass's worth of savvy from me? You are going to assign to Groper Media all representation of you and your incredibly sexy-sad story, and we are going to ride this to fame and fortune and megastar-fuckability. I can say that to you, can't I? You're still Jay Cornelius inside that pretty little head, aren't you?”

“Mostly. But why should I necessarily pick Groper to handle my story? Shouldn't I start a bidding war? Man, this is the body of Girly D'joan! And I'm right here. Talk about an inside scoop!”

Henry seemed genuinely taken aback. “Jayne, do you really think there's anyone out there with more sleaze-marketing expertise than yours truly? This is the story I was born to ride!”

Jayne pondered this honest and unsparing self-assessment. She realized that she no longer hated Henry, but only pitied him. Fuller comprehension of his drives and character had brought tolerance.

“Let me hear some of your marketing plans,” said Jayne. “And don't spare the dirt.”

§

From: The Beadle Monger

To: All Employees

Subject: Jayne Cornelius

I am highly pleased, highly pleased indeed! Operation Androgyne Messiah is back on track! Big kudos to all relevant departments: creative, fieldwork, grok-meld, scanalytics, sevagram programming and astral bookkeeping. Bonuses to be dispersed according to seniority, with highest senior grades receiving no less than one hundred quanta of karmic fluxion.

Please keep up the good work as we move ahead into the next stages of our campaign of enforced enlightenment.

§

Jayne felt like a hundred million dollars, which was appropriate given yesterday's judicial verdict confirming her sole ownership of all her donor's worldly possessions. This still struck her as an insane decision, but she wasn't complaining. All the usual biometrics declared that she was, indeed, beyond question, Girly D'joan, alive and well and almost fully recovered, her fingerprints and retinal scans and DNA genomic profile unaltered by the dreadful accident. Yes, she now had a different brain, but then similarly, too, all those other transplant patients had grafted kidneys or hearts, and nobody expected them to waive their legal rights of full possession and enjoyment thereof. Henry McKinley had spared no expense in hiring the best law firm and suborning the most pliable judge in Chicago.

But thoughts of wealth and borrowed fame were a distraction. Jayne Cornelius rolled out her Pilates mat, dropped into position, and allowed the energy of oxygen to pass into her blood and tissues. And they were hers now, every cell and corpuscle. Calm, calm. Concentration. Control. Center. Flow. Precision. And the soothing, energizing pulse of breath.

“Jay. Jayne. Christ, sorry, should have knocked.” In the doorway, Jessie gazed down at her former husband raised full length from the mat in a Shoulder Bridge, right foot squarely on the floor, perfect left leg raised perfectly in alignment through her elevated torso and hip, left toes pointed like a ballerina's. “My god, Jayne,” she said in a tone of confusion, “you're hot, man.”

A raw sexual jolt went through Jayne's vagina, roared up her spine, clobbered her diaphragm and lungs en route, brought her to the floor with a crunch. This was nothing like her abortive attempts to touch herself. This was that dream, brought to life—Jaime Brunelli of L'Almadrava. But not a rough, beautiful man from a fantasy. Her wife. Jessie. She felt..wet.

“Come here, you,” she said, and rolled to her feet, lithe and poised with the body of a twenty-two-year-old diva. They fell upon each other with hot mouths. After a long raging moment Jessie batted away her hand.

“This is wrong, Jay! You're a girl!”

“I thought you were the expert in gender confusion,” Jayne said, withdrawing, pouting despite herself, chagrined. “And what's the probability of that, anyway?”

“It's a popular course,” Jessie said. She backed away, found a chair, sat primly, watched her husband, her wife, in that sparkling sequined leotard cut in a lewd slash from her sharp hips all the way down to—”Your lawyer called. Congratulations on the decision.”

“Thank you. Jessie, I want you to know that—”

“None of it is mine,” she said bitterly. “Yes, your Miss Priss made it very clear. Since you are still legally Ms. D'joan, we're not married and never were. So under the settlement laws of Illinois and indeed everywhere else on the entire planet, I can expect nothing, not a penny.”