Steel Beach (21 page)

Anyway, I decided it would be pointless to seek her advice on the parts of my story I hadn’t gotten around to telling her, for at least a year or so. Make that five years.

The next day was spent farming the story out to competing rags and vids, but on our terms. The price was high, but willingly paid. They knew that next time they were as likely to be on the selling end, and would gouge appropriately. As was standard practice, I was always included as part of the deal, so I could mention the
Nipple
as often and as blatantly as possible while on live feeds. So I talked myself into a sore throat sitting beside endless commentators, columnists, and similar sorts, while the by now dated footage ran yet another time.

The only person who got as much exposure as I did during those two days was Eartha Lowe. A movement as radical as the Earthists will spawn splinter groups like a sow whelps piglets. It’s a law of nature. Eartha was the leader of the largest one, also called the Earthists, purely to give headaches to poor newspapermen, I’m convinced. Some of us distinguished them as Earthist(David) and Earthist(Lowe), others tried the abomination of Eartha-ists. Most of us simply called them the Earthists and the Other Earthists, something guaranteed to provoke a wailing woodnote wild from Eartha, because there was no need to explain who the “Others” were.

David had died politically intestate. There was no heir apparent in his organization. Increasingly, people were not planning for their own deaths, because they simply didn’t expect to die. Perhaps that explains the mordant fascination with violent images in popular entertainment and the clamor for more details about real deaths when they occur. We haven’t achieved immortality yet. Maybe we never will. People are reassured to see death as something that happens to somebody else, and not often at that.

Eartha Lowe was standing on every soapbox that would support her not-inconsiderable weight, welcoming the strays back into the fold. In her version, it was David who had split away. Who cared that he had taken ninety percent of the flock with him? We were told that Eartha had always loved David (no surprise; they had both professed to love
every
living creature, though David had loved Eartha more on the level of, say, a nematode or a virus, not so much as the family dog) and Eartha had returned his affection in spades. I couldn’t follow all the doctrinal differences. The big one seemed to be Eartha’s contention that any proper Earthist should be in the female image, to be a mirror of Mother Earth. Or something like that.

All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-and-Baileyest, rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to have been a part of it.

When the two-day purgatory was over, I collapsed into my bed for twelve hours. When I woke up, I gave some thought once more to getting out of the business. Was it a root cause of my self-destructive tendencies? One would have to think that hating what I did might contribute to feelings of worthlessness, and thus to thoughts of ending it all. I tabled the matter for the moment. I have to admit that though I may feel disdain for the things we do and the manner in which we do them, there is a heady thrill to the news business when things are really happening. Not that exciting things happen all that often, even in my line of work. Most news is of the not-much-happened-today variety, tricked up in various sexy lies. But when it
does
happen, it’s exhilarating. And there’s an even guiltier pleasure in being where things are happening, in being the first to know something. About the only other line of work where you can get as close to the center of things is politics, and even I draw the line at that. I have some standards left.

Talking to Callie had been a bust, advice-wise if not career-wise. But in searching for sources of dissatisfaction one thing had grown increasingly clear to me. I was wearing my body like a badly fitted pair of trousers, the kind that bind you in the crotch. A year as a female, ersatz though the experience had been, had shown me it was time for a Change. Past time, probably by several years.

Could that have been the fountain of my discontent? Could it have been a contributing factor? Doubtful, and possibly. Even if it had nothing to do with it, it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and get it done, so I could be comfortable again. Hell, it was no big deal.

When the terribly, terribly fashionable decide the old genitals are getting to be rather a bore, don’t you know, they phone the chauffeur and have the old bones driven down to Change Alley.

Normally, when it came time for a Change, I would hie me to some small neighborhood operation. They are all board-certified, after all, one just as able as another to do the necessary nipping and tucking. A confluence of circumstances this time decided me to visit the street where the elite meet. One was that my pockets were bulging with the shekels Walter had showered on me in the form of bonuses for the Burning Earth story. The other was that I knew Darling Bobbie when he was just Robert Darling of Crazy Bob’s Budget Barbering and Tattoo Parlor, back when he did sex changes as a sideline to bring in more money. He’d had a little shop on the Leystrasse, a determinedly working-class commercial corridor with a third of the shopfronts boarded up and plastered with handbills, running through one of the less fashionable neighborhoods of King City. He’d been sandwiched between a bordello and a taco stand, and his sign had read “Finast Gender Alteration On The Leystrasse—E-Z Credit Terms.” None of which was news to anyone: his was the
only
Change shop in the area, and you couldn’t offer so expensive a service around there without being prepared to finance. Not that he did a lot of it. Laborers can’t afford frequent sex changes and, as a group, are not that inclined to question Mother Nature’s toss of the dice, much less flit back and forth from one sex to the other. He did much better with the tattooing, which was cheap and appealed to his clientele. He told me he had regulars who had their entire bodies done every few weeks.

That had been over twenty-five years ago, when I had my last previous sex change. In that time, Crazy Bob had come up in the world. He had invented some body frill or other—I can’t even recall what it was now, these things come and go so quickly they make mayflies seem elderly—that was “discovered” by slumming socialites. He was elevated overnight into the new guru of secondary sexual attributes. Fashion writers now attended his openings and wrote knowingly about the new season’s whimsy. Body styling would probably never be as big or influential as the rag trade, but a few practitioners to the hi-thrust set had carved themselves a niche in the world of fashion.

And Crazy Bob had spent the last ten years trying to make people forget about the little cock shop next door to the Jalapeño Heaven.

Change Alley is a ridiculous name for the place, but it does branch off of the five kilometer gulch of glitz known as Hadleyplatz. For fifty years the Platz, as everyone knew it, had been the inheritor of such places as Saville Row, Fifth Avenue, Kimberly Road, and Chimki Prospekt. It was the place to go if you were looking for solid gold toenail clippers, not so great for annual white sales. They didn’t offer credit on the Platz, E-Z or otherwise. If the door didn’t have your gencode in its memory banks along with an up-to-the-millisecond analysis of your pocketbook, it simply didn’t open for you. There were no painted signs to be seen, and almost no holosigns. Advertising on the Platz ran to small logos in the bottom corners of plate glass windows, or brilliantly-buffed gold plaques mounted at eye level.

The Alley branched away from the main promenade at a sharp angle and dead-ended about a hundred meters later in a cluster of exclusive restaurants. Along the way were a handful of small storefronts operated by the handful of very tasteful hucksters who could persuade their clientele to part with ten times the going rate for a body make-over so they could have “Body By So-and-so” engraved on the nail of their pinky finger.

There
were
holosigns in the Alley shops, showing each designer’s ideas of what the fashionable man or woman was being these days. The tastemongers back on the main drag liked to say the Alley was
off
the Platz, but not
of
the Platz. Still, it was all a far cry from the tattoo templates filling the windows of the Budget Barber.

I wondered if I ought to go in. I wondered if I
could
go in. Bob and I had been drinking buddies for a while, but we’d lost contact after his move. I pressed my hand to the identiplate, felt the tiny pressure as a probe scraped away a minuscule amount of dead skin. The machine seemed to hesitate; perhaps I’d be sent around to the tradesmen’s entrance. Then it swung open. There should have been a flourish of trumpets, I thought, but that would have been too demonstrative for the Alley.

“Hildy! Enchanting, enchanting old boy. So good to see you.” He had come out of some concealed back room and covered the distance to me in three long strides. He pumped my hand enthusiastically, looking me up and down and adopting a dubious air. “Good heavens, am I responsible for
that
? You came just in
time
, my friend. Not a
moment
too soon. But don’t worry, I can
fix
it, cousin Bobbie will take care of
everything
. Just put yourself in my hands.”

I suddenly wondered if I wanted to be in his hands. I thought he was laying it on a trifle thick, but it had been a while since I’d seen him, and I’m sure he had appearances to maintain. The gushing, the mincing, all were nods toward tradition, something practiced by many in his line of work, just as lawyers tried to develop a sober facade suitable for the weighty matters they dealt in. Back before Changing, the fashion world had been dominated by homosexual men. Sexuality being as complicated as it is, with hundreds of identified orientations—not to mention ULTRA-Tingle—it was impossible to know much about anyone else’s preferences without talking it over and spelling it out. Bob, or perhaps I should say Darling, was hetero-oriented, male born and male leaning, which meant that, left to his own choice, he would be male most of the time with occasional excursions into a female body, and no matter his current sex would prefer the company of the opposite.

But his profession almost demanded that he Change four or five times a year, just as the rag merchants had better wear their own designs. Today he was male, and didn’t look any different from when I had known him. At least he didn’t at first. When I looked more closely, I saw there were a thousand subtle alterations, none of them radical enough so his friends wouldn’t recognize him on the street.

“You don’t have to take the blame,” I told him, as he took my elbow and guided me toward something he called a “Counseling Suite.” “Maybe you don’t remember, but I brought in all the specs myself. You never had a chance to practice your craft.”

“I remember it
quite
well, dear boy, and perhaps it was the will of Allah. I was still learning my
art
—please heed the stress on the word, Hildy—and I probably would have made a botch of it. But I do recall being
quite
cross.”

“No, Darling, in those days you didn’t get cross, you got pissed-off.”

He made a weird sort of smirk, acknowledging the jibe but not letting the tinkerbell mask slip a millimeter. I glanced around the suite, and had to stifle a laugh. This was girl heaven. The walls were mirrors, creating a crowd of Hildys and Bobbies. Most everything else was pink, and had lace on it. The
lace
had lace on it. It was fabulously overdone, but I liked it. I was in the mood for this sort of thing. I sank gratefully into a pink and white lacy settee and felt the anxiety wash away from me. This had been a good idea after all.

A female assistant or whatever entered with a silver bucket of champagne on ice, set it up near me, poured some into a tall glass. It was a measure of my alienation from my current soma-type that I watched these operations with complete disinterest. A week before…  well, before Scarpa Island, however that interval should be measured, I would have been attracted to the woman. Just at the moment I was effectively neuter. Robert didn’t interest me either. Actually, he probably wouldn’t interest me after the change, simply because he was not my “type,” a word simply dripping with meaning in the age of gender selection.

Like my host, I am hetero oriented. Which is not to say I have never engaged in sex with a partner of my current sex; hasn’t everybody? Can anyone remain truly heteroist when they have been both male and female? I suppose anything’s possible, but I’ve never encountered it. What I find is that sex for me is always better when there is a man and a woman involved. Twice in my life I have met people I wanted to become more deeply attached to when both of us were of the same sex. In both cases, one of us Changed.

I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t believe anyone can really explain reasons behind their sexual preferences, unless they’re based on prejudice: i.e., this or that practice is unnatural, against God’s law, perverted, disgusting, and so forth. There’s still some of that around, a bit of it in Bob’s old neighborhood, in fact, where he twice had windows smashed and once had truly repulsive Christian slogans painted over his sign. But sexual preference seems to be something that happens to you, not something you elect. The fact is, when I’m a boy I’m intensely interested in girls, and have little or no interest in other boys, and vice versa when I’m a girl. I have friends who are precisely the opposite, who are homo-oriented in both sexes. So be it. I know people who cover the whole spectrum between these two positions, from the dedicated males and females, homo and hetero, to the pan-sexuals who only require you to be warm and would be willing to overlook it if you weren’t, to the dysfunctionals who aren’t happy in either sex, to the true neuters, who identify with neither sex, have all external and internal attributes removed and are quite glad to be shut of the whole confusing, inconvenient, superfluous, messy business.