Steel Beach (23 page)

“You won’t frighten anyone with
that
, Hildy,” Bobbie said, looking sourly at the simulation of the genitals I’d just spent so much time elaborating. “I’d say your main problem here is boredom.”

“It was good enough for Eve.”

“I must have missed her last showing. Can’t imagine why. I’m sure it will prove quite useful in the circles you move in, but are you
sure
I couldn’t interest you in—”

“I’m the one that has to use it, and that’s what I want. Have a heart, Bobbie. I’m an old fashioned girl. And didn’t I give you a free hand with the skin tones, and the nipples, and the ears and the shoulder blades and the collarbones and the ass and those two fetching little dimples in the small of the back?” I turned at the waist and looked at the full-body simulation that had replaced one of the mirrors, and chewed on a knuckle. “Maybe we should take another look at those dimples…  ”

He talked me out of changing that, and into a slight alteration of the backs of the hands, and he bitched at me some more and threw up his hands in disgust at every opportunity, but I could tell he was basically pleased. And so was I. I moved around, watching the female I was about to become duplicate all my movements, and it was good. It was the seventh hour: time to rest.

And then a strange thing happened to me. I was taken to the prep room, where the technicians built their mystical elixirs, and I began to suffer a panic attack. I watched the thousand and one brews dripping from the synthesizers into the mixing retorts, cloudy with potential, and my heart started beating wildly and I began to hyperventilate. I also got angry.

I knew what I was afraid of, and anyone
would
be angry.

Unless you’ve chosen the most radical of body make-overs, very little of modern sex changing involves actual surgery. In my case, about all the cutting that was planned was the removal and storage of the male genitalia, and their replacement with a vagina, cervix, uterus, and set of fallopian tubes and ovaries which were even then being messengered over from the organ bank, where they’d reposed since my last Change. There would be a certain amount of body sculpting, but not much. Most of the myriad alterations I was about to undergo would be done by the potions being mixed in the prep room. Those brews contained two elements: a saline solution, and uncounted trillions of nanobots.

Some of these cunning little machines were standard, made from templates used in all male-to-female sex changes. Some were customized, cobbled together from parts stolen from microbes and viruses or from manufactured components, assembled by Bobbie and assigned a specific and often minute task, copyrighted, and given snippets of my own genetic code much like a bloodhound is given an old shoe to establish the scent. All of them were too small to be seen by the human eye. Some were barely visible in a good microscope. Many were smaller than that.

They were assembled by other nanobots at chemical-reaction speeds, and produced in groups seldom smaller than one million units. Injected into the bloodstream, they responded to the conditions they found there, gravitated to their assigned working sites using the same processes whereby hormones and enzymes found their way through the
corpus
, identified the right spots by using jig-saw-like pieces of these same bodily regulators as both maps and grapplers, attached themselves, and began to boogie. The smaller ones penetrated the individual cell walls and entered the DNA itself, reading the amino acids like rosary beads, making carefully planned cuts and splices. The larger ones, the kind with actual motors and manipulators and transistors, screws, scrapers, memories, arms—what used to be called microbots when they were first made with the same technologies that produced primitive integrated circuit chips—these congregated at specified sites and performed grosser tasks. The microbots would each be handed a piece of my genetic code and another piece synthesized by Bobbie, which functioned like eccentric cams in making the tiny machines do their particular job. Some would go to my nose, for instance, and start carving away here, building up there, using my own body and supplementary nutrients carried in by cargo microbots. Waste material was picked up in the same way and ferried out of the body. In this way one could gain or lose weight very quickly. I myself planned to emerge from the Change fifteen kilos lighter.

The nanobots labored diligently to make the terrain fit the map. When it did, when my nose was the shape Bobbie had intended, they detached themselves and were flushed away, de-programmed, and bottled to await the next customer.

Nothing new or frightening about that. It was the same principle used in the over-the-counter pills you can buy to change the color of your eyes or the kinkiness of your hair while you sleep. The only difference was the nanobots in the pills were too cheap to salvage; when they’d done their work they simply turned themselves off in your kidneys and you pissed them away. Most of the technology was at least one hundred years old, some more ancient than that. The hazards were almost nil, very well-known, and completely in control.

Except I now found I had developed a fear of nanobots. Considering what the CC had told me about them, I didn’t think it was entirely unfounded.

The other thing that frightened me was even worse. I was afraid to go to sleep.

Not so much sleep in the normal sense. I had slept well enough the night before; better than normal, in fact, considering my exhaustion from the two-day celebrity binge. But the epic infestation of nanobots I was about to experience wreaks havoc on the body and the mind. It’s not something you want to be awake for.

Bobbie noticed something was wrong as he took me to the suspension tank. It was all I could do to hold still while the techs shoved the various hoses and cables into the freshly-incised stigmata in my arms and legs and belly. When I was invited to step into the coffin-sized vat of cool blue fluid, I almost lost my composure. I stood there gripping the sides of the vat, knuckles white, with one foot in and the other not wanting to leave the floor.

“Something the matter?” Bobbie asked, quietly. I saw some of his helpers were trying not to stare at me.

“Nothing you could do anything about.”

“You want to tell me about it? Let me get these people out of the room.”

Did I want to tell him? In a way, I was aching to. I’d never gotten to tell Callie, and the urge to spill it to
some
body was almost overwhelming.

But this was not the place and certainly not the time, and Bobbie was most definitely not the person. He would simply find a way to incorporate it into the continuing Gothic novel that was The Life Of Robert Darling, with himself the imperiled heroine. I simply had to get through this myself and talk it over with someone later.

And suddenly I knew who that someone would be. So get it over with, Hildy, grit your teeth and step into the tub and let the soothing fluids lull you into a sleep no more dangerous than you’ve had every night for thirty-six and a half thousand nights.

The water closed over my face. I gulped it into my lungs—always a bit unpleasant until all the air is gone—and looked up into the wavering face of my re-creator, unsure when and where I would wake up again.

I found Fox deep in the bowels of the Oregon disneyland. He was engrossed in a blueprint projected on a big horizontal table at the foot of a machine the size of an interplanetary liner, which I later learned was the starter motor for a battery of machines that produced north winds in Oregon. Machines merely elephantine in size swarmed around the partially-assembled behemoth, some with human operators, some working on their own, and there was the usual crowd of blue uniformed laborers leaning on shovels and perfecting their spitting techniques.

He glanced up as I came closer, looked me up and down, and returned to his work. I’d seen a flicker of interest in his eyes, but no recognition. Then he looked up again, looked harder, and suddenly smiled.

“Hildy? Is that you?”

I stopped and twirled around for him, flashing a few dozen of Crazy Bob’s Best Patented Incisors and two of the greatest legs the Master ever designed as my skirt swirled out like a Dresden figurine. He tossed a light pen on the screen and came toward me, took my hand and squeezed it. Then he realized what he was doing, laughed, and hugged me tightly.

“It’s been too long,” he said. “I saw you on the ’pad the other day.” He gestured at me in a way that said he hadn’t expected what he was seeing now. I shrugged; the body spoke for itself.

“Reading the
Nipple
now? I don’t believe it.”

“You didn’t have to read the
Nipple
to catch your act. Every time I changed the channel, there you were, boring everybody to death.”

I made no comment. He had surely been as interested at first as Bobbie and everybody else in Luna, but why bother to explain that to him? And knowing Fox, he wouldn’t admit he could be as easily seduced by a sensational story as the rest of his fellow citizens.

“Frankly, I’m glad the idiot’s gone. You have no idea the kind of problems David Earth and his merry band cause in my line of work.”

“It’s Saturday,” I said, “but your service said you’d be down here.”

“Hell, it’s almost Sunday. It’s the typical start-up problems. Look, I’ll be through here in a few minutes. Why don’t you stick around, we can go out for dinner, or breakfast, or something.”

“The something sounds interesting.”

“Great. If you’re thirsty one of these layabouts can scare up a beer for you; give ’em something to do equal to their talents.” He turned away and hurried back to his work.

The brief sensation caused by my arrival died away; by that I mean the several dozen men and handful of women who had transferred their gazes from the far distance to my legs now returned to the contemplation of infinity.

A sidewalk supervisor unused to the ways of the construction game might have wondered how anything got done with so many philosophers and so few people with dirty hands in evidence. The answer was simply that Fox and three or four other engineers did all the work that didn’t involve lifting and carrying, and the machines did the rest. Though hundreds of cubic miles of stone and soil would be moved and shaped before Oregon was complete, not a spoonful of it would be shifted by the Hod-Carriers Union members, though they were so numerous one could almost believe they could accomplish it in a few weeks. No, the shovels they carried were highly polished, ceremonial badges of profession, as unsullied by dirt as the day they were made. Their chief function was safety. If one of the deep thinkers fell asleep standing up, the shovel handle could be slotted into an inverted pocket on the worker’s union suit and sometimes prevented that worthy from falling over. Fox claimed it was the chief cause of on-the-job accidents.

Perhaps I exaggerate. The job guarantee is a civil right basic to our society, and it is a sad fact that a great many Lunarians are suited only for the kind of job machines took over long ago. No matter how much we tinker with genes and eliminate the actually defective, I think we’ll always have the slow, the unimaginative, the disinterested, the hopeless. What should we do with them? What we’ve decided is that everyone who wants to will be given a job and some sort of badge of profession to testify to it, and put to some sort of work four hours a day. If you don’t want to work, that’s fine, too. No one starves, and air has been free since before I was born.

It didn’t used to be that way. Right after the Invasion if you didn’t pay your air tax, you could be shown to the airlock without your suit. I like the new way better.

But I’ll confess it seems terribly inefficient. I’m ignorant when it comes to economics, but when I bother to wonder about such things it seems there must be a less wasteful way. Then I wonder what these people would do to fill their already—from my viewpoint—empty lives, and I resolve to stop wondering. What’s the big problem with it, anyway? I suspect there were people standing around leaning on shovels when the contract for the first pyramid was signed.

Does it sound terribly intolerant for me to say I don’t understand how they do it? Perhaps they’d think the same of me, working in a “creative” capacity for an organization I loathe, at a profession with dubious—at best—claims to integrity. Maybe these laborers would think me a whore. Maybe I
am
a literary whore. But in my defense I can say that journalism, if I may be permitted to use the term, has not been my
only
job. I have done other things, and at that moment felt strongly that I would be moving on from the
Nipple
fairly soon.

Most of the men and women around me as I waited for Fox had never held another job. They were not suited for anything else. Most were illits, and the opportunities for meaningful work for such people are few. If they had artistic talent they’d be using it.

How did they make it through the day? Were these the people who were contributing to the alarming rise in suicide the CC reported? Did they get up some morning, pick up the shovel, think
the hell with it
, and blow their brains out? I resolved to ask the CC, when I started speaking to him again.

It just seemed so bleak to me. I studied one man, a foreman according to one of the many badges pinned to his denims, a Century Man with the gaudy lapel pin proclaiming he had spent
one hundred years
leaning on that shovel. He was standing near Fox, looking in the general direction of the blueprint table with an expression I’d last seen on an animal that was chewing its cud. Did he have hopes and dreams and fears, or had he used them all up? We’ve prolonged life to the point that we don’t have a clear idea of when it might end, but have failed to provide anything new and interesting to
do
with that vast vista of years.

Fox put his hand on my shoulder and I realized, with a shock and a perverse sense of reassurance that I must have looked like a cud-chewer myself as I thought my deep, penetrating thoughts. That foreman was probably a fine fellow to sit around and bullshit with. I’ll bet he was a terrific joke-teller and could throw one hell of a game of darts. Did we all have to be, to use the traditional expression, rocket scientists? I
know
a rocket scientist, and a slimier curmudgeon you would not care to meet.