All the Lives He Led

by Frederik Pohl

  Do you know how many square centimeters of skin it takes to enclose an average human body? Let’s just say there are a lot, and the woman with the rollerball rubbed it over every last one of them. Then, when she was through, she put the gadget down and looked toward the woman with the dictation mike. That one had been muttering into her mike throughout the examination. Now she spoke up. “That is it, sir,” she said, to my surprise addressing Professor Mazzini rather than Piranha Woman. “There is no evidence of a recent contact. Do you want me for anything else?”

  He shook his head. “You can go,” he said. Obediently she and the woman with the rollerball left. As they exited the door the wall screen’s psychedelic picture of my insides blinked out.

  They had taken with them all their portable equipment except for a stack of towels. It could have been that they were leaving them for my convenience, I suppose. I didn’t think so, but I kept my eye on them because they might come in handy.

  Piranha Woman, however, had her own agenda. Before the door had quite closed on the rollerball team she was standing over me. “Let us now clarify some points,” she began.

  The professor reined her in. “At least let the poor son of a bitch put his pants on,” he said.

  This particular poor son of a bitch didn’t just pull his pants up without argument. I took my time. I put on every article of clothing I had come there with, and before I put on any I raided the stack of towels to wipe off as much as I could of the lubricant they had smeared on my skin. The professor hadn’t said I could. He might, of course, have stopped me at any time. He didn’t. He was busily studying his opticle, and the look on his face might have had the beginnings of a smile.

  Piranha Woman had no such look. There was a major scowl on her face. She didn’t say anything until I was almost finished buttoning my overshirt. Then she gave Professor Mazzini a fed-up look and pounced on me. “Now, Sheridan,” she said angrily, “let’s have some truth out of you. I want to know everything that Tesch said to you or you to him. Honestly. Every word.”

  She asked for every word; I did my best to give her what she asked for. I took my time about it, too.

  First I told her about how much trouble Maury had gone to to get me up to his rooms, and about the amazing scope of his wet bar, and as close as I could remember the very words of our chatter. And then, as an afterthought, “Oh, wait, I don’t know if I mentioned this before. Did I tell you he said that at one time he had known Maris Morchan?”

  Then I yawned, making it clear I didn’t believe that anybody would care about the fact that Maury Tesch had once known a disease-carrying terrorist named Maris Morchan, but as I was politely covering my mouth I kept a watch on the expressions on their faces. The professor’s displayed forthright astonishment. Piranha Woman’s look was all of that, plus a generous helping of fury. “Why did you not tell us this before?” she demanded, her voice suddenly shrill.

  She had asked for honest answers; I gave her what she had asked for. “Because I knew you’d have a cat fit about it.” And that was probably a mistake, because then the yelling started all over again.

  That is, her yelling. The professor didn’t seem to care to be involved; he was talking to his opticle and paying little attention to Piranha Woman’s screeches. They started loud, and got louder, but I couldn’t tell her much more than I already had. That didn’t stop her. She kept asking the same handful of questions in a dozen different ways, differing mostly in the amount of invective they contained, until finally the professor put a hand to his opticle and called, “Major! There is some new evidence. We must talk.”

  And talk they did, the two of them, at considerable length though never loudly enough for me to hear. Whatever it was he was telling her she seemed to enjoy it, her expression ranging from startlement to pure pleasure, with grace notes of anger mixed with joy.

  Finally she asked something, as though requesting some kind of permission and he nodded, granting it and she turned back to me.

  Then I really began to worry. I could tell by the look on her face that whatever they had been discussing I wasn’t going to like it.

  She gave me what I can only describe as a now-you’re-going-to-get-it look, then turned and walked to the table against the wall. “Have you noticed this cup?” she asked me, but as usual didn’t wait for an answer. It was simply an inverted plastic cup and she was already lifting it. What was under it was a pink, gooey lump that did look familiar, though what it was doing there I couldn’t guess.

  I didn’t give her the satisfaction of showing my surprise. “Looks like some of Gerda’s chewing gum. So what? Probably it’s been there for weeks.”

  Piranha Woman was shaking her head, looking pleased with herself. “Not this piece, no. We gave it to the lab for DNA and they’ve just given the colonel the results. It’s fresh, all right.”

  For a moment my heart skipped a beat. “Gerda’s back?” I demanded.

  But I knew that wasn’t likely, and anyway Piranha Woman didn’t bother to answer it. “The results were a bit of a surprise,” she informed me. “Looks like there were three males in her apartment. One of them, of course, was the late Mr. Tesch. We didn’t find any of you on the gum—but that doesn’t mean you weren’t there—but there was DNA on the gum that came from an unidentified male.”

  “Well, hell, it could’ve come from anybody. I chewed some of her gum myself now and then—”

  She was clearly enjoying herself now. “Oh, it’s not your DNA, Sheridan. It was from some other male.” The gloating look slid from her face for a moment, and actually she seemed almost embarrassed. “Well, sure,” she said. “It took a while to identify him. The lab didn’t make the connection right away because he wasn’t in the active file. He was listed as dead, in fact. His name—the name he was known by in the case files—was Brian Bossert. That mean anything to you?”

  It took me a minute to recognize it. “Oh, sure,” I said. “You were talking about him in class. The terrorist. The Toronto guy. Blew himself up when his ship exploded.”

  But she was shaking her head. “That’s what was thought, yes,” she admitted. “Apparently we were wrong.”

  The professor took pity on her obvious suffering. “Everyone thought that, Yvonne,” he told her. “The evidence seemed clear.”

  “And wrong,” she snapped. “I am going to recommend an investigative commission to see why we were so wrong.”

  It would have been smart of me to stay out of it, but I was puzzled. “So then what’s your problem?” I asked. “This Bossert’s the guy you should be looking for, right?”

  “Oh,” Piranha Woman said, the expression on her face returning to the now-I’ve-got-you look that I hated, “we’ll be looking for him, all right. The only thing is, he isn’t a him anymore.”

  That got to me. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked angrily, though I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  She was smiling now. “See, the lab checked everything in her room. Even her dirty laundry. And off two pairs of her smelly panties we got traces of, well, secretions. So naturally the lab DNA’ed them, too, and guess what? The DNA was the same. They were male. And they were Brian Bossert’s, just like the gum.” She gave me a moment for that to sink in, then delivered the coup de grâce. “So where does that leave you, Sheridan? Do you feel bad because now you know that the woman you’ve been banging all these weeks started out as a man?”

  17

  THE VERY WORST BLOW EVER

  I can’t tell you how I felt after that.

  Well, I can, sort of. I hurt in places where I didn’t even think I had a pain nerve. I had never before felt anything like this.

  The closest I can come was way back when I was a kid. Had to be no more than nine, because that was the year we spent in the transit camps in Knoxville, Tennesee. I had the hots for a twelve-year-old girl named Edna Hollander, and that didn’t work out very well, either.

  Actually “hots” may be the wrong word. I wasn’t yea
rning to have sexual intercourse with her. I didn’t know exactly how that was done, for one thing. But I did, definitely, want her to let me put my hand down the front of her dress so I could caress her bra. Her bra, remember. Not even her naked breast, because that far I did not aspire.

  Edna was a little older than me, and a little taller. And, yes, she actually did have breasts, or at least the beginnings of them. And she was alleged to have her mother’s permission to use a little lipstick, powder, and perfume. She did smell definitely better than any of the other girls, and the big thing was that she acted as though she liked me. A couple of times at lunch she gave me part of her ham or tuna salad, so much better than the prefabricated mystery meat the transit camp kitchens provided for the likes of me.

  Anyway, I knew where she lived. So sometimes, after whatever miserable stew we were given for supper at the transit camp, I would hike over to her neighborhood—it wasn’t more than a kilometer or so each way—just so I could skulk in the shrubbery to see if I could catch a glimpse of her diving into her pool or rocking herself on their verandah, or sitting, usually with a friend, in the little summer house on their back lawn.

  Doing that last part wasn’t always a lot of fun for me, though. All too often the friend she was sitting with was that bastardly high school senior, Randy Doberman. And one night, just after dark, they were talking low-voiced in the summer house, and I was desperate to know if they were just talking, or if they were doing some kind of non-talking activity that I didn’t even want to think about. I thought that, with a little luck, I could sneak up into earshot without being seen. It turned out that I could. I did.

  Nobody ever has to tell me what a dumb move that was. I even knew at the time—what was the thing my mother used to say? Eavesdroppers never hear anything good of themselves? I did it anyway, and my mother’s old saying was right.

  Most of what I heard at first was from Randy, how he had scored not one but four goals at soccer and, from Edna, how wonderful he was. I couldn’t hear all they said, but what I heard was too much. It went like this:

  Randy:—pisses me off when—(inaudible, inaudible)—you can’t tell me you like the little prick.

  Edna: (inaudible, inaudible, and how I wished it wasn’t)

  Randy: (inaudible, inaudible)

  Edna: (sounds of her settling herself closer to Randy) Well, what am I going to do? Reverend Burford says we have to be nice to them and Mom thinks every word Reverend Burford says comes right out of God’s mouth. And anyway—

  And from then on it was pretty much inaudible from him, except for some kind of grunting sounds, and pretty much inaudible, inaudible, inaudible from her, until I heard him say, kind of out of breath, “And do you do this for that little prick, too?”

  She didn’t answer, and I was pretty sure why. It spoiled my sleep for months, even after we’d moved up to Allentown for the next stop after Knoxville, and what these goddamn Security shits were telling me now in Pompeii was having exactly the same effect on me.

  So what I did for the Security shits, I sat there and took it while Piranha Woman had her fun with the situation. She was trying to hurt me, of course. If she wasn’t succeeding that was only because I was already hurt a lot worse than she could possibly do.

  So she asked all her questions about our specific sexual practices, and about the physical description of Gerda’s private parts, and about a million or so other things that were absolutely none of her damned business … and, more often or not, were often a lot like the kind of questions one part of my head was throwing at another part. And getting no satisfactory answers, of course. But then, I didn’t have any answers to give Piranha Woman, either.

  It was quite a painful hour or so, until the professor said something to a guard, who at once trotted over to Piranha Woman to mutter at her. Looking startled, she turned to the professor: “But there is much more I want to question him about.” He shrugged. “We haven’t even told him about the Flu!” she finished, puzzling me a bit. What was there to tell me about the Flu that the news channels hadn’t already told the world, with pictures?

  “All the same, Yvonne,” he said, “let’s end this session, please.”

  He had phrased it as a polite request, but it was an order, and one she didn’t like. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, and turned to march out of the room. That appeared to be a cue for the rest of my audience, too, because they almost all followed. Even the professor. He did give me a sort of apologetic shake of the head as he left. I couldn’t guess why.

  The only person now in the room with me was a very wide-awake female Security guard. She wasn’t conversational. She was at least human, though, because when I explained a growing problem to her she escorted me, one hand on her gun, to a toilet down the hall. Ordinarily I’m not crazy about having a strange female standing not fifty centimeters away while I’m using a urinal. The need, however, was great.

  She even answered me when I asked what time it was. Eighteen hours fifteen, she said, which meant I’d been answering questions or asleep for the short balance of one night, all of the following day, and almost into the next night.

  When we got back to the interrogation room she took her position at the door and I sat on the edge of the examination couch, trying not to think about anything anybody had said to me for the last day or two. That didn’t work very well until it occurred to me to stretch out on the couch. Which I did, and the next thing I knew, or didn’t know, was that I was asleep.

  That was a successful way of dealing with the questions, but only a temporary one. When I woke up the questions were all still there in my head.

  I opened my eyes. Old Professor Mazzini was sitting with his hands clasped and occasionally covering a small yawn—probably because he’d been asleep, but not long enough to completely satisfy his ancient bones. To the guard he said, “You can leave us, Agnes.” To me: “I imagine you’re hungry, Bradley. I brought a few sandwiches.”

  He was right. I was hungry enough to consider that they were probably the best sandwiches I’d ever had, too. And when I had finished the professor leaned back, and stared at me, and shook his head. Then he said, “Aw, Bradley, do you have any idea what you’ve got yourself into this time?”

  I did not care for his tone. Oddly enough, that was a disappointment. I had come to think of him as—not as a friend, to be sure, but at least as something a lot closer to a human being than any other employee of Security I had ever run across.

  Anyway, I didn’t know the answer to his question. The professor knew it himself, though, and, surprisingly, he seemed willing to talk about it without blaming it all on me—another difference between him and the rest of Security.

  He hesitated for a moment, then said, “May I ask you a quite personal question?”

  I almost laughed out loud. “You mean there’s one that Piranha Woman forgot to ask?”

  He didn’t respond to that, but he asked the question anyway. “Tell me, weren’t you ever suspicious that Ms. Fleming was concealing something from you?”

  He was getting me pissed off all over again. “Hell, yes. She had plenty of secrets. I knew that. But if you mean about being, what do you call it? transsexual?, no. Never. I don’t care what you say. She was a woman, totally. Trust me on this. I’ve checked every damn centimeter of her body, a dozen times over.”

  He was shaking his head again, in that damn terrorist-briefing-class way he had. “That doesn’t actually prove anything, Bradley. If you’ve got the money and you know the right doctor and you don’t mind the pain, you can change the sex for anybody in the world, male or female. It’s not quick or easy, of course,” he said, the professorial lecturing tone stronger than ever. “It takes months just to do all the carving up you have to go through, and you can’t do it in a single session because there needs to be a significant amount of healing time between the stages. Then you have to clone some of the parts and grow them to maturity and so on. Then there’s a year or two to flush out the last of the old
hormones and bring in the new. But no, Bradley,” he said, with a nod of satisfaction, “you’re wrong. When your Gerda was born she was a boy, all right. Came fully equipped with the penis and the testicles and all the other plumbing you have. She just traded all that stuff in to acquire the new parts that you liked so well. We think she had it done in the Stans because they have some pretty fine facilities there and no government interference. And they don’t keep any records, or at least none they share with us. And there it is.”

  What can I say? As far as the medical details were concerned the professor wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t known about what a plastic surgeon could do, even outside of the Stans—look what they’d done to my Uncle Devious.

  Well, yes, there are things I can say. One of them is that my life, already about as bad as I thought it could be, was rapidly getting worse. Invasively worse. I couldn’t think of anything else, not even simple housekeeping things like “my arm’s tired” or “I’m going to need to pee again pretty soon” without ugly, undesired pictures spilling into my mind from the professor’s news. I’m not going to say what those pictures were like. There are a lot of things in my life that I don’t care to talk about, but there are only a few that can actually turn my stomach, and those details were at the top of the list.

  Professor Mazzini was silent, occasionally glancing at his book as though he really wished he could get back to reading it. I wished that too. I didn’t want to be told anything else, by anybody, about anything at all.