Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

  I had that weird feeling I recollect I had when I first scooped a female body from the draw forty-odd years ago. Shock and disorientation, firstly. Then a turn-on, racy, kinky, great. I’d got to the stage now of feeling I was on a date, dating Miranda, only I was Miranda. My first lady had been Qwainie, and Qwainie wasn’t my type, which in the long run made things easier faster. But Miranda is my type. Oh my yes. (Which is odd in a way as the only woman I ever was really serious with — well, she wasn’t like Miranda at all.) So I dialed Miranda another Angel, and we drank it down.

  As this was happening, a tall dark man with a tawny tan, the right weight, and nothing forcing steam out of his nose and eyeballs, came into the bar. He dialed a Coalwater, the most lethal beer and alcohol mix in the galaxy (they say), one of my own preferred tipples, and sauntered over.

  “Nice day, Scay.”

  “He knows me,” said Miranda’s soft cute voice with the slight lisp.

  “The way you drink, feller,” he said.

  I had emptied the glass, and Miranda’s ears were faintly ringing. I’d have to wait awhile for the girl to catch up.

  “Well, if he knows me that well, then I’ll hazard on who he is.”

  “Win, and he’ll stand you a Coalwater.”

  “The lady wouldn’t like that. Anyway. Let’s try Haro Fielding.”

  “Hole in one.”

  “Well, fancy that. They let us Out the same time again.”

  Haro, whom I thought was in the skin of one of the tech people whose name I had mislaid, grinned mildly.

  “I’ve been Out a couple of weeks. Tin and irradium traces over south. Due Back In tomorrow noon. You?”

  “Forty-two hours.”

  “Hard bread.”

  “Yeah.”

  We stared into our glasses, mine empty, and I wished sweet Miranda would buck up and stop ringing so I could drink some more. Haro’s rig had been auspicious, a tall dark man just like Haro’s own body. But he’d treated it with respect. That was Haro Fielding all over, if you see what I mean. A really nice guy, super-intelligent, intellectual, all that, and sound, as about nothing but people ever are, and that rarely, let me add. We had been working together on the asti-manganese traces the other side of the rockies when the Accident happened, back here in town. That was how we two kept our skins. I remember we were down a tunnel scraping away, with the analysis robot-pack clunking about in the debris, when the explosion ripped through the planet’s bowels. It was a low thrumming vibration, where we were, more than a bang. We were both a pair of tall guys, but Haro taller than me, with one of the best brains I ever came across. And he stood up and crashed this brain against the tunnel-ceiling and nearly knocked himself out. “What the F was that?” I asked, after we’d gotten ourselves together. “It sounded,” said Haro to me, “like the whole Base Town just blew up, hit the troposphere, and fell back down again.” He wasn’t far out.

  We made it back through the rock hills in the air-buggy inside twenty minutes. When we came over the top and saw the valley full of red haze and smoke and jets of steam, I was scared as hell. You could hear alarm bells and sirens going, but the smog was too thick to work out what kind of rescue went on and what was just automatic noise and useless. I sat in the driver’s seat, gunning the buggy forward, and swearing and half crying. And Haro said, “It’s okay.”

  “Of course it’s not bloody okay. Look at it — there’s no goddamn thing left —”

  “Hey,” he said, “calm down.”

  “Calm down! You’re crazy. No, I’m not just shaken up over who may have just died in that soup. I’m pissing myself that if it’s all gone, we’ll never get off this guck-heeled planet alive.”

  The point being that planet NX 5 (whereon we are) is sufficient distance from HQ that it had taken our team, the “pioneer squad” every expert Company sends in ahead of itself, to explore, to test, to annotate, to break open for the use of Man, had taken us, I started to say, around thirty Terran years to arrive. We’d traveled cryogenically, of course, deep-frozen in our neat little cells, and that was how we’d get back when it was time. Only if Base had blown up, then maybe the ship had blown up, too, plus all the life supports, the SOSs — every darling thing. Naturally, if reports suddenly stopped coming in, the Company would investigate. But it would take thirty years before anything concrete got here. Though NX 5 is a gallant sight, with its pyramidal rocks rich in hidden ores, its dry forests, and cold pastel deserts busy with interesting flora and fauna, and its purling pale lemon skies…it doesn’t offer a human much damn anything to get by on. While the quaint doggies that roam the lands, barking and walking upright, joy of the naturalist, had a few times tried to tear some of us to pieces. Marooned without proper supplies, shelter, or defense: with nothing — that was a fate and three-quarters.

  “We’ll be dead in half a month,” I said.

  “To die — to sleep, no more,” Haro muttered, and I began to think the blow on the head had knocked him silly, so it’d be a half month shared with a lunatic at that.

  However. We careened down into the smoke, and the first thing, a robot machine came up and ordered us off to a safety point. Events, it seemed, weren’t so bad as they looked. Matters were in (metal) hand.

  The short High Winter day drew to its end under cover of the murk, and we sat in the swimpool building on the outskirts, which had escaped the blast. Other survivors had come streaming and racketing in. There were about ninety of us crammed round the pool, eating potato chips and nuts and drinking cold coffee, which were all the rations the pool machines, on quarter-power, would give us. Most of the survivors had been away on recon or various digs or other stuff, like Haro and me. A handful with minor injuries, caught around the periphery of Base Town, were in the underground medical sanatorium which, situated northside, was unscathed. There were some others, too, a third of the planet away on field studies, who had yet to find out. It seemed that the core in the third quadrant of Base’s energy plant had destabilized, gone critical, and — wham. The blast was of course “clean,” but that was all you could say for it. The third quadrant (Westtown) had gone down a molten crater, and most of the rest of the place had reacted the way a pile of loose bricks might do in a scale-nine earthquake. That means, too, people die.

  By dawn the next chill day, we had the figures. There had been around five thousand of us on-world, what with the primary team and the back-up personnel — shipmen, ground crew, service, mechanics, and techies. Out of those men and women, one thousand nine hundred and seventy-three were now dead. What we felt and said about that I won’t repeat now; there’s nothing worse than a bad case of requiemitis. Some of them were pals, you see. And a couple of them, well. Well, one of them was once practically my wife, only we never made it that far, parted, stayed friends (cliché). Yep. Requiemitis. Let’s get on.

  Aside from the dead, there were a lot of gruesomely injured down in the San, nearly three thousand of them. While the hospital machineries could keep them out of pain and adequately alive, the mess they were in required one form of surgery only. The form that’s discreetly known on Earth as Rebo (rebodying) and is normally only for the blazing rich. Rebo, or the transfer of the ego, with all its memories, foibles, shining virtues, and fascinating defects, from one body (for some reason a wash-out — crippled, pan-cancerous — what you will) to another, is only carried out in extreme cases. And indeed the business was hushed up for years, then said not to work; then said not to be in use. It happened, though, that our Very Own Company was one of the sponsors of the most advanced Rebo techniques. Again, on Earth and the Earth Worlds, there are laws that limit transfer strictly. (And, naturally, there are religious sects who block the Sunday news, abhorring the measure.) In our case, though…we were different, weren’t we? A heroic advance guard on a remote planet, needed to carry out vital work, etc., and all that.

  Those were the first tidings of comfort and joy: figures of death and injury and rumors of Rebo. It threw us about somewhat. I noticed that
the machines started to serve us hot food and alcohol at about this juncture. Then Haro and I got plastered to the plaster, and I stopped noticing. The second gospel came on about an hour later.

  Now, an ego that’s transferred, where doth it go? It goeth into another body, natch. Fine. Generally it’s a grown body — android — tissue and cells. That can take anything from a trio of months to a year, depending on format and specifications, and, let it be whispered, on the amount of butter you can spread. Sometimes, too, there have allegedly been transfers into the recently dead bodies of others (there is supposed to be a gal in Appeline, New Earth, who bought her way into the pumped-out body of a movie star, dead of an overdose. Apocryphal perhaps.) Or even of animals. (There’s a poem about that one: Please, God, make of me a panther / A pretty panther, to please me / Pretty please, Hexos or Iaveh or Pan / There is no God but the god who can — / Make me a panther, please.)

  That — I mean, grown androids — is what should have happened here. Approaching three thousand bodies for those that, alive only on support systems, needed them. Trouble was — you guessed it — the tissue banks that would have begun the project were over in Westtown and blown to tomorrow. It would take thirty years to get us some more.

  The only facilities they had were the remains of the cryogenic storage (the ship had caught the blast), whole if depleted berths for about two hundred, into which three thousand persons were not going to fit. And another outfit, of which we knew little, but which would act, apparently, as the interim point of the transferal operation, a kind of waiting room between bodies. Mostly, a transfer flashes the subject through that place so fast it’s just a nonstop station on the way. Yet this area, too, was it seemed capable of storing. Storing an ego. And its capacity was unlimited.

  Just as requiems can be tedious, rehashing old action replays of panic and mayhem can get one down. So, I’ll just spin the outline for those of us who like it in the big bold type.

  The Company, who had gotten word of the latest position via the beacon intercom, had a proposition to offer us. And for proposition, read Fact. For we who are Company Persons know we belong to our Company, body and — yes, let’s hear it for laughs — soul.

  The Company would like us to stay on, and hang in there. This was how: the survivors of the Accident (and isn’t that a lovesome name for it?), about one hundred and fifty people of both sexes, would donate their bodies to a common fund. Now, and let me stress this, around one hundred and fifty bodies put out like pairs of pants and dresses for the use of — one deep breath — over three thousand footloose egos. For the life supports would be switched off and the liberated bodiless egos of the mortally wounded taken into the wonderful — what shall I call it? — place — that stored unlimited egos within its unlimited capacity. And into that place, also, would go the liberated egos of those whose “skins” had not been damaged, those skins now the property of All. And here in the place we would all live, not crowded, for the disembodied are not crowded, lords and ladies of infinite space, inside a nutshell. Then, when it was our allotted time physically to work or play, Out we would come and get in a body. Not our own. That would hardly be fair, would it? Make those who had lost their own bodies for good feel jealous. (For that reason, no one gets finally supplied from the Bank or the Store until everyone gets supplied. Suits for all or none at all.) Anyway, there might be a slip-up. Yes, slips-up happen, like cores destabilizing. Gray vibes to meet oneself on the street in thrall to another. And in thirty years the androids would start growing like beautiful orchids in their tanks. And in maybe sixty years (or a bit longer, we’re starting from scratch, remember, and not geared in the first place to do it) there’ll be suits for all, bodies for everyone. New bodies, old familiar bodies, loved ones, forgotten ones — ah, the compost with it. It stank. And we shrilled and howled and argued and screamed. And we ended up in it to our eyebrows.

  I recall wandering in a long drunk, and Haro, tall and dark and tawny, then as now, and drunk as me, said to me: “Calm down, Scay. They may blow it and kill us.”

  “But I don’t want to be killed, pal.”

  “Nothing to it,” said Haro. “Something to look forward to.”

  “My God, you still remember that,” said Haro, draining his Coalwater.

  Miranda’s ears had stopped dinging.

  “Say, Miranda, would you care for another?” I asked her in her own honeyed voice. “Of course I remember, you turkey. Get killed. Boy.”

  “Although Sens-D is a sort of death. You realize that, Scay?”

  “Yes. Surely. Only I’m not dead in there. In there stops me getting dead. You know, I was thinking, it’s funny —” (“You thinking is funny? You’re right there,” interpolates Haro) “ — you get in a skin and you come Out and you feel wrong, and you feel okay, all at the same moment. And if you stay with the skin awhile, weeks, a month at a time, especially if you’re working in it — it starts to feel natural. As if you always had it. Or something very like it, even if it isn’t like it. Take Miranda here, I could get used to Miranda. Seems unlikely now, but I know from past experience I could, and would. Meanwhile, the — place — that starts to seem alien and frightening all over. So you can hardly stand to go Back there. And now and then, you need their drugs to stop you kicking and screaming on the way to Transfer, as if you were going off to get shot in the skull. And yet —”

  “And yet?” said Haro, looking at me quietly with the other man’s dark eyes.

  “And yet, no one mentions it, but we all know, I suppose. When you come Out, there’s the Big Wrench. It’s yellow murder coming through into a new body. But when you go Back In —”

  “No Wrench.”

  “No Wrench. Just like slipping into cool water and drifting there. I know there’s sometimes a disorientation — it’s cold, I’ve gone blind — that stuff. But it happens less and less, doesn’t it? The last time I went Back. Hell, Haro. It was like gliding out of a lump of lead.”

  “And how do you feel about working, in Sens-D?”

  I narrowed Miranda’s gorgeous sherry eyes. Haro called it by the slang name, always, and I knew Haro. He was doing that just because, to him, “sensory deprivation” meant nothing of the sort, and he’d acknowledged it.

  “I work fine down, up, In there. I do. When they started asking us to work that way, assessments, work-ups, lay-outs — the ideas stuff we used to do prowling round a desk — I thought it’d be a farce. But it’s — stimulating, right? And then the assimilator passes on what you do, puts it in words Outside. I sometimes wonder how much talent gets lost just fumbling around in the physical after words —”

  “And did you know,” said Haro, “that some of the best work any of us ever did is coming out of our disembodied egos in Sens-D?”

  I swore. “Ger-eat. That means we’ll be stuck in there more and more. If the sweetheart Company found that out, they’ll fix our contracts and —”

  “But you just said, Scay, it’s good In there.”

  “Devil’s advocate. Come on. Where’s the Coalwater you promised Miranda?”

  He got the drinks and we drank them, and the conversation turned, because Company maneuvers and all the Company Likes and Wants can be disquieting. There have been nights in the skin I have lain and wondered, there, if the Company might not have arranged it all, even the Accident, just to see how we make out, what happens to us, in the place, or in the skin of another guy. Which is crazy, crazy. Sure it is.

  Anyhow, Haro was due Back tomorrow, and I had only thirty-seven more hours left.

  Rebuilt, and glamorized to make us happy, once we were stuck here for a century or so, Base Town was a strange sight, white as meringue against NX 5’s lemon sky. Made in the beginning for the accommodation, researches, and pleasures of a floating population of two thousand, you now seldom saw more than twenty people on the streets at a time. For whom now did the bright lights sparkle, and the musics play, the eateries beckon, the labs invite, and the libraries yawn? Who races the freeway, swims th
e pool? Who rides the carousel? And, baby, ask not for whom the bell tolls. With the desert blowing beyond the dust traps on all sides, the sand-blown craters of the west, the rockies over there, frowning down, where weird whippy birds go flying in the final spasms of sunset, Base has the look of an elegant surreal ghost town. It’s as if everyone has died, after all. The ones you see are only ghosts out for a day in the skin.

  A new road goes west, off to that ship the machines are still working on. Haro and I walked out to the road, paused, looked up it into the distance, but made no move to do more. Once, years ago, we all went to see what progress they were making on the getting-home stakes. So the road had occasional traffic, some buggy or jetcar puttering or zooming along, like a dragonfly with wings of silver dust. Not anymore. Oh, they’ll get the ship ready in time, it’s in the contracts, in time for the new bodies, so we can all go to sleep for thirty years and wake up home in HQ, which isn’t home. Who cares, anyway. What’s home, who’s home, to hurry for? Thirty years older, sixty years, one hundred and sixty. And we, the Children of the Ice, are the same as always. Live forever, and sell your soul to the Company Store.

  “Hey, Haro, what do we do now?”

  We discussed possibles. We could take a jeep out into the desert and track a pack of doggies, bring back a lady doggy and give it to Dydoo (who’d not smile). We could swim, eat curry, nap in the Furlough, walkabout, eat pizza, go to a movie. We did those. The film was Jiarmennon, sent out to our photo-tape receptors inside a year of its release on the Earth Worlds, by the kindly Company. A terrific epic, huge screen, come-at-you effects, sound that goes through the back of the cerebellum and ends up cranking the pelvis. One of those marvelous entertainments that exactly combine action, spectacle, and profound thought. I admit, some of the profound thought I didn’t quite latch onto. But the overall was something plus. Five hours, with intervals. Three other people in the theatre. One of them, the one in Fedalin, was asleep or passed out.