The Hormone Jungle

by Robert Reed

  Oh, well.

  I try, he thinks. That’s the point. I make the effort and isn’t that what matters in the world?

  The chamois feels smooth and dry in his hands. He pulls it taut and drags it across his slick black skin, careful not to tear the leather, and he happens to glance at the calming waters. He can see the sky reflected, assorted birds wheeling and the upper floor of the one building showing too, all dressed up in its weeds. One glass door reveals a single face glaring down at the laughter, eyes angry and the delicate mouth angry and one hand with its pinkish webbing pressing against the glass. Let him steam, thinks Gabbro. He almost makes it too easy, he thinks. It sometimes seems the guy forgets what it’s all about. Which is fun. Just fun. I do things to him, he thinks, and he tries to do them back. It’s a goofy wrestling match between people with nothing in common.

  He finishes with the chamois, pulling it across his broad bald head. Then he giggles and balls it up and throws it underneath the chair, April telling him, “Quit it.”

  “Quit what?”

  She says, “Can’t you see, darling? You scared them,” and she waves at the little Cradlers. “You and your human-fountain tricks.”

  “They’re scared and they’re laughing?” he asks, playing stupid.

  She shakes her head, frustrated. “Can’t you just hold yourself back a little? Please?” She touches one of his knees. “Gabbro? Dear?”

  Gabbro blinks and smiles, the muscles of his face letting the white ceramic teeth show in the sunlight. A few hours ago, in their apartment, she was flinging shit at him and screaming. In all of his life he has never known someone so quick to explode. If she didn’t get over it as fast, he tells himself, he’d have left her long ago. Somehow. He’d go crazy under the pressure.

  Relaxing himself and breathing softly, he tries flowing with the mood of the moment. “We should quit fighting,” he announces. “Let’s make a pact.”

  “Sure.”

  He says, “Never again?”

  “Never,” she promises, both hands on her closer knee. He feels her grip, the hyperfiber flesh laced with the synthetic nerves. “You know why I love you, Gabbro? You’re such a little boy.”

  He can’t count the times he’s heard it from her. A billion or a hundred billion, and how many pacts have they made?

  She calls him “Darling” and smiles, her face tanned and round. She’s wearing her tight, tight black swimsuit. The ample flesh threatens to burst out in a dozen places. Her breasts are barely restrained, from the big brown nipples downward. The long black hair is streaked with lines of bright gold, regularly spaced, and the hair lays flat on her back and butt, ending just short of her good-sized feet. She sure has her reserves ready, he thinks. He resists the urge to use the joke. Later, he thinks. Our next fight. Then his mind wanders back to when they met…a year and a half ago?…in that narrow park down in the Old Quarter. He was just off the tubetrain from Jarvis, fresh from Morning, and she had looked respectable and tall and well built in the city lights. He had felt like a little lost miner against the lights and buildings. A friendly voice was what he needed at that moment, and she listened to him tell how he had been recruited to come to Brulé and work in some deep operation. Something that would put him near the belly of the Earth’s crust.

  In that heat? she asked.

  I’m from Morning, he said. Or doesn’t it show?

  And she laughed and told him, Oh, it does. It does. I just can’t see how people stand that furnace. You know? Even with hyperfiber around them.

  We carry refrigerators on our backs, he said.

  Hey, she said. I’m teasing. I know.

  And we’re strong.

  Who doesn’t know that?

  I start work tomorrow, he confessed. Early.

  They’re hiring more and more of you, aren’t they? She laughed and said, Listen. I know all about you people. Why you’re here. All the good you’re going to do us. Brulé City and everyone.

  And he joked in turn, I’m doing it for me. Not you. When Small Fry pay me better money than I make at home, I do it for me!

  Small Fry? she asked.

  What we call you—

  Because we’re small, she said, and if we’re caught outdoors on dear Morning—

  —you fry.

  See! I’m smart about these things.

  He had come to the Old Quarter, he explained, looking for a certain bar. It was a rumored collection point for the Morning miners, and April confessed to knowing the address and why not follow her? So he did. And she mentioned, This has got to be something to see. All of this!

  There’s nothing like it on Morning, he said. He was amazed by all the people and the towering structures clustered together, his own home being a single building shared by three bachelors and set on an empty plain. He described it with hands and words, missing the place and missing all of Morning without actually feeling love. Funny, huh?

  They weren’t far from the bar. April led him and went inside with him, casual and self-assured, and it surprised Gabbro when he saw all the Small Fry spread among the miners. There were women and men both, Terrans and not. April said, Sure, sure. A lot of us come here. We like it here.

  You do?

  They say you’re the shape of men to come.

  Do they?

  Absolutely. Didn’t you know?

  It was fun, him and her together. It seemed natural and easy and Gabbro nearly forgot to ask her to come home with him, expecting her to keep at his side till the end. And he wasn’t too drunk, particularly after taking some sober-up pills. By the time they were in bed together, her wanting him on top, he was authentically scared. He was worried about his strength. In every meaningful sense, she felt like any woman feels. But what if he forgot that she wasn’t like any he knew? What if he did her harm? This was his first night on the Earth, in an apartment bought and furnished by his employers, and he didn’t want to think what would happen if he jerked wrong and cut the poor girl wide open.

  I’m not worried, she had claimed.

  You should be, he said. Anything can happen.

  Gabbro, she said. You’re a splendid hunk of flesh, yes, and I’m thrilled to be here. But I wish you’d put something into this venture. And now.

  And if something goes wrong—?

  Silly.

  It might!

  Oh, silly! She said, Don’t you understand? That’s part of the attraction!

  Venus might have been terraformed.

  The tools and skill existed, sure. Even a thousand years ago. It could have been refashioned into an honest second Earth. Only there were limits with time and expense. For the greater bulk of the System, from Cradle to the cold Oort Cloud, heat could be applied to land and ice and yield a crude soil and easy seas with plenty of opportunities for organic trickery. But Venus had more heat than ten worlds could use, and barely enough water to make a good dew. Importing volatiles meant buying comets and other expensive freight. Lunar City-States had tried such a business, and they still do today. They’re dry places. Brutally dry. Only their wealthiest citizens can swim in the stuff, or pee in it, or just let it run for the thrill of watching it.

  When colonists finally organized and purchased rights to Venus, taking them from the old Luna-Kross Compact, it was seen at once that the best solution wasn’t rebuilding the world. It was rebuilding themselves. So they renamed it Morning, thinking the word lent a certain promise and elegance to their endeavor. They borrowed cyborg technologies first used during the Anglo-Amazon Wars, in simpler forms, updating the designs and materials and capacities. Hyperfiber flesh was coupled with corrosion-proof electronics and power cells needing only minimal recharge. They encased themselves inside their protective shells, balancing strength with honest grace and sharp senses. The crux of it all was to retain their humanness. The feeling of being part of a machine, seductive or not, was strictly excluded. The hyperfiber flesh had something of the spring and look of real flesh, and the faces mirrored the flesh-on-blood faces below th
em—the glass eyes moist and the ceramic teeth a little crooked sometimes—and the more personal glands and their talents were neither more reliable nor pleasurable nor impressive—on a relative basis—than what comes with ordinary flesh and the maliciousness of genes.

  Their culture was immediately controversial.

  There were sects and established faiths that declared Morningers to be blasphemies of an ultimate sort. Arguments wouldn’t sway them, and still don’t. Logic or simple decency had no impact on blind perceptions. Monsters had appeared in the System. Demons! they cried. Treacherous demons! And still today, in many places and by different means, Morningers are restricted or outlawed or taxed unfairly. If they didn’t have so damned many uses and talents, of course, all of them would live isolated existences. But a good cyborg is invaluable. Particularly since the easy and comfortable places have been conquered…and sure, thinks Gabbro, maybe it’s fair calling us the people of the future.

  Demons or not, Morningers are born in the sky.

  As a boy, Gabbro was raised in a floating habitat anchored to a hyperfiber tower with the atmosphere’s cold reaches all around. Like every Morninger, he grew at a galloping pace. His pituitary gland spat out hormones and his tailored body turned long and clumsy, his height finally topping out at a graceless two and a half meters before his sixteenth standard birthday. Then, as if on a signal, his body quit its growing. A small ceremony was held—a thousand-year tradition being played out—and he was deemed an adult-in-waiting.

  The cyborg shell was built around him, slowly and carefully.

  Terrans, friendly or not, cannot comprehend the complex and fickle processes involved. It takes time and a measure of pain to make the transition. You lose your natural teeth and eyes, and the inside of your mouth is coated so whiffs of acidic air won’t scald it. And Gabbro suffered the usual troubles. Objects shattered in his new hands. He stumbled and broke walls and strong furniture. His body—the fleshy remnants of his natural body—weakened and shrank while the cyborg functions invaded and attached themselves to the muscles and nerve endings. It all seemed to take forever. It took him exactly four years to be transformed, which is fast; then Gabbro was pronounced an adult, officially and forever, and he was taken to the surface at the conclusion of a second ceremony—larger and more lavish, people honoring him for his courage and his persistence.

  As if he had had a choice in it all.

  His adjustments had only just begun. Morning was still very much a wilderness world, empty and harsh with its landscape of hard, broken stone and blowing dusts and the liquid-thick air greedily sucking up the sun’s heat. But Morningers had a plan. They were in the process of building a unique biosphere, slowly and patiently, planting forests of photosynthetic machinery growing like brush and trees, then stocking herbivores that tapped them for electrical food and predators that in turn caught and fed on the herbivores. Robotic lifeforms, yes. Not a unique vision in human history, but it was the first time the dream of machine worlds had seen a practical application. Much as Gabbro cares. He can recall how he hated all of it—the barren places and the scattered forested places and the little place where he lived and the brutal mines where he worked hellish shifts, emerging exhausted and with nothing to do and no real friends as of yet. So he spent any free time walking the plains where the strange ceramic bushes struggled to grow. If his hyperfiber muscles grew tired, he would run an illegal tap and drain some of the bushes dry of their excesses. Then he’d continue, going in some wide sloppy circle with Morning spread around him, ugly and endless, its air as hot as flowing lead and as dense as deep, deep water.

  Now Gabbro is staring up at the sun, eyes absolutely human in looks but indifferent to the glare.

  April says, “Say. Listen.”

  “Yeah?”

  She touches his nearest thigh and squeezes. “Let me make it up to you,” she tells him coyly. “Let’s go inside.”

  He thinks, then says, “Why don’t we wait.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m waiting for the bird to come back.” The bird. He wants to watch it torment the Gardener. He wants the chance to laugh. “Just this once.”

  She says, “Gabbro,” with a hook in her voice.

  Not again! he thinks.

  “I don’t want to say anything, dear.”

  He readies himself.

  “But what if the rumors are true? What if you’re put off the job?”

  He laughs and says, “I’ll sleep for a change. And swim more.” He shrugs again, thinking the chances were poor and Brulé wouldn’t let it happen. “Just rumors,” he says, his voice confident and sincere.

  “What does a tailored bird cost?”

  “What it’s worth. What I paid,” he says.

  “You should save some of your money.”

  “I do,” he lies. “But I’ll save more. How’s that?”

  “I hope so. I do.”

  Words give him time. He looks at the swimming Cradlers. They’re not paying attention to him any longer, his jokes forgotten. He looks at their smooth fur, matted and dark, and hears them talking in that songlike version of the standard System language, all squeaks and whistles. If you’re going to tailor yourself, he thinks, that’s the way. Make yourself cute. He sighs. He wishes April hadn’t brought up that layoff business. He’s heard enough rumors lately. Like after last week when the backers came through the mines—frowning men and women, Terran and a few lanky Lunarians, standing in those clumsy coldsuits and staring at all the big hardworking Morningers—and Gabbro had heard it from several directions that these backers had had enough. The project was too far behind schedule. The goals were too vague. It’s brutal work to forget the pressures and just do your own job. But he’s managed pretty well by his own estimation. Gabbro does all the shifts he can stand and makes no trouble for the bosses, and if he ever believes the rumors he also tells himself that he won’t be laid off. Not him! Maybe the bird was a bad move. All right. But it’s been his experience that planning for the worst makes it come to you. What he needs to do is keep laughing, keep happy, and work like a son-of-a-bitch. And what about April? He doesn’t know. It’s so damned frustrating to live with someone so long and realize that what you think is beyond her understanding. Not even a million years would make her know him. Not really.

  “What are you thinking?” She smiles, pleasant and ignorant.

  “I’m wishing I was rich,” he lies.

  “Not that we are rich?”

  “We’re rich.”

  “I’ll try it, too, darling. Let’s make it come true.”

  “Sure.” He glances at her swimsuit, wondering where it will split first. He breathes and shifts in his chair, making it creak and grind. Then he looks at himself, relishing his thoroughly human shape and the foreboding blackness of his skin. The skin is mildly photovoltaic. That’s the reason for the absorbing color. The apparent bones and muscle groups help the illusion, as do the phony veins and pores and even the creases on the tops of his big fingers. There aren’t any statues on Morning, he reminds himself. Art doesn’t have room in a wilderness. But he’s seen statues on World-Net and in person, some of the best ever made, and he has come to appreciate his shape all the more. He’s like something carved from obsidian, nude except for the tiny clinging swimsuit that hides nothing.

  “Gabbro?” she says with less patience.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t you come inside, please.”

  “Another minute.” He had grown up hearing stories about hatred of his kind. When he arrived on the Earth, at first, he had expected resentment and hatred and possible violence from the Terrans. Yet the truth is something more complex, more elusive. For instance, he has all kinds of Terran friends. And the people who dislike him are typically too intimidated to make noise. At least most of the time. Most of his neighbors like him well enough. Brulé City ran checks wherever they put Morningers, choosing areas where people would accept the presence of the cyborgs. He’s grateful. Maybe he’s scare
d the Cradlers too much, but it’s not on purpose. And the older Terrans like him because one night, in a driving rainstorm, he heard an odd something and went outside to find some kind of wild ape lost and trying to get under cover. The ape was at someone’s window, clinging tight and slapping the glass, and Gabbro leaped high and caught it and shook it a little, making it more scared of him than the storm. Then he let it run away. The police arrived later, and he went out and said sure, it was a prowler of some kind. He had chased it off. And that’s what the old people learned in time. Then for a long time, at odd intervals, food was left in his grocery chute, and someone sent April bags and bags of sweet candies.

  He looks up, ignoring April. He hopes to see the Gardener, but now he’s hiding or something, and so he looks the other way and spots Steward staring out at nothing. Steward, he thinks. They’ve talked a lot about all kinds of little things. Weather. Sports. The mantle mines. And foreign places. Steward doesn’t give clues to his history—he keeps to himself without being unfriendly or tight-lipped—but he knows the System. He knows the names of worlds and the ways people live, and he carries himself like a man who’s done some serious wandering. Sometimes Gabbro thinks they’d make good friends. One of them just needs to try.

  “Your bird’s not coming,” says April.

  “It’s up there. It’s waiting its chance.”

  “So what do you say?” she wonders, giving a bawdy laugh.

  “I guess. Sure.” The funny thing is that he doesn’t care about the bird or the Gardener. He got an idea about tormenting one with the other, and so he reactivated their feud. Hell, he thinks, the Gardener, Toby, would probably feel lost if I forgot about him for too long. He probably expects this sort of abuse, he tells himself.

  Only it’s been getting old these last months.

  Now he can barely care how it began.

  And now April stands, picking up her towel and chair and starting for their open door. Gabbro watches her fat ass and the cottage-cheese thighs and feels nothing. He wonders what would happen if he changed everything in his life now. Cut it down to bedrock and start again. He thinks of healing things with the Cradlers, and maybe the Gardener too…and his mind drifts to April and him in the beginning, the way she’d lie under him and trust him completely. Now it’s different. They still make love, sure, but now it’s changed. He never loses himself in the act. He is in total control of his every motion. And the trust she felt at the first has turned legitimate.