The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “So what do we do now?” he said.

  “Homosexual?” said Zelmet Emsley’s talking head. “Sure, it’s just a straightforward recompilation.” He settled onto a chair behind the intake counter in BioCore Receiving. The lightboard on top of the counter shimmered to consciousness and began to sing as he waggled his hand over it.

  “As I remember, most of it is at chromosome seven, region 7q36.” Emsley tapped through a series of files. “Right, and chromosome eight, region 8p12. Hmm. I’ll need to tweak chromosome ten at 10q26.” He wiped the lightboard with a dismissive wave. “Outpatient procedure, check in tomorrow after lunch and you can eat dinner first shift. Should take the sprites five or six days to spread to all your cells and that’s it, since you don’t need to grow anything you don’t already have.” Emsley’s talking head fixed Been with an officious stare. “But why do it at all?” His eyes bulged, suddenly as big as plums. “Hmm?” Even his thinking head blinked itself awake and squinted in Been’s general direction. “Trouble back in the pod?”

  Strictly speaking, Been’s reasons for wanting to switch his sexual orientation were none of Emsley’s business. Zelmet Emsley wasn’t a colonist. He was crew, the Nine Ball’s First Bioengineer; it was his job to look after the health of the colonists. This included performing reembodiments if requested, assuming that they posed no harm to anyone and did not make unreasonable demands on the resources of the BioCore. But Been was determined to be diplomatic with Emsley. In his decades of experience traveling on slipships dividing the sustain, he had learned the hard way that it never paid to provoke the crew.

  “No, no trouble.” Uninvited, Been sat down on the float across the desk from Emsley. It settled toward the deck briefly, before bearing up under his weight. “The thing is that Friday is my birthday and . . . well . . . I’m afraid I underreported my age. I’m actually going to be a hundred and thirty-two. Born on April 11, 2351. On Titan—that’s a moon you’ve probably never heard of back in the First System. Only eight and a half AU from Earth. Practically next door to the homeworld although I never did make it there. Somebody said the captain hails from Earth, or is that just a rumor? Because that would practically make us neighbors. How come we never see him—Captain Quellan, I mean? He’s not virtual, is he?”

  “You see him every day on the lightboards.” Both of Emsley’s heads gazed at him sternly. “This is a colonial transport, Mr. Watanabe, not a cruise ship. The captain keeps a lean crew and likes to make sure things are done right, which means he’s too busy to be socializing with passengers.”

  “My friends call me Been.” He pushed at the deck and the float bobbed and swung away from the counter. “Right, I understand he’s busy. So anyway, I’m a hundred and thirty-two and feel like I might be going a little stale so I’m thinking it’s time for a recast.”

  “I take it you had some reason to claim that you were fifty years younger than you actually are?” Emsley seemed more amused than annoyed at Been’s confession. “You’ve deceived us, Mr. Watanabe.”

  “Not you so much as Henk Krall and Lars Benzonia.” On another ship bound for a different planet, this might have been a serious matter. But the Nine Ball was no luxury liner and Been suspected that he wasn’t the only one on board who had misrepresented himself. Zola, for example, seemed rather an unlikely Consensualist.

  “Hmm,” said Emsley. “I thought you people were against changing personalities.”

  “We’re not against it, we’re just supposed to get consensus on it and that’s hard. Can you keep a secret?”

  Emsley pointed at the lightboard and the hatch to BioCore slid shut. “Try me.”

  “I’m not so sure I am a Consensualist anymore.”

  “Mr. Watanabe, we’re bound for a colony that is almost entirely Consensual.”

  “Been,” he said. “I guess that will make me someone special, won’t it? Actually, at first I was wondering if I shouldn’t recast as a woman but then I thought that it would be too much trouble in too short a time. I mean we are going to make planetfall soon, aren’t we? The captain’s first estimate was that it would take just eight months to divide the sustain.”

  “Trouble, yes.” As Emsley tilted his chair against the bulkhead of the BioCore, the seatback cracked under the strain, re-formed and then knitted itself together to take his weight. His thinking head rested against his talking head.

  “You’ve been recast,” said Been, “am I right?”

  “Three times.”

  “How long did you wait for your first?”

  “I was a hundred and forty-one when I had my personality transplant. At two hundred and thirteen, I became a heterosexual. And I was three hundred and four when I got this.” He tapped the temple of his thinking head.

  There were only so many times a human could be recast before going stale and each had to be more radical than the last. Oak Suellentrop was currently the oldest living human. At four hundred and sixty-two, he had been recast seven times, most recently as a floating bladder that cruised the jet streams in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter.

  “Well, the thing is,” said Been, “my grandmother went prematurely stale. We didn’t realize how far gone she was until it was too late. We tried everything—transplant, bodymods, transgendering, total reembodiment—to shake her out of it.” He let his voice go husky out of respect for this fictitious grandmother; Been had never known his real one. “She lived to be two hundred and eight but for the last sixty years all she wanted to do was watch old-fashioned porn and look up at Saturn.” Been pounded his fist into his open hand. “So yes, I’m a little nervous. Ready to embrace paradigm shift and grab a new point of view. Give me that electric kiss of anxiety and ‘Happy birthday, Been!’”

  “You could grow another head,” said Emsley.

  “I suppose.” Been looked thoughtful, as he pretended to consider the possibility. “But that would be at least as much trouble as becoming a woman, wouldn’t it? Besides, what would I put in it? I don’t think I’m smart enough to have more than one head. I mean, look at you. How much extra storage do you have up there, anyway?”

  Emsley perked up. Like most people who had opted for radical bodymod in a late recasting, he was clearly proud of what he’d had done. He unfixed his shirt so that Been could admire the astonishing breadth of his clavical bridge and the bulge where his spinal cord split in two. His thinking head was smaller than his talking head and had only a vestigial mouth and smudge of a nose. It sat low on its own stubby neck and seemed not to have much range of motion.

  “People used to think that symmetry was the key to beauty.” Emsley twisted his talking head to admire his thinking head. “But in my experience women are just fascinated by asymmetry.”

  “I was hoping to be gay,” Been said.

  Although it didn’t open its eyes, Emsley’s thinking head scowled. A flicker of embarrassment passed across the features of the talking head at being caught celebrating himself so thoroughly. “Yes, of course.”

  “Are there side effects I should know about?” Been pushed at the deck and the float drifted a few centimeters closer to the counter. “I heard there were changes in the brain.”

  Emsley shrugged. “The interstitial nucleus of your anterior hypothalamus will shrink over time, but no one will be able to tell that unless they peel your brain as part of a total reembodiment. The pheromone palette in your sweat will change. The people who you live with who are used to the way you smell might tell you that something’s different, without knowing what exactly.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad.”

  As Emsley leaned forward, his chair cracked once again and recurved around him. “In some ways, sexual reorientation is the most subtle of all possible recastings. Your sexuality, however you decide to express it, does not reside solely in your DNA. It’s in your brain, your genitals, your memory, your image of yourself and your personality. Yes, we can manipulate nature but there is also nurture to consider. I was gay for more than two centuries and I was still havin
g great sex with men some forty years after I became genetically straight. Just as you will have a hundred and something years of heterosexual nurture to deal with if you become gay.”

  “Thirty-two.” He bounced off the float. “A hundred and thirty-two. My birthday is Friday, can you do it before then?”

  Emsley never got the chance to answer. The high-pitched wail of a child in pain filled the passageway just outside BioCore Receiving. The hatch slid aside revealing two dazed colonists carrying a very pale boy, who was maybe five or six. His right hand was wrapped in a bloody towel.

  “There.” Emsley pointed to the float where Been had just been sitting and they set the boy down on it. Been pressed himself against the rear bulkhead to keep out of the way.

  The boy tried to curl into himself around the wounded hand but the bioengineer gently rolled him onto his back. “What is this then?” Emsley’s manner was so cool he might have been asking the time.

  “The boys got into the air vent somehow and Joss stuck his hand into a fan,” said the man, whom Been took to be the dad. “It was dark.”

  The expressions on Emsley’s faces were calm but alert as he pushed the boy’s hair aside. “Boys,” he said, as he painted sensor sprites onto the pallid forehead with his medfinger. Been could hear the lightboard begin to sing the boy’s vital signs. “Why is it always boys?”

  “It’s my fault,” said the woman, probably the mom. She sniffed but did not cry.

  “Our fault,” said the dad.

  “Yes, you’re right,” she said miserably.

  “Let’s make Joss comfortable.” Been heard hissing as Emsley pressed the medfinger to the boy’s temple. Joss immediately went limp. Emsley closed the boy’s eyes and unwrapped the towel. “Oh, dear,” he said. Blood spattered onto the float. “Were you able to find any of the fingers?”

  The dad was already offering him a blood-smeared plastic bag containing the severed fingers.

  Emsley held it up to the brightly illuminated overhead. “Hmm,” he said. “Too mangled.” He dropped the plastic bag into the trash. The mom gave off a strangled yip of protest as the lid closed for incineration.

  “Don’t worry.” Zelmet Emsley smiled at the boy’s parents. “We’ll grow him better ones.” As he maneuvered himself behind the float to push it into the BioCore, he noticed Been still squeezed against the bulkhead. “Ah, Been. I’ll see you Thursday, then?”

  Been didn’t know exactly who had bought the personality transplant that he was carrying in his mindsync, but that was often the case in his line of work. Besides, it all was perfectly legal. Everyone had the right to be recast, especially when there was a possibility that the client might go stale. Of course, the citizens of Little Chin could ostracize anyone who was recast without consensus approval. Been suspected that he was working for one of the leaders of the colony, which was why the client had paid extra for covert delivery. Been’s problem was that he had no idea where he was supposed to download the transplant. His contact on Nonny’s Home had never shown up. There had been no final briefing. With a one-way ticket, false ID, the transplant, and a third of his fee in hand, Been had chosen at the last minute to continue on to Little Chin in the hopes that the client would contact him there.

  But as the year aboard the slipship dragged by, he had come to regard his decision as foolhardy. How was he supposed to make delivery while remaining undercover? Sneak up on Lars Benzonia, Acoa Renkl, and Elma Stitch and ask if they were going stale? And if he couldn’t connect, he might be stuck on Little Chin with a personality transplant that only his client could unlock. His partial fee would pay for a ticket to someplace else, but probably nowhere he wanted to go. Meanwhile, the Consensualists would surely shun him once they found out that he barely knew the difference between agronomy and astronomy. Been needed a backup plan. He was sure that if he could only get a chance to talk to Harlan Quellan, captain and owner of the Nine Ball, he’d be able to strike some kind of deal for transport back to Nonny’s Home. He could offer partial payment and then join the crew to work his passage back. Once he was home, he could either insist on being paid in full or else return the personality transplant to AllSelf for a salvage fee. But first he had to see Harlen Quellan and the captain had proven impossible to see.

  “Been Watanabe,” Zola said over the din of the second seating for breakfast, “this is Ilona Quellan.”

  Zola had been standing between Been and Ilona. Now she stepped back so that he had an unobstructed view. Ilona sat by herself, as was her custom. She glanced up warily from a bowl of steamed rice, a short stack of pancakes spread with butter, a fillet of lightmeat, and half a grapefruit. Zola seemed to expect Been and Ilona would shake hands, but Been sensed that this was not an intimacy the pregnant woman would welcome. Instead, he circled to the other side of the long table, put his bowl of Figs ’N Flakes down, and sat opposite her, fighting the absurd attraction he had felt ever since he had first seen this unhappy woman.

  “Hello, Been Watanabe,” she said. “I understand you want something of us?”

  Been touched his forefinger and middle finger to his eyes, nose, and lips before turning them toward Ilona. “Hello, Ilona Quellan. Tomorrow is my birthday.”

  “Happy birthday to you then, sir.” She spread a hand over her huge belly. “This baby and I rejoice that you continue to exist.”

  The rest of Been’s pod settled around the two of them. Zola inserted herself next to Ilona and introduced her to Sandor and Nelly. She had met Ilona at the Arachnophiliac’s Meetup and had twice taken care of Ilona’s marbled spider Rags while Ilona was getting the baby reembodied. Rags was an Araneus marmoreus that daily filled her terrarium with webs of hypnotic complexity.

  There was a long moment when nobody had anything to say. Zola and Nelly perched expectantly at the edges of their chairs. Sandor began to eat. Ilona gazed at Been, apparently waiting for him to answer her original question. Been smiled back.

  There was nothing remarkable about Ilona Quellan, other than that she was extremely pregnant. She was a small woman, and her belly was so huge that the baby almost seemed to be more of her than she was of herself. She had fine features: subtle lips, steep eyebrows. Her black hair had highlights of gray. She looked tired, but that was only to be expected. She had been pregnant with her son for more than three years, if the rumors were to be believed. The babyface medallion that hung around her neck showed the baby to be asleep.

  If he tried, Been could look at Ilona critically. For example, no one could miss her constant scowl. Been could count the wrinkles and hear the mistrust in her voice and sense the wall she had built around herself to keep the world away. But he didn’t care; he imagined smoothing her wrinkles with his kisses and climbing the wall to win her heart. Of course, he had nursed his impossible infatuation from a distance because he was afraid of where it might lead him. She was the captain’s ex, pregnant, sad, unattainable, and aloof. Been had had many slipship romances, but never a secret obsession. It was so unlike him; he was at once delighted and alarmed.

  Zola kicked Been under the table. He glanced over at her and she twitched her head toward Ilona. Sandor had his nose in a plate of eggs but Nelly had pushed back from the table, too nervous to eat. Been could tell that the women in his pod were going to start speaking for him if he didn’t speak for himself.

  “For my birthday,” he said, “I decided to give myself a present. I’m going to be gay. Zelmet Emsley has already programmed the sprites; I’m getting them later today.”

  “And what made you decide this, Been?” said Ilona.

  “I’ve never been gay.” He shrugged. “I’ve never really been anyone but myself. Rather boring, wouldn’t you say? And I suppose I’m worried about going stale.”

  “At your age?” Sandor grunted in disbelief.

  “We all go stale eventually,” said Ilona. “Immortality is for turtles.”

  “Ilona is an authority on creative discomfort,” Zola broke in. They had all agreed that this was their best a
nd maybe only chance to move Been out of the pod now that they were sure he was going to become gay. Zola wasn’t going to let Been ruin it. “You should see what she has done with her cabin. It’s like a maze.”

  Nelly nodded vigorously. “Zola told me that just finding the couch made her feel smarter.” Her enthusiasm had an edge of desperation. “No one could ever go stale there.”

  “I’d very much like to see it,” said Been.

  Ilona nodded and then poured syrup over her pancakes, her fish, and her grapefruit. Zola and Nelly began to eat as well, as if something had just been settled, although Been wasn’t sure what.

  Zola said, “I really appreciate this, Ilona.”

  “Appreciate what?” Ilona teased a sliver from the fillet with her chopsticks. “Don’t assume, Zola. What do you imagine I’m doing?”

  “You’re talking to us,” said Been.

  “You’re here. It would be impolite to do otherwise.” Her smile was chilly. With a wrench, Been realized that he was wasting his time trying to charm her. Ilona Quellan would never willingly disrupt her life by letting him move into the spare hutch in her cabin.

  At that moment, the babyface lit up. The eyes on the medallion blinked several times, awash in a blue glow. They took in the people gathered at the table. Nelly gave the babyface an uncertain smile; many of the colonists were spooked by the long-unborn baby Quellan. Zola waved. Finally the babyface noticed Been.