The general stood up and walked out, followed by his aides. Lizard traded glances with Danny Anderson and then the two of them followed quickly. "General Poole-" She hadn't even glanced in my direction.
Dr. Zymph looked across the table at me. "You know, Lieutenant, you're even more deadly without a gun in your hands."
Then she got up and walked out. Jerry Larson muttered something unintelligible and followed.
I looked to Dr. Fletcher. "I don't get the job, huh?"
She touched my arm again. "James-you said what had to be said. Thank you for saying it."
"But-?"
"But I think you'd better make yourself scarce. This is going to take a while."
THIRTY-EIGHT
JACK LONDON Square in Oakland was not square.
It might have been square once, but now it was a great sweeping are that encircled a sheltered lagoon. Along the shore, tall trees strung with glittering lights overlooked wide lawns bordered with pink brick paths. Beyond the lawns was a long row of elegant threestory neo-Victorian buildings. There were clusters of tiny shops and open-air restaurants, all bathed in soft gaslight.
I felt as if I'd stepped into another world, an old-fashioned fantasy of another era. It looked like a fairy tale. Everything was too beautiful. There were wide avenues for strolling couples, shaded arcades and even a summery gazebo. The only vehicles were occasional pedicabs. Silvery music-like faint fairy-bells-came drifting across the water.
I was staring at a big bronze plaque set in a concrete marker. It had a huge arrow pointing directly at the ground, and the legend above it said: "YOU ARE THERE!"
Below, in smaller letters, it said, FOR GERTRUDE STEIN.
I guessed I was going to have to have someone explain it to me. I shouldered my rifle and started walking.
The restaurant was at the end of the strand. It was called This Crystal Castle and it was a gaudy pastiche of baroque gables and cupolas, gingerbread ornaments and stained-glass windows. It shimmered in a glow of opal, gold and rose-red light. It looked dike something out of a dream. As I approached, I could hear the gentle sound of a playful string quartet. Mozart? I wasn't sure.
Inside, the lobby was done in shades of emerald and gold. It was deliberately overdone to let you know that it was elegant; but I already knew this place was expensive-it had human waiters. The maitre d' was wearing a green Doorman-of-Oz suit. He asked me to check my rifle, but I glared at him and told him I was on twenty-four-hour duty; he bowed subserviently and got out of my way. Lizard wasn't here yet, so I stepped into the bar. It was interesting the way people reacted to the red beret of the Special Forces.
The bar was subdued and suggestive. The walls were polished oak and purple velvet wallpaper. The chandeliers glowed with the soft golden color of candlelight. The mirrors behind the bar were smoky, so you couldn't see yourself drinking.
While I waited, I studied the cocktail menu. There were drinks here I'd never heard of before. What, for instance, was a Rubber Worm? Or a Leather Helper? Or a Plumber's Revenge?
My phone beeped.
I pulled it off my belt and flipped it open. "McCarthy," I said.
"Jim?" Lizard's voice.
"Hi. Where are you?"
"Stuck in a meeting, thank you." She sounded annoyed. "This is going to be resolved tonight."
"What time will you be out? I'll wait."
"No good. They're sending out for sandwiches. We'll be here for hours. Unfortunately, you've opened a real-you should pardon the expression-can of worms. We're going to have to cancel our date."
I couldn't think of a single polite thing to say. "Jim-? Are you there?"
"Uh-yes. You've just won the undying gratitude of a couple of very large lobsters."
"I'm sorry, Jim, I really am." She didn't sound sorry. "How about tomorrow night?"
"Um-no, that won't work. Listen, let me call you. All right?"
"Yeah. I guess so."
"It's not all right, is it?" she said. "I can hear it in your voice."
So I admitted the truth. "Yeah, I'm disappointed. I was really looking forward to this."
"Jim-I've gotta run now," she said quickly. "I promise you, we'll work it out. I do care." She clicked off.
I stood there marveling at my peculiar mix of feelings. I felt disappointed and wonderful at the same time. I refolded my phone and stuck it on my belt. I replayed her words over and over in my head. "I promise you, we'll work it out," she'd said. "I do care." I could feel good for a long time on those three words.
Except-what was I going to do tonight? Me and my big mouth.
I turned to the bartender and ordered a Green Slime. It was tall. It was green. It was tart. It turned my knees to jelly. I had to sit down. I wondered how many it would take to turn the rest of me into a slimy green puddle. I ordered a second one. While I waited, I looked around the bar.
The Chinese girl had shining eyes.
That's what first attracted my attention-the way she was looking at me. Then I noticed her waist. She was deliciously slender. And her hands-as delicate as orchid blossoms. Then I noticed her eyes again. She looked as if she knew something I didn't.
She floated in my direction. My heart popped and missed a beat. Every male eye in the bar-and several female ones as wellswiveled to follow her. She was wearing a silk dress so red they'd have to retire the color after tonight. Just the way she walked was illegal in thirty-seven states. One fellow leaned out so far he nearly fell off his stool.
She stopped directly in front of me. I wondered which of the gods was smiling on me. "Something I can do for you?" I asked.
Her smile grew sweeter. She wet her lips and said, "I was wondering what caliber your gun was ... ?" She touched the barrel suggestively with one exquisite finger.
My mouth went dry. My throat wouldn't work. My tongue was paralyzed. "Uh," I finally said. "Well-uh, properly speaking, it doesn't have a caliber. It fires eleven-grain needles, four thousand per minute. Its focus isn't as precise as the two eighty-" My mouth kept making words-automatically. I was impaled on her smile. She never took her eyes off me. She was fascinated. "Uh-it tends to shred the target, but that's more effective. Against the worms, I mean."
"You have the greenest eyes," she said.
"I do?" I swallowed.
"Mm hmm." She slid onto the stool next to me. Somebody at the end of the bar moaned. I wondered if I were about to pass out from lack of blood to my brain.
The bartender rolled up to her immediately and beeped. "Your order, ma'am?"
She didn't even glance at the robot. She said, "I'll have a ... Pink Butterfly." She held her eyes on me-I was paralyzed by her spell. I wondered if I was drooling on myself.
The robot returned and put something pink and frosty in front of her.
I didn't know what to do, so I just grinned embarrassedly, and said, "You'll pardon me for saying this, but all of the Chinese girls I've met in the past have been extraordinarily... ah, demure. I mean-not quite so ... uh, forward. Are you sure you're Chinese?"
"Chinese?" She blinked in sweet confusion. She flipped open her purse and looked into her mirror. Her eyes went round. "My God-you're right! I am Chinese!" She closed her purse again. "Wow!" she said wonderingly. "Chinese! Wait'll I tell my mom!"
"Your mom? Right. She doesn't know?"
The girl laughed. "Well, how could she? I mean-I just found out myself "
I stared at her. This was too confusing. I felt as if my reality were starting to shred. I said, "I-uh, don't think that... I know what's really going on here, Ms.... ? I mean, maybe-that is, I was just going-"
"No, wait-" She touched my arm to stop me. "I'm sorry, Jim."
"Huh?" I stopped. I looked at her again. "Do I know you?"
She met my puzzled stare with embarrassing directness. "We've met. "
I studied her face. It was almost a perfect oval. She had high cheekbones and bright almond-shaped eyes. Her mouth was wide, but not too wide. Her hair fell to her shoulders like a wave of
sheer black silk. I'd never seen her before. I'd have remembered this face. And yet
I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something else going on here. "Who are you?"
She smiled. "If I'm Chinese, I'm supposed to be mysterious. You know, inscrutable. You figure it out." Her smile was impish.
All my alarm bells were ringing now, and I still didn't know why. I said, "What's your name?"
"You can call me Tanjy."
"Tanjy. Is that Chinese?"
"No," she said. "I'm not Chinese."
"You're not? I think you need to look in that mirror again."
"You still haven't figured it out, have you? I'll give you a hint." For just the briefest moment her face went blank, then she was back again. She said, "Do you get it now?"
I pointed at her. "What was that?"
"I was communicating with my terminal."
I frowned. "You're a-?"
"Telepath, yes. Something wrong?"
"Uh, no. You just caught me by surprise-" And then I realized
She said, "You ought to have your face checked. It does the most curious things when you're caught by surprise."
The realization was still sweeping over me. I grabbed her by the shoulders. "You son of a bitch!"
"Hi, Jimbo!" she said broadly.
"I should have known!" My mouth was working like a fish out of water. I managed to make some words with it. "Ted! Tanjy! Theodore Andrew Nathaniel Jackson! You creep!" People were staring at us. I didn't care.
She-he?-grinned at me. "Don't you even kiss an old friend hello?"
"Kiss you? I oughta-" I unclenched my fist. I sputtered helplessly. I didn't know what to say.
"Gee, Jim!" He-she?-twinkled. "You're cute when you're angry!"
THIRTY-NINE
LISTEN, I'M no bigot.
At least, I don't think I am.
But I was raised old-fashioned, so I never held much with people shifting their sexes around-but then again, whatever one or more consenting individuals wanted to do in the privacy of his or her own body was his or her own business. Certainly not mine.
I was able to achieve the enlightenment of that position by dint of an adolescence uncontaminated by any experience other than theoretical. That is, I didn't know anyone who had ever changed sex-or even gender-identity.
It is one thing to hold an enlightened position in a vacuum. It is quite another to be confronted by your ex-best friend wearing a body that can turn parts of men to stone.
I hadn't realized the Telepathy Corps worked like this. "Um-" I couldn't find the words. "This-this is going to require a lot more explaining than usual, Ted."
The way I'd always understood telepathy, it was like having a computer terminal in your head; the same microtechnology that made it possible to graft the artificial nerves in a prosthesis also made it possible to graft a prosthetic lobe into the human brain, a lobe that could be programmed for any multitude of date-processing and communication functions. I'd heard that the new generation of implants made full-sensory transmission possible, but I'd tluougllt it worked like a mental movie screen-like looking through the remotes on a spider.
Ted-Tanjy?-corrected that misperception quickly. "The transmission of experience is total-at least it experiences that way. I think they drop out a lot of the hash at the bottom, because the experience feels somehow cleaner, purer. When you become an operator-like I am-control is also assigned. That's when your soul moves out of your body. It feels just like being here. It's likebeing able to change bodies as often as you change your underwear. Or in your case, even more often."
He-she?-I really was going to have to figure this out-was a kind of courier. Sort of. There really wasn't a word in the language yet. His (her?) job was to gather experience and put it into the telepathy network, where it was recorded and made available to the-again, there was no word -synthesists, the people who experienced the data, assimilated it, and looked for patterns. It was so high-level even Ted/Tanjy didn't understand it. Yet. Perhaps eventually, she said.
Over dinner-well, it would have been stupid to waste the reservations-I asked her, "Where's your own body now?"
"You mean the one you think of as Ted?"
"Yeah. "
"It's in Amsterdam. I think. I'll have to check."
"You're not sure?"
"Jimmy," she explained, "when you get certified, you donate your body to the network. In return you get access to every other body in the network. Pretty soon, you give up the attachment to the body you grew up in. In fact, attachment is considered ... disloyal. That's the closest referent. Um-individualism is disloyal to the massmind in that it makes fragments. Hidden agendas pull the mass off center. Never mind-these are experiences that are beyond your referents. I'm sorry. I'm not used to communicating in such a narrow bandwidth."
"Uh-right."
"Well-" she said, "hard work must agree with you, Jimmy. You look terrific."
"I, uh-wish I could say the same for you, Ted-"
"Tanjy," she corrected.
"Uh, yeah, Tanjy. As a matter of fact, I can. I think I can truthfully say that I've never seen you looking better. Um, didn't they have any male bodies available?"
"Sure. But then you wouldn't have been willing to buy me dinner." She added, "Except for that, gender is really a very arbitrary definition."
"Not to the gendee."
"Not sex," she said. "Gender. Mundanes have trouble with that one, I know. Trust me. Gender is merely a role to play. Like all the other roles. A large part of the telepathy training is about overcoming your gender identification, your age identification, your racial identification-and all the other arbitrary identifications that you've wired up while you've been trapped in a single body. By the way, you'd love the section on personal hygiene. I discovered things I never knew about the female body. And the male."
"That must have been quite a revelation."
She ignored the jibe. "It's part of the basic agreements. You have to leave the body in as good condition as you found it. Proper food, proper exercise, enough rest, and so on." The Chinese girl grinned, but it was Ted's grin on her face. "It also means I'm not allowed to get pregnant or go out with sadists." She looked at me speculatively. "You want to keep that in mind?"
I could feel my face reddening. "I uh, think-that you can trust me," I said.
So, of course-naturally-we ended up back at her place. The body's place. The apartment was furnished with surprising luxury. An indoor garden. A lawn. A pool. An overhanging bedroom. A bed the size of Rhode Island.
"Well, why not?" Ted/Tanjy asked. "Think about it. Money is irrelevant to a telepath. It's difficult-not impossible, but difficult-to take it with you. But you don't become a telepath for the money anyway. All that's left are the local perks and privileges. A silk dress is easier to experience than a thousand caseys." He ran her hands up her body. I stared at the gesture. I'd never seen anyone fondle a woman from the inside.
Ted/Tanjy seemed to keep shifting from male to female. The body remained the same, but the personality inhabiting it was a chameleon, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes neither. It gave me a peculiar double vision. There were moments when I was conscious only of the person, not the body-and there were moments when I was acutely conscious of the body. It was gorgeous. I could have watched it for days. My erection was killing me. I would never wear tight underwear again.
Ted/Tanjy sat the body down on the couch. She left room for me.
I sat down on the chair opposite. "I have to admit-this is still very unnerving."
"I really do understand," she said. "The first time I found myself in a girl's body, I was so caught by surprise, I started to cry."
"You? Really?"
"It happened during my training," she explained. "Mostly, you spend the first part of your training in the body pool. You're always on call. They loan your body out to whoever needs a body to wear. Sometimes you get to ride along, most of the time not. When you can't, that's when they turn you loose in t
he library. You get to play a lot of recorded experiences. Pretty soon, you start to get a sense of the range of human experience that's available to you. It's mind-stretching, Jim. It really is. You're never quite the same afterward."
"I remember how you were at the bus stop in Denver," I said. "You were a little dazzled."
"That's an understatement, Jim. I was mindfucked. Everybody goes through it. You have to. It's part of the process. Suddenly you find out all kinds of amazing things. You get to look at the same incident from a hundred different points of view and pretty soon you start to get a holographic perspective. Your whole mindset is destroyed and reformed and destroyed, over and over and over-and each time, it's more exhilarating. It's like the first time you learned how to masturbate. It feels so good, you can't help but suspect there has to be something wrong with it, but you sure as hell aren't going to stop. You are definitely not the same person afterward. "
"You certainly weren't," I said. "Not then."
She nodded. "It's one of the very first tests. Becoming a telepath is like running an obstacle course. You have to make it past all the barriers. The first one is to simply find out if you can handle it. I nearly blew it. I almost disappeared into the network. It happens. People get lost, leaving their bodies behind. I was lucky. I came back.
"Somehow, I got past the initial exhilaration. You have to do that on your own. There's no help for that. If you do, that's when your real training starts."
"The real training?"
"Mm hm. They put you in a training class with thirty other men, and you start trading bodies with each other for short periods. This goes on for three or four weeks, and you still return to your own body at the end of each training session. That's so you can begin to appreciate what happens to a body when it's worn by someone who's unfamiliar with it. That teaches you respect for the equipment real fast.
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