A DAY IN THE SKIN
(OR, THE CENTURY WE WERE OUT OF THEM)
Tanith Lee
When we go out to colonize the planets of other stars, odds are that there will be unexpected catastrophes. Science fiction has told of such things often, but we must bear in mind that by the time we achieve interstellar travel our technology will be greatly advanced, so we may by then have the means to cope with great problems. Of course, coping will always remain basically a human task, as Tanith Lee shows in this story.
Tanith Lee is one of the most accomplished science fiction writers of the past ten years, in both short stories and novels. She’s been so prolific and accomplished that even a sample list of her books would be impractical; this story will give an example of why that’s true.
And the first thing you more or less think when you get Back is: God, where’s everything gone? (Just as, similarly, when you get Out you more or less think, Hey where’s all this coming from?) Neither thought is rational, simply outraged instinct. The same as, coming Back, it seems for a moment stone silent, blind dark and ice cold. It’s none of those. It’s nothing. In a joking mood, some of us have been known to refer to it, this-what shall I call it? this place-as Sens-D (sensory deprivation). It isn’t though, because when your Outward senses-vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch- when they go off, other things come on. The a/fer-senses. Hard to describe. For a time, you reckon them as compensation, stand-ins, like eating, out in the skin world, a cut of sausage when you hankered for a steak. Only in a while it stops being that. It becomes steak. The equivalent senses are just fine, although the only non-technical way I can come up with to express them is in terms of equivalents, alternatives. And time itself is a problem, in here, or down there, or where the hell ever. Yes, it passes. One can judge it. But one rarely does, after the first months. In the first months you’re constantly pacing, like some guy looking at his watch: Is it time yet? Is it time now? Then that cools off. Something happens, in here, down there… So that when at last the impulse comes through Time to get up (or Out) you turn lazily, like a fish in a pool (equivalents), and you equivalently say, Oh really? Do I have to?
“Sure, Scay. You do have to. It’s in the Company contract. And if I let you lie, there’d be all hell and hereafter to pay H.Q. Not to mention from you, when you finally get Out for keeps.”
So I alter-said, in the way the impulse can assimilate and send on, “How long, and what is it?”
“One day. One huge and perfect High Summer day. Forty-two hours. And you got a good one, Scay, listen, a real beauty.”
“Male or female?”
“A/ee-male.”
“All right. I can about remember being female.”
“First female for you for ten years, ah? Exciting.”
“Go knit yourself a brain.”
Dydoo, who manages the machines, snuffled and whined, which I alter-heard now clearly, as he set up my ride. I tried to pull myself together for the Big Wrench. But you never manage it. Suddenly you are whirling down a tunnel full of fireworks, at the end of which you explode inside a mass of stiff jelly. And there I was, flailing and shrieking, just as we all flail and shriek, in the middle of a support couch in the middle of Transfer.
“Husha hush,” said the machines, and gentle firm mechanical arms held me and held me down.
Presently I relapsed panting-yes, panting. Air.
“Look up,” said Dydoo. I looked. Things flashed and tickered. “Everything’s fine. You can hear me? See me?”
“I can even smell you,” I gasped, tears streaming down my face, my heart crashing like surf on the rocks. There was a dull booming pain in my head I cared for about as much as Dydoo cared for my last remark. “Dydoo,” I continued, speech not coming easy, “who had this one last? I think they gave it a cranial fracture.”
“Nah, nah. ‘S all right. Mike tied one on with the wine and brandy-pop. It’s pumped full of vitamins and de-tox. Should take about a hundred and fifteen seconds more, and you’ll feel just dandy, you rat.”
I lay there, waiting for Mike Plir’s hangover to go away, and watched, with my borrowed eyes, Dydoo bustling round the shiny bright room. He is either a saint or a masochist (or are they the same?). Since one of us has to oversee these particular machines, he agreed to be it, and so he took the only living quarters permanently available. The most highly developed local fauna is a kind of dog-like creature, spinally adapted for walking upright, like the Terran ape, and with articulated forepaws and jaw. With a little surgery, this nut-brown woolly beast, with its floppy ears and huge soulful eyes, was all ready for work, and thus for Dydoo.
“My, Dydoo,” I said, “you look real sweet today. Come on over, I’ll give you a bone.”
“Shurrup,” growled Dydoo. No doubt, these tired old jests get on his furry nerves.
Once my skull stopped booming, I got up and went to look at myself in the unlikely pier-glass at one end of the antiseptic room.
“Well, I remember this one. This used to be Miranda.”
There she stood, twenty-five, small, curvy, a little heavy but nice, creamy gold, with long fair hair down to her second cluster of dimples.
“Yeah. Good stuff,” said Dydoo, deciding yet again; he doesn’t or can’t afford to hold a grudge more than a minute.
“How long, I wonder, before I get a go at my own-”
“Now you know it doesn’t work like that, Scay. Don’t you? Hah?”
“Yes, I know it doesn’t. Just lamenting, Dydoo. Tell me, who had me Out last time?”
“Vundar Cope. And he broke off a bit.”
“What? Hexos Christ! Which bit?”
“Just kidding,” said Dydoo. “If you’re worried, I’ll take you over to the Store, and let yah look.”
“No thanks, for Chrissake. I don’t like seeing myself that way.”
“Okay. And try to talk like a lady, can’t you?”
“Walkies, Dydoo,” I snarled. “Fetch!”
“Ah, get salted.”
It took me a couple of quivery hours to grow accustomed to being in Miranda’s body; correction, Fern. Sub. 68. I bruised my hips a lot, trying to get between and by furniture that was no longer wide enough for me. The scented bath and the lingerie were exciting all right. But not in the right way, I’d been male in the beginning and much of the time after, and I’d had a run of being male for every one of my fifty-one days a year Out for ten, eleven years. That’s generally how it’s designated, unless an adventurous preference is stated. Stick with what you’re used to. But sometimes you must take what you can get. I allowed a while before I left Transfer, to see to a couple of things. The lingerie and the mirrors helped. It was a safe bet, I probably wouldn’t be up (to mis-coin a phrase) to any straight sex this holiday. Besides, I didn’t know who else was Out, and Dydoo had gotten so grouchy in the end, I hadn’t bothered to ask. Normally there are around forty to fifty people in the skin on any given day. Amounts of time vary, depending on how the work programs pan out and the “holiday” schedules have built up. My day, I now recalled, was a free diurnal owing to me from last year, that the Company had never yet made up. Perfect to the letter, our Company. After all, who wants to get sued? Not that anyone who sues ever wins, but it’s messy.
I wondered, as the moving ramp carried me out into town, just what Dydoo was getting paid to keep him woofing along in there.
The first body I passed on Mainstreet was Fedalin’s, and it gave me the creeps, the way it still sometimes does, because naturally it wasn’t Fedalin inside. Whoever was, was giving it a heck of a time. Red-rimmed eyes, drug-smoked irises, shaking hands and faltering feet. To make matters worse, the wreck blew a bleary whistle after Miranda’s stacking. I didn’t stop to belt him. My lady’s stature and her soft fists were of use only in one sort of brawl. I could see, I thought, nor for the first, why the Company rules keep your own personal body in the Store whenever you yourself are Out. It means you never get into your own skin, but then too, there are never any overlaps, during which you might meet yourself on the sidewalk with some other bastard driving. Pandemonium that would be, trying to throttle them, no doubt, for the lack of care they were taking with your precious goods-and only, of course, ending up throttling yourself. In a manner. Although I didn’t like looking at my own battered old (thirty-five) skin lying there, in ice, like a fish dummy, in the Store, I had once or twice gone over and compulsively peeked. The second occasion, not only gave me the shivers, but I’d flown into a wow of a rage because someone had taken me Out for a week’s leave and put ten pounds on my gut. Obviously, the machines would get that off in a few days. (The same as lesions, black eyes, and stomach ulcers get got rid of. The worst I ever heard tell of was a cancerous lung that required one whole month of cancer-antibodies, which is twice as long as it takes to cure it in a body that’s occupied.) But there, even so, you get upset, you can’t help it. So it’s on the whole better not to go and look, though H.Q. says it’s okay for you to go and look-which is to prove to us all our skins are still around in the public lending library. Goddamn it.