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 (cliche). 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, 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 (re-bodying) 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 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, dependent 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 Javeh 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 transferral 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 a while, 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/n-”
“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.?”