I swore. “Ger-eat. That means we’ll be stuck in there more and more. If the sweetheart Company found that out, they’ll fix our contracts and-”
“But you just said, Scay, it’s good In there.”
“Devil’s advocate. Come on. Where’s the Coalwater you promised Miranda?”
He got the drinks and we drank them, and the conversation turned, because Company maneuvers and all the Company Likes and Wants can be disquieting. There have been nights in the skin I have lain and wondered, there, if the Company might not have arranged it all, even the Accident, just to see how we make out, what happens to us, in the place, or in the skin of another guy. Which is crazy, crazy. Sure it is.
Anyhow, Haro was due Back tomorrow, and I had only thirty-seven more hours left.
* * *
Rebuilt, and glamorized to make us happy, once we were stuck here for a century or so, Base Town was a strange sight, white as meringue against NX 5’s lemon sky. Made in the beginning for the accommodation, researches and pleasures of a floating population of two thousand, you now seldom saw more than twenty people on the streets at a time. For whom now did the bright lights sparkle, and the musics play, the eateries beckon, the labs invite and the libraries yawn? Who races the freeway, swims the pool? Who rides the carousel? And, baby, ask not for whom the bell tolls. With the desert blowing beyond the dust traps on all sides, and sand-blown craters of the west, the Rockies over there, frowning down, where weird whippy birds go flying in the final spasms of sunset-Base has the look of an elegant surreal ghost town. It’s as if everyone has died, after all. The ones you see are only ghosts out for a day in the skin.
A new road goes west, off to that ship the machines are still working on. Haro and I walked out to the road, paused, looked up it into distance, but made no move to do more. Once, years ago, we all went to see what progress they were making on the getting-home stakes. So the road had occasional traffic, some buggy or jetcar puttering or zooming along, like a dragonfly with wings of silver dust. Not any more. Oh they’ll get the ship ready in time, it’s in the contracts, in time for the new bodies, so we can all go to sleep for thirty years and wake up home in H.Q., which isn’t home. Who cares, anyway. What’s home, who’s home, to hurry for? Thirty years older, sixty years, one hundred and sixty. And we, the Children of the Ice, are the same as always. Live forever, and sell your soul to the Company Store.
“Hey, Haro, what do we do now?”
We discussed possibles. We could take a jeep out into the desert and track a pack of doggies, bring back a lady doggy and give it to Dydoo (who’d not smile). We could swim, eat curry, nap in the Furlough, walkabout, eat pizza, go to a movie. We did those. The film was Jiarmennon, sent out to our photo-tape receptors inside a year of its release on the Earth Worlds, by the kindly Company. A terrific epic, huge screen, come-at-you effects, sound that goes through the back of the cerebellum and ends up cranking the pelvis. One of those marvelous entertainments that exactly combine action, spectacle and profound thought. I admit, some of the profound thought I didn’t quite latch on to. But the overall was something plus. Five hours, with intervals. Three other people in the theater. One of them, the one in Fedalin, was asleep or passed out.
When we came forth, the afternoon bloomed full across the town, a primrose sunshade for two suns, and it was sad enough to make you spit.
“Miranda’s hormones are starting to pick up. Did she have crying jags, do you know?”
We walked across to the Indoor Jardin, the one place we hadn’t yet re-seen. In the ornamental pond, the bright fish live and die and are taken away, and new bred bright fish put in. Maybe it was the last Coalwater taken in the Sand Bar on East, but I, or Miranda’s body, began suddenly to weep.
“Goddamn it, Miranda, leave it out, will you? I’ve only got you for another ten hours, and you do this to me. Quit, Miranda.”
“Why does it have to be Miranda who’s crying?” said Haro in his damn nice, damn clever way.
“Well who’s it look like?”
“Looks like Miranda. Sounds like you, feller.”
“Falsetto? Yeah. Well. I didn’t cry since-Christ, when did I last?”
“You want me to tell you.”
Belligerent, I glared at him through massed wet cilia thick as bushes. “So tell me, tell me, turkey.”
“When the core blew, and took Mary with it.”
“Ah. Oh, yes. Okay. Shit.”
The pain of that, coming back when I hadn’t expected it, stopped me crying, the way a kick in the ear can stop hiccups. You preferred the hiccups, all right?
“I’m sorry, Scay,” Haro said presently. “But I think you needed to know.”
“Know how I felt about-I know. It doesn’t help.”
“Sometime, it may. You wanted to be with her. And Company red tape on marriage liability got in your way and you both chickened out. But your insides didn’t.”
“I used to dream about it,” I said sullenly. “The Accident. And her, and what it must’ve-·”
There was a long pause, and the fish, who lived and died, burned there in the pond like votive candles.
“It’s over now,” said Haro. “It isn’t happening to her anymore, except inside your head.”
We sat on the stone terrace, and he put his arm over my Miranda’s shoulders, and Miranda responded, the length of her spine.
“Miranda,” I said, slightly ashamed, “wants you.”
“And I notice the guy I’m wearing today fancies the heck out of Miranda.”
He turned me, carefully, because I was a woman and he was much larger in build than I, and he kissed me. It was good. It got to me how good it was.
“We’ve never been in this position before,” I muttered, in Miranda’s husky voice. “As the space-captain said to the wombat.
“Never been male and female together, I mean.” I elaborated, as our hands mutually traveled, and our mouths, and our bodies warmed and melded together like wax, and the flame lights up about the usual way, about the usual part, but, oh brother, not quite. “What I mean is, kid. If you’d tried this on when we were both male, I’d have knocked you into a cocked cuckoo-clock.”
“The lady,” said Haro, “doth protest too much.”
So, I shut up, and we enjoyed it, Haro, Miranda, and I.
The lemon light was going to the acid of limes and the birds were tearing round the sky when we started back along Mainstreet. I hadn’t gotten Miranda too drunk, but I had got her well-laid, and that was healthful for her. She had nothing to reproach me with.
“You’re not, by any chance, walking me home, Haro Fielding?”
“Nope.”
“Well, good. Because, when I see you again, I don’t know how I’m going to live this down.”
Heck, yes, I could hear myself, even the sentence-constructs were getting to be like Miranda’s. That’s how you grow used to what you are. I suppose it was inevitable, the other scene, he and me, sometime. Buddies. Yip.
“Don’t worry too much about that,” said Haro.
I shrugged. “I’ll be Back In. I won’t be worrying at all. That place is a real de-sexer, too. Genderless we go. And get Out… confused.”
“That place,” he repeated. “In. All that labor and all that machinery, to keep alive. When all the time, being In is, I’d take a bet, almost what death is.”
“You said that already.”
“I did, didn’t I? So if that’s what death is like, where’s the difference?”
“The difference is, there’s a guaranty on this one. You get there. You go on. Not like-not like Mary, blown into a million grains of sugar.”
“Mary’s body.”
“Okay. Her body. I liked her body.”
Haro stopped, looking up over the town at the glowing dying sky.
“Don’t fool yourself. You loved Mary, not just Mary’s skin. And though Miranda and this guy here were making love, you and I were making it, too.”
“Oh now look-I’ve got nothing against-but I’m not-”
“Forget that. You’re missing the doorway and coming in the garbage-shoot with catsup in your hair. What I’m saying is this, and I want you to listen to me, Scay, or you won’t understand.”
“What do I have to understand, buster? Hah?”
“Just listen. Sens-D. is-Christ, it’s a zoo, an enclosure full of egos-of psychic, non-corporeal, unspecified, unclassified, inexplicable and unexplained matter, that persists out of, and detached from, the flesh. Got it?”
“I got it. So?”
“Death, Scay, is being that same psychic, non-corporeal, etc.-etc.-material-only Out of the skin and Out of the box.”