Millennium (9 page)

My reasons for this preference were complex and incompletely understood. Part of it was simple. There were plenty of opportunities to get hurt without going out searching for love.

Another part of it was deep down, and Sherman-the-therapist
had to dig it out in many sessions. I was terrified of a real penis. It could make me pregnant and if I was pregnant I’d have another kid and be hurt again.

Part of it was lies. The ones I told myself, and the ones others told me.

It is impossible in my neck of the woods to tell if the fellow you’re bedding down with has real equipment or a clever imitation. Harsh, but true. The chances were excellent that his cock was no more real than Sherman’s. Then again, he might still have the genitals he was born with.

The whole idea of skinsuits is that
you can’t tell.
And you certainly can’t ask.

And I had to know.

Don’t misunderstand. I didn’t want the real thing. I wanted a prosthesis. Safer. So if I’m looking for a man who actually remains male only on the genetic level, why not settle for Sherman?

Cold, cold.

I know it’s cold. But I never promised this would be pretty. Nobody ever told me my life would be anything but nasty, brutish, and very short, and I never expected anything else.

You take what you get, and you run with it.

Like this:

When Sherman had brought me to the place he calculated it was best for me to be that afternoon, he stopped fucking me. He prepared a light lunch and brought it to me in bed. I got out of my skinsuit and he massaged me while I ate.

We talked of this and that. As he massaged, he was examining me for new medical developments. About every second week he finds one. That day he didn’t.

Maybe I’ve given the impression that the real me looks like something dredged out of a sewage canal after a three-month swim.

It’s not that bad. Really. I don’t have any unpleasant smells. My skin is deathly white but it’s intact. My genitals are my own. I suppose the kindest adjective for my face would be emaciated,
but I couldn’t use it to crack mirrors. The false leg is not the result of disease; it was an accident. I don’t miss it. The prosthetic works better, and feels the same.

The hands are my worst feature. Those, and my remaining foot. It’s called para-leprosy. It’s not contagious. It’s passed down mother-to-child, locked in the genes. One day soon those hands will have to go.

I had lost all my hair when I was nine. I hardly remembered it.

The critical problems were all inside. Various organs were in advanced stages of disrepair. Many were gone, replaced by artificial ones. It was a toss-up which would be the next to go. Some we can replace with self-contained, life-sized imitations. Some require a roomful of machinery if they go rotten.

And what’s it to you, bug-fucker? For a twenty-seven-year-old woman in my place and time, I was the picture of robust health.

You don’t think we were running these snatches because we liked the exercise, do you? You must have grasped by now that they were the desperate solution to a terminal problem. If you saw me without my skinsuit, you’d understand the problem instantly.

But no one but Sherman ever will.

When he was through massaging me I redressed my grievances. I should insert a grateful little plug here for those wonderful folks who brought us the skinsuit. Cut it: it bleeds. Stroke it: it responds just like the skin you used to have or takes the place of the skin it’s covering. You’re never aware you’re wearing it. You can’t
feel
it; you feel
with
it. It’s semi-alive itself, and it works in some kind of symbolic relationship with whatever’s left of one’s body.

A handy thing about it is that it’s a great deal more malleable than real skin. It can be reset to new features if the need arises. In the snatch teams, it often does.

*    *    *

I put some clothes over the skinsuit and stepped out of the apartment.

I live on about the eightieth or ninetieth floor of a residence complex. I never actually counted; the lift tubes worry about where to take me. The building is about half full.

I paused at the balcony and looked down at the masses of drones milling about on the atrium floor.

Oh, my people. So lovely and so useless.

*    *    *

Call me Morlock.

At about the turn of the twentieth century a man named Herbert George Wells wrote a book. He knew nothing about time travel, had never heard of the Gate; his book was largely social commentary.

But his hero traveled into the future. There he found two societies: the Eloi and the Morlocks.

We call them drones and…what? Those of us who worked called each other zombies, or hardasses, or morons. Morlocks was good enough for me. In Wells’ book the Eloi were lovely and useless, but they had a lot of fun. The Morlocks were brutish and worked down in the crankcase of society.

You can’t have everything; this metaphor has run out of steam. In our case, both the drones and the workers were lovely on the outside and rotten at the core. But we zombies worked and the drones didn’t.

I have never really blamed them. Honest.

There are several possible responses to a hopeless situation:

Despair and lethargy.

Eat-drink-and-be-merry.

Suicide.

And mine, which was to grasp at the last straw of hope time travel offered. About one citizen in a thousand chose to emulate me.

Suicide was popular. In the springtime you didn’t dare walk the streets for fear of being squashed by a falling body. They
jumped singly, in pairs, in great giggling parties. The Skydivers at the End of Time.

But the favorite anodyne was to live it up. I can’t think of any cogent reason why that choice was not the best. For them, that is. If I could do it, I’d have been a grease spot on the pavement a long time ago.

The trouble is that grease spot would not be doing anything to change the world that had killed my child. I could not prove that my work was any more effective, but at least there was a chance of it.

Nobody forces anyone to work. If they don’t want to, we wouldn’t have them anyhow. I can’t imagine stepping through the Gate toward some long-ago catastrophe with a draftee at my side.

There are some fringe benefits of working. Extra drug and nutrient rations, personal robot servants, black market tobacco…I guess that about sums it up. Oh, yeah. As a worker, I can kill anybody I want to if they get in my way while I’m working on a Gate project. The BC protects the civil rights of drones only where it concerns other drones. I can snuff them with impunity, can go amok, if I want to, and lay waste to thousands and the BC will never upbraid me for it.

I usually don’t. Though sometimes in the mornings, on the sidewalks…

If I kill another worker I’d better have a damn good reason. But I can do it if I think I can talk my way out of it.

That may be the biggest difference between my world and the thousands of years of human civilization that have preceded it. We don’t have a government to speak of. The BC takes care of running things. We are the Anarchy at the End of Time. An odd thing for somebody with the title of Chief of Snatch Team Operations to say, maybe. But I simply took the job when it became vacant. If anybody wanted it bad enough I’d give it to them.

One day nobody will want it and we can shut down the Gate.

*    *    *

There was another snatch scheduled for that afternoon. It had been on the agenda for three days. In that time the Operations gnomes had been setting up the details, choosing the teams, plotting the strategy. We don’t usually have that much time; I’ve been on snatches that got off in twenty minutes, total.

But on this one I’d be leading personally. Again, I didn’t pick myself. The BC did that, based on the fact that I was the closest body match to a stewardess who would be alone in her hotel room from the night before the ill-fated flight until shortly before she boarded the plane. That can be a handy way to start an operation. We call it a joker run, and I was to be the joker.

The name of this stewardess (flight attendant, actually, since the snatch was not going to 1955 but to the liberated ’80s) was Mary Sondergard. She worked for Pan American World Airways.

It meant I’d be spending a night in New York, all by myself. I didn’t mind. New York in the ’80s is not a bad place. If you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere.

*    *    *

There was a large team assembled for the snatch. This was to be a mid-air collision. Two large jets were going to tangle in the air and our job, as usual, was to get the passengers off before they hit the ground.

I assembled everyone in the ready-room and examined their disguises. Each was made up to look like a flight attendant on one of the planes, so they fell into two groups according to company uniform. There was Lilly Rangoon and her sister Adelaide, Mandy Djakarta, Ralph Boston, Charity Capetown, William Paris-Frankfurt, and Cristabel Parkersburg, plus several others I didn’t know well. It looked like a good team to me.

And it felt good not to be rushing. Cristabel pointed out to me after I briefed them that my speech was rather jumbled and full of words that were antique in 1980 America. That can happen. Among ourselves we talk a polyglot with elements as varied as thirteenth-century Chinese and fortieth-century Gab. Before a snatch we try to limit ourselves to the target language, but it
can get messy. I have the fragments of a thousand tongues in my head. Sometimes the cross-chatter is awful.

So I took a booster shot of 20th Amerenglish and hoped for the best. In no time, my head was buzzing with vocabulary and idiom. It doesn’t always go smoothly. Once I caught an alliteration bug from a defective language pill and spent weeks babbling my Babylonian and scattering silly syllables in my Swedish until people could hardly live with me.

I…stepped through the Gate and saw instantly there had been a mistake.

We’d tried to catch Ms. Sondergard in the bathroom, preferably in the tub. You’re never more helpless than when you’re naked, prone, and up to your neck in water. She was in there, all right, but instead of stepping inside with her I had materialized stepping
out
of the bathroom.

I’m sure the BC would have a long, technical explanation for it; for my money, the silly son of an abacus must have reversed a sign.

But it was a pretty problem. I couldn’t go in after Sondergard, even though I could see her there in the tub, because I’d simply step back through the Gate and into the future. However, the Gate has only one side (one of the
least
odd things about it). From where she sat she could not see the Gate, though she was looking right through it. This was as it should be, since from her side the Gate was not there. If she stepped through she’d only travel into the bedroom.

So I caught her eyes, wiggled my fingers at her, grinned, and stepped aside. She could no longer see me. I waited.

It sounded like she churned most of the water out of the tub. She had seen something…or at least she
thought
she had seen…

“What the hell?” Her voice was not pleasant when she was scared. “Who the hell…is somebody…Hey!” I was taking mental notes. The voice is the trickiest thing to get right, and I’d have to imitate it for a while. Now if only she wasn’t a screamer.

I figured she’d have to come out and see what was going on, scared or not. I was right. She hurried out of the bathroom, passing right through the Gate as if it weren’t there—which it wasn’t, from her side. She had a towel wrapped around her.

“Jesus Christ! What are you doing in my—” Words fail you at a time like that. She knew she ought to say something, but it would sound so silly. How about,
Excuse me, haven’t I seen you in the mirror?

I put on my best Pan American smile and held out my hand.

“Pardon the intrusion. I can explain everything. You see, I’m—” I hit her on the side of the head and she staggered and went down hard. Her towel fell to the floor.

“—working my way through college.” She started to get up, so I caught her under the chin with my knee.

I knelt and checked her pulse, and rubbed my knuckles on the carpet. Heads are surprisingly hard. You can hurt yourself hitting them. She’d be okay, but I had loosened some front teeth with my knee.

I was supposed to shove her through the Gate, but I had to pause. Lord, to look like that with no skinsuit, no prosthetics. She nearly broke my heart.

I grabbed her under the knees and wrestled her to the Gate. She was a sack of limp noodles. Somebody reached through, grabbed her wet feet, and pulled.
So long, love! How’d you like to go on a long voyage?

Then there was not much to do. I sat on the edge of her bed for a while, letting the excitement die away, then kicked off my shoes and took her purse from the table beside the bed. I poked through it. There was an open pack of Virginia Slims and one still in cellophane. I lit four of them, took a deep drag, and leaned back on the bed.

It’s rare to have free time on a snatch. Here it was only eight o’clock in the evening. Sondergard’s flight didn’t leave until tomorrow evening. I was suddenly struck with very un-Chief-like thoughts. Just outside my room was the Big Apple, and I was in the mood to make applesauce.

I pulled the drapes and looked out. I estimated I was on the third and top floor of one of those long, new (in the ’80s) airport motels, the kind whose signs seem to blur together: the Thunderhilton Regency Inn. I couldn’t spot the airport itself, wasn’t really sure if I was near La Guardia or Idlewild (sorry; JFK). Some sort of shopping center was spread out below me. The parking lot was crowded with Christmas shoppers. Across the way was a disco.

I watched the couples coming and going and tried to fight off the blues. It would have been nice to go over there and dance the goddam night away. Hell, I’d have settled for pushing a cart through the aisles of the big barn of an A&P.

As a younger woman I would have done it. As Chief of Snatch Team Operations it was out of the question. There were strict security regulations against that sort of thing. Risks had to be minimized, and a one-legged para-leper be-bopping to the Bee Gees just didn’t qualify as a risk that needed to be taken. What if I got hit by a car while crossing the parking lot? What if I was driven mad by the muzak Christmas carols in the A&P? Whether I lived, died, or stayed sane was not ultimately important to the Gate Project, but letting some doctor from the ’80s get a look at my bionic leg was.