A Day for Damnation

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 the 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.

"Then they start leaving you in your traded bodies for longer and longer periods, so you can start to learn how to fit into a new body comfortably, how to work with it instead of against it-and also so you can begin to give up the attachment you have to your own body. After all, you may never see it again. You end up being everybody in your training class. Once-after we'd had a chance to get to know each other-they scrambled us around and we had to figure out who was wearing whose body. It was really eye-opening. We discovered a lot about the signals that we project unconsciously. One boy gave himself away because he didn't realize how often he wiped his nose-even when it wasn't running. We always knew which body he was in.

"Anyway, I guess I got cocky. I started to think I could handle anything they threw at me. After all, I'd already experienced so much in the library, I thought I was an expert. God, I was a jerk."

"No!" I said, grinning.

"Oh, yes!" she laughed back. "I was even a bigger jerk than you." She grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes. "Listen to me, Jim-there is an incredible difference between being the recipient of an experience and the author of it. They really set me up to discover that.

"It was my first prolonged solo, although I didn't know it at the time. They just told me I was to take a walk through the woods and smell the flowers. I didn't think anything about it-they had started bouncing all of us around on odd little errands. They never told us the purpose of the assignments until afterward. Sometimes it was a test, sometimes they wanted to record a specific experience, sometimes they wanted to see what we would discover on our own.

"Anyway, you're going to laugh when you hear this. I found myself on a hillside. I was alone. I was wearing a sweat shirt and jeans and tennis shoes. The background feel of the body was different of course, it always is, but this one felt funnier than usual. I had a lower center of gravity and I felt kind of soft. I'd had the opportunities to wear a lot of different bodies by then, so I knew it took a little while to get adjusted, so I didn't think too much about it. I just sort of took it for granted. I assumed they'd given me one of those flabby effeminate little-boy bodies that we used to call capons. I figured they wanted this body exercised and that was the purpose of this assignment. I was so naive.

"So, I started walking. It was a beautiful day. The air smelled of flowers, everywhere. I think I must have been in Hawaii or the Bahamas, or someplace tropical. The closer you get to the equator, the more intense the light is-well, the colors here were just incredibly bright and beautiful.

"The day was hot, a little muggy, and I thought I could smell the sea. And my skin was darker than I was used to-and smoother-so I figured they'd given me a native body. Once, I reached into my shirt to scratch a nipple and I was amazed at how soft and sensitive I was. But I still didn't put it together. Still not yet. To be fair, the body was young-maybe thirteen or fourteenand not all that well developed. In fact, it was quite boyish. But still-you'd think that I, one of the great breast-strokers of our time, would have figured it out, wouldn't you? Well, I didn't. Not from the inside.

"The body was wearing a pack. There was food in the pack, and a canteen, but no mirror or ID card. Nothing to let me know who or what I was. That's part of the training too. You can't take on the identity of the host body. You have to create a new one, your own.

"After a while, I realized I had to pee. There was no one around, so I just unzipped my jeans and reached in-and reached inand felt around and felt around- It was funny, I still hadn't quite figured it out, I thought I was tangled in my underwear. You know how you'll think anything to avoid confronting the truth? I finally got annoyed, I figured there was something wrong with this bodyI yanked down my jeans and my underpants and-just stared at myself I can still remember the feeling of... there's no other word for it-horror. Everything contracted at once. It was like something squeezing me in the balls-except I didn't have any balls! No penis, no nothing! Just hair! I forgot who I was, where I was everything! I felt betrayed! It must have been terribly funny to the monitors. I started feeling around in my crotch looking for myself. I still couldn't quite accept the truth yet. There was all this loose skin-and it was all wet and skwooshy-and it was so sensitiveand then I touched my own clitoris-and I knew-

"I think I yelped in surprise. I can't tell you the shift of identity I experienced, Jim. It wasn't just the body that was female-I was! When I realized it, I nearly came! My nipples came instantly erect, I could feel them hardening against the material of the sweat shirt. My skin flushed. My face got hot. It was an incredible wave of feeling that swept up through me. I felt dizzy. I nearly fell down. It was the most exquisite flash of excitement and discovery and shock. You can't imagine it.

"They hadn't told me on purpose. It was a setup. The point of the exercise was for me to discover the assumptions that I brought to a circumstance. Oh boy, did I feel stupid-and flustered. The physical waves of shock-and pleasure-were still sweeping through my body. That's when I started to cry. It was such a basic mistake! I felt so embarrassed. I'd wanted to be the perfect trainee and instead I'd just demonstrated how pompous and naive and airheaded I really was. The monitors were probably laughing their heads off over me.

"After I stopped crying, I started feeling silly. And after that, I realized that they wouldn't have done this to me if they hadn't had a purpose. So I tried to figure out what the purpose was. I decided they'd wanted to teach me a little humility. Well, they'd certainly done that. Learning how to pee from a squatting position doesn't sound difficult, but if you're not familiar with how the equipment works-well, never mind."

"So what happened?"

She shrugged. "I cleaned myself up and waited for my recall. I thought that now that I'd figured it all out, the exercise was over. Only it wasn't. Nothing happened. They left me waiting. After a while, I figured it out again. They weren't going to recall me. There was something else I had to discover. Are you sure you want to hear the rest of this?"

I said, "If you don't finish this story, I'll kill you."

"Right," she said. "So I took off all my clothes and started examining the body as thoroughly as I could."

"Huh?"

"Well, wouldn't you?"

"Uh-"

I thought about it. "I guess so."

"Of course," she said. "As soon as you're sure it's safe, the first thing you do is explore the most unknown thing in your environment." She added, "But there was something else going on here too. I didn't want to be caught by any more surprises. You see, I'd heard stories about people flunking out during training-"

"I didn't know it was possible to flunk out of the corps," I interrupted.

"It isn't possible. But it happens. What they do is, they put you in `maintenance.' It means they transfer you into some old body that they're not currently using, or have no plans to use, or no need for, and let you stay there. Your job is to maintain it. Right? It puts you out of the way.

"Anyway, we were in that part of our training where we were starting to lose some of our fellows, and they never told us why, so I couldn't help but wonder. I'd had a little run-in with a captain during my training and she'd threatened to send me to a leper colony-or something equally unpleasant. Maybe she'd made good her threat, I didn't know. This could very well be my body for the next umpty-leven years. I'd already made one mistake with it. I didn't want to make any more. I figured I'd better find out exactly who I was-or who I was wearing, that is. You know, Jim, the English language is really inadequate for this kind of discussion."

"You're doing okay," I said. "Go on."

"Well-it was like being a kid again. You know how when you reach a certain age, a certain point in life, you start getting really curious about your body and what it can do. Some of it is sexual, some of it isn't. You explore all your nooks and crannies. You find out what you feel like. You see what parts of you are smooth and what parts are hairy. You touch the places that are sensitive to find out just how sensitive you are. You do a lot of masturbating for a while. You have to do it. It's part of the job of moving in and getting comfortable and finding out how the body works.

"We'd had that in the training-we'd had to trade bodies and then explore ourselves from the inside. You can't imagine how silly it looks to see a room full of naked men sitting on the floor and playing with themselves, examining their hands, their fingers, their toes, their etceteras. But it's part of the job of developing your sensitivities.

"This was the first time I'd ever really been a female, so I went through the steps as completely and thoroughly as if I had a manual in front of me. I knew I was being really tested now, so I explored that body as if I were going to spend the rest of my life in it. I found out everything I could about what it meant to be a female. I suppose someone who'd grown up in a female body would think most of what I discovered was terribly naive, but I was excited. I felt like I was discovering a new continent. I guess, in a way, I was.

"Of course, I did all that stuff that you see in the movies. I pinched my nipples, I stroked my breasts, I rubbed the insides of my thighs-do you know the inside of a woman's thighs are extraordinarily sensitive? Most men don't. That's why they're such uninspiring lovers. There's a lot you can learn if you just listen to the body.

"It was a remarkable afternoon for me, Jim. My whole sexual identity was destroyed-and rebuilt. You see, always before I'd been a guest at a woman's body, a visitor. Now, I was the ... host. Hostess! I gave myself permission to do everything I'd always been curious about, but too polite to ask. It was like being given a wonderful, delicious toy to play with.

"I spent the whole afternoon playing with myself, Jim. I had a great time. It was terrific. I found out later that almost all men do that the first time they're turned loose in a female body. They can't resist their own curiosity. The women tend to be a little bit shyer their first time in male equipment. You figure it out. But it was an incredible experience, Jim. Do you know that female bodies don't experience orgasm like male bodies? A female orgasm comes in waves-wave after delicious wave that sweep up inside of you. It was incredible. I fell in love with myself five times over." Her face was glowing, her eyes were shining. Even the retelling of the experience had aroused her.

I felt momentarily embarrassed at her-his?-revelations. It wasn't just the information-it was the candor with which he shared it. It was too intimate. I was embarrassed because I was aroused-and fascinated. I wanted to hear every bit of his story. Her story.

"Do you know what they did to me?" she asked.

"What?"

"They left me in that body for three weeks."

"In the forest?"

"In the forest," she said.