Mindscan

14

The moonbus, as I’d seen before boarding it, was a simple-looking affair: a brick-shaped central unit, with great engine cones protruding from its rear end, and two cylindrical fuel tanks, one strapped to each side. The bus was silvery white, and the tanks, I was told, were painted a color called teal, apparently a mixture of blue and green. It sported the Hyundai logo in several places, and a United Nations flag on each side near the back.

There was a wide window across the front of the brick for the pilot (he apparently didn’t like to be called a driver) to see through. The bus could accommodate fourteen passengers: there were eight swiveling seats along one side, and six down the other; a gap after the second seat made room for hanging space suits. Next to each passenger seat was a window about the size of those on airplanes; each window even had one of those vinyl blinds you could draw down, like on a plane.

Behind the last two seats were a small toilet on one side, and a tiny airlock cubicle on the other—“Pity the poor fool who mixes them up,” the pilot had quipped during his orientation remarks.

The passenger cabin only extended halfway down the brick; the other half was taken up with cargo holds, the engines, and life-support equipment.

The moonbus’s normal run was from LS One, on the Lunar Nearside, to High Eden, then on to Chernyshov Crater, both on Farside. Chernyshov was the site of a SETI facility, where big telescopes scanned the heavens for the radio chatter of alien lifeforms. Immortex leased space at High Eden to the SETI group, and had allowed an auxiliary radio telescope to be built there, giving the SETI researchers an eleven-hundred-kilometer baseline for interferometry. There were always a few SETI researchers at High Eden, and, indeed, two of the moonbus’s other passengers today were radio astronomers.

We were getting close to High Eden, according to the status display shown on the monitors that hung from the ceiling. The gray, pockmarked lunar surface continued to streak by beneath us while a song I’d never heard before was playing through the moonbus’s speakers. It was rather nice.

Karen, the old lady next to me, looked up and smiled. “What a perfect choice.”

“What?” I asked.

“The music. It’s from Cats.”

“What’s that?”

“A musical—from before you were born. Based on T. S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats.”

“Yes?”

“You know where we’re going, no?”

“High Eden,” I said.

“Yes. But where is it?”

“The far side of the moon.”

“True,” said Karen. “But more specifically, it’s in a crater called Heaviside.”

“Yes?” I said.

She sang along: “Up up up past the Russell Hotel/Up up up to the Heaviside layer…”

“What’s the Heaviside layer?”

Karen smiled. “Don’t feel bad, my dear boy. I imagine most people who saw the musical didn’t know what it was, either. In the musical, it was the cat version of heaven. But ‘Heaviside layer’ is actually an old term for the ionosphere.”

I was surprised to hear a little old lady talking about the ionosphere—but, then again, as I had to keep reminding myself, this was the author of DinoWorld. “See,” she continued, “when it was discovered that radio transmissions worked over large distances, even over the curve of the Earth’s horizon, people were baffled; after all, electromagnetic radiation travels in a straight line. Well, a British physicist named Oliver Heaviside figured there must be a charged layer in the atmosphere that radio signals were bouncing off. And he was right.”

“So he got a crater named after him?”

“Two, actually. One here on the moon, and another on Mars. But, see, in a way we’re not just going to Heaviside crater. We’re going to the best place ever—the ideal retirement community. The perfect heaven for old cats.”

“Heaven,” I repeated. I felt my spine tingle.

Toronto. August. A warm breeze off the lake.

The play had been terrific—perhaps Widdicombe’s best—and the evening was pleasantly warm.

And Karen looked—well, not lovely; that would be going too far. She was a plain thirty-year old woman, but she’d dressed up very nicely. Of course, some people had stared at us, but Karen had just stared right back. In fact, she’d told one gawking man that if he didn’t look away, she’d turn on her heat vision.

In any event, I could hardly complain about Karen’s appearance. I hadn’t been any bargain to look at when I’d been flesh—too skinny, I knew, eyes too close together, ears too large, and…

And…

Funny, that. I only remembered those things because Trista, that cruel girl, had enumerated them in high school, ticking off my faults when I’d asked her out on a date—another of the great moments in Jake’s love life. I could remember her words, but…

But I was having a hard time conjuring up a mental picture of my current self. The psychologists at Immortex had advised us to get rid of any photos of our old selves we had on display in our homes, but I hadn’t had any. Still, it was days since I’d seen myself in a mirror, and even then—now that I no longer had to shave—they’d only been cursory glances. Could I really be forgetting what I used to look like?

Regardless of appearances, though, it was doubtless easier for an eighty-five-year-old woman to put her hand on the knee of a forty-four-year man than the other way around.

And, to my shock, Karen did just that, back in her hotel suite, after the play, the two of us sitting side by side on the lush, silk-upholstered couch in the living room. She unfolded her hand in her lap, lifting it, moving it slowly, giving me plenty of time to signal with body language or facial expression or words that I didn’t want it to complete its obvious trajectory—and she let it come to rest on my right thigh, just above the knee.

I felt the warmth of her touch—not quite 37 degrees Celsius, but certainly more than room temperature.

And I felt the pressure, too: the gentle constricting of her fingers on the shifting plastic over the mechanics and hydraulics of my knee.

The hand of the biological Karen would have been liver-spotted, with translucent, loose skin, and swollen, arthritic joints.

But this hand…

This hand was youthful, with clean unblemished skin, and silvery white nails. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring; she’d still been wearing one at the Immortex sales pitch. I guess maybe she’d let the biological original take it to the moon.

Still, that hand…

I shook my head slightly, trying to dispel the picture of her old biological appendage that my mind kept superimposing on the new, sleek, synthetic one.

I remembered taking a psychology course, years ago, in which the prof talked about intentionality—the ability of the mind to affect external reality. “I don’t think about moving my arm,” she said. “I don’t work out the steps involved in contracting the muscles. I just move my arm!” And yet I realized what I did next would have enormous consequences, would define a road, a path, a future. I found myself hesitating, and—

There, my arm moved. I saw it twitch slightly. But I must have aborted the move, overriding my initial impulse, exercising that conscious veto Porter had spoken about, for my arm was almost immediately still again.

Just move my arm!

And, at last, I did, swiveling it at the shoulder, hinging it at the elbow, rotating it at the wrist, gently curving the fingers, placing my hand over hers.

I could feel warmth in my palm, and—

Electricity? Isn’t that what it’s called? The tingle, the response to the touch of—yes, damn it, yes—another human being.

Karen looked at me, her cameras—her eyes, her beautiful green eyes—locking on mine.

“Thank you,” she said.

I could see myself reflected in her lenses. My eyebrows went up, catching, as always, a bit as they did so. “For what?”

“For seeing the real me.”

I smiled, but then she looked away.

“What?”

She was silent for several seconds. “I … I haven’t been a widow that long—only two years—but Ryan … Ryan had Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t…” She paused. “It’s been a long time.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle, I suspect.”

“You think?”

I closed my eyes and listened to Karen’s voice, which, I had to admit, did sound warm and alive and human. “That’s okay,” she said, snuggling her body against mine. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

I smiled. “Sure.”

And Karen smiled her perfectly symmetrical smile back at me. She had a luxurious two-room suite. We repaired—funny word, that—to the bedroom, and…

And I found nothing sexy about it, dammitall. I wanted it to be sexy, but it was just plastic and Teflon rubbing together, silicon chips and synthetic lubricants.

On the other hand, Karen seemed to be enjoying it. I knew the old joke about having a cherry sundae every day for years, and then suddenly not being able to have one anymore; you’d really want another cherry sundae. Well, after several years, I guess any cherry sundae tasted good…

Eventually, Karen came—if the term had any etymological validity in this context. She closed her plastiskin lids over her glass eyes and made a series of increasingly sharp, and increasingly guttural, sounds as her whole mechanical body went even more rigid than it normally was.

I felt kind of sort of a bit close to coming myself while Karen was; I’d always felt more aroused, more sexy and sexual, when someone was orgasming thanks to me. But it didn’t crest, didn’t peak, didn’t last. I pulled out, my prosthetic member still rigid.

“Hi, stranger,” said Karen, gently, looking into my eyes.

“Hi,” I replied. And I smiled, doubting it was easy to tell a forced smile from a real one with these artificial faces.

“That was…” she said, trailing off, seeking a word. “That was fine.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “I never used to come during intercourse. It took … um, you know.”

She made a contented sound. “There must be some women working on Immortex’s body-design team.”

I was happy for her. But I also knew that the old saying was true. Sex didn’t happen between the legs; it happened between the ears.

“What about you?” asked Karen. “How are you doing?”

“It’s just…” I trailed off. “It’s, ah, it’s going to take some getting used to.”