I pointed at her. "What was that?"
"I was communicating with my terminal."
I frowned. "You're a-?"
"Telepath, yes. Something wrong?"
"Uh, no. You just caught me by surprise-" And then I realized
She said, "You ought to have your face checked. It does the most curious things when you're caught by surprise."
The realization was still sweeping over me. I grabbed her by the shoulders. "You son of a bitch!"
"Hi, Jimbo!" she said broadly.
"I should have known!" My mouth was working like a fish out of water. I managed to make some words with it. "Ted! Tanjy! Theodore Andrew Nathaniel Jackson! You creep!" People were staring at us. I didn't care.
She-he?-grinned at me. "Don't you even kiss an old friend hello?"
"Kiss you? I oughta-" I unclenched my fist. I sputtered helplessly. I didn't know what to say.
"Gee, Jim!" He-she?-twinkled. "You're cute when you're angry!"
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. "