I would like to say that during the next four months I did all sorts of daring and exciting things, but the truth is that there are only brief moments like that in a job like mine—all the rest is boring, plodding stuff. The corporation provided me with subsidized housing—a comfortable tree-lined flat with full kitchen, air conditioning, and the rest that was quite pleasant. The job they started me at was anything but demanding, and the speed with which I “assisted” designers in improving new circuit designs marked me quickly for bigger and better things, particularly since I was careful to let my superiors take the credit while keeping evidence of who really did the work—evidence they knew about. This put them in my debt without my seeming threatening. I could have hogged full credit and had not. In a word, I was becoming indispensable, at least to the next level above me, like the man said. It was child’s play, actually, since the designs used on Cerberus were a good ten or even twenty years out of date and quite limited in one area. No self-aware computers of any kind were allowed here. That was really the key to retardation in the Warden Diamond, and a clever one on the part of the Confederacy, which was very real, even here. You didn’t have to land or even enter the atmosphere to wipe an entire borough off the face of the planet, and they’d do that as an object lesson if they got wind of any bending of the rules.
In point of fact, that very primitiveness imposed on the planet aided me over many other technological masterminds, since most or all of them were trained and developed on machines too advanced for here. There were very few of us, really, who could do the utmost with the older designs.
I made a number of friends and quickly became a social gadfly. The corporation had a lot of teams competing against other corporate employee teams in just about every sport I knew. After working out regularly and fine-tuning this body I now wore, I excelled at them, as usual, though I was never able to get myself up to the physical peak of my original body.
Bork hunting, however, I passed on, at least for the time. It seemed that bork were monstrous, nasty creatures that inhabited the oceans, seemed to be composed entirely of teeth, and occasionally grew large enough to swallow boats whole. They had a natural dislike of everything and everybody and were even known to attack boats just for being there, and sometimes, even to snare a low-flying shuttle. Hunting them just required too many specialized skills, and that sport had no initial appeal for me. Though bork were nasty, the oceans contained an enormous number of creatures that had some commercial uses, from unicellular protein creatures that linked together into floating beds kilometers long to smaller sea creatures that provided edible meat, skins, and other such things. Bork hunting might be a thrill for some, but to the ocean harvesting corporations it was a commercial necessity.
The flying creatures with such names as geeks and gops, made me wonder just what sort of person first named all these things. The flying things, mostly small, served the function of insects on other worlds, cross-pollinating this jungle from the top. In addition, there were a few predatory fliers that were monsters, too. One giant flier with a thick barrel-like body about a meter around had a neck more than three meters long and a wingspread of more than ten meters. Its head looked like a nightmare of blazing reptilian eyes and sharp teeth, but nobody much paid attention to them as long as they didn’t come too close. These were carrion eaters mostly, and they remained aloft over the oceans much of the time.
Body switching was rare, although I was approached once or twice in a casual way. Every once in a while somebody new would show up who would turn out to be somebody old after all. Although few people switched—except for the occasional couple that switched almost nightly, always with each other—the subject was nonetheless a regular topic of conversation in lounges and at parties. The possibility was always there, around you, even if you, didn’t see it. You were reminded of it constantly when you went home or stayed at a hotel on a company trip, and you always slept shielded and alone, no matter how friendly or intimate you became with others.
There were some topics nobody really referred to, though. One was children—you just didn’t discuss it—and second was advancing age. Few people you met looked any older than forty, and those who looked the oldest seemed much more jittery and under a lot more pressure than most.
Body switching ended any sort of sexual stereotypes, to a greater extent even than on the civilized worlds. When gender could so easily be exchanged, it seemed silly to think of separate sexual roles, particularly since it seemed that all the women I met had been sterilized. That, too, interested me—this was true of both sexes on the civilized worlds where all breeding was done in bio-breeding centers, but the actuality seemed particularly peculiar here. So when I saw the pregnant girl, I was drawn irresistibly to her.
I had taken to frequenting a small store near the docks which specialized in entertainment electronics and which seemed to have some sort of a remarkable underground connection stretching off-world at some point that got a lot of the latest performances from the civilized worlds. Here was a piece of home, a place where you might run into other former prisoners, now exiles like myself, there also to get a little taste and memory of what was lost. She was there one day, looking over the latest selections. A tiny young woman—it was impossible to think of her other than as a girl. From her looks, she could hardly have been out of her mid-teens. She had extremely long reddish-brown hair, perhaps a meter or more in length, that was held loosely with a brightly sparkling headband.
Actually, I wouldn’t have known she was pregnant except for Otah, the owner of the place. I happened to be talking gadgets with him, as usual, when I spotted her. “Hmmm. Cute. Never saw her around here before.”
“You stay away from that one,” Otah warned gravely. “She’s with child.”
I frowned. “First time I’ve heard that here. I was beginning to wonder how any of the natives came about. But what’s the taboo?”
“Pregnant. Don’t you know? It’s not a condition, it’s a Class II occupation.”
Well, there it was at last. “It’s a job? She makes a living having babies?”
He nodded. “Hell of a tiling, ain’t it? There’s a whole colony of them down off Akeba. There’s some that love it, but most of ’em would kill to switch bodies outta there. Once you’re that, you’re that. Best to keep ’em on a business basis only.”
I had to chuckle. “What do they do? Steal your soul?”
He looked stricken. “Don’t say that. Some of ’em’s desperate enough to do most anything.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at his caution and wonder just what could be so horrible. I did sort of wonder about the whole idea, though. Cloning was certainly within the allowable technology, if they wanted to spend the massive setup costs. Instead they seemed to have opted to take a percentage of young women, probably selected for genetic characteristics, and paid them to have kids. It seemed to me that, except for the birth itself, the major problem would be boredom—or perhaps being harried to death with a nursery full.
Certainly I’d never heard of motherhood being something horrible. On some, of the more primitive frontier worlds it was something of an occupation and had been since the dawn of time. This was a piece of the social puzzle I had wanted to fill in, and here was the opportunity.
In order not to alarm Otah, I didn’t approach her in the shop, but surreptitiously followed her when she left. After some window-shopping, she went to a sidewalk cafe and sat down at one of the outside tables, apparently enjoying the sun and salt spray. I allowed her to order, then casually walked up and into the cafe patio, and stopped as if seeing her for the first time.