He had joined Conrad's crew only five years later, already a productive member of society, and with a rather disarming acceptance of anything his elders might choose to tell him. One of the first on-the-job lessons Conrad had tried to impart was to question everything—especially authority—because if a child didn't know at least that much, what great things could you really expect of him? And so, Mack had dutifully joined the trolls, not merely in shape but in habit and thought.
“They're raw. They just seem to have it closer to right,” he'd told Conrad at the time. And what could Conrad—himself a childhood rebel—say to that?
With its wide-open spaces—empty land totaling five times the Earth's own surface area—P2 also had centaurs, who could cover a lot of ground in a day. They were “indolent, snooty fuffers,” in Mack's opinion, and you didn't tend to see them much in the actual cities. They needed to stretch their equine legs, and tended to stay in the farm country and the wilderness beyond it.
Of course, there was more to society than just these two groups; while a majority of people preferred a human skin, fully twenty percent of the colony had gone troll or centaur. Another five percent had taken even more exotic turns—like the semiaquatic gillmen and four-armed vishni—or had fit themselves into body plans of their own unique design. Some of the forms were beautiful—hell, a few were glorious—and their owners claimed to have viewpoints as unique and valuable as the skins around them.
“I can think in shapes,” one young man had told Conrad in a job interview, through a mouth that seemed little more than a slit in the pimple-like protuberance of his head, on a body covered in smooth yellow scales. “I can smell an improper angle.”
Which was probably true. Probably. But the boy could barely walk, and couldn't look up at all, and Conrad had advised him to seek employment in some industry where his death by falling debris was not quite so bloody likely. The fact remained that the human form had been refined through a million generations of primate evolution, where these one-off experiments had not. Any architect could tell you that new features—especially glorious ones—exacted their cost somewhere else in the system. There were trade-offs aplenty, but no free lunches, or even cheap ones. And the consequences of random experimentation could be awfully severe.
Indeed, many of the self-made were lurching, shambling disasters—the failed “angel” subculture being the most prominent example. In the unlikely event that Conrad ever decided to shed the humanity that Donald and Maybel Mursk had given him, he would probably stick close to an established body form for exactly this reason: because a thousand boisterous kids couldn't be too far wrong. If nothing else, they knew what felt good.
“Anything else?” Mack asked.
“No, thanks, that's all for now. I'll see you. End call.”
The holie window winked out, leaving Conrad alone.
There was no doubt about it, of course: Mack was his surrogate son. As he'd told the monarchs of Sol, he'd never yet felt the desire to procreate. Oh sure, he made copies of himself, but he'd never found anyone that he felt comfortable mixing them with, to create an entirely new person, as different from Conrad as Mack was from Karl Smoit.
It wasn't that he lacked for women in his life, either. In fact, the breeding program had been accelerated for that most carnal of reasons: the colony had had more men than women, and the gender imbalance was pleasing to no one. So the faxes of Domesville and especially Bupsville had cranked out hundreds—and eventually thousands—of custom-built women into the waiting arms of the colony's men. And maybe, if Conrad thought about it, that was part of the problem: the word “children” to him meant “other people's children,” whom he might hire, or ask out on a date, or engage with in more specific recreational activities.
But to breed with one of them, to use a child to produce another child, well . . . that did strike him as unseemly. This probably marked him as an eccentric or even—God forbid—a naturalist in the eyes of the children who knew him. But a man had to have his limits, and know them, and stay within them if he wanted his own respect.
And anyway, the dating pool of women his own age was pretty damned sparse, and he'd worked his way through most of it—the bits he cared for, anyway—in the colony's first century. And with this reflection, it occurred to him with some surprise that he was probably waiting for the wheel of his life to make another big turn and give him a shot at Xmary again. He wasn't her first love, nor probably her longest, but she was his on both counts. That meant something, and though it seemed a complex task to bring his life back in line with hers, well, he did have forever in which to accomplish it.
And this thought, in turn, brought a rare burst of sympathy for his ancestors, for the thousands of human generations who had lived and died in the distant past, never dreaming of this moment. If he were one of them, he'd've dropped in his tracks a long time ago and never had his second chance, or even known that he'd wanted one. “Life is short,” they used to say. Ha!
And goodness gracious, on the heels of that came still another realization: if the future really was infinite, then his second shot at Xmary, like the first, was doomed to fail. And then, perhaps, to succeed again. And again, and again, in a never-ending cycle he could neither change nor wish to escape from. And he felt in that moment, for the first time in his life, what it truly meant to be immorbid. And for some reason, the idea made him shiver.
Chapter thirteen.
The medicine show
At the hospital, despite his VIP status, they made Conrad wait. And not even on wellstone couches, but on cloth ones with some sort of foam padding inside, about as comfortable as sitting on open ground. And said couches were full of people, some slightly known to him and some not, some obviously sick or injured and some apparently healthy. There were several couples here as well, sitting with their hands clasped together and excited or expectant or nervous looks on their faces.
“You know, I designed this building,” he told the receptionist.
And that was a mistake, because the receptionist and door guard was Genie Scott, whom Conrad had spent a few days fuffing, many years ago. They were long days—Barnardean days—and once you spent the sleepshift with a woman, even one sleepshift, you pretty well forfeited your right to tell her anything like that, ever again.
“You'll wait in line like everyone else,” she said firmly. “I don't care if you designed the planet.”
“Well, I did design the . . .” But he saw her look and declined to finish the sentence. Anyway, there was a security robot waiting in the storage room behind her, visible through the open doorway, and although it was no Palace Guard, if Conrad made too much trouble the thing would simply throw him out in the street again.