“Yes, that’s often one of the symptoms of beatification,” the Bishop says placidly. “The transgendered occupy a special place of honor in our rites, and to have it imposed on you by the Hypercolony is a special sign of grace.” And Huw sees that it’s true, but he doesn’t feel as upset about it as he knows he ought to. The ants have given him a whole goddamn new body while the ambassador was singing a duet with them, and he—she—is about five developmental-years younger, five centimeters shorter, and if her pubes are anything to go by, her hair’s going to come in two shades lighter than it was back when she was a man.
It’s one realization too many, so Huw zones out as the Bishop’s minions wheel her up the corridor and into an elevator while the Bishop prattles on. The explanation that the Bishop is the leader of both the Church Temporal—the Fallen Baptists—and the Church Transcendental—the polyamorous perverts—passes her by. There’s some arcane theological justification for it all, references to Zoroastrian dualism, but in her depression and disorientation the main thing that’s bugging Huw is the fact that she survived—and Bonnie didn’t. That, and worrying about how to pay for a really good gender reassignment doc when she gets home.
Huw tries to imagine what the old Huw, the Huw who went down to his pottery every day, would have felt about being turned into a woman by a bunch of quasi-sentient ants en route to immortal transcendence. A lot angrier, she thinks. But after all she’s been through, well, her moral outrage gland appears to have forgotten how to fire. (Or perhaps it wasn’t installed in this new body, which is an outrage, but she can’t get worked up about it, because, well, no moral outrage, right? The fact is, she can just have it all put back the way it was, and all the niggling differences between the original equipment and the new parts they’ll grow her just don’t seem that important anymore. Huw doesn’t really like personal growth, but some is inevitable.
Upstairs in whatever dwelling they’re in, there’s a penthouse suite furnished in sybaritic luxury. Carpets of silky natural growing hair, wall-hanging screens showing views from the landscapes of imaginary planets, the obligatory devotional orgy beds and sex crucifixes of the Church of Teledildonics. The Bishop leads the procession in through the door, and a familiar voice squawks: “You’ll regret this!”
“Perhaps.” The Bishop is calm, and Huw sees why fairly rapidly.
Judge Giuliani spins her chair round and glares at them; then her eyes fasten on the wheelchair. “What happened here?” she says.
“The alien artifact you so urgently seek,” the Bishop says with heavy irony. “It has accomplished its task, and we are blessed by the fallout. Its humble human vessel whom you see before you—” A hand caresses Huw’s shoulder. “—is permanently affected by the performance, and We are deeply relieved.”
“Its. Task.”
Giuliani is aghast. “Are you insane? You let it out?”
“Certainly.” The Bishop smirks. “And we are all the ah, ah, better for it.” He pauses for a moment, sneezes convulsively, and shudders orgasmically. “Oh! Oh! That was good. Oh my. Yes, ah, the cloud has reestablished its communion with the North American continent, and I feel sure that the Hypercolony is deeply relieved to have offloaded almost two decades’ worth of uploads—everything that has happened since the Rapture of the Nerds, in fact.”
“Ah.”
Giulani glares at the Bishop, then gives it up as a bad job—the Bishop doesn’t intimidate easily. “Who’s this?” she says, staring at Huw.
“This? Don’t you recognize her?” The Bishop simpers. “She’s your creation, after all. And you’re going to take very good care of her, aren’t you?”
“Gack,” says Huw, blanching. She tries to lever herself out of the wheelchair, but she’s still weak as a baby.
“If you think I’m—” A puzzled expression crawls over the judge’s face. “Why?” she says. She peers closer at Huw and hisses to herself: “You, you little rat-bastard! Court is in session—”
“—
Because the ambassador she carries is the main pacemaker for all uploads from the North American continent, and if you don’t look after her, the cloud will be very pissed off with you. And so will the Hypercolony. Oh, and if you don’t promise to look after her, you aren’t going home. Is that good enough for you?”
“Ahem,” says
Giuliani. She squints at Huw, eyebrows beetling evilly. “Main pacemaker for a whole continent? Is that true?”
Huw nods, unable to trust her throat.
“Hmm.”
Giuliani clears her throat. “Then, goddamnit, I hereby find you not guilty of everything in general and nothing in particular. All charges are dismissed.” She glares at the Bishop. “I’ll even get her enrolled in the witness protection program. Will that do for now?”
Huw shudders, but the Bishop nods agreeably. “Yes, that will be sufficient,” he says. “New skin, new identity, clean sheet. Just remember, you wouldn’t want the Hypercolony to come calling, er, crawling, would you?”
The judge nods, meek submission winning out over bubbling rage.
“Very well. There appears to be a jet with diplomatic clearance on final approach into Charleston right now. Shall we go and put you it?”
Halfway across the Atlantic, Huw falls into a troubled sleep, cuddled restlessly in her first-class berth. Sitting up front in ambassador class, the judge mutters darkly to herself, occasionally glancing nervously over her shoulder in the direction of Huw and her passenger. Far above them, the cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its mutifarious sensory apparati, holding its ineffable internal squabbles, thinking its ineffable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. Now there’s someone to talk to downstairs, signals synchronized by the beat of Huw’s passenger, it grows positively voluble: catching up with the neighborhood gossip, chuckling and chattering in many voices about the antics of those lovable but dim dreaming apes who remain below.
Huw dreams she’s back at Sandra Lal’s house, in the aftermath of that memorable party that started this whole thing off. Only she’s definitely she—wearing her new body, aware of it but comfortable in it at the same time. She’s in the kitchen, chewing over epistemology with Bonnie. A sense of sadness spills over her, but Bonnie laughs at something, waving—Bonnie is male, this time—at the window. Then he holds out his hand to Huw. Huw walks into his embrace and they hold each other for a long time. Bonnie doesn’t say anything, but his question is clear in Huw’s head as she leans her chin on his shoulder. “Not yet,” Huw says. “I’m not ready for that. Not till I’ve kicked Ade’s butt halfway into orbit and cleared it with the judge. They’re making you a saint, did you know that?”
Bonnie nods, and makes a weird warbling singsong noise in the back of her throat. It soothes Huw, and she can feel an answering song rising from the ambassador. “No, don’t worry about me,” Huw murmurs. “I’ll be all right. We’ll get together sometime; I just have some loose ends to tie up first.”
And the funny thing is that even inside her dream, she believes it.
Parole Board
History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.
Huw has been home for almost two weeks, going through the motions of a life that made sense to her earlier self but now seems terminally mired in arbitrary constraints. There is the pottery to tend, kilns to clean, extruders to manage, and a windmill with a squeaky bearing that wants periodic seeing to. There is a nineteenth-century terraced house to clean, for in the absence of electricity, there are no labor-saving robots. Newly reembodied, Huw is her own servant, and succeeds for a time in losing herself in manual labor. It’s better than confronting what s/he’s been through head-on.