We talked a while longer, and she wrote out a time and a destination in the salt crystals. Then someone else sat next to her and started fondling her breasts and she was showing a definite interest, so I got up and returned to the dance floor.
I danced almost an hour longer, but my heart wasn't really in it. A guy made a play for me, and he was pretty, and persuasive, and a very good, raunchy dancer, but in the end I felt he just didn't try hard enough. When I'm not the aggressor I can choose to take a lot of persuading. In the end I gave him my phone code and said call me in a week and we'd see, and got the impression he probably wouldn't.
I showered and bought a paper chemise in the locker room, staggered to the tube terminal, and got aboard. I fell asleep on the way home, and the train had to wake me up.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I've read about hangovers. You just about have to believe those people were exaggerating. If only a tenth of the things written about them were true, I have no desire to experience one. The hangover was cured long before I was born, just a simple chemical matter, really, no tough science involved. I'd sometimes wondered if that was a good idea. There's an almost biblical belief deep in the human psyche that we should pay in some way for our over-indulgences. But when I think that, my rational side soon takes over. Might as well wish for the return of the hemorrhoid.
When I woke up the next morning, my mouth tasted good.
Too good.
"CC, on line," quoth I.
"What can I do for you?"
"What's with the peppermint?"
"I thought you liked peppermint. I can change the flavor."
"There's nothing wrong with peppermint qua peppermint. It's just passing strange to wake up with my mouth tasting like anything but… well, it wouldn't mean anything to you, I don't guess taste is one of your talents, but take my word for it, it's vile."
"You asked me to work on that. I did."
"Just like that?"
"Why not?"
I was about to answer, but Fox stirred in his sleep and turned over, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I had shaken out a tooth-cleaning pill, then I looked at it sitting there in my hand.
"Do I need this, then?"
"No. It's gone the way of the toothbrush."
"And science marches on. You know, I'm used to what they call future shock, but I'm not used to being the cause of it."
"Humans usually are the cause of the new inventions."
"You said that."
"But you can never tell when a human will take the time to work on a particular problem. Now, I have no talent for asking questions like that. As you noted, my mouth never tastes bad in the morning, so why should I? But I have a lot of excess capacity, and when a question like that is asked, I often tinker with it and sometimes come up with a solution. In this case, I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the things that would normally rot in your mouth while you are sleeping, and changes them into things that taste good. They also clean away plaque and tartar and have a beneficial effect on gums."
"I'm afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me."
"It's in the water supply. You don't need much of it."
"So every Lunarian is waking up today and tasting peppermint?"
"It comes in six delicious flavors."
"Are you writing your own ad campaigns now? Do me a favor; don't tell anyone this is my fault."
I got into the shower and it turned on, gradually warming to just a degree below the hottest I could stand. Don't ever say anything about showers, Hildy, I cautioned myself. The goddam CC might find a way to clean the human hide without them, and I think I'd go mad without my morning shower. I'm a singer in the shower. Lovers have told me I do this with indifferent esthetic effect, but it pleases me. As I soaped myself I thought about a nanobot-infested world.
"CC. What would happen if all those tiny little robots were taken out of my body?"
"Doing it would be impractical, to say the least."
"Hypothetically."
"You would be hypothetically dead within a year."
I dropped the soap. I don't know what answer I had expected, but it hadn't been that.
"Are you serious?"
"You asked. I replied."
"Well… shit. You can't just leave it lying there."
"I suppose not. Then let me list the reasons in order. First, you are prone to cancer. Billions of manufactured organisms work night and day seeking out and eating pinpoint tumors throughout your body. They find one almost every day. If left unchecked, they would soon eat you alive. Second, Alzheimer's Disease."
"What the hell is that?"
"A syndrome associated with aging. Simply put, it eats away at your brain cells. Most human beings, upon reaching their hundredth birthday in a natural state, would have contracted it. This is an example of the reconstructive work constantly going on in your body. Failing brain cells are excised and duplicated with healthy ones so the neural net is not disrupted. You would have forgotten your name and how to find your way home years ago; the disease started showing up about the time you went to work at the Nipple."
"Hah! Maybe those things didn't do as good a job as you thought. That would go a long way toward explaining… never mind. There's more?"
"Lung disease. The air in the warrens is not actually healthy for human life. Things get concentrated, things that could be cleaned from the air are not, because replacing lungs is so much cheaper and simpler than cleaning up the air. You could live in a disneyland to offset this; I must filter the air much more rigorously in there. As it is, several hundred alveoli are re-built in your lungs every day. Without the nanobots, you'd soon begin to miss them."
"Why didn't anyone ever tell me about all this?"
"What does it matter? If you'd researched it you could have found out; it's not a secret."
"Yeah, but… I thought those kind of things had been engineered out of the body. Genetically."
"A popular misconception. Genes are certainly manipulable, but they've proved resistant to some types of changes, without… unacceptable alterations in the gestalt, the body, they produce and define."
"Can you put that more plainly?"
"It's difficult. It can be explained in terms of some very complicated mathematical theories having to do with chaotic effects and chemical holography. There's often no single gene for this or that characteristic, good or bad. It's more of an interference pattern produced by the overlapping effects of a number of genes, sometimes a very large number. Tampering with one produces unintended side-effects, and tampering with them all is often impossible without producing unwanted changes. Bad genes are bound up this way as often as good ones. In your case, if I eradicated the faulty genes that insist on producing cancers in your body, you'd no longer be Hildy. You'd be a healthier person, but not a wiser one, and you'd lose a lot of abilities and outlooks that, counterproductive though they may be in a purely practical sense, I suspect you treasure."
"What makes me me."
"Yes. You know there are many things I can change about you without affecting your… soul is the simplest word to use, though it's a hazy one."
"It's the first one you've used that I understand." I chewed on that for a while, shutting off the shower and stepping out, dripping wet, reaching for a towel, drying myself.
"It doesn't make sense to me that things like cancer should be in the genes. It sounds contra-survival."
"From an evolutionary viewpoint, anything that doesn't kill you before you've become old enough to reproduce is irrelevant to species survival. There's even a philosophic point of view that says cancer and things like it are good for the race. Overpopulation can be a problem to a very successful species. Cancer gets the old ones out of the way."