“I beeped her a message with all the news a little while ago; she ought to be getting it just about now.”
“What did you say?”
“That all was well. That we loved her. That you’d be home soon.”
I swallowed. “Just me? Not you?”
“Dear Jonathan.” Jin Tshei drifted closer, took my good hand in her curiously soft artificial fingers. “There’s no magic wand to enable me to return to the Belt. Just wishing it won’t make it so. I’m going to have to stay here—and work for it.”
“Work? How do you mean?”
“Now that we’re finally organized, we boxies are going to have to make our peace with the newbies and present a united front—after all, they’re as much us as a butterfly is a caterpillar, aren’t they? We have to be united. And why should we be segregated here on the Moon as if we were typhoid carriers? One of these days we’re going to burst out—back to Earth and out to the Belt. Between us, we’ve got lots of money and some of the smartest, most experienced brains in the Solar System. Pretty soon I think you’re going to see people on Ceres agitating for full human rights for everyone, no matter what they look like or what they’re made of.”
“You mean a PR campaign?”
“Of course. Lobbying, advertising, articles, shows, out-and-out propaganda, some of it very subtle, almost subliminal conditioning, some of it very loud and obvious, teams of visiting boxies and newbies coming to show that we’re really not so inhuman as we’ve been made out to be. Syndicated TV series with boxie heroes and heroines, novels and games with heroic newbies. Anything that money and cleverness can do—we’ll do.”
“But that won’t bring you back!” I protested, my voice cracking.
She squeezed my hand. “Eventually it will. Not in this box, maybe, but in some sort of body. First as a visitor, then someday as a full-fledged citizen again. I promise, Jonathan: I’ll be back. Tell Isabel I love her.”
I threw my arm around Jin Tshei’s beautiful head and wept.
That was some time ago.
Hartman, Bemis & Choupette successfully underwrote the Kennedy-grad-Dooley’s Downfall tube tunnel 5-3/4 percent non-callable bonds of 2314 at 1-1/2 over par and pocketed 27 million Belter buckles for its efforts—some of which even dribbled down to Jonathan Welbrook White.
Isabel and I now spend a lot more time together that we used to, but she still speaks tenderly and longingly of Jin Tshei. So maybe Psych Service is smarter than either of us gave them credit for being.
Valerié-France is doing well at her school/clinic/home in Switzerland and is delighted to receive far more frequent visits from one of her mommies than she ever used to. She also enjoys tremendous prestige among the other children for being the only person there whose mother is a beautiful head on a shiny steel box.
Jin Tshei is still attached to her box although she could have moved to a newbie body some months ago. She is one of seven box people elected to the LPDA and says she intends to remain in her box until she and everyone else like her enjoy full civil rights throughout the Solar System.
On her first trip to Earth to visit Vally, Jin Tshei was forced to smuggle herself in hidden among a shipment of mutated Lunar eagles. Two days later she proclaimed her true status at a widely televised happening in front of the Palace of Human Rights in Geneva. It was six weeks before the authorities managed to get her deported, and since then she—and other boxies and newbies—have been visiting Earth with ever-increasing ease.
Isabel and I hope that her campaign promise to remain in her box and fight for boxie rights is just as binding as any other politician’s campaign promise and that on our next get-to-gether, either here or on the Moon, she’ll greet us from a newbie body, looking as much like the old Jin Tshei as possible.
“I do love her,” declared Isabel, “but how can I hug a box?”
J. Davis Alexander has surreptidous-ly spent a large portion of the fortune he made with the tunnel bond issue financing the activities of half a dozen recently formed Belter groups working for full implementation of human rights for all humans. Not through altruism—but because he still has dreams of immortality in a fine new body as long and lean as that of his gorgeous wife—and of eventually cornering the market on everything in the Solar System.
And me?
I’m not so certain as Jin Tshei and J. Davis Alexander are about the endless virtues of semi-eternal life in the form of either boxies or newbies. A couple of demographic projections I’ve seen by the sort of people who study this stuff prove pretty convincingly that if you turn almost everyone into a newbie, eventually the inorganic people are going to far outnumber the organic ones. And then maybe they’ll start asking themselves just why they need all these messy ganics around. After all, their bodies are good for at least a couple of thousand years…
But, of course, by the time that comes about, the only way I’d be around to worry about it would be as a boxie or newbie myself. Which would probably give me an entirely different perspective on the matter.
And as Isabel says—after coming back from a three-week visit to the Moon and Jin Tshei—it would be easy enough for Psych Service, or any other of the Belt governments, to add a rider to their marriage and reproduction licenses.
To wit: if you want to have children, you have to formally give up any future claim for trading in your aging organic body for that of a boxie or a newbie.
In other words, you can either live forever through your children and their children, or you can live forever in an artificial body—but you can’t do both.
It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.
I also bought as much stock as I could in Lunar tobacco producers and cigarette manufacturers. So far, because of a sharply increased rate of immigration of boxies from Earth to the Moon, the stocks are up 217 percent.
And I’ve unofficially been helping the Lunar government establish their first consulate office here in Clarkeville.
After all, even we Belters grow old and die someday.
Except when we can get a free ticket to the Moon and a shiny new box…
Jin Tshei: Hurry home—we miss you!