By the time I was removed from the various restraining devices in my bed at M’guli Sadartha Memorial Hospital, and inserted into my own little medical ground effect machine, I had almost grown used to the sight of boxboy and boxgirl nurses floating in and out of my private room and attending to my needs.
Almost.
But every time I saw Jin Tshei’s lovely face with her once-long hair, now cropped to a black stubble, appear by my side attached only to a metal box, my eyes welled up. It wasn’t fair! Someone as beautiful and young and wonderful as Jin Tshei couldn’t be a boxgirl, nothing but a collection of pumps and filtration systems to cycle oxygen and nutrients and blood in and out of her brain.
“How long will you have to… stay like that?” I finally had the courage to ask, my eyes focused on the two shiny steel tubes with long, delicate metal fingers at their ends that had replaced Jin Tshei’s golden limbs. On the other side of the room a wizen-faced attendant I called Charlie the Boxboy drifted languidly about his housekeeping duties, his sharp brown eyes spending far more time on Jin Tshei’s features than on his cleaning and polishing equipment.
“I don’t know,” sighed Jin Tshei. “I really haven’t had the courage to ask. A long time, I think.” She managed a melancholy smile. “I do know that you can’t just float into Neiman-Printemps and buy yourself a new flesh-and-blood eighteen-year-old body.”
“That’s for sure,” interjected Charlie the Boxboy, giving up all pretense of working and drifting towards Jin Tshei as if drawn by a magnet. “You got some boxies like me who ain’t never gonna get one of them fine new newbie bodies, no matter how much they like to tell folks like you that every one of us here is created equal and we’re all gonna be a beautiful newbie someday.” His thin lips twisted in disgust. “It just ain’t true. You just wait and see, Miss, it just ain’t true.” Shaking his head in mournful resignation, he pulled his vacuum cleaner and dusting equipment into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.
“Poor old man,” murmured Jin Tshei, staring at the closed door. “I hope I don’t turn out like him.” She turned back to me with a determined look on her face. “Look, I’ve been practicing.” To illustrate, the box that was now her body drifted away from my bedside and did a series of fancy pirouettes in what little open space my cramped room afforded.
“You’re getting pretty good with those compressed air thrusters or whatever it is that keeps you floating,” I said, trying to keep a quaver from my voice.
“After the first ten minutes or so it seems to become almost instinctive. Evidently they hardwire the feedback sensors on the thrusters directly to the part of the brain that controls your body’s sense of balance. Whatever it is, it works. I just think higher, or lower, or left, or right, and that’s the way I go.” She stretched one of her long, silvery arms towards me and wiggled her intricately articulated fingers almost in my face. “The same with my nice new fingers. That took a little longer, but now I can write my name or use chopsticks or—”
“Chopsticks? You can eat?”
Jin Tshei’s face clouded over. “No. Nothing but packaged nutros—and they’re loaded directly into my box. The chopsticks are just a training exercise: you’d be surprised how hard it is to use them compared to doing almost any other thing.” She sighed. “Once you’ve mastered chopsticks, you’re ready for everything else the Moon has to offer.”
I used the fingertip controls on the right side of my bed to push me into a slightly more upright position. My left arm and left leg, which had absorbed most of the impact of my crash landing against the cabin wall, were still tightly immobilized. “Well, I guess we can always put you on the HB&C payroll to give that wretched boss of mine a firsthand report on the Moon’s MedSys.” I could hear my voice thickening with anger. “If it weren’t for him sending me here, this would never have happened! You’d still be—”
“Hush—what’s done is done. There’s no use blaming anyone. If I’d come down to the Moon by myself, I might have gotten off the shuttle ten seconds sooner and realty been killed.”
Once again thick tears welled up in my eyes. “What about Isabel?” I muttered, finally daring to broach the most delicate subject of all. “Does she know—?”
“Jonathan White? From Ceres?” The door opened and a tall, middle-aged man bounced into the room with the economical hopping motion that instantly told me he was a native Loonie. He was also one of the very few non-box people I’d seen since awakening in M’guli Sadartha. He alighted by the side of my bed and squeezed my relatively good right hand in both of his. “What a terrible, terrible catastrophe! It’s only now I’ve found out where you—” He swung around to face Jin Tshei. “And you must be Mr. White’s companion. What a terrible thing to have happened!” He shook his mostly bald head in dismay. “But at least they managed to save you.”
“As a boxgirl, yes.”
The intruder smiled cheerfully. “It’s a start. Believe me—I know!” He gestured broadly with his powerful arms and enormous hands. “Look at me. How old would you say I am?”
“Before we play guessing games,” I snapped irritably, “just who are you?”
“Who—oh, I am sorry! I thought I’d told you: Tom Van Bastolaer, of Peebles, Van Bastolaer & Mustapha, the lead underwriters for the Kennedygrad tunnel bonds. I’m the fellow who’s supposed to be showing you around and answering all of J. Davis Alexander’s questions.” Once again he pumped my hand between his.
“Oh. But first we have to guess how old you are.” I scrutinized Van Bastolaer carefully. He seemed to be a very well-preserved sixty-two or sixty-three, so, out of politeness, I said, “Forty-eight or nine?”
Van Bastolaer flashed a toothy grin. “One hundred and twenty-seven—and I feel like I’m good for another hundred at least!”
I stared at him in astonishment. Finally my brain began to work. “You mean you’re one of the—”
“Newbies. Absolutely.” Van Bastolaer swung around to where Jin Tshei hovered in midair. “That’s what we call ourselves, you know. From new bodies. Just like Jonathan here’s a gan-ic, short for organic—we Loonies have had plenty of time to develop our own particular argot.”
“And I’m a boxie—or boxgirl. At least it’s descriptive.”
Tom Van Bastolaer nodded. “But it’s how we all start out, my dear, even the richest of us immigrants. Everyone works as a boxie for three years of public service and then you’re eligible for citizenship.” Once again he flashed his shiny incisors. “And then you’re eligible to buy a body. Just like this one.”
“Somehow I tliink I’d prefer a girl’s.” Jin Tshei had managed a tiny smile. “But I know what you mean—and you’re kind to try to cheer me up.”
“Wait a minute here,” I said, struggling to sit up even straighter. “You mean that’s a real body you’re… you’re wearing?”
“Flesh and blood?” Van Bastolaer sighed. “I’m afraid we can’t have everything. No, no matter how good it looks, it’s really nothing more than a very fancy version of the box your lovely friend here is wearing. It’s completely inorganic—as opposed to organic, which is why all the human-type Loonies are called ganics. Truth to tell, though, it doesn’t work as efficiently as a box in some ways—it’s sometimes a lot easier just floating along in your little box than it is bouncing around in a body, even a body as good as this one. But on the other hand, who wants to look in a mirror and see yourself growing out of a box, no matter how handy it is?” Jin Tshei drifted closer to the underwriter. “Can you feel anything in your body? If you can’t, then I’d think you might as well just stay in your box—and avoid looking at mirrors.”