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Tom Van Bastolaer smiled tolerantly, expert to neophyte. “You’ll be amazed at how lifelike they’ve managed to make these things.” He pinched his left wrist. “It doesn’t feel exactly like my old body used to—I don’t think it does—but at least it feels like something. All your bodily sensations are up in your brain anyhow, aren’t they? So, as I understand it, all these arms and legs and things on this body are packed with nanochips hardwired to various parts of my brain with all sorts of clever feedback circuits. So when I hit myself on my artificial thumb with a hammer, the appropriate neurons and synapses up in my brain are activated and to me it really feels as if I had hit a real flesh and blood thumb.” His smile broadened. “Except, of course, my thumbnail doesn’t turn black and eventually fall off.”

“Hrmph,” I muttered, trying to visualize J. Davis Alexander’s wolverinelike disposition encased within a virtually unbreakable, immortal body. “And you say this body of yours is 127 years old?”

“No, no—I’m 127 standard years old. This particular body’s only about forty years old, less actually. I immigrated to the Moon when I was eighty-seven and just about ready for the glue factory on Earth, spent three years as a boxie, and then got this body just after my ninetieth birthday. So it’s about thirty-seven years old, I suppose.” He patted himself on his broad chest. “Never had a problem with it, no more head colds, no more heartburn, no more unexplained aches and pains.” He focused his attention on Jin Tshei. “Believe me, my dear, to get one of these bodies, it’s worth three years as a boxgirl emptying bedpans and cleaning sewers.”

“How much does one of these things cost?” I asked.

“A lot—the equivalent of a couple hundred thousand Earth dollars. But once you’re a citizen, you can work for anyone who’ll hire you—and most of the companies on the Moon ’ll guarantee your newbie loan. And remember: the body you’re buying may be good for a couple of centuries. So what’s a couple of hundred thousand against that?”

Jin Tshei’s enthusiasm about the joys of boxgirling was considerably more muted than Tom Van Bastolaer’s when she next dropped in on me three days later. “Maybe I’ll like it better when I’ve learned all the ins and outs of running this thing and I get something more interesting to do. Right now I’m an assistant junior apprentice water line inspector.”

“Sounds important,” I grinned as cheerfully as I could from the depths of the GEM chair to which I had graduated earlier in the day. But even in the chair my left limbs were still attached to various therapeutic devices that simultaneously immobilized them and put them through an agonizing series of rehabilitative maneuvers. “What’s it actually mean?

“They plug all sorts of sensors and detectors into the power strip in my box, infrared, ultraviolet, vaporometers and stuff like that, stick an oxygen generator over my head, then shove us into the city’s water system. And off we go, inspecting every water line we can fit through, millimeter by millimeter.”

“Isn’t that sort of… dangerous?”

Jin Tshei shrugged the best she could considering she had no shoulders. “They say it isn’t. But what do they care? There’s lots more box people ready to go if I get stuck in a crack and drown—and even more old-timers on Earth just drooling at the notion of getting out of their bodies and into a box.” She produced a weary smile. “Actually, there are some interesting people among the boxies while they wait to get sorted out. Doctors, scientists, writers, hookers, a little bit of everything. Sooner or later, though, we’ll all get classified and reassigned, so that the real doctors and nurses are taking care of people like you.”

“And what do former hookers do now that they’re in boxes?”

“About what former museum curators do—empty bedpans and inspect sewage lines. But I guess when you consider the alternative, being a boxgirl isn’t that bad at all.”

“I suppose not.” I looked away from her still incomparably lovely face so incongruously growing out of a silver box. “You got the word from Isabel, I suppose?”

We half-looked at each other with hooded eyes for a moment that stretched out longer and longer. Isabel had beeped a long condensed message over the thirty-four minutes of real time that separated us from Ceres. Neither Jin Tshei nor I wanted to talk about its contents.

The various Belter governments—the most important ones are Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Eunomia, and Juno, the five largest asteroid worlds—agree on very few things. One of them, though, is that they don’t want any box people or newbies among their citizens. When you die in the Belt, you die, there’s no second chance as a sendent box, no matter how useful the contribution the boxboy or boxgirl might make to society.

But Jin Tshei was a Belt citizen, bom and raised in Ceres, and although she was now a boxgirl 540 million klicks away, it was through absolutely no initiative of her own. Ceres had to allow her to return, to take up her former life as best she could.

Didn’t they?

Isabel said no.

As the resource allocations manager of the Clarkeville assessor’s office, Isabel knew precisely who actually ran our little world—and where their skeletons were buried. If all the people she’d spent the last ten days wheedling, cajoling, pleading with, and occasionally outright threatening, said that Jin Tshei couldn’t come home, then that was that: Jin Tshei could never return to the Belt.

Actually, though, that wasn’t quite accurate. From the depths of my bed I had been doing some on-line research in Liberty City’s general library. As far as Ceres was concerned, once Jin Tshei’s head had been attached to its life-support box, she was no longer a living person, much less a citizen. But dead or alive, in every twelve-month calendar period, she could come to Clarkeville for a three-month stay, just like any other tourist or prospective immigrant. After that, it was either leave or become a citizen.

And she couldn’t become a citizen—because she was a boxgirl.

It was a neat catch-22.

Even if she spent three years on the Moon doing socially constructive work as a boxie, accumulating enough money to buy a fine new human-type post-boxie body from Macys-Walmart or whoever sold them, and came to Ceres as a completely human-looking girl, it still wouldn’t work: every Cerean citizen has to submit to a routine but thorough annual medical check-up—Psych Service demands that we Cereans all have a sound body in order to maintain our supposedly sound minds.

No, if Jin Tshei ever wanted to return to the Belt, she’d have to find her own unclaimed asteroid, colonize it, and then live there as its sole citizen.

It didn’t seem to be a very enticing alternative.

“Yes,” said Jin Tshei at last. “I got her message.”

Once again our eyes avoided direct contact. We were both thinking the same thing. As long as Ceres Central Registry was not officially notified of Jin Tshei’s transformation into a boxgirl, she was still legally alive, albeit not physically present on Ceres—and still legally married to Isabel.

If she tried to return to Clarkeville—or if someone tipped off Central Registry as to her present status—then she’d be declared legally dead, her estate would be settled, and her marriage to Isabel would come to an end.