“Like you.”
“Absolutely. Right now I’ve got a sixteen-room apartment, two boxgirl housekeepers, a boxboy chef to cook for my human friends, a secretary, and I’m thinking about getting a butler. I tell you, Jonathan, not even a king on Earth lives the way I do.”
For a long moment I watched the crews of boxies using their industrial lasers as they drilled out one small cubicle after another in the rock face across the atrium. Shops, boutiques, and athletic and entertainment centers had already been installed on the two levels at the bottom of the 100-meter-high atrium. There seemed to be hundreds, maybe thousands of boxies swarming around the construction site.
“You say there re 18,000 or so immigrants a month being turned into boxies?” I said after doing a little mental calculating.
“Right.”
“And native Loonies, the ones who’re born here, don’t have to become boxies, they can just go ahead and buy themselves a newbie anytime they need one?”
“Right again.”
“So how come there are 13 or 14 million boxies, or whatever the figure is? If you process 18,000 immigrants a month into boxies, and they stay that way for three years before getting their citizenship, I’d think that the most you could have at any one time would be 648,000.”
“I suppose,” agreed Tom Van Bastolaer. “But you’ve got to remember that not every boxie is as thrifty and hardworking as he should be. Even a boxie can find ways to spend his money. And keep from working as much as he’s supposed to. So a lot of them finish their three-year contracts and don’t have the money to buy their citizenship. So they have to stay in their boxes until they do have enough money.” He scowled disgustedly at the notion of such shiftless beings.
“What’s it cost, Lunar citizenship?”
“An even hundred thousand Lunar Florins, which sounds like a lot. But it can be done if you just work hard enough!”
“I suppose so,” I conceded. “I know I’d sure have a lot of incentive to get out of one of those boxes. Speaking of which, what about these MedSys Centers? That seems to be the key point in this whole process where broken-down old geezers from Earth are turned into shiny new boxies. If you’re talking about 50 billion Loonies someday, making people into boxies has got to be a growth industry.”
Van Bastolaer grinned. “I was wondering how long it would take you to figure that out. So that’s our next stop: the Omer and Michele Darr MedSys Center.”
“Oh? Well, it’s going to have to wait until after lunch, I’m afraid.” I nodded at the new recorder on my right wrist that had replaced the one smashed on my other arm. “I’ve got an appointment with the radiologist in half an hour to see how my bones are coming along.”
“I was listenin’, you know,” said Charlie the Boxboy as he guided my GEM chair down the corridor, “to what that bigshot newbie was sayin’ to you t’other day in your room, Mr. White, and most of it was nothin’ but a pack of lies, you know what I mean?” Ahead of us I could see the sign that pointed to X-rays, but Charlie brought us to an obstinate halt in the middle of the corridor.
“What kind of lies?” I asked, apprehensive about anything that might affect Jin Tshei.
Floating just at my eye-level, Charlie squinted at me confidentially. “Well, it ain’t so much lies, mebbe, Mr. White, but what he ain’t sayin’. And sometimes that’s just the same as lyin’, ain’t it?”
“Absolutely. But for example?”
“Well, like when he says that ever’one what comes to the Moon has gotta work as a boxie and then they can buy themselves a fine new newbie. That’s sorta true, but what he ain’t tellin’ you is that when rich guys like him get off the ship on the Moon and they got the dough to buy themselves their citizenship as soon as their three years are up, then they don’t gotta work at just any kind of scut job the Labor Board assigns you to, like shovelin’ pig manure and cleanin’ out old sewers. They can go do any job they can get—and get paid regular wages for it.”
“But they’re still boxies, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, but they’re free boxies, if you see what I mean, not like most of the rest of us.”
I pursed my lips, trying to work out exactly what Charlie was driving at. “You mean that rich boxies can get jobs just as if they were newbies—or real humans? And get paid for it?”
“Hey, I’m a real human too, Mr. White, it ain’t my fault I’m stuck here in this box!”
“Sorry, Charlie. All of this is confusing for me.”
“It’s real simple,” he said in exasperated tones. “All the boxies you see like me ain’t never gonna have no newbie bodies. We’re gonna work the rest of our lives hauling crap around while the rich guys lord it over us.”
“But after three years—”
“After three years, if you can’t pay for your citizenship, then you have to take any jobs the Labor Board assigns you to.”
“But surely they pay—”
“Yeah, slave wages! Just enough to keep us alive! And then they deduct about a million things from our pay: taxes, housing, nutros, air and water, maintenance and repairs and tune-ups on our boxes, and about a million other things they don’t tell you about when they sign you up on Earth for your life in paradise on the Moon. Hell, they even make us pay for usin’ our radios that let us talk with the other boxies, and that’s about the only pleasure we do have. Paradise, ha!” For a moment I was afraid he was actually going to spit on the hospital wall. “I tell you the real truth, Mr. White, the truth is when you’re done being a boxie after your first three years, you owe more money to the Labor Board than you’ve saved to buy your citizenship. And you’re gonna keep on owing ’em until your box breaks down for good or you just can’t take it anymore and you take a floater out through an airlock without your helmet on. It’s either that or spendin’ the next 500 years as a boxie. And believe me, Mr. White, that ain’t nothin’ to look forward to!”
“But Mr. Van Bastolaer said that the companies here on the Moon will guarantee the loans to buy your body.”
“Yeah, if you’re a citizen. But if you ain’t, forget it! And if you’re a bigshot newbie or a native-born ganic who ain’t never got to be a boxie even when he’s about ready to croak, what are you gonna do: pay real wages like you would to another ganic, or pay nothin’ wages to a boxie you can keep around for fifty or a hundred years doin’ the same job for nothin’? You tell me which one you’re gonna do, Mr. White. I’ve earned my citizenship a hundred times over, but I’ll never get it, not from them!”
With a snort of infinite disgust, Charlie activated my ground-effect chair and propelled me toward my appointment with the radiologist.
Another boxie, I recalled. One who had citizenship and the commensurate salary of a certified radiologist? Or one who, like Charlie, was little more than a feudal serf? And likely to remain that way for an infinitely long lifetime?
What was that line from the ancient song—“You owe your soul to the company store”?
Four hours after my visit to the X-ray lab I knew all I wanted to about how a ninety-one-year-old Shanghai bureaucrat riddled with incurable bone cancer was turned into a shiny new boxgirl. If you were a medical doctor or a blood-loving sadist, it was probably fascinating stuff; if you were an ethical broker & bourseman it was merely stomach-churning. “What about all the leftover… bodies?” I muttered. “I haven’t seen anything in the way of cemeteries.”
“We Loonies are not very sentimental, I’m afraid. It all makes very nice fertilizer for the organic farmers. Another blue chip for your portfolio.”