Strange Trades (39 page)

In the men’s john, SUITs stood at the urinals with their metal zippers down.

And in Carl’s office, two SUITs were screwing.

A female SUIT lay on its back on the desk, with a male SUIT pumping its vacant crotch against the empty skirt.

Thus did they reproduce.

I picked up a phone and dialed Sys-Ops. A recording came on.

“The Faber Building is currently under heuristic monitoring. No human personnel are available. If you wish to page a human operator, please call this number.…”

I dropped the handset, and the recording began to recycle tinnily.

Then I left the building.

The driver of the cab I hailed was a SUIT. Made of jeans, flannel shirt and leather jacket, not cut from the same elegant material as those in the Faber Building, he was a SUIT nonetheless.

I let him drive me to the airport, magnetic hands on the wheel, magnetic foot on the accelerator, and I tossed the fare in his magnetic lap.

The enormous concourse was filled with SUITs. SUITs behind the counters, SUITs dispensing coffee, SUITs manning the X-ray machine, SUITs wheeling suitcases!

A SUIT sold me a ticket on my credit card.

A ticket to far, far, far away.

A small island in the tropics, where there are no SUITs.

Because there is no one there but me.

And I go naked all day.

When Bruce Sterling contacted me for permission to reprint my story, “Stone Lives,” in his soon-to-be-historic
Mirrorshades
anthology, I was elated. This was the first reprint request I had ever received, and for what counted, depending on your definition, as either my first, second or third professional sale. Truly, I felt I had finally arrived on the real SF scene. Hugo and Nebula Awards lay glittering just around the corner of my career path. (Now, fifteen years later, I can laugh at my naiveté without too much ironic bitterness creeping into my guffaws.) So when Bruce wrote a short time later that he was hoping I’d let him switch his anthology choice from “Stone Lives” to “Skintwister,” I brashly refused. Let Bruce live with the hasty decision he had made, I thought. I’ll save “Skintwister” for best-of-the-year volumes and Hollywood options.

Needless to say, the story has never again seen the light of day until now. The resounding silence that greeted its original appearance was the first step of many on my long road of hubris- snuffing education in the ways of publishing.

My mate, Deborah Newton, helped me de-sappify the original ending of this tale, where all the protagonists exchanged hugs and kisses. She’s justifiably proud of her editorial touch, and I think she still expects her Hugo Award
“Real Soon Now.”

Skintwister

Keats was wrong.

Beauty is not forever; and alone it is not even enough. Anything permanent is suspect. All is vanity and mutability, flash and eternal change. Fashion is truth, and truth fashion. That is all ye know, and all ye need to know. Society changes daily, hourly, and so must the individual, even if it’s to no purpose. As a visionary artist of the last century once sang when filled with ennui, “I wanna change my clothes, my hair—

“—my face.”

And the high priests of transformation, those perceived as the almighty trendsetters and arbiters, are in reality its most debased servants, unable to locate their true selves amid the welter of arbitrary change they foster. Ask the man who knows.

Yours truly, Dr. Strode.

The girl lay in bed like an anxious Madonna. I had forgotten her name. Here at the Strode Clinic, the patients came and went so quickly, and in such numbers, that I often lost track of their individuality. But Maggie Crownover, my head nurse, briefed me before we entered the girl’s private room.

“Hana Morrell is next, Doctor,” Maggie had said, all brisk efficiency. “She’s fourteen, a technician at the Long Island coldfusion station. Her credit’s solid. No organic defects. Strictly a makeover.”

“No organic defects” was an understatement. The girl was a perfect beauty.

Propped up on pillows, surrounded by bedside monitors, she nearly stole my breath away. Blonde hair like incandescent light filaments framed a heart-shaped face with skin the color of powdered pearls. Her eyes were an arresting gray, her nose had an insouciant tilt, her lips were a feature Rubens might have bestowed on his favorite model.

She smiled, and I thought,
My God, how the hell am I going to improve on this face?

I extended my hand and we shook, slim hand strong in mine.

“Hello, Dr. Strode.”

“Ms. Morrell, good morning. I understand you’re here for a facial biosculpt.” I tried to keep any disapprobation out of my voice. Her credit was all I should be concerned with.

She nodded timidly, as if only in my presence had she realized what she was planning to do.

I spoke quickly and confidently, to get her over this last hump. She had signed the consent form already, and I wasn’t about to lose the easy fee she represented by allowing her to vacillate now.

“Let’s have a look at your new face, then, shall we.”

Maggie took her cue and stepped to the holocaster. A bust formed of light and color suddenly filled the air above the girl’s bed, translucent in the bright sunshine that flooded the private room and its luxurious furnishings.

Subtle disappointment welled up in my throat. Like a fool, I had thought that perhaps this girl would be different. Her beauty had misled me into thinking her desires would be commensurate. But she was like all the rest, following the latest trends as helplessly as a surfer caught in a tsunami.

The holo was a woman of vaguely Eurasian/Polynesian features: skin olive-bronze; epicanthic folds around the eyes; strong chin; thin lips; nose rather small; glossy hair jet-black. It had been assembled from stock graphics in real time on the clinic’s computer-aided-design system, under the direction of the patient. Ever since the amalgamation of Hong Kong into the Hawaiian-Japanese prosperity sphere last year, this face, or something almost identical, had been chosen by sixty percent of my female patients.

“Fine.… It will look wonderful on you,” I lied. Sick at heart with contemplating the natural beauty I was about to destroy forever, I moved toward her to get the whole thing over with.

“Wait,” she said nervously, before I could lay my hands on her face. “Could you just brief me once more on exactly what’s going to happen?”

Now I was starting to get annoyed. “I assume you’ve read the literature the clinic provides, Ms. Morrell. It’s all spelled out there.”

She smiled wanly, and I buckled.

“Okay. A quick refresher. I am going to peek you and initiate changes in your cells that will, more or less, return selected cells temporarily to an embryonic state.”

Her look of puzzlement made me sigh.

“Ms. Morrell, have you ever considered how you ended up with the face you now possess?”

A negative shake.

“During embryogenesis, your cells differentiated and accumulated in definite patterns. These patterns resulted from the play of energy as it was dissipated into the embryonic environment against various constraints. You might think of a mountain stream pulled along by gravity and being configured by the shape of the streambed and channel and rocks in the flow. Although all individuals share the same cell-adhesion mechanisms, your unique genes dictated the temporal and spatial constraints of your development, and hence your unique morphology. Following me so far?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Very well. What I am about to do is influence your cells directly through Banneker psychokinesis. I am going to reawaken their potential for development—which, as an adult, you have lost. By peeking selected sites, activating cell-loosening enzymes such as trypsin, and planting my own constraints in place of your predetermined genetic ones, I will rebuild your face in the shape you desire.”

Naturally bright, she had followed my more elaborate explanation with real understanding, and seemed to be losing her anxiety. “Exactly what’s going to happen to my old face?”

I tossed her a bone. “Good question, Hana. Under normal conditions, your epidermis is constantly sloughing off, as new cells are produced subcutaneously and rise to the surface to take the place of the old ones. On the average, a new cell takes a month to migrate to the surface. An extinct disease like psoriasis represents what happens when epidermal replacement occurs more frequently, say in a week. What I am going to provoke in your body is something like that. For roughly a week, you are going to look very ugly indeed, as your old features slough away and the new ones manifest themselves underneath. This is an uncomfortable but entirely safe process, and you will be monitored throughout. Also, I will be making daily adjustments based on how I read the changes. The treatment could even be conducted on an outpatient basis, if the temporary disfigurement weren’t so drastic.”

But then
, I thought,
I wouldn’t clean up on daily room charges.

“Are you gonna have to alter my bones?” she asked.

I considered the holo. “It appears not, although I could, by regulating your osteoblasts and osteoclasts. The face you’ve chosen goes well with your current skeletal structure.”

She opened her rosy lips for another question, but I cut her off, fed up with her vain hesitation. My bedside manner definitely had its rough edges today.

“Ms. Morrell. Either you want this treatment or you don’t. My training consists of eight years at Johns Hopkins and four more at the Banneker Institute itself. I have been running this clinic for ten years and have performed more biosculptures than you have fused atoms. Now, can we proceed? I have other patients to see.”

She nodded yes meekly, and I felt the perverse thrill of having another human entirely obedient to my will. I tried to suppress it, but couldn’t completely succeed.

Disgusted with myself, I placed my hands on her soon-to-be- lost face.

Then I dove beneath her flesh.

How do you convey extrasensory modes of being in terms of the five senses? I haven’t found a way after all these years. It may be impossible. Better minds than mine have tried. Synesthesia comes close, offering the feeling of skewed perspectives, of the mundane transformed, but in the end, it, too, fails to capture the reality.

Still, how else can I tell it?

My surroundings vanished. The first thing I tasted was Hana’s health and youth, refreshing as the heat of the sun. I could have reveled in it for hours, and had to pull myself away. Her vitality was so different from what the hurt and sick people, the broken ones, had given me in school. That was a taste I couldn’t stomach, the reason why I used my talents as I did. Next I went beyond surfaces, to bathe in the noisy cellular automatons I proposed to change. They hummed a blue light like ginger, happy and content in their stubborn ways. I felt the configurations of muscles and bones, swam along the maxillae and up the zygomatic arch to the temporal bone and down to the nasal bone, even unto the cartilage at the tip. When I was certain I knew her face in its entirety, I began to initiate the changes.

A writer I like once proclaimed, “There is no art without resistance of the medium.” I was an artist by any standards, and my medium was one of the most recalcitrant. The plastic stuff I worked with had its instructions on how to behave, and resented my intrusions. Membranes squeezed out lugubrious sparks against my mental tweaking. Pseudopods of angry noise attempted to push me back. Still, I persisted, knowing the battle would be mine. I ordered growth here, diminishment there. Melanin, marshal your forces and march! Lymph system, retreat! Sebaceous glands, surrender!

At last I was satisfied. I swam out of her skin, back to the external world.

The return of sunlight caused me to blink painfully. I stepped back awkwardly, fatigue heavy in my limbs. Maggie steadied me, anticipating my confusion.

“Wow,” Hana said. “What did you do? I feel like ants were crawling under my face.”

“Get used to it,” I said. “It only becomes more intense.”

I turned to go. At the door, I stopped, guilty, and said, “Ms. Morrell— I’m sorry if I was rather brusque.”

But she didn’t even hear me, both hands on her alien face, as she felt the changes massing beneath her forsaken flesh.

Scarves of smoke ghosted the trapped air in the club. Twisting ceilingward, they encountered shafts of colored light that tinged them gaudily, lending them a brief vitality much like life.

Almost everyone in the noisy, crowded room was smoking—both tobacco and California sinsemilla. When a Banneker graduate could peek away your lung cancer for more money than a prole made in a year, then smoking—once almost extinct—became yet another exclusive status symbol of the rich.

And we—Jeanine and I—were indeed among the rich tonight.

After a tiring day at the clinic, I had felt I deserved the best night out I could manage. That meant one place:
Radix Malorum
, atop the Harlem Pylon. Just the view south from its sweeping windows was worth the inflated prices. Manhattan looked as if some angry god had ripped down the night sky, shaken the stars into geometric patterns, and laid the priceless carpet at our feet.