Master of Space and Time (19 page)

“Of course, dear. He'll love the new you.”

“She
. Not too much off the sides and make it spiky on top.”

They did my hair and nails, and then they fixed my face. I told the makeup girl I wanted to look like I was from Detroit. She got the picture. When they were done, I looked even better than I had yesterday. Except for the clothes. I wondered if I should go back upstairs and . . .

“Come on, Joe,” said Nancy, stomping into the beauty salon. “I've been waiting and waiting for you.”

We hit the street and caught a cab. Nancy didn't
want to get our Corvette out of the hotel garage. On the way uptown we stopped to buy me a tailored tweed suit in earth tones. I was starting to look kind of butch. But from Detroit, strictly from Detroit.

“O
PEN
up, Eddie.” I could see his eye staring out the peephole in his steel-covered door. “It's Joe and Nancy Fletcher.”

“You're not Joe Fletcher.” His voice was slow and amused. He was kind of a wirehead. “If I let you in, will you—”

“Here,” said Nancy, pushing me aside. “You recognize me, don't you, Eddie?”

“Who's your girlfriend? Does she like men?”

“Open the goddamn door, Eddie!” I could hear someone coming up the stairs after us. This was a terrible place to be standing around with two million bucks in my purse.

Eddie let us in just as the footsteps reached our landing. Instead of a mugger, it was a neighbor, a young professional like Ed. I wondered where all the weirdos I'd seen outside lived. What a crowd!
Wireheads, she-males, black'n'whites, oz-drippers, and God's own number of gunjy mues.

Eddie ushered us down his long hall and into the living room. His two big dogs were barking.

“Tasp?” he offered, holding up a little machine the size of a flashlight. It was a remote stim-unit: if you beamed it at the base of your skull you'd get colors and a pleasure flush. Usually I didn't indulge, but right now I really needed a lift. Nancy had been cold-shouldering me ever since the beauty parlor. She'd waited in the cab—fuming—while I'd visited the dress shop. I guess it was all kind of freaking her out.
She's just a person too
, I reminded myself as I raised the tasp to my head.
A person who wants to be happy
.

I pressed the button and things got better real fast.

“What's your name?” Eddie was saying, smiling at me and holding out his hand for the little pleasure machine.

“It's Joe, Eddie, it really is.” Nancy refused Eddie's offer of the tasp and kept talking. She was here to do business. “Yesterday he was Marilyn Monroe and today he wants to be Susan Gerber. We want for you to make him some ID.”

Eddie zapped himself again and wandered over to the window. “Come here, Joe, look at this.” Now that Nancy had confirmed it, he didn't seem to have any trouble accepting my changed appearance. He'd been living uptown for a long time. “Look at those dead cars,” said Eddie.

I tasped myself once more and looked down at the cars Eddie was talking about. There were three
of them on his block, cars with headlights, tires, chrome, and engine parts all gone.

“Picked clean,” I chuckled.

“Check,” said Eddie. “I'm always looking at them and thinking about valet parking. A salesman from Iowa, right? He leaves his car with the valet at the Sheraton, and this is how the car looks the next day. The one up at the corner was mine.” He was laughing so hard now that he had to lean on the windowsill for support. “What'd you say your name was? How'd you get in here, anyway?”

“I came with her.” I jerked my head at Nancy.

“Oh, right. Joe Fletcher. So you went trans-sex?”

“Yeah, basically. And I need ID. Susan Gerber from Detroit.”

“Check. Hold on to this and don't let me have it back till I finish.” Eddie passed me the tasp. At least he didn't have a socket yet. Once you got the socket in your skull you were pretty well done for.

“Nancy and Joe,” said Eddie, sitting down at his desk. “Wow. Would you throw me that tasp, Joe?”

“You just told me not to.”

“Check.” Eddie turned on the desk's screen and put his fingers on the keyboard. “Susan Gerber from Detroit? Got a street address?”

“You'll have to look it up.”

“Okay.” He punched a few buttons and got the information. “105 Madius Street. You got a picture of the lovely new you, Joe?”

“No.”

“Okay we'll do that next.” Eddie hit some more buttons and the screen displayed three different ID cards, front and back. The thing had a typesetting program built in. Another push of the button
and a hard copy of the cards slid out onto the desk. “Now we get the pictures and paste these up. Could you just hand me that tasp?”

“I'll
take the tasp,” said Nancy, snatching it out of my hand.

I followed Eddie into his photo room and we got the shots. He had a videoscan still camera, so there was no waiting for the prints. I studied one of the pictures, trying to believe it was really me. I was still light-headed from the stim, and it all seemed pretty exciting.

“I could do with one more pulse,” I told Nancy as we came back into the living room.

“Check,” said Eddie. “Me too.”

With both of us standing over her, Nancy gave in. We each took a couple more pulses before she got the tasp back from us.

“Where were we?” Eddie asked.

“IDs,” nagged Nancy. “If you guys are going to keep getting blasted, you could at least offer me a drink or something, Eddie.”

“A beer?”

“Fine.”

While Eddie was getting the beer, Nancy took the opportunity to chew me out. “You're going to go right down the drain in a hurry, Joe, if you don't get your real body back. It's not like you to be using stim this way.”

“What do you care? You don't love me.”

“I do too love you, Joe. Who else would put up with you?”

“I'm not so hard to get along with. I'm just a person who wants to be happy. A person just like you.”

“That's your big insight from having a woman's body?”

“It's true, isn't it?”

“As far as it goes. But the surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time.”

“That sounds like something your father told you. What a redneck.”

“At least he has a penis.”

“I'm going to see Harry, Nancy. I'm going to see Harry for the gluons today.”

Eddie returned with three beers. “ID,” he said, reminding himself. “We still have to do the hard part.” He had full-color paper replicas of each of the three cards, front and back, made out to Susan Gerber and with my picture on each one. “First, sign these, Joe. Michigan driver's license, federal citizen card, and a cash key.”

“Write
Susan Gerber
,” Nancy reminded me, as if I didn't know.

I signed the flimsy papers, and then Eddie took them down the hall. The dogs started barking again.

“Come on, girls,” called Eddie, “I'll show you my machine.”

“Which one?” I asked cautiously.

“Look.” He had a plastics molder and—most important of all—a selection of official plastic blanks. If your card didn't have the right field patterns, you could forget it. The fields were like invisible seals of validation. One by one he laminated the graphics onto the plastic blanks.

“Did we talk money yet?” Eddie inquired.

“Whatever you say.” I took the fresh IDs and admired the craftsmanship.

“Call it five thousand.”

“Check.” I took out my wad and peeled off the bills.

“Can I have my tasp back now, Nancy?”

“Sure,” said Nancy, handing it over.

Eddie and I passed the tasp back and forth for a while. Pretty soon I was laughing harder than I'd ever laughed before. And then I was in a taxi again. Robot driver. There was a person next to me. Nancy.

“Where are we, Nancy?”

“We're going to Rahway.
You
are. I'll get out there and fly to Princeton. I want to get Serena.”

“Check.”

“Stop acting like a wirehead or I'll leave you flat.”

I clammed up and looked out the window. Ugly, ugly. It seemed stupidly wasteful to take a taxi all this distance. But we had money to burn. Can money buy happiness? It still seemed worth a try. I wondered how much a tasp would cost—in case this yellow gluons thing didn't work out.

“M
Y
cell window's right next to a metal roof, and all day there's a bumblebee out there. He's beautiful, Susie, he's just like a comic-strip bug: a big dot for a body and a lazy eight for wings. He's always patrolling his territory, you know, going around in a sort of polygonal path, but if he sees another bug—
zow!
” Harry threw his hands in the air, trying to show how fast the bumblebee could move.

“I'm not really your sister,” I hissed, “I'm Fletcher! We've got something important to discuss.” We were sitting at either side of a long table with an armed prison guard at the end. The guard looked too bored to be listening to us—but that could have been an act. Harry chose to ignore my whispers.

“So what I've been doing, Susie, is tricking the
bumblebee. I wad up a piece of toilet paper and throw it out through my bars.
Zoom
, he's right on top of it. I did it a lot a lot a lot until he started getting mad. He figured out where all the fake bugs were coming from.”

“Please, Harry.” I leaned forward, trying to get his attention. “You have to help me find some yellow gluons.”

“Then I filled up my mouth with water. For squirting. Because I knew the bumblebee was going to come for me the next time I threw out a piece of paper. And he did! I tell you, Susie, he looked as big—as big as a dog, coming at me like that.”

“Did you get him?” I sighed. Harry may or may not have known it was me, but right now he needed to be talking to his sister.

“I sure did. Remember those great water-gun fights we used to have with the neighbors?”

“You mean the Fletcher kids? Joe and Nancy?”

Harry shot me a look of understanding. “That's right. We had three special guns, remember?”

“I sure do. I wish I had one of them now. I wish I had a lot of things. Oh, Harry, I hate looking like this. I didn't know what I was doing.”

“I wish I could help you. I'm not too crazy about being in jail, either. The feds keep grilling me, but I haven't told them anything. One of the FBI guys told me I'm going to get twenty years.”

“Wow. I've got money, you know. I'll get you the best lawyer.”

“Gee, thanks. You want to hear about the cockroach under my bed?”

“Come off it, Harry.” We were both leaning across the table, with our faces almost touching.
The guard was definitely not paying attention any more. “I want to try running the blunzer again. Where can I find yellow gluons?”

“I've been racking my brain. Someone at Princeton might have some. Do you know any of the physics guys?”

“Alwin Bitter!”

“Beautiful. But do you think you can operate the blunzer? You don't really understand how it works, Joe.”

I felt like laughing in his face. “
I
don't understand? I happen to be the one who told
you
how to build it, Harry.”

His face clouded over in sudden anger.
“You?
Don't try to hog the credit, Fletcher. I designed and built it. It's my invention.”

“Sure it is,” I sneered. “Where did you get the original idea though, huh?”

“In—in a dream. But it was
my
dream, and—”

“It wasn't your dream, Harry. I fed it to you. When I got blunzed yesterday I went back in time and gave you the dream about how to build the blunzer.” Harry was shaking his head and holding his eyes squeezed shut. “It's true, Harry. Remember the river with the duck that walked on water?”

Harry's eyes snapped open. “Oh. Oh, my. Didn't you have to trade some mass to move back like that? The way I had to move Zeke forward to go see you in the car?”

“I just sent my image. You don't really have to trade mass. You just did it that way so you could make a Godzilla.”

“This is confusing.” Harry glanced over at the guard. The guy was out on his feet. “Assuming
Bitter gets you the gluons, what are you going to wish for this time? You'll only have a second or two.”

“I'd just like things back the way they were. Of course I'll keep my money.”

Harry studied my face for a minute. “You're still the same underneath, Fletch. You're the one who's really crazy. That's what I always tell people, but they never listen. Have you gotten laid yet?”