Nigel nodded. The ocean invasion dominated the reports, but there were many political ramifications. There had been the customary Western tut-tutting over the latest purges in the Socialist African Union. Steam was leaking, with a shrill howl, from the New Marxism, which was getting encrusted with the same old blemishes—flagging zeal, increasingly brutal suppression of dissent, no economic miracles. Astonishingly, even the French intellectuals had abandoned them. A century or more of theory, from Fascism through worn-out Marx to PseudoCap, was finally yielding to the sociometric savants, surrendering the Grand Era of sweeping Theory to the comforting rule of Number.
“I gather from the summaries that you’ve found no life sites, then?” Nigel asked.
“Not yet. Hundreds of planets, either on the grav-lens or by probe, and—nothing.”
“Um.” He glanced at Nikka. “Think I’ll take a walk.”
“I’ll order drinks for us. Nikka, there’s a lot to catch up on, and …”
Nigel passed through private iridescent clouds of yellow and pink and ruby. He became a flitting intruder in a stone courtyard; then a sandy beach; a star cluster; a swirling, tangled struggle between bronze, winged demons; a nineteenth-century office. He met a grinning panda bear with a tennis racket and waved away the animal’s whispered proposition. Someone offered him a drink; he slid it into his wrist and felt its tang.
When he returned, three mugs of dark, odoriferous beer sat on the table. At the edge of their cloud sphere, a shabby trio played trumpet, bass, and drums. The air now held the flat, oily memory of yesterday’s fried food. The bartender held his post at a crude oak bar and glowered at them. Behind him, taped to a cloudy mirror, a stained sign read: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.
“Do you suppose they mean us?” Nigel asked, trying to go along with matters.
“I thought you’d like an old Earth locale. Look, I can update it if you—” She tapped her wrist and a 3-D sprang into life at Nikka’s elbow. The bar faded. A fat man was admiring a pile of eggs, delicately scrambled with cream sauce. He began ingesting them, sucking them up through a straw. Nigel looked closer and saw the man himself was made of garlicked spinach, oiled strands of tagliatelli, and his trousers were of pâté.
“Gluttony chic?” he asked, and turned to Nikka. “M’love, you’ve been out of the Slots for two months—how long does it take to get used to this?”
“The point is,” Nikka explained slowly, “to not get accustomed. It’s supposed to add endless variety.”
“This was Earth’s idea, too?”
“Shipboard and Earthside worked it out together. There’s a new theory of variance-interaction—”
“Spare me. This looks like a bloody amusement park.” Carlotta frowned and reached up to tune her hair from black to white. Nigel glanced around. Cloud spheres hung everywhere in the great gallery. Carlotta got up to greet a passing couple. She stood to one side, clutching one elbow, aloft on some new platform sandals like a frail, hoofed animal. Women standing that way seemed to feel more poised, but he reflected that to him it looked just the reverse.
In the crowds Nigel saw men with hair grown all down their backs and in swirling spirals around their bodies; women with patchy skin pigment that shifted as he watched; men with breasts; women without hair.
He shook his head. Carlotta introduced a couple and Nigel nodded, barely remembering them. There was some conversation he could not follow and they left. “Uh … I didn’t quite catch … ?”
“That was Alex and David,” Carlotta said.
“But … Alex …”
“Well, he’s had the Change, of course.”
“Changed sex?”
“Just as an experiment. It’s completely reversible. About six months in the Slots, rearranging body mass and growing new glands and so on.”
“But Alex … was such …”
“Look,” Carlotta said, “he had a lot of personality facets he’d suppressed. That was clear, wasn’t it, from the stiff kind of way he went around?”
“I thought he was simply disciplined, well organized.”
“Look, a lot of engineers seem that way, but if you pry them open, take a look at the guts—”
“Doesn’t seem possible, somehow, I …” Confused, Nigel came halfway out of his seat, intending to go after Alex and … And what? he thought. Ask him how in God’s name he could come to do such a thing? Nigel stopped himself. It was a deeply personal matter, after all. He shouldn’t barge into what was undoubtedly a difficult time for Alex. He sat back down.
“You look a little rocky,” Carlotta said sympathetically. He nodded mutely. Moments passed. Discordant music filtered in from other zones. The air became flavored with ozone and perfume. Nikka and Carlotta began to talk about crew members who were in new jobs, had new lovers, or otherwise had done something in the last five years worth chewing over. To Nigel this conversation sounded much like a catching-up over lukewarm gossip such as one might hear in any large office building. The ordinariness of it struck him. Who would have guessed that a starship plowing across the light-years would come to resemble, in its human dimension, any other bureaucratic barge? He let most of the detail slip by him and thus was brought up short when Nikka casually remarked that she had moved into Carlotta’s small cabin. She had lived there since she came out of Slotsleep, two months before.
“Then you’ve done no work on getting our apartment back into order?” he asked.
Nikka pursed her lips. “There’s been so much to see, to understand—Lancer is much more exciting now, Nigel, since all these changes.”
“Indeed,” he said wryly.
“And, I don’t know why, but Carlotta and I have had so much fun together. Of course, I was sad that we were not slated to come out of the Slots at the same time. But it did give me a chance to adjust to, to all this.” She waved a hand at the chasm.
Carlotta smiled winningly. “And it’s been great to have you back.” She squeezed Nikka’s hand. “Both of you.”
“I still can’t see why Lancer should need to have such, such …” Nigel let his voice trickle away. Carlotta went into a psychosocial explanation, in part the bounty of the last two decades of work Earthside, which had caught up to Lancer. He listened attentively, all the while wondering if his British background made it impossible for him to appreciate fully these rapid-fire swervings of the social matrix. His past was not merely a learned liking for afternoon tea, cold baths, cricket, a certain level of domestic discomfort, and the occasional patrician accent. There were currents in society that ran deeper and, he felt instinctively, could not be so casually deflected by a bit of dewy-eyed technology. You need not be a master of the Snow-called two cultures to see that.
More couples stopped at their table, recognized them, and shook hands warmly. Nigel could remember most of their names; their odd clothes or hair or altered faces seemed not so important after he’d heard the customary didja-have-a-good-sleep, how’s-tricks-with-Nikka, say-let’s-have-y’all-ovah-foah-dinner-real-soon style of conversation. They were people he still knew pretty well. Displaced in time a bit, yes, and caught up in a novelty-first social air he could not comprehend, quite. In time, no doubt …
And yet, and yet—
Many more of them now worked in Interactive Mode, computer-linked to the vast machines that churned in Lancer’s bowels. They maintained the fusion fire aft, repaired the life-support apparatus, sensed the flow of water and gas that kept the biosphere regulated. Over the years this had changed them. They talked as though they were always listening for a distant voice, half-heard, that murmured just beyond the hearing of the moment. They rubbed the big raw sockets at hip and elbow and shoulder, where the constellations of motor nerves gathered. They thought differently, talked little, seemed to lean on each word as though it should have more significance than it possibly—to Nigel—could. He discovered that when they wished to learn something, they exchanged cerebral templates with someone who knew the material. The technique had been transmitted from Earth three years before. A techno-summary package came in over the radio link each four months, now, to bring up to parallel specs with Earth.