Changer of Worlds

mother’s name. Oh, and I might mention something else that I’m sure Durkheim doesn’t know—she’s the youngest person who evergot a brown belt from Robert Tye.”

Victor sighed. Again, he was in a cloud of dust. “What’s a brown belt? And who’s Robert Tye?”

I’m getting a little tired of that damn grin, he thought sourly, seeing its reappearance. The words which followed didn’t help a bit.

“Not a devotee of the martial arts, are you? Well, I’d figured as much from our little fracas in the tavern.” Grin.

So, Victor had wound up idling away the day with Usher’s wife in the Loop. Her name—or so she claimed, in defiance of all logic—was Virginia. Victor had his doubts, especially in view of her scandalous clothing and the way she continually tormented him.

But he was obscurely relieved when she explained that she wasn’t really a prostitute.

“Not any more, anyway,” Ginny explained—although, at the moment she spoke the words, she was doing her best to prove to the world otherwise, the way she was pressed against him as they ambled through one of the bazaars in the Old Quarter. Under Victor’s prodding, as they made their way through the crowded streets and open-spaced bazaars, Virginia gave him some of her life’s history.

Before too long, he was sorry he had asked. Not because Virginia prattled—to the contrary, her narrative was terse and brief. But simply because it is one thing to understand, in ideological terms, that a social institution is unjust. It is another thing entirely to hear that injustice graphically described by one of its victims. The first causes abstract anger; the second, nausea and helpless fury.

Virginia had been born—bred—on Mesa. C-17a/65-4/5 was the name on her tongue. The label, it might be better to say. The “C” line was one of Manpower Inc.’s most popular breeds, always in demand on the market. Sex slaves, in essence. “17” referred to the somatic type; the “a” to the female variant. Her genotype had been selected and shaped for physical attractiveness, and for as much in the way of libidinal energy and submissiveness as Mesa’s gengineers could pinpoint in the genetic code. Which, of course, was not much—especially since the two desired psychological traits tended to be genetically cross-linked with a multitude of opposing characteristics. One of which, unfortunately, was a type of intelligence popularly characterized as “cleverness.” As a result, a high percentage of C-lines had a tendency to escape captivity once they left the extreme security environment of Mesa itself.

To combat that tendency, and in an attempt to “phenotypically induce” the desired submissiveness, the developing C-lines were subjected to a rigorous training regimen. Manpower’s engineers, of course, had an antiseptic and multisyllabic jargon phrase to describe it: “Phenotype developmental process.” But what it amounted to, in layman’s terms, was that C-lines were systematically and continually raped from the age of nine.

“The worst of it,” Virginia mused, “is that there wasn’t even any real lust involved. No emotion at all. The rapists—sorry, the phenotype technicians—have to be chemically induced to even get an erection.” She actually managed a giggle. “Sometimes, looking back, I almost feel sorry for them. Almost. I don’t think there exists anybody in the galaxy as bored with sex as those people.”

“Nine?” Victor asked shakily.

She shrugged. “Yeah. It hurts. A lot, in the beginning. And it’s even worse for the b-variants. Those are the boys.”

Victor felt like he was wading in a cesspool. But he finally understood the sheer savagery of the Audubon Ballroom. He had never approved of the kind of terrorist tactics which their militants often applied to individual targets. Counterproductive, ideologically. But—

She laughed harshly. “Almost! Ha! That one time Jeremy X and his comrades caught a phenotype technician here on Terra—stupid bastard went on vacation, can you believe it?—I raced down to see the body like everybody else.”

At one time, Victor would have winced. Now, he simply growled his own satisfaction. He knew the incident she was referring to. It had been one of the most famous exploits of the Ballroom, and one which had produced a gale of official outrage. The Solarian League’s Executive Council met in an elaborate palace. As part of the palace’s decor, there was a statue in the center of the antechamber. The statue was a human-sized replica of a gigantic and long-destroyed ancient monument called the Statue of Liberty. The Council members had not been amused to arrive one day and find the naked body of a “phenotype engineer” impaled on the statue’s torch, with a sign hanging around his neck which read: Hoist on his own petard, wouldn’t you say?

He took a deep breath. “I still think the tactics are counterproductive.”

Virginia smiled slyly. “That’s what Kevin says, too.” The smile faded. “I don’t know. I suppose you’re right. But—”

She took her own deep breath. “You don’t know what it’s like, Victor,” she said softly. There was a hint of moisture in her dark eyes. “All your life you’re told you’re inferior—genetically. Not really human. You wonder about it yourself. Sometimes I think the way I put on such a slutty act is just because—” No hint, now; the tears were welling. She wiped them away half-angrily. “So maybe you and Kevin are right. All I know is that after I saw that body I felt a lot better about myself.”

The moment passed, and Virginia went back to her customary badinage. “Anyway, after I escaped I made my living as a whore. The pay’s good and what else do I know how to do?” Sourly: “Kevin insisted that I give it up, when he proposed.”

Victor had learned enough to resist his natural impulse: But surely you were glad to abandon that life of degradation! Virginia, he was quite certain, had been happy enough to quit the trade. But she enjoyed goosing the greenhorn.

Ginny goosed him again. “And he was so mean to my pimp, too.” Sigh. “Poor Angus. He was so refined, and Kevin is such a ruffian.”

When she realized he wasn’t going to rise to the bait, Ginny grinned. The grin, of course, was lascivious. Whatever the reality of their relationship and repartee, Victor realized that Ginny was a far more experienced field agent than he was. Except for that one brief teary-eyed moment, she had never once broken cover. Any of Durkheim’s men who was following them would be quite certain by now that Victor Cachat had finally abandoned his stiff and proper ways. Another puritanical revolutionary undone by the fleshpots of Terra. Join the club.

And so, just as Usher had planned, it would never occur to them that the same Victor Cachat was getting a better introduction to the Loop and its secrets than they’d ever gotten.

“Smart man,” mused Victor.

“Isn’t he?” agreed Ginny happily.

The Third Day

Helen

Helen had no way of keeping track of time, beyond the meals which her captors gave her. After four meals, she decided that they were feeding her twice a day. Which, if she was right, meant that she had now been imprisoned for three days.

The food was plentiful, but consisted of nothing more than some kind of standard rations. For troops, possibly, although Helen suspected darkly that the rations were designed for convict laborers. Nasty stuff. She certainly wouldn’t feed crap like that to armed soldiers. They’d mutiny within a week.