IX.
JACKIE WORKS IN BLOSSOMS, a nightclub in West Hollywood. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Jackies in Los Angeles, thousands of them across the country, hundreds of thousands across the world.
Some of them work for the government, some for religious organizations, or for businesses. In New York, London, and Los Angeles, people like Jackie are on the door at the places that the in-crowds go.
This is what Jackie does. Jackie watches the crowd coming in and thinks, Born M now F, born F now M, born M now M, born M now F, born F now F . . .
On “Natural Nights” (crudely, unchanged) Jackie says, “I’m sorry, you can’t come in tonight” a lot. People like Jackie have a 97 percent accuracy rate. An article in Scientific American suggests that birth gender recognition skills might be genetically inherited: an ability that always existed but had no strict survival values until now.
Jackie is ambushed in the small hours of the morning, after work, in the back of the Blossoms parking lot. And as each new boot crashes or thuds into Jackie’s face and chest and head and groin, Jackie thinks, Born M now F, born F now F, born F now M, born M now M . . .
When Jackie gets out of the hospital, vision in one eye only, face and chest a single huge purple-green bruise, there is a message, sent with an enormous bunch of exotic flowers, to say that Jackie’s job is still open.
However, Jackie takes the bullet train to Chicago, and from there takes a slow train to Kansas City, and stays there, working as a housepainter and electrician, professions for which Jackie had trained a long time before, and does not go back.
X.
RAJIT IS NOW IN his seventies. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. He is rich enough to satisfy any whim; he will, however, no longer have sex with anyone. He eyes them all distrustfully from his apartment’s window, staring down at the bronzed bodies on the Copacabana, wondering.
The people on the beach think no more of him than a teenager with chlamydia gives thanks to Alexander Fleming. Most of them imagine that Rajit must be dead by now. None of them care either way.
It is suggested that certain cancers have evolved or mutated to survive rebooting. Many bacterial and viral diseases can survive rebooting. A handful even thrive upon rebooting, and one—a strain of gonorrhea—is hypothesized to use the process in its vectoring, initially remaining dormant in the host body and becoming infectious only when the genitalia have reorganized into that of the opposite gender.
Still, the average Western human life span is increasing.
Why some freebooters—recreational Reboot users—appear to age normally, while others give no indication of aging at all, is something that puzzles scientists. Some claim that the latter group is actually aging on a cellular level. Others maintain that it is too soon to tell and that no one knows anything for certain.
Rebooting does not reverse the aging process; however, there is evidence that, for some, it may arrest it. Many of the older generation, who have until now been resistant to rebooting for pleasure, begin to take it regularly—freebooting—whether they have a medical condition that warrants it or no.
XI.
LOOSE COINS BECOME KNOWN as coinage or, occasionally, specie.
The process of making different or altering is now usually known as shifting.
XII.
RAJIT IS DYING OF prostate cancer in his Rio apartment. He is in his early nineties. He has never taken Reboot; the idea now terrifies him. The cancer has spread to the bones of his pelvis and to his testes.
He rings the bell. There is a short wait for the nurse’s daily soap opera to be turned off, the cup of coffee put down. Eventually his nurse comes in.
“Take me out into the air,” he says to the nurse, his voice hoarse. At first the nurse affects not to understand him. He repeats it, in his rough Portuguese. A shake of the head from his nurse.
He pulls himself out of the bed—a shrunken figure, stooped so badly as to be almost hunchbacked, and so frail that it seems that a storm would blow him over—and begins to walk toward the door of the apartment.
His nurse tries, and fails, to dissuade him. And then the nurse walks with him to the apartment hall and holds his arm as they wait for the elevator. He has not left the apartment in two years; even before the cancer, Rajit did not leave the apartment. He is almost blind.
The nurse walks him out into the blazing sun, across the road, and down onto the sand of the Copacabana.
The people on the beach stare at the old man, bald and rotten, in his antique pajamas, gazing about him with colorless once-brown eyes through bottle-thick dark-rimmed spectacles.
He stares back at them.
They are golden and beautiful. Some of them are asleep on the sand. Most of them are naked, or they wear the kind of bathing attire that emphasizes and punctuates their nakedness.
Rajit knows them, then.
Later, much later, they made another biopic. In the final sequence the old man falls to his knees on the beach, as he did in real life, and blood trickles from the open flap of his pajama bottoms, soaking the faded cotton and puddling darkly onto the soft sand. He stares at them all, looking from one to another with awe upon his face, like a man who has finally learned how to stare at the sun.
He said one word only as he died, surrounded by the golden people, who were not men, who were not women.
He said, “Angels.”
And the people watching the biopic, as golden, as beautiful, as changed as the people on the beach, knew that that was the end of it all.
And in any way that Rajit would have understood, it was.
Excerpt from Stardust
1998
THE STAR HAD
