Ringing the Changes

There has been a transmission error in the shunt room, and several dozen bodies have been left without minds, while several dozen minds are held in the stasis net, unassigned and, for the moment, unassignable. Things like this have happened before, which is why changers take out identity insurance, but never has it happened to so many individuals at the same time. The shunt is postponed. Everyone must be returned to his original identity; then they will start over. Suppressing the news has proved to be impossible. The area around the hospital has been besieged by the news media. Hover-cameras stare rudely at the building at every altitude from twelve to twelve hundred feet. Trucks are angle-parked in the street. Journalists trade tips, haggle with hospital personnel for the names of the bereaved, and seek to learn the identities of those involved in the mishap. “If I knew, I’d tell you,” says Jaime Rodriguez, twenty-seven. “Don’t you think I could use the money? But we don’t know. That’s the whole trouble, we don’t know. The data tank was the first thing to blow.”

The shunt room has two antechambers, one on the west side of the building, the other facing Broadway; one is occupied by those who believe they are related to the victims, while in the other can be found the men from the insurance companies. Like everyone else, the insurance men have no real idea of the victims’ names, but they do know that various clients of theirs were due for shunting today, and with so many changers snarled up at once, the identity-insurance claims may ultimately run into the millions. The insurance men confer agitatedly with one another, dictate muttered memoranda, scream telephone calls into their cufflinks, and show other signs of distress, although several of them remain cool enough to conduct ordinary business while here; they place stock market orders and negotiate assignations with nurses. It is, however, a tense and difficult situation, whose final implications are yet unknown.

Dr. Vardaman appears, perspired, paternal. “We’re making every effort,” he says, “to reunite each changer with the proper identity matrix. I’m fully confident. Only a matter of time. Your loved ones, safe and sound.”

“We aren’t the relatives,” says one of the insurance men.

“Excuse me,” says Dr. Vardaman, and leaves.

The insurance men wink and tap their temples knowingly. They peer beyond the antechamber door.

“Cost us a fortune,” one broker says.

“Not your money,” an adjuster points out.

“Raise premiums, I guess.”

“Lousy thing. Lousy thing. Lousy thing. Could have been me.”

“You a changer?”

“Due for a shunt next Tuesday.”

“Tough luck, man. You could have used a vacation.”

The antechamber door opens. A plump woman with dark-shadowed eyes enters. “Where are they?” she asks. “I want to see them! My husband was shunting today!”

She begins to sob and then to shriek. The insurance men rush to comfort her. It will be a long and somber day.

Now go on with the story

After a long time in the stasis net, the changer decides that something must have gone wrong with the shunt. It has never taken this long before. Something as simple as a shift of persona should be accomplished quickly, like the pulling of a tooth: out, shunt, in. Yet minutes or possibly hours have gone by, and the shunt has not come. What are they waiting for? I paid good money for a shunt. Something wrong somewhere, I bet.

Get me out of here. Change me.

The changer has no way of communicating with the hospital personnel. The changer, at present, exists only as a pattern of electrical impulses held in the stasis net. In theory it is possible for an expert to communicate in code even across the stasis gap, lighting up nodes on a talkboard; it was in this way that preliminary research into changing was carried out. But this changer has no such skills, being merely a member of the lay public seeking temporary identity transformation, a holiday sojourn in another’s skull. The changer must wait in limbo.

A voice impinges. “This is Dr. Vardaman, addressing all changers in the net. There’s been a little technical difficulty, here. What we need to do now is put you all back in the bodies you started from, which is just a routine reverse shunt, as you know, and when everybody is sorted out we can begin again. Clear? So the next thing that’s going to happen to you is that you’ll get shunted, only you won’t be changed, heh-heh, at least we don’t want you to be changed. As soon as you’re able to speak to us, please tell your nurse if you’re back in the right body, so we can disconnect you from the master switchboard, all right? Here we go, now, one, two, three—“

—Shunt.

This body is clearly the wrong one, for it is female. The changer trembles, taking possession of the cerebral fibers and driving pitons into the autonomic nervous system. A hand rises and touches a breast. Erectile tissue responds. The skin is soft and the flesh is firm. The changer strokes a cheek. Beardless. He searches now for vestigial personality traces. He finds a name, Vonda Lou, and the image of a street, wide and dusty, a small town in a flat region, with squat square-fronted buildings set well back from the pavement, and gaudy automobiles parked sparsely in front of them. Beyond the town the zone of dry red earth begins; far away are the bare brown mountains. This is no place for the restless. A soothing voice says, “They catch us, Vonda Lou, they gonna take a baseball bat, jam it you know where,” and Vonda Lou replies, “They ain’t gone catch us anyway,” and the other voice says, “But if they do, but if they do?” The room is warm but not humid. There are crickets outside. Cars without mufflers roar by. Vonda Lou says, “Stop worrying and put your head here. Here. That’s it. Oh, nice—” There is a giggle. They change positions. Vonda Lou says, “No fellow ever did that to you, right?” The soft voice says, “Oh, Vonda Lou—” And Vonda Lou says, “One of these days we gone get out of this dime-store town—” Her hands clutch yielding flesh. In her mind dances the image of a drum majorette parading down the dusty main street, twirling a baton, lifting knees high and pulling the white shorts tight over the smug little rump, yes, yes, look at those things jiggle up there, look all the nice stuff, and the band plays Dixie and the football team comes marching by, and Vonda Lou laughs, thinking of that big hulking moron and how he had tried to dirty her, putting his paws all over her, that dumb Billy Joe who figured he was going to score, and all the time Vonda Lou was laughing at him inside, because it wasn’t the halfback but the drum majorette who had what she wanted, and—

Voice: “Can you hear me? If there has been a proper matching of body and mind, please raise your right hand.”

The changer lifts left hand.

—shunt

The world here is dark green within a fifty-yard radius of the helmet lamp, black beyond. The temperature is 38 degrees F. The pressure is six atmospheres. One moves like a crab within one’s jointed suit, scuttling along the bottom. Isolated clumps of gorgonians wave in the current. To the left, one can see as though through a funnel the cone of light that rises to the surface, where the water is blue. Along the face of the submerged cliff are coral outcroppings, but not here, not this deep, where sunlight is of a primal coldness.

One moves cautiously, bothered by the pressure drag. One clutches one’s collecting rod tightly, stepping over nodules of manganese and silicon, swinging the lamp in several directions, searching for the places where the bottom drops away. One is uneasy and edgy here, not because of the pressure or the dark or the chill, but because one is cursed with an imagination, and one cannot help but think of the kraken in the pit. One dreams of Tennyson’s dreamless beast, below the thunders of the upper deep. Faintest sunlights flee about his shadowy sides: above him swell huge sponges of millennial growth and height.

One comes now to the brink of the abyss.

There hath he lain for ages and will lie, battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, until the latter fire shall heat the deep; then once by man and angels to be seen, in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. Yes. One is moved, yes. One inclines one’s lamp, hoping its beam will strike a cold glittering eye below. Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea. There is no sign of the thick ropy tentacles, the mighty beak.

“Going down in, now,” one says to those above.

One has humor as well as imagination. One pauses at the brink, picks up a chalky stone, inscribes on a boulder crusted with the tracks of worms the single word:

NEMO

One laughs and flips aside the stone, and launches one’s self into the abyss, kicking off hard against the continental shelf. Down. And down. Seeking wondrous grot and secret cell.

The changer sighs, thinking of debentures floated on the Zurich exchange, of contracts for future delivery of helium and plutonium, of puts and calls and margins. He will not enter the abyss; he will not see the kraken; feebly he signals with his left hand.

—shunt

A middle-aged male, at least. There’s hope in that. A distinct paunch at the middle. Some shortness of breath. Faint stubble on face. The legs feel heavy, with swollen feet; a man gets tired easily at a certain age, when his responsibilities are heavy. The sound of unanswered telephones rings in his ears. Everything is familiar: the tensions, the frustrations, the fatigue, the sense of things unfinished and things uncommenced, the staleness in the mouth, the emptiness in the gut. This must be the one. Home again, all too soon?

Q: Sir, in the event of an escalation of the crisis, would you request an immediate meeting of the Security Council, or would you attempt to settle matters through quasidiplomatic means as was done in the case of the dispute between Syria and the Maldive Islands?

A: Let’s not put the horse in the cart, shall we?

Q: According to last Monday’s statement by the Bureau of the Budget, this year’s deficit is already running twelve billion ahead of last, and we’re only halfway through the second quarter. Have you given any concern to the accusation of the Fiscal Responsibility Party that this is the result of a deliberate Communist-dictated plan to demoralize the economy?

A: What do you think?

Q: Is there any thought of raising the tax on personality-shunting?

A: Well, now, there’s already a pretty steep tax on that, and we don’t want to do anything that’ll interfere with the rights of American citizens to move around from body to body, as is their God-given and constitutional right. So I don’t think we’ll change that tax any.

Q: Sir, we understand that you yourself have done some shunting. We—

A: Where’d you hear that?

Q: I think it was Representative Spear, of Iowa, who said the other day that it’s well known that the President visits a shunt room every time he’s in New York, and—

A: You know these Republicans. They’ll say anything at all about a Democrat.

Q: Mr. President, does the Administration have any plans for ending sexual discrimination in public washrooms?

A: I’ve asked the Secretary of the Interior to look into that, inasmuch as it might involve interstate commerce and also being on Federal property, and we expect a report at a later date.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President.

The left hand stirs and rises. Not this one, obviously. The hand requests a new phase-shift. The body is properly soggy and decayed, yes. But one must not be deceived by superficialities. This is the wrong one. Out, please. Out.

—shunt

The crowd stirred in anticipation as Bernie Kingston left the on-deck circle and moved toward the plate, and by the time he was in the batter’s box they were standing.

Kingston glanced out at the imposing figure of Ham Fillmore, the lanky Hawks southpaw on the mound. Go ahead, Bernie thought, I’m ready for you.

He wiggled the bat back and forth two or three times and dug in hard, waiting for the pitch. It was a low, hard fastball, delivered by way of first base, and it shot past him before he had a chance to offer. “Strike one,” he heard. He looked down toward third to see if the manager had any sign for him.

But Danner was staring at him blankly. You’re on your own, he seemed to be saying.

The next pitch was right in the groove, and Bernie lined it effortlessly past the big hurler’s nose and on into right field for a single. The crowd roared its approval as he trotted down to first.

“Good going, kid,” said Jake Edwards, the first-base coach, when Bernie got there. Bernie grinned. Base hits always felt good, and he loved to hear the crowd yell.

The Hawks’ catcher came out to the mound and called a conference. Bernie wandered around first, doing some gardening with his spikes. With one out and the score tied in the eighth, he couldn’t blame the Hawks for wanting to play it close to the belt.

As soon as the mound conference broke up it was the Stags’ turn to call time. “Come here, kid,” Jake Edwards called.

“What’s the big strategy this time?” Bernie asked boredly.

“No lip, kid. Just go down on the second pitch.”

Bernie shrugged and edged a few feet off the base. Ham Fillmore was still staring down at his catcher, shaking off signs, and Karl Folsom, the Stag cleanup man, was waiting impatiently at the plate.

“Take a lead,” the coach whispered harshly. “Go on, Kingston—get down that line.”

The hurler finally was satisfied with his sign, and he swung into the windup. The pitch was a curve, breaking far outside. Folsom didn’t venture at it, and the ball hit the dirt and squirted through the catcher’s big mitt. It trickled about fifteen feet back of the plate.

Immediately the Hawks’ shortstop moved in to cover second in case Bernie might be going. But Bernie had no such ideas. He stayed put at first.

“What’s the matter, lead in ya pants?” called a derisive voice from the Hawk dugout.

Bernie snarled something and returned to the base. He glanced over at third, and saw Danner flash the steal sign.

He leaned away from first cautiously, five, six steps, keeping an eye cocked at the mound.

The pitcher swung into a half-windup—Bernie broke for second—his spikes dug furiously into the dusty basepath—

Out! Out! Out! The left hand upraised! Not this one, either! Out! Get me out!

—shunt

Through this mind go dreams of dollars, and the changer believes they have finally made the right match-up. He takes the soundings and finds much here that is familiar. Dow-Jones Industrials 1453.28, down 8.29. Confirmation of the bear signal by the rails. Penetration of the August 13 lows. Watch the arbitrage spread you get by going short on the common while picking up 10,000 of the $1.50 convertible preferred at—

The substance is right; so is the context. But the tone is wrong, the changer realizes. This man loves his work.

The changer tours this man’s mind from the visitors’ gallery.

—we can unload 800 shares in Milan at 48, which gives us two and a half points right there, and then after they announce the change in redemption ratio I think we ought to drop another thousand on the Zurich board—

—give me those Tokyo quotes! Damn you, you sleepy bastard, don’t slow me up! Here, here, Kansai Electric Power, I want the price in yen, not the American Depositary crap—

—pick up twenty-two percent of the voting shares through street names before we announce the tender offer, that’s the right way to do it, then hit them hard from a position of strength and watch the board of directors fold up in two days—

—I think we can work it with the participating preference stock, if we give them just a little hint that the dividend might go up in January, and of course they don’t have to know that after the merger we’re going to throw them all out anyway, so—

—why am I in it? Why, for the fun of it!—

Yes. The sheer joy of wielding power. The changer lingers here, sadly wondering why it is that this man, who after all functions in the same environment as the changer himself, shows such fierce gusto, such delight in finance for the sake of finance, while the changer derives only sour tastes and dull aches from all his getting. It’s because he’s so young, the changer decides. The thrill hasn’t yet worn off for him. The changer surveys the body in which he is temporarily a resident. He makes himself aware of the flat belly’s firm musculature, of the even rhythms of the heart, of the lean flanks. This man is at most forty years old, the changer concludes. Give him thirty more years and ten million more dollars and he’ll know how hollow it all is. The futility of existence, the changer thinks. You feel it at seventeen, you feel it at seventy, but often you fail to feel it in between. I feel it. I feel it. And so this body can’t be mine. Lift the left hand. Out.

“We are having some difficulties,” Dr. Vardaman confesses, “in achieving accurate pairings of bodies and minds.” He tells this to the insurance men, for there is every reason to be frank with them. “At the time of the transmission error we were left with—ah—twenty-nine minds in the stasis net. So far we’ve returned eleven of them to their proper bodies. The others—”

“Where are the eleven?” asks an adjuster.

“They’re recuperating in the isolation ward,” Dr. Vardaman replies. “You understand, they’ve been through three or four shunts apiece today, and that’s pretty strenuous. After they’ve rested, we’ll offer them the option to undergo the contracted-for change as scheduled, or to take a full refund.”

“Meanwhile we got eighteen possible identity-insurance claims,” says another of the insurance men. “That’s something like fifteen million bucks. We got to know what you’re doing to get the others back in the right bodies.”

“Our efforts are continuing. It’s merely a matter of time until everyone is properly matched.”

“And if some of them die while you’re shunting them?”

“What can I say?” Dr. Vardaman says. “We’re making every attempt.”

To the relatives he says, “There’s absolutely no cause for alarm. Another two hours and we’ll have it all straightened out. Please be assured that none of the clients involved are suffering any hardship or inconvenience, and in fact this may be a highly interesting and entertaining experience for them.”

“My husband,” the plump woman says. “Where’s my husband?”

—shunt

The changer is growing weary of this. They have had him in five bodies, now. How many more times will they shove him about? Ten? Twenty? Sixteen thousand? He knows that he can free himself from this wheel of transformations at any time. Merely raise the right hand, claim a body as one’s own. They’d never know. Walk right out of the hospital, threatening to sue everybody in sight; they scare easily and won’t interfere. Pick your body. Be anyone who appeals to you. Pick fast, though, because if you wait too long they’ll hit the right combination and twitch you back into the body you started from. Tired, defeated, old, do you want that?

Here’s your chance, changer. Steal another man’s body. Another woman’s if that’s your kick. You could have walked out of here as that dyke from Texas. Or that diver. That ballplayer. That hard young market sharpie. Or the President. Or this new one, now—take your pick, changer.

What do you want to be? Essence precedes existence. They offer you your choice of bodies. Why go back to your own? Why pick up a stale identity, full of old griefs?

The changer considers the morality of such a deed.

The chances are good of getting away with it. Others in this mess are probably doing the same thing; it’s musical chairs with souls, and if eight or nine take the wrong bodies, they’ll never get it untangled. Of course, if I switch, someone else switches and gets stuck with my body. Aging. Decrepit. Who wants to be a used-up stockbroker? On the other hand, the changer realizes, there are consolations. The body he wishes to abandon is wealthy, and that wealth would go to the body’s claimant. Maybe someone thought of that already, and grabbed my identity. Maybe that’s why I’m being shunted so often into these others. The shunt-room people can’t find the right one.

The changer asks himself what his desires are.

To be young again? To play Faust? No. Not really. He wants to rest. He wants peace. There is no peace for him in returning to his proper self. Too many ghosts await him there. The changer’s needs are special.

The changer examines this latest body into which he has been shunted.

Quite young. Male. Undergraduate, mind stuffed full of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Kierkegaard. Wealthy family. Curling red hair; sleek limbs; thoughts of willing girls, holidays in Hawaii, final exams, next fall’s clothing styles. Adonis on a lark, getting himself changed as a respite from the academic pace? But no: the changer probes more deeply and finds a flaw, a fatal one. There is anguish beneath the young man’s self-satisfaction, and rightly so, for this body is defective, it is gravely marred. The changer is surprised and saddened, and then feels joy and relief, for this body fills his very need and more. He sees for himself the hope of peace with honor, a speedier exit, a good deed. It is a far, far better thing. He will volunteer.

His right hand rises. His eyes open.

“This is the one,” he announces. “I’m home again!” His conscience is clear.

Once the young man was restored to his body, the doctors asked him if he still wished to undergo the change he had contracted for. He was entitled to this one final adventure, which they all knew would have to be his last changing, since the destruction of the young man’s white corpuscles was nearly complete. No, he said, he had had enough excitement during the mixup in the shunt room, and craved no further changes. His doctors agreed he was wise, for his body might not be able to stand the strain of another shunt; and they took him back to the terminal ward. Death came two weeks later, peacefully, very peacefully.