Beyond
Rejection
JUSTIN LEIBER
DEL
REY
A Del Rey Book
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

The author thanks the trustees of the estate of
Dylan Thomas for permission to quote the line
"After the first death there is no other." All rights
reserved.
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1980 by Justin Leiber
All rights reserved under International and Pan-
American Copyright Conventions. Published in the
United States by Ballantine Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultane-
ously in Canada by Random House of Canada,
Limited, Toronto, Canada.
Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgments
The author thanks the following for writing space,
inspiration, and/or criticism: Diane Bairstow, Steve
Branson, Chris Ciesiel, Carol Maddox, Stanley Mar-
tens, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Douglas
Miller, Alice Phalen, and his PHI 136 class, Fall 1979.
Deeper debts are owed Marion, Martha, Fritz, and,
of course, Shasta IV of the University of Houston,
cougar.

Contents
I.		The Body Had a Most Unusual
Character	l
II.		Why They Are Called Vampires	11
III.		Fine-Tuning	17
IV.		Negligence Was One Possibility	25
V.	Basic Physical Procedures	31
VI.	Psychological Rejection	39
VII.	A Young, Healthy Blanked Body	49
VIII.	Top Credit on the Zombie Market	55
IX.	Motivation Is Crucial	65
X.	A Prehensile Tail	73
XI.	They Must Play	81
XII.	Learning to Be a Woman	87
XIII.		The Masks of Gender	97
XIV.		Philpritz Modulation	111
XV.	The Older Harmonizers Whisper	117
XVI.	Learning to Love	127
XVII.	Self and the Other	145
XVHI.	Taking Over the Controls	151
XIX.	The Most Intimate Bodily
Relationship	159
XX	Beyond Rejection	173

I
Beyond
Rejection

I
Austin Worms, chief somatician, submit-
ted that the body had a most unusual
character and history.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
Gxxhdt.
Etaoin shrdlu. Mmm.
Antir-M.
Away mooncow Taddy-fair fine. Fine again, take.
Away, along, alas, alung the orbit-run, from swerve of
space to wormhole wiggle, brings us. Start now. Wake.
So hear I am now coming out of nothing like Eros out
of Death, knowing only that I was Ismael Forth—stately,
muscled well—taping in, and knowing that I don't know
when I'm waking or where, or where-in. And hoping that
it is a dream. But it isn't. Oh, no, it isn't. With that gog-
gling piece of munster cheese oumphowing on my earlids.
And seemingly up through endless levels and configura-
tions that had no words and now no memories. Wake.
Austin Worms, interning somatician, sighed. He
slipped a bookmark into Bruhler's The Central Equations
of the Abstract Theory of Mind and stretched the back
muscles that concentration and frustration had kinked.
He had the basic theory of the human mind. As any high-

2
Justin Leiber
schooler knew from reading the pioneering twentieth-
century work of Alan Turing and Noam Chomsky, the
human mind could be described quite apart from the
physical brain. Similarly, one could describe the software,
or program, of a computer without talking about the par-
ticular kind of electrical circuitry which realized it. But
Worms was cowed by the nonstandard number theory in
which the software of the human mind had to be given.
Since he had set himself the task at the beginning of his
internship at Rockefeller, he must have pushed himself
into Bruhler's equations a hundred times. He found his
grasp of the abstractions beginning to cloud up before he
got through the preliminaries. He would probably still be
hitting the book when he finished his career. God help us
ghouls, he thought.
At the center of the laboratory to which Worms' study
cubicle was annexed, a human female body jogged atop a
rubber-surfaced treadmill. A gradual accumulation of
minor variations had led the body from the center track
of the treadmill. The slight change in the slap-slap of the
jogger's feet alerted Worms. Before the warning lights
began to flicker on his board he took position behind the
jogger, slapped one thigh in a practiced way that would
have the running figure back on center in a hundred
paces without oscillation or straying to the other side, and
adjusted some of the wires that led into the helmet that
the jogger wore. He paused only to stare once again at
the unusual physical endowment of the body's backside.
Whoever got this one was in for some surprise. Still, the
face had fine, firm lines. The small breasts bounced.
His intercom buzzed.
"Hey, Ghoulie, you got company. Just some Regional
Representatives aides and guests. Nothing fancy—they're
not anything to do with funding reviews, just a bit of
sightseeing. We'll be up in five, right?"
"Okay. And don't call me by that name, Terry."

Beyond Rejection	3
Austin Worms sighed again. There would be five to ten
people milling about his lab for an hour or so, knocking
things over, fiddling with knobs, or at least looking like
they wanted to fiddle with knobs, asking silly questions,
and cracking the usual jokes about zombies and what
somaticians did with zombies when no one else was
around. At least they wouldn't say "Hey, Ghoulie" to his
face.
Terry, the snotty, gangling kid who was tour guide,
would want to come back and jaw after passing the tour
group on through the psychetician lab down the hall. And
the vampire business didn't take more than fifteen min-
utes to fade into absolute boredom for anyone who didn't
love mathematics, so Terry would be back soon. Worms
put Bruhler back onto the bookshelf and sighed again. He
would have denied that it was a sigh of relief.
Humming a space-marine tune, he drew a canister of
coffee beans from his hiding place at the back of the hor-
mone refrigerator. He sent a measure of beans through a
fungal micromincer that cost as much as a personal heli-
copter. The lab was fresh with the odor of perfect coffee
when Terry and his gang of six entered. The jogger
jogged on. He would let her run on for the aides to see.
Sugar level would need a slight adjustment and the rest
just a visual check and a feel of the musculature. A good
somatician could tell a tiny deviation in a blood chemistry
level as a good harmonizer could "hear" a discord be-
tween some tape bits and the blanked brain's latencies,
though the somatician couldn't say exactly what it was
about the feel or look of the zombie that indicated the de-
viation.
He and Terry had finally got one of the guests, a lean
young beauty, to stop prancing about and settle down
next to the aide who brought him. Worms began his
spiel: "People often think that it ought to be simple
enough to just manufacture an adult human body, like

4	Justin Leiber
building a house or a helicopter. You'd think that, well,
we know what chemicals are involved, and how they go
together, how they form cells according to DNA tem-
plates, and how the cells form organ systems regulated by
chemical messengers, hormones, and the like. So we
ought to be able to build a fully functional human body
right up from scratch."
Worms moved so that he blocked their view of the
jogger. He brought his drained coffee cup down for em-
phasis.
"And, of course, we could build a human body up from
scratch, theoretically, anyhow. But no one ever has. In
fact, no one has ever even started to. De Reinzie manu-
factured the first fully functional human cell—muscle tis-
sue—in the middle of the last century, about 2062 or so.
And shortly after that the major varieties were cooked up.
And even then it wasn't really manufactured from scratch.
De Reinzie, like all the rest, built some basic DNA tem-
plates from actual carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on, or
rather from simple sugars and alcohols. But then he grew
the rest from these. That's growth, not manufacture. And
nobody's come closer to building an organ than a lab that
made a millimeter of stomach wall for several million
credits a couple of decades ago.
"I don't want to bother you with the mathematics," he
continued, looking away from Terry. "But my old profes-
sor at Tech used to estimate that it would take all the
scientific and manufacturing talent of Earth and the rest
of the Federation something like fifty years and a googol
credits to build a single human hand.
"You can imagine what it would take to make some-
thing like that," he said, moving out of their line of vision
and gesturing at the jogging figure. He took the clipboard
that hung next to the treadmill's controls and scanned the
sheets on it.
"This body had been blank for three years. It has a

Beyond Rejection	5
running-time age of thirty-one years, though of course
Sally Cadmus—that's the person involved—was born over
thirty-four years ago. What with demand, of course, three
years is a long time for a body to remain out of action.
She's in good health, fine musculature for a spacer—says
Sally was an asteroid miner here. Seems the body spent
two years frozen in a Holmann orbit. We've had it for
four months and we're prepping it now. You might see
her walking around any day now.
"But Sally Cadmus won't. Her last tape was just the
obligatory one made on reaching majority and she left no
instructions for implantation. I trust, people, that all your
tapes are updated." He gave them the family doctor look
and went on, moving closer and dropping his voice.
"I have my mind taped every six months, just to be
safe. After all, the tape is you—your individual software,
or program, including memory store. Everything that
makes you you." He walked up to the aide who had
brought the beautiful young man.
"You—for instance—Ms. Pedersen, when did you have
your last tape job?"
The aide, a gaunt red-haired woman in her mid-thirties,
snatched her arm from around her young man and glared
at Austin Worms.
"What business—"
"Oh, I wouldn't really expect you to say in front of
other people." He grinned at the others as Pedersen sub-
sided. "But that's the whole point, you see. Maybe she
has been renewing her tape yearly, which is what our pro-
fession recommends as an absolute minimum. But a lot of
people neglect this elementary precaution because they
are so appalled by the thought of severe bodily injury.
They just let things slide. And because the topic is so per-
sonal, no one knows, no one asks, no one reminds them
until the once-in-half-a-million accident happens—truly ir-
reparable body damage or total destruction.

6
Justin Leiber
"And then you find that the person hasn't taped for
twenty years. Which means . .
He surveyed the group to let it sink in. Then he saw the
beautiful girl-child. Terry had been hiding her, no doubt.
A classic blond-haired, blue-eyed girl in her midteens.
She was looking straight into his eyes. Or through them.
Something ... He went on.
"Which means if he or she is lucky and there's estate
money, you've got someone who has to face all the ordi-
nary problems of rejection that come in trying to match a
young mind with what is almost certain to be a middle-
aged body. But also the implant has all those problems
multiplied by another. The implant has to deal with a
world that is twenty years in the future. And a 'career'
that is meaningless because he lacks the memory and
skills that his old mind picked up over that twenty years.
"More likely, you'll get the real blowout. You'll get
massive rejection, psychosis and premature essential senil-
ity, and death. Real, final mind death."
"But you would still have the person's tape, their soft-
ware, as you call it," said Ms. Pedersen. "Couldn't you
just try again, with another blank body?" She still had her
hands off her young man.
"Two problems. First"—he stuck his index finger in the
air—"you got to realize how very difficult it is for a mind
and a body to make a match, even with all the help us
somaticians and psycheticians can provide, the best that
modern biopsychological engineering can put together.
Even with a really creative harmonizer to get in there and
make the structure jell. Being reborn is very hard work in-
deed.
"And the failure rate under ordinary circumstances-
tapes up-to-date, good stable mind, decent recipient
body—is about twenty percent. And we know that it
jumps to ninety-five percent if there's a second time
around. It's nearly that bad the first time if you got some-

Beyond Rejection	7
one whose tapes are twenty years out of date. The person
may get through the first few days all right but he can't
pull himself into reality. Everything he knows was lost
twenty years ago. No friends, no career, everything out of
shape. Then the mind will reject its new body just as it
rejects the new world it has woken up to. So you don't
have much of a chance. Unless, of course, you're the rare
nympher or still rarer leaper.
"Second, the Government underwrites the cost of the
first implantation. Of course, they don't pay for a fancy
body—a nympher body, that is. You'd pay more than two
million credits for one of those beauties. You get what's
available and you are lucky if you get it within a year or
two. What the Government underwrites is the basic oper-
ation and tuning job. That alone costs one and a half mil-
lion or so. Enough to pay my salary for a hundred years.
Enough to send the half-dozen or so of you on the Cu-
nard Line Uranium Jubilee All-Planets Tour in first class."
Austin had been moving over to the treadmill control
console while speaking. As he finished, his audience no-
ticed a large structure descending from the ceiling just
over the jogging figure, Sally Cadmus' body. It looked like
a cross between the upper half of a large mummy and a
comfortably stuffed armchair. Austin glided over to the
treadmill. The audience watched the structure open like
an ancient iron maiden. Some noticed that the jogging
figure was slowing down.
Austin arrived just in time to complete a flurry of ad-
justments on the jogger's control package before the
structure folded itself around. Two practiced blows on
the back of the jogger's thighs brought the legs out of
contact with the slowing treadmill.
"It's a lucky thing that implantation is so risky and the
sort of accident that calls for it so rare," he said as the
structure ascended behind him. "Otherwise, the Kellog-

8
Justin Leiber
Murphy Law, which underwrites the first implantation,
would bankrupt the Government."
"Where is the body going?" asked the blond-haired
youngster. Austin could see now that she was probably no
more than ten or eleven years old. Something about her
posture had made him think she was older.
"Normally it would go into a kind of artificial hiberna-
tion—low temperature and vital activity. But this body
will be implanted tomorrow, so we'll keep it at a normal
level of biological function." He had given the body an
additional four cc.'s of glucose-saline plasma beyond the
program. That was to compensate for the extra jogging.
He hadn't done the official calculations. It wasn't that
such mathematics was more than a minor chore. If you
had asked him to explain, he would have said that the
official calculation would have called for half again as
much plasma. But he sensed that the body got more than
usual from every cc. of water, from every molecule of
sugar. Perhaps it was something in the sweat smell, the
color and feel of the skin, the resilience of the muscula-
ture. But Austin knew.
The somatic aides would have said that Austin Worms
was the best ghoul in the Solar System, a zombie's best
friend. And they would have meant what they said even
if they went on to joke.
Austin had vomited for the first and only time in his life
when he learned the origin of the slang terms "ghoul"
and "vampire."
The sounds of Terry's tour group faded as they moved
up the hall to the psychetician laboratory. But Austin did
not return to Bruhler's The Central Equations of the Ab-
stract Theory of Mind. He had been puzzled by what the
eleven-year-old blond girl had said to him before saunter-
ing off to catch up with the rest of the tour. She had said,
"I bet that mind is gonna be in for a real shock when it
wakes up with that thing on its backside." He wondered

Beyond Rejection	9
how she could know that it wasn't just part of the crazy-
quilt system of tubes and wires that the jogger had on her
back.
"I'm Candy Darling," she had added as she left the
room. Now he knew who she was. You never knew what
to expect in a harmonizer.

II
Psycheticians take care of minds. That's
why they are sometimes called vampires.
Somaticians are called ghouls because
they take care of bodies.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. II, Press Releases
Germaine Means grinned wolfishly at them. "I am a
psychetician. What Terry would call a vampire. Call me
Germaine if that does not appeal."
They were seated facing a blackboard at one end of a
large room which was otherwise filled with data cabinets,
office cubicles, and computer consoles. The woman who
addressed them wore severe and plain overalls. When she
had first come to the Norbert Wiener Research Hospital—
NWRH—the director had suggested that the chief psy-
chetician might dress more suitably. That director had re-
tired early.
"As you know from what Austin Worms told you, we
think of the individual human mind as an abstract pattern
of memory, skill, and experience that has been impressed
on the physical hardware of the brain. Think of it this
way: when you get a computer factory-fresh, it is like a
blanked human brain. The computer has no subroutines,
just as the brain has no skills. The computer has no data

12	Justin Leiber
arrays to call on, just as the blanked brain has no memo-
ries.
"What we do here is try to implant the pattern of mem-
ory, skill, and experience that is all that is left of a person
into a blanked brain. It is not easy because brains are not
manufactured. You have to grow them. And a unique per-
sonality has to be part of this growth and development.
So each brain is different. So no software mind fits any
hardware brain perfectly. Except the brain that it grew
up with.
"For instance," Germaine Means continued, softening
her tone so she would not alert Ms. Pedersen's boyfriend,
who was dozing in a well-padded chair, his elegant legs
thrust straight out in full display, tights to sandals. "For
instance, when pressure is applied to this person's foot,
his brain knows how to interpret the nervous impulses
from his foot." She suited her action to her words.
"His yelp indicates that his brain recognizes that con-
siderable pressure has been applied to the toes of his left
foot. If, however, we implanted another mind, it would
not interpret the nervous impulses correctly—it might feel
the impulses as a stomachache."
The young man was on his feet, bristling. He moved to-
ward Germaine, who had turned away to pick up what
looked like a pair of goggles with some mirrors and gears
on top. As he reached her, she turned to face him and
pushed the goggles into his hands.
"Yes, thank you for volunteering. Put them on." Not
knowing what else to do, he did.
"I want you to look at that blond-haired girl who just
sat down over there." She held his arm lightly as he
turned and his balance wavered. He appeared to be look-
ing through the goggles at a point several degrees to the
right of Candy Darling.
"Now I want you to point at her with your right hand-
quick!" The young man's arm shot out, the finger also

Beyond Rejection	13
pointing several degrees to the right of the girl. He began
moving his finger to the left, but Germaine pulled his
hand down to his side, outside the field of vision that the
goggles allowed him.
"Try it again, quick," she said. This time the finger was
not as far off. On the fifth try his finger pointed directly to
Candy Darling, though he continued to look to her right.
"Now off with the goggles. Look at her again. Point
quick!" Germaine grabbed his hand the instant he
pointed. Though he was not looking directly at Candy
Darling, he was pointing several degrees to the left of her.
He looked baffied.
Germaine Means chalked a head and goggles on the
blackboard, seen as if you were looking down at them
from the ceiling. She drew another head to the left of the
line of sight of the goggled head and chalked "150" in to
indicate the angle.
"What happened is a simple example of tuning. The
prisms in the goggles bend the light so that when his eyes
told him he was looking straight at her, his eyes were in
fact pointed fifteen degrees to her right. The muscles and
nerves of his hand were tuned to point where his eyes
were actually pointed—so he pointed fifteen degrees to
the right
"But then his eyes saw his hand going off to the right,
so he began to compensate. In a couple of minutes—five
tries—his motor coordination compensates so that he
points to where his eyes tell him she is—he adjusted to
pointing fifteen degrees to the left from usual. When I
took the goggles off, his arm was still tuned to compen-
sate, so he pointed off to the left until he readjusted."
She picked up the goggles. "Now, a human can adjust
to that distortion in a few minutes. But I could calibrate
these so that they would turn the whole room upside
down. If you then walked around and tried to do things,
you would find it difficult. Very difficult. But if you kept

14	Justin Leiber
the goggles on, the whole room would turn right side up
after a day or two. Everything would seem normal be-
cause your system would have retuned itself.
"What do you think will happen if you then take the
goggles off?"
Candy Darling giggled. Ms. Pedersen said, "Oh, I see.
Your mind would have adjusted to turning the, ah, mes-
sages from your eyes upside down, so when you took the
goggles off-"
"Precisely," said Germaine, "everything would look up-
side down to you until you readjusted to having the gog-
gles off—and it happens the same way. You stumble
around for a day or so and then everything snaps right
side up again. And the stumbling-around part is impor-
tant. If you are confined to a chair with your head fixed in
position, your mind and body can't tune themselves.
"Now I want you to imagine what happens when we
implant a mind into a blanked brain. Almost everything
will be out of tune. The messages from your eyes won't
simply be inverted, they'll be scrambled in countless
ways. Same thing with your ears, nose, tongue—and with
the whole nerve net covering your body. And that's just
incoming messages. Your mind will have even more prob-
lems when it tries to tell the body to do something. Your
mind will try to get your lips to say water,' and Sol knows
what sound will come out.
"And what's worse is that whatever sound does come
out, your new ears won't be able to give your mind an ac-
curate version of it."
Germaine smiled at them and glanced at her watch.
Terry stood up.
"Terry will be wanting to take you on. Let me wrap
this up by saying that it is a very simple thing to play
someone's mind tape into a prepared brain. The great
problem is in getting the rearranged brain, the cerebral
cortex, speaking strictly, to be tuned into the rest of the

Beyond Rejection	15
system. As Austin Worms may have told you, we start an
implant operation tomorrow. The initial tape-in will take
less than an hour. But the tuning will take days and days.
Even months, if you count all the therapy. Questions?"
"Just one," said Ms. Pedersen. "I can understand how
difficult it is for a mind to survive implantation. And, of
course, I know it is illegal to implant a mind that is over
eighty-five. But couldn't a person—if you call a mind a
person—live forever by passing through body after body?"
"Okay, that's a tough one to explain even if we had a
lot of time and you knew a lot of mathematics. Until this
century it was believed that senility was a byproduct of
the physical breakdown of the body. Today we know that
a human mind can have roughly one hundred years of ex-
periences before it reaches essential senility, however
young the body it occupies. As you know, a few success-
ful leapers have survived implantation after a fifty-year
wait. So a leaper might, in theory, still be functioning a
thousand years from now. But such an individual's mind
will not be able to encompass any more lived experience
than you. When all there is of you is a tape in storage,
you aren't really alive."
After they had filed out, Germaine Means noticed that
the blond-haired girl had remained.
"Hi, I'm Candy Darling," she cried. "I hope you don't
mind. I thought it would be fun to sneak in on the stand-
ard tour. Get the smell of the place."
"Where's your VAT?"

I!!
Harmonizing calls more for dramatic than
scientific talent. A harmonizer fine-tunes
body and mind through a combination of
sensitivity and imagination.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. II, Press Releases
Francois Vase's gaunt frame, encased in black silk paja-
mas and an antique robe, was stretched out upon a genu-
ine nineteenth-century Chesterfield sofa that he had pur-
chased from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Candles
fitfully illuminated walls covered with the drawings of
Aubrey Beardsley and S. Clay Wilson. Both artists whose
elegant and black decadence reminded Vase of two of his
favorite historical milieus. One the gas-lit London of Jack
the Ripper. The other the San Francisco of the 1960s and
1970s before the Great Repression that swept North
America in the last decade of the twentieth century (a bi-
zarre union of opponents of pollution and technology,
abortion, drugs, feminism, intellectuals, and sexuality that
repealed the original Bill of Rights, deported or killed
over a million people, and faded out after a decade, leav-
ing North America only too willing to ratify the Concor-
dat of Tokyo).
Francois was in his midsixties, but a taste for ancient

18	Justin Leiber
forms of self-abuse and a disdain for the more cosmetic
capacities of modern medicine made him look much
older. He was reading Anton de Bruyier's Lewis Carroll
and Pre-Twenty-first Century Decadence, a work that
had once made it fashionable to believe that Carroll's
chief talent was as a photographer of prepubescent nude
girls. An observer might have thought that the room ap-
peared smoky because of the candles and the clay pipe
that Frangois sucked at intervals. The pipe held tobacco
rather than the more usual mixtures of marijuana and
Vegan leaf that those who smoked, smoked—and in pri-
vate. And the tobacco was one of the rare traditional
strains that still contained carcinogenic tars.
The observer would have been wrong about the smoky
appearance of the room, though. Concealed ventilators
cleaned the air, while a projector system that could put a
hologrammic ballet performance on the table next to the
sofa carried out the humble function of creating the vis-
ual illusion of smoke and augmenting the candlelight.
While Frangois had a taste for traditional vices, he took
some precautions. He had his lungs washed at regular in-
tervals.
A set of vibrations projected in Fran5ois Vase's inner
ear reminded him that it was 5:00 p.m. He stretched his
six-and-a-half-foot body, shivering delicately, and opened
the teakwood box on the table, where he had put aside
his pipe. The box was lined with worn green velvet and
had variously shaped depressions for its contents in the
manner of a case for draftsperson's instruments or an
orchestral flute. The five depressions held two squat
bottles, a leather strap, a set of needles, and a hypoder-
mic syringe, whose shining brass barrel bore the inscrip-
tion bayerische medizinalwerkzeugen I905. Fran?OiS
swabbed his arm with fluid from the bottle labeled
alkohol—the fluid, in fact, was a much more modern
disinfectant—and injected himself with a carefully meas-

Beyond Rejection	19
ured amount from the bottle labeled diacetylmorphine.
With practiced efficiency his long fingers replaced the
strap from his arm to the box, sterile-closured the needle,
and refilled the velvet depressions. He settled back with
time to spare, ready to give his full attention to the first
stirrings of the red flush that would soon wash over him.
He found a peculiar nostalgia in the ancient drug—a nos-
talgia that was more pain than delight. You could say that
a modern drug-user would look on his habit as a drinker
of Vegan malt Scotch might regard someone who drank
moonshine whose mash was softened by battery acid.
After the development of the orthoamines at the end of
the twentieth century, opiate and barbiturate addiction
disappeared completely, just as corn-silk smoking had
ceased centuries earlier when farm boys were allowed to-
bacco.
The voice in Francis Vase's inner ear said, "Priority-
two call, sir, on your private line. Germaine Means."
"Entry. Sound only. Hello, Germaine. I have an early
flick laid on. I'll be with you at the VAT room by ten
o'clock tomorrow morning. What's up?"
"Afraid to display your depravities, you old hermit?
Let me in."
A projection of Germaine Means stood before him.
"Germaine," he said, "I like to savor a rush."
"You've had your heroin? I'm just checking around
with the whole crew. Odd. Many of them have quirky lit-
tle rituals that they go through before an implant begins.
One of my psycheticians does four hours of mantras the
night before. If you want to have a runny nose when we
start, who am I to complain? Harmonizers are strange
people."
"Bosh, Germaine. It gives me a good feeling of sensi-
tivity if I start an implant with a mild withdrawal reac-
tion. I always want to harmonize this mind and that body
—that's my job—but the reaction gives me a special grip

20
Justin Leiber
on things. I feel the incoherences. There is . . . look, the
director agrees, Worms agrees, indeed you agree—"
"Francois, calm down. I really am not complaining. I
wanted to make sure you took your shot on schedule.
Candy Darling has turned up. Been on Earth since yester-
day. The whole staff is ready." She broke off to look at the
drawings on the walls.
"You do have peculiarly revolting tastes, Frangois."
"I have a need of extremes, Ms. Means. It will be quite
interesting to harmonize with a nympher. I've always
thought the nymphing experience would benefit a har-
monizer. I would have done it myself were the failure rate
not so great. The desire must drive one so . . ."
Both the material Francois Vase and the ghosdy Ger-
maine Means were silent.
The nympher will face the struggle of implantation and
a ten-percent risk of failure because the nympher so
wants the experience of living once more through to pu-
berty. The experience of living from infancy to fourteen
or so, with reinforcement taping through the first few
years. And most of the small number of successful
nymphers prefer to sell out at fourteen and start again,
though many will bring up their body to sixteen or seven-
teen in order to get a better price. Germaine brought the
silence to a close.
"Enough, enough, Frangois. Now let me review. The
Sally Cadmus cortex has a point-seven-five on the Lashley
Scale, Losey alpha-one-three-three-six. The Ismael Forth
mind has a point-oh-oh-five compatibility on the Broca-
Shannon inequalities. We're going for Antagonistic-Null
Tracking Measures all the way through."
"Index?"
"Close. Look." A ghostly blackboard appeared behind
Germaine's projection. It began to fill with figures.
Back at the NWRH, some five hundred miles to the
south, Austin Worms raised his arm in a ritual toast along

Beyond Rejection
21
with his fourteen somatician assistants. They were now
alone in the sky-top staff lounge. Candy Darling and Ger-
maine Means' two associate psycheticians had left to relax
at the frizzies.
"Vampires are uptight
They're sticklers for rules
Zombies are all right
But three cheers for the ghouls I"
Though the somaticians hit the last line hard, that quality
of boisterousness was not enough to disturb the sky-top
bartender. Somaticians were ghouls, after all.
The bartender was, however, finally moved to expel the
rump of the somaticians when they chanted an ancient
nineteenth-century verse—a verse celebrating the career
of two men of Edinburgh who found simple murder a
more convenient method of supplying medical cadavers
than mere grave robbing.
"Up the close an' doun the stair,
But an' ben wi' Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the boy that buys the beef."
The bartender was not so much bothered by the noise.
He thought that the second line in particular must be a
reprehensible reference to sodomy. Austin Worms could
have told him that he was wrong about that. But and ben
were Scottish for the squalid kitchen and bedroom in
which Burke and Hare, and their common-law wives,
smothered fifteen people. When he bought the bodies,
Robert Knox, head of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons,
was one of the most notable anatomical lecturers in
Europe. Fran?ois Vase had once bid at a private antique
auction for one of the inch squares of tanned flesh from
Burke's body, promptly flayed after execution by some

31	Justin Leiber
enterprising Scotsman. He had intended it as a macabre
gift for Austin Worms. Fortunately the bidding went too
high.
In fact Austin had left the party before the advent of
Burke and Hare. Feeling mildly tipsy and sentimental,
and very secretive, he was floors below in the body-
storage area. Moving noiselessly, he had locked all the en-
trances to the somatician laboratory complex. Now he
tripped the switches that would return the Sally Cadmus
body to the center of the somatician lab.
Five minutes later, if you had entered the lab, you
would have seen a man and woman dancing. Dancing a
slow and wholly chaste Vegan pavane. Austin led his
partner with infinite and wistful respect. A touch here, a
gentle pull there, with hardly any use of the maze of con-
trols on her back. It was a kind of goodbye. And tomor-
row would be a kind of death too.
In fact someone had entered the lab, and as silently as
Austin Worms. Germaine Means watched them from the
darkest corner of the lab, near Austin's study cubicle. She
was not a sentimental person but she was not a fool. She
watched as the dance ended and Austin kissed Sally
Cadmus gently on the cheek and looked a final time into
those sightless eyes. Germaine knew that Austin would
have calculated the effect of this midnight tryst on the
blanked body to the nth degree. It would not interfere
with tomorrow's operation.
Austin Worms had been caring for the Sally Cadmus
body for months. He knew it in a way that no lover ever
knows the body of his beloved. Knew its graceful har-
monies and taut reflexes, its subtle concordances of gut
and circulation, of skin and lymph. Tomorrow an alien
structure would be etched into this brain and all would
be changed, all subtly transfigured in a way that few but
Austin would notice or care about. This was a very pri-
vate mourning. Austin stood, head bowed, for a time after

Beyond Rejection	23
the body shuttle had returned Sally Cadmus to storage.
Germaine Means came up behind him but she did not
touch him until his head had straightened. "Come on,
Austin," she whispered as she put her arm around his
shoulder. "We have a very full schedule tomorrow. Let's
call it a day."
She marveled at the fact that she had whispered.

IV
It was agreed that the lack of information
about the final condition of the Ismael
Forth body was unfortunate and suspi-
cious. Culpable negligence was only one
possibility.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
At 5:02 a.m. the sunlight hit the communications mast
of the Norbert Wiener Research Hospital in Greater
Houston. The rays came most directly through the air
over New Orleans. Before earth-heaving became part of
systematic agriculture, the rays would have come minutes
earlier and from a more southerly direction.
Floors below, the Sally Cadmus body was receiving a
spectrum of chemicals. Chemicals that would build mus-
cle tone and resilience, fortify vascular resistance to ex-
treme pressure fluctuation, and generally prepare tissue
and organ systems for the insult and trauma of implanta-
tion: ergonovines, orthoamines, acetylfluoridates. The
body was already carefully enmeshed in the implantation
chamber of the VAT operating theatre. Four scrubbers,
under the direction of the body somatician team, had just
finished smoothing the body in. A few millimeters of rum-
ple might cause an ugly thrombosis. Inside the trans-
parent cylinder the body could move limb, torso, head, or

26
Justin Leiber
the tiniest segment of face tissue in free response to any
muscular activity. Equally, the incredible net of sensor-
transducers that registered such activity could itself pro-
duce any pressure or movement that the control consoles
directed.
At 5:30 a.m. Germaine Means' Vegan Siamese was
playing the black-panther-stalks-the-white-hunter game
atop the bookcase next to Germaine's bed. Vegan Siamese
are a protected and registered subrational ET catkind,
general intelligence of a chimpanzee, specialized
hundred-word language capacity, and a peculiar sensi-
tivity to romance and politics. They name themselves.
This creature called himself Koullah, possibly as this al-
lowed the pleasing alliteration of "Koullah kill."
Koullah had acquired a taste for the campy Tarzan and
the Round Table films. He could pick up only a word
here and there. Of course he had no sense of the cam-
piness. Koullah would play through the panther-stalk seg-
ments over and over while Germaine and Tommie were
out. And sometimes when they were asleep, with the
sound low. Having attained his present post with a mock
stealthiness that sent shivering flashes from his flaring
nostril to his hindquarters, which were now squirming up
behind him, Koullah looked down on the helpless white
hunter, muttering softly, "Oh, vhite perzonz, Koullah
ksill."
Unfortunately, Vegan Siamese are not nearly as coordi-
nated as more ordinary cats. They require a dispropor-
tionately large skull to house a cerebral cortex with three
times the volume and six times the folding of the ordinary
cat brain. Koullah's romantic temperament overbalanced
caution. He fell with a screech of claws and a warning
cry on the sleepers below. Germaine decided to get up.
As she finished her cup of coffee in the kitchen bay, Koul-
lah slumped abjectly in a corner, still calling out, "Zootly,
zootly, Koullah sbad."

Beyond Rejection	27
Today was the day. It was only partly to break off
Koullah's mournful exploitation of The Three Mullamul-
gars that she called on him for a big-day-and-good-luck.
She left the apartment near the climax of an enthusiastic
chant that sounded like repetitions of "Sgermaine zot
chizen sgood." Koullah was an unspeakably expensive
present from a multibillionaire nympher implant, and
Germaine was delighted that he should employ metaphor
in the fashion of the chimpanzee Washoe, the first recog-
nized subrational. In Koullah's value system, "eating
chicken" meant ultimate effort and grand success.
At 7:00 a.m. Austin Worms and his somaticians began
their checklist, working from Austin's central body con-
sole through the six specialized ones—eyes, ears, body,
face, nose, and tongue, in their working language. They
would be finished by nine o'clock. Time for coffee and a
bite before the 10:00 a.m. countdown. Austin planned for
a little rest and good sugar-protein levels for starters. He
hadn't slept well.
At 7:15 a.m. Frangois Vase settled into his seat on the
Boulder-Houston flick. Candy Darling felt a delicious
shiver run through her as she looked at her body in the
fresher mirror in the L.B.J. Houston Hotel. She had
worked over the Ismael Forth mind file until three
o'clock, but she felt like she'd had a full night's sleep.
At 8:15 a.m. the wall separating Austin Worms' soma-
tician laboratory from the still larger VAT complex folded
upward into the ceiling. Germaine Means could see her
whole crew milling about. Good chicken eating, she said
to herself. The two body somaticians had to call on Austin
Worms to muster enough authority to get Frangois Vase
and Candy Darling to stop chattering so they could start
smooth-in.
Germaine coughed them to order at 10:00 a.m., March
27, 2112 a.d.
"Sally Cadmus-Ismael Forth implantation. Body,

28
Justin Leiber
thirty-one years' running time. Dorsal bioprosthesis.
Mind, twenty-six essential years on tape. Chief psyche-
tician, Germaine Means. Chief somatician, Austin Worms.
We have harmonizer Frangois Vase as the double and
harmonizer Candy Darling as the other."
Germaine stood at the controlling console, flanked by
her two seated associates. The implantation chamber was
directly behind her. The two similar chambers containing
Frangois Vase and Candy Darling were to her right. She
faced the somatician consoles, which curved like a kidney
from Austin Worms' master console, a few feet to her left,
through the various sensory panels to the general body
console some fifty feet down the operating theatre. As al-
ways, she thought of the consoles as a rough repre-
sentation of the real proportions of the human neuro-
logical systems. The "eyes" and "ears" formed the nearest
two of the sixths of the kidney. Then came "face"—that
meant facial recognition, gestures, expressions, and so on.
The "tongue," which covered speech abilities, formed the
middle of the kidney with the "nose" board—actually,
smell, taste, part of balance and sexuality. The "body"
console, whose concern was the body from the neck down,
was the center of attention for the first hour of implanta-
tion. The first thing an untuned mind might do is to halt
the circulatory system or to order the entire musculature
to tear itself to pieces. Gross physical adjustment came
first. Sense tuning came later.
Austin would immediately direct a professional staff of
fourteen through the day, with general directions and an
occasional countermand from Germaine Means. But by
tomorrow he would be the only somatician left on the
team of six that would carry through the rest of the im-
plantation. Austin had his master control console set to
replicate the body console's display as the taped-in count-
down was completed.
Frangois Vase, who could tune his chamber so that his

Beyond Rejection	29
body would experience everything that happened to the
Sally Cadmus body or could reverse matters so that the
implant "double" would duplicate all that he did, had cut
all his circuits to the implant chamber. Vase waited to see
the implant body writhe and flail about like an extreme
case of Saint Vitus' dance. His work would begin as they
started to tune the senses. Candy Darling would have lit-
tle to do until the next day.
Tuning worked from the bottom up but with frequent
backsteps. The hormone-organ system has a distant and
rough relationship to the mind—though there are psycho-
somatic stomach ulcers and low-blood-sugar depressions.
Austin Worms had the system wide open right from the
initial tape-in. Later he would fine-tune the system by
asking Frangois Vase to get himself piping up a scale
from apprehensive to wildly frightened, while Worms cal-
ibrated the blood pressure and adrenal levels to run in
unison. Of course Austin would be asking a Frangois Vase
who would be so connected with the Sally-Ismael com-
plex that what he felt, she felt. The muscular-nervous sys-
tem of the body was the first big step, then the senses and
sense coordination—and back to the motor system, and so
on and so on.
Through the long day a cacophony of messages—in
sound, in electricity—circulated through the room. Few
would make immediate sense to the ordinary person,
many made sense only to two or three of the people in the
room . . .
"Austin, ear and tongue. We cannot have that solution
for plosive feature recognition. Squishy. You have to add
a neurological lattice. We're checking catastrophe and
main-sequence theoretic. Don't go cheap. We want her to
hear right down to Brownian noise." The system formed
by the eyes and ten-gram brain of a bald eagle had forty
times the acuity of human vision. But a good human ear

go	Justin Leiber
could not be made more sensitive without running into
the static of random molecular motion . . .
"Austin, I want to feel happy and active. Pipe up by
ones at three-minute intervals."
"Germaine?"
"Okay. But stop at four."
This short interchange would have to be understood in
context. Frangois did not ask Austin to stimulate his own
body. The harmonizer had to manage his (or her) own
body chemistry by pure imagination. The implant com-
plex got the drugs. And Frangois' hps did not produce the
Frangois-sounding voice. Had Frangois moved his lips so,
at that point the implant would have duplicated his hp
movements. Frangois' voice was initiated by a delicate,
typewriting-like movement of his fingers that worked
through a computer to produce a reasonable facsimile of
Frangois' speech . . .
"Antagonistic-Null Tracking Measure."
"Bend her right leg, Frangois . . ."
"Retinal Quadrant Three down-in and counting . . ."
"Nose locked and out . . ."
"How do you hear that, Candy? . . ."
"I only look that way. I'm ten years older than Fran-
gois, damn it . . ."
"We got eyes! We got eyes! . . ."
. . and leaping like a ballerina . . ."
"Cool and clean. Go."

V
Austin Worms declared that basic physi-
cal meshing procedures were complete.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
Gxxhdt.
Etaoin shrdlu. Mmm.
Anti-M.
Away mooncow Taddy-fair fine. Fine again, take.
Away, along, alas, alung the orbit-run, from swerve of
space to wormhole wiggle, brings us. Start now. Wake.
So hear I am now coming out of nothing like Eros out
of Death, knowing only that I was Ismael Forth—stately,
muscled well-taping-in, and knowing that I don't know
when I'm waking or where, or where-in. And hoping that
it is a dream. But it isn't. Oh, no, it isn't. With that gog-
gling piece of munster cheese oumphowing on my ear-
lids.
And seemingly up through endless levels and
configurations that had no words and now no memories.
Wake.
"Helow, I'm Candy Darlinz."
"I am Ismael returned" was what I started to try to
reply. After the third attempt it came out better. And the

32	Justin Leiber
munster cheese had become a blond-haired young girl
with piercing blue eyes.
"Your primary implantation was finished yesterday,
finally. Everyone thinks you're a success. Your body is a
pip. You're in the Norbert Wiener Research Hospital in
Houston. You have two estates clear through probate.
Your friend Peter Strawson has covered your affairs. It's
the first week of April, 2112. You're alive."
She stood up and touched my hand.
"You start therapy tomorrow. Now sleep."
I was already drifting off by the time she had closed
the door behind her. I couldn't even get myself worked
up by what I was noticing. My nipples felt as big as
grapes. I went out as I worked my way down past the
belly button.
The next day I discovered that I had not only lost a
penis. I had gained a meter-long prehensile tail. It was
hate at first sense.
I had worked my way up to consciousness in slow
stages. I had endless flight dreams—walking, running,
staggering on, away from some nameless horror. And
brief flashes of sexuality that featured performances by
my (former) body.
I really liked my old body. One of my biggest prob-
lems, as Dr. Germaine Means was soon to tell me. I could
picture clearly how it had looked in the mirrors as I did
my stretch and tone work. Just a hair over six foot four.
Two hundred and five pounds, well-defined muscles, and
just enough fat to be comfortable. A mat of curly red
chest hair that made it easy to decide to have my facial
hair wiped permanently. It felt good to be a confident
and even slightly clumsy giant, looking down on a world
of little people.
Oh, I wasn't a real body builder or anything like that.
Just enough exercise to look good—and attractive. I

Beyond Rejection	33
hadn't in fact been all that good at physical sports. But I
had liked my body. It was also a help in the public rela-
tions work that I did for IBO.
I was still lying on my back. I felt shrunk. Shrunk. As
the warm, muzzy flush of sleep faded, my right hand
moved up over my ribs. Ribs. They were thin and they
stuck out, as if the skin were sprayed over the bare cage. I
felt like a skeleton until I got to the lumps. Bags.
Growths. Sacks. Even then part of me realized that they
were not at all large for a woman, while most of me felt
that they were as big as cantaloupes.
You may have imagined it as a kind of erotic dream.
There you are in the hospital bed. You reach and there
they are. Apt to the hands, the hardening nipples nestled
between index and middle fingers. (Doubtless some men
have felt this warm reverie with their hands on real flesh.
The women may have felt pinch and itch rather than the
imagined sensual flush. I know whereof I speak. I now
know a lot of sexuality is like that. Perhaps heterosex-
uality continues as well as it does because of ignorance:
each partner is free to invent the feelings of the other.)
But I was quite unable to feel erotic about my new ac-
quisitions. Both ways. My fingers, as I felt them, felt pa-
thology. Two dead cancerous mounds. And from the in-
side—so to speak—I felt that my flesh had swollen. The
sheet made the nipples feel raw. A strange feeling of sep-
aration, as if the breast were disconnected, nerveless jelly
—and then two points of sensitivity some inches in front
of my chest. Dead spots. Rejection. I learned a lot about
these.
As my hand moved down I was prepared for the
swerve of hip. I couldn't feel a penis and I did not expect
to find one. I did not call it "gash." Though that term is
found occasionally in space-marine slang and often
among the small number of male homosexuals of the ex-
treme S&M type (Secretary & Master). I first learned the

34	Justin Leiber
term a few days later from Dr. Means. She said that tra-
ditional male-male pornography revealed typical male il-
lusions about female bodies: a "rich source of information
about body-image pathologies." She was certainly right in
pointing out that "gash" was how I felt about it. At first.
I was not only scrawny, I was almost hairless. I felt re-
ally naked, naked and defenseless as a baby. Though my
skin was several shades less fair—and I passed a scar. I
was almost relieved to feel the curly groin hair. Gone.
Sticklike legs. But I did feel something between my
thighs. And knees. And ankles, by Sol.
At first I thought it was some sort of tube to take my
body wastes. But as I felt down between my legs I could
tell that it wasn't covering those areas. It was attached at
the end of my spine—or rather it had become the end of
my spine, stretching down to my feet. It was my flesh. I
didn't quite intend it—at that point I can't say that I in-
tended anything, I was so shook—but the damned thing
flipped up from the bottom of the bed like a snake, throw-
ing the sheet over my face.
I screamed my head off.
"Cut it off" was what I said after they had given me
enough betaorthoamine to stop me flailing about. I said
this several times to Dr. Germaine Means, who had
directed the rest of them out of the room.
"Look, Sally—I'll call you that until you select a name
yourself—we are not going to cut your tail off. By our cal-
culations such a move would make terminal rejection al-
most certain. You would die. Several thousand nerves
connect your brain with your prehensile tail. A sizable
portion of your brain monitors and directs your tail—that
part of your brain needs exercise and integration like any
other component. We taped the pattern of your mind into
your present brain. They have to learn to live together or
you get rejection. In brief, you will die."

Beyond Rejection	35
Dr. Means continued to read me the riot act. I would
have to learn to love my new body—she practically
gushed with praise for it—my new sex, my new tail. I
would have to do a lot of exercise and tests. And I would
have to talk to a lot of people about how I felt. And I
should feel pleased as pisque to have an extra hand.
My new body broke into a cold sweat when I realized
that I had—truly—no choice. I wasn't poor, assuming what
I had heard yesterday was true. But I certainly couldn't
afford an implant, let alone a desirable body. What I had,
of course, came free under the Kellog-Murphy Law.
After a while she left. I stared at the wall numbly. A
nurse brought a tray with scrambled eggs and toast. I ig-
nored both nurse and tray. The thin-lipped mouth sali-
vated. Let it suffer.
By midday I was sure that I was feeling bladder pres-
sure. By the time Candy Darling showed up there was
pain. The betaorthoamine had long ago worn off. I itched.
My hunger had given way to nausea. I wanted to die or
at least sleep. But this scrawny, cancer-lumped thing was
demanding more and more attention.
"I hear you've been nasty," said Candy Darling. She
took up a seat next to the bed. The armchair was low and
the bed high. She leaned forward, elbows with two blue
eyes goggling between were inches from my face. She
kissed me. Small hands felt my face. There was a smell
which I might call a cross between baby powder and
playground. There was a playful nip on my cheek. And
then, suddenly, she was sitting on my midsection, beam-
ing down at me.
For a few seconds I had felt like some monstrous man-
nequin in a mad doll house. But this was thrown aside by
a storm of sexual feeling coupled with tears. I simply can-
not explain how I felt.
"Now let's have a look at you," Candy broke in, pulling
down the sheet and yanking open the top of my gown.

36	Justin Leiber
My reaction was instinctive. I tried to cover the breasts.
But Candy had enough leverage to hold my hands aside.
"Nice boobies," she said. "Yours stick straight forward.
IH have some in a year or two. And I'll get hair and pe-
riods and all that."
I now felt the pressure of her buttocks on my belly
excruciatingly.
"I have to use the toilet."
"What'll you give me, huh?" She squirmed, which
made my problems worse.
"Please get off me." I felt weak and nervous.
"Okay, but you got to promise to be my slave for the
rest of the day—promise?"
I promised.
She took my arm as I got up, but I shook her off. And
then nearly ran into the wall as I lost my balance. I
looked down at the toilet bowl and realized that I would
never aim down at it while standing again.
"Hey, you got a real bush," said that sparkling voice. I
slammed the door on it. I urinated but this did not seem
to relieve all of the pressure. I got up too quickly and be-
came very sick indeed. It now appeared fortunate that I
had not eaten breakfast. As I finished my dry heaves I felt
those cool and capable hands again. She led me back to
the bed.
"Gee whiz, what does it feel like, huh?"
A menstrual period was all I needed.
It was not, however, all I got. Candy demanded my
hours of slavery with all the unreason of a golden eleven-
year-old. I was only to learn that Candy Darling was an
eighty-year-old spy a few days later.
Actually, the slavery game was good for me in a way.
Candy got me walking around and seeing people. She
toured me through the VAT—Vital Activity Transducer.
It was the operating theatre where the (my) implant was
done. I wore a loose coverall and hid the tail by running

Beyond Rejection	37
it down one leg. I had a confrontation with Candy over
this last. She wanted me to leave it bare—"Looks wild,
like a freeble's lutch"—curving it up behind me like a
squirrel's tail. As if it were a flag!
The next days were full of tests and interviews. They
were so full that some of the details are fuzzy. I didn't un-
derstand much of it. I had slumped from outrage into a
stolid depression.
Candy Darling was a relief from this. We continued the
game, which cast me as a slightly dumb big sister. I knew,
of course, that it was a game. On the third day I told her
as much. Her reaction landed me in a completely new sit-
uation.

VI
Psychological rejection would be the real
issue from now on.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
Of course, I sensed from the first that Candy had to be
more than an innocent bystander. She knew too much
and—let's face it—I was not the sort of person to attract
such patience and help. Besides, she could stand up to Dr.
Germaine Means, a feat which would have added to the
laurels of a double Nobelist with the stature of a Lin-
coln and the muscles of a gorilla. One thing that made me
painfully aware of Candy's role was the name question.
Obviously, I had to have a name. From the start they
followed Dr. Means' line; they called me Sally. I could see
the point, of course. They wanted me to accept the
scrawny female body. I ran into the same three-point lit-
any in every therapy session I had those first three days.
One, "A mind has no sexual identity." Two, "You will re-
ally come to love it—just lean back and let your body give
you a ride." Three, "Think of how lucky you are to be
able to experience both sexes' sexuality." What they didn't
say said it all: Love it or lose it.
I collided with a scrubber from another floor the third
morning. As we disentangled, his hand cupped a buttock
briefly. He gave a little wink and twist of his hips as he

40	Justin Leiber
sauntered away. That time I did vomit. The incident
brought the name matter to a head. After I cleaned my-
self up I set off to tell Dr. Means. Perhaps it was an acci-
dent that Candy was there in Dr. Means' laboratory too.
Want to bet?
I had the matter worked out in my own mind. Obvi-
ously, I should retain Forth as my last name. Common
enough practice for implants. And I had all sorts of mem-
ories of my parents, though they were the Procyon worm-
hole away and naturally I hadn't seen them in the three
years since they emigrated. I certainly had no memories
of Sally Cadmus' parents.
And, being reasonable, I would have to concede that I
couldn't go on being Ismael Forth. Though an implant
could inherit the estates of both mind and body, the im-
plant was a new legal entity. So why not a nice name like
Patricia? Even Dr. Means couldn't criticize a bona fide fe-
male name like that, right? Wrong.
Not that I got to lay out my whole position. When I got
to the name Patricia, Dr. Means laughed loudly and
abruptly, and convulsively. So loudly and so abruptly that
Austin Worms, my body therapist, and some tall old guy
looked in from next door to check on what was happen-
ing. But they just stood there, the other side of a sizable
laboratory, so they could not hear what Dr. Means went
on to say. Which, I suppose, is just as well. Embar-
rassment was the word for what was going on with me.
Embarrassment may seem a petty word, but what it
names can be some of the most self-destructive and un-
manning experiences one can go through. Perhaps Dr.
Means spoke quietly out of some consideration for my
state. But what she had to say certainly didn't seem in-
tended to make me feel any less embarrassed.
"Look, Forth, you are so unbelievably transparent, you
are so damned dumb, you make me want to laugh, cry, or

Beyond Rejection	41
just hug you. No threat intended by that last part—I will
not touch you.
"Forth, you are trying to name your fate. You are like
some guy who claims to want a gentle, sensitive, and non-
violent son and insists on naming the boy Spike. Except
that you are doing a job on yourself. You know as well as
I do that 'Patricia' normally shortens to good old Tat.'
You are not expecting to be called 'Patty,' are you, Patty
dear?"
I had to admit that that horrible possibility had not oc-
curred to me. The way she hit the t's in pat-tee (not
paddy) irked me. She wasn't finished.
"Look, I would not mind, indeed I would be more than
happy, if you were seeing your way to being a woman—a
woman, got it?—a woman who happened to like putting
on some classical male moves. You would be fine as a
woman who liked to be called Pat. But that is not what is
going on with you. You, or rather a twisted-up part of
you, insists that it is still a male and that he will be a fe-
male only over his dead body."
Though I was getting angry, hurt, or whatever, I don't
know that I would have been able to say anything back.
In my case my guardian angel Candy stepped in.
"Germaine, if Forth wants to be Patricia Forth, that's
her right." Candy had been leaning against a desk a few
feet from the table where Dr. Means and I were sitting.
Now she stood between Dr. Means and me. She wore a
pullover and white exercise shorts. Her legs glowed. I had
no idea whether her tan was melanohormones or overex-
posure to sunlight.
"Of course I know Forth has the legal right. In any case
the proper way to avoid rejection is to get the implant to
make choices, to coordinate, come alive. But I have to
point out consequences." Germaine stood up as she said
this.
"Germaine, you are so committed to simple truths."

42	Justin Leiber
Candy pulled my ear lobe in a friendly but infuriating
way.
"Patricia here has a name which might become Pat,
gee whiz!, and so you conclude that she's trying to hold
on to a male identity. Unhealthy. Should be named
Martha or Mary, nice dutiful female names! And how
about my name, Germie dear? I'm so totally confused
about my identity and sexuality I gave up worrying my-
self about it. I'm no jewel but I function all right. And
anyhow—"
Now she scruffed the hair on the back of my skinny
neck.
"—if little Patty here is giving herself the name of a
problem, well, that's just honest. She is a problem. Some-
times you have to embrace death."
Germaine left after a couple more of Candy's remarks.
She winked as she turned away. Funny thing was that she
winked at me.
"Thanks for getting Dr. Means off me," I said to
Candy. "But the whole business is upside down and
you're the screwiest part of it. I don't know what you
people want to do to me. I mean, I do know that you
want me to accept this whole strange business.
"Take this weird tail I have." In the local area of the
hospital I had given up running the damn thing down
under my clothes. It was trailed out behind me. "I have
been trying to cooperate by exercising it. Already I can
curl it around something, though I can't adjust the grip.
Can't really make it go where I want it. Strangest thing to
have flesh where it can't be. I keep on trying to feel my
way out to that emptiness at the end of my spine, or
rather what used to be at the end of it. Maybe it's a little
like those phantom pains people used to get in a missing
leg before modern regeneration methods came in. Forget
that.
"I have the same business with my new sex and the

Beyond Rejection	43
rest of this body. I'm surprised that Dr. Means hasn't al-
ready turned up at bedtime with some handsome male
gorilla to exercise all my parts. So I accept. So I have sex
in a female body. So I learn to be a gymnast with this new
equipment. So I learn to dress and speak a little different
and all that. It's all like some super feat. I know that you
only get a few bodies a year to work with—Means said
four in the Solar System last year—and they're mostly old
bodies of suicides. After all, the premature death rate is
one in a billion; I'm one in a billion if you count me that
way. So the point is that I got a young body, which is a
plus, but everything else is wrong. Sally Cadmus' body
was just the best of bad choices.
"So why should I accept this? Why should I even try? I
probably got a lot less than normal chances to make it
through this. And if I make it through rejection, what
have I got? I just don't like this. Feels itchy, all of me.
Never stops. Like tiny snakes are crawling all over my
skin. I want to succeed sometimes, I suppose, but what
can I look forward to? I just can't get myself to care
enough. There's a kind of distance, a fuzziness, about my
sensations. Forget that, too."
Now I looked straight at Candy. While I was glaring I
noticed that my tail, or rather the last foot or two of it,
was swishing around in an arc just above the floor to the
left and behind my chair.
"But—forget about me—what are you? Who are you? A
lot of the time you are much too sarcastic and bright and
—and everything—for someone your age, whatever it is.
You look hke a tall eleven-year-old girl. Fair skin and
baby blond hair in antique braids, no less. Like a sky-
maiden dream in one of Pardo's Vegan pop epics. But we
all know you have got to be older than that by several
years. And I'd be a total idiot if I didn't recognize that
you got to be part of the therapy setup. Unless this is all
some hallucination, you are fooling around with me in

44	Justin Leiber
some sort of way. You and your fingers. What's your
game, Candy?"
I continued to glare at Candy Darling at the end of this
speech. But I was distracted by the swishing of the end of
my tail, which had continued through my attack. My tail
—the last foot or so of it, that is—flicked gracefully back
and forth. This was some sort of automatic reflex. At least
I had no control over it. And I couldn't yet produce such
a controlled and sinuous movement.
"I have lots of games, Patricia," said Candy.
I didn't think that Candy had noticed the swishing.
The table was between her and my tail. I managed to
think the tail up. I got it hooked around my left knee.
"And I know what my games are and I'm going to talk
to you about them. More than I can say for you, both
ways. And then we'll get to you, Patty dear—"
I suddenly realized that I had never seen her face ex-
pressionless and motionless before. Her eyes seemed to
lose their pigment.
"—for you know you won't find me as easy to deal with
as Germaine. She's still young and soft-headed. Early for-
ties. And you are?"
"I taped in at twenty-six, so that's my essential mental
age, whatever happened to my body afterwards."
"And your body was thirty-one when it went into al-
most three years of low hibernation. The hibernation pe-
riod doesn't really count, of course. At that temperature
and chemical activity, mental function bleeds out. You
get something like a 'blanked' brain in a few weeks, even
without positive clearing. And the physical body res-
pirates and ages at about an-hour-to-a-year rate. So let's
say you're almost thirty. I am eighty years old, give or
take a year or two, and I ain't no gullible softy. And I
know your experience because I've been there. This is my
sixth body."

Beyond Rejection	45
It seemed almost as impossible as a stone cat grinning
when one of her usual giggles flickered across her face.
"I'm a nympher, kid. One of the forty or so successful
multiples in the Solar System, or the Federation for that
matter. Nympher experience also helps me at my job. I'm
a harmonizer and a reasonably good one, or so I'm told.
In brief, I'm a sort of doctor and you're my patient. Such
as you are. I'm also something else but we'll get to that
later, big Patty. For now the subject is you."
Then Candy gave it to me.
"You think of yourself as rational and reasonable-
sound mind and so on—except that you feel imprisoned in
this body. You think of yourself as making a considered
choice of name. And quite apart from that, you have
made a reasonable survey of your situation and you don't
like it. Death rather than dishonor. You are turning in
your ticket and checking out with all . . . the dignity of
a hysterical littie brat."
Candy made a gesture with her hand as if introducing
me to an audience with those last words. My hands went
up in reflex or protest and then, moving under them, she
got in a deft jab to my solar plexus. I doubled up just a
bit. It was an accurate but light blow. And I saw that my
tail had wound itself around her arm. Something in me
was saying Gotcha.
"You are about as rational as a block of wood. You
haven't asked the most basic questions about your situa-
tion. And you obviously haven't given any thought to
your responsibilities."
"What responsibilities? My parents can more than take
care of themselves and they are a hundred thousand light
years from here, anyhow. I was just an off-and-on PR per-
son for IBO. My friends can take care of themselves. I
don't have any real responsibilities to anybody. If I die
from rejection, that's it. I'm not a billionaire. So nobody
gets hurt."

46	Justin Leiber
"How about this body, Patricia Forth?" Candy was
pointing at me. "Have you got any idea of what rejection
death will do to it? Do you care? Do you know how much
I'm worth on the hoof?"
"Okay, okay," I said, "your body must be worth over a
million credits—if you make it through your next implant
to enjoy the money."
"It's worth what it's worth, whether I survive my next
implant or not. That's the point you are forgetting. A
body is worth so much because the only way we know
how to produce one is the traditional way—and that takes
years and years of exercise and experience, and it leaves
you with an occupant. So aside from a one-in-a-billion
character like me who's crazy enough to have her mind
played into an infant every few months from birth until
the brain is big enough to take the whole load, there's no
source of bodies for implant except the rare suicide decla-
ration. And who's interested in suicide when we can treat
almost any psychological problem and can repair almost
any physical disease, excepting total physical destruction?
So the Sally Cadmus body is worth something like a mil-
lion credits if you want to try to count. Rejection will
make a mess of it."
"So who cares about a weirdo suicide body with this
damn tail?" I said.
"You ought to, for one. That's one of the questions you
haven't asked. You're occupying her body and you
haven't shown one bit of curiosity about her. She's not a
suicide, incidentally. Possibly the only nonsuicide, non-
nympher body ever implanted at NWRH. And the tail is
a bioprosthesis—she must have got the thing started grow-
ing by adolescence. Must have been interesting how she
got parental permission. She must have been a hellion.
Anyhow, it's just exactly what someone needs when they
work in weightlessness. She was an asteroid miner. It's
not the money—that's just what we count by—you owe

Beyond Rejection	47
her, you're responsible for her. Though she's doing better
by you so far."
"What do you mean?" I said. "Sally Cadmus is dead. I
don't owe her anything."
"Forth, it is true that certain electrochemical patterns
no longer exist in the cerebral cortex of the brain you hap-
pen to be rather inadequately occupying, but that's all.
There's a lot of Sally Cadmus in the rest of the brain, and
in the sense-motor system. Reflexes, unconscious skills,
well-trained muscles, the whole bit. That's the Sally
Cadmus you are responsible for. You got the body on
trust."
"She gave it up, right?" I didn't feel too sure of myself,
after Candy's statement that Sally Cadmus didn't sui-
cide. Suicide declaration is about the only way I could
see of a body coming free, apart from nymphing.
Candy Darling stood up and gestured me toward the
door. "I'm going to show you what happened to Sally
Cadmus. Might teach you a little respect for what you've
been given, for what you are, in fact."
Candy got a small reel of tape from the VAT room with
Austin Worms' help. We took it back to my room.
"Another thing you haven't asked about," said Candy
as she inserted the tape into the room console. "Another
thing you haven't asked one word about is what hap-
pened to the body you had—you don't know when it died,
or where, or why, or even that it died. Sit down."
I sat. I should mention that the tape in question was
just an ordinary recording tape, not one of those huge
magnetic discs that can record the structure of a mind.
Candy started a tape. There was static, as if one were
hearing a long-range broadcast.

VII
A young, healthy blanked body is worth
several million credits. You can buy a copy
of your own mind tapes for less than a
hundred credits—if you have any use for
it, that is.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. Ill, The Chiefs Report
"Hello, this is Sally Cadmus, prospector bond number
delta-tau-seven-three-six-oh-two. Ship, Baleen Blanco,
Federation registry number rho-nine-nine-seven-theta.
This is a last statement.
"I was in-suit checking the surface of an outrider of
Eros IV when my ship blew up. Probably just holed by a
rock in the secondary fuel area. Bad luck in that I'm so far
from the central belt that I'm a few hundred miles inside
Earth's perihelion. Shouldn't get hit by space junk here.
Funny to feel so far from help this close in the system.
"I figured Lamda Station was closest, but at near a
hundred thousand miles their automatic-tracking screens
wouldn't have even registered the blowup. I had my
spares on my suit, about thirty-five hours of oxygen. Es-
sentially no chance of survival.
"Ship compartment was totaled but I managed to scav-
enge the big external chem-fuel tank. The one I filled

50	Justin Leiber
my suit tanks with. I cut the big tank free from the
debris. Milked seven cuts out of my Alpha-Max, never did
neater mincework in my life. I now have the big tank
jury-tubed into my suit propulsion pack. In fact, up to
now I've been hugging this twenty-five-foot tank as tight
as possible. The propulsion unit pushes on the small of my
back, almost a foot above the base of my tail, and with
the unit on maximum thrust I've had to keep a hell of a
good grip on all the inertia of the tank. It would weigh a
couple of tons on Earth. Max thrust is over two hundred
and fifty pounds, so I've had to be glued or I'd have been
ripped away from this huge tank—which provided the
fuel, so I had to take the bucking.
"My boots are still locked into some holder hooks and
my gauntlets are clipped into a line of tube-fittings. The
tube-fittings that ring the tank a fortunate two feet above
its center of gravity. Since the rocket thrust from my unit
goes through the small of my back and straight in front of
me, I've had to balance the tank in front of me, letting the
thrust push all of the front of me into the tank. Any other
position and I would have pulled away. Locked on this
way, I'd have to say it's lucky I had my tail to control the
propulsion unit, particularly since the hose fitting from
the big tank into the propulsion pack is a real patch job. I
was bracing the fitting for most of the push. My tail still
feels stiff, though I ran out of fuel fifteen minutes ago.
I've got nothing to do but talk now.
"I figure I've had fuel to push this little unit for maybe
twenty hours. Okay, nineteen twenty-two on my helmet
timer. That's over fifty times more push than you nor-
mally carry on your pack. But all this is rough.
"Okay, whatever could mean the difference between
cutting in on Earth from sunside or marside. In fact, more
than Earth's diameter by a long shot. Plan is I'm going to
curl wide round the sun so that I will catch a fat, slow
curve outside Earth orbit. Let Earth catch up with me the

Beyond Rejection	51
second time around, giving her gravitational field good
chances of picking me up. I've been astrogating by—I
guess you might call it—the seat of my pants.
"I figured that there was no chance of me living but I
can salvage something. Someone ought to get a body that
isn't really beat up. If you are listening to this three years
from now, I've got myself in the orbit I want. Fuel is
gone. I don't know that I'd want to give this body the
problem of living with a ten years' younger version of my
mind. I specified that I didn't want implant when I got
my majority. No tapes since.
"With fair luck this orbit should mean that I will catch
Earth the second time she comes by this way. Earth has
got so much sky junk they should pick up something as
small as me and the tank. Biggest target I can aim at. If
they can't pick me up coming in, you think Luna Station
would? Luna has maybe seven to a dozen screens active-
Earth must have like a couple thousand radar systems
going. I can't aim myself well, so I need a big, sensitive
target.
"Not too close to the sun, either. That's one advantage
to the fat curve. I've arranged a foil heat baffle over me.
But my main protection from heat is a kind of sea anchor,
or rather solar wind anchor, trailing out a couple hundred
feet behind me. A kind of sail that I hope will keep the
tank between me and the sun by always puQing my side
of the tank away from the sun.
"Okay, I'm messing around a lot, but I guess when
there is something to save, you save. I specified nonre-
newal on my majority tapes. They'd be ten years outdated.
I am setting my suit pack to deep-hibernate me. The suit
was checked through two months back and the Rossetti
circuitry looks like it'll go a hundred years. I have re-
trieved the hibernation procedures and the declaration
regulations on my suit computer. I guess I should make a
formal statement.

52	Justin Leiber
"I, Sally Cadmus, let stand by my nonrenewal declara-
tion. I understand that deep-hibernation procedure
means the cessation of my mental structure. The higher
electrochemical structure is randomly erased. I know that
there is little chance of mental survival after even a few
hours. You might as well give my estate to the implant.
"Good luck to her, anyhow. Hope she likes the tail.
Useful. It's been a good time. She might . . .
"My beeper tells me I'm down to danger point on oxy-
gen. My body needs some even for deep hibernation-
breath a month. I'm hitting the circuit. Assume I've said
the usual sentiments. Never could stand that stuff.
Though I guess it may not be last landing. I'll be a shoot-
ing star if the screens don't pick me up far enough out.
"My solar wind anchor works. The tank is between me
and the sun. The constellations are spread all around me.
The great hunter Orion with his bright Dog. The South-
ern Cross. It's peculiar that us spacers are the first people
since the invention of artificial lighting to be as familiar
with them as the ancient Greek mariners and desert wan-
derers who named the constellations. My high school sci-
ence teachers said the ancient Greeks foisted the constel-
lations on us as arbitrary fantasies. Nothing connects the
stars in Orion. They only give a vague outline of a hunter
from Earth perspective, since some of Orion's stars are
hundreds of light years away, while others are much,
much farther. Just a matter of arbitrary perspective, or so
he said.
"But Mr. Edgett never said it was arbitrary to call the
sky blue. Yet the perspective for seeing the sky blue is a
lot more narrow. You have to be somewhere in the nar-
row band of the Earth's lower atmosphere to see the sky
as blue—a couple miles up and the sky starts to blacken.
But you can see the hunter pattern we call Orion any-
where in the Solar System or near abouts. If there were
Alpha Centaurians they could use the same constellations.

Beyond Rejection	53
I can use Ursa Major to get my bearings as well as the an-
cient Phoenicians. 'Magnetic north' has no more meaning
to me than it did to them. The sky is black. And bright
with figures. The ancients had no light to blind them to
the stars. Gemini, Virgo, Taurus, the whole crew: light
my way . . . Orion, hunter, mother . .
There was a long silence after Candy switched the tape
off. I had never had the experience of space travel. I
avoided flying, using flicks whenever possible. The one
time I took a suborbital rocket to Singapore I got motion
sickness. But I was struck by the sense of freedom that
must go with weightlessness. The sense of being able to
move with equal ease in any direction with no more effort
than the mere flip of a tail. I thought of Sally Cadmus
with nothing but endless space in all directions on her
long orbit round the sun.
"How was her aim?" I asked Candy.
"As she figured," said Candy after she coughed and
cleared her throat. "The station that picked you up re-
ports that you were aimed so well that you would have
gone into Earth orbit if they hadn't caught you. They also
say that it is physiologically impossible for Sally to have
had that good a sense of aim. According to those guys,
human sights and reflexes could not have managed more
than a thousand-to-one shot of coming anywhere near
that close to Earth. You should still be up there by all
rights, Patty Forth.
"And I've been saying 'you' because, let's face it, you
are the Sally Cadmus body, with nothing more than some
electrochemical repatterning in the cerebral cortex. With
nothing more than a tune from a tape labeled Ismael
Forth."

VIII
Candy Darling remarked that the original
Ismael Forth body, if undamaged, would
fetch top credit on the zombie market.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
I admit to being impressed by hearing Sally Cadmus'
account of herself. Weightlessness had made me so sick
on my Singapore rocket flight—a conference organized by
my own Interplanetary Business Operations—that I
switched to an ocean liner on my way back. I remember
worrying about whether anyone would find out that I
didn't take the rocket back. But the Sally Cadmus body—
my body—had spent a lot of time in space.
I was standing at the in-town flicker just after the last
important session of the Singapore conference broke up. I
was hailed by none other than Norman Saylor Mather,
the imperious and ancient ex-President and Board Chair-
man of IBO. I had been introduced to Chairman Mather
some years ago by Uncle Wendel, a midmanagement type
who got me into my IBO job. I was surprised that Mather
had remembered me. But he hadn't remembered my
name. He stood there with his hammy hands pinching my
arms, saying, "Hah, you're young . . . young . . . look
damn good, damn good, damn . .
"Ismael Forth," I eventually choked out.

56,	Justin Leiber
I was worried that he might find out that I wasn't tak-
ing the rocket back. Embarrassing. Last thing on my
mind was the idea of taking advantage of this personal
contact.
"That's fine—Ismael Forth, you say—that's fine, young
fella, that's fine," he roared on. After a final "that's fine,"
he slammed me on the back once or twice, gabbed about
college sports, and abruptly walked off. I slunk down to
the flickerway, resolving never to allow myself to get into
such a jaunt again. No rockets!
But now . . . Well, if I could take weightlessness now, I
could stand up to the Norman Saylor Mathers of the uni-
verse. Do elegant acrobatics in free fall. Show the old
coot. Come to think of it . . .
Candy brought me out of that reverie with a tug on the
end of my tail.
"Like I said, kiddo, this goes the other way too," said
Candy. She was perched on one end of my bed, her legs
swinging back and forth, her hands still loosely holding
my tail in her lap. Though she had returned to her usual
precocious eleven-year-old voice, she had some disturbing
things to say.
"It's strange that you didn't ask about where your new
body came from. But it's a whole lot stranger that you
didn't ask where your old body went. I told you—first
time you woke up from the VAT operation—that you had
been implanted and that you didn't have any estate or
money problems. Do you realize, Patricia Forth, that
since you've been awake you haven't asked what hap-
pened to your Ismael Forth body? Or when it happened,
or where?"
I thought about it. Though I had daydreamed about
the way my old, tall, well-muscled body looked—though I
had definitely yearned—I had never actually asked myself
what happened to the damn thing. Instead of hating my
scrawny new body and demanding that my poor tail be

Beyond Rejection	57
cut off, why hadn't I screamed for my old body? Or at
least asked what had happened to it? After all, the sort of
total body wipeout that called for the risks and problems
of implantation was a one-in-a-billion event. I should
have been curious. I was curious now.
"So what did happen?" I said. "You know, Candy, that
all I got are memories up to that yearly tape update. I
don't have a clue in that about any dangers. And doing a
little PR work for IBO—Interplanetary Business Opera-
tions—wouldn't mean any risks. And I didn't have any
dangerous hobbies like mountain climbing, lung diving,
or sky sports. To tell the truth I was more careful of my-
self than most people, though I kept myself in good shape
... I mean I kept the Ismael Forth body in good shape."
Let's see now, I thought to myself, they must have been
planning the operation for months. I had Ismael Forth
memories until my tape update in January, 2111. Some-
time later in 2111 something happened to my earlier body.
Something conclusive. Candy was looking at one of the
pink sheets from my medical file.
"There is not as much information here as there might
be because you died on Rim. No regular autopsy and
scavenger program, as you would get in a civilized place,
so we don't know anything much. All this says is that you
traveled as a tourist to Rim, landing there at Xanadu on
July eighth, 2111 a.d., and that you died by drowning
near there on July fourteenth. Now, what do you think of
that?"
Candy Darling patted my tail as if she expected it to
answer.
I was dumbfounded. I couldn't even recall having
heard of a place called Rim. It certainly isn't in North
America, I thought.
"What on Earth is Rim?" I asked.
"It's not on Earth at all, dummy. Rim is the nearest
Earthlike planet to the new Canopus wormhole. Federa-

58,	Justin Leiber
tion's put a stop on any development except for a small
resort area—very exclusive—around Xanadu."
"I have never heard of the place. And besides I never—"
Candy Darling cut off the beginning of my confession.
"Hold it, Patty Forth, give yourself time to think. I got at
least two reasons to think you should've heard of Rim.
First is that your company, IBO, actually controls most of
Xanadu and the surrounding area, and is interested in
the potential mass development of Rim. Of course neither
IBO nor the Federation conservationists have an interest
in publicizing Rim much now. But you should have
heard of the place, working for IBO—"
"But, Candy," I broke in, "I've never been in space. I
never would—I mean Ismael Forth never would—have
taken a spaceflight. The only time I experienced weight-
lessness I was so sick I swore I would never do it again.
When I was Ismael Forth wild monsters wouldn't have
driven me into space. Anyhow, how could I have afforded
an interstellar trip?"
Candy looked at me quizzically.
"Would it help," she said, "if I told you that my second
reason for thinking that you might have heard of Rim is
that you won an IBO employee lottery for an all-ex-
penses-paid vacation on 'the exclusive, someday-to-be-
developed wonderworld' of Rim? Here, look at this."
Candy had a clipping in her hand. She did not hand it
up the bed toward my extended hands. She held the clip-
ping over the end of my tail.
I am sure you don't know how it feels to grab some-
thing with your own prehensile tail. ("Prehensile tail"
means one that can encircle and grasp an object. The
South American monkeys have such tails, though African,
Asiatic, and Vegan monkeys do not.) To me my tail feels
as if the last foot or so were longer and bigger than all the
rest of it. The last foot really feels. I had been trying to

Beyond Rejection	59
learn how to grasp things with my tail for days without
success.
I guess it was just a case of thinking too hard. Of wor-
rying about success. In any case, I grabbed the clipping
from Candy's hand with my tail and had it in front of my
face before I realized what was happening. Automatic
reflexes.
I was too interested in the clipping to think about my
new achievement. The clipping was from the IBO in-
house newsletter, The Iboer, dated June thirtieth of last
year.
IBO PR Man Overwhelmed by Surprise Vacation
Prize
Ismael Forth won't be working or seeing friends
the next few days. He'll be too busy preparing for
the trip of a lifetime, an all-expenses-paid two-week
vacation on fabulous Rim, a virgin wilderness world
billions of miles from Earth. Lucky Ismael Forth will
be hobnobbing with the small number of rich and
powerful sophisticates who have visited Xanadu, the
one spot of luxury and civilization that the Federa-
tion allows on Rim. Someday IBO will make this
wonderworld available to all of us.
"I never expected to win a prize like this," said
Ismael at his home yesterday. "Tell them I'll bring
back a bug-eyed monster to put on the lunchroom
wall." Have fun, Ismael!
Though I recognized the typeface and style of the old
Iboer, I somehow didn't take in the point of the article at
once. The first thing that occurred to me was that the fine
that IBO was someday making "this wonderworld availa-
ble to all of us" was a load of syrup. The fact of the mat-
ter is that while a lot of people have taken a trip or two
inside the Solar System, not many people can afford inter-
stellar flight. Interstellar flight belongs to the immigrants,

69,
Justin Leiber
the good old rich and powerful, and the professionals—the
explorers, scientists, and military types of the Federation,
and of course the wormhole flight crews themselves.
My parents, for example, took bonded passage as im-
migrants to Osiris, out the Procyon wormhole. We would
not have been likely to see one another again even if I
had remained Ismael Forth and had conquered my space
sickness. Interstellar flight was just too costly. Realis-
tically, there is only a difference in tone between
"interstellar" and "wormhole." "Interstellar" means
between-stars, while "wormhole flight" means via-what-
e v er - i t - is - that - connects - some - of-this - universe's-space-
time - with - others - in - absolute - simultaneity - outside - E i n -
steinian-reality. But the one way to make an interstellar
flight that does not require several lifetimes is by worm-
hole flight, so in practice the two are the same.
And then, as you would be expecting, I finally took in
the whole clipping—and felt little shivers all the way
down my spine. Tail, too. An undulation which termi-
nated in a reflexive whipping motion of the tip.
Space flight and weightlessness. And wormhole flight as
well.
"But, Candy," I said, "that's impossible. I told you, my
old body—Ismael Forth—was never in space. I got very
sick on my only suborbital flight. Very embarrassing not
to be able to take weightlessness at all. I would never
have gone to Rim even if the trip were free. This article
from the Iboer . . ."
I had intended to say that the article was crazy. But I
stopped as I realized that Candy was rhythmically
squeezing the end of my tail. The rhythm was the univer-
sal three shorts—in this case pinches—followed by three
longs and another three shorts. SOS.
When I stared at Candy her finger briefly touched her
lips. After the pinching I recognized that the finger must
mean silence. If someone had had a video hologram of

Beyond Rejection	61
Candy Darling and me, they would not have noticed
Candy's gesture.
Candy took what looked like a palmsize computer-
video from her bag. She punched several addresses on the
keyboard, listening to random static after each operation.
Then she took the back off the computer-video and
punched some internal buttons.
You can't take the back off a normal computer-video.
And you certainly can't take the back off a cheap, rain-
bow-colored, Maizie-the-Cow children's model.
Candy now leaned back, relaxed, on the bottom of my
bed.
"Not," she said, "that I really thought that anyone was
bugging us. But rules have to be followed and they say I
got to clear an area before I talk openly to anyone. Patty,
girl, I am not only a harmonizer, I am an investigator for
the Federation."
Candy Darling gave me a glowing and invincible
eleven-year-old grin. Like the cat with chicken feathers in
its teeth.
"You see, Patty, a prepubertic girl with a very adult
and cynical mind makes a very good spy indeed. Sort of
Shirley Holmes peeping out of Alice in Wonderland's
eyes."
At this point Candy gave me a peculiar look that was
probably intended to suggest just such a combination—
the astute mind leering cynically out of its innocent cas-
ing. I understood how effective the disguise was: a blond-
haired, blue-eyed, eleven-year-old girl simply cannot look
like a jaded and ingenious detective. Even if she is.
"What it comes to is this," continued Candy. "Your Is-
mael Forth body is one of several that have disappeared
in an odd way in the past two years. The odd way is that
they have all suffered so-called accidents that either
wiped out all trace of the body—explosions and the like—
or the body dies in a frontier place like Rim, where rou-

62,
Justin Leiber
tine medical procedures—autopsy, gene identification,
scavenging, and other ghoulwork—won't be done. There
are other suspicious circumstances. But your, Ismael's, in-
ability to take weighdessness is a mighty glaring clue. You
would never have walked your Ismael Forth body on
board a spaceship. So you didn't go on board. But the
body did. And wasn't seen too often after departure on the
F.S. Pequod by my information . . ."
Body-snatching. Zombies.
Candy didn't actually say the word body-snatching. It
just hung in the air. So that was what it was really all
about. The bastards had taken my old body.
Suddenly I felt my horror turn into a cold, clear hatred.
For the first time since I had been awakened by Candy
Darling I felt fully alive and hot with purpose. I was
awake.
"How?" I said.
"Well, Patty dear," replied that girlish and eerie voice,
"It's something that we always knew could be done. You
know that the Federation doesn't allow implants after a
mind has reached an essential age of eighty-five. That's
the Kellog-Murphy Law again. One reason we don't
allow those late implants is that they don't work well. You
get less than the normal four-in-five chance of surviving
body-mind rejection. And some of the successful ones
begin to go bad in a few months. But the other big reason
is that people's bodies—originals—begin to start to break
down after eighty-five or ninety or so, even with all the
preservation techniques we got. So some people might
want to take a risk in their nineties, a last fling.
"As Counselor Kellog said, It is impossible to distrib-
ute that mixed blessing fairly, given the few donor bodies
available and the expense of the operation; so it must
not be distributed at all.'
"What a very few people know is that you can press a
few years beyond essential mind death—if you can pay

Beyond Rejection	63
the cost. The cost is frequent implants and a kind of para-
noia. You need a whole lot of money and something like a
private army and a VAT implant operation of your very
own."
I can testify that the sweat of a young body with an an-
cient mind smells sweet. Lack of development of the
sweat glands that come with puberty, I suppose.
Candy wriggled up the bed. An observer would have
seen a classical mother-daughter or older-younger sister
scene. Candy had her head nestled on my breast. I could
feel an interesting and irritating tingle in the nipple. And
I was quite conscious that Candy's knee was slipping, as
she talked to me, from my bellybutton down between my
legs.
"We think," she whispered, "that we might find out
something by checking out Rim. And you do happen to
know what the Ismael Forth body looks like.
"Germaine has said you spent some time looking at
your old self in sauna mirrors. The only photographs
we've been able to get of you are several years out of
date. And I would need a decoy companion in my case.
People my age don't go on interstellar voyages alone. No
one will recognize your new body or wonder who you
might be, if you act like a normal zenith-class tourist.
"Are you game, Patty?"
I didn't know whether I wanted to have sex or an expe-
dition with Candy Darling. But I was her woman.
"Let's get 'em" is what I said.
And we did.

IX
"Motivation is crucial," remarked Fran-
cois Vase. "We have got to give her every
reason to want to live."
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
The most satisfying experience of the next two days
was to walk past Dr. Means, down the elevator, and out
of the door of the Norbert Wiener Research Hospital. Not
that Dr. Means was as sticky about it as you would ex-
pect. As a rather more traditional male than usual on
Earth I had rather disliked a modern woman like Dr.
Means. But she wears well. Worms, the head ghoul, was
full of advice about exercise and infections and all that
sort of stuff. Weird to think that he had handled me, exer-
cised and patted me, for months before the implant. But
Dr. Means didn't protest after Candy and I made it clear
we were going, and she shook our hands rather gravely as
we left.
The most interesting experience was acquiring a ward-
robe—unless you count our discovery of what Candy
called "the telltale tail."
Candy's plan of action came to this: we would not mess
around with IBO here. I was a closed issue to them. Is-
mael Forth was dead. No point in reopening that. We

66,
Justin Leiber
made a good pair of investigators. Or, rather, I was a
good cover for Candy.
We would travel to Rim on the F.S. Pequod. Same ship
that the Ismael Forth body traveled on. Same crew.
Might be able to dig up some information on how the
body had behaved. Zombies—bodies without minds-
could be rigged up to look conscious and \valk about, but
there were all sorts of telltales. And there would have
been someone on board who had minded the Ismael
Forth body. We would want to know who that was, or
who they were, if there were more than one. After we got
to Rim we would try to figure out what had really hap-
pened to the Ismael Forth body. Within the restricted
area allowed it by the Federation, Xanadu was supposed
to have the beginnings of the most exclusive of the inter-
stellar-set resorts. I was looking forward to that.
But there were problems in the plan. Candy pointed
them out before we left NWRH. The one we argued
about was what identities we should assume. Candy Dar-
ling would have little difficulty passing as a ten-year-old.
All she had to do was watch her mouth. Watch about slip-
ping into talking like a cynical adult, but she was used to
that. What Candy said was that most kids really have
adult minds by the age of ten or so, and most adults, par-
ents particularly, try to ignore this state of affairs. So
Candy figured that she had no problem passing off an
adult mind in a kid's body because that's what "normal"
ten-year-olds are doing anyhow. Sounds reasonable if you
think about it.
But Candy needed to travel with someone. And I was
needed to make an identification in any case, so I would
be the traveling companion. The question was, What sort
of traveling companion?
I had my hands full being a female. Who was I to com-
plain at being a mother in addition?
Candy made a convincing case on the basis of ages,

Beyond Rejection	67
though I think she enjoyed the idea too, the little son of a
	(daughter of a	?). I had no idea of the sex of
the body Candy had started out with.
My body was, physically, thirty-one. And it looked that
old too. At least that's what Candy said. At the time I had
no opinion about how it looked. I avoided mirrors like
someone might avoid the eye of a basilisk.
So I was thirty-one and Candy was, or looked to be,
eleven. What could be more innocent, or more likely, than
that we should be mother and daughter? Who was I to
protest?
One thing you have to get straight if you're to follow
this account is that Candy was leading me around by the
hand through this whole period. I suppose a few children
dominate their parents in such a manner. I don't know
how else to explain the way Candy took me shopping.
"Let's make Mommy" was what she chirped in my ear
as she pushed into Houston's Rostard's, a stylish million-
aire's clothier far beyond my previous experience.
"Dress her well, M. Herbert," is what she said to the el-
egant gentleman who rushed up to greet her after we en-
tered the store. And dress me (or it) is what Herbert pro-
ceeded to do—as if he were handling a clothing dummy,
or perhaps merely someone heavily sedated. He must
have dealt with odd clients of Candy's before. He made
some comment about looking forward to dressing her up
when she reached adolescence again. He must have
known her before she had her present body.
The wardrobe was constructed in a private suite. Her-
bert scurried in and out while Candy slipped from her au-
thoritatively adult manner (to Herbert) to her sassy little
darling style (to me). I—the Patricia Forth body, that
is—just stood there, moving the limbs about when they
asked me to. I had hoped that my tail, at least, would dis-
turb the suave M. Herbert. But it dismayed him no more

68,
Justin Leiber
than my nudity or being ordered about by an eleven-
year-old girl.
First of all a decision had to be made about what to do
with the tail. The loose pants I had been wearing around
the hospital allowed me to conceal it by stuffing it down
one leg into a loose-fitting boot top. But you can't be
wearing pants and boots all the time. You certainly can't
wear them all the time on a luxury liner. Especially when
you are rolling in credits.
You had to give it to M. Herbert, though. When they
got my clothes off and he saw the tail, his first reaction
was artistic. He saw it as a unique providence, almost a
challenge. He wanted to leave it in plain view. In fact
he wanted to create a new style in clothing around it.
"After I have finished and they have seen the ensem-
ble, the stylish ladies will want fake tails just to be able to
wear the new style. She will be regal, an exotic princess, a
queen, an empress from afar . . ." He went on for some
time like that, fondling my tail and positively glowing as
he speculated about what jewelry would fit the tip of it.
He went so far as to argue with Candy about it until
she shut him up. Candy took the view that we were to be
inconspicuous and untraceable. So the tail must be hid-
den. And we were to be wealthy. Who but the wealthy
would be riding the Pequod to Rim? And who but such a
passenger could be expected to put forward a zenith dis-
play of fashion? I must have all sorts of clothing, much of
it for display and social occasions. So dresses, shirts,
skirts, and tolongs were the order of the day. And while I
was to be a mother, I was also to be a beautifully and
commandingly dressed young woman.
Candy put it another way. "You're a regular red-hot
momma, Momma," she said while I was modeling a par-
ticularly dashing black evening gown. The gown's cloak-
like fines more resembled a tolong than a dress. Except
that the (my) breasts were bare.

Beyond Rejection	69
Because of the tail, Herbert had to select from among
tolongs, reasonably loose pants, and skirts and dresses
that flared at the waist or buttocks. When my legs were to
be bare they wrapped the tail between the legs and
around the belly. The whole business of the tail still made
me sick. I still wanted it off, whatever Dr. Means said
about that making my brain go sick. I was even less some
sort of monkey than a woman. But I could move the tail.
(Think of moving the little bone at the end of your spine.
And think that feeling out the back of you. A long curling
and winding cylinder. And finally put something that
feels like your index finger and a bit of thumb at the end.)
It just didn't feel right to have this whole appendage,
my appendage, wrapped around me like a jockstrap or a
belt. It didn't want to be that way.
I didn't feel quite the same way about the brassieres.
Though the dead lumps on my chest didn't feel as large
or as horrible or even as cancerous as at first. It felt better
having a brassiere over them. Like having them packed
away in two form-fitting elastic bandages.
But otherwise I didn't feel happy with the frilly under-
wear that M. Herbert and Candy went in for. And it
wasn't simply me, you know. It was also the skin I was
walking around inside of. I felt weird about the silky
nonabsorbent stuff just because it was for a woman, and
mostly for dress and party occasions. I had run into it be-
fore only in sexual fumblings—and then, of course, from
the other side of the fence, so to speak. But it seemed
somehow that my skin didn't like it either. Itchy in some
funny way. I don't think Sally Cadmus would have worn
that sort of stuff.
I couldn't say more than "itchy in some funny way"
because I was still going through all sorts of tuning with
my senses. I was slowly working together what I felt in-
side when one sense or another got pushed by what was
out there. When I first had mustard on my tongue, for ex-

70,	Justin Leiber
ample, my mind gave me the smell and feel of turpentine.
After several weeks that changed too. It wasn't so much
that the actual taste changed. As if it tasted just a bit like
turpentine, but it was mustard. Yellow, tangy, belongs on
dubers. That came to be the way mustard was supposed
to taste.
Your senses are tuned. All hooked up to the world by
years of smelling, seeing, tasting, touching, moving, and
working with objects out there. But I was still all out of
whack that way.
Plus I had a new tail and even what you might call a
new sense. That's the business of what Candy called the
"telltale tail." It happened right there while they were
trying the clothes on me. It's important for what happens
later.
M. Herbert had just removed a white linen tolong from
my body. The tolong was too loose and flowing to be very
practical. Apparently it was suitable wear for garden par-
ties but not after dark. Sol knows why Candy and Her-
bert thought I needed such an item. They couldn't have
garden parties on the F.S. Pequod. (I was wrong about
that last point, as you'll see.)
Candy and Herbert were speculating as to whether I
should get another tolong of the same style but some
other color. And I was free to stretch my legs and tail.
Without clothes I would walk with the tail curving down
behind me to within a few centimeters of the floor, with
the sensitive tip curving up (and often weaving from side
to side in an inquisitive manner).
As I passed by the back wall of the suite, the tip of my
tail felt something that is hard to describe.
Imagine an intelligent extraterrestrial creature who
could see ultraviolet rays. Then imagine that creature
trying to explain to us what color ultraviolet was. But
what happened to me was harder to relate because at
least we know some of the color spectrum—ultraviolet is

Beyond Rejection	71
just up the spectrum a little beyond what we humans can
see.
But imagine a wholly different sense. Like bats, who
see the things around them in all directions by bouncing
high-pitched sounds off them. Or like the many fish who
can sense other fishes' magnetic fields.
What it felt like was something like this: I felt as if my
tail was bathed in some sort of yellowish light. At the
same time I got a feeling as if the whole assemblage, from
tail tip up to the bottom of my spine, were a mouth that
was puckered up by testing something really astringent,
like alum. And I also had the strange feeling that I was
smelling something putrid. I leaped away.
At the moment that this combination of feelings hit me,
the tip of my tail was a few centimeters from what looked
to be an inconspicuous light switch on the back wall. Cu-
rious, I moved back, slowly flexing my tail toward the
switch area. I swished my tail back and forth. The same
weird combination of sensations occurred whenever the
tip of my tail came within a few centimenters of the light
switch.
I wasn't sensitive to light switches, I was sure. I'd al-
ready met up with plenty of them. There was something
different about this light switch.
"Caught something, Patricia?" said Candy, coming up
behind me.
"There's something funny about this light switch. My
tail reacts to it."
"Ah, yes, my lady," said M. Herbert somewhat apolo-
getically as he waddled up, wringing his hands. It was the
first remark that he had addressed to me since I had en-
tered the store.
"You see, my lady, it is sometimes necessary for one
such as myself to be more cautious than you might as-
sume. All is not as simple as it looks."

72,	Justin Leiber
He held his hands up and pursed his lips in a gesture at
the complications of galactic mercantilism.
"Certainly Mme. Candy here is hardly what she would
seem.
"And you, my charming lady with the tail. You, I sus-
pect, are not as you seem."
He favored me with a smile that suggested we were
part of some elegant conspiracy. Then he did something
complicated with the light switch and the plate that held
it on the wall. The plate popped out of the wall. M. Her-
bert turned to us, his hands outward, palms up, the way a
magician holds them after a trick. I could not resist ap-
plauding.
Candy examined the efficient gun-metal-and-glass de-
vice that looked out from where the plate had been.
"A Zeiss-Telemark spy scope," said Candy. "And with
the full microstat capacity too. You have expensive tastes,
M. Herbert."
"At Rostard's we have the best always," replied Her-
bert. He bowed.
I swept out of Rostard's encased in an impeccably aus-
tere, steel-gray tolong whose simple lines carried all the
authority of four centuries of French tailoring.
"Your tail looks to be sensitive to the spy-scope range
of electromagnetic radiation," said Candy. "Maybe the
damn thing will have a useful function after all."
"You could say, Mommy-poo . . ."
Here she smiled up at me cherubically while sneaking a
swift pinch to my buttocks.
"You could say that you have a telltale tail."
My punch missed.

X
A prehensile tail is found only among small
monkeys. A large monkey cannot have a
tail strong enough to be an independent
support for tree travel, just as a bird as
big as an ostrich cannot afford wings
strong enough for flying. In weightlessness,
however. . .
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
I must say that if my former body had any sort of con-
sciousness when it (he?) traveled to Rim, it must have en-
joyed the marshaling of the stewards.
Ensconced in an elegant, virginal white tolong, Candy
bore herself with all the grace and dutifulness that one
might expect of a real eleven-year-old aristocratic
daughter. She sat, legs straight and together, to my left in
the thin dawn-shimmering air of Rocky Mountain Raiser
Port. To my right, feet separated by the regulation thirty
centimeters, hands clasped behind, stood the F.S. Pe-
quods First Officer, Duncan Hanney Starbuck. The daz-
zlingly white collar that protruded from his deep-blue
dress uniform might have been as stiff as his spine. But I
doubted it.
I stood, my left hand in maternal grace on Candy's
shoulder. I wore a tweed cloak of pale-gray Vegan sky

74,	Justin Leiber
sheep. You would not only have thought that Mrs. Pa-
tricia Forth had money and lots of it; unconsciously you
would have felt that the money had been transmuted into
grace and casual authority through generations. M. Her-
bert had done his job. It was not an accident that First
Officer Duncan Starbuck had chosen to attend me on the
resplendently polished oakwood quarterdeck of the
Rocky Mountain Raiser. He had hardly paused to chat
with two or three passengers before introducing himself.
Nor was it an accident that he should have personally
insisted on fetching a chair for Candy. He came close to
apologizing for the fact that Captain Mathew A. Brain-
bridge was already aboard the Pequod, orbiting the earth
in company with Space Station Zebra, some hundreds of
kilometers above us.
For several minutes now, khaki-clad teams of raiser
crew members had been bustling about. Their movements
were punctuated by the shrill squeals of bosuns' whistles.
Already the raiser was lighter than air, the vast platform
swaying slightly and ponderously in the early morning
air. The platform was shackled to earth by a hundred
lines. The crew's activity ensured that it was pulled up-
ward directly by the score of balloons fettered to its pe-
ripheries. The raiser was the size of a midcity block. It
was flat, with two exceptions.
One was the quarterdeck where we stood. The other, at
the platform's center, was the gigantic packet catapult.
The catapult would hurtle into space the passengers, the
stewards, and the still-Earthside portion of the Pequod's
crew. The compressed air catapult ensured that the
packet ship's rocket did not blow to bits the vast but deli-
cate structure of the raiser platform. Or explode the su-
perlight hydrogen that filled its balloons.
Diffidently, First Officer Starbuck explained that early
spaceships blasted their way into space with an unspeak-
ably enormous expenditure of fossil-product energy. And

Beyond Rejection	75
with a criminally mad production of atmospheric pollu-
tion. In those days overland jet flights were permitted.
And ocean transports employed fossil-fuel engines rather
than the sails of modern vessels.
"I don't mean just in harbor or on a lee shore, where
we employ electric engines," said First Officer Starbuck,
his voice dropping to a whisper. "They didn't even use
sails in normal sailing conditions." His voice now sunk to
near inaudibility. "They didn't even have sails."
He was looking away from me. If anything, his spine
was stiffer than before. The tightening of the muscles in
his face gave his profile a sculptured look, emphasizing
his cheekbones.
The regal figure of Chief Steward Ernest Inger ap-
peared below us at the peak of the raiser's waist. He was
resplendent in his starched white uniform decked with
gold braid. With a clear but respectful sense of relish in
the importance of his gesture, he put his silver whistle to
his lips as a conductor might raise his baton. Two meas-
ured blasts and the bustle of the crew of the raiser sub-
sided into silence. He put the whistle to his lips for a third
blast and a mad twittering of hornpipes coincided with
his whistle. Simultaneously, the twenty stewards of the
F.S. Pequod appeared in uniforms only marginally less
splendid than that of their chief. They popped as one
from under the conning shed and quick-marched in uni-
son to the pipes to the raiser's ladders. Even the climb
had a balletic precision. As the pipes ascended to a final
pitch of ecstatic madness, the paired groups of ten stew-
ards strode up two gangways from the lower deck to the
waist, crossing each other in the ascent in a brilliant har-
mony of white and gold. The piping ceased precisely as
they marshaled into rigid attention before the Chief
Steward.
"That is about all they are capable of doing," said First
Officer Duncan Starbuck. "Aside from being able to bring

76,	Justin Leiber
you a poached egg before it cools. Keeps them in condi-
tion."
"But it is charming," I said in my best new manner. As
if charming was something that menials and small chil-
dren did when suitably motivated. Not something that an
officer or woman of breeding would dream of under-
taking.
I was rewarded with a warm smile from Officer Star-
buck. Candy winked at me. She was probably feeling rest-
less as Mistress Candice Armitage Forth, daughter of
Mrs. Patricia Cabot Armitage Forth. Imposing, regal, ex-
cellent. I would have intimidated you.
"Warp and toggle her, Mr. Nichols," said First Officer
Starbuck as the packet settled into the gigantic bulk of
the Pequod. His voice took on a less commanding tone.
"Gentlepersons, the brief period of weightlessness will
soon be over."
To tell the truth even the gentle and ponderous sway-
ing of the raiser platform had begun to make me worry
about space sickness. I had never experienced weight-
lessness. Even jet travel made me queasy. Maybe I should
put that another way: the Ismael Forth body had never
spaced.
I really began to worry when we were nested down in
the closely packed seats of the tiny packet boat. As the
thousands of elastic filaments settled over me, I hardly
heard the encouraging comments of Chief Steward Inger.
The packet was as jammed with people as a pomegranate
with seeds; the twenty-one stewards, other members of
PequocTs crew, and the twoscore or so passengers. The
passenger and conning compartment of the packet took
up over a third of her length. The engines and fuel that
took up the rest of her thirty-meter length were just
sufficient to lift her slantwise a few kilometers into the
stratosphere. Unassisted, she would then inevitably have

Beyond Rejection	77
begun to sink and soon plummet to Earth. But assistance
was to be had.
Space Station Zebra, dropping into the radical nadir of
its orbit, would catch the packet. Imagine an osprey div-
ing on a fish that leaped above the ocean's surface, only to
sweep upward into the blue once again. "Catch" is the
operative word, for the huge station and the tiny packet
are no match in speed or direction. The packet has spent
its force and is at the point of sinking downward, while
the station, having reached the lowest point of its orbit, is
just to begin its sweep away from the Earth.
Zebra, like most space stations, was shaped like a
doughnut. Unlike the deep-space ship Pequod, which it
would rejoin after reaching halfway to its apogee, Zebra
was streamlined for its sweep through the middle atmos-
phere. The packet was caught in an elaborately struc-
tured web in the hole of the doughnut. As if the naviga-
tional problem were not enough, there was a further
complication. The station was cartwheeling around its
axis to maintain a modicum of gravity for the occupants
of the doughnut.
"This packet is a boat," I heard the First Officer cor-
recting a passenger. "Not a ship, like Pequod. A boat is
conned by a pilot, while a ship's direction is the respon-
sibility of the Captain, the bridge officers, and the navi-
gator. Both a boat and a ship are she's.
"The station is an it," he added didactically. I was be-
ginning to enjoy Starbuck.
Several of the passengers gasped as the compressed air
of the catapult slammed us skyward. A boyish voice
screamed. The momentary pressure on my back and tail
felt strangely reassuring. I felt balanced somehow as the
lesser pressure of the packet's rocket phased in. Like the
ascent a dancer feels when her partner helps her rise with

87,	Justin Leiber
his palm thrusting up the small of her back. I felt the sort
of tingle that runs through you just before you sneeze.
You hardly have a chance to grow used to the motion
of the packet before it slams into the web of the station.
And then the stewards are bustling about rapidly, jostling
the passengers up and into the joist tube, which snakes
out through the webbing of the station. The idea is to get
the passengers into the artificial gravity of the station fast,
before they feel the effects of their rapidly declining
weight.
The boy who had screamed looked quite green. His
eyes wobbled. Chief Steward Inger and I helped him into
the tube. I beamed at Candy. She looked like she was
sucking a lemon.
"Thank you very much indeed, my lady," said Chief
Inger, tipping his hat. We completed our entry into the
near-Earth-level gravity of the doughnut portion of Space
Station Zebra. Inger smiled deferentially.
"I believe, my lady, that it was the poor tyke's first time
in space. One doesn't quite know how they will react. I'm
sure you've seen such cases. And I'm sure he'll come
round promptly. If not, Doc will put him right."
Chief Inger tapped the braid on his cap once more.
"I'll keep an eye on him for you, my lady."
Real weightlessness came two hours later. Zebra had
matched orbits with Pequod. We reentered the tiny
packet, now moored on the outside of the doughnut. We
were propelled gently into the gigantic bulk of the Pe-
quod, which looked like a dumbbell festooned with
countless masts, antennae, and reception cones. There
was unavoidable weighdessness for the very brief period
from the warp in of the packet until we were once again
bustled off into the weighted passenger areas of the Pe-
quod. Weightlessness.
Five full minutes of weightlessness before finally, apol-

Beyond Rejection	79
ogetically, First Officer Duncan Starbuck insisted that I
must leave the weightless packet boat because he couldn't
exit the packet until the last of the passengers had left.
I felt the tingles washing through me much more
strongly this time. The tip of my tail felt hot. Weight-
lessness. It washed over me. Like Mom, Dad, the old
Howard frizzie theater, Julie's pale-green eyes, the warm
drowsy feel of the old backyard Klein-closure—like all
there is that renews us and protects us and is us, my
thoughts cascading to my body's rhythms. Weight-
lessness.
Home.

XI
It is impossible to tune mind and body in
isolation. They must play upon each other
and the world.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. II, Press Releases
Chief Engineer Trudy Double sauntered up to the Cap-
tain's table in Pequod's dining salon. Her unaccustomed
interruption momentarily scattered the solemn rituals of
the three stewards who hovered about our table. She bent
down past my left side to whisper something to Captain
Mathew A. Brainbridge.
"Yes, yes, Chief," he said discreetly. "Of course. And
have Ernest tell the galley to lay on something special."
He cleared his throat deliberately and smiled expan-
sively to the table, once more the genial host. His fair and
florid skin curved a touch too loosely over his tall frame.
As Officer Starbuck might have put it, the apposition of
"Chief" and "Ernest" made a distinction age-old to ships.
Engineer Double belonged to the real crew of the Pe-
quod, the men and women who conned her computers,
juggled the nonstandard numbers representing her im-
pending wormhole trajectory, worried over her running
gear, and maintained the atomic fires of the power end of
her dumbbell structure, holding fusion reactions of tem-

91,
Justin Leiber
peratures over two million degrees Celsius in spidery
webs of magnetism. Chief Engineer Trudy Double was,
at the most informal, simply Chief, as Duncan Starbuck
was First and Captain Brainbridge Captain. Even the
lowliest member of Chief Double's six-person staff, Mate
Victor Blout, was always at least Mate, or Blout, never
Victor.
Ernest Inger was chief of the entire staff concerned
with pleasuring the passengers, maintaining the living
quarters, and feeding the crew. And he was a cornucopia
of regal dignity and ponderous gentility. Yet the Chief
Steward was Ernest. He was deferred to by all but the
senior officers. Chief Double was a six-footer with the
agility of a space-born gymnast, and she did not suffer
fools gladly or for long. Yet Ernest Inger could speak to
Chief Double in the manner of a sententious uncle. But
to Chief Double as much as to the Captain—indeed, to the
lowliest of the officers—he was Ernest. Always and ever
Ernest.
The Captain paused while the stewards served the
dacca. This dacca was a golden, tongue-tingling variety.
The Chief Steward confided that it was brewed only in
far Permio, outside the official reach of the Federation.
The dacca was poured from an antique pewter pitcher
into goblets of light-rose-colored diamond, spun to paper
thinness and tensile strength by the diamond blowers of
New Holland. The golden dacca frothed against the pale
rose of the diamond goblets.
The steward pouring the dacca paused over Candy's
glass.
"I should like you to try some, Candice," I said to her,
thus removing the steward's indecision. "And you will
want to have some of that black cheese on the thin wa-
fers, too."
Our stateroom contained three books about haute cui-
sine and zenith-class fife style. Even Candy had never

Beyond Rejection	83
eaten the classic accompaniment for expensive dacca. The
black cheeselike stuff—glenna un petit—was extracted
from the anal glands of a Vegan weasellike creature. It
cost three thousand credits a kilogram Earthside. I
spooned a generous portion onto my plate.
"You will find that it tastes like fine chanterelle mush-
rooms, my dear. Something of the consistency of a creamy
cheese like Brie, though, Candice." I spoke with stealthy
confidence. Horvath's Galactic Gastronomique is an
amusing and engrossing book when read in the right
spirit.
"Thank you, Mother."
"I should try just a smidgen, Candy," said Captain
Brainbridge. He leaned across me to smile at her. His
knee brushed mine.
The Captain cleared his throat again. His eyes circled
the table, the Captain's table, from left to right. The
Corns and the Piggs, five Texans whose New Houstonian
money gilded their lack of sophistication or restraint into
myth-proportioned eccentricity. Isa Pigg V had once
Earth-heaved a Matterhorn-sized mountain into the San
Hernandez Fault to change the view from her ancestral
mansion north of Austin, Texas. Then three youngish
Mathers, heirs to the IBO money. Third Officer Stubb, a
handsome and presentable young man, who was imported
from the Navigator's table in order to balance our table
sexually. And Candice Armitage Forth. And me, to Cap-
tain Mathew A. Brainbridge's right.
"The Pequod will enter the Canopus wormhole some-
time tomorrow afternoon. It is a tradition of space to have
some festivity during wormhole flight." Captain Brain-
bridge's voice became more confiding.
"As those of you who have experienced it know, worm-
hole flight is a kind of initiation. And a most pleasurable
one, I assure you." He smiled at me. Under my tolong my
tail itched.

84,	Justin Leiber
"The non-Einsteinian weave of wormhole space has a
curious effect on the human nervous system. You are
likely to feel just a touch giddy, a touch warm.
"We had planned a somewhat more sumptuous dinner
than usual." He gestured as if apologizing that the meal
we had just enjoyed consisted of something like oily algae
burgers.
"And a party of sorts. But Trudy Double, our Chief En-
gineer, has suggested that we make the party a masked
costume ball.
"Now, you may feel that this is a silly business." He
smiled. "And of course it is. But I assure you that worm-
hole flight is conducive to such silliness. You won't feel
silly while it is happening, just effervescent.
"And perhaps"—he winked—"perhaps a trifle amorous."
My knee felt his again.
The glenna un petit tasted like rotten cocktail onions.
Horvath's Galactic Gastronomique is not infallible.
"He's attracted to you, all right," said Candy from
the antique ottoman on which she sprawled. She sucked
absent-mindedly on the oily-smelling Vegan cannabis that
she favored.
"He loves to talk about you. Boring. Mistress Forth this
and Mistress Forth that. And you're not all that sexy. Just
magisterial and exotic. But you'll never get anything out
of First Officer Duncan Starbuck. He would probably be
unable to speak if you held his hand. And if you touched
his cock, he'd probably burst half his blood vessels.
"Me he can talk to. And talk he do. Trajectories, stor-
age of dress uniforms, wardrobe suppers, null-transfer bi-
sections, off-point Hendersen flanges, hyperspace Hol-
mann orbits, wormhole isolation, proper officer's kit
packing.
"I just try to steer him a little bit—big blue eyes looking
up worshipfully." The bluish smoke eddied upward.

Beyond Rejection	85
Candy continued in her best little-girl voice:
"Gee, what's that, Dunkie?
"That's awful weird-looking. What does it do?
"What was it like to space from Earth to Rim before?
Tell me about it. Tell me. Tell me.
"And what were the passengers like? Were all of them
rich like Momma? Did . . . ?"
Candy raspberried. "A real stable orbit, that guy. But I
did find out something."
What Candy found out was that no one of the current
complement of the Pequod had been with her when she
spaced some months before, bearing my old body to Rim.
Crews need to be rotated regularly. Keeps them in trim.
Gives the officers broader experience. Or so maintained
First Officer Duncan Starbuck.
"There's the manifest and the logs from the voyage."
Candy spoke in a cool, distant voice that now had little of
the eleven-year-old in it. "Both are in the Captain's office
safe. It's open during the workday.
"But the office is guarded by the Sergeant-at-Arms
through the day. Not to mention the secretary. The First
Officer and Chief Steward Inger have access to the safe.
But I doubt that even little old Candy Forth could man-
age to maneuver Dunkie into something like that."
Candy got up and stubbed out her cigarette before she
reverted to her little-girl voice.
"I'd just love to see the manifest and log for the last
Earth-Rim voyage of the Pequod. Almost as much fun as
a twenty-cartoon frizzie. Please, please, Dunkie.
"That would go over like a lead raiser in a thin atmos-
phere.
"And I don't think either of us would do any better
with Chief Inger or the Captain. We have got to get into
the safe after working hours."
Candy flopped down on my bed between my legs, her
head on my belly and pale blond hairs splashed over my

86,
Justin Leiber
thighs. She looked upward at the elaborate, mildly erotic
mural that covered the ceiling of the master bedroom of
the suite.
"But there's a problem. I wouldn't have the slightest
trouble opening the Captain's door. Simple four-gimbal
lock.
"A minor problem is that we will need the Captain
away from his suite. But the real catch is that Captain
Brainbridge personally locks his safe at the end of the day
and opens it in the morning. The problem is what keeps
the safe closed. It's a crater lock. A crater lock. Do you
know how a crater lock works? Brainbridge himself is the
key, he doesn't just carry it around with him.
"Momma, I think you're going to have to be a tosser."
The lumps suddenly felt very lumpy. I felt acid coming
up my throat as Candy went on. "A sharp, agile profes-
sional.
"A real gusty five-thousand-credit whore."

XII
She will have to learn to be a woman.
She must realize that this will be hard and
that it can be done.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
It is possible to admire fingers. Imagine Candy Darling,
eighty going on twelve, now Candice Armitage Forth. A
leggy, prepubescent blue-eyed beauty with long pale-
blond hair. When she does not speak, nothing hints of
anything else, except perhaps her hands. At one time or
another, you've realized that the face of people over
thirty reveals them. But hands tell their tales too. And
often earlier in life.
Even in repose Candy's hands are surprisingly power-
ful. Fingers thick, proportionate to their length, like the
fingers of real pianists and surgeons as opposed to those
of romantic visions. Efficient tools.
When Candy is fully into her charming though spunky
prepubescent role, you will suddenly see her hands. Just a
little jarring. Puzzling. Then the hand will move on and
the eleven-year-old will reemerge.
You won't think of a nympher. There are less than a
hundred in the whole Federation, after all. Just for the
very rich. And they don't make a lot of noise about it.

88,
Justin Leiber
No, you would just feel a momentary strangeness. And
then forget it.
Candy's hands are more impressive in action. Deft, de-
cisive, sure. Extracting the modules and transducers from
panels in her baggage cases. Inserting them into the oth-
erwise innocent though enormously versatile Horst-Leica
hologrammic camera that I carried in my baggage.
Building the system—more illegal than private zombies"
—into the wall so that it looked like it had always been
there. All you lost was the view of two erotic cherubs.
Calibrating the instrumentation.
She had me move here, move there. Hold one uncom-
fortable position or another, my tail folded underneath
me. Invisible.
I dressed myself for the ball in the manner of M. Win-
drem's famous four-character performance of the stage
play Female Man. While I was moving about, posing for
Candy's calibration, I thought of the four-face mask.
Candy's. The one thing in her baggage with a history.
You got an eleven-year-old face looking up at you. But
the voice cracks the whip. Candy stood at the closet door
just under the Horst-Leica that obscured the cherubs.
Obscured them innocuously.
"Here's a mask," she said. She turned its curious four-
fold structure in her fingers.
"Here."
It smelled both musty and sweaty. The dank feel that
leather has after a good space of years.
"It was given me at my disappearance party near sev-
enty years ago. When I was sixteen. My first nymphing.
It's a reproduction of the four-quadrant mask that Win-
drem wore in Female Man. Male-dominated female, fe-
male living without males, male-killing female, female
being fully human—you've seen it, Patricia. Anyhow,
you've seen the Rebiel film version.
"The reddish quarter. The one with the scars here.

Beyond Rejection	89
That's the killer part. The black part, over your right eye,
that's the dominated female. You see the eye paint and
the plastic eyebrow?"
I held the stiffening leather in my hand. A tiny fleck of
the bluish eye paint crumbled off. What had the mask
seen over seventy years? The eye sockets looked about
right for me. Candy held it up before me.
"The left forehead—the white quarter—that's the whole
human part. The female man. Man as the whole species.
"And the green quadrant is special for you." Candy
looked up, eyes sparkling, then held mine as she finally
gave me the mask.
"Virginity. Or, anyhow, malelessness.
"Wear it, Patricia," Candy said.
"Wear it, Patricia, or whoever you are. Wear it."
I took it clumsily.
"Wear it, my friend."
Candy's Peter Pan costume—green tights, fluffy, near-
transparent top. Would have strained the libido of a saint.
It would have thrilled committed pederasts. Little imma-
ture naps just visible. Bunlike buttocks.
I wore the mask and the white garden-party tolong.
The one that M. Herbert and Candy had picked out at
Rostard's.
As we entered the grand salon I saw Captain Brain-
bridge and First Officer Duncan Starbuck. Brainbridge's
bulk and air of command identified him. And his wiry
pepper-colored hair stuck out from behind his mask. He
was costumed as a sea officer of three centuries back. The
uniform wasn't exactly military. More likely, he was
dressed as a commercial sailor. Or perhaps a pirate. His
mask gave him a striking scar and beard.
It was perhaps inevitable that most of the PequotTs
officers should have dressed as ancient sailors like their
captain. Chief Inger was one of two exceptions. He wore

99,	Justin Leiber
a uniform. But it wasn't naval. It was more magnificent
than that: white, trimmed with blue-and-gold braid. A
honeybee was embroidered on the bosom. He wore no
mask. His hand was thrust in the waist of the jacket.
Ernest Inger was the European Emperor Napoleon. Since
that ruler's name was Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest had
managed to remain a first-name person. Different status,
though.
Chief Engineer Trudy Double was the other officer
who did not dress as a sailor. I heard her explosive
laugh. She stood against the wall of a hologram of a
charming farmhouse from something like the European
Middle Ages. The farmhouse looked too clean, too airy,
too well proportioned, to be wholly practical or believa-
ble. It was a farmhouse for fairies and princesses. Trudy
Double was talking to three characters. They were proba-
bly the Texans of the Captain's table. Two of the Texans
were each dressed as some sort of bizarre reptihan crea-
ture. I learned from Captain Brainbridge that they were
supposed to be something called armadillos. Actually
mammals, though with a most saurian casing.
Trudy Double was costumed as some sort of hairy mon-
ster. Maybe a Vegan moully. It seemed to fit her charac-
ter. She had one hairy arm draped over the shoulder of
the more portly armadillo, perhaps Isa Pigg V's.
I could see that Trudy Double's familiarity annoyed
Captain Brainbridge. Her laughter boomed out once
more as Captain Brainbridge and First Officer Duncan
approached Candy and me. Duncan, like the rest of the
deck officers, was dressed like Captain Brainbridge. I
would have recognized him by his ramrod back if for no
other reason.
But Captain Brainbridge had more important things to
do than correct a minor impropriety. Me. He wanted me.
Or at least so I thought. And if he did not want me now,
he would soon.

Beyond Rejection	91
My tail itched. And the acid was in my throat again. If
necessary I could chew a beta pastille for my breath.
They straighten up your mouth chemistry for hours.
Brainbridge took in my fourfold mask. He wore a blue-
and-white-striped pullover under his dark-blue sea jacket.
And his captain's cap was without braid.
"Aye, and thou art all parts of a lady, M'lady Patricia,"
he said. He gave his voice an antique and husky twang.
After wormhole entrance at six o'clock, the whole deck
and engine crew—Captain to navigator, Duncan Starbuck
to Victor Blout—had gathered in the drinking salon. It
was now nine o'clock. The Captain had doubtless ab-
sorbed much. And then there was the influence of worm-
hole flight itself.
"Ain't she a comely lass, matey," said Captain Brain-
bridge, slamming Duncan on the back. Duncan nearly
caromed into Candy. His neck reddened. His face must
have been scarlet under his mask.
"Pardon me for the beauty that overwhelms me,
M'lady," continued the implacable Brainbridge. The Cap-
tain was obviously enjoying himself.
Through the long afternoon the entire deck crew had
been unavailable, closeted in the bridge and the major
computer compartment. The fabric of Einsteinian space
twisted into extravagant and unpredictable filaments as
the Pequod neared the oscillating normal-space coordi-
nates of the Canopus wormhole.
As the saintly Albert Einstein had argued two centu-
ries ago, normal space does not allow a velocity exceed-
ing the speed of light. You would mislead in calling this a
speed limit. That might suggest the image of a traffic
officer stopping speeders. As if you really could exceed
the speed of light but something always slowed you.
But that is to confuse what saintly Albert said. It is not
as if there's some speeder's goal, theoretically attainable,

92,	Justin Leiber
like the runner's three-minute thirty-second mile—a goal
that you wanted to reach but just couldn't. There is simply
no place in normal space time for the faster-than-light. As
you approach the speed of light your increase in velocity
must become instead a change in the character of your
vehicle. Speed changes into mass. To become close to the
speed of light is to become closer to being the mass of the
universe.
To exceed the speed of light is to be foreign to the uni-
verse. To be outside of it.
Wormholes are such outsiders, exceptions to the rigor
of normal space. Like whirlpools. Like atomic trans-
formations within the context of normal chemical reac-
tions. Or like chemical reactions within the context of me-
chanical events like impact, friction, and acceleration.
Thus in 1934 Chandrasaker argued that a star exceed-
ing Earth's Sun's mass by two could not exist. Thus what
physicists know as Chandrasaker's Limit. Such a star,
when it has exhausted its major nuclear reactions, cannot
exist. It cannot exist because no Einsteinian reason could
be given why such a star should not shrink to less than
the dimensions of a grain of sand. No reason that it
should not become inexpressibly small.
Yet Chandrasaker's view was forever paradoxical.
Stars of much more than two times Earth's Sun's mass are
common. And many have exhausted the nuclear fuel that
allows them to battle Chandrasaker's Limit. How can
they exist?
The solution is that normal space, Einsteinian space,
cannot everywhere exist. A wormhole is such a state of
nonexistence.
Some—most—wormholes are foul. Black. There is no
exit from them into normal space time. A few exit into
normal space. Thus Pequod could penetrate through tens
of hundreds of folded light-years as a mosquito might
drive its proboscis through several layers of gauze.

Beyond Rejection
93
The first wormhole trip that humans undertook success-
fully was in 2025. The crew of the Sappho managed the
hundred-light-year trip from Alpha Centauri to Beta
Tau in sixteen hours of subjective time. There were four
female members among Sappho's seven personnel. Two
ended the sixteen-hour trip pregnant. A forty-year-old
male virgin, mathematically talented and impossibly shy,
bunked three of the females and the other two males.
The whole crew wanted to do it again.
Within a few minutes, and not a few champagne
daccas, the passengers had been reduced to the amorous
hilarity of the officers.
The person who perhaps most fit the hologrammic
scene wore tight short pants, white hose, gold-buckle
shoes, a crown, and a splendid gold-bedecked long coat.
He paused in conversation with the two armadillos. Tak-
ing a pinch of powder too dark to be cocaine or triorthoa-
mine from a silver pillbox, he snorted as genteelly as such
an action allowed. I was happy that he was doubled up
by his explosive sneeze. Real snuff. Authenticity only at a
price.
"Let me introduce you to the Dauphin de Joinville,"
shouted one of the armadillos to Brainbridge and me. She
was definitely Isa Pigg. And even more hilariously over-
bearing than usual.
The Dauphin bowed. He had on an elegant black dom-
ino mask that covered only half of his face. He was the
eldest of the three IBO heirs.
The other two IBOers were close cousins. It soon be-
came apparent what their costumes were. Or, rather, cos-
tume was. And that they were very close indeed. In sev-
eral ways.
Midge Mather, that is, a svelte eighteen-year-old with
long black hair like Isobella Ion and a delightfully sala-
cious mouth. And Bertie Mather, son of Norman Saylor

94,	Justin Leiber
Mather, a wiry, curly-haired scion to a multiple of for-
tunes. Even brattier than his sister and a year younger.
So entered the moose. Giggling hysterically, it walked
through the impalpable hologrammic wall of the farm-
house. The head emerged magically from the sparkling
white walls like a swimmer from unrippled water. Then
the front legs—Bertie's—and the whole beast. The moose
spoke.
"Quit bumping into my cojones, Midge, you pathetic
little cripple. And get your paws off the merchandise."
"One more insult, Bertie baby, and you will be too
loose for the most well-endowed bugger in New San
Francisco. I got my Steely Dan dildo back here, you
meat brain."
And so Midge Mather joined us, if not in face, at least
in voice and presence.
"Velcome to ze Petit Trianon, my dears," said the
Dauphin. "We bring you Marie Antoinette's France, Mes-
sieurs et Mesdames—and mooses."
"Apres moi le deluge," said Victor Blout. "After me,
the deluge." Suiting action to words, Blout stumbled for-
ward, falling through several cows and a stone fence and
retching into a hologrammic pig's trough that would not
have held a thimble of water, let alone the evidence that
Blout had already overdone it.
"I believe that it was Louis the Fourteenth who said
that. And he dies in bed rather than of a severed head
like Louis the Sixteenth." First Officer Duncan Starbuck
had come up behind me.
He contemplated the fallen Blout, already being pulled
at by a dismayed steward.
"Still, there is something to be said for the guillotine,"
Duncan continued, mock mournfully.
This was the first display of levity I had had from Dun-
can. I liked him. Straight orbit and all.

Beyond Rejection	95
Through the long afternoon, non-normal Holmann-
orbit projections had relentlessly succeeded one another
on the giant main screen of the major computer compart-
ment. The bridge had a much smaller version of the same
projections. Candy and I watched the navigation staff
from a glassed-in gallery. Seven consoles in a semicircle
were below us.
"Alpha vector one-oh-oh-five."
"Zero graphing on normal space, still."
"Watch out. Bearing scantion tau-irrational radical
seven-four-oh-nine-nine is better. It's foul down the other
way."
Duncan explained at the ball that wormhole entry is a
little like paddling a canoe through rapids. You jockey,
back-paddling, calculating, holding, until you see your
opening between the white-watered rocks. Then you let
go with all you've got.
Except that you spend hours calculating, and you have
only one go. And if you fail you don't get wet. You just
aren't anything anywhere anymore.
Finally there was a mild but authoritative cough.
"Done," pronounced the elegant, cool, high-pitched
voice of Chief Navigator Arabella Q. Queeg.
She had driven the Pequod into the wormhole like a
spear.
At fifteen the Chief Navigator had established the first
humanly surveyable proof of the claim that four tints
suffice to give distinct colors to every possible partitioning
of a map. In 1977 a computer at the University of Illinois
had examined the over three thousand special cases of the
four-color problem. A human mathematician would have
taken much more than an entire lifetime simply to read
through a single one of these computer surveys. And so
topology stood until Arabella Q. Queeg. Her proof occu-
pied twenty-five pages of Mathematische Studien. It was
also etched on a two-meter square sheet of platinum next

96,	Justin Leiber
to the five-hundred-year-old door to Sir Isaac Newton's
rooms at Trinity College of Cambridge University.
Navigator Arabella Queeg was a native of Vega and
red as a scarlet woodpecker. She played hyper-Nim with
the central computer. And she talked to her Vegan Sia-
mese cat. Once she was thought to have smiled at Third
Officer Stub. But this was probably just absent-minded-
ness.
She did not attend the ball.

XIII
Austin Worms suggested that sexuality
would be an extraordinary experience for
the patient. She will have been on both
sides of the masks of gender.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
Why had I felt so giddy when Duncan s hand brushed
against the back of my tolong? Perhaps part of it was that
he would have felt my tail if he pressed at all hard.
Brainbridge's hands were much more forward. It was not
much later than twenty-three hundred hours and his
hands had twice hovered over my breasts like bees over
clover. They buzzed about and darted in for the sweet
stuff. Rostard's impeccable tailoring had made the white
tolong more austere than racy. It did, however, bare my
breasts. The sense of austerity shpped more when Brain-
bridge made like a human brassiere with two thick hands.
The trick now was to balance him. I had to keep him hot
but away from below my bellybutton until I got him back
to my stateroom. Or at least until he was so wiped that he
wouldn't recognize what was wrapped around my waist
under the puffed structure of the tolong.
Say, this was fun.
My breasts no longer felt like dead lumps. I was aware
of their firm, small appearance. The nipples stood up like

98,	Justin Leiber
two ripe olives. The aureoles felt, oh, congested and
lively. Perhaps from the cool air, yes. And people's eyes.
And of course the Captain's hands.
"Momma's litde apples" was what Candy had said
when I had put the tolong on in our stateroom.
I would have to remember to think of the Captain as
Mathew. Matt. I would have to.
The moose now stood between two cows, its backside
and rear legs obscured by a hologrammic statue of young
Octavius Caesar. I did not think that Midge knew she
was troubling the illusion of the Petit Trianon, however.
Bertie certainly didn't.
The front legs of the moose were shaking rhythmically,
faster and faster. You could hear Bertie's pants. I don't
know whether Midge's rumored Steely Dan was in opera-
tion. But the chest of the moose was being buffeted in
and out between its front legs.
"The moose looks like it is going to have a heart attack,
don't you think?" I said, smiling at Duncan.
The First Officer choked on his laugh. I could see his
blue eyes through the openings in his mask. His pupils
were dilated.
Bertie gave a final whoosh. The front half of the moose
fell forward. Midge's face and forearms, and the back half
of the moose, emerged from the shining white statue of
the father of the Roman Empire.
"Imperial decadence," said Duncan.
"Your turn in back, Bertie," said Midge.
"My baton, Maestro," said Bertie, emerging from the
crumpled foresection of the moose. He grabbed the Steely
Dan from Midge's left hand.
Candy, Candy, Candy, how can I do this? How can I
stand this? The man is drunk, yes. The man is crazy over
what he imagines as my zenith class. That really means
my money, my clothes, my breeding. Yet my clothes will

Beyond Rejection	99
have to go when he has me on that bed. And you can't
wear money there, either.
Breeding? I'm just—I was just—an ordinary guy. Sally
Forth was a prospector, a tramp of space. Her body was
straight and wiry strong, her face, my face, high cheek-
boned, taut chin lines. We.
Are.
For it.
How we loved weightlessness. How I love?
Toilets can be a problem when you have a tail. Partic-
ularly if you're hiding it. And—ah—the release of letting it
out. Letting it free. The questing, inquisitive feel of the
tip, like some incredible prolongation of my spine into the
grip of a couple of powerful fingers—and the flexibility
and sensitivity of a tongue. And the pleasing heft of the
main body of my tail.
I pulled the tolong up to my bellybutton. Held it there
with the upper part of my arms while I slid the gossamer
tights down my thighs. Gossamer woven from the web
filaments of the undomesticable moon spiders of Vega's
second planet. Strong. Also used for sutures in inner-ear
surgery. The packaging, M. Herbert, the packaging is su-
perb. But what of the contents?
Or am I perhaps an onion, all peelings and no core? All
surface, no inside or outside, like a Klein bottle? And I
imagine an inner voice that says, After the first death
there is no other. No other, other.
"Remember two things, Momma," Candy whispered in
my ear before she went, dutiful child, to our stateroom,
Chief Steward Inger looking hungrily after her, one of
his Napoleonic golden bees bedecked with the tears of
some complicated emotion.
"Remember. If . . . no, when the clothes come off, you
need merely lie back and let it happen. Remember that
he's eager, drunk, and bemused at rutting with a zenith-
class lady. Probably already thinking about telling some

109,	Justin Leiber
buddy about it. And he'll follow your lead in anything be-
cause everyone who isn't zenith class thinks zenith-class
sex is kinky and sophisticated. And they don't want to
blow it.
"Remember that no man can be overflattered about his
sexual performance.
"And remember that only half of you is a virgin."
Those strong, fine hands held me momentarily, and I
looked down at Peter Pan's green mask.
"And remember what Germaine Means said. A tail is
not a sexual organ. A tail is a tool, a sensor. More a pen
than a penis, more an eye than a gut."
I felt the urine sluice between my legs. More of a hiss-
ing sound than before. And no loud tinkling of the drops
against the porcelain.
Looking down, I parted my pinkish lips. I could see
two drops of urine glistening among the hairs like dew in
a ground spider's web. I smoothed my thumbs down the
pen-nib-sized organ. So like the erect penis of a small
male cat. Maybe we are all the same, only distorted in
various ways. Like what you see in the mirrors of fun
houses.
I felt the queasiness and inner contortions that I had
with my first period. I once could press four hundred
pounds. I'm weak, small, female.
I was startled to realize that mine smelled like per-
fume.
It's so small, so small. My questing middle finger
moved more easily than ever before. My flesh inside was
plumper. Slippery. I am only half a virgin. Or less.
Candy, Candy, Candy. How?
"You're like a whale," I whispered as he entered me
with difficulty. Indeed he had all the grace of a beached
whale as he lay there on top of me. But I do not think

Beyond Rejection	iox
that he thought I was referring to the whole of his
anatomy.
First he wallowed on me for five minutes, then he en-
tered me again. Slob. I had to keep him in position for at
least twenty minutes. I used my fingers on his arse when
his erection faltered again. He was so heavy.
A cherub's face turned into Candy above me. She
smiled down at the primal scene. Then four fingers. Four
minutes more at least. Candy waved. She returned to her
invisible maneuvers behind the Horst-Leica.
"Matt," I breathed. "Matt, my Captain." Our fateful
trip is almost done, I hope.
I knew that I got more from Candy's hands as they
briefly held me before she left the ball than from all of
Brainbridge's gropings. Even dear, shy Duncan's hand
against the back of my tolong had been more sensual.
Gropings. Pinchings. Squeezings. As if my breasts were
lemons and his hands robot juicers. His movements had
become more shaky, more crude after the first few min-
utes on top of me. Spreading my legs as if they were logs.
Gruntings. Grunting as he tried to pinch my breasts while
keeping his chest up. Spitting in my ear (doubtless he
meant to blow gently, but he was drunk and careless and
piggish).
"Stay on my saddle, you brute," I said the one time he
had the grace to suggest a change of position. By the
puffs, that remark seemed to please him almost as much
as the one about the whale.
I had to keep him on top for twenty minutes. Candy
needed that time to make a simulation of the crater lock.
Captain Brainbridge himself was the crater-lock key.
A crater lock is tuned to open only to the neurological
pattern of the five-thousand-odd neurochemically active
lattices of the nerves within one person's spinal column.
In practical terms the crater pattern is several hundred
times more unique than finger or retinal prints. And it

102,
Justin Leiber
changes and must be reset every month or so. And best of
all, from security's viewpoint, it is very difficult to simu-
late. With the best sort of licensed and radon-alpha-
sealed equipment, you needed about fifteen minutes to
get a good simulation, according to Candy. Only a few
people knew it was possible. "You and only you are the
key" was the publicly undisputed claim of Crater Lock
INP.
After Candy had left the ball and I returned from the
toilet, I had found Captain Brainbridge and Trudy Dou-
ble arm-wrestling. The Captain's antique sailor rig and
the Chief Engineer's hairy monster costume made a fetch-
ing contrast. For a space of a minute or so they sat facing,
hand against hand, like some tableau of man and beast,
technology and jungle, mind and matter. Finally, the
Captain's superior weight told.
I had been glad that Captain Brainbridge had won. A
defeated man is a suspicious man. He stretched,
straightening his shoulders.
"Your muscles are stiff, I imagine," I said. I reached
both hands over his shoulders, stroking my thumbs over
the muscles between his shoulder blades and spine. My
touch was firm but with the slightest overtone of a caress.
"I don't suppose you'll allow me a rematch in the squid
race, Captain?" asked Chief Double. Her laugh was like a
bark. She was too tall and lean to be a very animal-
looking monster. Impressive, though.
"No, matey," said Captain Brainbridge. He was main-
taining his antique voice. "Ye'll hardly catch me in that
sort of space-larking, a bearded gentleman such as meself.
"Besides," he added, giving a glance down at my
breasts, "I have a most distinguished lady at my side."
I had looked up at him. The fourfold mask I wore con-
cealed my expression. He had nothing to go on but my ex-
pressionless eyes, my Hps, and the prejudiced voice of his
libido.

Beyond Rejection	103
"Perhaps," I said as the Chief Engineer and the others
turned away, "perhaps you would find a back rub some
comfort. I am not untalented as a masseuse."
My fingers slipped to his buttocks, taut within the blue
wide-bottomed pants. "I find it so bourgeois when a
woman lacks the basic skills of the boudoir."
I had him harpooned. He saw only me. Felt only my
fingers between his legs.
"I have a recherche massage oil in my stateroom. Or-
lando Pons. From Rostard's of Houston. A superior tingle.
"Come with me, Mathew. Matt.
"I always have a good wine in my ice bucket. And
there's some commendable Vegan leaf." It would serve
Candy right if the Captain went for that.
"Come."
I had led him away. His eyes had looked glazed. He
had looked to be a very happy man.
Behind us the noise of various officers' squid-race chal-
lenges. One of the armadillos was bare from the waist
down. He was bare because he had been trying to spell
alamo on a bulkhead. His aim was doubtless affected by
the changes that were occurring in the holograms. The
Versailles of Louis XVI was changing into the Washing-
ton Square Park of New York City in the 1960s. Raucous
music had been replacing the Vivaldi. Seven of the rev-
elers disappeared from view inside a gigantic hologram
of Washington Square Arch. The Dauphin de Joinville
was embarrassing an ostrich.
The Captain did not know that the massage oil was im-
pregnated with a complex of magnotransducing rare
earths that would make it possible for Candy to simulate
the crater key.
As we had left I had heard one of the mates stage-
whisper to Chief Engineer Double: "Captain can't squid
race better than a groundhog, but he gets his share."
What was a squid race?

104,	Justin Leiber
After I had worked his muscles and thoroughly cov-
ered his back with the ersatz Orlando Pons oil, I stood
back from the goatish and thoroughly bemused Brain-
bridge. He had removed his mask as he entered my state-
room. His large baby-fat face was flushed. The rare earths
were in his skin, invisible.
"Why don't you use the fresher, Captain, while I mix
up something interesting? Don't bother putting your
clothes back on." When I heard the water running, I had
dimmed the lights, pulled off my shoes, mask, tolong, and
tights. Candy was already in position, concealed by a
hologrammic projection that lowered the spacious ceiling
by two feet.
I lay naked, waiting, tail concealed beneath me in the
bedclothes.
"Come to me," I had said when he returned.
While he puffed I saw the fourfold mask, just barely
visible in dim light, looking at me from where I had hung
it.
After Candy signaled and Brainbridge the whale came,
legs spasming between mine, I once again suggested the
fresher. This time around a gadget of Candy's would feed
a chemical into the spray that would remove the rare-
earth traces.
"Go, love, have your shower. Let me enjoy your sperm
dripping between my thighs."
Actually, I wasn't the inventor of that line. I was hav-
ing trouble figuring out how to get him out of the room
and into the shower without revealing my tail. Suddenly
the words appeared on the ceiling like a message from the
gods. Candy, seeing my difficulty, had projected it up
there. It was all I could do to stop myself from laughing,
or retching.
But Candy's line worked like a charm. He sang in the
shower. I put a heavy silk robe on, wrapping my poor tail

Beyond Rejection	105
once more around me. We will exercise tomorrow, I said
to it.
I would have felt drained and wretched for the rest of
the night except for what Captain Brainbridge pointed
out when he returned once more from the fresher.
"Chief's the only officer I've ever known like that," he
said. For the first time in several hours he seemed inter-
ested in something other than my body. He stood looking
out of my stateroom view port. I saw that he was looking
down the two-hundred-meter-long tube that connected
the globular power section of Pequod with the similarly
shaped command and passenger section that contained
us. And then I saw it. Flashing crazily as one or another
view port or running lamp illumed its mad, gay progress.
Dumbbell-shaped, Pequod simulated gravity by rotat-
ing around an axis running down its length. This provides
weight, particularly as one approaches the portions of
both globes that are farthest from the axis. But the con-
necting tube itself and portions of it running into both
globes have weightlessness. A squid race is a race through
or along this weightless tube, from power section to com-
mand. It is called a squid race because of the mode of
travel an experienced spacer uses to race in weight-
lessness. Running is impossible, of course, and neither
vacuum nor air provides enough resistance for paddling.
You grab things, you pull yourself along in a squidlike
manner by hand, throwing your body forward feet first.
Then while flying forward, you flip yourself so that your
hands are again in front, ready to grab and pull once
more. Mad tumbling in space, or through the tube cor-
ridor.
Or at least something like that was Captain Brain-
bridge's explanation. I wasn't listening much, transfigured
by what I saw out of the view port.
It was Chief Engineer Trudy Double. In weight-

106,	Justin Leiber
lessness, like some sort of supermonkey, she was swinging
from mast to antenna to disc to handhold or what all, rip-
ping along from the power section to my own. But Trudy
Double didn't have to flip herself around after throwing
herself forward feet first with her hands. No, when she
was zipping forward feet first she would grab from be-
tween them with a tail. Her tail. And then forcefully
swing herself forward by her tail, now becoming hand
first once again. Imagine the most beautiful, most exciting
high-wire circus aerial flips you've ever seen. Make the
flips bigger, more graceful, and have them happen again,
and again, and unbelievably again. Space larking.
My tail felt electric.
"You didn't think the tail to her gorilla suit was a fake,
did you?" said Captain Brainbridge. He seemed puzzled
by my complete bewitchment with the scene.
"It's not much of a race, you know," he added. "She al-
ways wins. Even though she does the double course, here
to there and then back again."
At last Brainbridge was gone. And Candy was off to
burgle the crater safe. Wormhole festivity night was the
safest time to do that job. Most of the crew were drunk,
amorously entwined, or both. My tail still felt electric as I
remembered the race of Chief Engineer Trudy Double.
Slack time. Own time.
I put the fourfold mask on once more.
I found Duncan Starbuck, Chief Inger, Trudy Double,
Victor Blout, and Officer Stubb singing one of the mourn-
ful space chanties out of New Scotland.
You could not see below their waists. They were ob-
scured by the concrete and water of a large fountain.
Though thus properly situated for the part, they hardly
looked or sounded like Bhine maidens.
"Duncan," I said at the end of one particularly lugu-
brious stanza. The song had begun, "Annie spaced from

Beyond Rejection	107
Triton and her hair was deep-space black." Things got
worse and worse after that, death succeeding death, in-
cluding, in merciless specificity, the families of both
Annie and the singer, plus the singer s space bat, Annie's
dog, Hardtack, and a cow whose ownership seemed to be
in doubt. And Annie herself, of course, wasted into dec-
orously pale doom by nothing more clear than grief and
loneliness—or, perhaps, boredom.
"Duncan?"
"My lady, my lady," he said, first thickly, then courtly,
as one who wakes.
"Duncan, come here. I have something to show you."
Candy would hate me for this.
But I was sick of stealth and sick of deception.
When I uncovered he stared at my tail. And then with
enormous seriousness he bent and kissed it from tip to
arse.
"You will say nothing of it."
I am whale, I am whale. Sweeping through me, over
and over. I am raiser, I am packet. Gxxhdt Gxxhdt. Again.
Mmm. From tail tip to toe tingle, from gracious finger
to greedy mouth, from haunch to heart, past Eve and
Adam, from swerve of hip to bend of thigh, from tail to
tale, past Duncan's castle and oh-so-tiny olives, hair and
skin encased, till thousandsee, till chloroplast and sunlight
make life, till all the Earth sends up grasses. Again.
Mmm.
Returning from Duncan's suite I passed Brainbridge's
office. Hope Candy got something, captain mathew ahab
brainbridge, commanding was what the billet plaque
said. "Got you" was what I said.
I was drifting off to sleep at five, spent. In a few hours
Pequod would reenter normal space, without much more
ado than a cork released under water might make in

108,	Justin Leiber
reaching the surface. The problem was getting in right.
Getting out took care of itself.
In moving about above, Candy had displaced a mini-
spot that had illumed the cherubs and lovers of the ceil-
ing. Now the light shone down and from behind the
mask. I had put the mask over the top of the open ward-
robe door. And the air system must have just kicked in
because the mask was swaying. Swaying so that the light
coming through the eye sockets waxed and waned. As if
the eyes were moving, peering.
The black-and-green quarters of the mask's right half
seemed to bleed together and separate, again and again.
The black forehead was the dominated woman. The
green cheek and jaw was the maleless woman. You could
read in it that I had lost my virginity and that I had been
male-dominated. Male-dominated, the whale atop spum-
ing in my ear.
Yet I had manipulated Captain Brainbridge. I had
used, though not in the way that he had used. In a way I
had won. When I was Ismael Forth I had sometimes felt
contempt at premodern women, at housewives, and at
house husbands for that matter. An easy ride, Ismael
Forth had thought.
But then, why had I felt filthy after my session with
Brainbridge? Why had I felt I had lost? Lost.
And then I understood in my guts something Dr. Ger-
maine Means had said, seemingly so long ago. I felt com-
pany with every dominated person, every adult made
child, secretary, servant, lackey, cur, chattel, plaything,
slave, possession. Our only victories are always defeats,
always reassertions of our status. Cunning, cousining,
suckling up to. Manipulating someone because one can-
not straightforwardly ask, demand, earn, or take for one-
self.
"In premodern society women were not regular mem-
bers of the armed forces. They were not allowed to fight.

Beyond Rejection	109
As late as the twentieth century you would find males
saying that females had it soft because they were not in-
ducted into the vast armies of the time. There are still a
few males like that today. What they ignore is obvious.
No slave society ever allowed its slaves to bear arms. No
really racist society ever allowed many of the racially
dominated group to be full-fledged soldiers. Soft is very
hard indeed."
That was what Germaine Means had said. I thought of
the blood-red lower lefthand quadrant of the mask. It was
mostly in darkness. The killer, the slave rebellion, Spar-
tacus. Could I kill? Would I?
I remembered when Uncle Herbert had taken me to a
friend's quaint antiquarian farm in Williamsburg. He
showed me how a chicken was slaughtered. Some of the
blood that spurted from the animal's neck had hit my
hand. I washed it for hours. I didn't eat chicken for a long
time after that. Squeamish. And I loved eating chicken.
"You ought to be able to kill what you want" was what
Uncle Herbert said.
Would I be the whole mask, black, green, red, white?
The white of full humanness, holding it all together?
Candy hadn't been angry that I had bedded Duncan.
She chuckled at me, holding the copies she had made of
the ship's files.
"Good for you, Patricia. Bet you popped the socks off
him." She gave me an unchildish kiss.
"Maybe we ought to try a Vegan sandwich with a cou-
ple of guys sometime" was the last thing she said that
night. Her laugh was easy and friendly. The mask contin-
ued to blink at me as I disappeared into sleep. Perhaps it
was laughing too.
Rim awaited us.

XIV
I have seen Frangois Vase lose his temper
only once. When I made a joke about
Philpritz Modulation. I replied that a col-
lector of Aubrey Beardsley and S. Clay
Wilson had no right to be so sensitive,
but . . .
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. I, Dossiers
"It's a Philpritz Modulator," said Candy.
She was surrounded by reproductions of Tequod's
papers dating from the voyage that had taken my old
body to Rim. She wasn't speaking to me. Her voice was a
whisper with a strange tension in it. I could see her star-
ing at a photograph. Her hand had reached up to the
back of her neck, the fingers slowly, absently stroking her
spine. I could see her face now in the mirror covering the
wardrobe door.
Fear. That was it. Fear, horror, something like that.
And a grim tension in the cheek muscles. I had never seen
anything like that in Candy's face before.
Her free hand stroked down from her forehead, shut-
ting her own eyes. A slow full breath in, a pause, then a
measured exhalation with just a touch of tremor in it. She

112,
Justin Leiber
stayed like that for perhaps a minute: legs folded under,
one hand over her eyes, the other covering her neck.
Then she rubbed her eyes and put her hands to her
side. Her eyes were cold.
"Do you know what a thumbscrew is?" she asked
quietly and clearly.
"No," I said. "And I don't know what a Philpritz Mod-
ulator is, either."
She turned and looked me up and down. Then she
turned back again and began to speak slowly and monot-
onously and precisely. She turned away, as if she did not
wish to see a human being while she spoke.
"Seventy years ago, when I was really eleven or so, I
read United States history. Congressional history. The
projectile-handgun-control debates of the 2000's. A
congressperson said that just as a thumbscrew, a projec-
tile handgun had nothing but an evil use. It had no other
earthly purpose but killing humans.
"Someone on the other side said that that comparison
wasn't right. Killing was sometimes justified. In self-
defense. In killing to save other lives. But a thumbscrew
was always wrong to use. Intrinsically wrong, he said.
"I looked up the word 'intrinsically.' I found out what
that meant. But I couldn't find 'thumbscrew' in the dic-
tionary. I was curious. What could be worse than a device
for killing people? So I read around and found out what a
thumbscrew was.
"It's a very simple mechanical device. Imagine a hol-
low with three internal surfaces. A fourth surface can be
moved in or out of the hollow with great force and
slowness by a mechanical screw. The interior surface may
be smooth but is more likely ribbed or studded. Like a
simple woodworking vise except that it is fit for no other
purpose than grasping the human thumb or finger. Grasp-
ing and gradually crushing, breaking, grinding . . ."

Beyond Rejection	113
I wanted to go away then. But the cold, even voice held
me stock-still.
"Physical torture. The attempt to extract a confession
or information, or just to torment, through specialized in-
struments.
"And there were others. I wangled an adult media card
and read ancient history, read and read. Leg screws, racks,
iron maidens, the thousand cuts, the strappado, pincers,
the boot, hot coals, boiling water, ants, rats, the stake."
Her voice was still cold and even. Crazy. The eyes
open, staring. And blue and empty, like a clear Earth sky.
"I once tried to explain physical torture to a Regilian.
Oh, it wasn't back then in 2052 when I first read this
stuff, before we ran into the Regilian octopoids. It was
just five years ago. We talked about literature. About
Dylan Thomas and Xenophon, and Storba. Drinking
dacca, which affects them just like us.
"Trylig couldn't understand what I meant. Just
couldn't understand the concept of deliberate physical
torture. I don't mean wouldn't accept. Trylig couldn't
grasp it."
The voice was still cold and even, a clear soprano.
Three drops eased slowly down Candy's left eye.
"We drank dacca and I smoked Vegan and we played
pisque and held each other, that Regilian and me. He
liked my size. But Trylig never understood, Sol bless it,
her, him, or whatever. Trylig never understood."
There was a long pause. I brought Candy her fixings.
When she fumbled I reached for the papers and leaf.
She gave me one look and I backed off. Her movements
became precise.
"Of course, the projectile-gun-control congressperson
had a response. If you can kill to save people's lives, if
that can justify the projectile handgun, then why not the
thumbscrew? Why not the thumbscrew to gain informa-
tion to save lives? Why not? Why not the boot and the

123,	Justin Leiber
strappado, the rack, the eye pincers? Why not a Philpritz
Modulator to accomplish some noble purpose?"
Candy shook her head and looked, finally, directly at
me. She handed me the photograph she had stared at.
"A log entry, theoretically—photos at the end that the
logperson hadn't had a chance to index. They missed it.
Didn't know shipboard procedures."
Candy handed me the magnifying glass. There was
someone, backside up, lying on one of the PequocTs
bunks. Sprawled in a slack and disorderly way.
Candy pointed, under the glass, to a ridge above his
neck. And to the squarish shadow against the bulkhead
over his shoulder.
"The Philpritz Modulator fits over the back of your
neck. There. It has no other use than the domination of a
human body and a human mind. No other use whatso-
ever. Possession or manufacture of a Philpritz Modulator
is grounds for permanent incarceration or mind-altera-
tion therapy. But if some psycheticians got ahold of you
first, it could be much worse. Vampires take care of their
own."
Then, of course, I realized why the body was eerily fa-
miliar. Ismael Forth.
I was now on the floor next to Candy. I was conscious
that some of the muscles in my left cheek were spasming.
I did not know when I got down. I was there for some
minutes. I felt Candy's hands on me briefly. She cleared
her throat and went on, firmly, efficiently. Pulling me into
things once more.
Candy flipped some ordinary typed log pages in front
of me. She handed me the magnifier again.
"See that edge over there. And look at the log page
numbers. Clever, but not good enough. I caught myself
when I was photographing. You can see the irregularity if
you flip the log pages over quickly. The numbers on those

Beyond Rejection	115
pages are slightly displaced. They probably took them
from another blank logbook.
'Two pages of PequocFs log were removed. And the
crew was reassigned to a stint that would take them far
from this part of the galaxy. That means real influence."
I didn't understand what had happened. I told Candy
so.
"Oh, it's not difficult to figure out the essentials," con-
tinued Candy. "The rest of the log is normal. The crew
and passengers didn't realize anything. Except, of course,
whoever was minding the Ismael Forth body.
"You can see the initials of the medical orderly on the
edge of the photograph. The Ismael Forth body must
have had a minor seizure or something. And in public, or
maybe when a steward went in the stateroom by acci-
dent.
"So the ship's doctor would have been called, and
part of the routine would have been to take a photograph.
All that would have stopped quick and smooth, though,
or they would have noticed the Philpritz Modulator. Not
necessarily recognized what it was, but enough to make
them puzzle and ask questions that would need real an-
swers.
"There's a passenger listed as bunking next to Ismael
Forth, a Delbert Sperling, M.D. He must have been
minding Ismael Forth. Must have shooed the ship's per-
sonnel out. But there still would have been a log entry,
and at least three or four of the Pequod's staff would have
memories of a minor incident.
"So the log had to be changed and the Pequorfs per-
sonnel sent as far away as possible. Botation is common
enough but it's almost always partial. This time they all
went."
Candy looked at. me. She took a final drag on her
Vegan, squashed it, and began shoveling the papers to-

125,	Justin Leiber
gether. Packing, sorting, clearing up, and making un-
suspicious.
"Patty, m'dear," she said several minutes later, "we are
dealing with some very big and very careful people."
We had come out of the wormhole that morning,
emerging with plenty of Rim-ward velocity no more than
a few light-minutes from our destination. We were due to
rendezvous with Rim's packet boat at eleven hundred
hours tomorrow.
Bad dreams that night. Endless weary walking. Ger-
maine Means and Austin Worms chasing me through the
corridors of NWRH. My old body, looming up out of the
darkness. I saw some device in its hands. I ran. Endless,
fearful fragments.
When I awoke in my sweat-damp bed it was but six
hundred hours. The first thing I saw was Candy Darling.
She must have heard me in the night. She was asleep in
the armchair that she must have pulled next to my bunk.
Her so-innocent-looking head lolled against the back of
the chair.
She had composed a coded message—ostensibly from
Lady Patricia Forth—that would go out by hyper-F, du-
plicates by regulation going into the ship's transmission
records and to the local Federation office on Rim.
But we were going into Rim alone. I could hear
Candy's even breathing. How was it that I was no longer
afraid?

XV
The older harmonizers whisper the story
that Candy Darling and a psychetician
were accused of killing someone some
forty years ago. While I am not free to
verify this, my own feeling is that if Candy
Darling killed someone, he deserved it.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. I, Dossiers
"Well, I wrote we should go north," said Candy, fold-
ing up the pilot's relief map. "We'll just be going farther
north than we'd planned on."
Her face was grimy from the smoke. There was a large
black smear of graphite lubricant on her forehead where
she had pushed back her hair. The front of her classic
white dress was splattered with some sort of greenish
chemical from the instrument panel.
The air was full of the smell of burning things. The
thick oily stench of the flame-resistant seat padding,
which was turning to a viscous liquid in the heat. The
breath-catching smell of insulator plastics, transistors,
batteries, ernoids, and silicones in the smoldering instru-
ment panel. The acrid, nutty, evil smell of our scorched
hair and his burned flesh.

8,	Justin Leiber
"Quick," she said, "put the emergency pack on." She
pushed my unresisting arms through the straps and
slipped the light pack up on my back. I was dazed.
"March, damn you. Go for those trees up that way.
Quick. They'll be here in a few minutes and they'll kill
us. What's two more to them?"
Still dazed, I turned to the mangled helicopter. One
rotor blade and its tail in the air, it looked like some mon-
strous black insect. Fire crackled in the control and pas-
senger areas. Flame had not got to the shiny fuel tanks
slung under the fuselage.
"March, Patty, and forget Mr. Jacobs. His whole chest
was wiped by the laser blast that hit the controls. Who do
you think is all over your front?"
I looked down at my gray tolong. There was one great
splash of blood across my left breast. And a piece of half-
seared flesh was caught in the medallion. The laser had
sliced his chest strap too. His broken torso had swung
over on me.
"I got things to do. Now get. Double time to the trees
up there. Upcountry." She pushed me from behind. I got.
A couple of hundred meters off to my right I could see yet
another one of those giant signs that said, in letters large
enough to read from the sky,
danger—no entry
ecologically restricted area
We had crossed the first series of them at least ten kilome-
ters back. I wondered why they bothered putting one this
far in. Anyone close enough to read it from their flier
would already be in the firing range of the automatic
track-and-fire laser rifle that had brought us down.
Officially, the packet boat had glided us into Xanadu,
Rim's only town. In fact, everyone called it Rim City.

Beyond Rejection	119
"City" was a trifle of an exaggeration. There was the
Xanadu Hilton Lodge, Rim Port, a small Federation
office, a marina two kilometers south on Lake Mather,
and a handful of small buildings. There was also the
rumored Executive Eyrie, some kilometers north up the
one permitted corridor into the ecologically restricted
forest lands.
Discovered some thirty years ago, Rim was of Earth
mass but clear of humans aside from the hunting and lake
area stretching in an arc some one hundred and fifty kilo-
meters south of Rim City. The Rim City area was a tiny
portion of the mideast of a sprawling northern continent
that covered more than half the globe from east to west.
Federation surveyors and biologists had laid out the vis-
ual grid of sixty-odd automatic video posts over the
northern and two southern continents. But since that time
humans had been restricted by law to an area not much
larger than Earth's island of Hawaii. The Rim City cli-
mate was mild. And it was mild through the year, for Rim
varied less than Earth in orbital inclination as it circled its
sun. You could have snow fall a few hundred kilometers
north. But not around Rim City.
The select guests of the Xanadu Hilton Lodge hunted
terran moose in the open area south of Rim City. They
fished Lake Mather. Or they cast flies for the hybrid
trout in the streams leading into Lake Mather.
And they had the glories of the Xanadu Lodge itself.
French and Vegan cuisine. Total dimensional private-
booth frizzies. An inevitably vulgar but quite convincing
reproduction of the nineteenth-century Hotel Monaco
gambling hall. And small but zenith-class health and sex-
ual accommodations.
There were rooms for no more than sixty guests at the
Xanadu Hilton. That should mean, and probably did, at
least three hundred lodge personnel. I remembered a line
from Isobella Beeton's Zenith-Class Life: "Even with the

120,
Justin Leiber
most judicious employment of modern technology it is a
received maxim that it is necessary to maintain a ratio of
five servitors to every person."
Candy had managed to draw out the elderly manager
of the marina on the first day. It appeared that the Execu-
tive Eyrie had perhaps threescore personnel and, for the
moment, no more than a half-dozen guests. Midge and
Bertie had apparently gone up there. They were the only
Pequodians aside from the Piggs to land on Rim.
Add to that the twenty or so Federation and raiser-port
personnel and some fishing and hunting guides, and you
have a little less than five hundred people. Not much for
even the twenty-thousand-odd square kilometers around
Rim City that were ecologically accessible to humans.
"You could hide anything here" was what Candy had
said when we got back to our room at the end of our first
day on Rim. Candy was laid out flat on her bed. We had
just returned from a talk with the marina people and a
long walk around the Rim City area. Before that Candy
had talked in confidence with the two Federation officers
about Ismael Forth's drowning. I'd snooped around the
Xanadu Lodge to no effect.
If anything I'd felt more tired than Candy when we got
to our room. She was in great physical shape. But instead
of lying down, I paced around nervously.
"Funny that they should have got permission for this
size of ecological violation but no larger," said Candy.
"You could have a million people here without much
more damage. And if you wanted to keep it untouched,
why allow this? Plus Earth-import moose and hybrid
trout. IBO must have used megapull on this one.
They . . ."
Candy was watching me. I stopped pacing. The room
had not made me feel uncomfortable before. I stripped
off my dress and let my tail loose. That would make me
comfortable.

Beyond Rejection
130
It didn't.
Candy motioned me to walk around. I realized my tail
was tingling as it had at Rostard's of Houston. I felt an-
noyed that Candy had realized what was going on before
I did. Candy put her finger to her lips when I turned to
her.
"That's what they all say about IBO around here. Lotsa
money. And they can give your hair a full alpha-lux treat-
ment. Couldn't get that on the Pequod, and . . Candy
continued chattering while she watched me. A couple of
times she moved so that I would cover a particular area.
We found it soon enough. Built into the top of a light
fixture, it scanned the sitting room and most of one bed-
room. Candy took a careful look at it. It didn't look like
that was what she was doing. She was apparently decid-
ing where and how to hang a picture of Randy Krupa, the
electric vroomist.
And then we decided to write letters. Candy showed
me the one she wrote to Uncle Tinsley. It was for me, of
course. "Hurried installation, not very professional," I
read. "It's got visual and auditory function. They put it in
while we were out today. Ismael Forth was supposed to
have drowned in a diving accident south of here in the
middle of Lake Mather. South—where they wouldn't
mind people looking, I bet. We'll rent a view-copter and
go north tomorrow. Don't say anything about it now. It'll
be a sudden whim."
As I read her note Candy had continued to chatter. She
was good at it. I contented myself with an occasional ab-
stracted "Yes, my dear."
Early the next day we rented a helicopter from Xanadu
Hunting and Touring. Mr. Jacobs, our pilot, was a lanky,
easy-going man in his forties. He was happy to view-
copter an aristocratic young woman and her coltish
eleven-year-old daughter. He was less happy later.
We began with a leisurely sweep to the southwest. To

122,
Justin Leiber
the north we could see the line of ecological restriction
signs that indicated prohibited territory. A few kilome-
ters out of Rim City I had begun to hint at an interest in
taking a look north. There were some mountains up there.
Innocent and charming Candy took up the appeal.
The mountains were too far. And it was illegal.
Well, we just wanted a glimpse. Money was no object
among friends. Mommy was a big tipper (that last from
Candy in a whisper).
It was illegal and they were real tough on things like
that. He could lose his contract.
Patricia Cabot Forth did not forget someone who did a
favor, someone who was a friend. Why, once on Vega, a
loutish maitre d' had actually fired a waiter who had
made sure that the Forth table got the last of the fresh
glenna un petit. The next day the waiter became manager
of an exclusive restaurant. And the day after that the
maitre d' found himself unemployed and unemployable.
And so on.
We seemed to have come close to getting Mr. Jacobs'
help when I mentioned a particular interest in flying up
north of the Executive Eyrie. That made Mr. Jacobs look
particularly worried. And adamantine about his refusal to
help. Candy pointed at him. Jacobs appealed to her. Even
such an innocent, charming young girl had to under-
stand . . .
We did not learn what Candy had to understand. Mr.
Jacobs had slumped forward into his seat harness, a
glassy look in his now half-open eyes. Candy took the
controls in an efficient and confident way.
"You'll find some philex in the medkit just back of your
seat," said Candy. "Wipe his throat and put just a dab of
the philex on it. No marks by the time we get back."
I found two drops of blood and a small puncture to the
left of Jacobs' Adam's apple. They disappeared.
"I'll put him to on the way back. Just confront him

Beyond Rejection	123
with what we've done. They'll never believe that he was
just a victim. Better take our money and chance getting
away with it. And so on."
Candy had grinned at me across the inert body.
"North. Upcountry."
We soared up north through the signs that strictly pro-
hibited such travel. Ecological-restriction signs. We had
skirted a cleared area a few kilometers north of Bim City.
Probably the Executive Eyrie. Some twenty kilometers
north of Rim City we found out that the prohibition had
more force behind it than signs. And we found out why.
North of Rim City you find a mottling of grass and
scrub land and forest. Small hills and valleys.
Candy kept the helicopter low as we crisscrossed north-
ward. I scanned with low-power vibration-stabilized bin-
oculars. But it was Candy who saw them first as we came
over the lip of a small valley.
"Zombies," she said. She grabbed the binoculars and
thrust the control stick in my hand. "Just keep her
steady."
I could see the group of young males. They were doing
what looked like calisthenics in a large cleared area. A
fully dressed figure directed them.
"Yeah, zombies. I bet those are Philpritz Modulators,"
said Candy. "Let's get down and out of here."
And then the laser hit, and Mr. Jacobs was dead, and
we were on the ground on an upland plain a kilometer or
two north of an exercise field for zombies. Not blanked-
mind bodies in research hospitals. No, real people, with
real minds under Philpritz Modulator control. Spare
parts.
I marched toward the tree line automatically. This was
my first time with sudden death. I made no effort to wipe
the blood from the front of my tolong. It would have
done no good. I could feel the dampness soaking through.

124,	Justin Leiber
I picked the piece of flesh out of the medallion. One had
to be careful about how one walked.
I was three-fourths of the way to the trees when I was
hit by the explosive whoomp-whoomp of the fuel tanks.
Candy must have set them off. I saw her pop up from
some sheltering rocks near the inferno. She ran toward
me. When we reached the tree line a few minutes later,
Candy had her plans formed.
There was a reasonable chance they might think we all
died in the crash. The heat from two acetylnovine tanks
would leave practically nothing of Jacobs' body. What
was left could be confused into three bodies.
Going south toward Rim was out. We had seen zom-
bies. We had been hit by a device which was nearly as il-
legal as zombies themselves. Under no conditions could
we be allowed to get to Rim City. Under no conditions
could we be allowed to live. So north was the hope. Up-
country.
"We have the pilot's local map, a tourist map of Rim,
and a survival pack" was what Candy said as we reached
the cover of the trees. She pointed on the tourist map to
an intersection north of Rim City.
"It's an automatic video tracking post. Federation, like
the other sixty on the globe. As always, sealed and pro-
tected against ecological poachers. We can use their
video alarm system. Once we hit that and broadcast, they
can't stop us. And I don't think that they will think we'll
try to get there."
I looked at the map. There were several inches between
Rim City and the intersection.
"Yeah," said Candy. "It's about eight hundred kilome-
ters as the eagle flies." They wouldn't think of us tackling
something like that.
After we were a kilometer into the forest we buried the
blood-encrusted tolong and Candy's dress. We put on the

Beyond Rejection	125
survival overalls. Both of us had good walking shoes. We
walked.
I did not talk about what had been reverberating in my
mind since I glimpsed the zombies. I did not think I had
seen my old body among them. But they were all big,
healthy young males. It would not have been out of place.
Candy must have known I was happier not talking about
it.

XVI
Learning to love others' bodies is a way
of learning to love your own. She must
interact with bodies. And not just with hu-
mans. Rejection is still a possibility.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
Something was following us. Some animal. Probably
sampling the waddlers' carcasses we left behind. Candy
had heard something two days back. And last night I had
caught a glimpse of sleek grayish fur when an odd flare of
the fire lit up some bushes.
And now I was caught against a rock wall. The bushes
stirred. First the large hght-gray eyes. They flashed red
when the cat looked toward the setting sun. Toward me,
that is.
Then the long, lithe gray-green body, emerging from
the bush in such a manner that one thought of a holo-
gram. It was the size of a young lion. Bigger than a leop-
ard. And it was not a hologram. I could see the grass mov-
ing where the front claws flexed in the soil, gripping,
readying. The tail, last to emerge from the bush, switched
back and forth.
When you face danger, suddenly time slows down. You
notice details. What struck me was how healthy, how
vital, how muscular, the body was. No domestic animal I

128,
Justin Leiber
had ever seen looked so alive, so beautiful. The ears went
back against the cat's skull. The canines were enormous.
I wanted to run but I knew that would just have the
cat on my back.
I was weary and wary. We had been upcountry for ten
days. Dodging the stingers, smacking at the biting insects,
discovering waddlers as a good food source, above all try-
ing to find a way through the scrub forest that covered
most of this portion of the continent. Our way was about
eight hundred kilometers as the eagle flies. A good hard
walk of twenty days or so if you had a straight road. But
we had no road. And we could not move on a straight like
an eagle.
Like Candy, I had a number of bites on my face, neck,
ears, hands, and ankles. Some were from flying insects but
many and the worst were from what we called stingers.
Stingers were birds, not insects. They had feathers, wings,
mini-talons, and didn't taste half bad roasted, though
there wasn't enough meat on them to bother with. They
looked like hummingbirds in operation. Except when they
dived at you. And it was nasty when they hit you.
They were on us halfway through the first morning.
That was shortly after we had hit the fourth and main
tributary, C-4, of the river Alph. The river Alph that ran
past Rim City when it reached it some thirty-five kilome-
ters south. Stingers turned out to be more common
around any sort of water. But we had little choice about
being close to water. The only effective way for a small
number of people with nothing but a map to navigate
through relatively thick brush or forest is by following
rivers.
Aside from stinger and insect bites, we had a number
of scratches and bruises from our battles with brush and
undergrowth. Most of this final kind of damage came
from our first blundering push to put distance between
ourselves and the burning helicopter.

Beyond Rejection	129
Pushing, tearing, and snapping branches, half tree-and-
bush climbing as much as walking, we had got through
about half a kilometer when Candy slowed us. We could
hear the angry chop-chop of three or four helicopters.
This was where we had changed. I stuffed my torn and
bloody tolong and Candy's bedraggled dress into some
sort of animal hole under a tree. We pushed some dirt on.
We put on the coveralls. They had come out of two tubes
in the survival kit. Made of unfashionable garlon, they
had a sleazy look. Unisize adjusting, they fit reasonably
well after ten minutes of moving about in them. (Garlon,
spun molecule-fine and woven into a surface with su-
perreflective aluminum, was the material for the sails that
space stations used to regain the orbital height lost when
they swooped to pick up packet boats. Enormously wide
garlon sails and solar-light pressure to push them.)
Once or twice a helicopter had swept over us. But they
had given no sign that they noticed us. We went on more
quietly. Some three hours later we had made it several ki-
lometers into the forest. I had been panting for most of it.
My feet had hurt and I could feel the beginnings of blis-
ters. My coverall had been soaked with sweat.
"Enough, let's rest. And see what we've got." Candy
looked tired too. But she was obviously in much better
shape than I.
We hadn't much. The medkit. Philex and some more
mechanical blood-stoppers. Some broad-spec duramides,
pain-killing orthoamines. A bug repellent that lasted us
two days. Some experimental stinger repellent that didn't
work. Two pairs of visual-radiation glasses, both soon to
be broken. Some antifungal salve. Some solar-radiation
protective cream. An all-purpose knife-tool.
The two overalls. Three days' food and water. A pop
tent. The whole survival kit was designed to send calls for
help and to keep people alive wherever their helicopter

130,	Justin Leiber
crashed. It was not intended for traveling, nor was it de-
signed to last. We had a surprise ahead on that score.
An inflatable boat. The heaviest item was the forty-
eight-hour continuous-broadcast survival beacon. The
sort that is broad frequency and carries no message ex-
cept the endless beep-beep of interplanetary distress. The
second heaviest item was the visual beacon, a beta-carbon
arc lamp. Both beacons would first bring people who
would kill us. Neither could send a message.
We left the radio and light beacons and the inflatable
boat. Heavy, useless. If we could make the Federation
video station, we could get off a real message. So it
wouldn't matter who got to us first. The radio beacon con-
tained our only direction-finder. As the instructions for
setting the continuous broadcast indicated, there was a
compass inside—but we had no way of telling what it
said. It was just for automatic broadcast. Leaving the
stuff behind us was like burning a bridge.
The next few days had been composed of two realities.
One reality was the map.
The large-scale tourist's map was a version of the origi-
nal Federation survey map of 2110—a scaled-down ver-
sion of the portion of the survey mapping that consisted
of a Mercator projection square, the 3,ooo-by-3,ooo-
kilometer section of Rim that had Rim City as its center.
It had ditonic color branching, so you had a color scale
both for height and for vegetative character.
There had not been anything significant in the way of
mountain ridges on the scrub lands that could help us as a
route. What we had were rivers. River C-4 was a tribu-
tary of Alph. If we could get to C-4, and be sure it was
C-4, we would be able to go north along the river until
we hit the Increase Mountains, , better than halfway to the
Federation video station. In any planet with significant
vegetation, rivers and ridges are the natural paths.
We had moved what we thought was east the morning

Beyond Rejection	131
of our first day upcountry. Our goal was to meet C-4 and
to follow it north. The forest then was low and matted.
Trouble to push through. The brush was worse to get
through, more problems about where your shins might
scrape, about where your feet might hit ground.
The map had been one reality. The other was what was
assaulting all our senses. What we were enduring was one
of the most familiar Earth-plane forms of vegetation,
something you'd find on Ceta Tau II or on Vega—or on
any planet of normal formation with roughly the Earth's
mass and much the same mean yearly amount of solar ra-
diation and precipitation.
We moved slowly through low-lying, partially marshy
brush-and-low-tree-covered temperate forest. Arrays of
insects surrounded both of us with a buzzing nimbus. The
days were warm and heavy with moisture. If you know
vegetation well you might have been able to tell you
weren't on Earth, or whatever. I couldn't tell the
difference from the plants.
But the sky was different. The blue was somehow more
blue, more intense, deeper, and at the same time the sun
itself gave you less of a yellow or red light. It was warm,
hot, but it somehow didn't look hot. We came to keep our
skins out of the light as much as possible, and we used
our protective lotion on hands and face. Rim's sun burned
you quicker than Earth's sun.
I had been dazed by the helicopter crash and the blun-
dering slog through the undergrowth that followed.
When we got out of the pop tent the next day I felt
scared. I realized how significant a decision Candy had
made for us. The survival beacons were some kilometers
back, unrecoverable. Every step we took made it more
difficult for us to turn back to Rim City. We had food for
six days on half rations. We would have to find some-
what?—on our way. Our hope then seemed to be to follow
rivers, and eventually some mountain ridges, which

132,	Justin Leiber
would also serve to orient us on the map. And then we'd
hit the automatic-tracking video station.
Before I seamed up my overalls, I got out the folding
knife-tool and cut a hole. My tail hung out free from then
on. No more need for concealment. I was soon to find
that it helped to have a third hand for brush.
"First we get to the river. Should take us a couple of
hours. We just head for where the sun is rising. The river
is long enough, so we can't miss it."
Then Candy took more than half her share of going
first, breaking trail. We were on our way shortly after
dawn, fortified by the first of twelve survival-pack
synthoprotein bars. It was to be at least noon before we
hit River C-4. And the stingers were on us hours before
then.
I have said that stingers look like hummingbirds. The
first flight of four or five had bright-blue plumage. I was
cheered by their appearance. Until one landed on my
shoulder and sent its razor-sharp bill through my coverall
into my back. Over the running battle that then followed,
Candy got two minor stabs and I got four more wounds.
But none of these compared to my first bite.
Slapping and stumbling, stumbling and slapping. Slog.
We soon were better at dodging them and scaring them
off. But this slowed our progress through the brush. Even-
tually we found that it was best to stick to areas with
some tree cover. Not thick enough to trouble our sense of
direction but thick enough to cause the stingers flying
problems. They were terrible pests. Even with tree cover
they still got to us. The tree cover was better, though. In-
stead of stumble, slap, stumble, slap, it was more hke
stumble, stumble, stumble, slap, and so on.
Every few minutes of painful, progress through the low-
lying forest brush seemed like an eternity. That first
morning my coverall was sodden no matter the miracles
of garlon fabric. My hps had little crusts on them. I could

Beyond Rejection	133
feel the water moving around in the blister on my left
foot.
We broke into a clearing and I saw the glistening,
deep-blue water of C-4. I pulled off my pack and threw
myself into the water. The blessed coolness enfolded me.
I drank and splashed.
Candy at that point was standing on the bank, looking
annoyed and wary.
"Think about this place, damn it," she said. "The river
might be a good place for hunters. The ones we might
hunt, you've scared. And you've advertised us to the ones
who might hunt us." Well, of course I had to admit that
Candy was right.
We didn't know much about the local plants and ani-
mals. The place looked like Earth. A vacation wonderland
ought to have something like some of the favored plants
and animals of Earth. Plus the local ecological inevita-
bilities, like the biting insects. But the stingers had been a
surprise. I now realized that I had heard something about
stingers, or something very similar. Someone had called
them bee-bees (maybe from biting birds, or barb-birds,
or whatever).
And Candy had heard of kill cats and groaners. The
local equivalents of Hons and bears.
But more important to us were what we came to call
waddlers. And we had heard nothing of them in Rim
City.
Candy was quiet for most of the rest of that first full
day upcountry. We slogged upstream, upcountry, for the
rest of the day. Each of us alone in weariness and the
endless putting of one foot in front of another. We put up
the tent just before sundown that day and lay down ex-
hausted. I woke an hour or so after sunset. I felt tired and
bit up. I did have that blister and some muscles were
sore. But I didn't feel half bad. It's good to use your mus-
cles.

134,	Justin Leiber
Candy was asleep. Asleep and shivering. She had more
stinger bites than me now. Partly it was that my tail was
good at fending them off. Partly it was that I had been
doing much of the path-breaking as we went upriver.
The path-breaker's back is protected by the person be-
hind.
Candy was shivering as much from exhaustion as from
the rapid evening cooling. I pulled the filament-foam ther-
mal cover over most of Candy. Her face looked grayish in
the fading light. I realized then that her physical re-
sources were limited, however hard she pushed herself.
She was lanky. A little over a meter and a third in height,
less than forty kilos in weight. Thin. Eleven years old
physically. I realized only at that point that I was
stronger than she. And I realized that I could endure
more physically.
It was quite dark when I really noticed the stars. The
day had been cloudless. The dark was dusted with dia-
monds. If you have always lived on an overpopulated
world like Earth or even a well-populated world like
Vega, you will not know the splendor of that night.
Rim, pollution- and moon-free, is an extraordinary the-
ater for stars. I was outside now, staring at the familiar
constellations. Rim was less than thirty light-years from
Earth. Not enough of a distance to change many constel-
lations. I felt at home seeing them.
Of course, while much of the celestial sphere was famil-
iar, our angle to it was different. What must be Capella
was directly overhead rather than on the horizon. And
Capella was brighter than Sirius in Earth's sky. No more
than five light-years away, at a guess. I saw Orion over
the direction that the river took upcountry. Roughly
north. Orion's sword was gone. However, the belt and the
four great stars were intact, blazing in the black sky.
But then something came to me. Orion was due north
on Rim. It wasn't just north now, it was the north axis of

Beyond Rejection	135
the celestial sphere. Moving us to a different angle with
respect to the enduring constellations meant that the belt
of Orion was roughly in the same position that Polaris,
the North Star, held on Earth! I did not know how I knew
this. But I knew it. Orion was north on this world. I knew
this in the way that you know something from a thousand
clues that you pick up unconsciously. I knew that Orion's
belt, the midmost portion of that four-starred, four-
limbed great hunter—I knew that Orion's belt was true
north. North.
"How do you know Orion is north?" said Candy from
the tent. I did not realize that I had spoken.
And then I had a sense of diagrams in my mind. Dia-
grams, rotating images that I had no names for. Orion just
had to be in the slot to stay true north. I knew, I knew
through Sally Cadmus' body, a body whose nervous sys-
tem and lower brain or whatever held a sense of direction
just as they held a system for directing the basic uncon-
scious pattern of heart-muscle movements that moved the
body's blood from lung to limb. "I just know it's north," I
said to Candy.
We would come to use Orion as an aid to navigation.
The constellation was visible before the full darkness of
night. We used it to select a distant landmark. A distant,
distinctively positioned mountain top, for example. Then
you could use that mountain as your north for a day or
two. Helped, particularly in overcast weather.
We restricted ourselves to half rations to make the food
last six days. On the morning of the second day up-
country, Candy told me what we should look for for food.
"We have got to find our ecological niche," said Candy
rather solemnly.
"Though we're sampling the berries, they won't pro-
vide solid nourishment. And lots of things are after the
berries too. Those groaner bears and a whole host of birds
and small mammals.

136,	Justin Leiber
"We can't compete with animals in what they can do
too—hke ran after things and grab them. Any animal we
can catch by running or grabbing would have been wiped
out long ago by predators.
"So we need a way of catching a meal that requires our
special talents—intelligence, use of tools. Like something
stationary with a protective shell. We have our folding
knife to open the shell."
Candy went on while we were checking out the river,
without much success. No clamlike creatures, unless you
count snails. Something shrimplike and fast. Didn't man-
age to catch any fish on that or any other day.
"Another example is the porcupine. Its quills stop any
ordinary mammal or reptile. Because it's so protected it
waddles about, slow enough for a human to catch it,
knock it out with a heavy tree limb, and then get to the
meat through the unprotected belly. We need something
like that."
Candy was off over the bank to a bush with the small
reddish berries that we had already decided were edible.
"Though I can't say these aren't half bad." Her hps were
reddish from the berries. Candy didn't have my endur-
ance but she was resilient. Her body didn't have my
heavy, musky smell, either. Two days sleeping together in
the same clothes had already taught us that.
We found our porcupines on the morning of the third
day upcountry. We called the first one we saw waddler.
Imagine a gray turtlelike creature, half to a meter long in
the shell, a little more if you counted the stubby but pow-
erful head and hmbs.
It took us about a minute to realize that we'd found our
ecological niche. We trapped our first waddler with a
combination of yells and branches driven into the ground.
We levered it on its back so we could get to its vulnerable
spots. Then we rekindled last night's fire and jockeyed

Beyond Rejection	137
the upside-down waddler carcass into the middle of the
fire.
We found that the waddler's undershell would crack
open if you turned the waddler right side up halfway
through cooking and then upside down again at the very
end. The limbs and back muscles made a good meal for
two. The rest we didn't eat. I wouldn't have traded a mor-
sel of it for more synthoprotein bars. Or for some glenna
un petit, for that matter.
We found more waddlers as we went upriver. We sup-
plemented them with the berries and some onionlike
thick grass that was good cooked with the waddler meat.
We had found our ecological niche. What I did not
realize until some days later is that the ecological niche
works more than one way. We had found a way of using a
portion of the environment. What we did not see is that
another portion of the environment would use us.
And so we worked north, upcountry along the river
that was to take us over six hundred kilometers on our
journey. The river that was to be our companion for end-
less weeks. Though we got better at dealing with the
stingers and the insects and the brush, each day was a
struggle. Upcountry.
On the evening of the ninth day we looked over our
bodies inside the netting of the tent. The fire gave us
enough light to do the usual checking for wee crawling
things, bloodsuckers, and so on.
I noticed two livid spots on Candy's shoulders.
"What are those?" I asked. They weren't recent bites.
More like a freckle but flat to the skin and purplish.
Candy screwed her head around to get a look at them.
"Those are the stinger bites I got on the first day. You
got one like them on your neck too. Those are scars. Cen-
turies ago people used to get them whenever they got any
sort of real wound." .
I had heard of scars, of course. A few people probably

138,	Justin Leiber
still have them for one reason or another. But modern
medicine can stop them from happening, or remove them
if you happen to acquire some outside the reach of a sur-
gery. Scars. I expected we'd acquire more before we were
through.
"Our descent into the primitive," said Candy. She lay
flat out, relaxed.
And then, in the sudden light of a flare-up of the fire, I
saw sleek grayish fur disappear into the brush. It hap-
pened so quickly that I wasn't sure I had really seen
something. I connected it in my mind with the crashing
noise Candy had heard yesterday. After listening for a
while I turned to tell Candy of it but she was already
asleep. I forgot to mention it the next morning.
And now, late next day, with the sun drooping down
the rock wall behind me, a very large cat. Size of a young
lion. The sunset lighting was what changed the cat's eyes
from milky gray to reddish when it looked directly at me.
What happened for the next few minutes is in some
ways still quite real to me. As if it happened in hologram-
mic slow motion, with stop frames, and in color more
vivid than real life.
But the experience is divided in focus. Two lines of
clear, narrow separate experience. One was the advance
of the cat, ambling slowly forward—every detail, every
change of ear position, of paw, of haunch, of eyelid, every
step forward. That reel runs along through memory.
The other focus is an inner voice, myself talking to my-
self.
If you are to understand what these minutes were like,
you have to imagine the infinitely graceful and wholly
fearful movements of the cat as it came to me. And you
have to listen to what that inner voice was saying, and
saying as fast as possible, like a coach talking an athlete
through some particularly complicated maneuver.

Beyond Rejection	139
Imagine the cat.
Bigger than you. Probably weighs close to eighty kilos.
Got to be much stronger and faster than you. A cat half
its size could wipe you.
Okay, get back a bit. Behind you is the rock wall.
Watch the cat, watch it. Don't lose its eyes. Face it,
you, face it. You can't run from it. Just keep looking, keep
looking, baby. Hold its eyes.
Crouch, squat. On your hams. Back against the rock
wall. Hand up in front. That's the way they tell you to
deal with big dogs. Squat. Less of a target that way.
Now it's stopped. Okay, keep looking, keep looking. No
fast movements, you, no fast movements.
You can't run, so you got to depend on fear or affection.
And it's going to have to be a mix. Can't scare it. Not re-
ally.
Hold its eyes. Watch it, watch it. It's still at least five
meters away. The ears are no longer folded back. It's
showing you its fangs. Okay, okay, keep holding the eyes.
The ears are still up. Why don't you show it your fangs?
You have got to know how to get along with this cat.
Cats don't kill their own kind. Think cat. Be a cat. If it
shows fangs, you show fangs. Learn to hiss.
Okay, it's only a body's length away. Crouching. Ears
back. Watch it. Watch it. Tail is moving. Okay, okay, let's
toss a stone over to the right. Slow hand motion, quick
flip. Distract it.
Okay, now give it a little hiss. Got it off balance.
Ears are up again.
Okay, start talking to it. Slow, even, friendly tone. Talk
to it.
Okay, it's coming closer. Keep looking at it and don't
move a muscle. Don't move. Its ears are up and its mouth
is closed. Closer, baby, baby, don't move.
And then an utterly surprising thing happened.

140,	Justin Leiber
The cat slid forward. Its head from nose to ear rubbed
along my hairline from forehead to ear.
The cat moved back. Dazed, as if out of a fog, I saw
the cat, upper lip screwed up, sniffing the air with a look
in its eyes that an animal gets when it is concentrating on
an odor, savoring an odor.
Then the cat laid itself flat. Not looking quite at me but
keeping me in mind. Since it was less than five meters
away, I didn't feel like trying to sneak away. I relaxed
some of my iron-tight muscles and leaned back against
the rock face. I regretted that I didn't have some turtle
meat with me.
I had plenty of time to take in the alarming beauty of
its muscles. And the sensuous grace that went into all its
movements. This was the kill cat. I had not been able to
decide on its sex. Recalling the name "kill cat," I also
recalled that it was a hermaphrodite, coming into one sex
or the other for a week or two in four-month cycles.
But the cat was never the kill cat for me. At first it was
the cat, later the Cat or Cat.
After letting me look at it for those few but endless
minutes, the cat once more sauntered over to me. I went
into my full defensive posture. The cat snarled, almost
perfunctorily. I did my best to snarl. The cat then mean-
dered off into the bush.
I waited, motionless, heart thumping, for five or ten
minutes, now in full shadow from the setting sun. No
more signs of the cat.
I got up to walk the hundred meters back to camp.
Halfway there I heard a snapping sound behind me and
dropped to the ground. I heard a swish of air and felt hot
breath near me for a fraction of a second. And then I saw
the cat landing less than a body's length in front of me. It
looked back at me, eyes glowing. It gave something of a
bark. And then it bounded off into the bush.
I had to remember that cats play with one another.

Beyond Rejection	141
Play rough. Play on the edge of being serious. Playing at
preying.
Though I felt shaken, I also felt exhilarated as I re-
turned to the campfire. I told Candy of my encounter,
though I didn't mention the closeness of it.
Candy suggested that we bury or burn the extra
waddler meat so that the cat would have no reason to fol-
low us. I argued that what we had left each day was
probably plenty for the animal. It wouldn't have any rea-
son to attack us if the food supply held. There were
plenty of waddlers.
Afterwards I wondered whether what I said really
made sense. I knew I wanted to see the cat again. Was I
intoxicated by the danger? I could hear the quizzical lit-
tle bark that had been the last sound the cat had made. I
saw great Orion appearing in the north, diamonds against
the ever-darkening blue. Was I the hunter or the hunted?
Next day I could sense that the cat was near us once or
twice. At evening I once again walked some distance
from where we had camped.
This time the cat bounded at me. Three heart-
wrenching bounds, a couple of meters apiece, and then it
swerved to one side of me.
Down, I said to myself, and keep eyes locked. Move
slow. If it's going to run by your head again, see if you
can't rub its back as it goes by. Like a bullfighter with a
bull, yes. You rub heads like the matador scrapes close to
the bull as it goes by. Your hand in a trailing caress like
the end of the matador's cape. Turn, keep your hands up,
lock eyes, watch it coming in until it ducks its eyes down.
Again. Pass. Again.
And sometimes you have to slow the passes down. Play-
ing too passionately is close to letting go. Distract it. Slow
matters down.
On some of the passes that second night with Cat, I
could hear it. A low, rough, rumbling purr.

142,	Justin Leiber
We continued these strange twilight trysts for days. I
did not tell Candy. The long day of trekking upcountry
was enough to occupy us. Candy would fold up just be-
fore dusk for a nap, or for the whole night. And I would
go off to meet the cat.
I played a strange sort of mental bookkeeping about
what I was doing. I told myself that I could not be in real
danger because the Cat had plenty to eat. And anyhow,
the Cat clearly regarded these meetings as social occa-
sions—it kept out of view during the day, kept out of
Candy's vision. On the other hand, I also told myself that
each of these meetings was an accident. An unplanned
coincidence.
These meetings usually started with at least one repeti-
tion of the head rub-by that had been our first surprising
contact. On the third evening, turning back after the rub-
by, Cat leaped forward with a little bark and instantly
had all four canines in my left shoulder, over the collar-
bone. I kept my squat, motionless. I felt Cat's hot breath.
I could smell Cat's heavy smell, leathery and faintly
urinous.
We were both motionless for several of Cat's pants. I
realized that Cat's canines were more holding than biting.
I scratched Cat along its throat and chest. I had begun
my usual chatter to Cat, soothing, playful, and, I hoped,
with no hint in my voice of the pain and fear I felt.
I slapped at Cat's back flank with my tail. Distraction.
Then I tried being just a little stern. "Off, Cat, now off.
You play too rough. Off, Cat."
And then, suddenly, Cat was licking my hair with great
sweeps of its rough tongue. And again, Cat was in that
pose, upper lip screwed up, sniffing away at the odors in
and on its nose and tongue. This body—its (my) odor-
was all that stood between me and death.
This minor confrontation produced a further break-
through. That third night we began to play. A restrained

Beyond Rejection	143
version of patty-cake, hand open, against paw, claws re-
tracted. Jumping over each other. Squinching down
under cover, eyes looking out just above it, mock stealthy,
and the other pretending to bumble up unaware. In all of
it my wild and heady wonder was that I was playing
there in Rim's twilight with a creature little more than my
weight but so well equipped with teeth, claws, and mus-
cles that it could have the life from me in seconds.
My heart, my body, was complete in that twilight
clearing with Cat. There was no sense of uncertainty in
our motions, no sense of forethought or mistake. Innocent
of compromise. When I got back near the tent I finally
checked my wounds. Only one of the canines had done
more than bruise the skin. That one wound looked like no
more than a medium stinger bite.
On the fifth night, when I struggled down into our tent,
Candy was awake.
"You know that you are absolutely crazy, don't you?"
she said.
The dying fire's glow lit up her blond hair. But her face
was dark.
"I followed you and watched you with your animal
friend. I gather that's where you've been off to the last
few nights. You're absolutely crazy." She moved her face
toward me and the firelight sparkled in her eyes and
across her lips. "Not unimpressive, Patty. You looked very
good there. The two of you looked very good."
And now the face was very close.
"And I'll tell you something else, Patty dear. Some-
thing I don't think you may have noticed. Because if you
had noticed it, you'd probably already have been de-
manding we recruit your damn lion.
"Have you noticed that where that creature of yours is
there aren't any stingers?" Candy grinned at me, her full
face now in the firelight.
"You were really impressive, my ecological nicher."

144,	Justin Leiber
And Candy kissed me.
The next day Cat knew. It let us see it several times
during the day. And late in the day, when we settled
down to roast a waddler, Cat settled into the edge of the
clearing, a couple of meters from me and a much more re-
spectful distance from Candy. There were no stingers.
We made great progress the next three weeks. Mostly
Cat traveled within a few meters of us. That meant no
stingers.
I saw why one time when Cat had been away for the
better part of an hour. A flight of two of the reddish
stingers peeled off and dived on Candy. Just as the first
was about to hit Candy I caught a gray-green streak in
the corner of my eye. And there was Cat going by, a hair's
breadth away from Candy, with both stingers down, one
in Cat's teeth, the other smashed to the ground.
Cat gulped the stinger in its mouth and then ambled
over to the one on the ground, picked it up, and pre-
sented it to me. I took it respectfully. Candy watched all
this without moving. To that point Cat had never been
closer than a couple of meters to her.
Since it was close to camp time, I set down the pack,
popped the tent, and started to put a fire together. That
was how I discovered the taste of stingers. You didn't
think that I was so far gone as to eat the thing raw, did
you? Not yet, anyhow.
I felt better at the end of the three weeks upcountry.
My body was harder and tauter. The kilometers came
easier. The sloughing part of the day lengthened from
something like two-thirds of the daylight to three-
quarters. If anything, the days were a degree or two
cooler. We could tell our progress by coordinating what
we saw of tributaries and lakes with our map. There was
enough of geographical feature for us to be reasonably
sure we had it right. Though Candy had taken to pro-
nouncing C-4 so that it sounded hke cipher.

XVII
A successful implant displays acceptance
at the deepest and most primitive levels of
being. Where self and the other become
one.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. Ill, The Chief's Report
Candy leaned against the mouth of our cave. We had
fixed the side of her coverall with philex but it was frayed
and loosening again. The garlon of our coveralls still kept
us fairly warm but it was going. From the time unicouple
material leaves the tube it has a limited fife in the air. All
coverall seams up, Candy was not quite shivering.
"You know even Cat didn't try to go out this morning.
Yesterday it had trouble right away. Practically buried it-
self in the dip just below the cave mouth. And then just
struggled back."
Candy didn't have to say that we were in trouble. We
were a good portion through the Increase Mountains
when the snow began to fall, gendy, softly. That was eve-
ning three days ago. By next morning the snow was a
quarter of a meter to a meter deep. The day was bleak
and dim, foggy when it wasn't snowing. We couldn't see
our landmarks—particularly the twin peaks, on the map
KP and KB, that we needed to keep just to our west as we

146,	Justin Leiber
passed by. And we couldn't see our footing. Stumbling,
sliding, falling, we gave up after less than a hundred me-
ters. We felt lucky to make it back to the cave.
The next day was even bleaker and dimmer and the
snow fell more thickly, silently. Only Cat tried a walk.
And lay panting, wet and steamy, after nearly losing it-
self. What had I brought Cat to? I didn't think it could
get out of here any more than we.
The last of our carefully dried and lightly toasted
waddler meat now smelled sweetish. Just a touch of pu-
tridity. It was nearly gone in any case. The two-liter con-
tainer that I had stocked with turtle fat for the Cat
was drained. Nothing left but the rancid smell. The cave
was full of heavy, dubious odors. We had expected to be
through the pass of the Increase Mountains by yesterday
at the latest. We had less than a day's rations left. Scraps.
And the cold burned off our calories even if we weren't
walking.
There was no wood for burning, no fire. Water we had
by letting snow warm in a poly bag. That cost our heat in-
side the cave. And Candy was using plenty of water by
then. Fever.
Before, we had slept Candy next to me and the Cat on
the other side—when it chose to lie there, as it did more
frequently as we ascended.
That night I eased Candy over next to Cat after she
had fallen fully asleep. Between us she had as much
warmth as she could get. I laid awake while Cat and
Candy slept. Awake, Candy was nervous about Cat. Both
asleep, they moved easily against each other, shifting po-
sition in harmony. Cat's odor was heavy in the air. I felt
good about that.
What was I to do with them?
Later Candy awoke, fever down for a bit. She whis-
pered to me while Cat slept.
"There's a poem by a twentieth-century poet. Dylan

Beyond Rejection	147
Thomas." Candy's voice was husky, congested. The skin
of her face was taut over the cheekbones and eye sockets,
and the skin was reddish from the weather and her fever.
"The first nympher I ever knew read it to me. And
when I took up harmonizing too, I read it to my first stu-
dent, a guy who'd trained as a vampire. A trained psyche-
tician but he wanted to get into the real center of mind
implant—the place where you form a way of living from
the mind tapes and the body's latencies. Harmonizing
memories and reflexes. Sensory ins. Motor outs.
"The poem's about the way in which what makes up
your body goes back into living things when you die. Part
of you may become muscle tissue in a squirrel or a seg-
ment of the husk of an ear of corn. A bit of your amino
acid may end up as a flexor in a neurological lattice of
some late-twenty-second-century human."
Candy's voice was distant, automatic, slow. The winds
that had followed the last deadly snowfall were still. In
the breaks between Candy's words I sometimes heard the
faint whistle of Cat's breathing.
"I am eighty years old. I am cynical enough, weary
enough, scattered enough, aching enough, to say that."
I stroked Candy's forehead. My cool, trail-roughened
fingers against that heat.
"I tell myself that I am eighty. But what is eighty?
"This body that I am, that is dying in this snow-locked
trap, is eleven years old. It is so lithe and agile, so young,
so bloody costly . . ."
Her hand closed over mine.
"You know I haven't—it hasn't—had a period yet. I felt
a tremor of a cramp on Pequod and an itch in my nipples.
Now I will end without it."
I knew that Candy had had her last implant. Her mind
was past the limit for implant. By law no tapes would
have been made for her. She would die altogether.
"I have sent five bodies into the world," the slow, mo-

148,	Justin Leiber
notorious voice continued. "I even saw the first one die a
few years back. The body was sixty-odd and not too via-
ble—too old for the ghouls to use. And the mind was right
up against ninety-five plus.
"You know"—Candy gave a slight humorless chuckle—
"you know I was her designated next of kin? I had to see
her through it. Not pleasant.
"I got so stung by it that I began to think about illegal
rejuvenation. It's something the vampires don't talk
about. They stop doing transplants after mental-age
eighty because they have a high failure rate. They also
stop because even if you seem to make implant and over-
come rejection, you get a body-shredding reaction.
"If you succeed in implanting a ninety-year-old mind,
the body you set it in starts to age and break down like
crazy. They did it a couple of times back in the 2050's
when implanting got started. Fact is, Bruhler's equations
predict that a ninety-year-old mind will chew up an im-
plant body at ten times the normal rate. And at ninety-
five, it will be close to fifty times.
"That means that if I had been able to implant her
ninety-six-year-old mind successfully, she would age a
nympher body into physical old age within a year. The
next one would take maybe a quarter of a year. And so
on. You'd run through a whole supply of young bodies.
Funny how you think of things like that."
There was a long pause, punctuated by a snort from
Cat that momentarily interrupted its slow breathing.
"So she, my first nympher body, died. And I will die
here, it seems. But not the other bodies I brought up.
"Suppose that there was a tape of me left somewhere.
Suppose they'd played it in on a body and it worked.
Would that mean that I was still alive? There's no direct
line between this body and that consciousness, between
what I now am and that medical event. What if someone
were just born who happened to develop a mind a lot like

Beyond Rejection	149
mine? That person might be more hke me now than a real
implant. So how can it make sense to say that the implant
is more me than the mind that is more like me?
"I remember my third body. What a personality I had
then. I was a whole lot different from what I was in my
fourth and fifth bodies. You are both your Bruhler-equa-
tion mental structure and the physical brain and body
that are shaped by and that shape those structures."
Candy's fingers closed hard on mine. I felt her eyes on
me.
"Who are you, Patty?
"The body of Sally Cadmus has been interacting with
what was salvaged from Ismael Forth's mental life. Is-
mael Forth isn't left intact, or you'd be dead and the
operation an implant-rejection failure. In a way Ismael
Forth and Sally Cadmus are dead. In a way they are not.
In a way a fifty-year-old person may contain a ten-year-
old person that he was, and in a way he does not.
"The Dylan Thomas poem is titled 'A Refusal to Mourn
the Death by Burning of a Child in London.' The last line
of the poem is 'After the first death there is no other.'
"We're always being born and dying, my friend. When
we go, how will you count the numbers?"
Candy said that last word numbers several times, each
mouthing more indistinct than that before it. After a time
her fingers loosened. Her breathing slowed into a har-
mony with Cat's.
I love you, Candy, but what is it that I love? That
graceful and beautiful and vigorous body? That?
But it is just too easy to say that I love that agile, firm,
ancient mind—that motherly mind. Motherly, of course,
not in some patronizing and sentimental sense. Moth-
ering.
No, I cannot say it is the mind alone that I love.
Think of her hands.

150,	Justin Leiber
I do not know who I am. Perhaps it does not matter to
us.
I could see Orion in the cave's mouth. The bright
hunter was fading as I watched it. Clouds. More snow.
And even a rise in temperature could not melt the snow
fast enough to save us.
I awoke near dawn. The cave was a touch warmer, the
air sodden with moisture. I had been awakened by Cat,
who was at the cave's mouth. Cat had given a little bark.
I could see Cat move forward, nose first, and then jerk
back. Cat's sleek gray-green fur glistened against the mist
that was whitening in the milky dawn. And then I heard
something more than our breathing.
Rain. Steady, heavy beat. Warm air from the south.
Water, water, endless water. Water that would clear a
way through deep snow. I had not thought of rain.
Cat barked. And began licking up one of the steady
trickles of water that were cutting through the snow
cover above the cave's mouth. I stroked its back.
That afternoon the sun broke through the rain clouds,
blue and dazzling. We were on our way. We camped well
into the tree line of the northern edge of the Increase
Mountains. Candy's fever was gone. We had won
through. A day or two would see us on the flats.
Waddlers. Food. And a week would bring us to the Fed-
eration video station.

XVIII
When the implant starts taking over the
controls, that's when you really know
you're on your way.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. I, Dossiers
We soon had reason to be glad the rain had not elimi-
nated all of the snow.
The next afternoon Cat, who was off some distance
from the trail we were making, began barking. As we
neared we could also hear an occasional snarl. Cat had
trapped a large creature, a sort of boar, in a snow-lined
gully. As we came up, the boar was swinging its mur-
derous-looking tusks from side to side, snorting at Cat.
The boar's legs barely kept its stomach above the snow. It
could not move quickly. Cat stood surefooted at the
snowless edge of the gully, snarling when the furious boar
tried to move out of the snow.
The boar looked near Cat's weight and its tusks looked
like they could do nasty work. Cat was hungry. (We were
hungry.) But evolution makes a carnivore cautious about
attacking a creature its own size, particularly one with
good defensive weapons. Cat would stand a fair chance of
getting badly hurt by those tusks. No carnivore can afford
such risks as a steady diet. Solitary lions and wolves live

152,	Justin Leiber
mostly on mice and other small rodents. And the snow
which was hampering the boar's movements would give
Cat trouble too.
We were far enough below the tree line so that here
and there straight-branched hardwoods were replacing
the scraggly, gnarled softwoods that fringed the stony
upper slopes. Candy was cutting away at the branches
with the knife-tool. While we hurried at making two
spears, I was much more aware of the need to help Cat
before it made a serious attack on the boar than I was of
any need for food. Danger is a marvelous eliminator of
hunger.
It was a clumsy business. One I'm not too happy think-
ing about. Suffice it to say that after many attempts
Candy and I pinned the boar momentarily and Cat took
lethal hold of the back of the boar's neck. The savage
grace of Cat's final attack compensated for the shameful
clumsiness of the badgering thrusts Candy and I had con-
tributed.
Within a few minutes Cat, full-bellied, was methodi-
cally and contentedly hcking its claws. Candy and I were
not to stuff ourselves as quickly. We set a fire but it began
to rain. It was some time before we found a cave and
enough dry wood to do a respectable cooking job. When
we were finishing our meal, Cat woke briefly and looked
out at me from the middle of the cave. Its eyes glowed
with the reflected light of the fire. Cat purred. Cat
stretched, still purring, and curled up next to Candy.
Certainly there was a pattern in Cat's genes. It was
programmed by nature to love companions of what it
loved. The hunting pack is built on such principles. So
Cat loved and respected Candy because she had hunted
with Cat and because Cat loved me. Candy was comfort-
able with Cat lying against her back. Was Candy's emo-
tion so different from Cat's? Were thoughts so far from
genes, minds from bodies? We had hunted together.

Beyond Rejection
153
That cave was a trap for us.
Late that night we met our first groaner. A groaner
looks much like a kodiak brown bear with just a sugges-
tion of a gorilla in its forelimbs and posture. They run up
to over half a ton in weight. The one that came for us that
night—crazy with some sort of determination beyond
hunger—must have weighed at least three hundred kilos.
Afterwards we literally could not move it out of the
mouth of the cave.
For me it began all at once. I awoke hearing a cre-
scendo of the deep, throaty, menacing pants that gave the
groaner its name. At the same time I felt Cat slide by me,
infinitely taut and graceful.
Candy and I grabbed for what we had used to worry
the boar. Candy was closest to the cave's wide mouth.
Her spear—a slightly crooked pole with a sharpened end-
touched the groaner as it entered. The groaner flung
Candy's pole aside like a match stick, throwing Candy
against the side of the cave.
Perhaps I helped Cat by thrusting my own spear for-
ward, perhaps not. Examining the groaner later I could
see that the sharp end had failed to make it between the
bear's ribs. It slid upward, slashing the bear's hide, making
a superficial scratch. It was male. Its claws were like rail-
road spikes.
Cat, who had hesitated so long over the boar, barking
and snarling, feinting and wary, now just hurtled for-
ward, a stream of grayish fur. Cat had him around the
neck. The groaner shook Cat again, and again and again,
tearing at Cat's belly with long, cruel strokes of his fore-
claws. And then, convulsively, Cat was thrown across the
cave.
The groaner turned to me, eyes bright, almost reddish
in the half light. The bear would make short work of
Candy and me.
But then I saw the bright red of arterial blood on the

154,	Justin Leiber
bear's throat. Where Cat had clung for so long, with des-
perate determination, gouging and grinding with its jaws.
The blood was pulsing rhythmically, matting the
groaner's chest, throwing gouts of blood against the cave
wall.
The groaner's eyes glazed. The groaner slumped. He
gave a half moan, half sigh, dying.
Candy was standing next to me. Her garlon overalls
were ripped from shoulder to haunch along the left side
of her back. Her shoulder had some scratches where she
must have hit rock when the groaner threw her. The skin
was ruddy and livid. She would have a nasty bruise there
tomorrow. The groaner sagged further, spreading to cover
the whole lower half of the cave's mouth. There was a
whispery rattling sound, and we no longer heard the
groaner's heavy pants.
Cat was sprawled motionless where it had been flung.
Like a garbage sack that had missed the disposal chute.
When I came over, Cat moved only its eyelids, looking up
at me, then letting the lids droop once more. There was
blood, presumably groaner's, slopped over its muzzle.
There was no heavy flow from its many belly cuts. But
the groaner had done its work. There was one long
wound, from rib through belly, opening the body cavity
with crude surgery. I could see Cat's stomach and a bit of
the tangle of its intestines.
I squatted for several minutes over Cat.
Candy took my hand, gently trying to lead me away.
"It's terrible," she said. "I can't tell you how I feel about
Cat. Let's get outside."
I said nothing. I did not move. Candy pulled again.
"Look, we're okay. I'm a little bruised. You're shook up.
But we can make it to the station. We made it this far."
I did not move. My face was wet and I was shivering.
"Come on, Patty. Come on. Cat was a marvelous
friend, but it can't heal a half-meter slice like that. And

Beyond Rejection	155
any wild animal will die of infection witli the body cavity
open like that."
Candy pulled at me again. "Let's leave it some privacy.
Come on. We got things to do."
I pushed Candy aside.
The garlon material of our coveralls had been out of
the tubes for several weeks. It was beginning to fray and
disintegrate. No reliable thread there. I found what I
wanted in the stitching on one of the packs. Cutting
freely with the knife-tool, I extracted a few lengths of
thread strong enough so that I could not snap them.
The all-purpose knife-tool was the next to go. It had an
awl on it the size of a large needle. Using a rock, I
smashed at the middle of the tool until the pins holding
the blades and other tools sheared out. I pulled the awl
blade out of the wreckage of the tool. I put some of my
thread through the hole that had anchored the awl to the
tool. Then I savaged the medkit.
I sprinkled the entire supply of antibacterial powder
into and on the hps of Cat's body cavity. As I forced my
crude needle through Cat's flesh I felt an occasional jerk
from Cat. It once tried to turn to look at me but failed. I
tried to make reassuring noises. My hands were slippery
with Cat's blood.
Afterwards, and clumsily, I hacked away at the
groaner's belly with the long, now handleless, blade of the
smashed tool. Cat took a few slivers of liver dosed with
orthoamine sulphate from my hands before settling into a
long, deathlike sleep.
I sat next to it through much of the rest of the day.
Candy got me to eat a little of the leftover boar meat. The
meat whose smell trail must have brought the cold-hun-
gered groaner. I felt nauseated. After a time Candy man-
aged to get me to he down. I could hear Cat's shallow
breathing.
Candy and I had said nothing from the time I began

156,	Justin Leiber
pulling thread out of the pack. My hands were covered
with blood and my face must have been besmeared with
it, for I remember wiping tears and sweat away from my
eyes. Candy must have thought I was crazy. Maybe I
was.
But Cat lived.
After the waiting, the rest was not difficult. Though by
the time we reached the automatic-tracking Federation
station three weeks later, Candy and I looked like we
belonged to the stone age. The garlon overalls gave out
completely, shredding and tufting and tearing like tissue
paper. For two days, once we had started, we wore folds
of groaner hide but they stank and attracted insects, so
we set them aside. After a day it felt perfectly natural to
walk naked. Out of the mountains the daytime tempera-
tures were warm enough. We kept one pack but even that
was lifted by some creature. We were still carrying stakes,
mine tipped by the long knife blade, Candy's by a
groaner claw. Cat was with us, almost wholly healed,
breathing vitality. We got Cat moving a week after the
groaner attack, though earlier we'd had to stretcher Cat
out of the cave with two poles wound round with the
tent. The groaner had begun to reek after two days, at-
tracting every sort of creature.
We found the station easily enough. Fortunately it was
located down in the V formed by the join of two north-
ward-flowing rivers. At three or four kilometers distance
we saw the beacon pole from a hillock near the river we
were following.
Cat entered the small two-room station with us. Apart
from the beacon pole and the entrance stairs, the station
was below ground. Minimum ecological interference.
I do not think that I have ever felt as happy as I felt
striding those last meters toward the station. I felt healthy
and taut. Fifteen minutes in the station's tiny fresher took

Beyond Rejection	157
care of much of our stone-age quality. There were clothes
to put on too. Simple overalls but the material felt more
natural than garlon. We had called Rim City's Federation
office as soon as we got inside. Though the place was
called a video station, voice transmission was all that was
possible. I told the increasingly excited man who an-
swered on the emergency Federation band who and
where we were. Then Candy took over to explain why
we'd split. She asked for a tight beam check. Then she
identified herself and explained about me and the Phil-
pritz Modulated zombies and all. The guy picked up on it
after a while and got the officer in charge on a hook. The
heaver and packet personnel were nominally Federation
and probably could be depended on in a showdown. We
were told to get off the air unless we had a real emer-
gency. And we were told to wait by the radio. They
would be here in four or five hours by helicopter.
After freshing, the three of us half dozed. We would
hear the sound of the rotors. They would be surprised by
Cat. We would have to get them all inside the helicopter
while we said goodbye to Cat. No point in taking risks.
In fact they came in less than three hours. And we did
not hear the sound of rotors. They came by light plane,
gliding the last few kilometers with silent engines, land-
ing a few hundred meters away in a meadow. And they
were not Federation.
The diethyl nitrous oxide that they fed the ventilation
system flipped me from half sleep into unconsciousness.
The first and last impression I had that something was
wrong was just that I knew I was going to sleep too fast.
Sleep did not come at you like a floor to which you were
falling. Sleep did not crush you out.

XIX
The implant mind must give up and over-
come the most intimate bodily relationship
that humans ever know.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook,
Append. Ill, The Chief's Report
I was shaken out of unconsciousness hand- and ankle-
cuffed, with a fragmenting headache and someone on top
of me. Pain was what got me half awake. My tail was
mostly running down one of my legs under the coverall.
But a few inches of it were uncomfortably coiled up
under my buttocks and I was being pushed painfully
back on it. I was still so groggy from the gas that I wasn't
fully conscious. It was like a painful dream.
The person on top of me was breathing hoarsely next to
my ear. Perhaps I made some sound, for the breathing
paused for a moment. The person's hands were on my
back. I was being hugged, rhythmically. Why?
You have to remember I really wasn't yet capable of full
consciousness.
Then I realized that my coverall was unzipped down
the front. And the person was male. And I felt, besides
the pain in my tail and the pressure between my legs, a
tingling realization. I was weightless. I was in space.
That was why the guy was hugging me. Rape is more

160,	Justin Leiber
difficult in weightlessness. A man has to pull himself into
you. He can't just lift himself up and let gravity push him
into you.
I suppose I was lucky that I was so groggy. On what
seemed to be an emergency surgery shelf, my body was
pulled flat and firmly secured by plastic cuffs. I couldn't
have resisted if I had been wide-awake. Though I knew
his penis had entered me, I felt more nausea than pain.
When I was fully conscious several minutes later, I was to
feel real soreness. As it was, I don't think he realized I
was partially awake.
It went on and on. I felt humiliation and anger, yes.
But abstractly, distantly. The sound of his panting and the
half-articulate mumbles that began as he nearly climaxed
—this hit me much more than the peculiarly distant rub-
bing of unprepared flesh.
Finally it was over.
I had blinked my eyes open enough to confirm that I
was in a small private-business planetary ship. In particu-
lar I was in the kitchen, which normally doubles as a sur-
gery. The light hurt. I kept my eyes closed as he got off
me. What had happened?
"Pleasure before business, my little zombie maiden," he
said. "Though I suppose you missed the pleasure. There'll
be plenty more when you're awake. We'll have you
around in a bit."
There was an evil yet familiar tone to his soliloquy. As
if I were hearing a familiar voice distorted by some form
of frequency modulation.
I felt the prick of a hypodermic needle. I felt a rush of
warmth in my blood. My nausea washed away as I be-
came fully awake.
"The modern methods didn't work so well with your
little brat. And I had to ditch Dr. Sperling. We shall see
what traditional methods will do for us.
"Wake, my dear."

Beyond Rejection	161
That last request was coupled with a stinging slap. My
eyes popped open. Wide.
Before me stood Ismael Forth. The old body.
It looked different. Nastier. Unhealthy perhaps. There
seemed to be more tremor in the hand movements.
I saw, of course, the Ismael Forth body. I could not—
cannot—say how much of the difference I saw was really
there or a product of my altered viewpoint. (You have
never looked directly at your own face. You have seen
your face only in mirrors—or in photographs, videos, holo-
grams. Who knows how strange your face would look to
you if you could see it directly?)
At first sight I felt amazement. This lasted but an in-
stant. It was hate at second sight. I knew who this was.
This person had kidnapped Ismael Forth. And caused my
first death. Those zombies Candy and I saw from the heli-
copter were for this maniac.
The person who had slapped me flipped around, float-
ing, as his whirling slowed, toward what would have been
the ship's ceiling under gravity. When you hit downward
in weightlessness, you go upward. He obviously hadn't
had a lot of experience with weightlessness. Indeed, he
got his hands out just in time to save himself a good
smash on the head. (One of the confusing and dangerous
features of weightlessness for the inexperienced is that
weight but not inertia is lost. If you hurtle yourself across
a big room in weightlessness, you won't fall to the floor,
but you will hit the wall on the other side of the room as
hard as if you hurtled yourself right at the wall on Earth.
They wouldn't let the passengers on Pequod into the
weightless section because of the danger of concussion.)
Gingerly, lubberhold to lubberhold, the Ismael Forth
body returned to me. Heavy, muscular, a little fat. The
man who pulled himself into me was strong.
He came toward me with a collar in his hand. His
lubber's slippers were once more adhering to the deck

171,
Justin Leiber
fabric. He must have slapped me quite hard to have
pulled even one slipper from the deck. Now I saw that
there was a metal device bonded to the back of the collar.
Suddenly he had it around my neck. I jerked convulsively
in all the small ways that my bonds allowed. The inner
surface of the collar felt oily, used. I could smell the stale
odor of an earlier occupant. I could smell vomit.
"Awake now, aren't you?" that hateful haunting voice
said. "And you know what I just put on you. Your little
protegee was wired up to stop Dr. Sperling's drugs. The
doctor said that no one but a CID special would have
that sort of psychological prep. To be sure, the doctor
might have exaggerated to excuse his mistake. But you
are no innocent tourist, obviously."
He looked appraisingly into my eyes. "You would do
well not to make a mistake with me."
I had a Philpritz Modulator around my neck. I could
feel odd twinges from my spine where the metal unit now
rested.
"The doctor is now dead. He would have found it
difficult to explain the implant equipment and the zom-
bies whenever your backup team arrived. In any case I
would not have him along. He's a traceable identity. I am
not. I must disappear now. We have another operation."
Except for an occasional savage gleam, he had all the
air of a genial doctor explaining health to an adolescent.
The occasional body tremor was probably what Candy
would have called a symptom of over-age implant. This
person must run through bodies every few months, al-
ways on the edge of rejection and mental breakdown.
Candy, where are you?
"Now, you must understand some very simple facts. I
know you are CID, a Federation agent. You have as-
sumed the name Patricia Cabot Forth. I would have ex-
pected a fake name even if you weren't so stupidly cocky
as to have taken the name of one of the zombies. I can

Beyond Rejection	163
just imagine you hotshots inventing code names like Op-
eration Forth Filled or Forth Right. You pitiful young-
sters."
He looked down at me and patted the Philpritz Mod-
ulator. "I am not a fool. Without Dr. Sperling I cannot do
a full synch integration. I cannot order you about through
this P.M.
"But that probably doesn't matter. Anyone wired up to
stop interrogation drugs would probably explode if you
tried genuine Philpritz control. Sperling said that and I
am sure he was right. He also said it would be perfectly
safe to use the P.M. as I'm using it. Just as a device to
paralyze your voluntary muscles.
"Pity if he's wrong and you die before I'm finished. But
I need the control over you. Particularly since some of
what I intend for you may mean I'll have to take off your
cuffs. Of course I am much stronger than you but there's
very little point in being incautious.
"You'll also find that the kinds of paralysis I can pro-
duce with the P.M. are very convincing, very—how am I
to put it?—painful. Just fiddling with the P.M. There were
two bodies that turned out to have hidden discontinuities.
Couldn't take me as implant. So I played with them to
find out what you could do with just a nonsynched P.M.
You will find that your most fervent wish is that your fa-
ther and mother never met. You'll pray for death like a
thirsty man for water.
"But I have more powerful means than P.M. More
powerful. More traditional, certainly, and more bloody.
Medieval in the original sense.
"That's a time I've always felt I was from. I should
have been a medieval prince. Or perhaps a fanatic Puri-
tan, as my name suggests. And we are now at the first
stage of that subtle sequence that they understood so well
then. I am showing you the instruments, Pat dear."

164,	Justin Leiber
He turned a switch that put me and the operating shelf
upright with respect to the room.
"There, there, now," he said, zipping up my coverall
partway. "Think of me as your doctor."
He pulled a control chip from his pocket and punched
a few keys.
I felt the horribly desperate feeling you get when you
are drowning, when you can't get any air into your lungs.
And I couldn't move a muscle, though every part of me
was screaming Move, move anywhere, move anything,
MOVE.
Then it stopped and I could see him again. He waved
the control chip in front of me.
"First instrument. A very mild demonstration."
He patted my cheek.
"My dear Patricia Forth, permit me to introduce my-
self. I am Norman Saylor Mather. My mind is ninety-
seven years old and nothing, absolutely nothing, is going
to stop me living out the years I can add by frequent
implantation. Nothing.
"As an experienced special you must have understood—
even before I mentioned my name—that I cannot let you
live. But you are going to find out that there are many
worse things than death, my dear. There is only one ques-
tion between us: that is whether or not you are going to
die in the comparatively painless way that your partner
Candy did when Dr. Sperling's drugs tripped her special
self-destruct circuits."
Candy, I will kill him for you somehow. I swear it,
Candy.
"Oh, you didn't know she was dead, did you? Oh, yes."
He smiled again, the genial doctor. "Yes. You know, we
started on her first just because you got an extra dose of
the gas. You rolled over next to one of the vents.

Beyond Rejection	165
"So we flew you straight back to the manor under-
ground. Had to leave a man behind to get you back.
"Sperling said you weren't going to be out of it for
hours, even with a litde help. But we got the kid out real
quick. Then Sperling gave her something to open her up
and she turned cyanotic the moment the drug hit her
vein.
"Hated to see it happen. It would have been amusing
to have played around with her. Attractive.
"Then we knew we were in trouble. You weren't inno-
cent tourists who stumbled on something. Stumbled on
something that even an innocent would realize was so il-
legal that the baddies would want them dead. You were
agents and there was someone behind you. So we had to
get out of there. And we'd take you because we still
needed to find out what you knew.
"I didn't want to kill Sperling. But he couldn't come
and he could be interrogated. Besides, he had blundered."
He spoke as if he wanted to convince me that he had
been rational rather than merely angry, crazy angry. I
will kill him for you, Candy.
"So I got out of there fast. Me and my baggage—you
and a few instruments—took the packet. And I transferred
from the station to this IBO operations yacht.
"And I am now going to find out what you know. If
you cooperate I promise you a painless death. Yes?"
He paused. I said a word.
"Cat?"
"Yes, the kill cat. That was quite a surprise for us. The
gas didn't have as much of an effect on the animal. It
could work its jaws but not its limbs. Fell over when it
tried to get Mannings. I zapped it out of pure hunting
reflexes. Magnificent beast. I regret I wasn't able to bring
it back as a trophy. What on earth was that damned beast
doing there?"
I will kill him for you.

66,
Justin Leiber
My face must have shown him something.
"Well, my dear Pat, it isn't important for me to know
that."
"There is one thing you have to understand about what
happens now." He brought out what looked like a medkit
bag. He talked as he opened and unpacked it.
"I am going to introduce you to torture. Something an-
cient that I understand quite as well as Dr. Sperling ever
understood his drugs. Torture, rather than drugs, is what
the ancients used to extract information. What you have
to understand is the relationship between the tortured
and the torturer."
He was laying out devices—modern, handmade, not
manufactured devices—on a magnetized panel. His hand
flicked out to give me another stinging slap. It was as
hard as before but he had braced himself better so he did
not lose floor contact.
"Pay attention, my dear.
"As a creature of the present age you may not have
even heard of physical torture, of the efficient use of pain.
You probably don't know what intense, stabbing, re-
peated, unending pain is. What you might think is that
the torturer—that's me—applies pain until the tortured—
that's you—is willing to say something. Rationally, at
some point the pain will be enough to make you open
your mouth.
"But it's not that simple."
He punctured this last comment with a cruel punch
just below my ribs, a punch that opened my mouth.
"The problem is that the torturer has to be sure that
what he is told is the truth. He has to be sure that he isn't
being told lies. Most of the time the torturer can't check
whether he is being told the truth.
"Suppose you tell me I will be safe down on Rim for at
least another week. If I check this by waiting, and you
are lying, I'm caught. So the torturer can't just force you

Beyond Rejection	167
to say anything. The torturer has to own you, has to drive
you so crazy with pain and fear that you'll blurt out the
truth and he'll know it's the truth."
His hand snaked out and patted my cheek.
"Pain will break you, my dear. I will break you. I will
be your psychotherapist, your confessor, your father, your
high priest.
"You will come to fear me above all things, you will
beg me for death, you will watch me like the most devout
worshiper watches his god. Eventually, you will hate
yourself so much that you will love telling the truth."
He reached for one of his devices.
"That's why the ancient religious torturers, the inquisi-
tors, were the best at torture. They understood that tor-
ture is an extreme form of religious conversion.
"At some point I will know that you are so far gone in
hysteria and self-contempt that I can believe what you
say.
"I regret that this will mean that I will have to destroy
your personality and do considerable damage to your
body."
I had to remember that he wanted me to believe he
was crazy. He couldn't expect me to believe his simpering
and insincere regrets. But of course he was crazy anyhow,
underneath his slyness. And he wanted me balled up in
this paradox.
He watched me. There was a glistening of sweat on that
so-familiar, so-strange face. He loves this.
He's done this before.
"I used to wonder why the medieval torturers did so
much sheer damage to the bodies they worked on. If you
could cause as much pain working on the surface—which
is where most of the nerves are—why bother crushing a
knee or an elbow? The amateurs of the twentieth century
often prided themselves on not leaving even superficial
marks, let alone pulverized joints. They failed to really

68,
Justin Leiber
understand the underlying psychology of torture, of body
image.
"My rule is that the more gross the body damage, the
less the person has to hold on to. The less—"
He slapped me again.
"Pay attention. I said the less the person has left, the
easier it becomes to give up."
He held up a peculiar and crudely made pair of pliers.
"This pulls out fingernails. You have no idea how painful
I can make it feel.
"But this, this is my special pride."
He held up something of metal and wood that looked
like a hip boot. The metal looked preindustrial, hand-
worked. He showed me the heavy screws that contracted
or expanded the boot. There was even a hammer to help
the mechanical advantage of the screws.
"I bought this from the Papal Archival Museum collec-
tion. An amazing find. It was almost certainly used by
Sprenger's people in the 1450's and '6o's. Sprenger wrote
Malleus Maleficarum, 'The Hammer against Witches.'
The basic text on torture by someone who did it profes-
sionally. He showed you how you could get miserable,
frightened women to confess to horrendous and wholly
imaginary crimes, knowing that this confession would
mean the final agony of slowly burning on the stake. He
got them to believe they did the imaginary crimes they
confessed. He got their broken, pain-seared bodies to kiss
his hands in penance for the imaginary crimes. He tri-
umphed over bodies!
"Do you know what a leg screw is, dear Pat?" he said,
waving that ancient horror in my face. There were discol-
orations in the ancient wood. Stains. Old and new.
A centimeter of muscle spasmed rhythmically in his
cheek. He put the boot aside.
"You understand that I am showing you the instru-
ments. When the Pope let the inquisitors have Galileo, he

Beyond Rejection	169
told them they could do nothing more than show Galileo
the instruments. And they did it. Galileo recanted his own
science, his pride, his life's work. All that, and all they did
was talk to him. And show him how some physical instru-
ments worked. A purely psychological victory!"
I will kill him.
He went on with his lecture for a time. There were sev-
eral more devices. I did not listen much. I watched his
sweating, spasming face. Grossly, he was that familiar yet
strange late-twenties strong male body. Yet the little signs
of tremor were appropriate to someone very old—or some-
one with a degenerative nervous disease. Candy had said
that someone like this would chew up young bodies. How
much longer could he last?
Now he was heating the tips of pencil-sized metal rods.
They developed a ruddy glow inside the familiar spheri-
cal flame that weightlessness produces.
He took the Philpritz Modulator control chip from his
shirt pocket. He tapped it while I tried to prepare for the
suffocating horror that had happened before. But all I felt
was a kind of slackness through my body. A muscular
numbness. No shortness of breath.
"You will note, my dear, that you cannot move your
arms or legs. With this setting you can breathe and move
your facial muscles and so on. But you can't move your
arms and legs. You are functionally incapacitated. Help-
less. You have no idea how this helplessness intensifies
pain.
"But you will."
He flicked the control chip and my limbs came to life
again. He came toward me with the chip in his left hand
and two glowing rods in his right.
"You will notice that the human forearm is not very
sensitive."
He touched the tip of one rod against my left arm. My

170,	Justin Leiber
body convulsed and I choked back a scream as the bolt of
pain stabbed through me. I felt a sudden light sweat over
my body. And I smelt burned flesh.
I will kill him for you, Candy. For you, Cat.
For you, Sally.
"A bit painful, yes. But notice now . . ." He flicked the
control chip and my arms and legs went slack again. Then
the other rod came down an inch from the first.
Horrible, intolerable, releaseless, unending pain. I
heard a scream at some impossible distance from that
pain that consumed me. Etaoin shrdlu. I felt that the
crotch of my coveralls was wet and thought with mad
irrelevance that in weightlessness the liquid was as likely
to seep up my body as down my legs. From a distance I
heard his voice.
"You see how different it is. How painful when your
body is helpless. And that was an insensitive part of your
skin. You'll appreciate the difference when I burn some-
thing genuinely sensitive."
He unzipped my coverall down the front and pulled it
aside so that my nipples were exposed.
The video com was beeping from the control room.
Visibly, he took control of himself. He mopped his face
with a handkerchief.
"That will be the manor, I expect. I will have to leave
you for a bit." He checked my cuffs briefly. After glancing
at the setting he put the control chip next to his other in-
struments. My legs and arms were still paralyzed.
"Ta ta," he said, leaving the kitchen compartment.
I will kiH.
As he left the compartment I realized that I could
move my tail. It was convenient that he had unzipped the
coverall. The tip of my tail is like a long multi-articulate
finger coupled with a stubby thumb. In seconds I got my
tail up between my legs and had the finger grasping the
tongue of the P.M. collar. I could smell urine and sperm.

Beyond Rejection	171
With the collar off I went for the handcuffs. And then the
hands did the legs. Free and weightless.
I dived for the compartment hatch.
There he was, over the video com, looking away from
me. His head was leaned against the space-hardened glass
of the midship portal.
Sometimes you do something as if you know exactly
how to do it—and you do know exactly how to do it—but
you have no conscious sense that you know how.
I slid myself into position against the firm hatch stan-
chion and pushed off like an acrobat—maximum muscle
power and maximum control. I (we?) flipped half across
the compartment and I came into him boots first, legs
ramrod stiff, the whole inertia of my body hitting the
back of his head like a hammer. Caught between my
boots and the portal, his head crumpled with a dull liquid
sound hke a watermelon.
I think that I will call myself Sally. Sally Forth.
I spaced the body.
The video com was bust. His legs had jerked across as
he died, wrecking the Vernier settings. Could be fixed but
I won't bother. I could reach the Rim station by dead
reckoning. I wouldn't need the radar or the computer. I
suddenly realized that I probably could use the naviga-
tional computer.
Ismael Forth had never spaced. But Sally Cadmus had.
As I set the manual controls I realized that my boots
were slippery. I looked down. Mather's blood was
smeared over the smooth leather of my boots. I did not
think that I would clean them now.
Cat was dead. Candy was dead. And I would mourn
for them later.
In the midst of death I was alive. I was myself.
Again.

XX
Germaine Means announced that the pa-
tient is beyond rejection.
—I. F. + S. C. Operation Logbook
Gxxhdt.
Etaoin shrdlu. Mmm.
Anti-M.
Away mooncow Taddy-fair fine. Fine again, take.
Away, along, alas, alung the orbit-run, from swerve of
space to wormhole wiggle, brings us. Start now. Wake.
So hear I am now coming out of nothing like Eros out
of Death, knowing, Anti-M.
"Auntie Em," I blurted, goggling at Germaine Means. I
was in a hospital bed.
"Antagonistic-Null Tracking Measure, actually," re-
plied Germaine. "When you reach ANTM that means we
have a successful implant. It seems very quick when it
happens—like the point where the room flips right side up
when you are wearing prism lenses that turn your image
upside down. Imagine those flips happening all over the
place. You're all together, mind and body." She reached
and held my hand. Firmly. Flesh on flesh.
"Though I would think that Mother Em would be
more appropriate than Auntie," added Germaine. Her hps

174,	Justin Leiber
quivered for a mini-second and a huge smile burst across
her face. She laughed. Laughed like all the world was
friends.
They—meaning Frangois Vase, who played Mather and
Brainbridge; Candy Darling, who played herself, the
Other; Austin Worms, M. Herbert and so on; Germaine,
who I now saw had in her a httle of Trudy Double and a
little of myself—they, the people who had played the
characters, looked down at me.
"I trust you enjoyed your time in Pequod," said Austin
Worms in a right fair imitation of Chief Steward Inger.
He grinned, his face flushed. "This time they let a soma-
tician play a couple of roles too. So glad you made it."
And there was Candy, holding my eyes, half apolo-
getic, half proud and happy. Candy. There she was half
altered and half the same. Candy. Candy was alive. Tears
came.
Frangois Vase coughed.
"As a devotee of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
American culture, I have always thought that an ancient
video of that time—The Wizard of OZ—represents what
really goes on in the successful harmonization of a mind
implant. In a way it is like all good stories are implicitly.
But the Wizard of OZ video is explicit. It's the story of a
mixed-up person in Kansas coming to understand herself
and her world better through hving through the fantasy
world of OZ.
"Only, of course"—Frangois' eyes twinkled—"Kansas
was a story too. As we—not just you—are all a story if we
are to be understood. In order to tune mind and body you
have to move them around. You can't correct a dishar-
mony between eye and hand except by having eye watch
while hand moves. To tune a mind and body you must
have much of that stuff woven into personahty and his-
tory. You need a story.
"We have here a story of Rim, of Pequod, of Houston.

Beyond Rejection	175
And if the Rim was just what we imagined, not the 'real'
Rim—well, this Houston, this Norbert Wiener Research
Hospital is just what we imagine it to be. The bare stuff
of the place doesn't think. Reality is always unknowable,
uh-"
The uh came when Candy goosed Frangois. He did
quite a commendable leap for someone his age. Candy
perched on my bed. The familiar face was familiar on first
sight. But somehow more vibrant. Her hands, those
strong and capable hands, held mine. Her eyes glowed.
"You're here and we are here, Sally, that's what's im-
portant."
"Cat?" I said to her.
Germaine Means whistled.
"Cat's here too, or part of Cat," said Germaine.
A Vegan Siamese leaped on my bed next to Candy. The
Siamese moved confidently up my body, planted fore-
paws on my breasts, and nuzzled my face. We somehow
knew each other's movements.
"We used Koullah in the VAT for most of the cat part
of the story," said Germaine in my ear.
"Zeet chizen, zeet chizen, sgood, sgood, Zally," said
Koullah in her peculiar form of cat-English. Koullah
grinned—if you can say that of a mentally augmented
Vegan cat. Koullah looked like some sort of crazy minia-
turization of the cat I had known.
"You mean you made me up," I said. I said it to Candy.
"You made me up and none of it was real. I'm not real."
Frangois Vase replied:
"No, Sally Forth—that is your name now, isn't it?—
Candy and I, the rest of us, we didn't make you up, we
didn't dream your dream. We tuned it.
"We didn't dream your dream any more than we con-

176,	Justin Leiber
structed your muscles and motives. We posed a situation,
we put people into your world, we got things together.
"But you determined what happened as much as we,
Sally. And you made us as much as the reverse. Me espe-
cially."
Candy interrupted:
"What Frangois means is that his VAT chamber was
hooked with yours so that he felt every emotional or mus-
cular reaction you came up with. Toned down a bit, of
course. Frangois' body couldn't take the physical strains
you were taking."
I saw discolorations on Candy's shoulder. Like stinger
scars, though much smaller.
"Yes, Sally, that too. Stigmata, you might call them.
You got bruised and I got bruised. You can't tune a body
without the physical end of it too. You could call the story
fantasy but both of our bodies went through it."
"And," said Austin Worms, smiling down from behind
Candy, "we had to replace the sensor pads in your VAT
chamber six times. You walked a thousand kilometers
even if you never left the VAT chamber. And you got
alpha-level motor-muscular tone."
Germaine ran her fingers along Koullah's muzzle.
"Cat, too, you know," said Germaine. "We borrowed a
cougar from the University of Houston. The mascot of the
space-ball team. Koullah didn't have the right proportions
for full contact. We figure you and the cougar got on well
because you both had lots of weighdessness experience.
You'll find you know something about maneuvering
around big animals."
Then they showed me their instruments. The VAT op-
eration theatre, its chambers and control modules, endless
relays, transducers, data banks. On one wall, next to a
facsimile of a first edition of Melville's Moby Dick, I saw
a copy of the Dylan Thomas poem that Candy loved.
Frangois Vase had explained to me how the har-

Beyond Rejection	177
monizers had started on the Moby Dick business. Sally
Cadmus' ship had been called the Baleen Blanco—the
White Whale—which is what Moby Dick was. Frangois
and Candy had been unable to resist the sexual possi-
bilities that this suggested.
On Germaine Means' master control module I saw a
thick loose-leaf notebook. The label read Ismael Forth +
Sally Cadmus Logbook. Germaine told me that I would
be able to use the logbook if I wanted to write up my own
account of my operation. Hence what you hold.
Afterwards we had a party in the lounge. We sang
ghoul and vampire songs. And Austin Worms got quite
drunk and sat next to me on a couch, alternating between
kissing my cheek and crying, while Frangois Vase,
stretched out on the floor, rested his back on my legs. I
declined his offer of heroin, though I did do some of
Candy's Vegan leaf. I played with Koullah with my tail.
Mind and body we.
At the end Germaine and Candy led me off to bed.
Candy stayed. I saw her off at Houston Space Port the
next day. There was something between us deeper than
love.
Gxxhdt.
Etaoin shrdlu. Mmm.
Anti-M.
Away mooncow Taddy-fair fine. Fine again, take.
Away, along, alas, alung the orbit-run, from swerve of
space to wormhole wiggle, brings us. Start now. Wake.
So hear I

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Justin Leiber is at present a member of the Philoso-
phy Department of the University of Houston, teach-
ing courses about the mind/body problem, foun-
dations of linguistics and psychology, and ex-
traterrestrial communications. His free time is di-
vided between writing, communing with cats, com-
puters, and cougars, and wondering whether the
electric ambiance of Houston represents the end of
Western civilization or merely its transfiguration. He
has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a B.
Phil, from Oxford University. His academic publica-
tions include Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Over-
view, Structuralism, and many papers with intriguing
tides, such as "Talking with Extraterrestrials," "In-
sulting," and "Paradigmatic Immorality." He has also
taught at the City University of New York, Oxford
University, and M.I.T. Beyond Rejection is his first
novel and begins a trilogy.