28

The very idea of life and all its unexplored terrain unfolded before him like a treasure map. Garth needed to understand so many obvious things he had never thought about before. Sitting alone in a retro coffee shop and drinking strong espresso, he figured that the best thing would be to compile a list of experiences he wanted to acquire. A formal plan for his artistic growth.

The List.

A month earlier, using a frugal amount of the credits Mordecai Ob had given him, Garth had purchased an inexpensive used datapad from a group of Sharetakers selling odds and ends on the street corner. He had gone to visit Teresa, and at the time he’d been hoping to help her, but now he felt guilty about it. The abusive group didn’t deserve his support in any way.

He sat under the coffee shop’s green awning, sipping from a tiny porcelain cup. He let his thoughts wander, mulling over new ideas, the breadth of what he needed to learn. Possibilities and possibilities.

Through hopscotching, Garth could actually be different people, from the ugly to the sublime. It was an opportunity the great classical artists had never had. His art had to speak to each man and woman, to all of humanity. Therefore, he must experience every facet of the human condition from the point of view of each individual, not just as an outside observer.

Nursing his espresso, Garth recorded ideas on the datapad. The magnitude of the task gave him a headache, but he scribed so quickly, adding new ideas, that his fingers were a blur. It was both exciting and overwhelming.

He would slog through his List one item at a time. He had to comprehend being a man, being a woman. Was there any difference inside, in the heart and the soul, or just societal training from childhood in his home-body? If he could swap genders at will, was he still somehow fundamentally male, or did all the differences ride on the chromosomes and hormone cocktails of the cells?

He had to know what it was to be old and frail, and to be young and athletic. He needed to be exhausted to the core from a lifetime of hard work . . . and filled with manic unreleased energy, never able to sleep.

He would be muscular and he would be obese. As a woman, he could be flat chested or well endowed. He would be short, and tall; he could wear different colors of skin. He wanted to be pregnant and give birth to a child. In one deformed body he’d be looked upon with disgust; in another, he’d be stunningly beautiful, stimulating the glands of every person who looked at him. And he would do it both from the male side and from the female side.

Garth had to experience everything.

He finished his tiny cup, the caffeine singing through his system, but he felt more energized than even the espresso could account for. He scanned the List and knew he had written barely half of the things that would occur to him. But he could keep adding ideas even as he removed completed ones.

He had a mission now. Life itself would be his full-time job.

 

After the new painting was hung in a well-lit hallway in Mordecai Ob’s house, the only thing that looked out of place was the Bureau Chief himself. Garth just couldn’t get used to seeing the man wearing Eduard’s body.

Without speaking to the blond artist, Ob appraised the eerie painting of glitter-oils that gradually flowed across preprogrammed paths. Garth had re-created the tumbling breakers from Waimea Beach, but replaced the frothing wavetops with a scatter of stars that spilled into a black universe, showering upon a vague luminous representation of a human form, a soul.

“It’s very compelling, Garth.” Ob at last turned to look at him with a very un-Eduard-like expression. “Hypnotic, but disturbing. I’m glad you’re not painting flowers or puppy dogs.”

Garth had told him about his trip to Hawaii, about his near-death experience. Then he told his patron about the List. “It’s like a quest, Mr. Ob. A specific catalogue of things I want to do and experience.”

“Such enthusiasm! I truly envy you your ambition and your inspiration. I just wish I could capture some of that for myself. Does this mean you’ll be wanting additional money?”

Garth felt embarrassed. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “No, sir. I just wanted to tell you what I intended to do. I thought you should know.”

The Bureau Chief gave him a patronizing smile. “Of course. I’ll transfer more credits into your account within the hour.” His shoulders sagged, as if Eduard had gotten too little sleep in his own body. He began to lead Garth down the hall toward the exit.

Garth hesitated, looked at his friend’s familiar features. “Would it be possible for me to visit Eduard while I’m here? Just to say hello.”

The other man frowned, then slowly shook his head. “I’d rather you didn’t, Garth. Eduard will be exercising my body for another hour, and I don’t want to distract him.”

Disappointed, Garth agreed. “All right, maybe next time. I’ll bring you another work soon.”

 

No longer spending his weekends among the aspiring artists, Garth returned to the bazaar as an observer. Now, as he walked among the stalls and rugs, he gazed upon the marketplace with new eyes. He studied faces and illustration techniques, including sculptures made of colored plasmas, gravity-defying paintings fashioned from 3-D gels, aroma symphonies.

Excited, he took notes, seeing things he had never seen before. Some vendors gave him strange looks, suspicious of his questions and scrutiny. One woman even asked if he was working undercover for the Beetles or some other investigatory agency.

With an artist’s eye, he jotted down details, questions to ask someday. He noted how the vendors were attentive to well-dressed customers in healthy bodies, while a swarthy, hirsute man had to clamor to get the attention of the person behind a chocolate stand.

The incident piqued Garth’s curiosity, and he wondered if this short hairy man had a stunning wife at home, or someone just as lumpish. Perhaps the man was a convict finishing a probationary term in a brutish form, and would not receive his own physique back until his sentence was up.

Over the past century of hopscotching, equality had come with particular force . . . but only in certain areas. Skin color and gender didn’t matter much, men and women, blacks and whites, Hispanics, Asians—anyone could be anyone, by choice. On the other hand, different manifestations of discrimination crept in with a vengeance, creating a clear-cut and striking physical class system. Anyone wealthy or powerful enough could lease a young and attractive physique, while poor and downtrodden people were forced to trade away their bodies to make enough money to survive.

Garth wondered how much real variation there was at the ultimate core of a human being. If he could answer that question, he could make the most profound statement any artist had ever produced.

He remembered the amateurish mural he had painted in the basement of the Falling Leaves, how his one small idea had grown to encompass new details, new characters and scenes. Now Garth was attempting a vastly larger task: a mural of all humanity.

The next step would be to figure out how to implement that plan.

 

Club Masquerade provided the most opportunities all in one place. The majority of people didn’t hopscotch indiscriminately, too shy or too afraid, viewing the process as more personal than sexual intercourse. But many Club patrons already wanted temporary new bodies, wanted different experiences. Garth saw them as resources for his work.

One heady evening, he picked up an attractive ginger-haired woman for a one-night/two-body stand—no strings attached, no expectations, just hedonistic fun. They danced, and touched . . . then swapped, and danced and touched again. Later, during the hours in her bed, the woman pleasured herself in her own body, and then in Garth’s.

The woman played strange mood music and insisted on keeping the bedroom air temperature uncommonly cold. They were forced to keep themselves warm through body heat, which she happily provided.

Garth had been a woman before, and he’d had sex in Teresa’s original body, but this time he paid complete attention to how everything felt, how everything fit. As he touched his soft female skin, her moist openings, Garth wished he had placed his electronic pad within reach. He needed to document his impressions before they faded from memory. In a woman’s body, the nerve endings were different, distributed in new patterns. Various movements produced alternate responses.

He wanted to jot down his observations as a man, then as a woman, comparing the differences in intensity and sensation during orgasm in each gender. But the ginger-haired woman kept him too busy with her own agenda. She seemed very familiar with the workings of both types of bodies, but had no particular interest in contributing to the world of art.

When Garth continued to ask questions, the woman was at first delighted but eventually put off. Clearly, she’d never done such internal self-analysis. Before long, Garth knew the answers and the subtleties better than she did herself.

The ginger-haired woman gave him an insincere invitation to look her up again. After he left, Garth realized that of all the questions, he’d forgotten to ask her name. . . .