A STRANGER’S face peered into my cylindrical cell: turquoise eyes glittered behind the transparent washers of growing nictitating membranes; healing suture lines crisscrossed a bald skull; ears and nostrils puckered with internal sphincters; black freckles would soon be confluent. Dark thoughts were hidden in the face. Thoughts I’d guessed too well.
He watched me often, this stranger. Each day his face was a little different, its metamorphosis more nearly complete. I’d become impatient to see the final form of his disguise.
Red culture media swirled between my face and his. Tiny oxygen bubbles streamed into cosmic lines. I blinked. Film cleared from the stranger’s eyes. They followed my eyes, as though synchronized with gimbals. I blew media out my nose. Twin vortices spread from the stranger’s nostrils.
You’ve guessed my secret, of course. I was the stranger.
His face was an image of my own, reflected from the concave wall of a hybridization tank. His metamorphosis was only my own transformation, For a month I’d been watching the process.
My mouth grinned widely. My plan was working perfectIy. Before long, I’d be unrecognizable. My previous face and body would exist only as a holographic memory in the Corps’ master personnel files. And in my memory, as a death mask yet to be: eyes shattered into eggshells and popped from their sockets; tongue protruding from a mouth filled with frozen, foamy spit; skin as blue as a peeled grape. That image had tormented me for long days and longer nights before I devised a way to exorcise it from my thoughts. I had suffered considerable inconvenience and not a little discomfort to make sure I would never look like the face inserted in my mind by a vaporizing timestone. Why the paranoia? Because if I looked like that, I’d be dead.
I had alwas expected my own end to be random and totally unexpected—like a star winking out of an entropic sky. Death had had no substance before I wore the timestone. And after? It had too vivid an image then: frozen vitreous humor formed a filigree of frost behind ice cataracts.
I’d been warned. I hadn’t had enough sense to listen. What had the sailor called his chronotropic crystal? Deathstone. Yes, that was it. He left space to try to escape the scenario of his death, not knowing the scene was to be played on Earth. You saw an image of your own death in a timestone. You knew how your end would come. You might even guess where, umess the stone tricked you. But one crucial parameter was missing—you didn’t know when. A year. A hundred years. A thousand. There was no way to be sure. Not without another timestone. Mine was gone. There was only one other. I had to find it before death saw through my disguise. I knew how I was going to die. I didn’t know when it would be. It was as impossible for me to accept an incomplete knowledge of my fate as it was to resist the urge to cheat destiny.
So I’d devised a plan that would accomplish both.
Of course, there was no guarantee my scheme would work. But I’d alwavs been willing to take a gamble. Besides, I also always hedged my bets—you know, covered them both ways. So my plot had an elegant complexity beneath its apparent simplicity. Quite ingenious, actually.
How do you go about cheating death?
First, change your appearance more thoroughly than any disguise that could be purchased from a cosmetic surgeon, so even your basic gene structure is altered. Maybe that alone is enough to confuse the time matrix. But if it isn’t, there is still the other timestone. If it can be found. Only one man knows where he’s hidden it. And he is hiding himself, disguised in a mindrider’s body—trying to cheat his own destiny by endlessly trading bodies. If I could find him, I could find the other timestone,
Become someone else and find a timestone. Easy enough. Except I was in jail at the time, about to be sent to a prison farm where I’d have no control of my destiny at all. A real bitch, you say. You don’t know the half of it. But I’d figured out a way to do everything with one simple manipulation. Even get me out of jail and heading toward Titan, where I wanted to go anyway. I was a clever toad, I was.
But I couldn’t rid myself of the nagging doubt that it was futile to try to impose free will on a universe ruled by predestination. I had the terrible premonition I might have only moved myself to another curve on an equation with only one solution set, one common intersection, one locus!
I paddled with my good hand, rotating in my fluid-filled tank. My new face followed me around, staying in front of me on the mirrored interface of liquid/crystal. Subtle changes had occurred. Blue-flecked melanomae contained more pigment granules. Nictitating membrane edges grew closer together. I looked down. A strange body danced before me: tall and angular; lean, hard muscles twitched as new nerve fibers inserted endplates within them; long surgical scars faded; joints were still red and swollen from the polymer mesh used to reinforce their ligaments; bones had new tuberosities from their own reinforcement. I touched places still sore from cybersurgery. Then I clutched my genitals, finding reassurance in their familiar softness. I held my penis in my hand. It seemed unchanged. It looked the same. But I knew otherwise. I flexed a newly augmented cremaster muscle. My scrotum tightened, pulling into its pouch inside my pelvis. My penis followed, slipping out of my hand to retract between my legs in reverse coitus. Pretty slick, huh?
By now you’ve guessed my plan. At least the first part. You know what creature I am becoming.
You must think me mad.
Sometimes I wonder.
The stranger smiled. Red light gleamed from his eyes, darkening to purple. He knew what madness lay within.