Robert Silverberg - At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party

The contest went on and on. Hungering for victory, I grew tense, apprehensive, gloomy, despondent. Candelabra’s design was spectacular, and Mingimang’s was fascinatingly perplexing, and Vishnu’s was awesomely cunning. Some, indeed, seemed almost beyond the capacity, of contemporary genetic engineering to accomplish. I saw no hope of winning, and my month with Domitilla seemed in jeopardy. Her own turn came last. She took the podium, grasped the stick, closed her eyes, sent her thought-projection to the screen with an intensity of effort that turned her fiery mantle bright yellow and sent it arching out to expose her blue-black furry nakedness.

On the screen a standard human form appeared.

Not quite standard, for it was hermaphrodite, round rosy-nippled breasts above and male genitals below. Yet it was the old basic body other than that, the traditional pre-Shaping shape, used now only by the unfortunate billions of the serving classes. I gasped, and I was not alone. It’s no easy thing to amaze a group so worldly as we, but we were transfixed with amazement, dumbstruck by Domitilla’s bizarre notion. Was she mocking us? Was she merely naive? Or was she so far beyond our level of sophistication that we couldn’t comprehend her motives? Trays clattered to the ground, drinks were spilled, we coughed and wheezed and muttered. The meters that were judging the contest whirled and flashed. No doubt of the winner: Domitilla had plainly provoked the most intense surprise, and that was the criterion. The party was at the edge of scandal. But Mortissa was equal to the moment.

“The winner, of course, is Domitilla,” she said calmly. “We salute her for the audacity of her design. But my husband and I regard it as hazardous to the life of our child to give it the standard form for its first Shaping because of the possibility of misunderstanding by its playmates, and so we invoke our right to choose another entry, and we select that of our quasi-cousin Sandalphon, so remarkable for its combination of subtlety and strength.”

“Well done!” Melanoleum called, and I did not know whether she was cheering Mortissa for her astuteness or Domitilla for her boldness or me for the beauty of my design. “Well done!” cried Vishnu, and Candelabra and Hannibal took it up, and the tensions of the party dissolved into a kind of forced jubilation that swiftly became the real thing.

“The prize!” someone shouted. “Who’s the prize?”

Spinifex thumped his huge fins. “The prize! The prize!”

Mortissa beckoned to Domitilla. She stepped forward, small and fragile-looking but not in the least vulnerable, and said in a clear, cool voice, “I choose Sandalphon.”

We left the party within the hour and popped to San Francisco, where Domitilla lived alone in a spherical pod of a house suspended by spider-cables a mile above the bay.

I had my wish. And yet she frightened me, and I don’t frighten easily.

Her fiery mantle engulfed me. She was nineteen, I was ninety-three, and she ruled me. In that frosty blue radiance I was helpless. Five Shapings, and only nineteen? Her eyes were narrow and cat-yellow, and there were worlds of strangeness in them that made me feel like a mud-flecked peasant. “The famous Sandalphon,” she whispered. “Would you have picked me if you had won? Yes, I know you would. It was all over your face. How long have you had this Shaping?”

“Four years.”

“Time for a new one.”

I started to say that Hapshash and the other leaders of our set were traveling in the other direction, that the fashionable thing was to keep one’s old Shaping; but that seemed idiocy to me now as I lay in her arms with her dense harsh fur rubbing my scales. She was the new thing, the terrifying, inexorable voice of the dawning day, and what did our modes matter to her? We made love, my worlds of experience against her tigerish youthful vitality, and there, at least, I think I matched her stroke for stroke. Afterward she showed me holograms of her first four Shapings. One by one her earlier selves stepped from the projector and pirouetted before me: the form her parents had given her that she had kept for nine years, and then the second Shaping that one always tends to cling to through puberty, and the two of her adolescence. They were true conglomeroid Shapes, a blending of images out of all the biological spectrum, a bit of butterfly and a bit of squid, a tinge of reptile and a hint of insect, the usual genetic fantasia that our kind adores, but a common thread bound them all, and her current Shape as well. That was the compactness of her body, the taut narrowness of her slender frame, powerful but minimal, like some agile little carnivore, mink or mongoose or marten. When we redesign ourselves, we can be any size we like, whale-mighty or cat-small, within certain basic limitations imposed by the need to house a human-sized brain in the frame that the gene-splicers build for us; but Domitilla had opted always to construct her fantasies on the splendid little armature with which she had come into the world. That too was ominous. It spoke of a persistence, a self-sufficiency, that is not common.

“Which of them do you like best?” she asked, when I had seen them all.

I stroked her strong smooth thighs, “This one. How tight your fur lies against your skin! How beautiful the sail is on your back! You’ve brought out your deepest self.”

“How would you know my deepest self after two hours?”

“Don’t underestimate me.” I touched my lips to hers. “Part hunting-cat, part dinosaur—the metaphor’s perfect.”

“Let’s make love again. Then we’ll pop to Jerusalem.”

“All right.”

“And then Tibet.”

“Certainly.”

“And Baltimore.”

“Baltimore?”

“Why not?” she said. “Hold me tighter. Yes. Yes.”

“Do I get only a month with you?”

“Thirty days. Those were the terms of the contest.”

“Do you always abide by terms?”

“Always,” she said.

We popped to Jerusalem at dawn, and then to Tibet, and then, yes, to Baltimore. And many more places in the thirty days. She was trying to exhaust me, thinking that nineteen has some superiority over ninety-three, but there, at least, she had misjudged things; at each Shaping we are renewed, you know. I loved her beyond measure, though she terrified me. What did I fear? What does anyone fear most? That in a vulnerable moment someone will say, “I understand what a fraud you are: I have seen all your facades fall away: I know the truth about you.” I would not say such a thing to Melanoleum, nor Nullamar to me, nor any of us to any of us, but yet I felt Domitilla wouldn’t hesitate to flay me down to the core beneath the Shapings if that suited her whim, and I lived in dread of that, and I always will.

On the thirtieth day she said goodbye.

“Please,” I said. “Another week.”

“Those were the terms.”

“Even so.”

“If we refuse to honor contracts, all society collapses.”

“Have I bored you?” Foolish question, inviting destruction.

“Not nearly as much as I thought you would,” she replied, and I loved her for it, having expected worse. “But I have other things to do. My new Shaping, Sandalphon.”

“You won’t. What you are now is too beautiful to discard.”

“What I will be next will surpass it.”

“I beg you—stay as you are a little longer.”

“I undergo engineering tomorrow at dawn,” she said, “at the gene-surgery in Katmandu.”

Arguing with her was hopeless. We had our last night, a night of miracles, and while I slept she vanished, and the walls of the world fell in on me. I hurried out to my friends, and was houseguest in turn with Nullamar and Mandragora and Melanoleum and Candelabra, and not one of them said the name of Domitilla to me, and at the end of the year I went to Spinifex and Mortissa to admire the new child in the graceful shell of my happy designing, and then, despondent, I popped to Katmandu. All year long a new Domitilla had been emerging from the altered genetic material of the previous one, and now her Shaping was nearly complete. They wouldn’t let me see her, but they sent messages in, and she agreed to my request to have dinner with her on the day of her coming-forth. That was still a month away. I could have gone anywhere in the world, but I stayed in Katmandu, staring at the mountains, thinking that my month of Domitilla had gone by in a flick and this month of waiting was taking an eternity; and then it was the day.