Robert Silverberg - At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party

The inner door opened and nurses came out, standard humans, and an orderly or two and then the surgeon and then Domitilla. I recognized her at once, the same wiry armature as ever. The new body she wore was the one she had designed for the child of Spinifex and Mortissa. A standard human frame, mortifyingly human, the body of a servant, of a hewer of wood and drawer of water, except that it glowed with the inner fire that burned in Domitilla and that no member of the lower orders could conceivably have. And she was different from the standards in another way, for she was naked, and she had used the hermaphrodite design, breasts above, male organs below. I felt as if I had been kicked; I wanted to clutch my gut and double over. Her eyes gleamed.

“Do you like it?” she asked, mocking me.

I was unable to look. I turned and tried to run, but she called after me, “Wait, Sandalphon!”

Trembling, I halted. “What do you want?”

“Tell me if you like it?”

“The terms of the contest bound you not to use any of the designs,” I said bitterly. “You claimed always to abide by terms.”

“Always. Except when I choose not to.” She spread her arms. “What do you think? Tell me you like it and I’m yours for tonight!”

“Never, Domitilla.”

She touched her groin. “Because of this ?”

“Because of you,” I said. I shivered. “How could you do it? A standard, Domitilla. A standard!”

“You poor old fool,” she said.

Again I turned, and this time she let me go. I traveled to Madagascar and Turkey and Greenland and Bulgaria, and her images blazed in my mind, the wolverine-girl I had loved and the grotesque thing she had become. Gradually the pain grew less. I went in for a new Shaping, despite Hapshash and his coterie, and came out simpler, more sleek, less conglomeroid. I felt better, then. I was recovering from her.

A year went by. At a party in Oaxaca I told the story, finally, to Melanoleum, stunning in her new streamlined form. “If I had it all to do over, I would,” I said, “One has to remain in an existentially pliant posture, of course. One must keep alert to all possibilities. And so I have no regrets. But yet—but yet—she hurt me so badly, love—”

“Look over there,” said Melanoleum.

I followed her glance, past Hapshash and Mandragora and Negresca, to the slender, taut-bodied stranger scooping fish from the pond: beetle-wings, black and yellow, luminescent spots glowing on thighs and forearms, cat-whiskers, needle-sharp fangs. She looked toward me and our eyes met, a contact that seared me, and she laughed and her laughter shriveled me with post-causal mockery, contra-linear scorn. In front of them all she destroyed me. I fled. I am fleeing still. I may flee her forever.