Robert Silverberg - At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party

I am contemporary. I am conglomeroid. I am post-causal, contra-linear, pepto-modern. To be anything else is to be dead, nezpah? Is to be a fossil. A sense of infinite potential and a stance of infinite readiness: that’s the right philosophy for our recombinant era. Alert to all possibilities, holding oneself always in an existentially pliant posture.

So when quasi-cousin Spinifex called and said, “Come to my fetus-party tonight,” I accepted unhesitatingly. Spinifex lives in Wongamoola on the slopes of the Dandenongs, looking across into Melbourne. I happened to be in Gondar on my way to Lalibela when his call came. “Mortissa and I have a new embryo,” said Spinifex. “We want everyone to help us engineer it. There’ll be a contest for the best design. The whole crowd’s coming, and some new people.” Some new people. Could I resist? It’s not such a big deal to go from Ethiopia to Australia for a fetus-party. Two hours, with transfers. I was on the pop-chute in half a flick. Pop to Addis, pop to Delhi, pop to Singapore, pop to Melbourne, pop pop pop pop and I was there. Some new people. Irresistible. That was the night I met Domitilla.

Spinifex and Mortissa live in a great golden egg on jeweled stilts, with oscillator windows and three captive rainbows moored overhead. In his current Shaping, Spinifex is aquatic, a big jolly blue dolphinoid with spangled red flukes, and spends most of his time in his moat. Mortissa’s latest Shaping is more traditionally conglomeroid, no single identifiable style, a bit of tapir and a bit of giraffe and some very high-precision machine-tooled laminations, altogether elegant. I blew kisses to them both.

About thirty guests had already arrived. I knew most of them. There was Hapshash in his ten-year-old Shaping, the carpeted look, last word in splendor then. Negresca still in her tortoise-cum-chinchilla, and Holy Mary looking sublime in the gilded tubular body that becomes her so well. There is a tendency among the ultra-elite to keep the same Shaping longer and longer, with Hapshash the outstanding example of that. At first I thought it was a sign of the recent economic dreariness, but lately I was coming to understand it as a significant underground trend: out of fashion is height of fashion. That sort of thing requires one to stay really aware. When Melanoleum came slithering up to me, she asked me at once how I liked her new Shaping. She looked exactly as she had the last time, a year ago at the big potlatch in Joburg—tendrils, iridescence, lateral oculars, high-spectrum pulse-nodes. For an instant I was baffled, and I came close to telling her I had already seen this Shaping, and then I caught on, comprehending that she had just had herself Shaped exactly like her last Shaping , which carried Hapshash’s gambit to the next level of subtlety, and I hugged her with all my arms and said, “It’s brilliant, love, it’s devastating!”

“I knew you’d pick up,” she said. “Have you seen the fetus?”

“I just got here.”

“Up there. In the globe.”

“Ah. Beautiful!”

They had rigged a crystalline sphere in a gravity-candle’s beam, so that it hovered twenty feet above the cocktail altar, and in it the new fetus solemnly swam in a phosphorescent green fluid. It was, I suppose, eleven or twelve weeks old, a little alien-looking fish with a big furrowed forehead, altogether weird but completely normal, a standard human fetus with no genetic reprogramming at all. Prenatal engineering is too terribly tacky for people like Mortissa and Spinifex, naturally. Let the standard folk do that, going to the cheapjack helixers to get their offsprings’ clubfeet and sloping chins and bandy legs cleaned up ahead of time, so that they can look just like everybody else when they come squirting out of the womb. That’s not our way.

Melanoleum said, “The design contest starts in half an hour. Do you have a good one ready?”

“I expect to. What’s the prize?”

“A month with anyone at the party,” she said. “Do you know Domitilla?”

I had heard of her, naturally—last season’s hot debutante, making the party circuit from San Francisco to the Seychelles. But I had been going the other way last season. Suddenly she was at my elbow, a dazzling child in a blaze of cold blue fire. It was her only garment, and under that chilly radiance I saw a slim furry form, five small breasts, sleek muscular thighs, vertebrae elongated to form the underpinning for a webbed sail down her back—an inspired conglomeroid of wolverine and dinosaur. My hearts thundered and my lymph congealed. She noted instantly the power she had over me, and her fiery cloak flared to double volume, a dazzling nimbus that briefly enfolded me and dizzied me with the scent of ozone. She was no more than nineteen, and I was ninety-three, existentially pliant, ready to be overwhelmed. I congratulated her on her ingenuity.

“My fifth Shaping,” she said. “I’ll be getting a new one soon, I think.”

“Your fifth?” I considered Hapshash and Negresca and Holy Mary, trendily clinging to their old bodies. “So quickly? Don’t. This one is extraordinary.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why it’s time for a new one. Oh, look, the fetus is trying to get born!”

Indeed the little pseudo-fish that my quasi-cousins had conceived was making violent but futile efforts to escape its gleaming tank. We applauded. The servants took that as their signal to come among us with hors d’oeuvres: five standard humans, big and stupid and docile, bearing glittering food-fabrics on platinum trays. We did our dainty best; the trays were bare in no time and back came the standards with a second round, caviars of at least a dozen creatures and sweetmeats and tiny cocktail-globules to rub on our tongues and all the rest. And then Spinifex heaved himself out of the moat with a great jovial flapping of flippers that splashed everyone, and a beveled screen descended and hovered in midair and it was time for the contest. Domitilla was still at my side.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said in a voice like shaggy wine. “I thought I’d meet you at the moon-party. Why weren’t you there?”

“I never go there,” I said.

“Oh. Of course. Do you know who’s going to win the contest?”

“Is it rigged?”

“Aren’t they all?” she asked. “I know who.” She laughed.

Mortissa was on the podium under merciless spotlights that her new Shaping reflected flawlessly. She explained the contest. We were to draw lots and each in turn seize the control-stick and project on the screen our image of what the new child should look like. Judging would be automatic: the design that elicited the greatest amazement would win, and the winner was entitled to choose as companion for a month any of the rest of us. There were two provisos: Spinifex and Mortissa would not be bound to use the winning design if they deemed it life-threatening in any way, and none of the designs could be used by the contestants for future Shapings of their own. The lots were drawn and we took our turns: Hapshash, Melanoleum, Mandragora, Peachbloom, Hannibal—

The designs ranged from brilliant to merely clever. Hapshash proposed a sort of jeweled amoeba; Peachbloom conjured up a hybrid Spinifex-Mortissa, half dolphin, half machine; Melanoleum’s concept was out of the Greek myths, Medusa hair and Poseidon tail; my onetime para-wife Nullamar invented a geometrical shape, rigid and complex, that gave us all headaches; and my own contribution, entirely improvised, involved two slender tapering shells that parted to reveal a delicate and sinuous being, virtually translucent. I was surprised at my own inspiration and felt instant regret for having thrown away something so beautiful that I might well have worn myself someday. It caused a stir and I suspected I would win, and I knew who I would choose as my prize. What, I wondered, did Domitilla have as her entry? I glanced toward her and smiled, and she returned the smile with an airy rippling of her flaming cloak.