Robert Silverberg - Ringing the Changes

There has been a transmission error in the shunt room, and several dozen bodies have been left without minds, while several dozen minds are held in the stasis net, unassigned and, for the moment, unassignable. Things like this have happened before, which is why changers take out identity insurance, but never has it happened to so many individuals at the same time. The shunt is postponed. Everyone must be returned to his original identity; then they will start over. Suppressing the news has proved to be impossible. The area around the hospital has been besieged by the news media. Hover-cameras stare rudely at the building at every altitude from twelve to twelve hundred feet. Trucks are angle-parked in the street. Journalists trade tips, haggle with hospital personnel for the names of the bereaved, and seek to learn the identities of those involved in the mishap. “If I knew, I’d tell you,” says Jaime Rodriguez, twenty-seven. “Don’t you think I could use the money? But we don’t know. That’s the whole trouble, we don’t know. The data tank was the first thing to blow.”

The shunt room has two antechambers, one on the west side of the building, the other facing Broadway; one is occupied by those who believe they are related to the victims, while in the other can be found the men from the insurance companies. Like everyone else, the insurance men have no real idea of the victims’ names, but they do know that various clients of theirs were due for shunting today, and with so many changers snarled up at once, the identity-insurance claims may ultimately run into the millions. The insurance men confer agitatedly with one another, dictate muttered memoranda, scream telephone calls into their cufflinks, and show other signs of distress, although several of them remain cool enough to conduct ordinary business while here; they place stock market orders and negotiate assignations with nurses. It is, however, a tense and difficult situation, whose final implications are yet unknown.

Dr. Vardaman appears, perspired, paternal. “We’re making every effort,” he says, “to reunite each changer with the proper identity matrix. I’m fully confident. Only a matter of time. Your loved ones, safe and sound.”

“We aren’t the relatives,” says one of the insurance men.

“Excuse me,” says Dr. Vardaman, and leaves.

The insurance men wink and tap their temples knowingly. They peer beyond the antechamber door.

“Cost us a fortune,” one broker says.

“Not your money,” an adjuster points out.

“Raise premiums, I guess.”

“Lousy thing. Lousy thing. Lousy thing. Could have been me.”

“You a changer?”

“Due for a shunt next Tuesday.”

“Tough luck, man. You could have used a vacation.”

The antechamber door opens. A plump woman with dark-shadowed eyes enters. “Where are they?” she asks. “I want to see them! My husband was shunting today!”

She begins to sob and then to shriek. The insurance men rush to comfort her. It will be a long and somber day.

Now go on with the story

After a long time in the stasis net, the changer decides that something must have gone wrong with the shunt. It has never taken this long before. Something as simple as a shift of persona should be accomplished quickly, like the pulling of a tooth: out, shunt, in. Yet minutes or possibly hours have gone by, and the shunt has not come. What are they waiting for? I paid good money for a shunt. Something wrong somewhere, I bet.

Get me out of here. Change me.

The changer has no way of communicating with the hospital personnel. The changer, at present, exists only as a pattern of electrical impulses held in the stasis net. In theory it is possible for an expert to communicate in code even across the stasis gap, lighting up nodes on a talkboard; it was in this way that preliminary research into changing was carried out. But this changer has no such skills, being merely a member of the lay public seeking temporary identity transformation, a holiday sojourn in another’s skull. The changer must wait in limbo.

A voice impinges. “This is Dr. Vardaman, addressing all changers in the net. There’s been a little technical difficulty, here. What we need to do now is put you all back in the bodies you started from, which is just a routine reverse shunt, as you know, and when everybody is sorted out we can begin again. Clear? So the next thing that’s going to happen to you is that you’ll get shunted, only you won’t be changed, heh-heh, at least we don’t want you to be changed. As soon as you’re able to speak to us, please tell your nurse if you’re back in the right body, so we can disconnect you from the master switchboard, all right? Here we go, now, one, two, three—“

—Shunt.

This body is clearly the wrong one, for it is female. The changer trembles, taking possession of the cerebral fibers and driving pitons into the autonomic nervous system. A hand rises and touches a breast. Erectile tissue responds. The skin is soft and the flesh is firm. The changer strokes a cheek. Beardless. He searches now for vestigial personality traces. He finds a name, Vonda Lou, and the image of a street, wide and dusty, a small town in a flat region, with squat square-fronted buildings set well back from the pavement, and gaudy automobiles parked sparsely in front of them. Beyond the town the zone of dry red earth begins; far away are the bare brown mountains. This is no place for the restless. A soothing voice says, “They catch us, Vonda Lou, they gonna take a baseball bat, jam it you know where,” and Vonda Lou replies, “They ain’t gone catch us anyway,” and the other voice says, “But if they do, but if they do?” The room is warm but not humid. There are crickets outside. Cars without mufflers roar by. Vonda Lou says, “Stop worrying and put your head here. Here. That’s it. Oh, nice—” There is a giggle. They change positions. Vonda Lou says, “No fellow ever did that to you, right?” The soft voice says, “Oh, Vonda Lou—” And Vonda Lou says, “One of these days we gone get out of this dime-store town—” Her hands clutch yielding flesh. In her mind dances the image of a drum majorette parading down the dusty main street, twirling a baton, lifting knees high and pulling the white shorts tight over the smug little rump, yes, yes, look at those things jiggle up there, look all the nice stuff, and the band plays Dixie and the football team comes marching by, and Vonda Lou laughs, thinking of that big hulking moron and how he had tried to dirty her, putting his paws all over her, that dumb Billy Joe who figured he was going to score, and all the time Vonda Lou was laughing at him inside, because it wasn’t the halfback but the drum majorette who had what she wanted, and—

Voice: “Can you hear me? If there has been a proper matching of body and mind, please raise your right hand.”

The changer lifts left hand.

—shunt

The world here is dark green within a fifty-yard radius of the helmet lamp, black beyond. The temperature is 38 degrees F. The pressure is six atmospheres. One moves like a crab within one’s jointed suit, scuttling along the bottom. Isolated clumps of gorgonians wave in the current. To the left, one can see as though through a funnel the cone of light that rises to the surface, where the water is blue. Along the face of the submerged cliff are coral outcroppings, but not here, not this deep, where sunlight is of a primal coldness.

One moves cautiously, bothered by the pressure drag. One clutches one’s collecting rod tightly, stepping over nodules of manganese and silicon, swinging the lamp in several directions, searching for the places where the bottom drops away. One is uneasy and edgy here, not because of the pressure or the dark or the chill, but because one is cursed with an imagination, and one cannot help but think of the kraken in the pit. One dreams of Tennyson’s dreamless beast, below the thunders of the upper deep. Faintest sunlights flee about his shadowy sides: above him swell huge sponges of millennial growth and height.