Robert Heinlein - The Number of the Beast

"Certainly we believe you!" I interrupted. "But what you've told us isn't news to us. What we don't know is how you are now alive and female. Reincarnation?"

"Oh, no! Reincarnation is nonsense."

I found myself irritated. Reincarnation is something I have no opinion about, since a housecleaning I gave my mind after we lost Mama Jane. "You have data?" I demanded.

"Deety, did I step on your toes?"

"No, you didn't, Lib. I asked if you had data."

"Well... no. But if you assume the truth of the proposition, I think I can show that it leads to a contradiction."

"The negative-proof method. It's tricky, Lib. Ask Georg Cantor."

Lib laughed. "Okay, I will attempt to have no opinion until someone shows me verifiable data, one way or the other."

"I was hoping you had data, Lib, since you've been dead and I haven't. Or don't recall having been."

"But I don't recall being dead, either. Just a whale of a blow in the back... then dreams I can't remember... then someone asking me patiently, again and again, whether I preferred to be a man or a woman... and at last I tracked clearly enough to realize that the question was serious....nd .1 answered, 'Woman'-and they made me answer that question at least once a day for many days-and then I went to sleep one night and when I woke, I was a woman... which did not astonish me nearly as much as to learn that fifteen centuries had passed. Being a woman seemed completely natural. I've had five children now-borne five, I mean; I had sired twenty-one... and one was put into me by one of my own descendants. Lazarus, when are you going to knock me up?"

"When the Greeks count time by the Kalends."

"Libby honey, when you want to swing that-if you aren't joking-check with me."

"Thanks, Dora; I'll remember. Lazarus, you will have to explain the paradox; I was just a puppet."

"Isn't it bedtime? We're keeping our guests up."

"Captain Hilda?" Lib inquired.

"Deety is in charge of time."

"Lib, I don't know ship's time yet. I gave you our seconds; we have sixty seconds to a minute; sixty minutes to an hour; twenty-four hours in a day. Primitive, eh? Is your time metric?"

"Depends on what you mean, Deety. You work to base 'ten,' do you not?"

"Yes. I mean: No, I work to base 'two' because I'm a computer programmer. But I'm used to converting-don't have to think about it."

"I knew you used 'ten' when I made a guess as to what you meant by 'six to the sixth power' and you accepted my answer. We now work to base-onehundred-twenty for most purposes-binary one-one-one-one-zero-zero-zero."

"Five-factorial. Sensible. Fits almost any base."

"Yes. We use it for routine work. But in scientific work we use base-three, because our computers use trinary. I understand it took Gay and Dora several milliseconds to interface."

"We aren't that slow!"

"My apologies, Dora. For some work we use a time scale that fits trinary. But for daily living, our clock is just like yours-but three percent slower. Our planet's day is longer."

"By forty-two of your minutes."

"You're quick, Deety. Yes."

"Your computers must be three-phase A.C."

"You are quicker than I was two thousand years ago. And I was quicker then."

"No way to tell and any computer makes us look like Achilles' tortoise. We had dinner at eighteen. Gay entered Dora about an hour and a quarter later. So for us it's about half past twenty, and we usually go to bed between twentytwo and twenty-three if we get to bed on time which we never do. What time is it in the ship and what is ship's routine?"

The others had let me and my new twin chatter. Now Lazarus said, "If this madhouse has a routine, I've never found it."

"01' Buddy Boy, you don't have a routine. I run this joint on the bell. Deety, it's just-bong!-twenty-one... and Lazarus never went to bed that early in all his evil years. Buddy Boy, what are you dodging?"

"Manners, Dora."

"Yes, Pappy. Deety, he's dodging the chicanery with which he fooled even himself... because he must admit the triple chicanery he wants to rope you in on-and it takes Gay because I'm not built for it. Until today I never heard of 't,' Tau and Teh. I thought 't'-that you call Tau-was all there was. Aside from paratime in an encapsulation surrounded by irrelevancy such as I am taking us through.

"But back to the corpse caper- Lib got herself killed about eight hundred Post Diaspora. Lazarus slaps her-him-into a tank of LOX, and places himher-it in orbit, with a beacon. Comes back quick as he can-and can't find Libby's cadaver. Fourteen centuries later my sister Teena, then known as Minerva, sees what should have been obvious, that any irrelevant ship, such as yours truly, is a time machine as well as a starship. A great light dawns on Lazarus; the corpse pickled in LOX is missing because he picked it up

earlier. So he tries again, more than a thousand years later and five years earlier-and there it is! So Lazarqs and I and Laz-Lor go to 1916 Old-Style-orGregorian, Old Home Terra, and bury Lib from the sky into the Ozarks where she-he-was born-which was pretty silly because we chucked her into those Green Hills about a century before she was-he-he was born. A paradox.

"But paradoxes don't trouble us. We live in paratime, Laz-Lor are acute cases of parapsychology, we operate under paradoctrines. Why, take your family-four doctors. A double pair o' docs."

"Dora!"

"Pappy, you're jealous. But I'll say this for Lazarus: He's slow but he gets there and has believed all his life that any paradox can be paradoctored. Happens he had lots of time to think after he chucked Lib to a fiery grave because he stayed in that primitive era and got his arse shot off and this caused a long convalescence.

"It occurs to him that, if he found the corpse through going back to shortly after he placed it in orbit, he might learn something interesting if he went back just before he put Lib's remains in orbit. So when he's well again, he does so, with his whole first team, headed by Doctor Ishtar, the greatest in the business, and I'm outfitted as a hospital with everything from microtomes to cloning capsules.

"So we go there and wait-we don't land. Along comes Lazarus in the clunker that he and Lib used to risk their lives in, and Pappy comes out in a pressure suit and detaches the LOX tank, and Lib is buried in space, waiting for judgment day. We respect Pappy's griefjust long enough for him to get out of the way, then I take the tank inside me. Ish gets to work, along with many others. Lots of live cells suitable for cloning. Brain intact. Dead but intact- okay, as all Ish wants are the memory configurations.

"In the course of this, Ishtar learns that the late lamented had the potential to go either way-which is why the Families' best telepathic hypnotist is sent for and keeps asking this clone: When you wake up, what do you want to be? Man or woman?"

"It was much later, Dora. I was already awake."

"Lib hon, you ask Ish. You had to decide long before you woke. Ish and her hormone artists had to work on you while you were still labile. Matter of fact, you never answered at all; the telepath kept reporting on your emotional state whenever you imagined yourself male, and your state when you imagined yourself female. Ish says that it made you happy to think of yourself as female."

"That's true. I've been ever so much happier as Elizabeth Long than I was as Andy Libby."

"That's it, folks. How Ish turned a mixed-up male into a happy female, fully functional and horny as Howard females always are."

"Dora! We have guests." Lazarus glowered.

"All married. Deety is youngest. Deety, did my bluntness shock you?"

"No, Dora. I'm horny enough to be a Howard myself. And terribly interested in how the great Slipstick Libby turns out to be my twin and female."