John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline

And then they damn well would broadcast.

Tweed was a familiar figure in the public ways of King City, and he had always loved it. The sight of him lumbering down Clarke Boulevard was beloved by most of his former constituents. Some days he would waddle aimlessly and amiably, pressing the flesh, with a smile and a pat on the back for all.

But the love of the people sometimes had to be kept at arm's length. One had to hobnob to keep winning mandates at the polls. On the other hand, there were times when it was necessary to move freely without being mobbed. His hat was the signal. If it was in his hand, they could feel free to talk to him. When he was wearing it, it was understood that he was busy on the people's business.

Hat firmly on his head, Boss Tweed pounded down the center of the corridor, implacable as a rhinoceros, spouting blue clouds of smoke from his cigar.

He turned corners with the ponderous grace of a tugboat, gradually working his way into less frequented parts of the city. There was an anonymous door at the end of a deserted stretch of corridor. It opened to his palmprint; he stepped into a small room and sealed the door behind him. At the press of a button, the room began a slow descent.

Off came the black and gray coat, the baggy pants, the shoes of hardened leather, the white spats. Soon he stood naked in front of a pile of clothes. Without his shoes he was nine centimeters shorter, but he was still a big man.

He did something to his face and the sagging jowls sagged even further, dropped, and fell into his hands. They were warm to the touch, made from a plastic that sat on the borderline between living and dead material. He dropped the two quivering masses onto the pile of clothes, onto the stovepipe hat he had worn every day for fifty years. The hat collapsed on itself.

For a moment he stood staring down at the pile of clothes, and he began to shake.

"No," he said. "No, this isn't the end. It's just a setback." He leaned against the wall behind him and waited for the fit of weakness to pass. With his face buried in his hands, more scraps of plastiflesh peeled away. When he finally looked up, his sense of purpose restored, he was a different person. He had shed thirty years of apparent age, along with the subtle gestalt of lines and protrusions that had marked his face as that of a male human being. He was androgynous now; his huge paunch could not conceal the fact that he had no genital organs. Two swellings on his chest could have belonged to a woman or a very fat man.

He heaved himself erect. With a wet slithering sound, twenty-five kilos of rubbery plastiflesh fell from his belly, his arms and legs, and his buttocks. The breasts remained, jutting out over a flat stomach he had not seen in fifty years.

Tweed was now outwardly a female, but a close examination of the labial folds hidden under the triangle of pubic hair would have revealed no vaginal opening. No hormones raged through Tweed's body, nothing that could divert him from his purpose. He had decided on neutrality long ago, and had never regretted it. Now, it was going to help save his life. The first step in adopting a new identity was radical cosmetic surgery, usually involving a sex change. That alone would never be enough to turn the trick, but it was an essential first step. He had just accomplished it in record time, as he had planned long ago if it ever came to this.

"Came to this..." he muttered. Again he felt weak. He staggered, and nearly fell on the slippery floor. The plastiflesh had dissolved, and so had the clothes. The water and gray sludge left behind by the disintegration was sucked into a drain in the floor.

He thought back over the years since the first glimmerings of the vision, the future of a liberated Earth. He knew there were those who thought him an opportunist, who felt he was just cashing in on a vein of opinion which had been growing in Luna for a century. But he was sincere.

Tweed had been sincere enough to take his only son and carefully raise him to be a killer, a follower of orders no matter what those orders might be. He had pored over ancient books for a year before trying it, but he had raised a soldier. The methods of the U.S. Marines and the Red Army had worked admirably, combined with drug therapy and behavioral psychology. Vaffa had never disappointed him, except for a lingering sadness that he and his clone brothers and sisters had been such dull company.

It would be a scandal, all right. Even with the month's grace period, things would begin to come out as soon as it was clear that Tweed had actually disappeared. People would be looking for him, computer search programs narrowing down on him, at first with concern for his safety. Later, when questions started to be asked, things would start to come to light. Vaffa would be the first of those things, but there would be more. There were two Vaffas still on Luna, and no chance to do anything about them.

Now he faced the nearly impossible struggle to reestablish himself as a data-banked citizen with a right of life. He could no longer be Boss Tweed. He had to fit himself into the cracks between the integrated circuits, the very task he had set for a dozen condemned criminals as their only alternative to working for him. It could be done—party members were in key positions in many of the most powerful computers—but it would take time.

"It's just a setback," Tweed said again.

But did it have to be? His/her new face frowned deeply as once more the facts were reviewed. There was still time to countermand the orders to Vaffa, but it was running out. The face contorted, and she/he slammed a fist into the wall. Lilo!

Tweed had always known, down deep, that with the kind of chances he/she was taking it was inevitable that one day someone would make it to freedom. Then, a few months ago, that call from Pluto. Lilo, dictating through Vaffa, telling Tweed what he had to do. It had galled him, but he really had no choice. Now this final blow, and again it came from Lilo. But which one? The teacher, Cathay, had dropped the pilot of the tug close to Poseidon after he took possession of the ship. The man had said Cathay was alone in the ship, that Lilo had fallen into the hole, or into Jupiter. How had she come back to do this?

Tweed remembered now that Lilo had a base in the Ring. It had to be that one. The other one was dead. She took a vicious satisfaction in the thought. The communicator was in her hand, ready to link with the relay station and tell Vaffa to kill them all. She stopped with her thumb on the button.

Two hours. That's how long there would be if the order was given. In two hours Lilo would be telling everything, and all the police in the system would be after Tweed. Could it be done? She had tricks Lilo had never heard of; the sex change alone would leave a false trail that might confuse the authorities for as long as three or four hours.

But that assumed no one was looking for her yet. If she gave the order to Vaffa now, the pursuit would start in two hours. And it would be literally snapping at her heels. She ran her thumbnail around the transmit button.

No. She needed a few days to get far ahead of them. In four days—in two, with luck—she would be someone else, with a personal history going back seventy years and all properly logged in the data banks. Boss Tweed was dead, and the new woman he had become yearned to avenge him. But it would be too costly. She must always think of the long term. In two or three years she would be back. She would be someone else this time, but it would not be like starting from scratch. The Free Earth Party would go on, and she would lead it.

The communicator fell to the floor and the elevator door opened. The nude woman stepped out and hurried down the corridor. There was much to do.

The cafeteria was filled to capacity and a little beyond the safe limits, though Lilo found it hard to believe. The place didn't look crowded.