There’s nothing else in life like having friends you can trust.
There were six of us riding the cyborg transbox out through the inner system, me and Rinty picked up at VenusLab, rotating back to Vesta along with some human researchers who’d finished their assignments, joining four Chinese boys come aboard at Mercury, who thought they might be on their way to Ixion now.
The Chinese had that funny Asian look you always see, with their flat faces, black eyes, and that long, curly golden hair. Me and Rinty had the doggier look OPEL favors for its cyborgs, designers at the Outer Planets Exploration Laboratory, coming as they had mostly from North America, favoring Western norms: Longer muzzles, with short, straight fur, mine a foxy reddish-gray, Rinty more tan-gold-black. Same body plan though, with four arms and four legs in mirror-bright chrome.
They let us in on their metashogon game as soon as we were loaded aboard, playing away the week since, with cards dealt from a five-deck shoe, and that was what we had, though disconnected from the datasets we had little real language in common, not much more than the language of the cards. Their names, I think, were all on the order of Chang and Eng.
Doesn’t matter. We’re all the same here.
Don’t know who we were, only who we are.
Do your job, dream your dreams, don’t talk about it.
I had cards in five hands, using the other three for balance, looking at faces and shapes, wondering how I’d wound up with so many panthans, so few jedwars. Going to have to fold soon, if I can’t do better than this.
Something crept in out of nowhere, out of the infamous inner night. Some guy doing something violent. Someone screaming. A pulse of joy. Flashing lights.
Gently, Rinty said, "Yo, Lassie. . . ?"
I looked up from the cards, saw curly faced Changs and Engs staring. Waiting. "Sorry." Rearranged my cards, laid out a pattern on the deck, among the circle of our hands. "There."
That made the Chinese guys mutter among themselves, sing-song. I let my muzzle fall open in a doggy smile. Something else we have in common.
I’ve heard tell how once upon a time they tried to make cyborgs out of cats and mice, tried to make versions that were all dog, or all human. None of it ever worked. Something magical about the combination of sliced up dog brain, bits and pieces of Social-Discard human, all of it glued to computer hardware some genius called a cerebroanalikon, back when they were still giving names to such things.
Build the brain, build the body, put it to work.
I heard they train the dogs before putting them in the mix.
No one’s ever said what they do to the men.
I can’t remember.
The idiot light over the door blinked, someone dialing in. There was a soft hiss as it slid open, light from beyond framing a distinct human shape, black in silhouette. A voice said, "HLL-357?"
That would be me.
I put down my cards, stood, and said, "Sir."
"Delivery."
"Yes, sir," I said, and, "Sorry, guys."
Rinty seemed dismayed. "I thought you were going to Vesta with me."
I shrugged. "I’m on permanent loan to Dr. Battenberg, you know that."
He looked away.
I smiled, made a little bow to the Chinese guys, who were gathering in the cards, knowing they’d have to start over again if it was to be five-handed now. "Yo, Rinty! I’ll be seeing you again, boy!" Offered a high-ten.
"Later."
"Sooner or later." Always. Friend.
And followed the human shape out through the hatch.
I only got the briefest little scrap of time to look out through the orbital cargo node’s offloading ramp, at the curved, hazy limb of the Earth, as I stood in line, while they marked me as hardware-in-transit, property of OPEL. Contraband, if sold. Most of the other cyborgs shuffling on through were marked Free-On-Earth, duty paid, or Safe-and-Delivered, restricted to the free-trade zone surrounding the cosmodrome wherever they were dropped off.
A voice, wired in, whispered, "Dar-es-Salaam . . ." and started calling out numbers. HLL-357. I joined another line, shuffling toward the lip of the ramp, where a shuttlebox waited.
Earth. Pale blue, not vivid at all, hardly colored compared to glaring, featureless Uranus, the lovely dark monochrome streaks and cloudy wisps of Neptune. Pale blue, crowded with swirls of white cloud, covering up those vaguer streaks of tan and green and red.
Manhome, I guess. But not my home.
The shuttle door slammed, leaving us crowded together in darkness, linking arms like so many brothers, or so many ants, whispering, one to the other, who are you? where from? whither goest?
Quo vadis? someone said.
And eventually I stood alone where they parked me–Wait here for your master–on the polished black marble floor of the main concourse of Dar-es-Salaam Cosmodrome, on the Isle of Pemba, within sight of fabled Zanzibar, by the shores of the Indian Ocean, while native humans swirled by in their multitudes, in their colorful costumes, in all their bewildering variety.
"There you are, Lassie! Let’s go! We’re late!"
She was tall, solid without being fat, thin without being slim, with pale, lightly freckled skin, with a flame-nimbus of dark red hair feather-cut around her skull. Her eyes were so pale blue in some light that they might look gray, in another, almost milky, deep set above stark cheekbones. She had those prominent teeth over which her lips would never quite close, sometimes like a smile, never far from feral.
"Dr. Battenberg," I said, making a slight bow, just the way she liked, "and Miss Vorhees."
Allie had little blonde Sonya–she of the electric blue eyes, too vivid to be real, some foolish gene-surgeon’s antique wet-dream–by the hand, towing her along, and you could see her joy at being the center of her own wet-dream’s attention, if only for a little while. Mine. Mine. That’s what the haunted look says.
The man that strolled along behind them would’ve made up the mass of the two women added together, tall, slabby, razor-cut black hair, hot green eyes, aquiline nose, just the way you’d imagine a man called Command-Pilot Ta-Den Okitas would look. All that and bored, bemused, just-putting-up-with it, too.
Allie said, "Let’s get the fuck out of here. Lassie, take charge of Denny’s little toy."
He made a little faux snarl, and said, "Oh, please, Allie. Your toy. You’re the one who insisted . . ." But she’d walked on, dragging little Sonya by the hand. He looked at me, rolled his eyes, and said, "Jesus. Maybe they’ll get over it."
I watched him walk away, walking after them, stride so much longer that he didn’t have to hurry, and whispered, "Maybe not." Final vacation. Then Dr. Battenberg and Command-Pilot Okitas will return to OPEL’s Piazzi Belt stronghold, will resume who they’ve always been, together. And Miss Vorhees? Back to California, all alone.
There’d been someone walking behind them, waiting now with me. Not someone. Something. You can always tell.
She held out a hand, and said, "KR-2578."
Gyndroid, I thought. All machine, however she looks. It looks? Almost as tall as Allie. But not quite. Almost as muscular. But not quite. Coffee-colored skin. Black hair. Round, handsome rump. Dark, dark brown eyes. "We’d better go," I said. "They call me Lassie, by the way. HLL-357." Even if she couldn’t tell, the three-letter prefix would say I was more meat than metal.
She took a step, leaned in, seemed to take a deep breath. Then, sort of smiling, she said, "Lassie? But you have male pheromones. Human and . . . something else." Looked me up and down, mainly inspecting my slender, furry humanoid torso. "Is that a vulva?"
"Not quite."
Just before we caught up to them, I said, "Do you have a name, or is it just numbers with gyndroids?"
She smiled, showing a rim of pretty white teeth. "I’m called She."
" ‘She?’ "
"She-Who-Must-Be-Obedient."
A heartbeat, then I laughed. She seemed to like that…
