Near the topmost deck, in a small lift with glass walls and flickering buttons, I, Dorothy Gentleman, ship’s detective, opened a pair of eyes and licked a pair of lips and awoke in a body that wasn’t mine.
It was the nails that first tipped me off. Blank bodies were just that: blank. My nails ought to have been the same color as the skin beneath—in my case, somewhere in a range of pinks, tending to florid.
Not silver, and not shaped.
This body was already inhabited.
My skin—someone’s skin—broke out in gooseflesh. Of course every human body was a horrifying collection of juices and tissues, acids and effluvia poured into a bag with a bunch of long rocks, a shambling accident of biology that made its own mysterious and often frustrating decisions without reference to the mind. They were disgusting miracles, every one. It was always a bit unsettling to wake up in a fresh form, until habit made a home of it.
But someone else’s home, and my self inside it! A nightmare. Imagine going to the washroom to be sick and having someone else’s sick come out.
I came very close to making this more than a metaphor. It took many deep, deliberate breaths for the squeamish feeling to subside.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Normally one woke up in Medical, surrounded by institutional teal paint and staff with the kind of professionally soothing voices that made you want to claw your own skin off. Not in the central lift, which went only from the topmost three decks to the Library at the very peak of the ship.
Oh, the Library was a marvel. I wish you could have seen it.
Everyone on the Fairweather had a book and a body: the Library held a copy of your mind in the one while you walked around in the other. You could update your book as often as you pleased, adding in experiences and memories from your waking self. And when your body was damaged—in an accident, or from the inescapable progression of aging and illness—you could have your book-mind decanted into a new one based on your personal genetic pattern and preferences for sex. Et voilà, a whole new lifetime.
And if, say, you’d had a rather rough time of things in your last body, you could rest for a time on the Library shelves, until you felt like being a human grappling with the world again. I’d meant to be resting.
I’d insisted, the last time I was asked. Yet here I was, contrary to my will, walking around on someone else’s legs and running my thoughts with someone else’s brain.
Something untoward must have happened.
“Ferry?” I queried, reaching out for the shipmind. No response.
Not terribly odd: the Fairweather—Ferry for short—had a million different things to monitor at any one time. Unless it was actively listening, you sometimes had to wait a minute for your query to make it to the head of the queue. The lift had stopped—had been stopped?—between decks, and until I knew more about what was happening it seemed foolish to go blundering around like a bear escaped from a zoo.
To pass the time, I started riffling through my pockets.
Apparently the person who owned this body was fastidious: they’d chosen a fine white cotton shirt and gray wool suiting of elegant simplicity. My trouser and waistcoat pockets held only four things: an access card, a pocket watch in a sleek silvered case, a powder compact with a mirror, and a small electric torch engraved with ALL MY LOVE, V.
