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Polymorph
Author: Scott Westerfeld

PART 1

THE PRINCIPLE OF SAFETY

Chapter 1

PAYDAY

Sometimes, someone would come home with her (or him) and would be amazed at the closet. It was the larger of the apartment's two small rooms. Clothing on hangers was suspended from a wire stretched diagonally across the room, between eye hooks buried in the white plaster walls. The eye hooks were uneven, and the force of gravity packed the clothes together at one end. The hangers held a collection of dresses, skirts, trousers, jackets, coats, suits. Some guests would assume that there was a roommate, as the clothes were for both sexes. But the clothes were too numerous and varied in size and style for only two wardrobes. Eclectic and somewhat shabby, they looked more like the start of a secondhand clothing store.

Milk cartons (the illegal kind) were wired together with garbage bag ties to make shelves in the two free corners. They were stuffed with T-shirts, scarves, underwear, gloves, trousers, shorts, and socks. The floor was littered with shoes paired off in tight embraces, their mingled laces wrapped around them.

This collection (no, definitely not a wardrobe) ranged across current and defunct street styles: a black jumpsuit, a silver Mylar jacket, combat boots; a white dress shirt hung under a tweed jacket, a snakeskin tie; a red evening dress and black feather boa. Some guests would notice that in the smaller room (which was bedroom, kitchen, and living room) a full-length mirror hung. They would smile to themselves. It was a collection of costumes.

Tonight it was hot in the apartment. The cool breeze from the two windows stalled against the heavy air inside the closet. She was digging through the milk cartons one by one, ignoring the heat. Sooner or later she would break a sweat. As each item was selected, she threw it into the bedroom. She picked among the shoes in the darkness under the hanging clothes, knowing them by feel. They were always the hardest decision.

At last, a pair of red hightop sneakers flew toward the stack in the other room. They were a prized possession, stolen from a lover. She let her bathrobe slip to the ground and kicked it into a carton. She ran her fingers through her hair. It was still wet, but the relief of the shower had already faded into the hot, sticky night.

Dressing in the other room, she was careful to avoid her reflection. The tank top was heavier than she would have liked, but the dark khaki was necessary to balance the red pants. They were military issue: many-pocketed and the iridescent coral that jump troopers wore. She Velcroed them tightly at the waist and ankles. This might be her last chance to wear them. This week, she had seen the bright-red color in a store window on West Broadway. Once SoHo legitimated a trend, it lost its currency in the clubs. She pulled a white headband down around her neck so she wouldn't forget it. Better to get the hair right first.

She didn't lace the sneakers yet, they were too large anyway. Her fingers felt weak as she put them on. With a shortness of breath, a faint tickling in her loins, and a fresh bead of sweat running down her side, excitement was growing quickly.

As usual, changing was unpleasant. As always, it was viscerally satisfying. She squatted, her back to the mirror, and breathed slowly and deeply to calm herself. First came a looseness in the gut, like a hasty elevator descent. The feeling expanded and she rocked forward, knees hitting the floor. Her hands balled into weak fists. A ragged cough escaped her lips. Her lungs weakened, until they seemed barely able to expand. The emptiness in her belly became a dull ache, and then a fiery pain that shot up into her head. The pain played across her face as it probed and pushed her features. Vision swam, the room warping. The roots of her hair burned.

Through it all, in a corner of her brain, she kept control. The steady vision in her mind's eye remained calm; sculpting the gross matter of flesh and bone, weaving the finer tissues of muscle and nerve. It took its time, oblivious to the racking pain in the body it manipulated. The first spasms had been the bold lines of a rough sketch. Then, as the work was done, the changes became smaller and less painful. Finally, the change was like a rough massage, a kneading of skin surfaces, a few brutal pinches and stretches.

When it was over, she let the dizziness subside before she opened her eyes.

She rolled over and stood at the mirror. There was the usual disorientation as her new reflection mimicked her. She readjusted the Velcro on her pants, which had grown too tight. The shoes fit better now and laced snugly. The khaki tank top, as predicted, complemented her now darker skin. The face was more beautiful than she normally liked, but the nose was strangely Roman, and the incongruity threw things off balance. The face was taken from a young girl, a child from a large Chinese family who lived in her housing project. She never used faces from magazines or films.

The neck was thin and elegant. It was modeled on a young Polynesian transvestite who worked an after-hours club downtown. The boy was a hustler, who had come home with her (or rather, him) in an ecstasy daze one night, no charge. She touched the neck intimately, remembering. The shoulders she regarded critically; too masculine. She shrugged them.

She combed her damp hair, pushed the headband up to frame her face, fussed with her hair until it gave the impression of an expensive cut. Arms at her sides, she regarded herself.

She was beautiful, statuesque, definitely Asian. Door workers for the clubs tended to favor Asians, whom they assumed to be more affluent and more ready to spend than whites. The clothing was wrinkled, but stylishly so.

Something was wrong, however. She was beautiful, but not. . . striking. Even with the odd nose, she still looked like a picture in a magazine. That was the kind of face she hated: the kind that rolled off printing presses by the millions, unthreatening, lovely, and unreal. She considered wreaking havoc with the nose, but then she would just look like a rich Japanese girl who had been the victim of cheap westernization surgery. She sat down on the bed.

There was a row of anatomy disks on the floor along the wall. Among the pages of paperware indexes were receipts, Post-its, business cards. These scraps of paper marked pages where a bar code or catalog number was highlighted. Each corresponded to a picture or video on one of the disks, where a diseased skin texture, a strange limb, or the line of a cadaver's exposed muscle had caught her eye. The change had heated her up, and she was anxious to leave the hot apartment, but she wanted to make one more adjustment. The image that had been in her mind's eye was too perfect, too clean. She thumbed through the paperware volumes quickly and distractedly, like a young girl leafing through a fashion magazine.

In the index to a medical journal downloaded from the public library, she found what she wanted. The page had been marked months ago with an invitation to a long-defunct club. She flicked on a power strip, and found the corresponding disk before her little machine had finished booting. The article took a few seconds to come up. Her graphics card was Canal Street cheap and always struggled to downgrade images from library-quality disks to a format it could handle.

   
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