Version 0.5 dtd 032500

Far too many short stories have been tediously strung out as
novels, or inflated to novelette length, so that a sharp pang of
pleasure can be experienced when a story is written to the
proper lengthwhich in this case is jewel-like conciseness.
Mr. Pohl, with more years behind him as writer and editor
than he cares to remember, draws freely upon his talent and
experience to produce a smooth and cool entertainment that
conceals a wicked barb of truth.

DAY MILLION

rm~
Frederik Pohl

On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about ten
thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love
story.
Now, although I haven't said much so far, none of it is
true. The boy was not what you and I would normally think
of as a boy, because he was a hundred and eighty-seven years
old. Nor was the girl a girl, for other reasons. And the love
story did not entail that sublimation of the urge to rape, and
concurrent postponement of the instinct to submit, which we
at present understand in such matters. You won't care much
for this- story if you don't grasp these facts at once. If,
however, you will make the effort you'll likely enough find it
jampacked, chockful and tip-top-crammed with laughter, tears
and poignant sentiment which may, or may not, be worth-
while. The reason the girl was not a girl was that she was a
boy.
How angrily you recoil from the page! You say, who the
hell wants to read about a pair of queers? Calm yourself.
Here are no hot-breathing secrets of perversion for the coterie
trade. In fact, if you were to see this girl you would not guess
that she was in any sense a boy. Breasts, two; reproductive
organs, female. Hips, callipygean; face hairless, supra-orbital
lobes non-existent. You would term her female on sight,
although it is true that you might wonder just what species
she was a female of, being confused by the tail, the silky pelt
and the gill slits behind each ear.
Now you recoil again. Cripes, man, take my word for it.
This is a sweet kid, and if you, as a normal male, spent as
much as an hour in a room with her you would bend heaven
and Earth to get her in the sack. DoraWe will call her that;
her "name" was omicron-Dibase seven-group-totter-oot S
Doradus 5314, the last part of which is a colour specification
corresponding to a shade of greenDora, I say, was femi-
nine, charming and cute. I admit she doesn't sound that way.
She was, as you might put it, a dancer. Her art involved
qualities of intellection and expertise of a very high order,
requiring both tremendous natural capacities and endless
, practice; it was performed in null-gravity and I can best
describe it by saying that it was something like the perform-
ance of a contortionist and something like classical baflel;'
maybe resembling Danilova's dying swan. It was also prett~
damned sexy. In a symbolic way, to be sure; but face it, most
of the things we call "sexy" are symbolic, you know, except
perhaps an exhibitionist's open clothing. On Day Million
when Dora danced, the people who saw her panted, and you
would too.
About this business of her being a boy. It didn't matter to
her audiences that genetically she was male. It wouldn't
matter to you, if you were among them, because you wouldn't
know itnot unless you took a biopsy cutting of her flesh and
put it under an electron-microscope to find the XY chromo-
.someand it didn't matter to them because they didn't care.
Through techniques which are not only complex but haven't
yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a
great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a
long time before they were bornat about the second horizon
of cell-division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is
becoming a free blastocystand then they naturally helped
those aptitudes along. Wouldn't we? If we find a child with an
aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If
they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman,
they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from
reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no
trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.
How much is "very little"? Oh, about as much as would be
caused by our own tampering with Divine Will by filling a
tooth. Less than would be caused by wearing a hearing aid.
Does it still sound awful? Then look closely at the next busty
babe you meet and reflect that she may be a Dora, for adults
who are genetically male but somatically female are far from
unknown even in our own time. An accident of environment
in the womb overwhelms the blueprints of heredity. The
difference is that with us it happens only by accident and we
don't know about it except rarely, after close study; whereas
the people of Day Million did it often, on purpose, because
they wanted to.
Well, that's enough to tell you about Dora. It would only
confuse you to add that she was seven feet tall and smelled of
peanut butter. Let us begin our story.
On Day Million, Dora swam out of her house, entered a
transportation tube, was sucked briskly to the surface in its
flow of water and ejected in its plume of spray to an elastic
platform in front of herahcall it her rehearsal hall.
"Oh, hell!" she cried in pretty confusion, reaching out to
catch her balance and finding herself tumbled against a total
stranger, whom we will call Don.
They met cute. Don was on his way to have his legs
renewed. Love was the farthest thing from his mind. But
when, absentmindedly taking a shortcut across the landing
platform for submarinites and finding himself drenched, he
discovered his arms full of the loveliest girl he had ever seen,
he knew at once they were meant for each other. "Will you
marry me?" he asked. She said softly, "Wednesday," and the
promise was like a caress.
Don was tall, muscular, bronze and exciting. His name was
no more Don than Dora's was Dora, but the personal part of
it was Adonis in tribute to his vibrant maleness, and so we
will call him Don for short. His personality colour-code, in
Angstrom units, was 5,290, or only a few degrees bluer than
Dora's 5,314a measure of what they had intuitively discov-
ered at first sight; that they possessed many affinities of taste
and interest.
I despair of telling you exactly what it was that Don did for
a living1 don't mean for the sake of making money, I mean
for the sake of giving purpose and meaning to his life, to keep
him from going off his nut with boredomexcept to say that
it  involved  a  lot  of  travelling.  He  travelled  in  interstellar
spaceships. In order to make a spaceship go really fast, about
thirty-one male and seven genetically female human beings
had to do certain things, and Don was one of the thirty-one.
Actually, he contemplated options. This involved a lot of
exposure to radiation fluxnot so much from his own station
in the propulsive system as in the spillover from the next
stage, where a genetic female preferred selections, and the
sub-nuclear particles making the selections she preferred de-
molished themselves in a shower of quanta. Well, you don't
give a rat's ass for that, but it meant that Don had to be clad
at all times in a skin of light, resilient, extremely strong
copper-coloured metal. I have already mentioned this, but you
probably thought I meant he was sunburned.
More that that, he was a cybernetic man. Most of his ruder
parts had been long since replaced with mechanisms of vastly
more permanence and use. A cadmium centrifuge, not a
heart, pumped his blood. His lungs moved only when he
wanted to speak out loud, for a cascade of osmotic filters
rebreathed. oxygen out of his own wastes. In a way, he
probably would have looked peculiar to a man from the 20th
century, with his glowing eyes and seven-fingered hands. But
to himself, and of course to Dora, he looked mighty manly
and grand. In the course of his voyages Don had circled
Proxima Centauri, Procyon and the puzzling worlds of Mira
Ceti; he had carried agricultural templates to the planets of
Canopus and brought back warm, witty pets from the pale
companion of Aldebaran. Blue-hot or red-cool, he had seen a
thousand stars and their ten thousand planets. He had, in fact,
been travelling the starlanes, with only brief leaves on Earth,
for pushing two centuries. But you don't care about that,
either. It is people who make stories, not the circumstances
they find themselves in, and you want to hear about these two
people. Well, they made it. The great thing they had for each
other grew and flowered and burst into fruition on Wednes-
day, just as Dora had promised. They met at the encoding
room, with a couple of well-wishing friends apiece to cheer
them on, and while their identities were being taped and
stored they smiled and whispered to each other and bore the
jokes of their friends with blushing repartee. Then they
exchanged their mathematical analogues and went away,
Dora to her dwelling beneath the surface of the sea and Don
to his ship.
It was an idyll, really. They lived happily ever afteror
anyway, until they decided not to bother any more and died.
Of course, they never set eyes on each other again.
Oh, I can see you now, you eaters of charcoal-broiled
steak, scratching an incipient bunion with one hand and
holding this story with the other, while the stereo plays dindy
or Monk. You don't believe a word of it, do you? Not for one
minute. People wouldn't live like that, you say with a grunt as
you get up to put fresh ice in a drink.
And yet there's Dora, hurrying back through the flushing
commuter pipes toward her underwater home (she prefers it
there; has had herself somatically altered to breath the stuff).
If I tell you with what sweet fulfilment she fits the recorded
analogue of Don into the symbol manipulator, hooks herself in
and turns herself on ...if I try to tell you any of that you will
simply stare. Or glare; and grumble, what the hell kind of
love-making is this? And yet I assure you, friend, I really
do assure you that Dora's ecstasies are as creamy and passion-
ate as any of James Bond's lady spies', and one hell of a lot
more so than anything you are going to find in "real life." Go
ahead, glare and grumble. Dora doesn't care. If she thinks of
you at all, her thirty-times-great-great-grandfather, she thinks
you're a pretty primordial sort of brute. You are. Why, Dora
is farther removed from you than you are from the austra-
lopithecines of five thousand centuries ago. You could not
swim a second in the strong currents of her life. You don't
think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recog-
nize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponen-
tial curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it
goes it goes like a bomb. And you, you Scotch-drinking steak-
eater in your relaxacizing chair, you've just barely lighted the
primacord of the fuse. What is it now, the six or seven hundred
thousandth day after Christ? Dora lives in Day Million, the
millionth day of the Christian Era. Ten thousand years from
now. Her body fats are polyunsaturated like Crisco. Her
wastes are haemodialysed out of her bloodstream while she
sleepsthat means she doesn't have to go to the bathroom.
On whim, to pass a slow half-hour, she can command more
energy than the entire nation of Portugal can spend today,
and use it to launch a weekend satellite or remould a crater
on the Moon. She loves Don very much. She keeps his every
gesture, mannerism, nuance, touch of hand, thrill of inter-
course, passion of kiss stored in symbolic-mathematical form.
And when she wants him, all she has to do is turn the machine
on and she has him.
And Don, of course, has Dora. Adrift on a sponson city a
few hundred yards over her head, or orbiting Arcturus fifty
light-years away, Don has only to command his own symbol-
manipulator to reduce Dora from the ferrite files and bring
her to life for him, and there she is; and rapturously, tirelessly
they love all night. Not in the flesh, of course; but then his
flesh has been extensively altered and it wouldn't really be
much fun. He doesn't need the flesh for pleasure. Genital
organs feel nothing. Neither do hands, nor breasts, nor lips;
they are only receptors, accepting and transmitting impulses.
It is the brain that feels; it is the interpretation of those
impulses that makes agony or orgasm, and Don's symbol
manipulator gives him the analogue of cuddling, the analogue
of kissing, the analogue of wild, ardent hours with the eternal,
exquisite and incorruptible analogue of Dora. Or Diane. Or
sweet Rose, or laughing Alicia; for to be sure, they have each
of them exchanged analogues before, and will again.
Rats, you say, it looks crazy to me. And youwith your
aftershave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across
a desk all day and chasing tail all nighttell me, just how the
hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or
Attila the Hun?