10

"After the explosion, I found myself with only one working body left, and that wasn't in very good shape. I had perception, that's about all I can say, and I crawled it out of the wreckage. It was like living a nightmare. Most of the time I was somewhere else; I hardly knew what that body was doing. My mind was a jumble of crazy images and time was all out of kilter for me. I relived pieces of my life over and over, especially other accidents, and part of the time while I was dragging that body over the debris that had fallen all around it I really believed I was back in some of those other times, never mind that the events didn't really match up. My delirium took care of those details.

"I recall nightmare snatches of crawling through a hole that was blown in the fence, and wandering through the streets into some ghetto district. I might have spent days there, sleeping in alleys, I just don't know.

"Eventually I had sense enough to drag myself into a flophouse. Maybe I was driven by hunger. Anyway, I got fed and put into something that resembled a real bed. I slept for sure then; again I don't know how long. But it was delirious, nightmare sleep, reliving the explosion and everything that followed over and over, my mind going off on wild excursions into some altered reality.

"Maybe I was just too long accustomed to running several bodies to be able to stay stuck with just one. Anyway, I woke up one night and realized I was in two places.

"One of them was the flophouse, in the clone body that was still in bad shape, all busted up inside and sick from exposure and abuse and lack of nourishment. The other place I woke up was a home in a middle class neighborhood. The room was clean and orderly, fresh-smelling; clean white linen, good air, no stink of sweat and garbage. And the body was fat and healthy.

"I've never been one to examine good fortune too closely. I got up and took a look around the place. It didn't take long for me to understand that I was using one of the bodies of some middle-class Minor who was asleep in the next room. In sleep, naturally, he'd returned to his Primary, leaving his clones unoccupied. He only had a couple. I played with controlling the other one for a bit, but in my condition it was more than I could handle. I began to worry about what would happen when my host woke up. But I couldn't give up this healthy body. So I got it dressed in street clothes and let myself out of the house.

"I set out walking, heading for the place I'd left my own clone. I had some half-formed idea of claiming to be a friend or relative and taking it out of there. But as I walked, I began to realize that I felt good. I felt more alive than I had since the accident. This body I'd adopted felt a bit odd. You know, different bone and muscle relationships than I was used to. But not much more so than some of my own modified clones had felt at first. For the first time, I began to really understand what had happened, that I had survived, that I was going to make it.

"Maybe you know what it feels like to survive a really serious threat to your existence, the sense of relief, how good you can feel and how good the world can look to you. That's what I began to feel, that kind of euphoria. I kept walking, but for a while I wasn't going anywhere, just walking for the sheer joy of it, for the sense of being alive in a relatively strong, healthy body after the weakness and delirium I'd been through in the clone. But before long I began to feel the limitations again, and I wanted to reach out, to pick up another body and expand my senses more. I remembered the clone, and realized I'd been ignoring it, maybe avoiding the depressing effect it might have had on this sense of well-being I'd been enjoying.

"So now I reached out for it - and it wasn't there! In a panic, I ran the rest of the way to the shelter where I'd left it. I found the room, and the body was still there, all right. But it was dead.

"Really dead. I frantically tried everything I could think of to revive it; blew in its mouth, pounded on its chest. But there was no breath, no heartbeat, and no ghost of mental activity I could focus in on.

"My initial panic turned into a cold fear. For the first time I really looked at the body that was lying there, looked at the condition of it. The clothing was in rags. One hand was smashed, and there were cuts and gouges all over it that must have bled profusely at first. No wonder I had been delirious; the fever must have been terrific. I think I kept it alive as long as I did by sheer will to survive. As soon as I left it, the biological functions had taken their natural course.

"I sat in that room with my dead clone, in a cold sweat. I was alive in a borrowed body. I had no way to know whether the owner would be able to find me and drive me out. What if he did? I had no body of my own left. If I lost this one, it would surely be the end for me. All I could think of was to put as much distance between myself and this body's owner as I could. So I abandoned that last useless hulk of my former self, and rushed back out into the street.

"I was half crazy with fear, not knowing whether I might lose this body to its owner at any moment, but my state of mind was different than it had been in the half-dead clone. Then I was delirious; now I became calculating.

"I realized that there were memories attached to this body. None of the owner's thoughts or emotions were there, but I got flashes of perception, pictures of the body's earlier experiences. These flashes of perceptual records seemed to be stimulated by the environment; as I stood on the street corner I got a flash from the body of hailing a cab from a similar spot. I had no money with me, and no way to get at my bank account. The death of my last clone had eliminated all chance of recovering that. But I realised that, like most Talents, the owner of this body probably used his thumbprint for credit ID.

"I hailed a cab, and had it take me to the airport. I thumbed the driver's identiplate to pay the fare, and again there was a flash of body recall. Sure enough, it took. So he had credit. I went in to the ticket counter, and looked at the departure schedule displays for the earliest flight that would get me far away. That turned out to be a sky shuttle hop to Sydney, Australia. I gave the name that had come up on the cabby's confirmation display, and thumbed an identiplate again. My luck held, and within the hour I was rocketing to the other side of the world.

"As the miles passed below, my fear of being displaced from the body I was using began to ease. I started to plot what I would do when I arrived. I figured I could use this body's access to credit as long as it held out. As you know, Johnny, there was no precedent for what I was doing. No one was going to suspect a clone of stealing from its owner. I didn't know what would be made of the disappearance of the body from its recliner in his home, but the true case would not be high on the list if it appeared at all. I figured I would have at least a month before the owner saw my charges appear on his credit billing and began to make a fuss.

"But that was just a start. I knew I wouldn't be happy with just one body. Now that I knew it was possible, I planned to try picking up others. Then if things began to get hot for this one, I could drop it and transfer again."