Body Surfing

But it was getting smaller every day, thanks to the voracious appetites of men like Hudson and Cortez and Columbus and all those other explorers who risked their lives so that civilized man would know the extent of his material existence. But what’s left now? For humanity to discover? For humanity to do? Your species has placed its foot on every square inch of the earth’s soil. Cooked its oceans as if they were pots of water, pumped its atmosphere full of lead and fluorocarbons as if blowing up a balloon. Now it’s time to make something. A new world. A new body. A new mankind, living in harmony with the Mogran—who are, after all, an inextricable part of them, born of their minds, incapable of living outside their bodies. Don’t you want to be a part of that?”
    There were two questions Jasper could have asked. One was human, the other immortal. One implied causality and morality, while the other was merely an inquiry into process, an accumulation of data. Jasper, human still—at least in his mind—did not ask how . He only asked:
    “Why?”
    And Leo, immortal to the core, was caught off guard. A whimsical smile played over Michaela’s face. A smile that was nearly innocent as Leo realized that his charge—his creation, his child—had made a choice based on an emotion more substantial than the need to be distracted from the emptiness of eternity.
    The demon ran Michaela’s hands over her body. Showed it to Jasper in all its teenaged glory.
    “I was going to give her to you.”
    Jasper shook his head. “What are you talking about?”
    “Michaela. Your one true love. I was going to make her immortal, just like you. To show you how much I cared. That my intentions were honorable.”
    Jasper looked at Michaela. From her slightly splayed toes gripping the smooth bark of the fallen tree to the inch of pale blond hair that had grown on her scalp in the last three days. Her legs, still pale and delicate from winter. Her arms, lean, quick, inquisitive, always reaching for something. Her breasts. Her hips. The delicate space between.
    Leo, seeing where Jasper looked, shook Michaela’s head.
    “Is that all she is to you? A body? Have you been listening to nothing I said? I was going to give you Michaela , not some flabby piece of meat.”
    Something happened then. The demon’s eyes glazed, and he seemed suddenly smaller. Less sure of himself. Scared even.
    “Jasper? I-is that you?”
    It was Michaela’s voice. Not Leo’s. Michaela’s.
    For one brief moment it seemed to Jasper that his soul exploded through the shell of Larry Bishop’s flesh and he stood there not just in his own clothes but his own body, exposed to Michaela’s sight. But even as his arm reached out to her, the sleeve of his sweatshirt rode up on Larry Bishop’s significantly longer arm, exposing the ruined remains of Q.’s $29,000 watch, and he knew it was just an illusion. His arm, like his head, was rotting in a grave in the cemetery.
    Michaela’s eyes blinked rapidly. “Who—who are you? What am I doing here?” She looked around wildly, realized she was standing over a river. She screamed, teetered, nearly fell. An instant later she smiled coyly at Jasper.
    “Leo,” Jasper said. An epithet, an accusation. Bastard. Traitor .
    “See, Jasper? That’s Michaela. Not this.” He punched his host’s thigh, her breast, her head.
    Jasper looked at the body Leo touched with such impunity. Call him shallow. Call him a man. Hell, call him a teenaged boy. But he didn’t believe the demon. Michaela’s flesh was every much a part of her as her love of raucous girl pop or nineteenth-century romances. If her mind were transplanted in another body, she would be a different person. Jasper didn’t like admitting that. Not because it made him seem shallow, but because it made him wonder what he was now. How much of him was still Jasper, how much was something else.
    “You were going to make her like us?”
    Leo’s eyebrows raised at the word. Us . “I was. A present for you. A companion, to make eternity less lonely.”
    “Don’t!” Jasper heard himself say before he knew he was going to say it. “Don’t do it!”
    “No need for melodrama, Jasper. I couldn’t if I wanted to. Your beloved? Sweet, virginal Michaela, who made you wait till you thought your balls were going to burst? She wasn’t so chaste, after all. Wasn’t quite the virgin she made herself out to be.”
    Jasper’s hands balled into fists. “Shut