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"Like his polymorphous main character
Westerfeld's writing pleases on many levels.
A delightful novel to discover, its tight plot kept me busy while the
characters were making off with my preconceived notions."
Cecilia Tan, editor of Genderflex and TechnoSex

An excerpt from Polymorph.

Sometimes, someone would come home with her (or him), and would be amazed at
the closet. It was the larger of two small rooms in the apartment. 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
second-hand clothes 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 tee-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 jump suit, a silver mylar jacket, combat boots; a white dress shirt hung
under a tweed jacket, a snake skin 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 legitimized 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 stomach 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 hair, still wet, 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 readier 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 took a few seconds to downgrade images from
library-quality disks to a format it could handle.

The pictures were as she remembered, digitized black-and-white photographs of an
exquisite pair of hands. They belonged to a woman who had lived in Oklahoma. The
fingers were almost normal, though strangely tiny compared to the palms. They were
delicate and fine, like precision instruments. The thumbs jutted out almost perpendicular to
the fingers. At first she thought the thumbs were short, but they were normal length,
simply embedded too far into the hand, as if attached to the bones of the index fingers. She
studied the pictures, six views and a navigable x-ray, carefully. The text fields were
cluttered with jargon that her two years of anatomy classes couldn't penetrate.

When the image had formed in her mind, more solid there than in the flat pictures,
she closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, quickly, and it began again. The pain, though
contained in her lower arms, was sharper than usual. It struck suddenly, with a blinding
flash of red behind her eyelids. It felt like someone was pulling her thumbs back
relentlessly. The bones inside snapped, rejoined, and snapped again. She let out a cry,
and there was a brief moment of panic. Perhaps she had gone too far, too fast in her
impatience. A familiar thought occurred to her: there were no doctors who could fix her.
She remembered her mother's horror when, as a child, she would bend in impossible
ways. "You'll get stuck that way!"

She had quickly learned to curb her transformations, and to practice the slow-
developing art alone and in secret. Now, she calmed herself with the memory of those
slow, erotic experiments in which she had first changed her shape, her face, her sex. In a
quiet, flashlight-lit closet in her mother's apartment, feeling her bones and organs dance as
if they were just tardily-developing muscles.

Slowly, panting and with eyes screwed shut, she gained control again. Her
instinctive sense of her hands' shape slowly came to match the image in her mind. The
hands throbbed with dull pain, but they felt whole. They flexed smoothly, but with a queer
feeling, as if the skin were stretching in an unfamiliar way. She opened her eyes.

She liked them better than the Oklahoman's hands. Their deformity was not twisted
or bizarre, merely alien. The fingers flexed with a kind of liquid motion, like the legs of an
upended tarantula. The thumbs were articulated in three places, the fingers syndactylic; a
web of skin between them taut when she splayed her hands. The hands ached dully. She
filled the sink with cold water and soaked them in it, wondering at their new shape. She
had experimented with ugliness before, and with shapes that simply hadn't...worked. But
never had a deformity seemed so fit. What was a successful mutated gene called in
biology? A fortunate monster.

When the pain subsided, she dried the hands. The everyday motion had to be
reinvented. She washed her face, suppressing a shudder as the hands first touched it, and

primped in the mirror again. She blew herself a kiss, borne on an alien palm.

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