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altered in one way or another. Some, like you, stay almost natural. Some of the alterations aren’t compatible with others. Not all of them involve penetration of one person by another, for instance. What these newsex people are saying is, if we’re going to tamper, why not come up with a system that is so much better than the others that everyone will want to be that way? Why should the sensations we associate with ‘sexual pleasure’ be always and forever the result of friction between mucous membranes? It’s the same sort of urge people had about languages back on Earth, back when there were hundreds of languages, or about weights and measures. The metric system caught on, but Esperanto didn’t. Today we have a few dozen languages still in use, and more types of sexual orientation than that.”
    I settled back in my chair, feeling foolish. But I’d done my part. Now Walter could get on with whatever he had in mind. I glanced at Brenda, and she was staring at me with the wide eyed look of an acolyte to a guru.
    Walter took another drag on his cheroot, exhaled, and leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.
    “You know what today is?” he asked.
    “Thursday,” Brenda supplied. Walter glanced at her, but didn’t bother to reply. He took another drag.
    “It’s the one hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of the Planet Earth.”
    “Remind me to light a candle and say a novena.”
    “You think it’s funny.”
    “Nothing funny about it,” I said. “I just wonder what it has to do with me.”
    Walter nodded, and put his feet down on the floor.
    “How many stories have you seen on the Invasion in the last week? The week leading up to this anniversary?”
    I was willing to play along.
    “Let’s see. Counting the stuff in The Straight Shit , the items in the Lunarian and the K.C. News , that incisive series in Lunatime , and of course our own voluminous coverage…  none. Not a single story.”
    “That’s right. I think it’s time somebody did something about that.”
    “While we’re at it, let’s do a big spread on the Battle of Agincourt, and the first manned landing on Mars.”
    “You do think it’s funny.”
    “I’m merely applying a lesson somebody taught me when I started here. If it happened yesterday, it ain’t news. And The News Nipple reports the news.”
    “This isn’t strictly for the Nipple ,” Walter admitted.
    “Uh-oh.”
    He ignored my expression, which I hoped was sufficiently sour, and plowed ahead.
    “We’ll use cuts from your stories in the Nipple . Most of ’em, anyway. You’ll have Brenda to do most of the leg work.”
    “What are you talking about?” Brenda asked Walter. When that didn’t work, she turned to me. “What’s he talking about?”
    “I’m talking about the supplement.”
    “He’s talking about the old reporters’ graveyard.”
    “Just one story a week. Will you let me explain?”
    I settled back in my chair and tried to turn off my brain.
    Oh, I’d fight it hard enough, but I knew I didn’t have much choice when Walter got that look in his eye.
    The News Nipple Corporation publishes three pads. The first is the Nipple itself, updated hourly, full of what Walter Editor liked to think of as “lively” stories: the celebrity scandal, the pseudo-scientific breakthrough, psychic predictions, lovingly bloody coverage of disasters. We covered the rougher and more proletarian sports, and a certain amount of politics, if the proposition involved could be expressed in a short sentence. The Nipple had so many pictures you hardly needed to read the words. Like the other padloids, it would not have bothered with any copy but for the government literacy grants that often provided the financial margin between success and failure. A daily quota of words was needed to qualify for the grants. That exact number of words appeared in each of our issues, including “a,” “an,” “and,” and “the.”
    The Daily