"I wonder why they never come back," Shay said. "Just to visit."

Tally swallowed.

"Because we're so ugly, Skinny, that's why."

Facing the Future

"Here's option two." Tally touched her interface ring, and the wallscreen changed.

This Tally was sleek, with ultrahigh cheekbones, deep green catlike eyes, and a wide mouth that curled into a knowing smile.

"That's, uh, pretty different."

"Yeah. I doubt it's even legal."

Tally tweaked the eye-shape parameters, pulling the arch of the eyebrows down almost to normal. Some cities allowed exotic operations-for new pretties only-but the authorities here were notoriously conservative. She doubted a doctor would give this morpho a second glance, but it was fun to push the software to its limits. "You think I look too scary?"

"No. You look like a real pussycat." Shay giggled. "Unfortunately, I mean that in the literal, dead-mouse-eating sense."

"Okay, moving right along."

The next Tally was a much more standard morphological model, with almond-shaped brown eyes, straight black hair with long bangs, the dark lips set to maximum fullness.

"Pretty generic, Tally."

"Oh, come on! I worked on this one for a long time. I think I'd look great this way.

There's a whole Cleopatra thing going on."

"You know," Shay said, "I read that the real Cleopatra wasn't even that great-looking.

She seduced everyone with how clever she was."

"Yeah, right. And you've seen a picture of her?"

"They didn't have cameras back then, Squint."

"Duh. So how do you know she was ugly?"

"Because that's what historians wrote at the time."

Tally shrugged. "She was probably a classic pretty and they didn't even know it. Back then, they had weird ideas about beauty. They didn't know about biology."