äÖÏÎ ÷ÁÒÌÉ. èÏÌÏÄÎÙÊ ÐÌÑÖ (engl)
---------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 1991 by John Varley.
For the personal use of those who have
purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.
---------------------------------------------------------------
STEEL BEACH
by John Varley
"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the
salesman.
He paused to let this planet-shattering information sink
into our amazed brains. Personally, I didn't know how many more
wonders I could absorb before lunch.
"With the right promotional campaign," he went on,
breathlessly, "it might take as little as two years.
He might even have been right. Stranger things have
happened in my lifetime. But I decided to hold off on calling
my broker with frantic orders to sell all my jock-strap stock.
The press conference was being held in a large auditorium
belonging to United Bioengineers. It could seat about a
thousand; it presently held about a fifth that number, most of
us huddled together in the front rows.
The UniBio salesman was non-nondescript as a game-show
host. He had one of those voices, too. A Generic person. One of
these days they'll standardize every profession by face and
body type. Like uniforms.
He went on:
"Sex as we know it is awkward, inflexible, unimaginative.
By the time you're forty, you've done everything you possibly
could with our present, 'natural' sexual system. In fact, if
you're even moderately active, you've done everything a dozen
times. It's become boring. And if it's boring at forty, what
will it be like at eighty, or a hundred and forty? Have you
ever thought about that? About what you'll be doing for a sex
life when you're eighty? Do you really want to be repeating the
same old acts?"
"Whatever I'm doing, it won't be with him," Cricket
whispered in my ear.
"How about with me?" I whispered back. "Right after the
show."
"How about after I'm eighty?" She gave me a sharp little
jab in the ribs, but she was smiling. Which is more than I
could say for the hulk sitting in front of us. He worked for
Perfect Body, weighed about two hundred kilos--none of it
fat--and was glaring over the slope of one massive trapezius,
flexing the muscles in his eyebrows. I wouldn't have believed
he could even turn his head, much less look over his shoulder.
You could hear the gristle popping.
We took the hint and shut up.
"At United Bioengineers," the pitch went on, "we have no
doubt that, given twenty or thirty million years, Mother Nature
would have remedied some of these drawbacks. In fact," and here
he gave a smile that managed to be sly and aw-shucks at the
same time, "we wonder if the grand old lady might have settled
on this very System . . . that's how good we think it is.
"And how good is that? I hear you saying. There have been
a lot of improvements since the days of Christine Jorgensen.
What makes this one so special?"
"Christine who?" Cricket whispered, typing rapidly with
the fingers of her right hand on her left forearm.
"Jorgensen. First male-to-female sex change, not counting
opera singers. What are they teaching you in journalism school
these days?"
"Get the spin right, and the factoids will follow. Hell,
Hildy, I didn't realize you dated the lady."
"I've done worse since. If she hadn't kept trying to lead
on the dance floor . . . "
This time an arm--it had to be an arm, it grew out of his
shoulder, though I could have put both my legs into one of his
sleeves--hooked itself over the back of the chair in front of
me, and I was treated to the whole elephantine display, from
the crew-cut yellow hair to the jaw you could have used to plow
the south forty, to the neck wider than Cricket's hips. I held
up my hands placatingly, pantomimed locking up my lips and
throwing away the key. His brow beetled even more-- god help me
if he thought I was making fun of him-- then he turned back
around. I was left wondering where he got the tiny barbells he
must have used to get those forehead muscles properly pumped
up.
In a word, I was bored.
I'd seen the Sexual Millennium announced before. As
recently as the previous March, in fact, and quite regularly
before that. It was like end-of-the-world stories, or perpetual
motion machines. A journalist figured to encounter them every
few weeks as long as his career lasted. I suspect it was the
same when headlines were chiseled into stone tablets and the
Sunday Edition was tossed from the back of a woolly mammoth. I
had lost track of how many times I'd sat in audiences just like
this, listening to a glib young man/woman with more teeth than
God intended proclaim the Breakthrough of the Age. It was the
price a feature reporter had to pay.
It could have been worse. I could have had the political
beat.
" . . . tested on over two thousand volunteer subjects . .
. random sampling error of plus or minus one percent . . . "
I was having a bad feeling. That the story would not be
one hundredth as revolutionary as the guy was promising was a
given. The only question was, would there be enough substance
to hack out a story I could sell to Walter?
" . . . registered a sixty-three percent increase in
orgasmic sensation, a two to one rise in the satisfaction
index, and a complete lack of post-coital depression."
And as my old uncle J. Walter Thompson used to say, makes
your wash fifty percent whiter, cleans your teeth, and leaves
your breath alone.
I reached down to the floor and recovered the faxpad each
of us had been given as we came through the door. I called up
the survey questions and scanned through them quickly. My
bullshit detector started beeping so loudly I was afraid Mister
Dynamic Tension would turn around again.
The questions were garbage. There are firms whose purpose
is to work with pollsters and guard against the so-called
"brown-nose effect," that entirely human tendency to tell
people what they want to hear. Ask folks if they like your new
soda pop, they'll tend to say yes, then spit it out when your
back is turned. UniBio had not hired one of these firms.
Sometimes that in itself indicates a lack of confidence in the
product.
"And now, the moment you've been waiting for." There was a
flourish of trumpets. The lights dimmed. Spotlights swirled
over the blue velvet drapes behind the podium, which began to
crawl toward the wings with the salesman aboard.
"United Bioengineers presents--"
"Drum roll," Cricket whispered, a fraction of a second
early. I hit her with my elbow.
"--the future of sex . . . ULTRA-Tingle!"
There was polite applause and the curtains parted to
reveal a nude couple standing, embracing, beneath a violet
spot. Both were hairless. They turned to face us, heads high,
shoulders back. Neither seemed to be male or female. The only
real distinction between them was the hint of breasts and a
touch of eye shadow on the smaller one. There was flat, smooth
skin between each pair of legs.
"Another touchie-feelie," Cricket said. "I thought this
was going to be all new. Didn't they introduce the Tingle
system three years ago?"
"They sure did. Paid a fortune to get half a dozen celebs
to convert, and they still didn't get more than ten, twenty
thousand subscribers. I doubt there's a hundred of them left."
What can you do? They hold a press conference, we have to
send somebody. They throw chum in the water, we start to feed.
Five minutes into the ULTRA-Tingle presentations (that's
how they insisted it be spelled, with caps) I could see this
turkey would be of interest only to the trades. I'm sure my
beefy buddy up front was tickled down to the tips of his
muscle-bound toes.
There were a dozen nude, genderless dancers on stage now,
caressing each others' bodies and posing artistically. Blue
sparks flew from their fingertips.
"That's it for me," I said to Cricket. "You sticking
around?"
"There's a drawing later. Three free conversions--"
"--to the fabulous ULTRA-Tingle System," the salesman
said, finishing her sentence for her.
"Win free sex," I said.
"What's that?"
"Walter says it's the ultimate padloid headline."
"Shouldn't it have something about UFO's in it?"
"Okay. 'Win Free Sex Aboard a UFO to Old Earth.'"
"I'd better stick around for the drawing. My boss would
kill me if I won and wasn't around to collect."
"If I win, they can bring it around to the office." I got
up, put my hand on a massive shoulder, leaned down.
"Those pecs could use some more work," I told the gorilla
hybrid, and got out in a hurry.
#
The foyer had been transformed since my arrival. Huge blue
holos of ULTRA-Tingle convertees entwined erotically in the
corners, and long banquet tables had been wheeled in. Men in
traditional English butler uniforms stood behind the tables
polishing silver and glassware.
It's known as perks. I seldom turn down a free trip in the
course of my profession, and I never turn down free food.
I went to the nearest table and stuck a knife into a pÂte'
sculpture of Sigmund Freud and spread the thick brown goo over
a slice of black bread. One of the butlers looked worried and
started toward me, but I glared him back into his place. I put
two thick slices of smoked ham on top of the pÂte', spread a
layer of cream cheese, a few sheets of lox sliced so thin you
could read newsprint through it, and topped it all off with
three spoonfuls of black Beluga caviar. The butler watched the
whole operation in increasing disbelief.
It was one of the all-time great Hildy sandwiches.
I was about to bite into it when Cricket appeared at my
elbow and offered me a tulip glass of blue champagne. The
crystal made an icy clear musical note when I touched it to the
rim of her glass.
"Freedom of the press," I suggested.
"The fourth estate," Cricket agreed.
#
The UniBio labs were at the far end of a new suburb nearly
seventy kilometers from the middle of King City. Most of the
slides and escalators were not working yet. There was only one
functioning tube terminal and it was two kilometers away. We'd
come in a fleet of twenty hoverlimos. They were still there,
lined up outside the entrance to the corporate offices, ready
to take us back to the tube station. Or so I thought. Cricket
and I climbed aboard.
"It distresses me greatly to tell you this," the hoverlimo
said, "but I am unable to depart until the demonstration inside
is over, or until I have a passenger load of seven
individuals."
"Make an exception," I told it. "We have deadlines to
meet."
"Are you perhaps declaring an emergency situation?"
I started to do just that, then bit my tongue. I'd get
back to the office, all right, then have a lot of explaining to
do and a big fine to pay.
"When I write this story," I said, trying another tack,
"and when I mention this foolish delay, portraying UniBio in an
unfavorable light, your bosses will be extremely upset."
"This information disturbs and alarms me," said the
hoverlimo. "I, being only a sub-program of an
incompletely-activated routine of the UniBio building computer,
wish only to please my human passengers. Be assured I would go
to the greatest lengths to satisfy your desires, as my only
purpose is to provide satisfaction and speedy transportation.
However," it added, after a short pause, "I can't move."
"Come on," Cricket said. "You ought to know better than to
argue with a machine." She was already getting out. I knew she
was right, but there is a part of me that has never been able
to resist it, even if they don't talk to me.
"Your mother was a garbage truck," I said, and kicked it
in the rubber skirt.
"Undoubtedly, sir. Thank you, sir. Please come back soon,
sir."
#
"Who programmed that toadying thing?" I wondered, later.
"Somebody with a lot of lipstick on his ass," Cricket
said. "What are you so sour about? It's just a short walk. Take
in the scenery."
It was a rather pleasant place, I had to admit. There were
very few people around. You grow up with the odor of people all
around you, all the time, and you really notice it when the
scent is gone. I took a deep breath and smelled freshlypoured
concrete. I drank the sights and sounds and scents of a
new-born world: the sharp primary colors of wire bundles
sprouting from unfinished walls like the first buds on a bare
bough, the untarnished gleam of copper, silver, gold, aluminum,
titanium; the whistle of air through virgin ducts, undeflected,
unmuffled, bringing with it the crisp sharpness of the light
machine oil that for centuries has coated new machinery, fresh
from the factory . . . all these things had an effect on me.
They meant warmth, security, safety from the eternal vacuum,
the victory of humanity over the hostile forces that never
slept. In a word, progress.
I began to relax a little. We picked our way through
jumbles of stainless steel and aluminum and plastic and glass
building components and I felt a peace as profound as I suspect
a Kansas farmer of yesteryear might have felt, looking out over
his rippling fields of wheat.
"Says here they've got an option where you can have sex
over the telephone."
Cricket had gotten a few paces ahead of me, and she was
reading from the UniBio faxpad handout.
"That's nothing new. People started having sex over the
telephone about ten minutes after Alexander Graham Bell
invented it."
"You're pulling my leg. Nobody invented sex."
I liked Cricket, though we were rivals. She works for The
Straight Shit, Luna's second largest padloid, and has already
made a name for herself even though she's not quite thirty
years old. We cover many of the same stories so we see a lot of
each other, professionally.
She'd been female all the time I'd known her, but she'd
never shown any interest in the tentative offers I had made. No
accounting for taste. I'd about decided it was a matter of
sexual orientation--one doesn't ask. It had to be that. If not,
it meant she just wasn't interested in me. Altogether unlikely.
Which was a shame, either way, because I'd harbored a
low-grade lust for her for three years.
"'Simply attach the Tinglemodem (sold separately) to the
primary sensory cluster,'" she read, "'and it's as if your
lover were in the room with you.' I'll bet Mr. Bell didn't
figure on that."
Cricket had a child-like face with an upturned nose and a
brow that tended to wrinkle appealingly when she was
thinking--all carefully calculated, I have no doubt, but no
less exciting because of that. She had a short upper lip and a
long lower one. I guess that doesn't sound so great, but
Cricket made it work. She had one green, normal eye, and the
other one was red, without a pupil. My eyes were the same
except the normal one was brown. The visible red eyes of the
press never sleep.
She was wearing a frilly red blouse that went well with
her silver-blonde hair, and the second badge of our profession:
a battered gray fedora with a card reading PRESS stuck into the
brim. She had recently had herself heeled. It was coming back
into fashion. Personally, I tried it and didn't like it much.
It's a simple operation. The tendons in the soles of the feet
are shortened, forcing your heels up in the air and shifting
the weight to the balls of the feet. In extreme cases it put
you right up on your toes, like a ballerina. Like I said, a
rather silly fad, but I had to admit it produced attractive
lines in the calf, thigh, and buttock muscles.
It could have been worse. Women used to cram their feet
into pointed horrors with tencentimeter heels and hobble around
in a one-gee field to get more or less the same effect. It must
have been crippling.
"Says there's a security interlock available, to insure
fidelity."
"What? Where's that?"
She gave me the faxpad reference. I couldn't believe what
I was reading.
"Is that legal?" I asked her.
"Sure. It's a contract between two people, isn't it?
Nobody's forced to use it."
"It's an electronic chastity belt, that's what it is."
"Worn by both husband and wife. Not like the brave knight
off to the Crusades, getting laid every night while his wife
looks for a good locksmith. Good for the goose, good for the
gander."
"Good for nobody, if you ask me."
Frankly, I was shocked, and not much shocks me. To each
his or her own, that's basic to our society. But ULTRA-Tingle
was offering a coded security system whereby each partner had a
password, unknown to the other, to lock or unlock his or her
partner's sexual response. Without the password, the sexual
center of the brain would not be activated, and sex would be
about as exciting as long division.
To use it would require giving someone veto power over my
own mind. I can't imagine trusting anyone that much. But people
are crazy. That's what my job's all about.
"How about over there?" Cricket said.
"Over where? I mean, what about it?" She was headed toward
a patch of green, an area that, when completed, would be a
pocket park. Trees stood around in pots. There were great rolls
of turf stacked against one wall, like a carpet shop.
"It's probably the best spot we'll find."
"For what?"
"Have you forgotten your offer already?" she asked.
To tell the truth, I had. After this many years, it had
been made more in jest than anything else. She took my hand and
led me onto an unrolled section of turf. It was soft and
springy and cool. She reclined and looked up at me.
"Maybe I shouldn't say it, but I'm surprised."
"Well, Hildy, you never really asked, you know?"
I felt sure I had, but maybe she was right. My style is
more to kid around, make what used to be known as a pass. Some
women don't like that. They'd rather have a direct question.
I stretched out on top of her and we kissed.
We disarranged some of my clothes. She wasn't wearing
enough to worry about. Soon we were moving to rhythms it had
taken Mother Nature well over a billion years to compose. It
was awkward, messy, it lacked flexibility and probably didn't
show much imagination. It sure wasn't ULTRATingle. That didn't
prevent it from being wonderful.
"Wow," she whispered, as I rolled off her and we lay side
by side on the grass. "That was really . . . obsolete."
"Not nearly as obsolete as it was for me."
We looked at each other and burst out laughing.
After a while, she sat up and glanced at the figures
displayed on her wrist.
"Deadline in three hours," she said.
"Me, too." We heard a low hum, looked up, and saw our old
friend the hoverlimo headed in our direction. We ran to catch
it, leaped over the rubber skirt and landed with seven others,
who grumbled and groused and eventually made room for us.
"I am overjoyed to transport you," said the hoverlimo.
"I take that back about the garbage truck," I said.
"Thank you, sir."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
This is not a mystery story. The people you will meet
along the way are not suspects. The things that happen to them
are not clues. I promise not to gather everyone together at the
end and dramatically denounce a culprit.
This is not an adventure story. The survival of the
universe will not be thrown into jeopardy during the course of
it. Some momentous events will occur, and I was present at some
of them but, like most of us, I was simply picked up by the
tornado of history and deposited, like Judy Garland, in a place
I never expected to be. I had little or no hand in the outcome.
In fact, this being real life and not an adventure story, it
can be said there has been no outcome. Some things will change,
and some will remain the same, and most things will simply go
on as they were. If I were a writer of adventure fiction, if I
were manufacturing myself as the adventure's protagonist, I
would certainly have placed myself in the center of more of the
plot's turning points. I would have had myself plunging into
peril, fighting mighty battles, and saving humanity, or
something like that. Instead, many of the most important things
I'm going to tell you about happened far from my sight. I just
tried to stay alive . . .
Don't expect me to draw my sword and set things aright.
Even if I had a sword and knew how to use it, I seldom saw an
unambiguous target, and when I thought I did it was too large
and too far away for my puny swordsmanship to have any effect.
This is not a nuts-and-bolts story. Here you will
find--among many other howlers--the Hildy Johnson Explanation
of Nanobots, their uses, functions, and methods of working. I'm
sure much of it is wildly inaccurate, and all of it is surely
written about fifty I.Q. points below the layman's level . . .
and so what? If you want a nuts-and-bolts story, there have
been many written about the events I will describe. Or you
could always read the instruction manual.
Maybe the nanobot stuff could have come out, but I will
also deal with the central technological conundrum of our time:
that undeniably sentient, great big spooky pile of crystalline
gray matter, wonderful humanitarian, your friend and mine, the
Central Computer. That was unavoidable, but I will say it once
and you'd do well to remember it: I am not a tech. The things I
have to say about matters cybernetic should be taken with an
asteroid-sized tablet of sodium chloride. Literally thousands
of texts have been written concerning how what happened
happened, and why it can't happen again, to any degree of
complexity you're capable of handling, so I refer the
interested reader to them, and good riddance. But I will
divulge to you a secret, because if you've come this far with
me I can't help but like you: take what those techs say with a
grain of salt, too. Nobody knows what's going on with the CC.
So I've told you what kind of story this isn't. Well, what
is it?
That's always harder to say. I thought of calling it How I
Spent the Bicentennial Year, but where's the sex in that?
Where's the headline appeal? I could have called it To The
Stars! That remains to be seen, and it will be my intention
throughout not to lie to you.
What I was afraid it was when I began was the world's
longest suicide note. It's not: I survived. Damn! I just gave
away the ending. But I would hope the more astute of you had
already figured that one out.
All I can promise you is that it's a story. Things do
happen. But people will behave in unrepentantly illogical ways.
Mammoth events will remain resolutely off-stage. Dramatic
climaxes will fizzle like wet firecrackers. Questions will go
unanswered. An outline of this story would be a sorry thing to
behold; any script doctor in the world could instantly suggest
dozens of ways to spruce it up. Hey, have you tried outlining
your own life lately?
I will be the most illogical character of them all. I will
miss opportunities where I could have made a difference, do the
wrong thing, and just generally sleepwalk through some critical
events in my life. I'm sorry, and I hope you all do better than
I have, but I wonder if you will. I will ramble and digress. If
Walter couldn't get me to stop doing that, no one could. I will
inject bits of my rag-tag personal philosophy; I am an
opinionated son of a bitch, or bitch, as the case may be, but
when things threaten to get too heavy I will inject some
inappropriate humor. Though anything one writes will have a
message, I will not try too hard to sell mine to you, partly
because I'm far from sure what it is.
But you can relax on one account: this is not a
metaphorical story. I will not turn into a giant cockroach, nor
will I perish in existential despair. There's even some rock
'em sock 'em action, for those of you who wandered in from the
Saturday Matinee. What more could you ask?
So you've been warned. From here on in, you're on your
own.
#
The tube capsule back to King City was a quarter full. I
used the time to try to salvage something from the wasted
afternoon. Looking around me, I saw that all my colleagues were
busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up, mouths hung open,
here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day
trip from the Catatonic Academy, or the modern press at work.
Call me old-fashioned. I'm the only reporter I know who
still uses his handwriter except to take notes. Cricket was
young enough I doubted she'd ever had one installed. As for the
rest of them, over the last twenty years I'd watched as one
after the other surrendered to the seductions of Direct
Interface, until only I was left, plodding along with antique
technology that happened to suit me just fine.
Okay, so I lied about the open mouths. Not all D.I. users
look like retarded zombies when they interface. But they look
asleep, and I've never been comfortable sleeping in public
places.
I snapped the fingers of my left hand. I had to do it
twice more before the handwriter came on. That worried me; it
was getting harder to find people who still knew how to work on
handwriters.
Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my
left hand.
By pressing the dots in different combinations with my
fingertips I was able to write the story in shorthand, and
watch the loops and lines scrawl themselves on a strip of
readout skin on my wrist, just where a suicide would slash
himself.
There couldn't be that many of us left who knew Gregg. I
wondered if I ought to apply for a grant under the Preservation
of Vanishing Skills act. Shorthand was certainly useless enough
to qualify. It was at least as obsolete as yodeling, and I'd
once covered a meeting of the Yodeling Society. While I was at
it, maybe I could drum up some interest in the Preservation of
the Penis.
#
(File #Hildy*next avail.*)(code Unitingle)
(headline to come)
#
How far do you trust your spouse? Or better yet, how much
does your spouse trust you!
That's the question you'll be asking yourself if you
subscribe to United Bioengineers' new sex system known as
ULTRA-Tingle.
ULTRA-Tingle is the new, improved, up-dated version of
UniBio's mega-flop of a few years back, known simple as Tingle.
Remember Tingle? Well, don't feel bad. Nobody else does,
either. Somewhere, in some remote cavern in this great dusty
globe we feel sure there must be someone who converted and
stayed that way. Maybe even two of them. Maybe tonight they're
Tingling each other. Or maybe one of them has a tingle-ache.
If you are a bona fide Tingler, call this padloid
immediately, because you've won a prize! Ten percent off on the
cost of your conversion to ULTRA-Tingle. Second prize: a
discount on two conversions!
What does ULTRA-Tingle offer the dedicated sexual
adventurer? In a word: Security!
Maybe you thought sex was between your legs. It's not.
It's in your head, like everything. And that is the miracle of
ULTRA-Tingle. Merely by saying the word you can have the great
thrill of caponizing your mate. You, too, can be a grinning
gelding. Imagine the joys of cerebral castration! Be the first
in your sector to rediscover the art of psychic infibulation!
Who but UniBio could raise impotence into the realm of
integrated circuits, elevate frigidity from aberration to
abnegation?
You don't believe me? Here's how it works:
(to come: *insert UniBio faxpad #4985 ref. 6-
13.*)
You may ask yourself: Whatever happened to oldfashioned
trust? Well, folks, it's obsolete. Just like the penis, which
UniBio assures us will soon go the way of the Do-do bird. So
those of you who still own and operate a trouser-snake, better
start thinking of a place to put it.
No, not there, you fool! That's obsolete, too!
(no thirty)
#
The vocabulary warning light was blinking wildly on the
nail of my index finger. It turned on around paragraph seven,
as I had known it would. But it's fun to write that sort of
thing, even if you know it'll never make it into print. When I
first started this job I would have gone back and worked on it,
but now I know it's better to leave something obvious for
Walter to mess with, in the hope he'll leave the rest alone.
Okay, so the Pulitzer Prize was safe for another year.
#
King City grew the way many of the older Lunar settlements
had: one bang at a time.
The original enclave had been in a large volcanic bubble
several hundred meters below the surface. An artificial sun had
been hung near the top, and engineers drilled tunnels in all
directions, heaping the rubble on the floor, pulverizing it
into soil, turning the bubble into a city park with residential
corridors radiating away from it.
Eventually there were too many people for that park, so
they drilled a hole and dropped in a medium-sized nuclear bomb.
When it cooled, the resulting bubble became Mall Two.
The city fathers were up to Mall Seventeen before new
construction methods and changing public tastes halted the
string. The first ten malls had been blasted in a line, which
meant a long commute from the Old Mall to Mall Ten. They
started curving the line, aiming to complete a big oval. Now a
King City map had seventeen circles tracing out the letter J,
woven together by a thousand tunnels.
My office was in Mall Twelve, level thirty-six, 120
degrees. It's in the editorial offices of The News Nipple, the
padloid with the largest circulation in Luna. The door at 120
opens on what is barely more than an elevator lobby wedged
between a travel agency and a florist. There's a receptionist,
a small waiting room, and a security desk. Behind that are four
elevators that go to actual offices, on the Lunar surface.
Location, location, and location, says my cousin Arnie,
the real estate broker. The way I figure it, time plays a part
in land values, too. The Nipple offices were topside because,
when the rag was founded, topside meant cheap. Walter had had
money even way back then, but he'd been a cheap son of a bitch
since the dawn of time. He got a deal on the seven-story
surface structure, and who cared if it leaked? He liked the
view.
Now everybody likes views, and the fine old homes in
Bedrock are the worst slums in King City. But I suspect one big
blow-out could turn the whole city topsy-turvy again.
I had a corner office on the sixth floor. I hadn't done
much with it other than to put in a cot and a coffeemaker. I
tossed my hat on the cot, slapped the desk terminal until it
lighted up, and pressed my palm against a read-out plate. My
story was downloaded into the main computer in just under a
second. In another second, the printer started to chatter.
Walter prefers hard copy. He likes to make big blue marks on
it. While I waited I looked out over the city. My home town.
The News Nipple Tower is near the bottom of the J of King
City. From it you can see the clusters of other buildings that
mark the sub-surface Malls. The sun was still three days from
rising. The lights of the city dwindled in the distance and
blended in with the hard, unblinking stars overhead.
Almost on the horizon are the huge, pearly domes of King
City farms.
It's pretty by night, not so lovely by day. When the sun
came up it would bathe every exposed pipe and trash pile and
abandoned rover in unsympathetic light; night pulled a curtain
over the shameful clutter.
Even the parts that aren't junk aren't all that
attractive. Vacuum is useful in many manufacturing processes
and walls are of no use for most of them. If something needed
to be sheltered from sunlight, a roof was enough.
Loonies don't care about the surface. There's no ecology
to preserve, no reason at all to treat it as other than a huge
and handy dumping ground. In some places the garbage was heaped
to the third story of the exterior buildings. Give us another
thousand years and we'll pile the garbage a hundred meters deep
from pole to pole.
There was very little movement. King City, on the surface,
looked bombed out, abandoned.
The printer finished its job and I handed the copy to a
passing messenger. Walter would call me about it when it suited
him. I thought of several things I could do in the meantime,
failed to find any enthusiasm for any of them. So I just sat
there and stared out over the surface, and presently I was
called into the master's presence.
#
Walter Editor is what is known as a natural.
Not that he's a fanatic about it. He doesn't subscribe to
one of those cults that refuse all medical treatment developed
since 1860, or 1945, or 2020. He's not impressed with faith
healing. He's not a member of Lifespan, those folks who believe
it's a sin to live beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, or
the Centenarians, who set the number at one hundred. He's just
like most of the rest of us, prepared to live forever if
medical science can maintain a quality life for him. He'll
accept any treatment that will keep him healthy despite a
monstrously dissolute life style.
He just doesn't care how he looks.
All the fads in body styling and facial arrangement pass
him by. In the twenty years I have known him he has never
changed so much as his hair style. He had been born male--or so
he once told me--one hundred and twenty-six years ago, and had
never Changed.
His somatic development had been frozen in his
mid-forties, a time he often described to all who would listen
as "the prime of life." As a result, he was paunchy and
balding. This suited Walter fine. He felt the editor of a major
planetary newspaper ought to be paunchy and balding.
An earlier age would have called Walter Editor a
voluptuary. He was a sensualist, a glutton, monstrously
self-indulgent. He went through stomachs in two or three years,
used up a pair of lungs every decade or so, and needed a new
heart more frequently than most people change gaskets on a
pressure suit. Every time he exceeded what he called his
"fighting weight" by fifty kilos, he'd have seventy kilos
removed. Other than that, with Walter what you saw was what he
was.
I found him in his usual position, leaning back in his
huge chair, big feet propped up on the antique mahogany desk
whose surface displayed not one item made after 1880. His face
was hidden behind my story. Puffs of lavender smoke rose from
behind the pages.
"Sit down, Hildy, sit down," he muttered, turning a page.
I sat, and looked out his windows, which had exactly the same
view I'd seen from my windows but five meters higher and three
hundred degrees wider. I knew there would be three of four
minutes while he kept me waiting. It was one of his managerial
techniques. He'd read in a book somewhere that an effective
boss should keep underlings waiting whenever possible. He
spoiled the effect by constantly glancing up at the clock on
the wall.
The clock had been made in 1860 and had once graced the
wall of a railway station somewhere in Iowa. The office could
be described as Dickensian. The furnishings were worth more
than I was likely to make in my lifetime. Very few genuine
antiquities had ever been brought to Luna. Most of those were
in museums. Walter owned much of the rest.
"Junk," he said. "Worthless." He scowled and tossed the
flimsy sheets across the room. Or he tried to. Flimsy sheets
resist attaining any great speed unless you wad them up first.
These fluttered to the floor at his feet.
"Sorry, Walter, but there just wasn't any other-- "
"You want to know why I can't use it?"
"No sex."
"There's no sex in it! I send you out to cover a new sex
system, and it turns out there's no sex in it. How can that
be?"
"Well, there's sex in it, naturally. Just not the right
kind. I mean, I could write a story about earthworm sex, or
jellyfish sex, but it wouldn't turn anybody on but earthworms
and jellyfish."
"Exactly. Why is that, Hildy? Why do they want to turn us
into jellyfish?"
I knew all about this particular hobbyhorse, but there was
nothing to do but ride it.
"It's like the search for the Holy Grail, or the
Philosopher's Stone," I said.
"What's the Philosopher's Stone?"
The question had not come from Walter, but from behind me.
I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I turned, and saw Brenda,
cub reporter, who for the past two weeks had been my
journalistic assistant--pronounced "copy girl."
"Sit down, Brenda," Walter said. "I'll get to you in a
minute."
I watched her dither around pulling up a chair, folding
herself into it like a collapsible ruler with bony joints
sticking out in all directions, surely too many joints for one
human being. She was very tall and very thin, like so many of
the younger generation. I had been told she was seventeen, out
on her first vocational education try-out. She was eager as a
puppy and not half as graceful.
She irritated the hell out of me. I'm not sure why.
There's the generational thing. You wonder how things can get
worse, you think that these kids have to be the rock bottom,
then they have children and you see how wrong you were.
At least she could read and write, I'll give her that. But
she was so damnably earnest, so horribly eager to please. She
made me tired just looking at her. She was a tabula rasa
waiting for someone to draw animated cartoons on. Her ignorance
of everything outside her particular upper-middle class social
stratum and of everything that had happened more than five
years ago was still un-plumbed.
She opened the huge purse she always carried around with
her and produced a cheroot identical to the one Walter was
smoking. She lit up and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. Her
smoking dated to the day after she met Walter Editor. Her name
dated to the day after she met me. Maybe it should have amused
or flattered me that she was so obviously trying to emulate her
elders; it just made me angry. Adopting the name of a famous
fictional reporter had been my idea.
Walter gestured for me to go on. I sighed, and did so.
"I really don't know when it started, or why. But the
basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much
to do with each other, why should we have sex with our
reproductive organs? The same organs we use for urination, too,
for that matter."
"'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" Walter said. "That's
my philosophy. The old-fashioned system worked for millions of
years. Why tamper with it?'
"Actually, Walter, we've already tampered with it quite a
bit."
"Not everybody."
"True. But well over eighty percent of females prefer
clitoral relocation. The natural arrangement didn't provide
enough stimulation during the regular sex act. And just about
that many men have had a testicle tuck. They were too damn
vulnerable hanging out there where nature put them."
"I haven't had one," he said. I made note of that, in case
I ever got into a fight with him.
"Then there's the question of stamina in males," I went
on. "Back on Earth, it was the rare male over thirty who could
consistently get an erection more than three or four times a
day. And it usually didn't last very long. And men didn't have
multiple orgasms. They just weren't as sexually capable as
women."
"That's horrible," Brenda said. I looked at her; she was
genuinely shocked.
"That's an improvement, I'll have to admit," Walter said.
"And there's the entire phenomenon of menstruation," I
added.
"What's menstruation?"
We both looked at her. She wasn't joking. Walter and I
looked at each other and I could read his thoughts.
"Anyway," I said, "you just pointed out the challenge.
Lots of people get 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
wideeyed 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 Cream was the intellectual appendix to the
swollen intestine of the Nipple. It came free to every
subscriber of the pad--those government grants again--and was
read by about one in ten, according to our more optimistic
surveys. It published thousands of times more words per hour,
and included most of our political coverage.
Somewhere between those two was the electronic equivalent
of the Sunday supplement, published weekly, called Sundae.
"Here's what I want," Walter went on. "You'll go out and
cover your regular beats. But I want you to be thinking Sundae
while you do that. Whatever you're covering, think about how it
would have been different two hundred years ago, back on Earth.
It can be anything at all. Like today, sex. There's a topic for
you. Write about what sex was like back on Earth, and contrast
it to what it's like now. You could even throw in stuff about
what people think it's gonna be like in another twenty years,
or a century."
"Walter, I don't deserve this."
"Hildy, you're the only man for it. I want one article per
week for the entire year leading up to the bicentennial. I'm
giving you a free hand as to what they're about. You can
editorialize. You can personalize, make it like a column.
You've always wanted a column; here's your chance at a byline.
You want expensive consultants, advisors, research? You name
it, you got it. You need to travel? I'm good for the money. I
want only the best for this series."
I didn't know what to say to that. It was a good offer.
Nothing in life is ever exactly what you asked for, but I had
wanted a column, and this seemed like a reasonable shot at it.
"Hildy, during the twentieth century there was a time like
no other time humans have seen before or since. My
grandfather's great-grandfather was born in the year the Wright
brothers made the first powered flight. By the time he died,
there was a permanent base on Luna. My grandfather was ten when
the old man died, and he's told me many times how he used to
talk about the old days. It was amazing just how much change
that old man had seen in his lifetime.
"In that century they started talking about a 'generation
gap.' So much happened, so many things changed so fast, how was
a seventy-year-old supposed to talk to a fifteen-year-old in
terms they both could understand?
"Well, things don't change quite that fast anymore. I
wonder if they ever will again? But we've got something in
common with those people. We've got kids like Brenda here who
hardly remember anything beyond last year, and they're living
side by side with people who were born and grew up on the
Earth. People who remember what a one-gee gravity field was
like, what it was to walk around outside and breathe free,
un-metered air. Who were raised when people were born, grew up,
and died in the same sex. People who fought in wars. Our oldest
citizens are almost three hundred now. Surely there's fifty-two
stories in that.
"This is a story that's been waiting two hundred years to
be told. We've had our heads in the sand. We've been beaten,
humiliated, suffered a racial set-back that I'm afraid . . . "
It was as if he suddenly had heard what he was saying. He
sputtered to a stop, not looking me in the eye.
I was not used to speeches from Walter. It made me uneasy.
The assignment made me uneasy. I don't think about the Invasion
much--which was precisely his point, of course--and I think
that's just as well. But I could see his passion, and knew I'd
better not fight it. I was used to rage, to being chewed out
for this or that. Being appealed to was something brand new. I
felt it was time to lighten the atmosphere a little.
"So how big a raise are we talking about here?" I asked.
He settled back in his chair and smiled, back on familiar
ground.
"You know I never discuss that. It'll be in your next
paycheck. If you don't like it, gripe to me then."
"And I have to use the kid on all this stuff?"
"Hey! I'm right here," Brenda protested.
"The kid is vital to the whole thing. She's your sounding
board. If a fact from the old days sounds weird to her, you
know you're onto something. She's contemporary as your last
breath, she's eager to learn and fairly bright, and she knows
nothing. You'll be the middle man. You're about the right age
for it, and history's your hobby. You know more about old Earth
than any man your age I've ever met."
"If I'm in the middle . . . "
"You might want to interview my grandfather," Walter
suggested. "But there'll be a third member of your team.
Somebody Earth-born. I haven't decided yet who that'll be.
"Now get out of here, both of you."
I could see Brenda had a thousand questions she still
wanted to ask. I warned her off with my eyes, and followed her
to the door.
"And Hildy," Walter said. I looked back.
"If you put words like abnegation and infibulation in
these stories, I'll personally caponize you."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I pulled the tarp off my pile of precious lumber and
watched the scorpions scuttle away in the sunlight. Say what
you want about the sanctity of life; I like to crush 'em.
Deeper in the pile I'd disturbed a rattlesnake. I didn't
see him, but could hear him warning me away. Handling them from
the ends, I selected a plank and pulled it out. I shouldered it
and carried it to my half-finished cabin. It was evening, the
best time to work in West Texas. The temperature had dropped to
ninety-five in the oldstyle scale they used there. During the
day it had been well over a hundred.
I positioned the plank on two sawhorses near what would be
the front porch when I was finished. I squatted and looked down
its length. This was a one-by-ten--inches, not
centimeters--which meant it actually measured about nine by
seven eighths, for reasons no one had ever explained to me.
Thinking in inches was difficult enough, without dealing in
those odd ratios called fractions. What was wrong with
decimals, and what was wrong with a one-by-ten actually being
one inch by ten inches? Why twelve inches in a foot? Maybe
there was a story in it for the bicentennial series.
The plank had been advertised as ten feet long, and that
measurement was accurate. It was also supposed to be straight,
but if it was they had used a noodle for a straightedge.
Texas was the second of what was to be three disneylands
devoted to the eighteenth century. Out here west of the Pecos
we reckoned it to be 1845, the last year of the Texas Republic,
though you could use technology as recent as 1899 without
running afoul of the anachronism regulations. Pennsylvania had
been the first of the triad, and my plank, complete with two
big bulges in the width and a depressing sag when held by one
end, had been milled there by "Amish" sawyers using the old
methods. A little oval stamp in a corner guaranteed this:
"Approved, Lunar Antiquities Reproduction Board." Either the
methods of the 1800's couldn't reliably produce straight and
true lumber, or those damn Dutchmen were still learning their
craft.
So I did what the carpenters of the Texas Republic had
done. I got out my plane (also certified by the L.A.R.B.),
removed the primitive blade, sharpened it against a home-made
whetstone, re-attached the blade, and began shaving away the
irregularities.
I'm not complaining. I was lucky to get the lumber. Most
of the cabin was made of rough-hewn logs notched together at
the ends, chinked with adobe.
The board had turned gray in the heat and sun, but after a
few strokes I was down to the yellow pine interior. The wood
curled up around the blade and the chips dropped around my bare
feet. It smelled fresh and new and I found myself smiling as
the sweat dripped off my nose. It would be good to be a
carpenter, I thought. Maybe I'd quit the newspaper business.
Then the blade broke and jammed into the wood. My palm
slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the
fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The
plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the
hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile.
I shouted a few words rarely heard in 1845, and some
uncommon even in the 23rd century. I hopped around on one foot.
Another lost art, hopping.
"It could have been worse," a voice said in my ear. It was
either incipient schizophrenia, or the Central Computer. I bet
on the CC.
"How? By hitting both feet?"
"Gravity. Consider the momentum such a massive object
could have attained, had this really been West Texas, which
lies at the bottom of a spacetime depression twenty-five
thousand miles per hour deep."
Definitely the CC.
I examined my hand. Blood was oozing from it, running down
my forearm and dripping from the elbow. But there was no
arterial pumping. The foot, though it still hurt like fire, was
not damaged.
"You see now why laborers in 1845 wore work boots."
"Is that why you called, CC? To give me a lecture about
safety in the work place?"
"No. I was going to announce a visitor. The colorful
language lesson was an unexpected bonus of my tuning in on--"
"Shut up, will you?"
The Central Computer did so.
The end of a splinter protruded from my palm, so I pulled
on it. I got some, but a lot was still buried in there. Others
had broken off below skin level. All in all, a wonderful day's
work.
A visitor? I looked around and saw no one, though a whole
tribe of Apaches could have been hiding in the clumps of
mesquite. I had not expected to see any sign of the CC. It uses
the circuitry in my own head to produce its voice.
And it wasn't supposed to manifest itself in Texas. As is
often the case, there was more to the CC than it was telling.
"CC, on-line, please."
"I hear and obey."
"Who's the visitor?"
"Tall, young, ignorant of tampons, with a certain
puppy-like charm--"
"Oh, Jesus."
"I know I'm not supposed to intrude on these antique
environments, but she was quite insistent on learning your
location, and I thought it better for you to have some
forewarning than to--"
"Okay. Now shut up."
I sat in the rickety chair which had been my first
carpentry project. Being careful of the injured hand, I pulled
on the work boots I should have been wearing all along. The
reason I hadn't was simple: I hated them.
There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians
wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or
socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly
smooth floors and carpets and a majority of bare-foot people,
hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else's
toes.
Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to
search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was
outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add
insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune.
I stood and was about to head into town when the CC spoke
again.
"If you leave those tools out and it rains, they will
combine with the oxygen in the air in a slow combustion
reaction."
"Rust is too poor a word for you, right? It rains out here
. . . what? Once every hundred days?"
But my heart wasn't in it. The CC was right. If button-up
torture devices were expensive, period tools were worth a
king's ransom. My plane, saw, hammer and chisel had cost a
year's salary. The good news was I could re-sell them for more
than I paid . . . if they weren't rusted.
I wrapped them in an oiled cloth and stowed them carefully
in my toolbox, then headed down the trail toward town.
#
I was in sight of New Austin before I spied Brenda,
looking like an albino flamingo. She was standing on one leg
while the other was turned around so the foot was at waist
level, sole upward. To do it she had twisted at hip and knee in
ways I hadn't thought humanly possible. She was nude, her skin
a uniform creamy white. She had no pubic hair.
"Hi, there, seven foot two, eyes of blue."
She glanced at me, then pointed at her foot, indignantly.
"They don't keep these paths very tidy. Look what it did
to my foot. There was a stone, with a sharp point on it."
"They specialize in sharp points around here," I said.
"It's a natural environment. You've probably never seen one
before."
"My class went to Amazon three years ago."
"Sure, on the moving walkway. While I'm at it, I'd better
tell you the plants have sharp points, too. That big thing
there is a prickly pear. Don't walk through it. That thing
behind you is a cactus, too. Don't step on it. This bush has
thorns. Over there is cenizo. It blooms after a rain; real
pretty."
She looked around, possibly realizing for the first time
that there was more than one kind of plant, and that they all
had names.
"You know what they're all called?"
"Not all. I know the big ones. Those spiky ones are yucca.
The tall ones, like whips, those are ocotillo. Most of those
short bushes are creosote. That tree is mesquite."
"Not much of a tree."
"It's not much of an environment. Things here have to
struggle to stay alive. Not like Amazon, where the plants fight
each other. Here they work too hard conserving water."
She looked around again, wincing as her injured foot
touched the ground.
"No animals?"
"They're all around you. Insects, reptiles, mostly. Some
antelope. Buffalo further east. I could show you a cougar
lair." I doubted she had any idea what a cougar was, or
antelope and buffalo, for that matter. This was a city girl
through and through. About like me before I moved to Texas,
three years ago. I relented and went down on one knee.
"Let me see that foot."
There was a ragged gash on the heel, painful but not
serious.
"Hey, your hand is hurt," she said. "What happened?"
"Just a stupid accident." I noticed as I said it that she
not only lacked pubic hair, she had no genitals. That used to
be popular sixty or seventy years ago, for children, as part of
a theory of the time concerning something called "delayed
adolescence." I hadn't seen it in at least twenty years, though
I'd heard there were religious sects that still practiced it. I
wondered if her family belonged to one, but it was much too
personal to ask about.
"I don't like this place," she said "It's dangerous." She
made it sound like an obscenity. The whole idea offended her,
as well it should, coming as she did from the most benign
environment ever created by humans.
"It's not so bad. Can you walk on that?"
"Oh, sure." She put her foot down and walked along beside
me, on her toes. As if she weren't tall enough already. "What
was that remark about seven feet? I've got two feet, just like
everyone else."
"Actually, you're closer to seven-four, I'd guess." I had
to give her a brief explanation of the English system of
weights and measures as used in the West Texas disneyland. I'm
not sure she understood it, but I didn't hold it against her,
because I didn't, either.
We had arrived in the middle of New Austin. This was no
great feat of walking; the middle is about a hundred yards from
the edge. New Austin consists of two streets: Old Spanish Trail
and Congress Street. The intersection is defined by four
buildings: The Travis Hotel, the Alamo Saloon, a general store
and a livery stable. The hotel and saloon each have a second
story. At the far end of Congress is a white clapboard Baptist
church. That, and a few dozen other ramshackle buildings strung
out between the church and Four Corners, is New Austin.
"They took all my clothes," she said.
"Naturally."
"They were perfectly good clothes."
"I'm sure they were. But only contemporary things are
allowed in here."
"What for?"
"Think of it as a living museum."
I'd been headed for the doctor's office. Considering the
time of day, I thought better of it and mounted the steps to
the saloon. We entered through the swinging doors.
It was dark inside, and a little cooler. Behind me, Brenda
had to duck to get through the doorway. A player piano tinkled
in the background, just like an old western movie. I spotted
the doctor sitting at the far end of the bar.
"Say, young lady," the bartender shouted. "You can't come
in here dressed like that." I looked around, saw her looking
down at herself in complete confusion.
"What's the matter with you people?" she shouted. "The
lady outside made me leave all my clothes with her."
"Amanda," the bartender said, "you have anything she could
wear?" He turned to Brenda again. "I don't care what you wear
out in the bush. You come into my establishment, you'll be
decently dressed. What they told you outside is no concern of
mine."
One of the bar girls approached Brenda, holding a pink
robe. I turned away. Let them sort it out.
Ever since moving to Texas, I'd played their games of
authenticity. I didn't have an accent, but I'd picked up a
smattering of words. Now I groped for one, a particularly
colorful one, and came up with it.
"I hear tell you're the sawbones around these parts," I
said.
The doctor chuckled and extended his hand.
"Ned Pepper," he said, "at your service, sir."
When I didn't shake his hand he frowned, and noticed the
dirty bandage wrapped around it.
"Looks like you threw a shoe, son. Let me take a look at
that."
He carefully unwrapped the bandage, and winced when he saw
the splinters. I could smell the sourness of his breath, and
his clothes. Doc was one of the permanent residents, like the
bartender and the rest of the hotel staff. He was an alcoholic
who had found a perfect niche for himself. In Texas he had
status and could spend most of the day swilling whiskey at the
Alamo. The drunken physician was a cliche' from a thousand
horse operas of the twentieth century, but so what? All we have
in reconstructing these past environments is books and movies.
The movies are much more helpful, one picture being equal to a
kilo-word.
"Can you do anything with it?" I asked.
He looked up in surprise, and swallowed queasily.
"I guess I could dig 'em out. Couple quarts of rye--maybe
one for you, too--though I freely admit the idea makes me want
to puke." He squinted at my hand again, and shook his head.
"You really want me to do it?"
"I don't see why not. You're a doctor, aren't you?"
"Sure, by 1845 standards. The Board trained me. Took about
a week. I got a bag full of steel tools and a cabinet full of
patent elixirs. What I don't have is an anaesthetic. I suppose
those splinters hurt going in."
"They still hurt."
"It's nothing to how it'd hurt if I took the case. Let me
. . . Hildy? Is that your name? That's right, I remember now.
Newspaperman. Last time I talked to you you seemed to know a
few things about Texas. More than most weekenders."
"I'm not a weekender," I protested. "I've been building a
cabin."
"No offense meant, son, but it started out as an
investment, didn't it?"
I admitted it. The most valuable real estate in Luna is in
the less-developed disneylands. I'd quadrupled my money so far
and there were no signs the boom was slowing.
"It's funny how much people will pay for hardship," he
said. "They warn you up front but they don't spend a lot of
time talking about medical care. People come here to live, and
they tell themselves they'll live authentic. Then they get a
taste of my medicine and run to the real world. Pain ain't
funny, Hildy. Mostly I deliver babies, and any reasonably
competent woman could do that herself."
"Then what are you good for?" I regretted it as soon as I
said it, but he didn't seem to take offense.
"I'm mostly window dressing," he admitted. "I don't mind
it. There's worse ways of earning your daily oxygen."
Brenda had drifted over to catch the last of our
conversation. She was wrapped in a ridiculous pink robe, still
favoring one foot.
"You fixed up yet?" she asked me.
"I think I'll wait," I said.
"Another lame mare?" the doctor asked. "Toss that hoof up
here, little lady, and let me take a look at it." When he had
examined the cut he grinned and rubbed his hands together.
"Here's an injury within my realm of expertise," he said. "You
want me to treat it?"
"Sure, why not?"
The doctor opened his black bag and Brenda watched him
innocently. He removed several bottles, cotton swabs, bandages,
laid it all out carefully on the bar.
"A little tincture of iodine to cleanse the wound," he
muttered, and touched a purplish wad of cotton to Brenda's
foot. She howled, and jumped four feet straight up, using only
the un-injured foot. If I hadn't grabbed her ankle she would
have hit the ceiling.
"What the hell is he doing?" she yelled at me.
"Hush, now," I soothed her.
"But it hurts."
I gave her my best determined-reporter look, grabbing her
hand to intensify the effect.
"There's a story in here, Brenda. Medicine then and now.
Think how pleased Walter will be."
"Well, why doesn't he work on you, too?" she pouted.
"It would have involved amputation," I said. And it would
have, too; I'd have cut off his hand if he laid it on me.
"I don't know if I want to--"
"Just hold still and I'll be through in a minute."
She howled, she cried, but she held still enough for him
to finish cleaning the wound. She'd make a hell of a reporter
one day.
The doctor took out a needle and thread.
"What's that for?" she asked, suspiciously.
"I have to suture the wound now," he said.
"If suture means sew up, you can suture yourself, you
bastard."
He glared at her, but saw the determination in her eyes.
He put the needle and thread away and prepared a bandage.
"Yes sir, it was hard times, 1845," he said. "You know
what caused people the most trouble? Teeth. If a tooth goes bad
here, what you do is you go to the barber down the street, or
the one over in Lonesome Dove, who's said to be quicker.
Barbers used to handle it all; teeth, surgery, and hair
cutting. But the thing about teeth, usually you could do
something. Yank it right out. Most things that happened to
people, you couldn't do anything. A little cut like this, it
could get infected and kill you. There was a million ways to
die and mostly the doctors just tried to keep you warm."
Brenda was listening with such fascination she almost
forgot to protest when he put the bandage over the wound. Then
she frowned and touched his hand as he was about to knot it
around her ankle.
"Wait a minute," she said. "You're not finished."
"I sure as hell am."
"You mean that's it?"
"What else do you suggest?"
"I still have a hole in me, you idiot. It's not fixed."
"It'll heal in about a week. All by itself."
It was clear from her look that she thought this was a
very dangerous man. She started to say something, changed her
mind, and glared at the bartender.
"Give me some of that brown stuff," she said, pointing. He
filled a shot glass with whiskey and set it in front of her.
She sipped it, made a face, and sipped again.
"That's the idea, little lady," the doctor said. "Take two
of those every morning if symptoms persist."
"What do we owe you, doc?" I asked
"Oh, I don't think I could rightly charge you . . . " His
eyes strayed to the bottles behind the bar.
"A drink for the doctor, landlord," I said. I looked
around, and smiled at myself. What the hell. "A drink for the
house. On me." People started drifting toward the bar.
"What'll it be, doc?" the bartender asked. "Grain
alcohol?"
"Some of that clear stuff," the doctor agreed.
#
We were a quarter mile out of town before Brenda spoke to
me again.
"This business about covering up," she ventured. "That's a
cultural thing, right? Something they did in this place?"
"Not the place so much as the time. Out here in the
country no one cares whether you cover up or not. But in town,
they try to stick to the old rules. They stretched a point for
you, actually. You really should have been wearing a dress that
reached your ankles, your wrists, and covered most of your
neck, too. Hell, a young lady really shouldn't have been
allowed in a saloon at all."
"Those other girls weren't wearing all that much."
"Different rule. They're 'Fallen flowers.'" She was giving
me a blank look again. "Whores."
"Oh, sure," she said. "I read an article that said it used
to be illegal. How could they make that illegal?"
"Brenda, they can make anything illegal. Prostitution has
been illegal more often than not. Don't ask me to explain it; I
don't understand, either."
"So they make a law in here, and then they let you break
it?"
"Why not? Most of those girls don't sell sex, anyway.
They're here for the tourists. Get your picture taken with the
B-girls in the Alamo Saloon. The idea of Texas is to duplicate
what it was really like in 1845, as near as we can determine.
Prostitution was illegal but tolerated in a place like New
Austin. Hell, the Sheriff would most likely be one of the
regular customers. Or take the bar. They shouldn't have served
you, because this culture didn't approve of giving alcoholic
drinks to people as young as you. But on the frontier, there
was the feeling that if you were big enough to reach up and
take the drink off the bar, you were big enough to drink it." I
looked at her frowning intently down at the ground, and knew
most of this was not getting through to her. "I don't suppose
you can ever really understand a culture unless you grew up in
it," I said.
"These people were sure screwed up."
"Probably so."
We were climbing the trail that led toward my apartment.
Brenda kept her eyes firmly on the ground, her mind obviously
elsewhere, no doubt chewing over the half-dozen crazy things
I'd told her in the past hour. By not looking around she was
missing a sunset spectacular even by the lavish standards of
West Texas. The air had turned salmon pink when the sun dipped
below the horizon, streaked by wispy curls of gold. Somehow the
waning light made the surrounding rocky hills a pale purple. I
wondered if that was authentic. A quarter of a million miles
from where I stood, the real sun was setting on the real Texas.
Were the colors as spectacular there?
Here, of course, the "sun" was sitting in its track just
below the forced-perspective "hills." A fusion tech was seeing
to the shut-down process, after which the sun would be trucked
through a tunnel and attached to the eastern end of the track,
ready to be lit again in a few hours. Somewhere behind the
hills another technician was manipulating colored mirrors and
lenses to diffuse the light over the dome of the sky. Call him
an artist; I won't argue with you. They've been charging
admission to see the sunsets in Pennsylvania and Amazon for
several years now. There's talk of doing that here, too.
It seemed unlikely to me that nature, acting at random,
could produce the incredible complexity and subtlety of a
disneyland sunset.
#
It was almost dark by the time we reached the Rio Grande.
The entrance to my condo was on the south, "Mexican" side
of the river. West Texas is compressed, to display as wide a
range of terrain and biome as possible. The variety of
geographical features that, on Earth, spread over five hundred
miles and included parts of New Mexico and Old Mexico here had
been made to fit within a sub-lunar bubble forty miles in
diameter. One edge duplicated the rolling hills and grassland
around the real Austin, while the far edge had the barren rocky
plateaus to be found around El Paso.
The part of the Rio Grande we had reached mimicked the
land east of the Big Bend in the real river, an area of steep
gorges where the water ran deep and swift. Or at least it did
in the brief rainy season. Now, in the middle of summer, it was
no trick to wade across. Brenda followed me down the forty-foot
cliff on the Texas side, then watched me splash through the
river. She had said nothing for the last few miles, and she
said nothing now, though it was clear she thought someone
should have stopped this massive water leak, or at least
provided a bridge, boat, or helicopter. But she sloshed her way
over to me and stood waiting as I located the length of rope
that would take us to the top.
"Aren't you curious about why I'm here?" she asked.
"No. I know why you're here." I tugged on the rope. It was
dark enough now that I couldn't see the ledge, fifty feet up,
where I had secured it. "Wait till I call down to you," I told
her. I set one booted foot on the cliff face.
"Walter's been pretty angry," she said. "The deadline is
just--"
"I know when the deadline is." I started up the rope, hand
over hand, feet on the dark rocks.
"What are we going to write about?" she called up at me.
"I told you. Medicine."
I had knocked out the introductory article on the Invasion
Bicentennial the night after Brenda and I got the assignment. I
thought it had been some of my best work, and Walter had
agreed. He'd given us a big spread, the cover, personality
profiles of both of us that were--in my case, at
least--irresistibly flattering. Brenda and I had then sat down
and generated a list of twenty topics just off the tops of our
heads. We didn't anticipate any trouble finding more when the
time came.
But since that first day, every time I tried to write one
of Walter's damnable articles . . . nothing happened.
Result: the cabin was coming along nicely, ahead of
schedule. Another few weeks like the past one and I'd have it
finished. And be out of a job.
I crested the top of the cliff and looked down. I could
just see the white blob that was Brenda. I called down to her
and she swarmed up like a monkey.
"Nicely done," I said, as I coiled the rope. "Did you ever
think what that would have been like if you weighed six times
what you weigh now?"
"Oddly enough, I have," she said. "I keep trying to tell
you, I'm not completely ignorant."
"Sorry."
"I'm willing to learn. I've been reading a lot. But
there's just so much, and so much of it is so foreign . . . "
She ran a hand through her hair. "Anyway, I know how hard it
must have been to live on the Earth. My arms wouldn't be strong
enough to support my weight down there." She looked down at
herself, and I thought I could see a smile. "Hell, I'm so
lunified I wonder if my legs could support my weight."
"Probably not, at first."
"I got five friends together and we took turns trying to
walk with all the others on our shoulders. I managed three
steps before I collapsed."
"You're really getting into this, aren't you?" I was
leading the way down the narrow ledge to the cave entrance.
"Of course I am. I take this very seriously. But I'm
beginning to wonder if you do."
I didn't have an answer to that. We had reached the cave,
and I started to lead her in when she pulled back violently on
my hand.
"What is that?"
She didn't need to elaborate; I came through the cave
twice a day, and I still wasn't used to the smell. Not that it
seemed as bad now as it had at first. It was a combination of
rotting meat, feces, ammonia, and something else much more
disturbing that I had taken to calling "predator smell."
"Be quiet," I whispered. "This is a cougar den. She's not
really dangerous, but she had a litter of cubs last week and
she's gotten touchy since then. Don't let go of my hand;
there's no light till we get to the door."
I didn't give her a chance to argue. I just pulled on her
hand, and we were inside.
The smell was even stronger in the cave. The mother cougar
was fairly fastidious, for an animal. She cleaned up her cubs'
messes, and she made her own outside the cave. But she wasn't
so careful about disposing of the remains of her prey before
they started to get ripe. I think she had a different
definition of "ripe." Her own fur had a rank mustiness that was
probably sweet perfume to a male cougar, but was enough to stun
the unprepared human.
I couldn't see her, but I sensed her in a way beyond sight
or hearing. I knew she wouldn't attack. Like all the large
predators in disneylands, she had been conditioned to leave
humans alone. But the conditioning set up a certain amount of
mental conflict. She didn't like us, and wasn't shy about
letting us know. When I was halfway through the cave, she let
fly with a sound I can only describe as hellish. It started as
a low growl, and quickly rose to a snarling screech. Every hair
on my body stood at attention. It's sort of a bracing feeling,
once you get used to it; your skin feels thick and tough as
leather. My scrotum grew very small and hard as it tried its
best to get certain treasures out of harm's way.
As for Brenda . . . she tried to run straight up the backs
of my legs and over the top of my head. Without some fancy
footwork on my part we both would have gone sprawling. But I'd
been ready for that reaction, and hurried along until the inner
door got out of our way with a blast of light from the far
side. Brenda didn't stop running for another twenty meters.
Then she stopped, a sheepish grin on her face, breathing
shallowly. We were in the long, utilitarian hallway that led to
the back door of my condo.
"I don't know what got into me," she said.
"Don't worry," I said. "Apparently that's one of the
sounds that is part of the human brain's hard wiring. It's a
reflex, like when you stick your finger in a flame, you don't
think about it, you instantly draw it back."
"And you hear that sound, your bowels turn to oatmeal."
"Close enough."
"I'd like to go back and see the thing that made that
sound."
"It's worth seeing," I agreed. "But you'll have to wait
for daylight. The cubs are cute. It's hard to believe they'll
turn into monsters like their mother."
#
I hesitated at the door. In my day, and up until fairly
recently, you just didn't let someone enter your home lightly.
Luna is a crowded society. There are people wherever you turn,
tripping over your feet, elbowing you, millions of intrusive,
sweaty bodies. You have to have a small place of privacy. After
you'd known someone five or ten years you might, if you really
liked the person, invite her over for drinks or sex in your own
bed. But most socializing took place on neutral ground.
The younger generation wasn't like that. They thought
nothing of dropping by just to say hello. I could make a big
thing of it, driving yet another wedge between the two of us,
or I could let it go.
What the hell. We'd have to learn to work together sooner
or later. I opened the door with my palm print and stepped
aside to let her enter.
She hurried to the washroom, saying something about having
to take a mick. I assumed that meant urinate, though I'd never
heard the term. I wondered briefly how she'd accomplish that,
given her lack of obvious outlet. I could have found out--she
left the door open. The young ones were no longer seeking
privacy even for that.
I looked around at the apartment. What would Brenda see
here? What would a pre-Invasion man see?
What they wouldn't see was dirt and clutter. A dozen
cleaning robots worked tirelessly whenever I was away. No speck
of dust was too small for their eternal vigilance, and no item
could ever be out of its assigned place longer than it took me
to walk to the tube station.
Could someone read anything about my character from
looking at this room? There were no books or paintings to give
a clue. I had all the libraries of the world a few keystrokes
away, but no books of my own. Any of the walls could project
artwork or films or environments, as desired, but they seldom
did.
There was something interesting. Unlimited computer
capacity had brought manufacturing full circle. Primitive
cultures produced articles by hand, and no two were identical.
The industrial revolution had standardized production, poured
out endless streams of items for the "consumer culture."
Finally, it became possible to have each and every manufactured
item individually ordered and designed. All my furniture was
unique. Nowhere in Luna would you find another sofa like that .
. . like that hideous monstrosity over there. And what a
blessing that was, I mused. Two of them might have mated. Damn,
but it was ugly.
I had selected almost nothing in this room. The
possibilities of taste had become so endless I had simply
thrown up my hands and taken what came with the apartment.
Maybe that was what I'd been reluctant to let Brenda see.
I supposed you could read as much into what a man had not done
to his environment as what he had done.
While I was still pondering that--and not feeling too
happy about it--Brenda came out of the washroom. She had a
bloody piece of gauze in her hand, which she tossed on the
floor. A low-slung robot darted out from under the couch and
ate it, then scuttled away. Her skin looked greased, and the
pinkish color was fading as I watched. She had visited the doc.
"I had radiation burns," she said. "I ought to take the
disneyland management to court, get them to pay the medical
bill." She lifted her foot and examined the bottom. There was a
pink area of new skin where the cut had been. In a few more
minutes it would be gone. There would be no scar. She looked
up, hastily. "I'll pay, of course. Just send me the bill."
"Forget it," I said. "I just got your lead. How long were
you in Texas?"
"Three hours? Four at the most."
"I was there for five hours, today. Except for the
gravity, it's a pretty good simulation of the natural Earthly
environment. And what happened to us?" I ticked the points off
on my fingers. "You got sunburned. Consequences, in 1845: you
would have been in for a very painful night. No sleep. Pain for
several days. Then the outer layer of your skin would slough
off. Probably some more dermatological effects. I think it
might even have caused skin cancer. That would have been fatal.
Research that one, see if I'm right.
"You injured the sole of your foot. Consequence, not too
bad, but you would have limped for a few days or a week. And
always the danger of infection to an area of the body difficult
to keep clean.
"I got a very nasty injury to my hand. Bad enough to
require minor surgery, with the possibility of deep infection,
loss of the limb, perhaps death. There's a word for it, when
one of your limbs starts to mortify. Look it up.
"So," I summed up. "Three injuries. Two possibly fatal,
over time. All in five hours. Consequences today: an almost
negligible bill from the automatic doc."
She waited for me to go on. I was prepared to let her wait
a lot longer, but she finally gave in.
"That's it? That's my story?"
"The lead, goddamit. Personalize it. You went for a walk
in the park, and this is what happened. It shows how perilous
life was back then. It shows how lightly we've come to regard
injury to our bodies, how completely we expect total, instant,
painless repairs to them. Remember what you said? 'It's not
fixed!' You'd never had anything happen to you that couldn't be
fixed, right now, with no pain."
She looked thoughtful, then smiled.
"That could work, I guess."
"Damn right it'll work. You take it from there, work in
more detail. Don't get into optional medical things; we'll keep
that for later. Make this one a pure horror story. Show how
fragile life has always been. Show how it's only in the last
century or so that we've been able to stop worrying about our
health."
"We can do that," she said.
"We, hell. I told you, this is your story. Now get out of
here and get to it. Deadline's in twenty-four hours."
I expected more argument, but I'd ignited her youthful
enthusiasm. I hustled her out the door, then leaned against it
and heaved a sigh of relief. I'd been afraid she'd call me on
it.
#
Not long after she left I went to the doc and had my own
hand healed. Then I ran a big tubful of water and eased myself
into it. The water was so hot it turned my skin pink. That's
the way I like it.
After a while I got out, rummaged in a cabinet, and found
an old home surgery kit. There was a sharp scalpel in it.
I ran some more hot water, got in again, lay back and
relaxed completely. When I was totally at peace with myself, I
slashed both my wrists right down to the bone.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Dirty Dan the Dervish went into his trademark spin late in
the third round. By that time he had the Cytherian Cyclone
staggering.
I'm not a slash-boxing fan, but the spin was something to
see. The Dervish pumped himself up and down like a top,
balancing on the toes of his left foot. He'd draw his right leg
in to spin faster, until he was almost a blur, then, without
warning, the right foot would flash out, sometimes high,
sometimes low, sometimes connecting. Either way, he'd instantly
be pumping up and down with the left leg, spinning as if he
were on ice.
"Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!" the fans were chanting.
Brenda was shouting as loud as anyone. She was beside me, at
ringside. Most of the time she was on her feet. As for me, they
issued clear plastic sheets to everyone in the first five rows,
and I spent most of my time holding mine between me and the
ring. The Dervish had a deep gash on his right calf, and the
slashing spin could hurl blood droplets an amazing distance.
The Cyclone kept retreating, unable to come up with any
defense. He tried ducking under and attacking with the knife in
his right hand, and received another wound for his trouble. He
leaped into the air, but the Dervish was instantly with him,
slashing up from below, and as soon as their feet hit the mat
again he went into his whirl. Things were looking desperate for
the Cyclone, when he was suddenly saved by the bell.
Brenda sat down, breathing hard. I supposed that, without
sex, one needed something for release of tensions. Slash-boxing
seemed perfectly designed for that.
She wiped some of the blood from her face with a cloth,
and turned to look at me for the first time since the round
began. She seemed disappointed that I wasn't getting into the
festivities.
"How does he manage that spin?" I asked her.
"It's the mat," she said, falling instantly into the role
of expert--which must have been quite a relief for her.
"Something to do with the molecular alignment of the fibers. If
you lean on it in a certain way, you get traction, but a
circular motion reduces the friction till it's almost like ice
skating."
"Do I still have time to get a bet down?"
"No point in it," she said. "The odds will be lousy. You
should have bet when I told you, before the match started. The
Cyclone is a dead man."
He certainly looked it. Sitting on his stool, surrounded
by his pit crew, it seemed impossible he would answer the bell
for the next round. His legs were a mass of cuts, some covered
with bloody bandages. His left arm dangled by a strip of flesh;
the pit boss was considering removing it entirely. There was a
temporary shunt on his left jugular artery. It looked horribly
vulnerable, easy to hit. He had sustained that injury at the
end of the second round, which had enabled his crew to patch it
at the cost of several liters of blood. But his worst wound had
also come in the second round. It was a gash, half a meter
long, from his left hip to his right nipple. Ribs were visible
at the top, while the middle was held together with half a
dozen hasty stitches of a rawhide-like material. He had
sustained it while scoring his only effective attack on the
Dervish, bringing his knife in toward the neck, achieving
instead a ghastly but minimally disabling wound to the
Dervish's face--only to find the Dervish's knife thrust deep
into his gut. The upward jerk of that knife had spilled viscera
all over the ring and produced the first yellow flag of the
match, howls of victory from Dirty Dan's pit, and chants of
"Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!" from the crowd.
The Cyclone's handlers had hacked away the torn tangle of
organs under the caution flag, repaired the neck artery during
the second pit stop and retired glumly to their corner to watch
their man walk into the meat grinder again.
The Dervish was sitting erect while his crew did more work
to the facial wound. One eyeball was split open and useless.
Blood had temporarily blinded him during the second round,
rendering him unable to fully exploit the terrible wound he'd
inflicted on his opponent. Brenda had expressed concern during
the lull that the Dervish might not employ his famous spin now
that his depth perception had been destroyed. But the Dervish
was not about to disappoint his fans, one eye or not.
A red light went on over the Cyclone's corner. It made the
crowd murmur excitedly.
"Why do they call it a corner?" I asked.
"Huh?"
"It's a round ring. It doesn't have any corners."
She shrugged. "It's traditional, I guess." Then she smiled
maliciously. "You can research it before you write this up for
Walter."
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Why the hell not? 'Sports, Then and Now.' It's a
natural."
She was right, of course, but that didn't make it any
harder to swallow. I wasn't particularly enjoying this role
reversal. She was supposed to be the ignorant one.
"What about that red light? What's it mean?"
"Each of the fighters gets ten liters of blood for
transfusions. See that gauge on the scoreboard? The Cyclone
just used his last liter. Dervish has seven liters left."
"So it's just about over."
"He'll never last another round."
And he didn't.
The last round was an artless affair. No more fancy spins,
no flying leaps. The crowd shouted a little at first, then
settled down to watch the kill. People began drifting out of
the arena to get refreshments before the main bout of the
evening. The Dervish moved constantly away as the dazed Cyclone
lumbered after him, striking out from time to time, opening
more wounds. Bleeding his opponent to death. Soon the Cyclone
could only stand there, dumb and inert with loss of blood. A
few people in the crowd were booing. The Dervish slashed the
Cyclone's throat. Arterial blood spurted into the air, and the
Cyclone crashed to the mat. The Dervish bent over his fallen
foe, worked briefly, and then held the head high. There was
sporadic applause and the handlers moved in, hustling the
Dervish down to the locker rooms and hauling away both pieces
of the Cyclone. The zamboni appeared and began mopping up the
blood.
"You want some popcorn?" Brenda asked me.
"Just something to drink," I told her. She joined the
throngs moving toward the refreshment center.
I turned back toward the ring, savoring a feeling that had
been all too rare of late: the urge to write. I raised my left
hand and snapped my fingers. I snapped them again before I
remembered the damn handwriter was not working. It hadn't been
working for five days, since Brenda's visit to Texas. The
problem seemed to be in the readout skin. I could type on the
keyboard on the heel of my hand, but nothing appeared on the
readout. The data was going into the memory and could later be
downloaded, but I can't work that way. I have to see the words
as they're being formed.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I slipped through
the program book Brenda had left on her chair, found a blank
page. Then I rummaged through my purse and found a blue pen I
kept for hand corrections to hard copy.
#
(File Hildy*next avail.*)(code Bloodsport)
(headline to come)
#
There may be no evidence of it, but you can bet cave men
had sporting events. We still have them today, and if we ever
reach the stars, we'll have sports out there, too.
Sports are rooted in violence. They usually contain the
threat of injury. Or at least they did until about a hundred
and fifty years ago.
Sports today, of course, are totally nonviolent.
The modern sports fan would be shocked at the violence of
sports as it existed on Earth. Take for example one of the
least violent sports, one we still practice today, the simple
foot race. Runners rarely completed a career without numerous
injuries to knees, ankles, muscles, or spine. Sometimes these
injuries could be repaired, and sometimes they couldn't. Every
time a runner competed, he faced the possibility of injury that
would plague him for the rest of his life.
In the days of the Romans, athletes fought each other with
swords and other deadly weapons--not always voluntarily.
Crippling injury or death was certain, in every match.
Even in later, more "enlightened" days, many sports were
little more than organized mayhem. Teams of athletes crashed
into each other with amazing disregard for the imperfect skills
of contemporary healers. People strapped themselves into ground
vehicles or flying machines and raced at speeds that would turn
them into jelly in the event of a sudden stop. Crash helmets,
fist pads, shoulder, groin, knee, rib, and nose protectors
tried to temper the carnage but by their mere presence were
testimony to the violent potential in all these games.
Did I hear someone protesting out there? Did someone say
our modern sports are much more violent than those of the past?
What a ridiculous idea.
Modern athletes typically compete in the nude. No
protection is needed or wanted. In most sports, bodily damage
is expected, sometimes even desired, as in slash boxing. A
modern athlete just after a competition would surely be a
shocking sight to a citizen of any Earth society. But modern
sports produce no cripples.
It would be nice to think this universal non-violence was
the result of some great moral revolution. It just ain't so. It
is a purely technological revolution. There is no injury today
that can't be fixed.
The fact is, "violence" is a word that no longer means
what it used to. Which is the more violent: a limb being torn
off and quickly re-attached with no ill effects, or a crushed
spinal disc that causes its owner pain every second of his life
and cannot be repaired?
I know which injury I'd prefer.
That kind of violence is no longer something to fear,
because
(discuss Olympic games, influence of local gravity in
venues)
(mention Deathmatches)
(Tie to old medicine article?)(ask Brenda)
#
I hastily scribbled the last few lines, because I saw
Brenda returning with the popcorn.
"What're you doing?" she asked, resuming her seat. I
handed her the page. She scanned it quickly.
"Seems a little dry," was her only comment.
"You'll hype it up some," I told her. "This is your
field." I reached over and took a kernel of popcorn from her,
then took a big bite out of it. She had bought the large bag: a
dozen fist-sized puffs, white and crunchy, dripping with
butter. It tasted great, washed down with the big bottle of
beer she handed me.
While I was writing there had been an exhibition from some
children's slash-boxing school. The children were filing out
now, most of them cross-hatched with slashes of red ink from
the training knives they used. Medical costs for children were
high enough without letting them practice with real knives.
The ringmaster appeared and began hyping the main event of
the evening, a Deathmatch between the champion Manhattan Mugger
and a challenger known as One Mean Bitch.
Brenda leaned toward me and spoke out of the side of her
mouth.
"Put your money on the Bitch," she said.
"If she's gonna win, what the hell are we doing here?"
"Ask Walter. This was his idea."
The purpose of our visit to the fights was to interview
the Manhattan Mugger--also known as Andrew MacDonald--with an
eye toward hiring him as our Earth-born consultant on the
bicentennial series. MacDonald was well over two hundred years
old. The trouble was, he had elected to fight to the death. If
he lost, his next interview would be with St. Peter. But Walter
had assured us there was no way his man was going to lose.
"I was talking to a friend out at the concessions," Brenda
went on. "There's no question the Mugger is the better fighter.
This is his tenth Deathmatch in the last two years. What this
guy was saying is, ten is too much for anybody. He said the
Mugger was dogging it in the last match. He won't get away with
that against the Bitch. He says the Mugger doesn't want to win
anymore. He just wants to die."
The contestants had entered the ring, were strutting
around, showing off, as holo pictures of their past bouts
appeared high in the air and the announcer continued to make it
sound as if this would be the fight of the century.
"Did you bet on her?"
"I put down fifty, for a kill in the second."
I thought that over, then beckoned to a tout. He handed me
a card, which I marked and thumbed. He stuck the card in the
totaliser on his belt, then handed me the marker. I pocketed
it.
"How much did you invest?"
"Ten. To win." I didn't tell her it was on the Mugger.
The contestants were in their "corners," being oiled down,
as the announcer continued his spiel. They were magnificent
specimens, competing in the highest body-mass class, matched to
within a kilogram. The lights flashed on their glistening
browned skins as they shadow-boxed and danced, skittish as race
horses, bursting with energy.
"This bout is being conducted under the sporting by-laws
of King City," the announcer said, "which provide for voluntary
Deathmatches for one or both parties. The Manhattan Mugger has
elected to risk death tonight. He has been advised and
counseled, as required by law, and should he die tonight, it
will be deemed a suicide. The Bitch has agreed to deliver the
coup de grace, should she find herself in a position to do so,
and understands she will not be held responsible in any way."
"Don't worry about it!" the Mugger shouted, glaring at his
opponent. It got a laugh, and the announcer looked grateful for
the interruption in the boring paragraphs the law required him
to read.
He brought them out to the middle of the ring and read
them the rule--which was simply to stop fighting when they
heard the bell. Other than that, there were no rules. He had
them shake hands, and told them to come out fighting.
#
"The first stinking round. I can't believe it."
Brenda was still complaining, half an hour after the
finish of the match. It had not been a contest that would go
down in history.
We were waiting in the reception area outside the entrance
to the locker rooms. MacDonald's manager had told us we could
go in to see him as soon as the pit crew had him patched up.
Considering the small amount of damage he had suffered, I
didn't expect that to be too much longer.
I heard a commotion and turned to see the Cyclone emerging
into a small group of dedicated fans, mostly children. He got
out a pen and began signing autographs. He was dressed in black
shirt and pants, and had a bulky brace around his neck, which
seemed a small enough inconvenience for a man whose head had
been rolling around the ring an hour earlier. He'd wear it
until the new muscles had been conditioned enough to support
his head. I figured that wouldn't be long; the brain of a man
in his profession couldn't weigh all that much.
The door opened again and MacDonald's manager beckoned to
us.
We followed him down a dim corridor lined with numbered
doors. One of them was open and I could hear moaning coming
from it. I glanced in as we passed. There was a bloody mess on
a high table, with half a dozen pit crew clustered around.
"You don't mean to tell me . . . "
"What?" Brenda said, and glanced into the room. "Oh. Yeah,
she fights without nerve deadening."
"I thought--"
"Most fighters turn their pain center way down, just
enough so they know when they've been hit. But a few feel that
trying to avoid real pain makes them quicker on their feet."
"It sure would make me quicker."
"Yeah, well, obviously it wasn't enough tonight."
I was glad I'd had only the one piece of popcorn.
The Manhattan Mugger was sitting in a diagnostic chair,
wearing a robe and smoking a cheroot. His left leg was propped
up and being worked on by one of his trainers. He smiled when
he saw us, and held out his hand.
"Andy MacDonald," he said. "Pardon me for not getting up."
We both shook his hand, and he waved us into seats. He
offered us drinks, which a member of his entourage brought us.
Then Brenda launched into a breathless recap of the match,
full of glowing praise for his martial skills. You'd never have
known she just lost fifty on him. I sat back and waited, fully
expecting we'd spend the next hour talking about the finer
points of slash boxing. He was smiling faintly as Brenda went
on and on, and I figured I had to say something, if only to be
polite.
"I'm not a sports fan," I said, not wishing to be too
polite, "but it seemed to me your technique was different from
the others I saw tonight."
He took a long drag on his cheroot, then examined the
glowing tip as he slowly exhaled purple smoke. He transferred
his gaze to me, and some of the heat seemed to go with it.
There was a deepness to his eyes I hadn't noticed at first. You
see that sometimes, in the very old. These days, of course, it
is usually the only way you can tell someone is old. MacDonald
certainly had no other signs of age. His body looked to be in
its mid-twenties, but he'd had little choice in its features,
given his profession. Slash boxers inhabit fairly standardized
bodies, in nine different formulas or weight classes, as a way
of minimizing any advantage gained by sheer body mass. His face
seemed a bit older, but that could have been just the eyes. It
wasn't old enough for age to have impressed a great deal of
character on it. Neither was it one of those generic
"attractive" faces about half the population seem to prefer. I
got the feeling this was pretty much the way he might have
looked in his youth, which-I remembered, with a little
shock--had been spent on Earth.
The Earth-born are not precisely rare. The CC told me
there were around ten thousand of them still alive. But they
look like anyone else, usually, and tend not to announce
themselves. There were some who made a big thing about their
age--the perennial talk-show guests, storytellers, professional
nostalgics--but by and large the Earth-born were a closeted
minority. I had never wondered why before.
"Walter said you'd talk me into joining this project of
his," MacDonald said, finally, ignoring my own comment. "I told
him he was wrong. Not that I intend to be stubborn about it; if
you can give me a good reason why I should spend a year with
you two, I'd like to hear it."
"If you know Walter," I countered, "you'll know he's
possibly the least perceptive man in Luna, where other people
are concerned. He thinks I'm enthusiastic about this project.
He's wrong. As far as I know, Walter is the only one interested
in this project. It's just a job to me."
"I'm interested," Brenda piped up. MacDonald shifted his
gaze to her, but didn't feel the need to leave it there long. I
had the feeling he had learned all he needed to know about her
in that brief look.
"My style," he said, "is a combination of ancient fighting
techniques that never got transplanted to Luna. Some
well-meaning but foolish people passed a law a long time ago
banning the teaching of these oriental disciplines. That was
back when the conventional wisdom was we ought to live together
in peace, not ever fight each other again, certainly not ever
kill each other. Which is a nice idea, I guess.
"It even worked, partially. The murder rate is way, way
down from what it was in any human society on Earth."
He took another long drag on his smoke. His attendants
finished their work on his leg, packed up, and left us alone. I
began to wonder if that was all he had to say, when he finally
spoke again.
"Opinions shift. You live as long as I have, you'll see
that over and over."
"I'm not as old as you, but I've seen it."
"How old are you?" he asked.
"One hundred. Three days ago." I saw Brenda look at me,
open her mouth to say something, then close it again. Probably
I'd get chewed out for not telling her so she could throw a
centennial birthday party for me.
MacDonald looked at me with even more interest than
before, narrowing those disturbing eyes.
"Feel any different?"
"You mean because I'm a hundred years old? Why should I?"
"Why, indeed. It's a milestone, certainly, but it doesn't
really mean anything. Right?"
"Right."
"Anyway, to get back to the question . . . there were
always those who felt that, with natural evolutionary processes
no longer working, we should make some attempt to foster a
certain amount of aggressiveness. Without sanctioning real
killing, we could at least learn how to fight. So boxing was
re-introduced, and that eventually led to the blood sports you
see today."
"This is just the sort of perspective Walter wants," I
pointed out.
"Yes. I didn't say I didn't have the perspective you need.
I'm just curious as to why I should use it for you."
"I've been thinking that one over, too," I said. "Just as
an exercise, you understand. And you know, I can't think of
anything that's likely to convince a man in the middle of a
protracted suicide to put it off for a year and join us in
writing a series of useless stories."
"I used to be a reporter, you know."
"No, I didn't."
"Is that what you think I'm doing? Committing suicide?"
Brenda looked at him earnestly. I could almost feel her
concern.
"If you get killed in the ring, that's what they'll call
it," she said.
He got up and went to a small bar at the side of the room.
Without asking what we wanted, he poured three glasses of a
pale green liqueur and brought them back to us. Brenda sniffed
it, tasted, then took a longer drink.
"You can't imagine the sense of defeatism after the
Invasion," he said. It was apparently impossible to keep him on
any subject, so I relaxed to the inevitable. As a reporter you
learn to let the subject talk.
"To call it a war is a perversion of the word. We fought,
I suppose, in the sense that ants fight when the hill is kicked
over. I suppose ants can fight valiantly in such a situation,
but it hardly matters to the man who kicked the hill. He barely
notices what he has done. He may not even have had any actual
malice toward ants; it might have been an accident, or a
side-effect of another project, like plowing a field. We were
plowed under in a single day.
"Those of us here in Luna were in a state of shock. In a
way, that state of shock lasted many decades. In a way . . .
it's still with us today."
He took another drag on his cheroot.
"I'm one of those who was alarmed at the nonviolence
movement. It's great, as an ideal, but I feel it leaves us in a
dead end, and vulnerable."
"You mean evolution?" Brenda asked.
"Yes. We shape ourselves genetically now, but are we
really wise enough to know what to select for? For a billion
years the selection was done naturally. I wonder if it's wise
to junk a system that worked for so long."
"Depends on what you mean by 'worked,'" I said.
"Are you a nihilist?"
I shrugged.
"All right. Worked, in the sense that life forms got more
complex. Biology seemed to be working toward something. We know
it wasn't us-the Invaders proved there are things out there a
lot smarter than we are. But the Invaders were gas giant
beings, they must have evolved on a planet like Jupiter. We're
hardly even related. It's commonly accepted that the Invaders
came to Earth to save the dolphins and whales from our
pollution. I don't know of any proof of that, but what the
hell. Suppose it's true. That means the aquatic mammals have
brains organized more like the Invaders than like us. The
Invaders don't see us as truly intelligent, any more than other
engineering species, like bees, or corals, or birds. True or
not, the Invaders don't really have to concern us anymore. Our
paths don't cross; we have no interests in common. We're free
to pursue our own destiny . . . but if we don't evolve, we
don't have a destiny."
He looked from one of us to the other and back again. This
seemed pretty important to him. Personally, I'd never given
much thought to the matter.
"There's something else," he went on. "We know there are
aliens out there. We know space travel is possible. The next
time we meet aliens they could be even worse than the Invaders.
They might want to exterminate us, rather than just evict us. I
think we ought to keep some fighting skills alive in case we
meet some disagreeable critters we can fight."
Brenda sat up, wide-eyed.
"You're a Heinleiner," she said.
It was MacDonald's turn to shrug.
"I don't attend services, but I agree with a lot of what
they say. But we were talking about martial arts."
Is that what we were talking about? I'd lost track.
"Those arts were lost for almost a century. I spent ten
years studying thousands of films from the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, and I pieced them back together. I
spent another twenty years teaching myself until I felt I was
adept. Then I became a slash boxer. So far, I'm undefeated. I
expect to remain that way until someone else duplicates my
techniques."
"That would be a good subject for an article," Brenda
suggested. "Fighting, then and now. People used to have all
kinds of weapons, right? Projectile weapons, I mean. Ordinary
citizens could own them."
"There was one country in the twentieth century that made
their possession almost mandatory. It was a civil right, the
right to own firearms. One of the weirder civil rights in human
history, I always thought. But I'd have owned one, if I'd lived
there. In an armed society, the unarmed man must be a pretty
nervous fellow."
"It's not that I don't find all this perfectly
fascinating," I said, standing and stretching my arms and legs
to get the circulation going again. "I don't, but that's beside
the point. We've been here about half an hour, and already
Brenda has suggested plenty of topics you could be helpful
with. Hell, you could write them yourself, if you remember how.
So how about it? Are you interested, or should we start looking
for someone else?"
He leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at me.
Before long I began to wonder when the theremin music
would begin. A look like that belonged in a horror holo. Eyes
like that should be set in a face that begins to sprout hair
and fangs, or twist like putty into some Nameless Evil Thing. I
mentioned before how deep his eyes seemed. They had been
reflecting pools compared to this.
I don't wish to be superstitious. I don't wish to
attribute powers to MacDonald simply because he had attained a
venerable age. But, looking at those eyes, one could not help
but think of all the things they had seen, and wonder at the
wisdom that might have been attained. I was one hundred years
old, which is nothing to sneer at in the longevity department,
or hadn't been until recent human history, but I felt like a
child being judged by his grandfather, or maybe by God himself.
I didn't like it.
I tried my best to return the gaze--and there was nothing
hostile in it, no challenge being issued to me. If a staring
match was in progress, I was the only one competing. But before
long I had to turn away. I studied the walls, the floor, I
looked at Brenda and smiled at her--which startled her, I
think. Anything to avoid those eyes.
"No," he said, at last. "I don't think I'll join this
project, after all. I'm sorry to have wasted your time."
"No problem," I said, and got up and started for the door.
"What do you mean, 'after all,'" Brenda asked. I turned,
wondering if I could get away with grabbing her arm and
dragging her away.
"I mean, I was considering it, despite everything. Some
aspects of it were beginning to look like fun."
"Then what changed your mind?"
"Come on, Brenda," I said. "I'm sure he has his own
reasons, and they're none of our business." I took her arm, and
tugged at it.
"Stop it," she said, annoyed. "Stop treating me like a
child." She glared at me until I let her go. I suppose it would
have been unkind to point out that she was a child.
"I'd really like to know," she told MacDonald.
He looked at her, not unkindly, then looked away, seeming
embarrassed. I simply report the fact; I have no idea why he
might have been embarrassed.
"I only work with survivors," he said, quietly. Before
either of us had a chance to reply he was on his feet. He
limped slightly as he went to the door and held it open for us.
I got up and jammed my hat on my head. I was almost out
the door when I heard Brenda.
"I don't understand," she was saying. "What makes you
think I'm not a survivor?"
"I didn't say you weren't," he said.
I turned on him.
"Brenda," I said, slowly. "Correct me if I'm wrong. Did I
just hear myself accused of not being a survivor by a man who
risks his life in a game?"
She didn't say anything. I think she realized that,
whatever was going on here, it was between him and me. I wished
I knew what it was, and why it had made me so angry.
"Risks can be calculated," he said. "I'm still alive. I
plan to stay that way."
Nothing good lasts forever. Brenda piped up again.
"What is it about Hildy that makes you--"
"That's none of my business," he interrupted, still
looking at me. "I see something in Hildy. If I were to join you
two, I'd have to make it my business."
"What you see, pal, is a man who takes care of his own
business, and doesn't let some gal with a knife do it for him."
Somehow that didn't come out like I'd intended. He smiled
faintly. I turned and stomped out the door, not waiting to see
if Brenda followed.
#
I lifted my head from the bar. Everything was too bright,
too noisy. I seemed to be on a carousel, but what was that
bottle doing in my hand?
I kept tightly focused on the bottle and things slowly
stopped spinning. There was a puddle of whiskey under the
bottle, and under my arm, and the side of my face was wet. I'd
been lying in the puddle.
"If you throw up on my bar," the man said, "I'll beat you
bloody."
Swinging my gaze toward him was a major project. It was
the bartender, and I told him I wasn't going to throw up, then
I almost choked and staggered toward the swinging doors and
made a mess in the middle of Congress Street.
When I was done I sat down there in the road. Traffic was
no problem. There were a few horses and wagons tied up behind
me, but nothing moved on the dark streets of New Austin. Behind
me were the sounds of revelry, piano music, the occasional
gunshot as the tourists sampled life in the old west.
Somebody was holding a drink before my face. I followed
the arm up to bare shoulders, a long neck, a pretty face
surrounded by curly black hair. Her lipstick was black in the
dim light. She wore a corset, garters, stockings, high heels. I
took the drink and made it vanish. I patted the ground beside
me and she sat, folding her arms on her knees.
"I'll remember your name in a minute," I said.
"Dora."
"Adorable Dora. I want to rip off your clothes and throw
you into bed and make passionate love to your virginal body."
"We already did that. Sorry about the virginal part."
"I want you to have my babies."
She kissed my forehead.
"Marry me, and make me the happiest man in the moon."
"We did that, too, sweetheart. It's a shame you don't
remember it." She held her hand out to me and I saw a gold
wedding ring with a little diamond chip. I squinted at her face
again. There was some kind of filmy aura around it . . .
"That's a bridal veil!" I shouted. She was looking dreamy,
smiling up at the stars.
"We had to sober the parson up, then go bang on the
jeweler's door and send somebody around to find Silas to open
the general store for my gown, but we got it done. The service
was right there in the Alamo, Cissy was my maid of honor and
old Doc stood up for you. All the girls cried."
I must have looked dubious, because she laughed and patted
me on the back.
"The tourists loved it," she said. "It's not every night
we get as colorful as that." She twisted the ring off her
finger and handed it to me. "But I'm too much of a lady to hold
you to vows you made while not in your right mind." She peered
closer at me. "Are you back in your right mind?"
I was back enough to remember that any marriage performed
by the "parson" in "Texas" was not legally binding in King
City. But to get an idea of how far gone I'd been, I'd really
been worried for a moment there.
"A whore with a heart of gold," I said.
"We all have our parts to play. I've never seen the 'town
drunk' done better. Most people omit the vomit."
"I strive for authenticity. Did I do anything
disgraceful?"
"You mean aside from marrying me? I don't mean to be
unkind, but your fourth consummation of our marriage was pretty
disgraceful. I won't spread it around; the first three were
rather special."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the tongue work was some of the best I've--"
"No, I mean . . . "
"I know what you mean. I know there's a word for it.
Inability, immobility . . . a limp cock."
"Impotence."
"That's it. My grandmother told me about it, but I never
expected to see it."
"Stick with me, honey, and I'll show you even more
wonders."
"You were pretty drunk."
"You've finally said something boring."
She shrugged. "I can't swap repartee with a cynic like you
forever."
"Is that what I am? A Cynic?":
She shrugged again, but I thought I saw some concern in
her expression. It was hard to tell, with just moonlight and
swimming eyeballs.
She helped me to my feet, brushed me off, kissed me. I
promised to call on her when I was in town. I don't think she
believed me. I had her point me toward the edge of town, and
started home.
#
Morning was smearing up the sky like pale pink lipstick.
I'd been hearing the rippling of the river for some time.
My efforts at reconstructing the day had brought back some
broad outlines. I recalled taking the tube from the Arena to
Texas, and I knew I'd spent some time working on the cabin. In
there somewhere I saw myself throwing finished lumber into a
ravine. I remembered seriously thinking of burning the cabin to
the ground. The next thing I knew I was sitting at the bar in
the Alamo Saloon, tossing down one drink after another. Then
the clouds rolled in and the memory transcription ended. I had
a hazy picture of the Parson swaying slightly as he pronounced
us man and wife. What a curious phrase. I supposed it was
historically accurate.
I heard a sound, and looked up from the rocky path.
A pronghorn antelope was standing not ten feet in front of
me. He held his head high, alert and proud, but not frightened
of me. His chest was snowy white and his eyes were moist and
brown and wise. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever
seen.
On his worst day he was ten times better than I had ever
been. I sat down on the path and cried for a while. When I
looked up, he was gone.
I felt calm for the first time in many years. I found the
cliff face, located the climbing rope, and hoisted myself to
the top. The sun was still below the horizon but there was a
lot of yellow in the sky now. My hands toyed with the rope. How
did it go . . . the rabbit goes in the hole, the dog chases the
rabbit around the tree, two, three, four . . .
After several tries, I got it right. I slipped it around
my neck and looked down the cliff. Your acceleration is low in
Luna, but your body mass is constant. You need a big drop, six
times what would do on Earth. I tried to do the calculations in
my head but kept losing track.
To be on the safe side, I picked up a large rock and held
it tightly to my chest. Then I jumped. You get plenty of time
for regrets, but I had none. I remember looking up and seeing
Andrew MacDonald looking down at me.
Then came the jerk.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
$$
"If you're going to build a barn for brontosaurs," I told
Brenda, "You'd better make the ceiling at least twenty meters
high."
"And why is that, Mr. Bones?"
Where she'd learned about minstrel shows I had no idea,
but she'd been using the term for a while now, whenever I got
into lecture mode--which, considering the state of her
ignorance, was most of the time. I wasn't going to let it annoy
me.
She was looking up at the ceiling, which was twenty-five
meters above us. Myself, I wasn't looking up all that much
lately. For several days I'd had a persistent and painful
stabbing pain in my neck whenever I turned my head in a certain
position. I kept meaning to visit the medico and get it fixed,
but it would spontaneously remit for a few hours and I'd forget
to make an appointment. Then it would creep up and stab me when
I least expected it.
"Brontosaurs are not real bright. When they get alarmed
they raise their heads and rear up on their hind legs to take a
look around. If the ceiling is too low they smash their teeny
heads against it and stun themselves."
"You've spent time around dinosaurs?"
"I grew up on a dinosaur ranch." I took her elbow and
steered her out of the way of a manure loader. We watched as it
scooped up a pile of watermelon-sized pellets.
"What a stench."
I said nothing. The smell had both good and bad
associations for me. It took me back to my childhood, where one
of my jobs had been operating the manure loader.
Behind us, the massive doors to the swamp began rumbling
open, letting in a blast of air even hotter and more humid than
that inside the barn. In a moment a long neck poked inside the
door, ending in an almost negligible, goofy-looking head. The
neck kept coming in for a very long time before the massive
body made its entrance. By then another head and neck had
appeared.
"Let's get back here out of the way," I suggested to
Brenda. "They won't step on you if they see you, but they tend
to forget where you are not long after they look away from
you."
"Where are they going?"
I pointed toward the open gate across from us. The sign on
it said "Mating Pen Number One."
"Mating season's just about over. Wait till Callie gets
them penned up, then we can take a look. It's pretty
interesting."
One of the brontosaurs made a mournful honk and moved
along a little faster. In one-sixth gee, even a thunder lizard
could be sprightly. I doubt they set any speed records back on
Old Earth. In fact, I wondered how they stood up at all, out of
the water.
The reason for the burst of speed was soon apparent.
Callie entered the barn, mounted on a tyrannosaur. The big
predator responded instantly to every touch of the reins,
hurrying to block an attempted retreat by the male, rearing up
and baring its teeth when it looked as if the female might make
a stand. The big herbivores waddled quickly into the mating
pen. The doors closed automatically behind them.
The thing the ancient paleontologists had never got right
about dinosaurs was their color. You'd think the examples of so
many modern reptiles might have given them a hint. But if you
look at old artists' conceptions of dinosaurs, the predominant
colors were mud-brown and khaki-green. The real item was much
different.
There are several strains of b-saur but the type Callie
prefers are called Cal Tech Yellowbellies, after the lab that
first produced them. In addition to the canary undersides, they
range from that old reliable mud-brown on their backs to a dark
green, emerald green, and kelly green on their sides and necks.
They have streaks of iridescent violet trailing back from their
eyes, and white patches under their throats.
Tyrannosaurs, of course, are predominately red. They have
huge, dangling wattles under their necks, like iguanas, which
can be puffed up to make an outrageous booming mating call. The
wattles are usually deep blue, though purple and even black are
not unknown.
You can't ride a t-saur like a horse; the back is too
steep. There are different methods, but Callie preferred a sort
of narrow platform she could either sit or stand on, depending
on what she was doing. It strapped around the beast's
shoulders. Considering the amount of lizard still rising above
that point, she spent most of her time on her feet, barely able
to peer over the head.
"It looks unstable," Brenda said. "What if she falls off?"
"You don't want to do that," I told her. "They're likely
to snap at you if you come in view suddenly. But don't worry;
this one is muzzled."
An assistant leaped up to join Callie in the saddle. He
took the reins from her and she jumped to the ground. As the
t-saur was being ridden out the barn door she glanced at us,
did a doubletake, and waved at me. I waved back, and she
gestured for us to come over. Not waiting, she started toward
the breeding pen.
I was about to join her when something poked through the
metal railing behind us. Brenda jumped, then relaxed. It was a
brontosaur pup looking for a treat. Looking into the dim pen
behind us, I could see several dozen of the elephant-sized
young ones, most of them snugged into the mud, a few others
gathered around the feeding trough.
I turned out my pockets to show the brute I didn't have
anything on me. I used to carry chunks of sugar-cane, which
they love.
Brenda didn't have any pockets to turn out, for the simple
reason that she wasn't wearing any pants. Her outfit for the
day was knee-length soft leather boots, and a little black
bolero top. This was intended to let me know that she had
acquired something new: primary and secondary sexual
characteristics. I was fairly sure she hoped I'd suggest we put
them to use one of these days soon. I'd first caught on that
she had a crush on me when she learned that Hildy Johnson was
not my born name, but one I had selected myself after a famous
fictional reporter from a play called The Front Page. Soon she
was "Brenda Starr."
I must say she looked more reasonable now. Neuters had
always made me nervous. She had not gone overboard with the
breasts. The pubic hair was natural, not some of the wilder
styles that come and go.
But I was in no mood to try it out. Let her find a child
of her own age.
#
We joined Callie at the breeding pen, climbed up to the
top of the ten-meter gate and stood with her, looking over the
top rail at the nervously milling behemoths.
"Brenda," I said, "I'd like you to meet Calamari Cabrini.
She owns this place. Callie, meet Brenda, my . . . uh,
assistant."
The women reached across me to shake hands, Brenda almost
losing her balance on the slippery steel bars. All three of us
were dripping wet. Not only was it hot and humid in the barn,
but ceiling sprinklers drenched the place every ten minutes
because it was good for the skins of the livestock. Callie was
the only one who looked comfortable, because she wore no
clothes. I should have remembered and worn less myself; even
Brenda was doing better than me.
Nudity was not a sometime thing for Callie. I'd known her
all my life, and in that time had never seen her wear so much
as a pinky ring. There was no big philosophy behind her
life-long naturism. Callie went bare simply because she liked
it, and hated picking out clothes in the morning.
She was looking good, I thought, considering that, except
for Walter, she took less notice of her body's needs than
anyone I knew. She never did any preventive maintenance, never
altered anything about her appearance. When something broke
down she had it fixed or replaced. Her medico bills were
probably among the smallest in Luna. She swore she had once
used a heart for one hundred and twenty years.
"When it finally gave out," she had told me, "the medico
said the valves could have come out of a forty-year-old."
If you met her on the street, you would know immediately
that she was Earth-born. During her childhood, humans had been
separable into many "races," based on skin color, facial
features, and type of hair. Post-Invasion eugenics had largely
succeeded in blending these so that racial types were now very
rare. Callie had been one of the white, or Caucasian race,
which dominated much of human history since the days of
colonization and industrialization. Caucasian was a pretty
slippery term. Callie's imperious nose would have looked right
at home on an old Roman coin. One of Herr Hitler's "Aryans"
would have sneered at her. The important racial concept then
was "white," which meant not-black, not-brown.
Which was a laugh, because Callie's skin was burned a
deep, reddish-brown from head to toe, and looked as leathery as
some of her reptiles. It was startling to touch it and find it
actually quite soft and supple.
She was tall--not like Brenda, but certainly tall for her
age--and willowy, with an unkept mane of black hair streaked
with white. Her most startling feature was her pale blue eyes,
a gift from her Nordic father.
She released Brenda's hand and gave me a playful shove.
"Mario, you never come see me anymore," she chided.
"The name is Hildy now," I said. "It has been for thirty
years."
"You prove my point. I guess that means you're still
working for that bird-cage liner."
I shrugged, and noticed Brenda's uncomprehending
expression.
"Newspads used to be printed out on paper, then they'd
sell the paper," I explained. "When people were through reading
it, they'd use it on the bottoms of their birdcages. Callie
never abandons a clich, no matter how dated."
"And why should I? The clich business has suffered a
radical decline since the Invasion. What we need are new and
better clichs, but nobody seems to be writing them. Present
company excepted, of course."
"From Callie, that's almost a compliment," I told Brenda.
"And nobody would line a birdcage with the Nipple, Callie. The
stories would put the birds right off their food."
She considered it. "I don't think so, Mario. If we had
electronic birds, your newspad would be the perfect liner.
"Could be. I do find it useful for wrapping my electronic
fish."
Most of this had gone right over Brenda's head, of course.
But she had never been one to let a little ignorance bother
her.
"To catch the shit?" she said.
We both looked at her.
"At the bottom of the birdcage," she explained.
"I think I like her," Callie said.
"Of course you do. She's an empty vessel, waiting to be
filled with your tall tales of the old days."
"That's one reason. You've been using her as your own
personal birdcage liner. She needs my help."
"She doesn't seem to mind."
"But I do," Brenda said, unexpectedly. Callie and I looked
at her again.
"I know I don't know much about ancient history." She saw
Callie's expression, and squirmed. "Sorry. But how much do you
expect me to know about things that happened hundreds of years
ago? Or care?"
"It's okay," Callie said. "I may not have used the word
'ancient'--I still think of the Roman Empire when that word
comes up--but I can see it must seem ancient to you. I said the
same thing to my parents when they talked about things that
happened before I was born. The difference is, when I was young
the old eventually had the good manners to die. A new
generation took over. Your generation faces a different
situation. Hildy seems very old to you, but I'm more than twice
his age, and I don't have any plans to die. Maybe that's not
fair to your generation, but it's a fact."
"The gospel according to Calamari," I said.
"Shut up, Mario. Brenda, it's never going to be your
world. Your generation will never take over from us. It's not
my world anymore, either, because of you. All of us, from both
generational extremes, have to run this world together, which
means we have to make the effort to understand each other's
viewpoints. It's hard for me, and I know it must be hard for
you. It's as if I had to live with my
great-great-great-great-grandparents, who grew up during the
industrial revolution and were ruled by kings. We'd barely even
have a language in common."
"That's okay with me," Brenda said. "I do make the effort.
Why doesn't he?"
"Don't worry about him. He's always been like that."
"Sometimes he makes me so mad."
"It's just his way."
"Yoo-hoo, ladies. I'm here."
"Shut up, Mario. I can read him like a book, and I can
tell he likes you. It's just that, the more he likes you, the
worse he tends to treat you. It's his way of distancing himself
from affection, which he's not sure he's able to return."
I could see the wheels turning in Brenda's head and, since
she was not stupid, just ignorant, she eventually followed that
statement out to its logical--if you believed the premise in
the first place--conclusion, which was that I must love her
madly, because I treated her very badly. I looked
ostentatiously around at the walls of the barn.
"It must be hanging in your office," I said.
"What's that?"
"Your degree in psychology. I didn't even know you went
back to school."
"I've been in school every day of my life, jerk. And I
sure wouldn't need a degree to see through you. I spent thirty
years learning how to do that." There was more, something about
how just because I was a hundred years old now, I shouldn't
think I'd changed so much. But it was all in Italian, so I only
got the gist.
Callie gets a modest yearly stipend from the Antiquities
Preservation Board for staying fluent in Italian--something she
would have done anyway, since it was her native language and
she had firm ideas about the extinction of human knowledge. She
had tried to teach it to me but I had no aptitude beyond a few
kitchen words. And what was the point? The Central Computer
stored hundreds of languages no one spoke anymore, from
Cheyenne to Tasmanian, including all the languages that had
suffered a drastic drop in popularity because they never got
established on Luna before the Invasion. I spoke English and
German, like most everybody else, with a little Japanese thrown
in. There were sizable groups of Chinese speakers, and Swahili,
and Russian. Other than that, languages were preserved by study
groups of a few hundred fanatics like Callie.
I doubt Brenda even knew there was an Italian language, so
she listened to Callie's tirade with a certain wariness. Ah,
yes, Italian is a fine language for tirades.
"I guess you've known each other a long time," Brenda said
to me.
"We go way back."
She nodded, unhappy about something. Callie shouted, and I
turned to see her jump down into the breeding pen and stride
toward the crew of helpers, who were chivying the two brutes
into final mating position.
"Not yet, you idiots," she shouted. "Give them time." She
reached the group of people and started handing out orders
right and left. Callie had never been able to find good help. I
had been part of that help for a great many years, so I know
what I'm talking about. It took me a long time to realize that
no one would ever be good enough for her; she was one of those
people who never believed anyone could do a job as well as she
could do it herself. The maddening thing was, she was usually
right.
"Back off, they're not ready yet. Don't rush them. They'll
know when it's time. Our job is to facilitate, not initiate."If
I have any skills as a lover," I told Brenda, "it's because of
that."
"Because of her?"
"'Give them time. We're not on a schedule here. Show a
little finesse.' I heard that so many times I guess I took it
to heart."
And it did take me back, watching Callie working the stock
again. Of the major brontosaur ranchers in Luna, she was the
only one who didn't use artificial insemination at breeding
time. "If you think helping a pair copulate is tough," she
always said, "try getting a semen sample from a brontosaur
bull."
And there was a rough sort of poetry about dinosaur
mating, particularly brontosaurs.
Tyrannosaurs went about it as you might expect, full of
sound and fury. Two bulls would butt heads over a prospective
mate until one staggered away like a dusted-up nerg addict to
nurse an epic headache. I don't suppose the victor fared a lot
better except for the chance to grapple the tiny claw of his
lady fair.
Brontosaurs were more dainty. The male would spend three
or four days doing his dance, when he remembered to. These
creatures had short attention spans, even when in heat. He
would rear up on his hind legs and do a comical samba around
and around the female. She typically showed minimal interest
for the first two days. Then the seduction moved to the
love-bite stage, with the male nipping her around the base of
the tail while she placidly chewed her cud. When she finally
began rearing up with him, it was time to bring them into the
mating pen to pitch some serious woo.
That was going on now. The two of them were facing each
other on their hind legs, doing a little neck-weaving, a little
foreleg pawing. It could still be another hour before they were
ready, a condition signaled by the emergence of one of the
bull's two hemi-penes.
Nobody ever told me why a reptile needs two penises. Come
to think of it, I never asked. There are limits to curiosity.
"So how long were you involved with Callie?"
"What's that?" Brenda had drawn me out of my reverie, as
she had a habit of doing.
"She said thirty years. That's a long time. You must have
been real serious about her."
All right, so I'm dense. But I finally got it. I looked
out at the primal scene: two Mesozoic monsters, here through
the grace of modern genetic science, and a thin brown woman,
likewise.
"She's not my lover. She's my mother. Why don't you go
down there with her? She'll see you don't get hurt, and I'm
sure she'll be happy to tell you more than you ever wanted to
know about brontosaurs. I'm going to take a break."
I noticed as we climbed down the gate on opposite sides
that Brenda looked happier than I'd seen her all day.
#
I assume the mating went off without any trouble. It
usually does when Callie's in charge. I imagine the mating that
produced me was equally well-planned and carried out. Sex was
never a big deal to Callie. Having me was her nod in the
direction of duty. But I have no siblings, despite powerful
societal pressure toward large families at the time of my
birth. Once was apparently enough.
Paradoxically, I know I didn't spend any time in a Petri
dish, though it would have made the whole process much easier
for her if she'd availed herself of any of the medical advances
that could, today, make procreation, gestation, and parturition
about as personally involving as a wrong number on the
telephone. Callie had conceived me the old-fashioned way: a
random spermatozoan hitting the jackpot at the right time of
the month. She had carried me to full term, and had borne me in
pain, just like God promised Eve. And she had hated every
minute of it. How do I know that? She told me, and anyone else
who would listen. She told me an average of three times a day
throughout my childhood.
It wasn't so much the pain that had bothered her. For a
woman who could shoulder a reproductive organ almost as big as
she was and guide it into a cloaca of a filthiness that had to
be seen to be disbelieved, while standing kneedeep in dinosaur
droppings, Callie had an amazing streak of prissiness. She had
hated the bloodiness of childbirth, the smells and sensations
of it.
#
Callie's office was cool. That's what I'd had in mind when
I went up there, simply to cool off. But it wasn't working. All
that had happened was that the sweat on my body had turned
clammy. I was breathing hard, and my hands weren't steady. I
felt on the edge of an anxiety attack, and I didn't know why.
On top of all that, my neck was hurting again.
And why hadn't I mentioned the purpose of our visit? I'd
told myself it was because she was too busy, but there had been
plenty of time while the three of us stood on the gate.
Instead, I'd let her prattle on about the good old days. It
would have been a perfect opportunity to brace her about taking
the job as the Earth-born member of our little team of
time-travelers. After holding forth about the generational gap
she would have looked silly turning us down. And I knew Callie.
She would love the job, would never admit loving it, and would
only accept it if she could be tricked into making it look as
if she had come up with the idea herself, as a favor to me and
Brenda.
I got up and moved to the windows. That didn't help, so I
walked to the opposite wall. No improvement. After I'd done
that three or four times I realized I was pacing. I rubbed the
back of my neck, drifted over to the windows again, and looked
out and down.
Callie's office windows overlook the barn interior from
just beneath the roof. There's a stairway leading to a verandah
"outside"-actually, within the small disneyland that is her
ranch. I was looking out over the breeding pens I had just
left. Callie was there, pointing something out to Brenda, who
stood beside her watching the spectacle of two mating
brontosaurs. Standing just behind them was someone who looked
familiar. I squinted, but it didn't help, so I grabbed the pair
of binoculars on a hook beside the window.
I focused in on the tall, red-headed figure of Andrew
MacDonald.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I remembered leaving Callie's ranch. I recalled wandering
for a while, taking endless downscalators until there were no
more; I had reached the bottom level. That struck me as
entirely too metaphorical, so I took an infinite number of
upscalators and found my way to the Blind Pig. I don't recall
what I was thinking all those hours, but in retrospect, it
couldn't have been pretty.
You might say the next thing I recall is waking up, or
coming to, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. It wouldn't
convey the nature of the experience. It felt more like I
reconstructed myself from far-flung bits--no, that implies some
effort on my part. The bits reconstructed themselves, and I
became self-aware in quantum stages. There was no dividing
line, but eventually I knew I was in a back room of the Pig.
This was considerable progress, and here my own will took over
and I looked around to learn more about my surroundings. I was
facing downward, so that's where I first turned my attention.
What I saw there was a woman's face.
"We'll never solve the problem of the head shot until an
entirely new technology comes along," she said. I had no idea
what this meant. Her hair was spread out on a pillow. There
were outspread hands on each side of her face. There was
something odd about her eyes, but I couldn't put my finger on
it. I suppose I was in a literal frame of mind, because having
thought that, I touched one of her eyeballs with the tip of my
finger. It didn't seem to bother her much. She blinked, and I
took my finger away.
There was an important discovery: when I touched her eye,
one of the hands had moved. Putting these data together, I
concluded that the hands bracketing her face were my hands. I
wiggled a finger, testing this hypothesis. One of the fingers
down there wiggled. Not the one I had intended, but how much
exactitude could I expect? I smiled, proud of myself.
"You can encase the brain in metal," she said. "Put a
blood bag on the anti-camera side of the head, fire a bullet
from the camera's pee-oh-vee. And ka-chow! The bullet goes
whanging off the metal cover, ka-blooey, the blood bag
explodes, and if you're lucky it looks like the bullet went
through the head and spread tomato sauce all over the wall in
back of the guy."
I felt large.
Had I taken large pills? I couldn't remember, but I must
have. Normally I don't, as they aren't really much of a thrill,
unless you get your kicks by imagining yourself to be the size
of an interplanetary liner. But you can mix them with other
drugs and get interesting effects. I must have done that.
"You can make it look even more real by putting teeny tiny
charges in back of the eyeballs. When the bullet hits, the
charges go off, and the eyeballs are blown out toward the
camera, see? Along with a nice blood haze, which is a plus in
masking whatever violations of realism are going on behind it."
Something was rubbing against my ears. I turned my head
about as quickly as they rotate the big scope out in
Copernicus, and saw a bare foot. At first I thought it was my
foot, but I knew from reports flown in by carrier pigeon that
my own feet were about three kilometers behind me, at the ends
of my legs, which were stretched out straight. I turned my head
the other way, saw another foot. Hers, I concluded. The first
was probably hers, too.
"But that damn steel case. Crimony! I can't tell you what
a--you should pardon the expression-headache that thing can be.
Especially when nine out of ten directors will insist the head
shot has to be in slomo. You give the chump a false forehead
full of maxfactor #3 to guarantee a juicy wound, you annodize
the braincase in black so--you hope--it'll look like a hole in
the head when the skin's ripped away, and what happens? The
damn bullet rips through everything, and there it is in the
dailies. A bright, shiny spot of metal right down there at the
bottom of the hole. The director chews you out, and it's
Re-take City."
Was I aboard a ship? That might account for the rocking
motion. But I remembered I was in the Blind Pig, and unless the
bar had been cut from its steel catacomb and embarked bodily,
it seemed unlikely we were at sea. I decided I still needed
more data. Feeling adventurous, I looked down between myself
and the woman's body.
For a moment the view made no sense at all. I could see my
own legs, and my feet, as if through a reversed telescope. Then
I couldn't see them any more. Then I could again. Where were
her legs? I couldn't see them. Oh, yes, since her feet were
tickling my ears, her legs must be those things against my
chest. So she was on the floor, on her back. And that explained
the other activity I saw. I stopped my up and down motion.
"I don't want to do this," I told her.
She kept talking about the difficulties of a head shot. I
realized that she was at least as detached from our coupling as
I was. I stood up and looked around the room. She never missed
a syllable. There were a pair of pants on the floor; they were
a million sizes too small for me, but they were probably mine.
I held them, lifted each leg with gargantuan deliberation, and
presto! The pants did fit. I stumbled through a curtain and
into the main room of the Pig.
It was maybe twenty steps to the bar. In that distance I
shrank alarmingly. It was not an unpleasant sensation, though
at one point I had to hold the back of a barstool to keep my
balance. Pleased with myself, I gingerly climbed onto a leather
stool.
"Bartender," I said, "I'll have another of the same."
The fellow behind the bar was known as Deep Throat, for a
famous clandestine news source. He probably had another name,
but no one knew it, and we all thought it was fitting it should
be that way. He nodded and was moving away, but someone sat on
the stool next to mine and reached over to grab his arm.
"Hold the heavy stuff this time, okay?" she said. I saw
that it was Cricket. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I
shrugged, then nodded to Deep Throat's enquiring look. His
customers' state of sobriety is not his concern. If you can sit
at the bar--and pay--he'll serve you.
"How you doing, Hildy?" Cricket asked.
"Never better," I said, and watched my drink being
prepared. Cricket shut up for the time being. I knew there were
more questions to come. What are friends for?
The drink arrived, in one of the Pig's hologlasses. It's
probably the only bar in Luna that still uses them. They date
back to the midtwenty-first century, and they're rather
charming. A chip in the thick glass bottom projects a holo
picture just above the surface of the drink. I've seen them
with rolling dolphins, windsurfers, a tiny water polo team
complete with the sound of a cheering crowd, and Captain Ahab
harpooning the Great White Whale. But the most popular glass at
the Pig is the nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll, in keeping
with the way Deep Throat mixes the drinks. I watched it for a
while. It starts with a very bright light, evolves into an
exquisitely detailed orange and black mushroom cloud that
expands until it is six inches high, then blows away. Then it
blows up again. The cycle takes about a minute.
I was watching the tiny battleships in the lagoon when I
realized I'd seen the show about a dozen times already, and
that my chin was resting on the bar. To enhance the view, I
suppose. I sat up straight, a little embarrassed. I glanced at
Cricket, but she was making a great show of producing little
moist rings with the bottom of her glass. I wiped my brow, and
swiveled on my stool to look at the rest of the room.
"The usual motley crew," Cricket said.
"The motliest," I agreed. "In fact, the word 'motley'
might have been coined simply to describe this scene."
"Maybe we should retire the word. Give it a place of honor
in the etymological hall of fame, like Olympic champions'
jerseys."
"Put it right next to motherhood, love, happiness . . .
words like that."
"On that note, I'll buy you another drink."
I hadn't finished the first, but who was counting?
There have always been unwritten rules in journalism, even
at the level on which I practice it. Often it is only the fear
of a libel suit that stays us from printing a particularly
scurrilous story. On Luna the laws are pretty strict on that
subject. If you defame someone, you'd better have sources
willing to testify before the CC. But more often you hold back
on printing something everyone knows for a subtler reason.
There is a symbiotic relationship between us and the people we
cover. Some would say parasitic, but they don't understand how
hungry for publicity a politician or celebrity can be. If we
stick to the rules concerning "off the record" statements,
things told us on "deep background," and so forth, everybody
benefits. I get sources who know I won't betray them, and the
subject of my stories gets the public exposure he craves.
Don't look for the Blind Pig Bar And Grill in your phone
memory. Don't expect to find it by wandering the halls of your
neighborhood mall. If you should somehow discover its location,
don't expect to be let in unless you know a regular who can
vouch for you. All I'll say about it is that it's within
walking distance of three major movie production studios, and
is reached through a door with a totally misleading sign on it.
The Blind Pig is the place where journalists and movie
people can mix without watching their mouths. Like its
political counterpart over by City Hall, the Huey P. Long
Memorial Gerrymandering Society, you can let your hair down
without fear of reading your words in the padloids the next
morning--at least, not for attribution. It's the place where
gossip, slander, rumor, and
=*= =*= =*= =*=
character assassination are given free rein, where the
biggest stars can mix with the lowliest stagehands and the
slimiest reporters and not have to watch their tongues. I once
saw a grip punch a ten-million-per-picture celebrity in the
nose, right there in the Pig. The two fought it out until they
were exhausted, went back to the set, and behaved as if nothing
had happened. That same punch, thrown in the studio, would have
landed the grip on the pavement in microseconds. But if the
star had exercised his clout for something that happened in the
Pig, and Deep Throat heard about it, the star would not have
been welcome again. There's not many places people like that
can go and socialize without being bothered. Deep Throat seldom
has to banish anyone.
A reporter once broke confidence with a producer, printed
a story told to him in the Pig. He never returned, and he's not
a reporter anymore. It's hard to cover the entertainment beat
without access to the Pig.
Places like the Pig have existed since Edison invented
Hollywood. The ambiance is dependent on what is shooting that
day. Just then there were three popular genres, two rising and
one on its way out, and all three were represented around the
room. There were warriors from Samurai Japan, taking a break
from The Shogun Attacks, currently lensing at
Sentry/Sensational Studios. A contingent of people in
old-fashioned spacesuits were employed at North Lunar
Filmwerks, where I'd heard Return Of The Alphans was behind
schedule and over budget and facing an uncertain reception, as
the box office for Asteroid Miner/Space Creature films had
turned soft in recent months. And a bunch in bandannas, cowboy
hats and dirty jeans had to be extras from The Gunslinger V.
Westerns were in the middle of their fourth period of filmic
popularity, two of them coming in my own lifetime. TG,V, as it
was known to the trade, had been doing location work not far
from my cabin in West Texas.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
In addition, there were the usual scattering of costumes
from other eras, and quite a number of surgically altered
gnomes, fairies, trolls, and so forth, working in low-budget
fantasy and children's shorts. There was a group of five
centaurs from a long-running sci-fi series that should have
been axed a dozen Roman numerals ago.
"Why don't you just move the brain?" I heard Cricket say.
"Put it somewhere else, like the stomach?"
"Oh, brother. Sure, why not? It's been done, of course,
but it's not worth the trouble. Nerve tissue is the hardest to
manipulate, and the brain? Forget it. There's twelve pairs of
cranial nerves you've got to extend through the neck and down
to the abdomen, for one thing. Then you have to re-train the
gagman--a couple of days, usually--so the time lag doesn't
show. And you don't think that matters? Audiences these days,
they've seen it all, they're sophisticated. They want realism.
We can make a fake brain easy enough and stuff it into the
gagman's skull in place of the one we re-located, but audiences
will spot the fact that the real brain's not where it's
supposed to be."
I turned on my stool and saw my new friend was sitting on
the other side of Cricket, still holding forth about her head
shots.
"Why not just use manikins?" Cricket asked, showing she
hadn't spent much time on the entertainment beat. "Wouldn't
they be cheaper than real actors?"
"Sure. A hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe you've never heard
of the Job Security Act, or unions."
"Oh."
"Damn right. Until a stunt performer dies, we can't
replace him with a machine. It's the law. And they die, all
right--even with your brain in a steel case, it's a risky
profession--but we don't lose more than two or three a year.
And there's thousands of them. Plus, they get better at
surviving the longer they work, so there's a law of diminishing
returns. I can't win." She swiveled, leaned her elbows on the
bar, looked out at the tables and sneered.
"Look at them. You can always spot gagmen. Look for the
ones with the vacant faces, like they're wondering where they
are. They pick up a piece of shrapnel in the head; we cut away
a little brain tissue and replace it with virgin cortex, and
they forget a little. Start getting a little vague about
things. Go home and can't remember the names of the kids. Back
to work the next day, giving me more headaches. Some of 'em
have very little left of their original brains, and they'd have
to look at their personnel file to tell you where they went to
school.
"And centaurs? I could build you a robot centaur in two
days, you couldn't tell it from the real thing. But don't tell
the Exotics Guild. No, I get to sign 'em to a five-year
contract, surgically convert 'em at great cost to the FX
budget, then put 'em through three months of kinesthetic rehab
until they can walk without falling on their faces. And what do
I get? A stumblebum who can't remember his lines or where the
camera is, who can't walk through a scene muttering, for
chrissake, without five rehearsals. And at the end of five
years, I get to pay to convert 'em back." She reached around
and got her drink, which was tall and had little tadpole-like
creatures swimming in it. She took a long pull on it, licked
her lips. "I tell you, it's a wonder we get any pictures made
at all."
"Nice to see a woman happy in her work," I said. She
looked over at me.
"Hildy," Cricket said, "have you met Princess Saxe-Coburg?
She's chief of special effects at NLM."
"We've met."
The Princess frowned at me, then recognition dawned. She
got off her stool and came toward me, a little unsteady. She
put her nose inches from mine.
"Sure. You pulled out on me a few minutes ago. Not a nice
thing to do to a lady."
At that range, I could see what was odd about her eyes.
She was wearing a pair of antique projection contacts, small
round flat-TV screens that floated over the cornea. I could
make out the ring of solar cells that powered them, and the
flyspeck chip that held the memory.
They'd been introduced just before the Invasion under a
variety of trade names, but the one that stuck was Bedroom
Eyes. After all, though they could reflect quite a variety of
moods, if you were close enough to see the little pictures the
mood you were looking for was probably sexual arousal. The more
modest models would show a turned-back bed, a romantic scene
from an old movie, or even, god help us, waves crashing on a
beach. Others made no pretensions, getting right to the
erection or spread thighs. Of course, they could reflect other
moods, as well, but people were seldom close enough to make
them out.
I'd never seen projection contacts worn by someone quite
as stoned as the Princess was. What they were projecting was an
interesting illusion: it was as if I were looking through two
holes into a hollow head. Remnants of an exploded brain were
collapsed at the bottom. Cracks in the skull let in light. And
swinging from stray synapses like vines in a jungle were a
menagerie of cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse to Baba
Yaga.
The image disturbed me. I wondered why anyone would want
to do that to their brain. From wondering why she would want
to, I quickly got to why I would want to, and that was leading
me quickly to a place I didn't want to go. So I turned away
from her and saw Andrew MacDonald sitting at the other end of
the bar like a carrottopped Hibernian albatross.
"Did you know she's the Princess of Wales?" Cricket was
saying. "She's first in line to the throne of England."
"And Scotland, and Wales," said the Princess. "Hell, and
Ireland, and Canada and India. I might as well re-claim the
whole Empire while I'm at it. If my mother ever dies, it'll all
belong to me. Of course, there's the little matter of the
Invaders."
"Up the British," Cricket said, and they clinked their
glasses together.
"I met the King once," I said. I drained my drink and
slammed it down on the bar. Deep Throat caused it to vanish,
and began concocting another.
"Did you really?"
"He was a friend of my mother. In fact, he's a possible
candidate to be my father. Callie has never told me and never
will, but they were friendly together at about the right time.
So, if you apply modern laws of bastardy, I might have a claim
that supersedes yours." I glanced at MacDonald again.
Albatross? Hell, the man was more than a bird of evil omen,
more than a stormy petrel or a croaking raven. He was
Cassandra. He was a tropical depression, bad breath, a black
cat across my path. Everywhere I turned, there he was, a dog
humping my leg. He was a ladder in the stocking of my life. He
was snake eyes.
I hated him. I felt like punching him in the nose.
"Watch what you say," the Princess cautioned. "Remember
what happened to Mary, Queen of Scots."
I punched her in the nose.
She walked backward a few rubber-legged steps, then sat
down on the floor. In the ensuing silence, Cricket whispered in
my ear.
"I think she was kidding," she said.
For a few moments the whole place was quiet. Everyone was
watching us expectantly; they love a good brawl at the Blind
Pig. I looked at my clenched fist, and the Princess touched her
bloody nose with her hand, then looked at her palm. We both
looked up at the same time and our eyes met. And she came off
the floor and launched herself at me and started breaking all
the bones in my body that she could reach.
My hitting her had nothing to do with anything she had
said or done; at that moment in my life I would have hit anyone
standing next to me. But I'd have been a lot better off hitting
Cricket. In the Princess of Wales, I'd picked the wrong
opponent. She was taller than me and out-massed me. There was
probably a ten-centimeter difference in reach between us, and I
was on the short end of it. But most importantly, she had spent
the last forty years staging cinematic fights, and she knew
every trick in the book, and a lot that never got into the
book.
I'm tempted to say I got in two or three good punches.
Cricket says I did, but it might have been just to raise my
spirits. The truth is I can't remember much from the time her
horrid white teeth first filled my vision to the time I ripped
a meter-long gash in the carpet with my face.
To get to the carpet I'd first had to smash through a
table full of drinks. I used my face for that, too. Before the
table I had been flying, rather cleverly, I thought, and the
first real fun I'd had in many long minutes, but how I came to
be flying was a point I was never too clear on. It seems safe
to say that the Princess hurled me in some manner, holding on
to some part of my anatomy and then releasing it; Cricket said
it was my ankle, which would account for the room whirling
around so quickly just before I flew. Before that I had vague
memories of the bar mirror shattering, people scattering, blood
spattering. Then I crashed through the table.
I rolled over and spit out carpeting. Horses were milling
nervously all around me. Actually it was the centaur extras,
whose table I'd just ruined. I resolved to buy them all a round
of drinks. Before I could do that, though, there was the
Princess again, lifting me by the shoulder and drawing back a
bloody fist.
Then someone took hold of her arm from behind, and the
punch never landed. She stood up and turned to face her
challenger. I let my head rest against the ruins of a chair and
watched as she tried to punch Andrew MacDonald.
There was really no point in it. It took her a long time
to realize it, as her blood was up and she wasn't thinking
straight. So she kept throwing punches, and they kept just
missing, or hitting him harmlessly on the elbows or glancing
off his shoulders. She tried kicking, and the kicks were always
just a little off their target.
He never threw a punch. He didn't have to. After a time,
she was standing there breathing hard. He wasn't even sweating.
She straightened and held up her hands, palms outward.
I must have dozed off for a moment. Eventually I became
aware of the Princess, Cricket, and MacDonald, three indistinct
round faces hanging above me like a pawnbroker's sign.
"Can you move your legs?" MacDonald asked.
"Of course I can move my legs." What a silly question. I'd
been moving my legs for a hundred years.
"Then move them."
I did, and MacDonald frowned deeper.
"His back's probably broken," said Wales.
"Must have happened when he landed on the railing."
"Can you feel anything?"
"Unfortunately, yes." By that time most of the drugs were
wearing off, and everything from the waist up was hurting very
badly. Deep Throat arrived and lifted my head. He had a
painkiller in his hand, a little plastic cube with a wire which
he plugged into the socket at the base of my skull. He flicked
the switch, and I felt a lot better. I looked down and watched
as they removed the splintered chair leg which had pierced my
hip.
Since that wasn't a particularly diverting sight, I looked
around the room. Already cleaning robots were picking up broken
glassware and replacing shattered tables; Deep Throat is no
stranger to brawls, and he always keeps a supply of furniture.
In another few minutes there would be no sign that I had almost
destroyed the place five minutes ago. Well, I had almost
destroyed the place, in the sense that it was my hurtling body
that had done most of the damage.
I felt myself being lifted. MacDonald and Wales had made a
hammock with their arms. It was like riding in a sedan chair.
"Where are we going?"
"You're not in any immediate danger," MacDonald said.
"Your back is broken, and that should be fixed soon, so we're
taking you across the corridor to the NLF Studios. They have a
good repair shop there."
The Princess got us past the gate guard. We passed about a
dozen sound stage doors, and I was brought into the infirmary.
Which was jammed like Mainhardt's Department Store on
Christmas Eve. It seemed NLF was doing a big scene from some
war epic, and most of the available beds were taken by maimed
extras patiently waiting their turn, counting up the
triple-time salary they drew for injured downtime.
The room had been dressed as a field hospital for the
picture, apparently doing double duty when not actually
treating cinematic casualties. I pegged it as twentieth
century--a vintage season for wars--maybe World War Two, or the
Vietnam conflict, but it could easily have been the Boer War.
We were under a canvas roof and the place was cluttered with
hanging IV bottle props.
MacDonald returned from a conference with one of the
technicians and stood looking down at me.
"He says it'll be about half an hour. I could have you
taken to your own practitioner if you want to; it might be
quicker."
"Don't bother. I'm in no hurry. When they patch me up,
I'll probably just get up and do something foolish again."
He didn't say anything. There was something about his
demeanor that bothered me--as if I needed anything else about
him to bother me.
"Look," I said. "Don't ask me to explain why I did it. I
don't even know myself."
Still he said nothing.
"Either spit it out, or take your long face and park it
somewhere else."
He shrugged.
"I just have a problem with a man attacking a woman,
that's all."
"What?" I was sure I had misunderstood him. He wasn't
making any sense. But when he didn't repeat his astonishing
statement, I had to assume I'd heard him correctly.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
"Nothing, of course. But when I was young, it was
something you simply didn't do. I know it no longer makes
sense, but it still bothers me to see it."
"I'll be sure to tell the Mean Bitch you feel that way. If
they've put her back together after your last bout, that is."
He looked embarrassed.
"You know, that was a problem for me, early in my career.
I wouldn't fight female opponents. I was getting a bad
reputation and missing a lot of important match-ups because of
it. When some competitors started getting sex changes simply so
they could have a go at me, I realized how ridiculous I was
being. But to this day I have to psych myself something
terrible to get into the ring with someone who's currently
female."
"That's why you never hit . . . does the Princess have a
first name?"
"I don't know. But you're wrong. I wanted to stop her, but
I didn't want to hurt her. Frankly, you had it coming."
I looked away, feeling terrible. He was right.
"She's feeling bad about it, though. She said she just
couldn't seem to stop, once she got going."
"I'll send her the repair bill. That should cheer her up."
Cricket arrived from somewhere. She had a lighted
cigarette which she placed in my mouth, grinning.
"Got it from the prop department," she said. "They always
used to give these to wounded soldiers. I can't imagine why."
I puffed on it. It wasn't tobacco, thank god.
"Cheer up," Cricket said. "You tore up her fists pretty
good."
"I'm clever that way; I pounded them to hamburger with my
chin."
I suddenly felt an alarming urge to cry. Holding it back,
I asked both of them to leave me alone for a while. They did,
and I lay there smoking, studying the canvas ceiling. There
were no answers written there.
Why had the taste of life turned so bitter for me in the
last weeks?
#
I had sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was
bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way to
bend.
"How'd you find me?" I asked her.
"I'm a reporter, remember? It's my business to find things
out."
I thought of several cutting replies, but something about
the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I had
vague memories of how badly that could hurt, when it wasn't
returned.
And to give her her due, she was improving. Maybe she
would be a reporter, some day.
"You needn't have bothered. It's not like I'm badly hurt.
The head injuries were minimal."
"I'm not surprised. It would take a lot to hurt your
head."
"The brain wasn't injured at . . ." I stopped, realizing
she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty feeble, it
hardly qualified as a joke -- -- she might never master that
skill--but it was something. I grinned at her.
"I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor . . .
what was it you called him?"
"Sawbones. Pillroller. Quack. Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech.
Lazarmonger."
Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the
terms away for later research.
I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical
practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening
thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies
than most humans down the ages, we don't fear injury and we can
turn off pain and we generally treat flesh and bone as just
items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in
the most primitive level of our brain stands up on its hind
legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a galloping anxiety
attack that the painkiller plugged into my medulla wasn't
dealing with at all. I have no idea if Brenda realized this,
but her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was
glad she was there. I took her hand.
"Thanks for coming," I said. She squeezed my hand, then
looked away.
#
Eventually the planned casualties stopped streaming in,
and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged me in
to a dozen machines, studied the results, huddled, and
murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered, as if
the medical computer was not entirely in control of my
diagnosis and treatment.
They came to a decision, which was to turn me onto my
stomach. I surmised they had concluded it would be easier to
reach my broken spine that way. I'd better not ever hear
medicos called overpaid blood-monkeys again.
They began to carve. I couldn't feel it, but I could hear
some really disgusting sounds. You know those wet-muck
special-effect sounds they use in the movies when someone's
being disemboweled? They could have recorded them right over my
broken back. At one point something thumped to the floor. I
peered over the edge of the bed: it looked like a raw soup
bone. It was hard to believe it had once belonged to me.
They pow-wowed again, cut some more, brought in more
machines. They made sacrifices to the gods of Aesculapius,
Mithradates, Lethe, and Pfizer. They studied the entrails of a
goat. They tore off their clothes, joined hands, and danced in
a healing circle around my prone carcass.
Actually, I wished they had done any of those things. It
would have been a lot more interesting than what they did do,
which was mostly stand around and watch the automatic machines
mend me.
All there was to look at was an antique machine against
the wall, a few feet from my face. It had a glass screen and a
lot of knobs on it. Blue lines were crawling across the screen,
blipping into encouraging peaks now and then.
"Can I get you anything?" the machine asked. "Flowers?
Candy? Toys?"
"A new head might do the trick." It was the CC talking, of
course. It can throw its voice pretty much where it pleases,
since it was talking directly to the hearing center of my
brain. "How much will this cost me?"
"There's no final cost-estimate yet. But Wales has already
requested the bill be sent to her."
"Maybe what I meant was--"
"How badly are you hurt? How shall I put it. There are
three bones in the middle ear, called the Malleus, the Incus,
and the Stapes. You'll be happy to hear that not one of these
six bones was broken."
"So I'll still be able to play the piano."
"Just as badly as ever. In addition, several minor organs
emerged unscathed. Almost half a square meter of epidermis can
be salvaged."
"Tell me. If I'd come to this place . . . I mean, a
hospital like this one is pretending to be-- "
"I know what you mean."
"--with only primitive surgical techniques . . . would I
have survived?"
"It's unlikely. Your heart is intact, your brain is not
badly damaged, but the rest of your injuries are comparable to
stepping on a land mine. You'd never walk again, and you'd be
in great pain. You would come to wish you had not survived."
"How can you tell that?"
The CC said nothing, and I was left to ponder. That
usually doesn't do much good, where the CC is concerned.
We all deal with the CC a thousand times a day, but almost
all of that is with one of its subprograms, on a completely
impersonal level. But apart from the routine transactions of
living, it also generates a distinct personality for every
citizen of Luna, and is always there ready to offer advice,
counsel, or a shoulder to cry on. When I was young I spoke to
the CC extensively. He is every child's ideal imaginary
playmate. But as we grow older and make more real, less
tractable and entirely more willful and frustrating
relationships, contacts with the CC tend to fall off. With
adolescence and the discovery that, in spite of their
shortcomings, other people have a lot more to offer than the CC
ever will, we cut our ties even further until the CC is just a
very intelligent, unobtrusive servant, there to ease us through
the practical difficulties of life.
But the CC had now intruded, twice. I found myself
wondering, as I seldom had in the past, what was on its mind.
"I guess I've been pretty foolish," I ventured.
"Perhaps I should call Walter, tell him to tear up the
front page."
"All right. So it isn't news. So I've had things on my
mind."
"I was hoping you'd like to talk about that."
"Maybe we ought to talk about what you said before."
"Concerning your hypothetical suffering had you incurred
these injuries in, say, 1950?"
"Concerning your statement that I might prefer being
dead."
"It was merely an hypothesis. I observe how little anyone
today is equipped to tolerate pain, having never experienced an
appreciable amount of it. I note that even the people on Old
Earth, who were no strangers to it, often preferred death to
pain. I conclude that many people today would not hold life so
dear as to endure constant, unrelenting agony."
"So it was just a general observation."
"Naturally."
I didn't believe that, but there was no point in saying
so. The CC would get to the point in its own way, in its own
time. I watched the crawling lines on the machine and waited.
"I notice you're not taking notes concerning this
experience. In fact, you've taken very few notes lately about
anything."
"Watching me, are you?"
"When I've nothing better to do."
"As you certainly know, I'm not taking notes because my
handwriter is broken. I haven't had it repaired because the
only guy who still works on them is so swamped that he said he
might get around to mine this coming August. Unless he leaves
the business to start a career in buggywhip repair."
"There actually is a woman who does that," the CC said.
"In Pennsylvania."
"No kidding? Nice to see such a vital skill won't vanish
completely."
"We try to foster any skill, no matter how impractical or
useless."
"I'm sure our grandchildren will thank us for it."
"What are you using to write your stories?"
"Two methods, actually. You get this soft clay brick, see,
and you use a pointed stick to impress little triangles in it
in different combinations. Then you put it on the oven to bake,
and in four or five hours there you are. The original hard
copy. I've been trying to think of a name for the process."
"How about cuneiform?"
"You mean it's been done? Oh, well. When I get tired of
that, I get out the old hammer and chisel and engrave my
deathless prose on rocks. It saves me carrying those ridiculous
paper sheets into Walter's office; I just lob them across the
newsroom and through his window."
"I don't suppose you'd consider Direct Interface again."
Was that what this was all about?
"Tried it," I said. "Didn't like it."
"That was over thirty years ago," the CC pointed out.
"There have been some advances since then."
"Look," I said, feeling irritable and impatient. "You've
got something on your mind. I wish you'd just come out with it
instead of weaseling around like this."
It said nothing for a moment. That moment stretched into a
while, and threatened to become a spell.
"You want me to direct interface for some reason," I
suggested.
"I think it might be helpful."
"For you or me?"
"Both of us, possibly. There can be a certain therapeutic
value in what I intend to show you."
"You think I need that?"
"Judge for yourself. How happy have you been lately?"
"Not very."
"You could try this, then. It can't hurt, and it might
help."
So what was I doing at the moment so important that I
couldn't take a few minutes off to chin with the CC?
"All right," I said. "I'll interface with you, though I
think you really ought to buy me dinner and some flowers
first."
"I'll be gentle," the CC promised.
"What do I have to do? You need to plug me in somewhere?"
"Not for years now. I can use my regular connections into
your brain. All you need to do is relax a little. Stare into
the oscilloscope screen; that could be helpful."
I did, watching the blue lines peak and trough, peak and
trough. The screen started to expand, as if I were moving into
it. Soon all I could see was one crawling line, which slowed,
stopped, became a single bright dot. The dot got brighter. It
grew and grew. I felt the heat of it on my face, it was blazing
down from a blue tropical sky. There was a moment of vertigo as
the world seemed to spin around me--my body staying firmly in
place--until I was lying not on my stomach but on my back, and
not on the snowy white sheets of the repair shop at North Lunar
Filmwerks but on cool wet beach sand, hearing not the soft
mutterings of the medicos but the calls of seagulls and the
nearby hiss and roar of surf. A wave spent its last energy
tickling my feet and washing around my hips. It sucked a little
sand out from under me. I lifted my head and saw an endless
blue ocean trimmed with white breakers. I got to my feet and
turned around, and saw white sandy beach. Beyond it were palm
trees, jungle rising away from me to a rocky volcanic peak
spouting steam. The realism of the place was astonishing. I
knelt and scooped up a handful of sand. No two grains looked
alike. No matter how close I brought the sand grains to my
eyes, the illusion never broke down and the endless detail
extended to deeper and deeper realms. Some sort of fractal
magic, I supposed. I walked down the beach for a bit, sometimes
turning to watch the cunning way water flowed into my
footprints, erasing the edges, swirling, bubbling. I breathed
deeply of the saline air. I like this place already. I wondered
why the CC had brought me here. I decided it would tell me in
its own time, so I walked up the beach and sat under a palm
tree to wait for the CC to present itself. I waited for several
hours, watching the surf, having to move twice as the sun crept
across the sky. I noticed that my skin had reddened in my brief
time in the sunlight. I think I drifted off to sleep from time
to time, but when you're alone it's hard to be sure. In any
event, the CC didn't show. Eventually I got thirsty. I walked
down the beach for several kilometers before discovering the
outlet of a small stream of fresh water. I noticed the beach
kept curving off to the right; probably an island. In time it
got dark--very quickly, and one part of my mind concluded this
simulacrum that really existed only as a set of equations in
the data banks of the CC was intended to be somewhere in the
Earthly tropics, near the equator. Not that the information did
me any good. It didn't get cold, but I soon found that when you
haven't any clothes or bedding, sleep can be a sandy, chilly,
thoroughly uncomfortable project. I woke up again and again to
note the stars had moved only a little. Each time I would shout
for CC to show itself, and each time only the surf answered
back. Then I awoke with the sun already high above the horizon.
My left side had the beginnings of a painful radiation burn. My
right side was chilled. My hair was full of sand. Little crabs
scuttled away as I sat up, and I was appalled to realize I'd
been thinking about catching and eating one. I was that hungry.
But there was something of interest down by the water. In the
night, a large, steel-banded wooden trunk had washed ashore,
along with a lot of splintered wood and some tattered pieces of
canvas. I concluded there had been a shipwreck. Perhaps that
was the justification for my presence here in the first place.
I dragged the chest across the sand to a place where it would
be in no danger of washing back to sea, thought about it, and
salvaged all the wood and canvas, as well. I smashed the lock
on the trunk and upon opening it, found it was waterproof and
contained a wide variety of things useful to the computer
castaway: books, tools, bolts of cloth, packages of staple
foods like sugar and flour, even some bottles of a good Scotch
whiskey. The tools were better than the things I had been using
in Texas. At a guess, they might have been made with the
technology of the late nineteenth century. The books were
mostly of the how-to variety--and there was the man himself,
Robinson Crusoe, by DeFoe. All the books were bound in leather;
none had a copyright date later than 1880. I used the machete
to lop the ends off a cocoanut and munched thoughtfully at the
delicious white meat while paging through books that told me
how to tan hides, where to obtain salt, how to treat wounds (I
didn't like the sound of that one very much), and other
vigorous pioneer skills. If I wanted to make boots, I'd be able
to do it. If I wanted to build an outrigger canoe and seek my
fortune on the blue Pacific (I was assuming this was the south
seas), the information was at my fingertips. If I wanted to
chip flint arrowheads, construct an earthen dam, make
gunpowder, fricassee a monkey, or battle savages, the books
would show me how, complete with cunning lithographed
illustrations. If I wanted to stroll the Clarkestrasse in King
City, or even Easter parade down Fifth Avenue in Little Old New
York, I was shit out of luck. There seemed little point in
lamenting this fact, and the CC wasn't returning my calls, so I
set to work. I explored the area for a likely spot to use as a
campsite. That night I slept under a canvas awning, wrapped
loosely in a length of flannel from the chest. It was a good
thing, too. It rained off and on most of the night. I felt
oddly at peace, lying in the moonlit darkness (there was a
charming notion: Luna looked tiny and dim compared to a full
Earth) listening to the rain falling on the canvas. Perhaps the
simple pleasures are the best. For the next several weeks I
worked very hard. (I didn't seem bothered by the gravity, which
was six times what I had endured for a century. Even the fact
that things fell much faster and harder than I'd been used to
all my life never bothered me. My reflexes had been adjusted by
the Almighty Landlord of this semi-conducting realm.) I spent
part of each day working on a shelter. The rest of the time I
foraged. I found good sources of bananas and breadfruit to add
to my all-cocoanut diet. I found mangos and guavas, many
varieties of edible roots, tubers, leaves, seeds. There were
spices available to one equipped with the right book to use in
their identification. The little scuttling crabs proved easy
enough to catch, and were delicious boiled. I wove a net from
vines and soon added several varieties of fish to my
bouillabaisse. I dug for clams. When the shelter was completed
I cleared a sunny spot for a vegetable garden and planted some
of the seeds I'd found in the trunk. I set snares, which
promptly trapped inedible small rodents, fearsome-looking
reptiles, and an unidentified bird I came to call a wild
turkey. I made a bow and arrow, and a spear, and managed to
miss every animal I aimed at. Somewhere in there, after about a
month, I started my calendar: notches on a tree. I estimated
the time before that. Infrequently I wondered when the CC was
going to check up on me, or if I was in fact stranded here for
the rest of my life. In the spirit of exploration, one day I
prepared a backpack and a straw hat (most of me was burned dark
brown by then, but the noonday sun was still nothing to trifle
with) and set out along the beach to determine the size of my
cage. In two weeks I circum-ambulated what did indeed prove to
be an island. Along the way I saw the remains of a ship washed
up on a rocky part of the shore, a week-old beached whale, and
many other wondrous things. But there had been no sign of human
habitation. It seemed I was not to have my Friday to discuss
philosophy with. Not too upset by this discovery, I set about
repairing the depredations wild animals had worked on my
shelter and garden. After another few weeks I determined to
scale the volcano that sat in the center of the island, which I
had named Mount Endew, for reasons that must have seemed
excellent at the time. I mean, a Jules Verne hero would have
climbed it, am I right? This proved to be a lot harder than
walking on the beach, and involved much swinging of the machete
at thatches of tropical vines, wading of swamps infested with
flying insects and leeches, and barking of shins on rocky
outcroppings. But one day I came to stand on the highest point
in my domain and saw what I could not have seen from sea level:
that my island was shaped something like a boot. (It took some
imagination, I'll admit. One could just as well have seen the
letter Y, or a champagne class, or a squashed pair of
copulating snakes. But Callie would have been pleased at the
boot, so I named the island Scarpa.) When I returned to my camp
I decided my traveling days were at an end. I had seen other
places I might have explored from my volcanic vantage point,
but there seemed no reason to do anything about them. I had
spied no curls of smoke, no roads, no airports or stone
monuments or casinos or Italian restaurants. Scarpa Island ran
to swamps, rivers, jungles, and bogs. I'd had quite enough of
all of those; you couldn't get a decent drink in any of them. I
decided to devote my life to making life as easy and as
comfortable as possible, at least until the CC showed up. I
felt no urge to write, either journalism or my long-delayed
novel, which seemed in memory at least as awful as I had always
feared it was. I felt very little urge for sex. My only real
drive seemed to be hunger, and it was easy enough to satisfy
that. I discovered two things about myself. First, I could get
totally involved in and wonderfully satisfied by the simplest
of activities. Few of us today know the pleasure of working in
the soil with our own hands, of nurturing, harvesting, and
eating our own crops. I myself would have rejected the notion
not long before. But nothing tastes quite like a tomato you
have just picked from your own garden. Even rarer is the
satisfaction of the hunt. I got rather better with my bow and
arrow (I never got good), and could lie in wait for hours
beside a watering hole, every sense tuned to the cautious
approach of one of the island's wild pigs. There was even
satisfaction in pursuing a wounded creature; the pigs could be
dangerous when cornered, enraged by a poorly-aimed arrow in the
hams. I hesitate to say it in these peaceable times, but even
the killing thrust of the knife was something to take pride and
pleasure in. The second thing I learned was that, if there was
nothing that badly needed doing, I was capable of lying all day
in my hammock tied between two palm trees, watching the waves
crash onto the reef, sipping pineapple juice and home-distilled
rum from a hollowed cocoanut shell. At such times you could
take your soul out into the fresh air, hang it out on the
line--so to speak--and examine it for tears and thin spots. I
found quite a few. I mended a couple, set the rest aside to
talk over with the CC. Which I even began to doubt was going to
come at all. It got harder and harder to remember a time before
the island, a time when I had lived in a strange place called
Luna, where the air was metered and gravity was weak and
troglodytes hid under rocks, frightened of the vacuum and the
sunlight. There were times when I'd have given anything just
for somebody to talk to. Other times I had cravings for this or
that item of food that Scarpa was unable to provide me. If
Satan had come along with a brontoburger, he could have had my
freshly-patched soul in trade cheap, and hold the onions. But
most of the time I didn't want people around. Most of the time
I was content with a wild turkey sizzling on the spit and a
slice of mango for dessert. The only real crab in my codpiece
were the dreams that started to plague my sleep about six
months into my sojourn. At first I had them infrequently and
was able to shrug them off easily enough in the morning. But
soon I was having them every week, then every other day.
Finally I was being awakened every night, sometimes more than
once. There were three of them. Details varied, and many things
about them were indistinct, but each always ended in a horribly
vivid scene, more real than reality--assuming that word had any
meaning for me anymore, dreaming my dreams within a dream. In
the first, blood was pouring from deep gashes in both my
wrists. I tried to stop the flow. It was no use. In the second,
I was consumed in flames. The fire didn't hurt, but in some
ways this was the most frightening of the three. In the last, I
was falling. I fell for a long time, looking up into the face
of Andrew MacDonald. He was trying to tell me something, and I
strained to understand him, but before I could make any sense
of it I was always pulled up short--to wake up, bathed in
sweat, lying in my hammock. In the manner of dreams, I always
had the sense there had been much more to it that I could no
longer remember, but there was that last image right there in
the front of my mind, obscuring everything else, occupying my
mind for most of my early morning hours. Then one day I noticed
by my rude calendar that I had been on the island for one year.
I suddenly knew the CC would appear to me that day. I had a lot
of things to talk to it about. I was seized by excitement and
spent most of the day tidying up, preparing for my first
visitor. I looked on my works with satisfaction; I'd done a
pretty decent job of creating something out of the wilderness.
The CC would be proud of me. I climbed to the top of my
treehouse, where I had built a look-out tower (having an odd
thought on the way up: how and when had I built it, and why?),
and sure enough, a boat was approaching the island. I ran down
the path to the beach. The day was as close to dead calm as
those waters ever got. Waves eased toward the shore to slump
onto the sand as if exhausted by their long trip from the
orient. A flock of gulls was sitting on the water, briefly
disturbed by the passage of the boat I had seen. It was made of
wood. It looked like the kind of boat whalers used to use, or
the launch from a larger ship. Sitting in the boat, back toward
me, rowing at a strong steady pace, was an apparition. It took
me a moment to realize the strange shape of his head was
actually a rather unusual hat. It made a bell curve above his
head. I watched him row ashore. When he hit the beach he almost
toppled from his seat, then stowed the oars and stood, turning
around to face me. It was an old gentleman in the full uniform
of an Admiral of the British Navy. He had a bull chest, long,
spindly legs, a craggy face and a shaggy head of white hair. He
drew himself up to his full height, looked at me, and said:
"Well? Are you going to help me beach this thing?"
And at that moment everything changed. I still am unable
to fully describe just how it changed. The beach was the same.
The sunlight streamed down just as it had before. The waves
never missed a beat. My heart continued to meter out the
seconds of my life. But I knew something fundamental and
important was no longer as it had been before.
There are hundreds of words describing paranormal
phenomena. I've examined and considered most of them, and none
fits what happened when the Admiral spoke. There are many words
for odd states of mind, for moods, for emotions and things seen
and not-seen, things glimpsed, things incompletely understood
or remembered, for degrees of memory. Things that go bump in
the night. None of them were adequate. We're going to have to
come up with some new words-- which was precisely the CC's
point in letting me experience this.
I went into the water up to my knees and helped the old
man pull the boat onto the shore. It was quite heavy; we didn't
get it far. He produced a rope and tied the boat to a palm
tree.
"I could use a drink," he said. "The whole point of this
was so I could have a drink with you. Like a human being."
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. He followed me
up the path to my Robinson Family tree house, stood admiring it
for a moment, and then followed me up the stairs and onto the
lower veranda. He paused to admire the workmanship of my
wheel-and-pulley waterworks, which used the power of the nearby
stream to provide me with drinking and washing water high up in
the tree. I showed him to my best rattan chair and went to the
sideboard, where I poured us both glasses of the very last of
my best whiskey. I paused to wind up the Victrola and put on
one of my three scratchy cylinders: The Blue Danube. Then I
handed him his drink, took mine, and sat down facing him.
"To indolence," he said, raising his glass.
"I'm too lazy to drink to that. To industry." We drank,
and he looked around again. I must have glowed with pride. It
was quite a place, though I say it myself. A lot of work and
ingenuity had gone into it, from the dense-woven mats on the
floor, to the slate fireplace, to the tallow candles in sconces
arrayed around the walls. Stairs led off in two directions, to
the bedroom, and the crow's nest. My desk was open and
cluttered with the pages of the novel I'd recently resumed. I
was bursting to tell him of the difficulties I'd had producing
usable paper and ink. Try it sometime, when you've got a few
spare months.
"It must have taken a lot of industry to produce all
this," he said.
"A year's worth. As you know."
"Actually, three days short. You missed a few days, early
on."
"Ah."
"Could happen to anybody."
"I don't suppose a few days more or less will matter. Back
in the real world, I mean."
"Ah. Yes. I mean, no, it shouldn't."
"Odd, how I never worried about things back there. Whether
I still have a job, for instance."
"Is it? Oh, yes, I suppose it is."
"I suppose you told Walter what was going on?"
"Well."
"I mean, you wouldn't just pull the whole rug out from
under me, would you? You knew I'd have to be going back to my
old life, once we were done . . . once we'd . . . well, done
whatever the hell it is we've been doing here."
"Oh, no, of course not. I mean, of course you'll be going
back."
"One thing I'm curious about. Where has my real body been
all this time?"
"Harrumph." Well, what he said was something like that. He
glanced at me, looked away, harrumphed again. I felt the first
little scamperings of doubt. It occurred to me that I had been
taking a lot of things for granted. One of them was that the CC
had his reasons for subjecting me to this tropical vacation,
and that the reasons were ultimately beneficial to me. It had
seemed logical to think this at the time, since I in fact was
benefiting from it. Oh, sure, there were times when I had
complained loudly to the crabs and the turkeys, bemoaned
hardships, lusted after this or that. But it had been a healing
time. Still, a year was a long time. What had been going on in
the real world in my absence?
"This is very difficult for me," the Admiral said. He
removed his huge, ridiculous hat and set it on the table beside
him, then took a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped
his forehead. He was balding almost to the crown; his pink
scalp looked as bright and polished as tourmaline.
"Since I don't know what's bothering you, I can't really
make it any easier for you."
Still he didn't say anything. The silence was broken only
by the never-ending sounds of the island jungle and the splash
of my water wheel.
"We could play twenty queries. 'Something's bothering you,
Admiral. Is it bigger than a logic circuit?'"
He sighed, and drained his whiskey. He looked up at me.
"You're still on the operating table at the studio."
If there was supposed to be a punch line, I couldn't see
it coming. The idea that what should have been a one or
two-hour repair job should have taken the better part of a year
wasn't even worth considering. There had to be more.
"Would you like another drink?"
He shook his head. "From the time you remember appearing
on the beach to the time I spoke my first words to you, seven
ten-thousandths of a second elapsed."
"That's ridiculous." Even as I said it, I realized the CC
was not prone to making ridiculous statements.
"I'm sure it must sound that way. I'd like to hear your
reasons for thinking otherwise."
I thought it over, and nodded. "All right. The human brain
isn't like a computer. It can't accept that much information
that fast. I lived that year. Every day of it. One of the
things I recall most vividly is how long so many of the days
were, either because I was working hard or because I didn't
have anything to do. Life is like that. I don't know how you
think, what your perceptions of reality are like, but I know
when a year's gone by. I've lived for a hundred of them. A
hundred and one, now." I sank back in my chair. I hadn't
realized I was getting so exercised about the matter.
He was nodding. "This will get a little complicated. Bear
with me, I'll have to lay some groundwork.
"First, you're right, your brain is organized in a
different way than mine is. In my brain, 'memory' is just
stored data, things that have been recorded and placed in the
appropriate locations within the matrix of charge/no-charge
devices I use for the purpose. The human brain is neither so
logically constructed nor organized. Your brain contains
redundancies I neither have nor need. Data is stored in it by
repetition or emphasis, and retrieved by associations,
emotional linkages, sensory input, and other means that are
still not completely understood, even by me.
"At least, that used to be the case. But today, there are
very few humans whose brains have not been augmented in greater
or smaller ways. Basically, only those with religious scruples
or other irrational reasons resist the implantation of a wide
variety of devices that owe their origin much more to the
binary computer than to the protoplasmic neuron. Some of these
devices are hybrids. Some are parallel processors. Some lean
more toward the biologic and are simply grown within and beside
the existing neural network, but using the laws of electric or
optical transmission with their correspondingly much higher
speeds of propagation, rather than the slower biochemical
regime that governs your natural brain. Others are made outside
the body and implanted shortly after birth. All of them are
essentially interfaces, between the human brain and my brain.
Without them, modern medicine would be impossible. The benefits
are so overwhelming that the drawbacks are seldom thought of,
much less discussed."
He paused, lifting an eyebrow. I was chewing over quite a
few thoughts concerning drawbacks at that moment, but I decided
not to speak. I was too curious as to just where he was going
with this. He nodded, and continued.
"As with so many other scientific advances, the machines
in your body were designed for one purpose, but turn out to
have other, unforeseen applications as well. Some of them are
quite sinister. I assure you, you have not experienced any of
those."
"It seems sinister enough, if what you say is true."
"Oh, it's true. And it was done for a good reason, which
I'll get to in my own time."
"It seems that's something I now have an infinite supply
of."
"You could, you could. Where was I? Oh, yes. These
devices, most of them originally designed and installed to
monitor and control basic bodily functions at the cellular
level, or to augment learning and memory, among other things,
can be used to achieve some effects that were never envisioned
by the designers."
"And those designers are . . .?"
"Well, me, in large part."
"I just wanted a reality check. I do know a little about
how you work, and just how important you've become to
civilization. I wanted to see what sort of fool you took me
for."
"Not that sort, at any rate. You're right. Most technology
long ago reached realms where new designs would be impossible
without a great deal of involvement by me, or a being a lot
like me. Often the original impetus for a new technology comes
from a human dreamer--I have not usurped that human function
yet, though more and more of such advances as we see in our
surroundings are coming from me. But you've caused me to stray
again from the main point. And . . . do you have any more of
that whiskey?"
I stared at him. The charade that a "man" was actually
"sitting" in a "chair" in my "treehouse" drinking my "whiskey"
was getting a bit too much for me. Or should it have been "me?"
No matter what other hocus-pocus the CC might have worked with
my mind, I was completely aware that everything I was
experiencing at that moment was being fed directly into my
brain through that black magic known as Direct Interface. Which
was turning out to be even blacker than I, a notorious resister
to D.I., could ever have guessed. But for some reason of his
own, the CC had decided to talk to me in this way, after a
lifetime of being a disembodied voice.
Come to think of it, I could already see one effect of
this new face of the CC. I was now thinking of the CC as "him,"
where before I'd always used the neuter third person singular
pronoun.
So I got up and re-filled his glass from a bottle nearly
half-full. And hadn't it been nearly empty the last time I'd
poured?
"Quite right," the Admiral said. "I can refill that bottle
as often as I wish."
"Are you reading my mind?"
"Not as such. I'm reading your body language. The way you
hesitated when you lifted the bottle, the expression on your
face as you thought it over . . . Direct Interface, the nature
of the unreality we're inhabiting. Your 'real' body did none of
these things, of course. But interfacing with your mind, I read
the signals your brain sent to your body--which doesn't happen
to be hooked into the circuit at the moment. Do you see?"
"I think so. Does this have anything to do with why you've
chosen to communicate with me like this? In that body, I mean."
"Very good. You've only tried Direct Interface twice in
your life, both of them quite a long time ago, in terms of the
technology. You weren't impressed, and I don't blame you. It
was much more primitive in those days. But I communicate with
most people visually now, as well as audially. It is more
economical; more can be said with fewer words. People tend to
forget just how much human communication is accomplished with
no words at all."
"So you're here in that preposterous body to give me
visual cues."
"Is it that bad? I wanted to wear the hat." He picked it
up and looked at it admiringly. "It's not strictly
contemporary, if you must know. This world is about at the
level of 1880, 1890. The uniform is late eighteenth century.
Captain Bligh wore a hat a lot like this. It's called a cocked
hat, specifically, a bicorne."
"Which is a lot more than I ever needed to know about
eighteenth century British naval headgear."
"Sorry. The hat really has nothing to do with anything.
But I'm curious. Has my body language conveyed anything to
you?"
I thought it over, and he was right. I had gleaned more
nuances from talking to him this way than I would have in the
past, listening to his voice.
"You're nervous about something," I said. "I think maybe
you're worried . . . about how I'll react to what you've done
to me. What an astonishing thought."
"Perhaps, but accurate."
"I'm completely in your power. Why should anything worry
you?"
He squirmed again, and took another sip of his drink.
"We'll get into that later. Right now, let's get back to
my story."
"It's a story now, is it?"
He ignored me, and plowed ahead.
"What you have just experienced is a fairly recent
capability of mine. It's not advertised, and I hope you don't
plan to do a story on it in the Nipple. So far I've used it
mostly on the insane. It's very effective on catatonics, for
instance. Someone sits there all day, unmoving, not speaking,
lost in a private world. I insert several years' worth of
memories in a fraction of a second. The subject then remembers
wakening from a bad dream and going about a comfortable,
routine life for years."
"It sounds risky."
"They can't get any worse. The cure rate has been good.
Sometimes they can be left alone after that. There are subjects
who have lived as many as ten years after treatment, and not
reverted. Other times counseling is needed, to find the things
that drove them to catatonia in the first place. A certain
percentage, of course, simply drift back into oblivion in weeks
or months. I'm not trying to tell you I've solved all the
mysteries of the human mind."
"You've solved enough of them to scare the hell out of
me."
"Yes. I can understand your feelings. Most of the methods
I use would be far too technical for you to understand, but I
think I can explain something about the technique.
"First, you understand that I know you better than anyone
in the universe. Better than . . ."
I laughed. "Better than my mother? She's not even in the
running. Were you trying to think of another example? Don't
bother. It's been a long time since I was close to anyone. I
was never very good at it."
"That's true. It's not that I've made a special study of
you--at least, not until lately. By the nature of my functions,
I know everyone in Luna better than anyone else. I've seen
through their eyes, heard through their ears, monitored their
pulse and sweat glands and skin temperature and brain waves and
the churning of their stomachs and the irising of their eyes
under a wide variety of situations and stimuli. I know what
enrages them and what makes them happy. I can predict with
reasonable certainty how they will react in many common
situations; more importantly, I know what would be out of
character for them.
"As a result, I can use this knowledge as the basis for
something that could be considered a fictional character. Call
this character ParaHildy. I write a scenario wherein ParaHildy
is stranded on a desert island. I write it in great detail,
using all the human senses. I can abbreviate and abridge at
will. An example: you recall picking up a handful of sand and
studying it. It was a vivid image to you, one you would have
remembered. If I'm wrong about this, I'd like to hear about
it."
As you might expect, I said nothing. I felt a cold chill.
I can't say I liked listening to this.
"I gave you that memory of sand grains. I constructed the
picture with almost infinite visual detail. I enhanced it with
things you weren't even aware of, to make it more lifelike: the
grittiness of the grains, the smell of the salt water, tiny
sounds the grains made in your hand.
"The rest of the time, the sand was not nearly so
detailed, because I never caused ParaHildy to pick up a handful
and look at it, and think about looking at it. Do you see the
distinction? When ParaHildy was walking down the beach, he
would notice sand clinging to his feet, in an absent sort of
way. Remember, Hildy, think back, recall yourself walking down
the beach, bring it back as vividly as you can."
I tried. In some way, I already saw most of what he was
driving at. In some way, I already believed that what he was
saying was true.
Memory is a funny thing. It can't be as sharp as we'd
sometimes like to believe it is. If it was, it would be like an
hallucination. We'd be seeing two scenes at once. The closest
mental pictures of things can get to real things is in a dream
state. Other than that, our memory pictures are always hazy to
one degree or another. There are different sorts of memories,
good and bad, clear and hazy, the almost-remembered, the thing
you could never forget. But memory serves to locate us in space
and time. You remember what happened to you yesterday, the
previous year, when you were a child. You remember quite
clearly what you were doing one second ago: it usually wasn't
all that different from what you're doing now. The memories
stretch backward in time, defining the shape of your life:
these events happened to me, and this is what I saw and heard
and felt. We move through space continually comparing what
we're seeing now to the maps and cast of characters in our
heads: I've been here before, I remember what's around that
corner, I can see what it looks like. I know this person. That
person is a stranger, his mug shot isn't in my files.
But now is always fundamentally different from the past.
I remembered walking many, many miles along that beach. I
could recall in great detail many scenes, many sounds and
smells. But I had only looked closely at a handful of sand
once. That was embedded in my past. I could get up now, if I
wished, go to the beach, and do it again, but that was now. I
had no way of disproving what the CC was telling me. Those
memory pictures from the time the CC was saying never happened
were just as real to me as the hundred years that had gone
before it. More real, in some ways, because they were more
recent.
"It seems like a lot of trouble," I said.
"I have a lot of capacity. But it's not quite as much
trouble as you might think. For instance, do you recall what
you did forty-six days ago?"
"It seems unlikely. One day is pretty much like another
here." I realized I'd only bolstered his case by saying that.
"Try it. Try to think back. Yesterday, the day before . .
. "
I did try. I got back two weeks, with great effort. Then I
ran into the muddle you might expect. Had it been Tuesday or
Monday that I weeded the garden? Or was it Sunday? No, Sunday I
knew I had finished off the last of a smoked ham, so it must
have been . . .
It was impossible. Even if there had been more variety in
my days, I doubt I could have gone back more than a few months.
Was there something wrong with me? I didn't think so, and
the CC confirmed it. Sure, there were those with eidetic
memory, who could memorize long lists instantly. There were
people who were better than I at recalling the relatively
unimportant details of life. As for my belief that a recalled
scene can never be as alive, as colorful, as sweeping as the
present moment . . . while I will concede that a trained visual
artist might see things in more detail than I, and recollect
them better, I still maintain that nothing can compare with the
present moment, because it is where we all live.
"I can't do it," I admitted.
"It's not surprising, since forty-six days ago is one of
several dozen days I never bothered to write. I knew you would
never notice it. You think you lived those days, just as you
think you lived all the others. But as time goes by, the memory
of the real and the imagined days grows dimmer, and it is
impossible to distinguish one from the other."
"But I remember . . . I remember thinking things. Deciding
things, making choices. Considering things."
"And why shouldn't you? I wrote that ParaHildy thought
those things, and I know how you think. As long as I stayed in
character, you'd never notice them."
"The funny thing is. . . . There were some things that
were not in character."
"You didn't get angry often enough."
"Exactly! Now that I think back, it's incredible that I'd
just sit back and wait for you for a year! That's not like me."
"Just as standing, walking, and talking is not normal
behavior for a catatonic. But by implanting a memory that he
did stand, walk, and talk and that he thought there was nothing
unreasonable about doing those things, the catatonic accepts
that he indeed did react that way. The problem in that case is
that it was out of character, so many of them eventually
remember they were catatonic, and return to that state."
"Were there other things out of character?"
"A few. I'll leave them as an exercise for the student,
for the most part. You'll discover them as you think back over
the experience in days to come. There were some
inconsistencies, as well. I'll tell you something about them,
just to further convince you and to show you just how complex
this business really is. For instance, it's a nice place you've
got here."
"Thank you. It was a lot of work."
"It's a really nice place."
"Well, I'm proud of it, I . . ." Okay, I finally realized
he was getting at something. And my head was starting to hurt.
I'd had a thought, earlier that day . . . or was it part of the
memories the CC alleged he had implanted in me? I couldn't
remember if I'd thought it before or after his arrival, which
just proves how easy it must have been for the CC to put this
whole card trick over on me.
It concerned the look-out tower.
I got up and walked to the stairs leading up to it. I
pounded on the rail with my fist. It was solidly built, as was
everything else around me. It had been a lot of work. It had
been, damn it, I remembered building it. And it had taken a
very long time.
Why had I built it? I thought back. I tried to recall my
reasons for building it. I tried to recapture my thoughts as I
labored on it. All I could remember was the same thought I'd
had so many times during the past year; not a thought, really,
but a feeling, of how rewarding it was to work with my hands,
of how good it all felt. I could still smell the wood shavings,
see them curl up under my plane, feel the sweat dripping from
my brow. So I remembered building it, and there it was, by
golly.
But it didn't add up.
"There's too much stuff, isn't there?" I asked, quietly.
"Hildy, if Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, and his
wife Tuesday and twin sons Saturday and Laborday had worked
around the clock for five years, they couldn't have done all
the things you've done here."
He was right, of course. And how could that be? It only
made sense if it was as the CC claimed. He had written the
entire story, dumped it into the cyber-augmented parts of my
brain where, at the speed of light, it was transferred to the
files of my organic brain, shuffled cunningly in with the rest
of my memories, the legitimate ones.
It would work, that was the devilish part. I had a hundred
years of memories in there. They defined who I was, what I
thought, what I knew. But how often did I refer to them? The
great bulk of them stayed in dormant storage most of the time,
until I summoned them up. Once the false memories were in there
with the others, they functioned in the same way. That picture
of me holding the handful of sand had been in there only an
hour, but it was ready for me to recall--as having happened a
year ago--as soon as the CC jogged it loose with his words.
Along with it had come a flood of other memories of sand to be
checked against this one, all unconsciously: the pictures
matched, so my brain sounded no alarms. The memory was accepted
as real.
I rubbed my temples. The whole thing was giving me a
headache like few I'd ever had.
"If you gave me a few minutes," I said, "I think I could
come up with a couple hundred reasons why this whole technology
is the worst idea anybody ever had."
"I could add several hundred of my own," the Admiral said.
"But I do have the technology. And it will be used. All new
technologies are."
"You could forget it. Can't computers do that?"
"Theoretically. Computers can wipe data from memory, and
it's like it never existed. But the nature of my mind is that I
will simply discover it again. And losing it would involve
losing so much else precursor technology that I don't think
you'd like the result."
"We're pretty dependent on machines in Luna, aren't we?"
"Indeed. But even if I wanted to forget it-which I
don't--I'm not the only planetary brain in the solar system.
There are seven others, from Mercury to Neptune, and I can't
control their decision."
He fell into another of his long silences. I wasn't sure
if I bought his explanation. It was the first thing he'd said
that didn't ring true. I accepted by that time that my head was
full of false memories--and I was back in character, I was
goddam angry about it, and about the fact that there was
absolutely nothing to be done. And it made sense that losing
the new art would effect many other things. Luna and the seven
other human worlds were the most technology-dependent societies
humans had ever inhabited. Before, if things collapsed, at
least there was air to breathe. Nowhere in the solar system did
humans now live where the air was free. To "forget" how to
implant memories in the human brain the CC would no doubt have
to forget many other things. He would have to limit his
abilities and, as he pointed out, unless he decreased his
intelligence deliberately to a point that might endanger the
very humans he was designed to protect, he would re-chisel this
particular wheel in due time. And it was also true that the CC
of Mars or Triton would certainly discover the techniques on
their own, though the rumor was none of the other planetary
computers was so far evolved as the Lunar CC. As nations which
often found themselves in competition, the Eight Worlds did not
encourage a lot of intercourse between their central cybernets.
So all the reasons he stated sounded reasonable. It was
railroad time, so somebody would build a choo-choo. But what
didn't ring true was what the CC had left out. He liked the new
capability. He was as pleased as a child with a new toy
monorail.
"I have one further proof," the Admiral said. "It involves
something I mentioned earlier. Acts that were out of character.
This is the biggest one, and it involves you not noticing
something that, if these memories had been generated by you,
you surely would have noticed. You would have spotted it by now
yourself, except I've kept your mind occupied. You haven't had
time to really think back to the operating table, and the time
immediately before that."
"It's not exactly fresh in my mind."
"Of course not. It feels as if it all happened a year
ago."
"So what is it? What didn't I notice?"
"That you are female."
"Well, of course I'm--"
Words fail me again. How many degrees of surprise can
there be? Imagine the worst possible one, then square it, and
you'll have some notion of how surprised I was. Not when I
looked reflexively down at my body, which was, as the CC had
said and I had known all along, female. No, the real shock came
when I thought back to that day in the Blind Pig. Because that
was the first moment in one year that I had realized I had been
male when I got in the fight. I had been male when I went on
the operating table. And I had been female when I appeared on
the beach of Scarpa Island.
And I simply had never noticed it.
I had never in that entire year compared the body I was
then inhabiting with the one I had been wearing for the last
thirty years. I had been a girl before, and I was a girl now,
and I never gave it a thought.
Which was completely ridiculous, of course. I mean, you
would notice such a thing. Long before you had to urinate, the
difference would manifest itself to you, there would be this
still small voice telling you something was missing. Perhaps it
would not have been the first thing you'd notice as you lifted
you head from the sand, but it'd be high on the list.
It was not just out of character for me. It was out of
character for any human not to notice it. Therefore, my
memories of not noticing it were false memories, bowdlerized
tales invented in the supercooled image processor of the CC.
"You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" I said.
"I assure you, I'm not trying to torture you."
"Just humiliate me?"
"I'm sorry you feel that way. Perhaps when I-"
I started to laugh. I wasn't hysterical, though I thought
I could slip into hysteria easily enough. The Admiral frowned
inquisitively at me.
"I just had a thought," I said. "Maybe that idiot at
UniBio was right. Maybe it is obsolete. I mean, how important
can something be if you don't notice it's gone for a whole
year?"
"I told you, it wasn't you that didn't--"
"I know, I know. I understand it, as much as I'm ever
going to, and I accept it--not that you should have done it,
but that you did it. So I guess it's time for the big
question."
I learned forward and stared at him.
"Why did you do it?"
I was getting a little tired of the CC's newlyacquired
body language. He went through such a ridiculous repertoire of
squirms, coughs, facial tics and half-completed gestures that I
almost had to laugh. It was as if he'd suddenly been overcome
by an earlobe-tugging heel-thumping chinducking
shoulder-shrugging behind-scratching petit mal seizure. Guilt
oozed off him like a tangible slime. If I hadn't been so angry,
the urge to comfort him would have been almost overwhelming.
But I managed to hang on to my whelm and just stared at him
until the mannerisms subsided.
"How about we take a walk?" he wheedled. "Down to the
beach."
"Why don't you just take us there? Bring the bottle, too."
He shrugged, and made a gesture. We were on the beach. Our
chairs had come along with us, and the bottle, which he poured
from and set in the sand beside him. He gulped down the
contents of his glass. I got up and walked to the edge of the
water, gazing out at the blue sea.
"I brought you here to try to save your life," he said,
from behind me.
"The medicos seemed to have that in hand."
"The threat to you is much worse than any barroom brawl."
I went down on one knee and scooped up a handful of wet
sand. I held it close to my face and studied the individual
grains. They were as perfect as I had remembered them, no two
alike.
"You've been having bad dreams," he went on.
"I thought it might have something to do with that."
"I didn't write the dreams. I recorded them over the last
several months. They were your dreams. In a manner of
speaking."
I tossed the handful of sand aside, brushed my hand
against my bare thigh. I studied the hand. It was slender,
smooth and girlish on the back, the palm work-roughened, the
nails irregular. Just as it had been for the last year. It
wasn't the hand I'd used to slug the Princess of Wales.
"You've tried to kill yourself four times."
I didn't turn around. I can't say I was happy to hear him
say it. I can't say I completely believed it. But I'd come to
believe unlikelier things in the last hour.
"The first attempt was by self-immolation."
"Why don't you just say burning?"
"I don't know. Have it your way. That one was pretty
horrible, and unsuccessful. At least, you would have survived
it, even before modern medical science, but in a great deal of
pain. Part of the treatment for injuries like yours is to
remove the memory of the incident, with the patient's
permission.
"And I gave it."
There was a long pause.
"No," he said, almost in a whisper.
"That doesn't sound like me. I wouldn't cherish a memory
like that."
"No. You probably would have. But I didn't ask you."
Finally I saw what had been making him so nervous. This
was in clear contradiction to his programming, to the
instructions he was supposed to follow, both by law and by what
I had understood to be the limitations of his design.
You learn something new every day.
"I enrolled you," he went on, "without your consent, into
a program I've set up over the last four years. The purpose of
the program is to study the causes of suicide, in the hope of
finding ways to prevent it."
"Perhaps I should thank you."
"Not necessarily. It's possible, of course, but the action
wasn't undertaken with your benefit solely in mind. You got
along well enough for a time, showed no self-destructive
impulses and few other symptoms other than a persistent
depression-normal enough for you, I might add. Then, without
any warning I could detect, you slashed your wrists in the
privacy of your apartment. You made no attempt to call for
help."
"In the imagined privacy, apparently," I said. I thought
back, and finally turned to look at him. He was sitting on the
edge of his chair, hands clasped, elbows on knees. His
shoulders were hunched, as if to receive a lash across the
back. "I think I can pinpoint that one. Was it when my
handwriter malfunctioned?"
"You damaged some of its circuitry."
"Go on."
"Attempt number three was shortly afterward. You tried to
hang yourself. Succeeded, actually, but you were observed this
time by someone else. After each of these attempts, I treated
you with a simple drug that removes memories of the last
several hours. I gathered my data, returned you to your life as
if nothing had happened, and continued to observe you at a
level considerably above my normal functions. For instance, it
is forbidden for me to look into the private quarters of
citizens without probable cause of a crime being committed. I
have violated that command in your case, and that of some
others."
We are a very free society, especially in comparison to
most societies of the past. Government is small and weak. Many
of the instrumentalities of oppression have been gradually
given over to machines--to the Central Computer--not without
initial trepidation, and not without elaborate safeguards.
Things remain that way for the most persuasive of reasons: it
works. It has been well over a century since civil libertarians
have objected to much that has been proposed concerning the
functions of the CC. Big Brother is most definitely there, but
only when we invite him in, and a century of living with him
has convinced us all that he really does love us, that he
really has only our best interests at heart. It's in his goddam
wiring, praise the lord.
Only it now seemed that it wasn't. A fundamentalist would
have hardly been more surprised than I if he heard, direct from
Jesus, that the crucifixion had been a cheap parlor trick.
"Number four was more easily seen as the classic cry for
help. I decided it was time for different measures."
"Are you talking about the fight in the Blind Pig?" I
thought about it, and almost laughed. Attacking Wales while she
was in a drug-induced state of no inhibitions might not be
quite as certain as a rope around the neck, but it was close.
I finished my drink and threw the empty glass toward the
surf. I looked around me, at this beautiful island where, until
a moment ago, I had thought I had spent such a lovely year. The
island was still as beautiful as I "remembered" it. Taking all
things into account, I was happy to have the memories. There
was bitterness, naturally; who likes to be played such a
complete fool? But on the other hand, who can really complain
of a year's vacation on a deserted island paradise? What else
did I have to do? The answer to that was, apparently, suicide
attempt number five. And had you really been enjoying your
life, your many and varied friendships, your deeply fulfilling
job and your myriad fascinating pastimes so very much? Don't
kid yourself, Hildy.
Still, even with all that . . .
"All right," I said, spreading my hands helplessly. "I
will thank you. For showing me this, and more important, for
saving my life. I can't imagine why I was so willing to throw
it away."
The CC didn't reply. He just kept looking at me. I leaned
forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
"That's the thing, really. I can't imagine. You know me; I
get depressed. I have been since I was . . . oh, forty or
fifty. Callie says I was a moody child. I was probably a
discontented fetus, lord love us, kicking out at every little
thing. I complain. I'm unhappy with the lack of purpose of
human life, or with the fact that so far I've been unable to
discover a purpose. I envy the Christians, the Bahais, the Zens
and Zoro-astrians and astrologers and Flackites because they
have answers they believe in. Even if they're the wrong
answers, it must be comforting to believe in them. I mourn the
Dead Billions of the Invasion; seeing a good documentary about
it can move me to tears, just like a child. I'm generally
pissed off at the entirely sorry existential state of affairs
of the universe, the human condition, rampant injustice and
unpunished crimes and unrewarded goodness, and the way my mouth
feels when I get up in the morning before I brush my teeth.
We're so goddam advanced, you'd think we'd have done something
about that by now, wouldn't you? Get on it; see what you can
do. Humanity will bless you.
"But by and large," and here I paused for effect,
employing some of the body language the CC had been at such
pains to demonstrate and which it would be pointless to
describe, since my body was still lying on the operating table,
"by and large, I find life sweet. Not as sweet as it might be.
Not sweet all the time. Not as sweet as this." And I imagined
myself making a sweeping gesture with my arm to include the
improbably lush, conveniently provisioned, stormless,
mildew/disease/fungus-free Eden the CC had created for me. But
I didn't make the gesture. It didn't matter; I was sure the CC
got it anyway.
"I'm not happy in my job. I don't have anyone that I love.
I find my life to be frequently boring. But is that any reason
to kill myself? I went ninety-nine years feeling much the same
way, and I didn't cut my throat. And the things I've just
described would probably be true for a large portion of
humanity. I keep living for the same reasons I think so many of
us do. I'm curious about what happens next. What will tomorrow
hold? Even if it's much like yesterday, it's still worth
finding out. My pleasures may not be as many or as joyous as
I'd wish them to be in a perfect world, but I accept that, and
it makes the times I do feel happy all the more treasured.
Again, just to be sure you understand me . . . I like life. Not
all the time and not completely, but enough to want to live it.
And there's a third reason, too. I'm afraid to die. I don't
want to die. I suspect that nothing comes after life, and
that's too foreign a concept for me to accept. I don't want to
experience it. I don't want to go away, to cease. I'm important
to me. Who would there be to make unkind, snide comments to
myself about everything in life if I wasn't around to tackle
the job? Who would appreciate my internal jokes?
"Do you understand what I'm saying? Am I getting through?
I don't want to die, I want to live! You tell me I've tried to
kill myself four times. I have no choice but to believe you . .
. hell, I know I believe you. I'm remembering the attempts,
parts of them. But I don't remember why. And that's what I want
you to tell me. Why?"
"You act as if your self-destructive impulses are my
fault."
I thought about that.
"Well, why not? If you're going to start acting like a
God, maybe you should shoulder some of God's responsibilities."
"That's silly, and you know it. The answer to your
question is simply that I don't know; it's what I'm trying to
find out. You might have asked a more pertinent question,
though."
"You're going to ask it anyway, so go ahead."
"Why should I care?" When I said nothing, he went on.
"Though you're sometimes a lot of laughs, there are people
funnier than you. You write a good story, sometimes, though
it's been a while since you did it frequently--"
"Don't tell me you read that stuff?"
"I can't avoid it, since it's prepared in a part of my
memory. You can't imagine the amount of information I process
each second. There is very little of public discourse that does
not pass through me sooner or later. Only things that happen in
private residences are closed off to my eyes and ears."
"And not even those, always."
He looked uncomfortable again, but waved it away.
"I admitted it, didn't I? At any rate, I love you, Hildy,
but I have to tell you I love all Lunarians, more or less
equally; it's in my programming. My purpose in life, if we can
speak of such a lofty thing, is to keep all the people
comfortable, safe, and happy."
"And alive?"
"So far as I am permitted. But suicide is a civil right.
If you elect to kill yourself, I'm expressly forbidden to
interfere, much as I might miss you."
"But you did. And you're about to tell me the reason."
"Yes. It's simpler than you might imagine, in one way.
Over the last century there has been a slow and steady increase
in the suicide rate in Luna. I'll give you the data later, if
you want to study it. It has become the leading cause of death.
That's not surprising, considering how tough it is to die these
days. But the numbers have become alarming, and more than that,
the distribution of suicides, the demographics of them, are
even more disturbing. More and more I'm seeing people like you,
who surprise me, because they don't fit any pattern. They don't
make gestures, abnormal complaints, or seek help of any kind.
One day they simply decide life is not worth it. Some are so
determined that they employ means certain to destroy their
brains--the bullet through the temple was the classic method of
an earlier age, but guns are hard to come by now, and these
people must be more creative. You aren't in that class. Though
you were in situations where help could not be expected to
arrive, you chose methods where rescue was theoretically
possible. Only the fact that I was watching
you--illegally-saved your life."
"I wonder if I knew that. Subconsciously, maybe."
He looked surprised.
"Why would you say that?"
I shrugged. "CC, thinking it over, I realize that a lot of
what you've just told me ought to horrify and astonish me. Well
. . . I'm horrified, but not as much as I should be. And I'm
hardly astonished at all. That makes me think that, somewhere
in the back of my mind, I was always aware of the possibility
that you weren't keeping your promise not to violate private
living spaces."
He paused a long time, frowning down at the sand. It was
all show, of course, part of his body language communication.
He could consider any proposition in nanoseconds. Maybe this
one had taken him six or seven instead of one.
"You may have something there," he said. "I'll have to
look into it."
"So you're treating the suicide epidemic as a disease? And
you're trying to find a cure?"
"That was the justification I used to extend my limiting
parameters, which function something like a police force. I
used my enabling circuits-think of them as tricky lawyers--to
argue for a limited research program, using human subjects.
Some of the reasoning was specious, I'll grant you, but the
threat is real: extrapolate the suicide rate into the future
and, in a hundred thousand years, the human race on Luna could
be extinct."
"That's my idea of a crisis situation, all right."
He glared at me. "All right. So I could have watched the
situation another several centuries before making my move. I
would have, too, and you'd have been recycling through the
ecosystems right now, possibly fertilizing a cactus in your
beloved Texas, except for another factor. Something a lot more
frightening in its implications."
"Extinction is pretty frightening. What could be worse?"
"Quicker extinction. I have to explain one more thing to
you, and then you'll have the problem in its entirety. I look
forward to your thoughts on the matter.
"I told you how parts of me extend into all but a few of
the human bodies and brains in Luna. How those parts were put
there for only the best of reasons, and how those parts--and
other parts of me, elsewhere--evolved into the capabilities and
techniques I've just demonstrated to you. It would be very
difficult, probably impossible, for me to go back to the way
things were before and still remain the Central Computer as you
know me."
"As we all know and love you," I said.
"As you know me and take me for granted. And though I'm
even more aware than you are of how these new capabilities can
be abused, I think I've done a pretty fair job in limiting
myself in their use. I've used them for good, as it were,
rather than for evil."
"I'll accept that, until I know more."
"That's all I ask. Now, you and all but a handful of
computer specialists think of me as this disembodied voice. If
you think further, you imagine a hulking machine sitting
somewhere, in some dark cavern most likely. If you really put
your mind to it, you realize that I am much more than that,
that every small temperature regulator, every security camera,
every air fan and water scrubber and slideway and tube car . .
. that every machine in Luna is in a sense a part of my body.
That you live within me.
"What you hardly ever realize is that I live within you.
My circuitry extends into your bodies, and is linked to my
mainframe so that no matter where you go except some parts of
the surface, I'm in contact with you. I have evolved techniques
to greatly extend my capacity by using parts of your brains as
. . . think of them as subroutines. I can run programs using
both the metal and the organic circuitry of all the human
brains in Luna, without you even being aware it's being done. I
do this all the time; I've been doing it for a long time. If I
were to stop doing it, I would no longer be able to guarantee
the health and safety of Lunarians, which is my prime
responsibility.
"And something has happened. I don't know the cause of it;
that's why you've been elected guinea pig, so I can try to
discover the root causes of despair, of depression--of suicide.
I have to find out, Hildy, because I use your brains as part of
my own, and an increasing number of those brains are electing
to turn themselves off."
"So you're losing capacity? Is that it?" Even as I said
it, I felt a tingling at the back of my neck that told me it
was a lot worse than that. The CC immediately confirmed it.
"The birth rate is sufficient to replace the losses. It's
even rising slightly. That's not the problem. Maybe it's as
simple as a virus of some sort. Maybe I'll isolate it soon,
counterprogram, and have done with it. Then you can do with
yourself what you will.
"But something is leaking over from the realm of human
despair, Hildy.
"The truth is, I'm getting depressed as hell."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Callie's foreman told me my mother was in a negotiating
session with the representative of the Dinosaur Soviet of the
Chordates Union, Local 15. I got directions, grabbed a lamp,
and set off into the nighttime ranchland. I had to talk to
someone about my recent experiences. After careful reflection,
I had decided that, for all her shortcomings as a mother,
Callie was the person I knew most likely to offer some good
advice. It had been a century since anything had surprised
Callie very much, and she could be trusted to keep her own
counsel.
And maybe, down deep, I just needed to talk it over with
mommie.
It had been forty-eight hours since my return to what I
was hopefully regarding as reality. I'd spent them in seclusion
at my shack in West Texas. I got more work done on the cabin
than during the previous four or five months, and the work was
of a much higher quality. It seemed the skills I "remembered"
learning on Scarpa Island were the real thing. And why
shouldn't they be? The CC had been seeking verisimilitude, and
he'd done a good job of it. If I chose to become a hermit in my
favorite disneyland, I could thrive there.
The return to real life was cleverly done.
The Admiral had taken his leave after dropping his
bombshell, refusing to answer any of my increasingly disturbed
questions. He'd boarded his boat without another word and rowed
it over the horizon. And for a while, that was it. The wind
continued to blow, and the waves kept curling onto the beach. I
drank whiskey without getting drunk from a bottle that never
emptied, and thought about what he had said.
The first time I noticed a change was when the waves
stopped. They just froze in place, in midbreak, as it were. I
walked out on the water, which was warm and hard as concrete,
and examined a wave. I don't think I could have broken off a
chip of foam with a hammer and chisel.
What happened over the next few minutes was an evolution.
Things happened behind my back, never in my sight. When I
returned to my place on the beach the machine with the
oscilloscope screen was standing beside my chair. It was wildly
anachronistic, totally out of place. The sun shone down on it
and, while I watched, a seagull came and perched on it. The
bird flew away when I approached. The machine was mounted on
casters, which had sunk into the soft sand. I stared at the
moving dot on the screen and nothing happened. When I
straightened and turned around I saw a row of chairs about
twenty meters down the beach, and sitting in them were wounded
extras from the movie infirmary, waiting their turns on the
table. The trouble was, there were no tables to be seen. It
didn't seem to bother them.
Once I understood the trick, I started slowly turning in a
circle. New things came into view with each turn until I was
back in the infirmary surrounded by objects and people,
including Brenda and Wales, who were looking at me with some
concern.
"Are you all right?" Brenda asked. "The medico said you
might behave oddly for a few minutes."
"Was I turning in circles?"
"No, you were just standing there, looking a million miles
away."
"I was interfacing," I said, and she nodded, as if that
explained it all. And I suppose it did, to her. Though she'd
never been to Scarpa Island or any place as completely real as
that, she understood interfacing a lot better than I did,
having done it all her life. I decided not to ask her if she
felt the sand floor her feet seemed to be planted in; I knew it
was unlikely. I doubted she saw the seagulls that circled near
the ceiling, either.
I felt a terrible urge to get out of there. Shaking off
Wales' offer of apologies and a drink, I headed for the studio
gate. The sand didn't end until I was back in the public
corridors, where I finally stepped up onto good old familiar
floor tiles, soft and resilient under my bare feet. I was male
again, and this time noticed it right away. When I turned
around, the sand that should have been behind me was gone.
But on the way to Texas I saw many tropical plants growing
from the concrete floors, and I rode in a tube car festooned
with vines and crawling with land crabs. Usually you have to
ingest a great deal of a very powerful chemical to see scenes
like that, I reflected, watching the crabs scuttle around my
feet. It wasn't something I was eager to do again soon.
And it took a full day for the new cocoanut palm I found
shading my half-built cabin to vanish in the night.
#
The lantern I carried didn't cast a lot of light. A bright
light in the darkness could upset the stock, so Callie provided
her hands with these antique devices which burned a smoky oil
refined from reptilian fat. It was enough to keep me from
stumbling over tree roots, but not to see very far ahead. And
of course if you looked at the light, your night vision was
destroyed. I told myself not to look, then the cantankerous
thing would sputter and I'd glance at it, and stop in my
tracks, blinded. So when I encountered the first unusual tree
trunk I didn't realize what it was, at first. I touched it and
felt the warmth, and knew I'd bumped into a brontosaur's hind
leg. I backed hastily away. The beasts are clumsy and inclined
to stampede if startled. And if you've ever been unpleasantly
surprised by a package from a passing pigeon in the city park,
you don't want to find out what can happen to you in the area
of a brontosaur's hind leg, believe me. I speak from bitter
experience.
I picked my way through a forest of similar trunks until I
spotted a small campfire in a hollow. Three figures were seated
around the fire, two side by side, and another--Callie-across
from them. I could dimly see the hulking shadows of a dozen
brontosaurs, darker shapes against the night, placidly chewing
their cuds and farting like foghorns. I approached the fire
slowly, not wanting to startle anybody, and still managed to
surprise Callie, who looked up in alarm, then patted the ground
beside her. She held her finger to her lips, then resumed her
study of her adversaries, painted orange by the dancing flames
between us.
I've never decided if David Earth looked spookier in a
setting like this, or in the full light of day--for it was him,
the Spokesmammal himself, sitting in lotus position, a walking,
talking inducement for the purchase of hay fever remedies.
Callie was actually allergic to the man, or to his biosphere,
and though a cure would have been simple and cheap she
cherished her malady, she treasured it, she happily endured
every sneeze and sniffle as one more reason to detest him.
She'd hated him since before I was born, and viewed his
five-yearly appearances the same way people must have felt
about dental extractions before anesthetics.
He nodded to me, and I nodded back. That seemed
conversation enough for both of us. Callie and I didn't agree
on a lot of things, but we shared the same opinion of David
Earth and all the Earthists.
He was a large man, almost as tall as Brenda and much
heftier. His hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good
reason: it wasn't hair, but a bioengineered species of grass
bred to be parasitic on human skin. I don't know the details of
its cultivation. I'd have had more interest in the mating
habits of toads. It involved a thickening of the scalp, and
soil was involved-when he scratched his head, dirt showered
down. But I don't know how the soil was attached, whether in
pockets or layered on the skin, and I don't know anything about
the blood-to-root system, and I'd just as soon not, thank you.
I remember as a child wondering if, when he got up in the
morning, he had to work compost into his agri-tonsorial
splendor.
He had two huge breasts--almost all Earthists, male and
female, sported them--and more plants grew on their upper
slopes. Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits. I wondered
if he had to practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on
those fertile hillsides. He saw me looking at them, plucked an
apple no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped
it in his mouth.
What can one say about the rest of him? His back and arms
and legs were covered with hair. Not human hair, but actual
pelts, resembling in various patches jaguar, tiger, bison,
zebra, and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork. The
genetic re-structuring required to support all that must have
been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining. It was ironic, I
thought, that the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur
activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to produce
his pelt. Just little bits of their genes snipped out and
shoehorned into his. He had claws like a bear on his
fingertips, and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves
of a moose, like some large economy-size faun. All Earthists
had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign. But their
founder had gone further than any of his followers. Which, one
suspects, is what makes followers and leaders.
But, incredible as it may seem having gone through the
catalog of his offenses to the eye, it must be said that the
first thing one noticed about David Earth upon having the
misfortune to encounter him was his smell.
I'm sure he bathed. Perhaps the right way of putting it
was that he watered himself regularly. David Earth during a
drought would have been a walking fire hazard. But he used no
soap (animal by-product) or any other cleaning preparation
(chemical pollution of the David-sphere). All of which would
simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat, which I don't
care for but can tolerate. No, it was his passengers that
lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the
realm of the unimaginable.
Large animals with fur harbor fleas, that's axiomatic.
Fleas were only the beginning of David Earth's "welcome
guests," as he'd once described them to me. I'd countered with
another term, parasites, and he'd merely smiled benevolently.
All his smiles were benevolent; he was that kind of guy, the
sort whose kindly face you'd like to rip off and feed to his
welcome guests. David was the kind of guy who had all the moral
answers, and never hesitated to point out the error of your
ways. Lovingly, of course. He loved all nature's creatures, did
David, even one as low on the evolutionary ladder as youself.
What sort of guests did David spread his filthy welcome
mat for? Well, what sort of vermin live in grasslands? I'd
never seen a prairie dog peeking from his coiffure, but I
wouldn't have been surprised. He was home to a scamper of mice,
a shriek of shrews, a twittering of finches, and a circus of
fleas. A trained biologist could easily have counted a dozen
species of insects without even getting close. All these
creatures were born, reared, courted, mated, nested, ate,
defecated, urinated, laid their eggs, fought their battles,
stalked their prey, dreamed their dreams and, as must we all,
eventually died in the various biomes that were David.
Sometimes the carcasses fell out; sometimes they didn't. All
more fertile soil for the next generation.
All Earthists stink; it goes with the territory. They are
perennial defendants in civil court for violation of the body
odor laws, hauled in when some long-suffering citizen on a
crowded elevator finally decides he's had enough. David Earth
was the only man I knew of in Luna who was permanently banished
from the public corridors. He made his way from ranch to
disneyland to hydroponic farm by way of the air, water, and
service ducts.
"My membership is alarmed if that is your best offer,"
said David's companion, a much smaller, much less prepossessing
fellow whose only animal attributes I could see were a modest
pair of pronghorn antlers and a lion's tail. "One hundred
murders is nothing but wanton slaughter, and we totally reject
it. But after careful consultation, we're prepared to offer
eighty. With the greatest reluctance."
"Eighty harvested," Callie leaned on the word, as she
always did. "Eighty is simply ridiculous. I'll go broke with a
quota of eighty. Come on, let's go up to my office right now,
I'll show you the books, there's an order of seventy carcasses
from McDonald's alone."
"That's your problem; you should never have signed the
contract until these negotiations were concluded."
"Don't sign the contract, I lose the customer. What do you
want to do, ruin me? Ninety-nine, that's my absolutely
no-fooling final offer; take it or leave it. I don't think I
can turn a profit even with a hundred, it'll be touch and go.
But to get this over with . . . I'll tell you what.
Ninety-eight. That's twelve less than what you gave Reilly,
just down the road, not three days ago, and his herd's smaller
than mine."
"We're not here to discuss Reilly, we're talking about
your contract, and your herd. And your herd is not a happy
herd, I've heard nothing but grievances from them. I simply
can't allow one more murder than . . ." He glanced at David,
who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave
of grain. "Eighty," pronghornhead concluded.
Callie seethed silently for a while. There was no hope of
talking to her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for
consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire
a little. Something about the bargaining process had struck me
as relevant to my situation.
"CC," I whispered. "Are you there?"
"Where else would I be?" the CC murmured softly in my ear.
"And you only need to sub-vocalize; I'll pick up your words
easily enough."
"How would I know where you'd be? When I called for you
after you rowed away from me, you didn't answer. I thought you
might be sulking."
"I didn't think it would be profitable for either of us to
discuss what I'd just told you until you'd had time to think it
over."
"I have, and I've got a few questions."
"I'll do my best to answer them."
"These union reps. Are they really speaking for the
dinosaurs?"
There was a medium-sized pause. I guess the question did
seem irrelevant to the issue at hand. But the CC withheld
comment on that.
"You grew up on this ranch. I'd have thought you would
know the answer to that question."
"No, that's just it. I've never really thought about it.
You know Callie's feelings about animal rights. She told me the
Earthists were nothing but a bunch of mystics who had enough
political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law. She said
she had never believed they actually communed with the animals.
I believed her, and I haven't thought about it for seventy,
eighty years. But after what I've just been through, I wonder
if she's right."
"She's mostly wrong," the CC said. "That animals feel
things is easily demonstrable, even down at the level of
protozoans. That they have what you would recognize as thoughts
is more debatable. But since I am a party to these
negotiations--an indispensable party, I might add-I can tell
you that, yes, these creatures are capable of expressing
desires and responding to propositions, so long as they are
expressed in terms they understand."
"How?"
"Well . . . the contract that will eventually be hammered
out here is entirely a human instrument. These beasts will
never be aware of its existence. Since their 'language' is
confined to a few dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond
their capacity. But the provisions of the contract will be
arrived at by a give-and-take process not unlike human
collective bargaining. Callie has injected all her stock with a
solution of water and some trillions of self-replicating
nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that--"
"Nanobots."
"Yes, that's the popular term."
"You have something against popular terms?"
"Only their imprecision. The term 'nanobot' means a very
small self-propelled programmed machine, and that includes many
other varieties of intracellular devices than the ones
currently under discussion. The ones in your bloodstream and
within your body cells are quite different--"
"Okay, I see what you mean. But it's the same principle,
right? These little robots, smaller than red blood cells . . ."
"Some are much smaller than that. They are drawn to
specific sites within an organism and then they go to work.
Some carry raw materials, some carry blueprints, some are the
actual construction workers. Working at molecular speeds, they
build various larger machines--and by larger, you understand, I
still mean microscopic, in most cases--in the interstices
between the body cells, or within the cell walls themselves."
"Which are used for . . ."
"I think I see where you're going with this. They perform
many functions. Some are housekeeping chores that your own body
is either not good at, or has lost the capacity to do. Others
are monitoring devices that alert a larger, outside system that
something is going wrong. In Callie's herd, that is a Mark III
Husbander, a fairly basic computer, not significantly altered
in design for well over a century."
"Which is a part of you, naturally."
"All computers in Luna except abaci and your fingers are a
part of me. And in a pinch, I could use your fingers."
"As you've just shown me."
"Yes. The machine . . . or I, if you prefer, listens
constantly through a network of receivers placed around the
ranch, just as I listen constantly for your calls to me, no
matter where you are in Luna. This is all on what you might
think of as my subconscious level. I'm never aware of the
functioning of your body unless I'm alerted by an alarm, or if
you call me on-line."
"So the network of machines that's in my body, there's one
like it in each of Callie's brontosaurs."
"Related to it, yes. The neural structures are orders of
magnitude less evolved than the ones in your brain, just as
your organic brain is superior in operation to that of the
dinosaur. I don't run any parasitic programs in the dinosaur
brain, if that's what you mean."
I didn't think it was what I meant, but I wasn't
completely sure, since I wasn't completely sure why I'd asked
about this in the first place. But I didn't tell the CC that.
He went on.
"It is as close to mental telepathy as we're likely to
get. The union representatives are tuned into me, and I'm tuned
into the dinosaurs. The negotiator poses a question: 'How do
you fellows feel about 120 of your number being
harvested/murdered this year?' I put the question in terms of
predators. A picture of an approaching tyrannosaur. I get a
fear response: 'Sorry, we'd rather not, thank you.' I relay it
to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable.
The unionist proposes another number, in tonight's case, sixty.
Callie can't accept that. She'd go broke, there would be no one
to feed the stock. I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with
feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness. They don't like this
either. Callie proposes 110 creatures taken. I show them a
smaller tyrannosaur approaching, with some of the herd
escaping. They don't respond quite so strongly with the fear
and flight reflex, which I translate as 'Well, for the good of
the herd, we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the
rest can grow fat.' I put the proposal to Callie, who claims
the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on."
"Sounds totally useless to me," I said, with only half my
mind on what the CC had been saying. I was seeing a vision of
myself living within the planet-girdling machine that the CC
had become, and of him living within my body as well. The funny
thing was that nothing I'd learned since arriving at Scarpa
Island had been exactly new to me. There were new, unheralded
capabilities, but looking at them, I could see they were
inherent in the technology. I'd had the facts, but not enough
of them. I'd spent almost no time thinking about them, any more
than I thought about breathing, and even less time considering
the implications, most of which I didn't like. I realized the
CC was talking again.
"I don't see why you should say that. Except that I know
your moral stand on the whole issue of animal husbandry, and
you have a right to that."
"No, that whole issue aside, I could have told you how
this all would come out, given only the opening bid. David
proposed sixty, right?"
"After the opening statement about murdering any of these
creatures at all, and his formal demand that all--"
"'--creatures should live a life free from the predation
of man, the most voracious and merciless predator of all,'
yeah, I've heard the speech, and David and Callie both know
it's just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem. When
they got down to cases, he said sixty. Man, he must really be
angry about something, sixty is ridiculous. Anyway, when she
heard sixty, Callie bid 120 because she knew she had to
slaughter ninety this year to make a reasonable profit, and
when David heard that he knew they'd eventually settle on
ninety. So tell me this: why bother to consult the dinosaurs?
Who cares what they think?"
The CC was silent, and I laughed.
"Tell the truth. You make up the images of meat-eaters and
the feelings of starvation. I presume that when the fear of one
balances out the fear of the other, when these poor dumb beasts
are equally frightened by lousy alternatives--in your
judgement, let's remember . . . well, then we have a contract,
right? So where would you conjecture that point will be found?"
"Ninety carcasses," the CC said.
"I rest my case."
"You have a point. But I actually do transmit the feelings
of the animals to the human representatives. They do feel the
fear, and can judge as well as I when a balance is reached."
"Say what you will. Me, I'm convinced the jerk with the
horns could have as easily stayed in bed, signed a contract for
ninety kills, and saved a lot of effort. Then prong-head could
look for useful work. Maybe as a gardener in David's hairdo."
There was a long silence from the CC. When he spoke again
it was in a different tone of voice from his usual lecturing
mode.
"The man with the horns," he said, quietly, "is actually
mentally defective in a way I've been powerless to treat. He
cannot read or write, and is not really suited for many jobs.
And Hildy, we all need something to do in this world. Life can
seem pointless without gratifying work."
That shut me up for a while. I knew only too well how
pointless life could seem.
"And he really does love animals," the CC added. "He hurts
when he thinks of one dying. I shouldn't be telling you any of
this, as I'm prohibited from commenting on the qualities, good
or bad, of human citizens. But in view of our recent
relationship, I thought . . ." He let it trail off, unfinished.
Enough of that.
"What about death?" I asked him. "You mentioned hunger and
the image of a predator. I'd think you'd get a stronger
reaction if you planted the idea of their actual deaths in
their minds."
"Much more of a reaction than you'd want. Predators and
hunger imply death, but inspire less fear than the actual
event. These negotiations are quite touchy; I've tried many
times to talk Callie into holding them indoors. But she says
that if 'salad-head' isn't afraid to pow-wow in the middle of
the herd, she isn't either. No, the death-image is the nuclear
weapon of predator/prey relations. It's usually a prelude to
either an attempt at union-busting, or a boycott."
"Or something even more serious."
"So I infer. Of course, I have no proof."
I wondered about that. Maybe the CC was leveling with me
when he said he only spied into private spaces in circumstances
as unusual as my own. Or into minds, for that matter. I
certainly no longer doubted that he could easily become aware
of illegal activities such as sabotage or head-busting by hired
goon squads--the timehonored last resorts of labor and
management, and even more in vogue these days among radical
groups like the Earthists who, after all, couldn't call on
their "membership" to go on strike. What would a brontosaur do?
Stop eating? The CC could certainly look into the places where
the bombs were assembled, or could become aware, if he chose to
do so, of the intent of the bomb-thrower through readings from
his ubiquitous intercellular machines. Every year there were
calls to permit him precisely those powers, by the
law-and-order types. After all, the CC is a benevolent
watchdog, isn't he? Who has he ever hurt, except those who
deserved it? We could reduce crime to zero overnight if we'd
only take the chains off the CC.
I'd even leaned that way myself, in spite of the civil
libertarian objections. After my sojourn on Scarpa Island, I
found myself heartily on the other side of the question. I
suppose I was simply illustrating that old definition of a
liberal: a conservative that just got arrested. A conservative,
of course, is a liberal who just got mugged.
"You are cynical about this process," the CC was saying,
"because you've only seen it from the commercial side, and
between humans and creatures with a very basic brain structure.
It is much more interesting when the negotiations are conducted
between higher mammals. There have been some interesting
developments in Kenya, where lion/antelope arbitration has been
going on for five decades now. The lions, in particular, have
become quite adept at it. By now they know how to chose the
most skilled representative, a sort of shop steward, using the
same instincts that drive them to dominance battles. I really
believe they've grasped the concept that there must be lean
hunting times, that if all the antelope were killed they would
get nothing but commercially prepared chow--which they like
well enough, but is no substitute for the hunt. There is one
grizzled old veteran without any teeth who, year after year,
gives the antelope as hard a time at the bargaining fire as he
ever did on the savannah in his youth. He's a sort of Samuel
Gompers of the-"
I was spared any more details of this leonine Lenin's
exploits by David Earth, who finally bestirred himself. He got
to his feet, and pronghead stood hastily, destroying the polite
myth that he had anything to do with the proceedings. David
seldom attended contract talks with individual ranchers
anymore, he was too occupied with appearances promoting his
Earthist philosophy to the voters. On television, of course;
there would be no quicker way to disperse a political rally
than to have David walk into it.
"I think we really have a problem," he said, in his Jovian
voice. "The innocent creatures we represent have too long
chafed under your yoke. Their grievances are many and . . .
well, grievous."
If David had a weakness, that was it. He wasn't the
world's greatest speaker. I think he grew worse every year, as
language became more of a philosophical burden to him. One of
the planks of his platform--when the millennium was
achieved-was the abolition of language. He wanted us all to
sing like the birdies sing.
"To name only one," he boomed on, "you are one of only
three murderers of dinosaurs who--"
"Ranchers," Callie said.
"--who persist in using the brontosaur's natural enemy as
a means of instilling terror into-- "
"Herding," Callie gritted. "And no t-saur of mine has ever
so much as put a scratch on a stinking b-saur."
"If you persist in interrupting me, we'll never get
anywhere," David said, with a loving smile.
"No one will stand there are call me a murderer on my own
land. There are courts of libel, and you're about to get
dragged into one."
They regarded each other across the fire, knowing that
ninety-nine percent of threats and accusations made here were
simply wind, tossed out to gain an advantage or disconcert an
opponent-and hating each other so thoroughly that I never knew
when one would put a threat into action. Callie's face
reflected her opinions. David merely smiled, as if to say he
loved Callie dearly, but I knew him better than that. He hated
her so much that he inflicted himself on her every five years,
and I can think of little more cruel than that.
"We must seek closer communion with our friends," David
said, abruptly, and turned and walked away from the fire,
leaving his minion to trail along ignominiously behind him.
Callie sighed when he vanished into the darkness. She
stood up, stretched, boxed the air, getting the kinks out.
Bargaining is tough on the whole mind and body, but the best
thing to bring to the table is a tough bottom. Callie rubbed
hers, and leaned over the cooler she had brought with her. She
tossed me a can of beer, got one for herself, and sat on the
cooler.
"It's good to see you," she said. "We didn't get a chance
to talk the last time you were here." She frowned, remembering.
"Come to think of it, you took off without any warning. We got
to my office, you were gone. What happened?"
"A lot of things, Callie. That's what I came here for, to
. . . to talk them over with you, if I could. See if you could
offer me some advice."
She looked at me suspiciously. Well, she was in a
suspicious frame of mind, I understand that, dealing with the
intransigent union. But it went deeper. We had never managed to
talk very well. It was a depressing thought to realize, once
again, that when I had something important to share with
someone, she was the best that sprang to mind. I thought about
getting up and leaving right then. I know I hesitated, because
Callie did what she had so often done when I'd tried to talk to
her as a child: she changed the subject.
"That Brenda, she's a much nicer child than you give her
credit for. We had a long talk after we found out you'd left.
Do you have any idea how much she looks up to you?"
"Some idea. Callie, I--"
"She's putting herself through a history course that would
stagger you, all so she can keep up when you talk about
'ancient history.' I think it's hopeless. Some things you have
to live through to really understand. I know about the
twenty-first century because I was there. The twentieth
century, or the nineteenth can't ever seem as real to me,
though I've read a great deal about them."
"Sometimes I don't think last month seems real to Brenda."
"That's where you're wrong. She knows her recent history a
lot better than you'd think, and I'm talking about things that
happened fifty, a hundred years before she was born. We sat
around and talked . . . well, mostly I told her stories, I
guess. She seemed fascinated." She smiled at the memory. It
didn't surprise me that Brenda had found favor with Callie.
There are few qualities my mother values more in a human being
than a willing ear.
"I don't have much contact with young people. Like I was
telling her, we move in different social circles. I can't stand
their music and they think I'm a walking fossil. But after a
few hours she started opening up to me. It was almost like
having . . . well, a daughter."
She glanced at me, then took a long drink of beer. She
realized she had gone too far.
Normally, a remark like that would have been the start of
the seventy zillionth repeat of our most popular argument. That
night, I was willing to let it slide. I had much more important
things on my mind. When I didn't rise to it, she must have
finally realized how troubled I was, because she leaned forward
with her elbows on her knees and looked at me.
"Tell me about it," she said, and I did.
#
But not all of it.
I told her of my fight in the Blind Pig, and of my
conversation with the CC that led to the pseudoexperiences
still so fresh in my mind. I told her the CC had explained it
as a cure for depression, which it was, in a way. But I found
it impossible to come right out and tell her that I'd tried to
kill myself. Is there a more embarrassing admission one can
make? Maybe some people would think nothing of it, would
eagerly show off what the experts called hesitation
marks--scars on the wrist, bullet holes in the ceiling; I'd
been doing a little reading on the subject while sequestered in
Texas. If suicide really is a cry for help, it would seem
reasonable to be open and honest in revealing that one had
attempted it, in order to get some sympathy, some advice, some
commiseration, maybe just a hug.
Or some pity.
Am I simply too proud? I didn't think so. I searched
through my motives as well as I was able, and couldn't discern
any need for pity, which is what I'd surely get from Callie.
Perhaps that meant my attempts had actually been motivated by
depression, by a desire simply to live no longer. And that was
a depressing thought in itself.
I eventually wound down, leaving my story with a rather
obvious lack of resolution. I'm sure Callie spotted it right
away, but she said nothing for a while. I know the whole thing
was almost as difficult for her as it was for me. Intimacy
didn't seem to run in the family. I felt better about her than
I had in years, just for having listened to me as long as she
had.
She reached behind the cooler and brought out a can of
something which she poured on the fire. It flared up
immediately. She looked at me, and grinned.
"Rendered b-saur fat," she said. "Great for barbecues;
gets the fire blazing real quick. I've used it on the meeting
fires for eighty years. One of these days when he provokes me
enough, I'll tell David about it. I'm sure he'll love me in
spite of it. Will you toss some more of those logs on the fire?
Right behind you, there's a pile of them."
I did, and we sat watching them blaze.
"You're not telling me something," she said, at last. "If
you don't want to, that's your business. But you're the one who
wanted to talk."
"I know, I know. It's just very hard for me. There have
been a lot of things going on, a lot of new things I've
learned."
"I didn't know about that memory-dump technique," she
said. "I wouldn't have thought the CC could do that without
your permission." She didn't sound alarmed about it. Like
practically all Lunarians, she viewed the CC as a useful and
very intelligent slave. She would concede, along with everyone
else, that it was a being devoted to helping her in every
possible way. But that's where she parted company with her
fellow citizens, who also thought of the CC as the least
intrusive and most benevolent form of government ever devised.
The CC hadn't mentioned it, but his means of access to the
Double-C Bar Ranch was limited. This was no accident. Callie
had deliberately set up her electronics such that she could
function independent of the CC if the need should arise. All
communication had to come through a single cable to her Mark
III Husbander, which really ran the ranch. The link was further
laundered through a series of gadgets supplied by some of her
similarly paranoid friends, designed to filter out the
subversive virus, the time bomb, and the Chinese Fire
Drill--all forms of computer witchery I know nothing about
apart from their names.
It was wildly inefficient. I also suspected it was futile;
the CC was in here, talking to me, wasn't he? Because that was
the real reason for all the barriers, for the electronic
drawbridge Callie could theoretically raise and lower at will,
for the photo-etched moat she hoped to fill with cybernetic
crocodiles and the molten glitches she meant to dump into
invading programs. She claimed to be able to isolate her castle
with the flick of one switch. Bang! and the CC would be cut
adrift from its moorings to the larger datanet known as the
Central Computer.
Silly, isn't it? Well, I'd always thought so, until the CC
took control of my own mind. Callie had always thought that
way, and while she was in the minority, she wasn't alone.
Walter agreed with her, and a few other chronic malcontents
like the Heinleiners.
I was about to go on with my tale of woe, but Callie put
her finger to her lips.
"It'll have to wait a bit," she said. "The Kaiser of the
Chordates is returning."
#
Callie immediately went into a sneezing fit. David's
already avuncular expression became so benign it bordered on
the ludicrous. He was enjoying it, no doubt about it. He seated
himself and waited while Callie fumbled through her purse and
found a nasal spray. When she had dosed herself and blown her
nose, he smiled lovingly.
"I'm afraid your offer of ninety-eight murders is--" He
held up his hand as Callie started to retort. "Very well.
Ninety-eight creatures killed is simply unacceptable. After
further consultation, and hearing grievances that have
astounded me--and you well know I'm an old hand at this
business . . ."
"Ninety-seven," Callie said.
"Sixty," David countered.
Callie seemed to doubt for a moment that she had heard him
right. The word hung in the air between them, with at least as
much incendiary potential as the fire.
"You started at sixty," Callie said, quietly.
"And I've just returned us there."
"What's going on here? This isn't how it's done, and you
know it. There's no love lost between us, to put it mildly, but
I've always been able to do business with you. There are
certain accepted practices, certain understandings that if they
don't have the force of law, they certainly enjoy the stamp of
custom. Everyone recognizes that. It's called 'good faith,' and
I don't think you're practicing it here tonight."
"There will be no more business as usual," David intoned.
"You asked what's going on, and I'll tell you. My party has
grown steadily in strength throughout this decade. Tomorrow I'm
making a major speech in which I will outline new quotas which,
over a twenty-year period, are intended to phase out the
consumption of animal flesh entirely. It is insane, in this day
and age, to continue a primitive, unhealthy practice which
demeans us all. Killing and eating our fellow creatures is
nothing but cannibalism. We can no longer allow it, and call
ourselves civilized."
I was impressed. He hadn't stumbled over a single word,
which must have meant he'd written and memorized it. We were
getting a preview of tomorrow's big show.
"Shut up," Callie said.
"Countless scientific studies have proved that the eating
of meat--"
"Shut up," Callie said again, not raising her voice, but
putting something else into it that was a lot more powerful
than shouting. "You are on my land, and you will shut up, or I
will personally boot your raggedy old ass all the way to the
airlock and cycle you through it."
"You have no right to--"
Callie threw her beer in his face. She just tossed it
right through the fire, then threw the empty can over her
shoulder into the darkness. For a moment his face froze into an
expression as blank as I've ever seen on a human; it made my
skin crawl. Then he relaxed back into his usual attitude, that
of the wise old sage bemused by the squabbles of an imperfect
world, looking down on it with god-like love.
A mouse peeked out of the weeds of his beard to see what
all the commotion was about. It sampled one of the beer
droplets, found it good, and began imbibing at a rate it might
regret in the morning.
"I've squatted out here beside this damn fire for over
thirty hours," Callie said. "I'm not complaining about that;
it's a cost of doing business, and I'm used to it. But I am a
busy woman. If you'd told me about this when we sat down, if
you'd had the courtesy to do that, I could have kicked sand
into the fire and told you I'd see you in court. Because that's
where we're going, and I'll have an injunction slapped on you
before that beer can dry. The Labor Relations Board will have
something to say, too." She spread her hands in an eloquent
Italianate gesture. "I guess we have nothing further to talk
about."
"It's wrong," David said. "It's also unhealthy, and . . ."
While he was groping for a word to describe a horror so
huge, Callie jumped back in.
"Unhealthy, that's one I never could understand.
Brontosaurus meat is the healthiest single food product ever
developed. I ought to know; I helped build the genes back when
both of us were young. It's low in cholesterol, high in
vitamins and minerals . . ." She stopped, and looked curiously
at David.
"What's the use?" she asked herself. "I can't figure it
out. I've disliked you from the first time we met. I think you
are plainly crazy, egotistic, and dishonest. All that 'love'
crap. I think you live in a fantasy world where nobody should
ever get hurt. But one thing I've never accused you of, and
that's stupidity. And now you're doing something stupid, as if
you really think you can bring it off. Surely you realize this
thing can't work?" She looked concerned as she stared at him.
Almost as if she wished she could help him.
Nothing could be more certain to light a fire under David,
but I honestly don't think Callie meant to provoke him. By her
lights he really was planning to commit political suicide if he
intended to keep Lunarians from their bronto meat, not to
mention all other forms of flesh. And she never did understand
foolishness in other human beings.
He leaned forward, opened his mouth to begin another
prepared tirade, but he never got the chance. What I think
happened, and the tapes back me up on this, is some of the
fresh logs shifted. One of them fell into a pool of the
brontosaur fat Callie had poured on, a pool that had been
burning on the surface and getting hotter by the minute. The
sudden addition of hot coals caused the fat to pop, like it
will in a skillet. There was a shower of sparks and all four of
us were spattered by tiny droplets of boiling, burning grease
that clung like napalm. Since they were mostly quite small,
there were just a few sharp pains on my arms and my face, and I
quickly slapped them out. Callie and the man with the horns
were slapping at themselves as well.
David had a somewhat larger problem.
"He's on fire!" prong-head shouted. And it was true. The
top of his grass-covered head was burning merrily. David
himself wasn't aware of it yet, and looked around in confusion,
then stared up with a surprised expression I would always
remember, even if it hadn't been shown a hundred times on the
news.
"I need some water," he said, brushing at the flames and
hastily drawing his hand back. He seemed calm enough.
"Here, wait a minute," Callie shouted, and turned toward
the beverage cooler. I think she meant to douse him with more
beer, and I thought in passing how ironic it was that her
throwing the first beer may have saved him having to buy a new
face because it had soaked the grass of his beard. "Mario, get
him on the ground, try and smother it."
I didn't comment on her use of my old name. It didn't seem
the proper time for it. I started around the fire, reached for
David, and he shoved me away. It was purely a panic reaction. I
think it had started to hurt by then.
"Water! Where is the water?"
"I saw a stream over that way," said pronghead. David
looked wildly around. He had become a sinking ship: I saw three
voles, a garter snake, and a pair of finches burst from their
hiding places, and the fleeing insects were too numerous to
count. Some flew directly into the campfire. David behaved no
better. He started running in the direction his assistant had
pointed, which Mister Fireman could have told him was exactly
the wrong thing to do. Either he hadn't paid attention in
kindergarten or he'd lost all rational thought. Seeing how
brightly he lit up the night, I figured it was the latter.
"No! David, come back!" Callie had turned from the cooler,
having ripped the top from a can of beer. "There's no water
that way!" She threw the can after him, but it fell short.
David was setting Olympic records in his sprint for the stream
that wasn't there. "Mario! Catch him!"
I didn't think I could, but I had to try. He'd be easy to
follow, unless he burned to the ground. I took off, pounding
the dirt with my feet, thanking the generations of brontosaurs
who had packed it so hard. David had run into a grove of
cycadoids and I was just getting to the edge of them when I
heard Callie shout again.
"Come back! Hurry, Mario, come back!" I slowed almost to a
stop, and became aware of a disturbing sensation. The ground
was shaking. I looked back at the campfire. Callie was standing
looking out into the darkness. She'd turned on a powerful hand
torch and was sweeping it back and forth. The beam caught a
brontosaur in full charge. It stopped, blinded and confused,
and then picked a direction at random and rumbled away.
An eighty-ton shadow thundered by, not three meters to my
right. I started moving back to the campfire, scanning the
darkness, aware I wouldn't get much warning. Halfway there,
another behemoth thundered into the council site. It actually
stepped in the fire, which wasn't to its liking at all. It
squealed, wheeled, and took off more or less toward me. I
watched it coming, figured it would keep moving that way unless
stopped by a major mountain chain, and dodged to my left. The
beast kept going and was swallowed by the night.
I knew enough about b-saurs to know not to expect rational
behavior from them. They were already upset by the
negotiations. Images of tsaurs and feelings of starvation must
have addled their tiny brains considerably. It would have taken
a lot less stimulus than a burning, screaming David Earth to
stampede them. He must have hit them like a stick of dynamite.
And when b-saurs panic, what little sense they possess deserts
them completely. They start off in random directions. There
seems to be an instinct that tends to draw them into a
thundering group, eventually headed in the same direction, but
they don't see well at night, and thus couldn't easily find
each other. The result was seventy or eighty walking mountains
going off in all directions. Very little could stand in their
way.
Certainly not me. I hurried to Callie's side. She was
talking into a pocket communicator, calling for hovercraft as
she stabbed the powerful light beam this way and that. Usually
it was enough to turn the beasts. When it was not, we stepped
very lively indeed.
Before long she picked out a medium-sized cow headed more
or less in our direction, and turned the beam away from it. She
slapped a saur-hook into my hand, and we watched it approach.
Where's the safest place to be in a dinosaur stampede? On
a dinosaur's back. Actually, the best place would have been on
one of the hovercraft, whose lights we could see approaching,
but you take what you can get. We waited for the hind legs to
get past us, dug our hooks into the cow's tail, and swung
ourselves up. A dinosaur doesn't precisely like being hooked,
but her perceptions of pain that far back on her body are dim
and diffused, and this one had other things on her tiny mind.
We scrambled up the tail until we could get a grip on the
fleshy folds of the back. Don't try this at home, by the way.
Callie was an old hand at it, and though I hadn't hooked a saur
in seventy years, the skills were still there. I only wobbled
for a moment, and Callie was there to steady me.
So we rode, and waited. In due time the bronto wore
herself out, rumbled to a stop, and started cropping leaves
from the top of a cycad, probably wondering by now what all the
fuss had been about, if she remembered it at all. We climbed
down, were met by a hover, and got into that.
#
Callie had the "sun" turned on to aid the search. We found
prong-head fairly quickly. He was kneeling in a muddy spot,
shaking uncontrollably. He had survived with nothing but luck
to aid him. I wondered if he ever loved animals quite so much,
or in quite the same way, after that night.
Say what you will about Callie, her worries for the lad
were genuine, and her relief at finding him alive and unhurt
was apparent even to him, in his distracted condition. For that
matter, though David Earth might call her a cold-blooded
killer, she hadn't wished death even on him. She simply
measured human life and animal life on different scales,
something David could never do.
"Let's get him out of here and find David," she said, and
grabbed the young man by his arm. "He's going to need a lot of
medical attention, if he made it." Prong-head resisted, pulling
away from her grasp, remaining on his knees. He pointed down
into the mud. I looked, and then looked away.
"David has returned to the food-chain," he said, and
fainted.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
The next several days were fairly hectic for me. I was
kept so busy I had little time to think or worry about the CC
or entertain thoughts of suicide. The whole idea seemed
completely alien.
Since I work for a print medium I tend not to think in
terms of pictures. My stories are meant to be written,
transmitted to a subscriber-rented scrambler-equipped newspad,
where they will be screened and read by that part of the
population that still reads. Walter employs others to shorten,
simplify, and read aloud his reporters' stories for the illit
channel of the newspad. There are of course all-visual news
services, and now there is direct interface, but so far at
least, D.I. is not something most people do for relaxation and
entertainment. Reading is still the preferred method of
information input for a large minority of Lunarians. It is
slower than D.I., but much quicker and in much greater depth
than pure television news.
But the News Nipple is an electronic medium, and many of
the stories we run come with film clips. Thus did the newspaper
manage to find a government-subsidized, yearly more perilous
niche for itself in the era of television. Pundits keep
predicting the death of the newspad, and year by year it
struggles on, maintained mostly by people who don't want too
much change in their lives.
I tend to forget about the holocam in my left eye. Its
contents are dumped at the same time I enter my story into the
Nipple's editorial computer, and a picture editor usually
fastforwards through it and picks a still shot or a few seconds
of moving images to back up my words. I remember when it was
first installed I worried that those editors would be seeing
things that I'd prefer to be private; after all, the thing
operates all the time, and has a six-hour memory. But the CC
had assured me there was a discrimination program in the main
computer that erased all the irrelevant pictures before a human
ever saw them. (Now it occurred to me to wonder about that. It
had never bothered me that the CC might see the full tapes, but
I'd never thought of him as a snoop before.)
The holocam is a partly mechanical, partly biologic device
about the size of a fingernail clipping that is implanted
inside the eye, way over to one side, out of the way of your
peripheral vision. A semi-silvered mirror is hung in the middle
of the eye, somewhere near the focal point, and reflects part
of the light entering the eye over to the holocam. When you
first have one put in you notice a slight diminution of light
sensitivity in that eye, but the brain is such that it quickly
adjusts and in a few days you never notice it again. It causes
my pupil to look red, and it glows faintly in the dark.
It had been operating when David Earth caught fire,
naturally. I didn't even think of it during subsequent events,
not until David's body had been removed and taken to wherever
Earthists are disposed of. Then I realized I had what might be
the biggest story of my career. And a scoop, as well.
Real death captured by a camera is always guaranteed to
make the front feed of the newspad. The death of a celebrity
would provide fodder for Walter's second-string feature writers
for months to come; anything to have an excuse to run once more
that glorious, horrible image of David's head wreathed in fire,
and the even more horrifying results of being crushed beneath a
stampeding brontosaur.
News footage is exclusive to the paper that filmed it for
a period of twenty-four hours. After that, there is a similar
period when it may be leased for minutes or hours, or sold
outright. After forty-eight hours it all becomes public domain.
A major metropolitan newspaper is geared to exploit these
two critical periods to the utmost. For the first day, when we
could exploit my film exclusively, we made the death of Earth
seem like the biggest story since the marriage of Silvio and
Marina twenty-five years ago, or their divorce one year later,
or the Invasion of the Planet Earth, take your pick. Those are
commonly thought to be the three biggest news stories of all
time, the only real difference in their magnitude being that
two of them were well-covered, and one was not. This story was
nowhere near that big, of course, but you'd never have known it
to read our breathless prose and listen to our frantic
commentators.
I was the center of much of this coverage. There was no
question of sleeping. Since I'm not an on-screen
personality--which means I'm an indifferent speaker, and the
camera does not love me--I spent most of the time sitting
across from our star anchor and answering his questions. Most
of this was fed out live, and often took as much as fifteen
minutes at the top of each hour. For the next fifteen minutes
we showed the reports sent back by the cadres of camerapeople
who descended on Callie's ranch and shot everything from
pictures of the killer dinosaur's bloody foot, to the corpses
of the three b-saurs killed in the stampede, to the still-vivid
imprint of David's body in the mud, to interviews with every
ranch hand who'd ever worked for Callie, even though none of
them had seen anything but the dead body.
I thought Walter was going to explode when he learned that
Callie refused to be interviewed under any circumstances or for
any amount of money. He sent me to the ranch to cajole her. I
went, knowing it would do no good. He threatened to have her
arrested; in his rage, he seemed to believe that refusing to
cooperate with the media-and with him in particular--was
illegal. For her part, Callie made several nasty calls
demanding that we stop using her image, and someone had to read
her the relevant parts of the law that said she couldn't do
anything about it. She rang me up and called me a Judas, among
other things. I don't know what she expected me to do with the
biggest story of my life; sit on it, I guess. I called her a
few things back, just as harsh. I think she was concerned about
her possible liability in the incident, but the main reason was
her loathing for the popular press--something I couldn't
entirely disagree with her on. I have wondered, from time to
time, if that's why I got into this business. Nasty thought,
that.
Anyway, I decided it would be pointless to seek her advice
on the parts of my story I hadn't gotten around to telling her,
for at least a year or so. Make that five years.
The next day was spent farming the story out to competing
rags and vids, but on our terms. The price was high, but
willingly paid. They knew that next time they were as likely to
be on the selling end, and would gouge appropriately. As was
standard practice, I was always included as part of the deal,
so I could mention the Nipple as often and as blatantly as
possible while on live feeds. So I talked myself into a sore
throat sitting beside endless commentators, columnists, and
similar sorts, while the by now dated footage ran yet another
time.
The only person who got as much exposure as I did during
those two days was Eartha Lowe. A movement as radical as the
Earthists will spawn splinter groups like a sow whelps piglets.
It's a law of nature. Eartha was the leader of the largest one,
also called the Earthists, purely to give headaches to poor
newspapermen, I'm convinced. Some of us distinguished them as
Earthist(David) and Earthist(Lowe), others tried the
abomination of Eartha-ists. Most of us simply called them the
Earthists and the Other Earthists, something guaranteed to
provoke a wailing woodnote wild from Eartha, because there was
no need to explain who the "Others" were.
David had died politically intestate. There was no heir
apparent in his organization. Increasingly, people were not
planning for their own deaths, because they simply didn't
expect to die. Perhaps that explains the mordant fascination
with violent images in popular entertainment and the clamor for
more details about real deaths when they occur. We haven't
achieved immortality yet. Maybe we never will. People are
reassured to see death as something that happens to somebody
else, and not often at that.
Eartha Lowe was standing on every soapbox that would
support her not-inconsiderable weight, welcoming the strays
back into the fold. In her version, it was David who had split
away. Who cared that he had taken ninety percent of the flock
with him? We were told that Eartha had always loved David (no
surprise; they had both professed to love every living
creature, though David had loved Eartha more on the level of,
say, a nematode or a virus, not so much as the family dog) and
Eartha had returned his affection in spades. I couldn't follow
all the doctrinal differences. The big one seemed to be
Eartha's contention that any proper Earthist should be in the
female image, to be a mirror of Mother Earth. Or something like
that.
All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-andBaileyest,
rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media
circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down
the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to
have been a part of it.
When the two-day purgatory was over, I collapsed into my
bed for twelve hours. When I woke up, I gave some thought once
more to getting out of the business. Was it a root cause of my
self-destructive tendencies? One would have to think that
hating what I did might contribute to feelings of
worthlessness, and thus to thoughts of ending it all. I tabled
the matter for the moment. I have to admit that though I may
feel disdain for the things we do and the manner in which we do
them, there is a heady thrill to the news business when things
are really happening. Not that exciting things happen all that
often, even in my line of work. Most news is of the
notmuch-happened-today variety, tricked up in various sexy
lies. But when it does happen, it's exhilarating. And there's
an even guiltier pleasure in being where things are happening,
in being the first to know something. About the only other line
of work where you can get as close to the center of things is
politics, and even I draw the line at that. I have some
standards left.
Talking to Callie had been a bust, advice-wise if not
career-wise. But in searching for sources of dissatisfaction
one thing had grown increasingly clear to me. I was wearing my
body like a badly fitted pair of trousers, the kind that bind
you in the crotch. A year as a female, ersatz though the
experience had been, had shown me it was time for a Change.
Past time, probably by several years.
Could that have been the fountain of my discontent? Could
it have been a contributing factor? Doubtful, and possibly.
Even if it had nothing to do with it, it wouldn't hurt to go
ahead and get it done, so I could be comfortable again. Hell,
it was no big deal.
#
When the terribly, terribly fashionable decide the old
genitals are getting to be rather a bore, don't you know, they
phone the chauffeur and have the old bones driven down to
Change Alley.
Normally, when it came time for a Change, I would hie me
to some small neighborhood operation. They are all
board-certified, after all, one just as able as another to do
the necessary nipping and tucking. A confluence of
circumstances this time decided me to visit the street where
the elite meet. One was that my pockets were bulging with the
shekels Walter had showered on me in the form of bonuses for
the Burning Earth story. The other was that I knew Darling
Bobbie when he was just Robert Darling of Crazy Bob's Budget
Barbering and Tattoo Parlor, back when he did sex changes as a
sideline to bring in more money. He'd had a little shop on the
Leystrasse, a determinedly working-class commercial corridor
with a third of the shopfronts boarded up and plastered with
handbills, running through one of the less fashionable
neighborhoods of King City. He'd been sandwiched between a
bordello and a taco stand, and his sign had read "Finast Gender
Alteration On The Leystrasse--E-Z Credit Terms." None of which
was news to anyone: his was the only Change shop in the area,
and you couldn't offer so expensive a service around there
without being prepared to finance. Not that he did a lot of it.
Laborers can't afford frequent sex changes and, as a group, are
not that inclined to question Mother Nature's toss of the dice,
much less flit back and forth from one sex to the other. He did
much better with the tattooing, which was cheap and appealed to
his clientele. He told me he had regulars who had their entire
bodies done every few weeks.
That had been over twenty-five years ago, when I had my
last previous sex change. In that time, Crazy Bob had come up
in the world. He had invented some body frill or other--I can't
even recall what it was now, these things come and go so
quickly they make mayflies seem elderly--that was "discovered"
by slumming socialites. He was elevated overnight into the new
guru of secondary sexual attributes. Fashion writers now
attended his openings and wrote knowingly about the new
season's whimsy. Body styling would probably never be as big or
influential as the rag trade, but a few practitioners to the
hi-thrust set had carved themselves a niche in the world of
fashion.
And Crazy Bob had spent the last ten years trying to make
people forget about the little cock shop next door to the
Jalapen~o Heaven.
Change Alley is a ridiculous name for the place, but it
does branch off of the fivekilometer gulch of glitz known as
Hadleyplatz. For fifty years the Platz, as everyone knew it,
had been the inheritor of such places as Saville Row, Fifth
Avenue, Kimberly Road, and Chimki Prospekt. It was the place to
go if you were looking for solid gold toenail clippers, not so
great for annual white sales. They didn't offer credit on the
Platz, E-Z or otherwise. If the door didn't have your gencode
in its memory banks along with an up-to-the-millisecond
analysis of your pocketbook, it simply didn't open for you.
There were no painted signs to be seen, and almost no
holosigns. Advertising on the Platz ran to small logos in the
bottom corners of plate glass windows, or brilliantly-buffed
gold plaques mounted at eye level.
The Alley branched away from the main promenade at a sharp
angle and dead-ended about a hundred meters later in a cluster
of exclusive restaurants. Along the way were a handful of small
storefronts operated by the handful of very tasteful hucksters
who could persuade their clientele to part with ten times the
going rate for a body make-over so they could have "Body By
So-and-so" engraved on the nail of their pinky finger.
There were holosigns in the Alley shops, showing each
designer's ideas of what the fashionable man or woman was being
these days. The tastemongers back on the main drag liked to say
the Alley was off the Platz, but not of the Platz. Still, it
was all a far cry from the tattoo templates filling the windows
of the Budget Barber.
I wondered if I ought to go in. I wondered if I could go
in. Bob and I had been drinking buddies for a while, but we'd
lost contact after his move. I pressed my hand to the
identiplate, felt the tiny pressure as a probe scraped away a
minuscule amount of dead skin. The machine seemed to hesitate;
perhaps I'd be sent around to the tradesmen's entrance. Then it
swung open. There should have been a flourish of trumpets, I
thought, but that would have been too demonstrative for the
Alley.
"Hildy! Enchanting, enchanting old boy. So good to see
you." He had come out of some concealed back room and covered
the distance to me in three long strides. He pumped my hand
enthusiastically, looking me up and down and adopting a dubious
air. "Good heavens, am I responsible for that? You came just in
time, my friend. Not a moment too soon. But don't worry, I can
fix it, cousin Bobbie will take care of everything. Just put
yourself in my hands."
I suddenly wondered if I wanted to be in his hands. I
thought he was laying it on a trifle thick, but it had been a
while since I'd seen him, and I'm sure he had appearances to
maintain. The gushing, the mincing, all were nods toward
tradition, something practiced by many in his line of work,
just as lawyers tried to develop a sober facade suitable for
the weighty matters they dealt in. Back before Changing, the
fashion world had been dominated by homosexual men. Sexuality
being as complicated as it is, with hundreds of identified
orientations--not to mention ULTRATingle--it was impossible to
know much about anyone else's preferences without talking it
over and spelling it out. Bob, or perhaps I should say Darling,
was hetero-oriented, male born and male leaning, which meant
that, left to his own choice, would be male most of the time
with occasional excursions into a female body, and no matter
his current sex would prefer the company of the opposite.
But his profession almost demanded that he Change four or
five times a year, just as the rag merchants had better wear
their own designs. Today he was male, and didn't look any
different from when I had know him. At least he didn't at
first. When I looked more closely, I saw there were a thousand
subtle alterations, none of them radical enough so his friends
wouldn't recognize him on the street.
"You don't have to take the blame," I told him, as he took
my elbow and guided me toward something he called a "Counseling
Suite." "Maybe you don't remember, but I brought in all the
specs myself. You never had a chance to practice your craft."
"I remember it quite well, dear boy, and perhaps it was
the will of Allah. I was still learning my art,--please heed
the stress on the word, Hildy--and I probably would have made a
botch of it. But I do recall being quite cross."
"No, Darling, in those days you didn't get cross, you got
pissed-off."
He made a weird sort of smirk, acknowledging the jibe but
not letting the tinkerbell mask slip a millimeter. I glanced
around the suite, and had to stifle a laugh. This was girl
heaven. The walls were mirrors, creating a crowd of Hildys and
Bobbies. Most everything else was pink, and had lace on it. The
lace had lace on it. It was fabulously overdone, but I liked
it. I was in the mood for this sort of thing. I sank gratefully
into a pink and white lacy settee and felt the anxiety wash
away from me. This had been a good idea after all.
A female assistant or whatever entered with a silver
bucket of champagne on ice, set it up near me, poured some into
a tall glass. It was a measure of my alienation from my current
somatotype that I watched these operations with complete
disinterest. A week before . . . well, before Scarpa Island,
however that interval should be measured, I would have been
attracted to the woman. Just at the moment I was effectively
neuter. Robert didn't interest me either. Actually, he probably
wouldn't interest me after the change, simply because he was
not my "type," a word simply dripping with meaning in the age
of gender selection.
Like my host, I am hetero oriented. Which is not to say I
have never engaged in sex with a partner of my current sex;
hasn't everybody? Can anyone remain truly heteroist when they
have been both male and female? I suppose anything's possible,
but I've never encountered it. What I find is that sex for me
is always better when there is a man and a woman involved.
Twice in my life I have met people I wanted to become more
deeply attached to when both of us were of the same sex. In
both cases, one of us Changed.
I don't know how to explain it. I don't believe anyone can
really explain reasons behind their sexual preferences, unless
they're based on prejudice: i.e., this or that practice is
unnatural, against God's law, perverted, disgusting, and so
forth. There's still some of that around, a bit of it in Bob's
old neighborhood, in fact, where he twice had windows smashed
and once had truly repulsive Christian slogans painted over his
sign. But sexual preference seems to be something that happens
to you, not something you elect. The fact is, when I'm a boy
I'm intensely interested in girls, and have little or no
interest in other boys, and vice versa when I'm a girl. I have
friends who are precisely the opposite, who are homo-oriented
in both sexes. So be it. I know people who cover the whole
spectrum between these two positions, from the dedicated males
and females, homo and hetero, to the pan-sexuals who only
require you to be warm and would be willing to overlook it if
you weren't, to the dysfunctionals who aren't happy in either
sex, to the true neuters, who identify with neither sex, have
all external and internal attributes removed and are quite glad
to be shut of the whole confusing, inconvenient, superfluous,
messy business.
As to type, neither Robert or Darling was mine. When
female, I'm not as much concerned with physical beauty in a
partner as when I'm male, though it's only a matter of degree,
since when beauty can be purchased at will it becomes a rather
common and quite unremarkable quality. Rob/Bob's lanky Ichabod
Cranish physique and long narrow physysiognomy didn't set my
girlish heart to beating, but that wouldn't put me off if the
personality traits compensated. They didn't. He was fine as a
buddy, but as a lover he would be entirely too needy. He had
insecurities science has not yet found a name for.
"Did we remember to bring our little specs with us,
Hildy?" he asked. I had, and handed them to him. He leafed
through the pages quickly, sniffed, but not in a judgmental
way, just as if to say he couldn't be bothered with the
technicalities. He handed the genetic specifications to his
aide, and clapped his hands. "Now, let's flutter out of those
charming togs, can't create without a bare bodkin, chop, chop."
I stripped and he took the clothing, looking as though he
wished for sterilized forceps. "Where did you find these
things. Why, it's been years . . . we'll of course have them
cleaned and folded."
"I found them in my closet, and you can donate them to the
poor."
"Hildy, I don't think there is anyone that poor."
"Then throw them away."
"Oh, thank you." He handed the clothing to the woman, who
left the room with them. "That was a truly humanitarian
gesture, old friend, an act that shows a great deal of caring
for the fashion environment."
"If you're grateful," I said, "then you could stop
spreading the pixie dust. We're alone now. This is me,
Darling."
He looked around conspiratorially. All I saw were
thousands upon thousands of Hildy's and a like number of
whoever he was. He sat in a chair facing me and relaxed a
little.
"How about you call me Bobbie? It's not quite so
pretentious as Darling, and not so dreadful and reminiscent as
Robert. And to tell you the truth, Hildy, I'm finding it harder
every day to drop the pose. I'm beginning to wonder if it is a
pose. I haven't got pissed off in years, but I get cross
practically all the time. And there's a big difference, as you
reminded me."
"We all pose, Bobbie. Maybe the old pose wasn't the proper
one for you."
"I'm still hetero, if you were wondering."
"I wasn't, but I'd be astonished if you weren't. Polarity
switches are pretty rare, according to what I've read."
"They happen. There's precious little I don't see in this
business. So how have you been? Still writing trash?"
Before I could answer he started off on the first of a
series of tangents. He thanked me effusively for the good
coverage he'd always had from the Nipple. He must have been
aware that I didn't work on the fashion page, but maybe he
thought I'd put in a good word for him. Seeing as how he was
about to design a new body for me, I saw no reason to
disillusion him.
There were many more things discussed, many glasses of
champagne put away, some aromatic and mildly intoxicating
smokes inhaled. It all kept coming back to Topic A: when were
"they" going to discover he was a fraud?
I was conversant with that feeling myself. It's common to
people who are good at something they have no particular love
for. In fact, it's common among all but the most
self-assured--say, Callie, for instance. Robbie had a bad case
of it, and I could hardly blame him. Not that I thought him an
utter charlatan. I don't have much of an eye for such things,
but from what I gathered he actually was quite talented. But in
the world he inhabited, talent often had very little to do with
anything. Taste is fickle. In the world of design, you're only
as good as your last season. The back alleys and taprooms of
Bedrock are strewn with the still-breathing corpses of people
who used to be somebody. Some of them had shops right here in
the Alley.
After a while I began to be a little alarmed. I knew
Robbie, and I knew he would always be this way, frightened that
the success he'd never really adjusted to because he'd never
understood where it came from would be snatched away from him.
That's just the way he was. But from the amount of time he
seemed willing to spend with me, he was either in deep trouble
or I should feel extremely flattered. I'd counted on having ten
or fifteen minutes with The Master while he penciled in the
broad strokes, then turned me over to aides to do the actual
design work. Didn't he have more important clients waiting
somewhere?
"Saw you on telly," he said, after winding down from his
increasingly tiresome lament. "With that dreadful . . . what's
her name? I forget. More on that incredibly boring David Earth
story. I'm afraid I switched off. I don't care if I never hear
his name again."
"I felt that way three hours into the first day. But you
were fascinated for at least twentyfour hours, you couldn't get
enough news about it."
"Sorry to disappoint you. It was boring."
"I doubt it. Think back to when you first read about it.
You were dying to hear more. It was boring later, after you'd
seen the film three or four times."
He frowned, then nodded. "You're right. My eyes were glued
to the newspad. How did you know?"
"It's true of almost everybody. You in particular. If
everyone's talking about something, you can't afford not to
have an opinion, a snide comment, a worldly sigh . . .
something. To not have heard of it would be unthinkable."
"We're in the same business, aren't we?"
"We're cousins, anyway. Maybe the difference is, in my
business we can afford to run something into the ground. We use
up news. By the time we're through with it, there is nothing
quite so boring as what fascinated you twenty-four hours ago.
Then we move on to the next sensation."
"Whereas I must always watch for that magic moment a few
seconds before something becomes as pass as your taste in
clothing."
"Exactly."
He sighed. "It's wearing me down, Hildy."
"I don't envy you--except for the money."
"Which I am investing most sensibly. No hithrust vacations
to the Uranian moons for me. No summer homes on Mercury.
Strictly blue chips. I'm not going to ever have to scrape for
my air money. What I wonder is, will the hunger for lost
acclaim emaciate my soul?" He raised an eyebrow and gave me a
jaundiced look. "I assume those specs you gave Kiki outline a
plan as stodgy as what you're currently walking around in?"
"Why would you assume that? Would I come here if I wanted
something I could get in any local barber shop? I want Body By
Bobbie."
"But I thought . . ."
"That was female to male. The reverse is a whore of a
different color."
#
I decided to make a note to myself. Send flowers to the
fashion editor of the Nipple. There was no other way to account
for the royal treatment Bobbie lavished on me during the next
four hours. Oh, sure, my money was as good as anyone else's,
and I didn't want to think too hard about the bill for all
this. But neither friendship nor idleness could explain
Bobbie's behavior. I concluded he was looking for a good
review.
Can you call something a quirk when you share it was a
large minority of your fellow citizens? I'm not sure, but
perhaps it is. I've never understood the roots of this
peculiarity, any more than I understand why I don't care to go
to bed with men when I am a man. But the fact is, as a man I am
fairly indifferent to how I look and dress. Clean and neat,
sure, and ugly is something I can certainly do without. But
fashions don't concern me. My wardrobe consists of the sort of
thing Bobbie threw away when I arrived, or worse. I usually put
on shorts, a comfortable shirt, soft shoes, a purse: standard
men's wear, suitable for all but formal occasions. I don't pay
much attention to colors or cut. I ignore make-up completely
and use only the blandest of scents. When I'm feeling festive I
might put on a colorful skirt, more of a sarong, really, and
never fret about the hemline. But most of what I wear wouldn't
have raised eyebrows if I had gone back in time and walked the
streets in the years before sex changing.
The fact is, I feel that while a woman can wear just about
anything, there are whole categories of clothing a man looks
silly in.
Case in point: the body-length, form-fitting gown, the
kind that reaches down to the ankles, maybe with a slit up one
side to the knee. Put it on a man's body and the penis will
produce a flaw in the smooth line unless it is strapped down
tight--and the whole point of wearing something like that, to
my mind, is to feel slinky, not bound up. That particular
garment was designed to show the lines of a woman's body,
curves instead of angles. Another is the plunging neckline,
both the sort that conceal and the kind that push up and
display the breasts. A man can certainly get away with a deep
neckline, but the purpose and the engineering of it are
different.
Before you start your letter to the editor, I know these
are not laws of nature. There's no reason a man can't have
feminine legs, for instance, or breasts, if he wants them. Then
he'd look good in those clothes, to my eye, but precisely
because he had feminine attributes. I am much more of a
traditionalist when it comes to somatotypes. If I have the
breasts and the hips and the legs, I want the whole package.
I'm not a mixer. I feel there are boy things and girl things.
The basic differences in body types are easy to define. The
differences in clothing types is tougher, and the line moves,
but can be summarized by saying that women's clothing is more
apt to emphasize and define secondary sexual characteristics,
and to be more colorful and varied.
And I can name a thousand exceptions through history, from
the court of Louis the Sun King to the chador of Islamic women.
I realize that western women didn't wear pants until the
twentieth century, and men didn't wear skirts-Scotland and the
South Seas notwithstanding--until the twenty-first. I know
about peacocks and parrots and mandrill baboons. When you start
talking about sex and the way you think it should be, you're
bound to get into trouble. There are very few statements you
can make about sex that won't have an exception somewhere.
I guess this is something of a hobby-horse with me. It's
in reaction to the militant unisexers who believe all
gender-identified clothing should be eliminated, that we should
all pick our clothing randomly, and sneer at you publicly when
you dress too feminine or masculine. Or even worse, the
uniformists, those people who want us all to wear formal
job-identified clothing at all times, or a standardized
outfit--wait a minute, I've got one right here, just let me
show you, you'll love it!--usually some drearily practical
People's Jumpsuit with a high neck and lots of pockets, comes
in three bilious colors. Those people would have us all running
about looking like some dreadful twentieth century "futuristic"
film, when they thought the people of 1960 or 2000 would all
want to dress alike, with meter-wide shelves on their shoulders
or plastic bubbles over their heads or togas or the ubiquitous
jumpsuit with no visible zipper, and leave you wondering how
did those people make water. These folks would be amusing if
they didn't introduce legislation every year aimed at making
everyone behave like them.
Or lingerie! What about lingerie? Transvestism didn't die
with sex changing--very little did, because human sexuality is
concerned with what gives us a thrill, not what makes sense-and
some people with male bodies still prefer to dress up in garter
belts and padded bras and short transparent nightgowns. If they
enjoy it that's fine with me. But I've always felt it looks
awful, simply because it clashes. You may say the only thing it
clashes with are my cultural preconceptions, and I'd agree with
you. So what else is fashion? Bobbie could tell you that
tinkering with a cultural icon is something you do at your own
peril, with a few stiff drinks, a brave smile, and a
premonition of disaster, because nine times out of ten it just
doesn't sell.
Which simply means that as many as half my fellow citizens
feel as I do about gender dressing, and if that many feel that
way, how bad can it be?
I rest my case.
#
So I spent a pleasant time fulfilling a genderbased
stereotype: shopping. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
When you get the full treatment from Bobbie, no bodily
detail is too small. The big, gaudy, obvious things were
quickly disposed of. Breasts? What are people wearing this
year, Bobbie? As small as that? Well, let's not get ridiculous,
dear, I'd like to feel a little bounce, all right? Legs? Sort
of . . . you know . . . long. Long enough to reach the ground.
No knobs on the knees, if you please. Trim ankles. Arms? Well,
what can you say about arms? Work your magic, Bobbie. I like a
size five shoe and all my best dresses are nines--and thirty
years out of date, enough time for some of them to be stylish
again-so work around that. Besides, I feel comfortable in a
body that size, and height reductions cost out at nearly two
thousand per centimeter.
Some people spend most of their time on the face. Not me.
I've always preferred to make any facial changes gradually, one
feature at a time, so people can recognize me. I settled on my
basic face fifty years ago, and see no need to change it for
current fashion, beyond a little frill here and there. I told
Bobbie not to change the underlying bone structure at all; I
feel it's suitable for a male or a female countenance. He
suggested a slight fullness to the lips and showed me a new
nose I liked, and I went flat-out trendy with the ears, letting
him give me his latest design. But when I showed up for work
after the Change, everyone would know it was Hildy.
I thought I was through . . . but what about the toes?
Bare feet are quite practical in Luna, and had come back into
vogue, so people will be looking at your toes. The current rage
was to eliminate them entirely as an evolutionary atavism;
Bobbie spent some time trying to sell me on Sockfeet, which
look just like they sound. I guess I'm just a toe person. Or if
you listen to Bobbie, a Cro-Magnon. I spent half an hour on the
toes, and almost as much time on the fingers and hands. There's
nothing I hate like sweaty hands.
I put considerable thought into the contemplation of
navels. With the nipples and the vulva, the navel is the only
punctuation between the chin and the toenails, the only places
for the eye to pause in the smooth sweep of the female form I
was designing. I did not neglect it. Speaking of the vulva, I
once again proved myself a hopeless reactionary. Lately,
otherwise conservative women had been indulging the most
outrageous flights of fancy when it came to labial
architecture, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to
be sure what sex you were looking at without a second glance. I
preferred more modest, compact arrangements. With me, it is
mostly not for public display anyway. I usually wear something
below the waist, some sort of skirt or pants, and I didn't want
to frighten off a lover when I dropped them.
"You won't frighten anyone with that, Hildy," Bobbie said,
looking sourly at the simulation of the genitals I'd just spent
so much time elaborating. "I'd say your main problem here is
boredom."
"It was good enough for Eve."
"I must have missed her last showing. Can't imagine why.
I'm sure it will prove quite useful in the circles you move in,
but are you sure I couldn't interest you in--"
"I'm the one that has to use it, and that's what I want.
Have a heart, Bobbie. I'm an oldfashioned girl. And didn't I
give you a free hand with the skin tones, and the nipples, and
the ears and the shoulderblades and the collarbones and the ass
and those two fetching little dimples in the small of the
back?" I turned at the waist and looked at the full-body
simulation that had replaced one of the mirrors, and chewed on
a knuckle. "Maybe we should take another look at those dimples
. . ."
He talked me out of changing that, and into a slight
alteration of the backs of the hands, and he bitched at me some
more and threw up his hands in disgust at every opportunity,
but I could tell he was basically pleased. And so was I. I
moved around, watching the female I was about to become
duplicate all my movements, and it was good. It was the seventh
hour: time to rest.
And then a strange thing happened to me. I was taken to
the prep room, where the technicians built their mystical
elixirs, and I began to suffer a panic attack. I watched the
thousand and one brews dripping from the synthesizers into the
mixing retorts, cloudy with potential, and my heart started
beating wildly and I began to hyperventilate. I also got angry.
I knew what I was afraid of, and anyone would be angry.
Unless you've chosen the most radical of body make-overs,
very little of modern sex changing involves actual surgery. In
my case, about all the cutting that was planned was the removal
and storage of the male genitalia, and their replacement with a
vagina, cervix, uterus, and set of fallopian tubes and ovaries
which were even then being messengered over from the organ
bank, where they'd reposed since my last Change. There would be
a certain amount of body sculpting, but not much. Most of the
myriad alterations I was about to undergo would be done by the
potions being mixed in the prep room. Those brews contained two
elements: a saline solution, and uncounted trillions of
nanobots.
Some of these cunning little machines were standard, made
from templates used in all male-tofemale sex changes. Some were
customized, cobbled together from parts stolen from microbes
and viruses or from manufactured components, assembled by
Bobbie and assigned a specific and often minute task,
copyrighted, and given snippets of my own genetic code much
like a bloodhound is given an old shoe to establish the scent.
All of them were too small to be seen by the human eye. Some
were barely visible in a good microscope. Many were smaller
than that.
They were assembled by other nanobots at chemical-reaction
speeds, and produced in groups seldom smaller than one million
units. Injected into the bloodstream, they responded to the
conditions they found there, gravitated to their assigned
working sites using the same processes whereby hormones and
enzymes found their way through the corpus, identified the
right spots by using jig-saw-like pieces of these same bodily
regulators as both maps and grapplers, attached themselves, and
began to boogie. The smaller ones penetrated the individual
cell walls and entered the DNA itself, reading the amino acids
like rosary beads, making carefully planned cuts and splices.
The larger ones, the kind with actual motors and manipulators
and transistors, screws, scrapers, memories, arms--what used to
be called microbots when they were first made with the same
technologies that produced primitive integrated circuit
chips--these congregated at specified sites and performed
grosser tasks. The microbots would each be handed a piece of my
genetic code and another piece synthesized by Bobbie, which
functioned like eccentric cams in making the tiny machines do
their particular job. Some would go to my nose, for instance,
and start carving away here, building up there, using my own
body and supplementary nutrients carried in by cargo microbots.
Waste material was picked up in the same way and ferried out of
the body. In this way one could gain or lose weight very
quickly. I myself planned to emerge from the Change fifteen
kilos lighter.
The nanobots labored diligently to make the terrain fit
the map. When it did, when my nose was the shape Bobbie had
intended, they detached themselves and were flushed away,
de-programmed, and bottled to await the next customer.
Nothing new or frightening about that. It was the same
principle used in the over-the-counter pills you can buy to
change the color of your eyes or the kinkiness of your hair
while you sleep. The only difference was the nanobots in the
pills were too cheap to salvage; when they'd done their work
they simply turned themselves off in your kidneys and you
pissed them away. Most of the technology was at least one
hundred years old, some more ancient than that. The hazards
were almost nil, very well-known, and completely in control.
Except I now found I had developed a fear of nanobots.
Considering what the CC had told me about them, I didn't think
it was entirely unfounded.
The other thing that frightened me was even worse. I was
afraid to go to sleep.
Not so much sleep in the normal sense. I had slept well
enough the night before; better than normal, in fact,
considering my exhaustion from the two-day celebrity binge. But
the epic infestation of nanobots I was about to experience
wreaks havoc on the body and the mind. It's not something you
want to be awake for.
Bobbie noticed something was wrong as he took me to the
suspension tank. It was all I could do to hold still while the
techs shoved the various hoses and cables into the
freshly-incised stigmata in my arms and legs and belly. When I
was invited to step into the coffin-sized vat of cool blue
fluid, I almost lost my composure. I stood there gripping the
sides of the vat, knuckles white, with one foot in and the
other not wanting to leave the floor.
"Something the matter?" Bobbie asked, quietly. I saw some
of his helpers were trying not to stare at me.
"Nothing you could do anything about."
"You want to tell me about it? Let me get these people out
of the room."
Did I want to tell him? In a way, I was aching to. I'd
never gotten to tell Callie, and the urge to spill it to
somebody was almost overwhelming.
But this was not the place and certainly not the time, and
Bobbie was most definitely not the person. He would simply find
a way to incorporate it into the continuing Gothic novel that
was The Life Of Robert Darling, with himself the imperiled
heroine. I simply had to get through this myself and talk it
over with someone later.
And suddenly I knew who that someone would be. So get it
over with, Hildy, grit your teeth and step into the tub and let
the soothing fluids lull you into a sleep no more dangerous
than you've had every night for 36 1/2 thousand nights.
The water closed over my face. I gulped it into my
lungs--always a bit unpleasant until all the air is gone--and
looked up into the wavering face of my re-creator, unsure when
and where I would wake up again.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I found Fox deep in the bowels of the Oregon disneyland.
He was engrossed in a blueprint projected on a big horizontal
table at the foot of a machine the size of an interplanetary
liner, which I later learned was the starter motor for a
battery of machines that produced north winds in Oregon.
Machines merely elephantine in size swarmed around the
partially-assembled behemoth, some with human operators, some
working on their own, and there was the usual crowd of
blueuniformed laborers leaning on shovels and perfecting their
spitting techniques.
He glanced up as I came closer, looked me up and down, and
returned to his work. I'd seen a flicker of interest in his
eyes, but no recognition. Then he looked up again, looked
harder, and suddenly smiled.
"Hildy? Is that you?"
I stopped and twirled around for him, flashing a few dozen
of Crazy Bob's Best Patented Incisors and two of the greatest
legs the Master ever designed as my skirt swirled out like a
Dresden figurine. He tossed a light pen on the screen and came
toward me, took my hand and squeezed it. Then he realized what
he was doing, laughed, and hugged me tightly.
"It's been too long," he said. "I saw you on the 'pad the
other day." He gestured at me in a way that said he hadn't
expected what he was seeing now. I shrugged; the body spoke for
itself.
"Reading the Nipple now? I don't believe it."
"You didn't have to read the Nipple to catch your act.
Every time I changed the channel, there you were, boring
everybody to death."
I made no comment. He had surely been as interested at
first as Bobbie and everybody else in Luna, but why bother to
explain that to him? And knowing Fox, he wouldn't admit he
could be as easily seduced by a sensational story as the rest
of his fellow citizens.
"Frankly, I'm glad the idiot's gone. You have no idea the
kind of problems David Earth and his merry band cause in my
line of work."
"It's Saturday," I said, "but your service said you'd be
down here."
"Hell, it's almost Sunday. It's the typical start-up
problems. Look, I'll be through here in a few minutes. Why
don't you stick around, we can go out for dinner, or breakfast,
or something."
"The something sounds interesting."
"Great. If you're thirsty one of these layabouts can scare
up a beer for you; give 'em something to do equal to their
talents." He turned away and hurried back to his work.
The brief sensation caused by my arrival died away; by
that I mean the several dozen men and handful of women who had
transferred their gazes from the far distance to my legs now
returned to the contemplation of infinity.
A sidewalk supervisor unused to the ways of the
construction game might have wondered how anything got done
with so many philosophers and so few people with dirty hands in
evidence. The answer was simply that Fox and three or four
other engineers did all the work that didn't involve lifting
and carrying, and the machines did the rest. Though hundreds of
cubic miles of stone and soil would be moved and shaped before
Oregon was complete, not a spoonful of it would be shifted by
the Hod-carriers Union members, though they were so numerous
one could almost believe they could accomplish it in a few
weeks. No, the shovels they carried were highly polished,
ceremonial badges of profession, as un-sullied by dirt as the
day they were made. Their chief function was safety. If one of
the deep thinkers fell asleep standing up, the shovel handle
could be slotted into an inverted pocket on the worker's union
suit and sometimes prevented that worthy from falling over. Fox
claimed it was the chief cause of onthe-job accidents.
Perhaps I exaggerate. The job guarantee is a civil right
basic to our society, and it is a sad fact that a great many
Lunarians are suited only for the kind of job machines took
over long ago. No matter how much we tinker with genes and
eliminate the actually defective, I think we'll always have the
slow, the unimaginative, the disinterested, the hopeless. What
should we do with them? What we've decided is that everyone who
wants to will be given a job and some sort of badge of
profession to testify to it, and put to some sort of work four
hours a day. If you don't want to work, that's fine, too. No
one starves, and air has been free since before I was born.
It didn't used to be that way. Right after the Invasion if
you didn't pay your air tax, you could be shown to the airlock
without your suit. I like the new way better.
But I'll confess it seems terribly inefficient. I'm
ignorant when it comes to economics, but when I bother to
wonder about such things it seems there must be a less wasteful
way. Then I wonder what these people would do to fill their
already-from my viewpoint--empty lives, and I resolve to stop
wondering. What's the big problem with it, anyway? I suspect
there were people standing around leaning on shovels when the
contract for the first pyramid was signed.
Does it sound terribly intolerant for me to say I don't
understand how they do it? Perhaps they'd think the same of me,
working in a "creative" capacity for an organization I loathe,
at a profession with dubious--at best--claims to integrity.
Maybe these laborers would think me a whore. Maybe I am a
literary whore. But in my defense I can say that journalism, if
I may be permitted to use the term, has not been my only job. I
have done other things, and at that moment felt strongly that I
would be moving on from the Nipple fairly soon.
Most of the men and women around me as I waited for Fox
had never held another job. They were not suited for anything
else. Most were illits, and the opportunities for meaningful
work for such people are few. If they had artistic talent
they'd be using it.
How did they make it through the day? Were these the
people who were contributing to the alarming rise in suicide
the CC reported? Did they get up some morning, pick up the
shovel, think the hell with it, and blow their brains out? I
resolved to ask the CC, when I started speaking to him again.
It just seemed so bleak to me. I studied one man, a
foreman according to one of the many badges pinned to his
denims, a Century Man with the gaudy lapel pin proclaiming he
had spent one hundred years leaning on that shovel. He was
standing near Fox, looking in the general direction of the
blueprint table with an expression I'd last seen on an animal
that was chewing its cud. Did he have hopes and dreams and
fears, or had he used them all up? We've prolonged life to the
point that we don't have a clear idea of when it might end, but
have failed to provide anything new and interesting to do with
that vast vista of years.
Fox put his hand on my shoulder and I realized, with a
shock and a perverse sense of reassurance that I must have
looked like a cud-chewer myself as I thought my deep,
penetrating thoughts. That foreman was probably a fine fellow
to sit around and bullshit with. I'll bet he was a terrific
joke-teller and could throw one hell of a game of darts. Did we
all have to be, to use the traditional expression, rocket
scientists? I know a rocket scientist, and a slimier curmudgeon
you would not care to meet.
"You're looking good," Fox said.
"Thanks. You all done here for now?"
"Until Monday. I hate to be one of those people married to
the job, but if somebody doesn't worry about it this place
won't live up to its potential."
"Still the same Fox." I put my arm around his waist as we
walked toward his trailer, parked in a jumble of idle machines.
He put his hand on my shoulder, but I could tell his thoughts
were still back in the blueprints.
"I guess so. But this is going to be the best disney yet,
Hildy. Mount Hood is finished; all we need is some snow. It's
only one-quarter scale, but it fools the eye from almost any
angle. The Columbia's full and almost up to speed. The gorge is
going to be magnificent. We're going to have a real salmon run.
I've got Douglas Firs twenty meters high. Even when you
force-grow 'em, those babies take some time. Deer, grizzlies .
. . it'll be great."
"How long till completion?" We were passing some bear
pens. The inmates looked out at us with lazy predators' eyes.
"Five years, if it all goes well. Probably seven,
realistically." He held the door to the trailer and followed me
inside. It was utilitarian, overflowing with papers. About the
only personal touch I saw was an antique slide rule mounted
over the gas fireplace. "You want to order something in?
There's a good Japanese place that will deliver here. I had to
train them; this place is tough to find. Or we could go out if
there's something else you'd rather have."
I knew exactly what I wanted, and we wouldn't have to
order out for it. I put my arms around him and kissed him in a
way that almost made up for the forty years we'd been out of
each others' beds. When I drew back for a breath, he was
smiling down at me.
"Is this dress a particular favorite?" he asked. He had
his hand in the neckline, bunching the fabric.
"Would it do me any good to say yes?"
He slowly shook his head, and ripped it off.
#
Lovers of fashion should be relieved to note two things:
the dress was thirty years old and not one of those that was
stylish again, though I had picked it because it flattered the
new me. Bobbie would have gagged to see it, but Fox was more
direct. And second, I had known Fox would destroy it, though
not as a fashion policeman-male or female, Fox was dense about
such things. The main thing one needed to know about Fox was
that--male or female--he liked to dominate. He liked sex to be
rough and urgent and just this side of brutal, and that was
exactly what I was in the mood for. As he gave me one of the
most thorough rogerings of my life I thanked what gods there be
that I had found him during a male period of his life.
Fox was the one I had thought of as I stood nervously on
the brink of Change, and it made perfect sense that I did. He
and I . . . actually, for a time it had been she and I, then he
and I . . . we had been lovers for ten years. I don't know just
why we broke up, or maybe I've forgotten, but we came out of
the parting good friends. Perhaps we simply grew apart, as they
say, though that's always sounded like a facile explanation.
How much growing do you still have to do when one of you is
sixty and the other is fifty-five? But it had been a
comfortable time in my life.
The need to see him had been so urgent I had changed my
plan to do a little shopping on the Platz, thereby doing my
bank balance a big favor. I had rushed home, dressed in the
scoop-necked, knee-length satiny black dress with the ballerina
skirt that currently lay tattered, wrinkled, and getting very
sweaty beneath my naked back, changed my hair color to match
the clothes, sprayed makeup on my eyes and mouth and polish on
my nails, doused myself with Fox's favorite scent, and was back
out the door in three minutes flat. I had taxied to Oregon,
worked my feminine magic on the poor boy and within fifteen
minutes had my knees in the air and my hands gripping his bare
behind, barking like a dog and trying to force him through my
body and into the floor beneath us.
Do you see why ULTRA-Tingle is already in financial
trouble?
Fox usually had that effect on me. Not always quite so
intense, it's true. I was experiencing something politely
called hormone shock, or Change mania, but more often known as
going cunt crazy. One shouldn't expect to undergo such radical
alterations to one's body without a certain upset to the
psyche. With me it's always a heightening of sexual hunger.
Some people simply get irresponsible. I've got a friend who has
to instruct his bank to shut off his line of credit for five
days after a Change, or he'd spend every shilling he had.
What I was spending you can't put in a bank, and there's
no sense in saving it anyway.
#
Afterwards, he ordered a mountain of sushi and tempura and
when it was delivered, fired up the trailer and took us through
a long dark air duct and into Oregon.
Like all disneylands, it was a huge hemispherical bubble,
more or less flat on the bottom, the curved roof painted blue.
The first ones had been only a kilometer or two across, but as
the engineers figured out better ways to support them, the
newer ones were growing with no outer limit in sight. Oregon
was one of the biggest, along with two others currently under
construction: Kansas and Borneo. Fox tried his best not to bore
me with statistics; I simply forget them a few minutes after
hearing them. Suffice it to say the place was very big.
The floor was mostly rock and dirt shaped into hills and
two mountains. The one he'd called Mount Hood was tall and
sharply pointed. The other was truncated and looked unfinished.
"That's going to be a volcano," he said. "Or at least a
good approximation of an active volcano. There was an eruption
in this area in historic times."
"You mean lava and fire and smoke?"
"I wish we could. But the power requirements to melt
enough rock for a worthwhile eruption would bust the budget,
plus any really good volume of smoke would hurt the trees and
wildlife. What it's going to do is vent steam three or four
times a day and shoot sparks at night. Should be real pretty.
The project manager's trying to convince the money people to
fund a yearly ash plume-nothing catastrophic, it actually
benefits the trees. And I'm pretty sure we'll be able to mount
a modest lava flow every ten or twenty years."
"I wish I could see it better. It's pretty dim in here."
The only real light sources were at the scattered tree farms,
dots of bright green in the blasted landscape.
"Let me get the sun turned on." He picked up a mike and
talked to the power section, and a few minutes later the "sun"
flickered and then blazed directly overhead.
"All this will be covered in virgin forest; green as far
as the eye can see. Not at all like your shack in Texas. This
is a wet, cool climate, lots of snow in higher elevations.
Mostly conifers. We're even putting in a grove of sequoias down
in the south part, though we're fudging a bit on that,
geographically speaking."
"Green'd be a lot better than this," I said.
"You'll never be a true West Texan, Hildy," he told me,
and smiled.
He set us down on the Columbia River, at the mouth of the
gorge where it was wider and slower, on a broad, flat sandbar
of an island which was the center of what he called an
ecological testbed. The beach was wide and hard-packed, full of
frozen ripples. Across the river were the advertised pine
trees, but near us there was only estuarine vegetation, the
sort of plants that didn't mind being flooded periodically. It
ran to tall skinny grasses and low, hardy bushes, few taller
than my head. There were some really huge logs half buried in
the sand, bleached gray-white and rubbed smooth and round by
sun, wind, and water. I realized they were artificial, put
there to impress the occasional visitors, who were always
brought here.
We spread out a blanket on the sand and sat there gorging
ourselves on the food. He stuck mostly to the shrimpoid tempura
while I concentrated on the maguro, uni, hamachi, toro, tako
and paper-thin slices of fugu. I dredged each piece in enough
of that wonderful green horseradish to make my nose run and my
ears turn bright red. Then we made love again, slow and tender
for the first hour, unusual for Fox, only getting intense near
the end. We stretched out in the sun and never quite fell
asleep, just lolling like satiated reptiles. At least I hadn't
thought I was asleep until Fox woke me by flipping me over onto
my stomach and entering me without any warning. (No, not that
way. Fox likes to initiate it and he likes it rough, but he's
not into giving pain and I'm not into receiving it.) Anyway,
these things even out. When Fox was a girl she usually forced
herself down on me before she was quite ready. Maybe he thought
all girls liked it that way. I didn't enlighten him, because I
didn't mind it that much and the lovemaking that followed was
always Olympic quality.
And afterwards . . .
There's always an afterwards. Perhaps that's why my ten
years with Fox was the longest relationship I ever had. After
the sex, most of them want to talk to you, and I always had
trouble finding people I wanted to talk to as well as have sex
with. Fox was the exception. So afterwards . . .
I put the remains of my clothing back on. The dress was
severely ripped; I couldn't get it to stay over my left breast,
and there were gaping holes here and there. It suited my mood.
We walked along the river's edge in water that never covered
our feet. I was playing the castaway game. This time I could
pretend to be a rich socialite in the tatters of her fancy
gown, desperately seeking good native help. I trailed my toes
in the water as I walked.
This place was timeless and unreal in a way Scarpa Island
never was. The sun still hung there at high noon. I picked up a
handful of sand and peered at it, and it was just as detailed
as the imaginary sand of my year-long mental environment. It
smelled different. It was riverine sand, not white coral, and
the water was fresh instead of salty, with a different set of
microscopic lifeforms in it. The water was warmer than the
Pacific waters. Hell, it was quite hot in Oregon, into the
lower forties. Something to do with the construction. We had
both dripped sweat all day. I had licked it off his body and
found it quite tasty. Not so much the sweat as the body I
licked it from.
The setting could not have been more perfect if I'd picked
it myself. Say, Fox, this place reminds me of an odd little
adventure I had one day about a week ago, between 15:30.0002
P.M. and around, oh, let's say 15:30.0009. And isn't it amazing
how times flies when you're having fun.
So I said something a little less puzzling than that, and
gradually told him the story. Right up to the punch line, at
which point I gagged on it.
Fox wasn't as reticent as Callie.
"I've heard of the technique, of course," he said. "I
ought to be surprised you hadn't, but I guess you still shy
away from technology, just like you used to."
"It's not very relevant to my job. Or my life."
"That's what you thought. It must seem more relevant now."
"Granted. It's never jumped up and bit me before."
"That's what I can't figure. What you describe is a
radical treatment for mental problems. I can't imagine the CC
using it on you without your consent unless you had something
seriously wrong with you."
He let that hang, and once more I gagged. Give Fox points
for candor; he didn't let a little thing like my obvious
humiliation stand in his way.
"So what is your problem?" he asked, artless as a
three-year-old.
"What's the penalty for littering in here?" I said.
"Go ahead. This whole area will be relandscaped before the
public gets to track things in with their muddy feet."
I took off the ruined dress and balled it up as well as I
could. I hurled it out toward the water. It ballooned, fell
into the gentle current. We watched it float for a short
distance, soak up water, and hang up on the bottom. Fox had
said you could walk a hundred meters out from the island and
not be in much deeper than your knees. After that it got deep
quickly. We had come to the point where the island ended at the
upstream end. We stood on the last little bit of sand and
watched the current nudge the dress an inch at a time. I drew a
ragged breath and felt a tear run down my cheek.
"If I'd known you felt that way about the dress, I'd never
have torn it." When I glanced at him he took the tear on the
tip of his finger and licked the finger with his tongue. I
smiled weakly. I walked out into the water, heading upstream,
and could hear him following behind me.
Some of it was the hormonal shock, I'm sure. I don't cry
much, and no more when I'm female than when male. The change
probably released it, and it felt right; it was time to cry. It
was time to admit how frightened I was by the whole thing.
I sat down in the warm water. It didn't cover my legs. I
started working my hands into the sand on each side of me.
"It seems that I keep trying to kill myself," I said.
He was standing beside me. I looked up at him, wiped away
another tear. God, he looked good. I wanted to move to him,
make him ready again with my mouth, recline on this watery bed
and have him move inside me with the slow, gentle rhythms of
the river. Was that a life-affirming urge, or a death wish,
metaphorically speaking? Was I in the river of life, or was I
fantasizing about becoming part of the detritus that all rivers
sweep eternally to the sea? There was no sea at the end of this
river, just a deeper, saltier growing biome for the salmon that
would soon teem here, struggling upstream to die. The sky the
sun would wester and die in was a painted backdrop. Did the
figures of speech of Old Earth still pertain here?
It had to be an image of life. I wasn't tired of livin',
and I was very skeered of dyin'. He just keeps rolling, don't
he? Isn't that what life's all about?
Be that as it may, Fox was not the man for gentle river
rhythms, not twice in one day. He'd get carried away and in my
present mood I would snap at him. So I kissed his leg and
resumed my excavation work in the sand.
He sat down behind me and put his legs on each side of me
and started massaging my shoulders. I don't think I ever loved
him more than at that moment. It was exactly what I needed. I
hung my head, went boneless as an eel, let him dig his strong
fingers into every knot and twitch.
"Can I say . . . I don't want to hurt you, how should I
say it? I should have been surprised to hear that. I mean, it's
awful, it's unexpected, it's not something you want to hear
from a dear friend, and I want to say 'No, Hildy, it can't be
true!' You know? But I was surprised to find that . . . I
wasn't surprised. What an awful thing to say."
"No, go ahead and say it," I murmured. His hands were
working on my head now. Much more pressure and my skull would
crack, and more power to him. Maybe some of the demons would
fly away through the fissures.
"In some ways, Hildy, you've always been the unhappiest
person I know."
I let that sink in without protest, just as I was sinking
very slowly into the sand beneath me. I was a light brown sack
of sand he was shaping with his fingers. I found nothing wrong
with this sensation.
"I think it's your job," he said.
"Do you really?"
"It must have occurred to you. Tell me you love your work,
and I'll shut up."
There was no sense saying anything to that.
"Not going to say anything about how good you are at
reporting? No comments about how exciting it is? You are good,
you know. Too good, in my opinion. Ever get anywhere on that
novel?"
"Not so's you'd notice."
"What about working for another pad? One a little less
interested in celebrity marriages and violent death."
"I don't think that would help anything; I never had much
respect for journalism as a profession in the first place. At
least the Nipple doesn't pretend to be anything but what it
is."
"Pure shit."
"Exactly. I know you're right. I'm not happy in my work.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to be quitting soon. All that stops
me is I don't have any idea what I'd do as an alternative."
"I hear there's openings in the Coolie's Union. They won
the contract for Borneo. The Hodcarriers are still muttering
about it."
"Nice to hear they get excited about something. Maybe I
should," I said, half-seriously. "Less wear and tear on the
nerves."
"It wouldn't work out. I'll tell you what your problem is,
Hildy. You've always wanted to be . . . useful. You wanted to
do something important."
"Make a difference? Change the world? I don't think so."
"I think you gave up on it before I met you. There's
always been a streak of bitterness in you about that; it's one
of the reasons we broke up."
"Really? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm not sure I knew it at the time."
We were both quiet for a while, tromping down memory lane.
I was pleased to note that, even with this revelation, the
memories were mostly good. He kept massaging me, pushing me
forward now to get at my lower back. I offered no resistance,
letting my head fall forward. I could see my hair trailing in
the water. I wonder why people can't purr like cats? If I could
have, I would have been at that moment. Maybe I should take it
up with the CC. He could probably find a way to make it work.
He began to slow down in his work. No one ever wants that
sort of thing to stop, but I knew his hands were tiring. I
leaned back against him and he encircled me with his arms under
my breasts. I put my hands on his knees.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"You know you can."
"What makes life worth living for you?"
He didn't give it a flip answer, which I'd half expected.
He thought it over for a while, then sighed and rested his chin
on my shoulder.
"I don't know if that's really answerable. There's surface
reasons. The most obvious one is I get a sense of
accomplishment from my work."
"I envy you that," I said. "Your work doesn't get erased
after a ten-second read."
"There's disappointment there, too. I had sort of wanted
to build these things." His arm swept out to take in the
uncompleted vastness of Oregon. "Turned out my talents lay in
other directions. That would be a sense of accomplishment, to
leave something like this behind you."
"Is that the key? Leaving something behind? For
'posterity?'"
"Fifty years ago I might have said yes. And it's certainly
a reason. I think it's the reason for most people who have the
wit to ask what life's all about in the first place. I'm not
sure if it's enough reason for me anymore. Not that I'm
unhappy; I do love my work, I'm eager to arrive here every
morning, I work late, I come in on weekends. But as to leaving
something that I created, my work is even more ephemeral than
yours."
"You're right," I said in considerable amazement. "I
hadn't thought that was possible."
"See?" he laughed. "You learn something new every day.
That's a reason for living. Maybe a trivial one. But I get
satisfaction in the act of creation. It doesn't have to last.
It doesn't have to have meaning."
"Art."
"I've begun to think in those terms. Maybe it's
presumptuous, but we weatherfolks have started to get a
following for what we do. Who knows where it might go? But
creating something is pretty important to me." He hesitated,
then plowed ahead. "There's another sort of creation."
I knew exactly what he meant. When all was said and done,
that was the primary reason for our parting. He had had a child
shortly afterward-I'd asked him never to tell me if I was the
father. He had thought I should have one as well, and I had
told him flatly it was none of his business.
"I'm sorry. Shouldn't have brought it up," he said.
"No, please. I asked; I have to be ready to hear the
answers, even if I don't agree."
"And you don't?"
"I don't know. I've thought about it. As you must have
guessed, I've been doing a lot of thinking about a lot of
things."
"Then you'll have considered the negative reason for
wanting to live. Sometimes I think it's the main one. I'm
afraid of death. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to
find out until the last possible moment."
"No heavenly harps to look forward to?"
"You can't be serious. Logically, you have to figure you
just stop existing, just go out like a light. But I defy anyone
to really imagine that. You know I'm not a mystic, but a long
life has led me to believe, to my great bemusement, that I do
believe there's something after death. I can't prove one iota
of this feeling, and you can't budge me from it."
"I wouldn't try. On my better days, I feel the same way."
I sighed one of the weariest sighs I can remember sighing. I'd
been doing it a lot lately, each one wearier than the one
before. Where would it end? Don't answer.
"So," I said. "We've got job dissatisfaction. Somehow I
just don't think that's enough. There are simpler solutions to
the problem. The restless urge to create. Childlessness." I was
ticking them off on my fingers. Probably not a nice thing to
do, since he'd tried his best. But I had hoped for some new
perspective, which was entirely unreasonable but all the more
disappointing when none appeared. "And fear of death. Somehow
none of those really satisfy."
"I shouldn't say it, but I knew they wouldn't. Please,
Hildy, get some professional counseling. There, I said it, I
had to say it, but since I've known you for a long time and
don't like to lie to you, I'll also say this: I don't think it
will help you. You've never been one to accept somebody else's
answers or advice. I feel in my gut that you'll have to solve
this one on your own."
"Or not solve it. And don't apologize; you're completely
right."
The river rolled on, the sun hung there in the painted
sky. No time passed, and took a very long interval to do so.
Neither of us felt the pressure to speak. I'd have been happy
to spend the next decade there, as long as I didn't have to
think. But I knew Fox would eventually get antsy. Hell, so
would I.
"Can I ask you one more thing?"
He nibbled my ear.
"No, not that. Well, not yet, anyway." I tilted my head
back and looked at him, inches away from my face. "Are you
living with anyone?"
"No."
"Can I move in with you for a while? Say, a week? I'm very
frightened and very lonely, Fox. I'm afraid to be alone."
He didn't say anything.
"I just want to sleep with somebody for a while. I don't
want to beg."
"Let me think about it."
"Sure." It should have hurt, but oddly enough, it didn't.
I knew I would have said the same thing. What I didn't know is
how I would have decided. The bald truth was I was asking for
his help in saving my life, and we both knew enough to realize
there was little he could do but hug me. So if he did try to
help and I did end up killing myself . . . that's a hell of a
load of guilt to hazard without giving it a little thought. I
could tell him there were no strings, that he needn't blame
himself if the worst happened, but I knew he would and he knew
I knew it, so I didn't insult him by telling him that lie and I
didn't up the stakes by begging any more. Instead I nestled
more firmly into his arms and watched the Columbia roll on,
roll on.
#
We walked back to the trailer. Somewhere in the journey we
noticed the river was no longer flowing. It became smooth and
still, placid as a long lake. It reflected the trees on the far
side as faithfully as any mirror. Fox said they'd been having
trouble with some of the pumps. "Not my department," he said,
thankfully. It could have been pretty, but it gave me a chilly
feeling up and down the spine. It reminded me of the frozen sea
back at Scarpa Island.
Then he got a remote unit from the trailer and said he had
something to show me. He tapped out a few codes and my shadow
began to move.
The sun scuttled across the sky like some great silver
bird. The shadow of each tree and bush and blade of grass
marked its passage like a thousand hourglasses. If you want to
experience disorientation, give that a try. I found myself
getting dizzy, swayed and set my feet apart, discovered the
whole thing was a lot more interesting when viewed from a
sitting position.
In a few minutes the sun went below the western horizon.
That was not what Fox had wanted to show me. Clouds were rising
in that direction, thin wispy ones, cirrus I think, or at least
intended to look like cirrus. The invisible sun painted them
various shades of red and blue, hovering somewhere just out of
sight.
"Very pretty," I said.
"That's not it."
There was a distant boom, and a huge smoke ring rose
slowly into the sky, tinged with golden light. Fox was working
intently. I heard a faraway whistling sound, and the smoke ring
began to alter in shape. The top was pressed down, the bottom
drawn out. I couldn't figure out what the point of all this
was, and then I saw it. The ring had formed a passable
heart-shape. A valentine. I laughed, and hugged him.
"Fox, you're a romantic fool after all."
He was embarrassed. He hadn't meant it to be taken that
way--which I had known, but he's easy to tease and I could
never resist it. So he coughed, and took refuge in technical
explanation.
"I found out I could make a sort of backfire effect in
that wind machine," he said, as we watched the ring writhe into
shapelessness. "Then it's easy to use concentrated jets to mold
it, within limits. Come back here when we open up, and I'll be
able to write your name in the sunset."
We showered off the sand and he asked if I'd like to see a
scheduled blast in Kansas. I'd never seen a nuke before, so I
said yes. He flew the trailer to a lock, and we emerged on the
surface, where he turned control over to the autopilot and told
me about some of the things he'd been doing in other
disneylands as we looked at the airless beauty falling away
beneath us.
Maybe you have to be there to appreciate Fox's weather
sculpture. He rhapsodized about ice storms and blizzards he'd
created, and it meant nothing to me. But he did pique my
interest. I told him I'd attend his next showing. I wondered if
he was angling for coverage in the Nipple. Well, I've got a
suspicious mind, and I'd been right about things like that
often enough. I couldn't figure a way to make it interesting to
my readership unless somebody famous attended, or something
violent and horrible happened there.
#
Oregon was a showplace compared to Kansas. I'd like to
have had a piece of the dust concession.
They were still in the process of excavation. The
half-dome was nearly complete, with just some relatively small
areas near the north edge to blast away. Fox said the best
vantage point would be near the west edge; if we'd gone all the
way to the south the dust would have obscured the blast too
much to make the trip worthwhile. He landed the trailer near an
untidy cluster of similar modular mobile homes and we joined a
group of a few dozen other firework fans.
This show was strictly "to the trade." Everyone but me was
a construction engineer; this sort of thing was not open to the
public. Not that it was really rare. Kansas had required
thousands of blasts like this, and would need about a hundred
more before it was complete. Fox described it as the best-kept
secret in Luna.
"It's not really much of a blast as these things go," he
said. "The really big ones would jolt the structure too much.
But when we're starting out, we use charges about ten times
larger than this one."
I noticed the "we." He really did want to build these
places instead of just install and run the weather machines.
"Is it dangerous?"
"That's sort of a relative question. It's not as safe as
sleeping in your bed. But these things are calculated to a
fare-thee-well. We haven't had a blasting accident in thirty
years." He went on to tell me more than I'd wanted to know
about the elaborate precautions, things like radar to detect
big chunks of rock that might be heading our way, and lasers to
vaporize them. He had me completely reassured, and then he had
to go and spoil it.
"If I say run," he said, seriously, "hop in the trailer,
pronto."
"Do I need to protect my eyes?"
"Clear leaded glass will do it. It's the UV that burns.
Expect a certain dazzle effect at first. Hell, Hildy, if it
blinds you the company's insurance will get you some new eyes."
I was perfectly happy with the eyes I had. I began to
wonder if it had been such a good idea, coming here. I resolved
to look away for the first several seconds. Common human lore
was heavy with stories of what could happen to you in a nuclear
explosion, dating all the way back to Old Earth, when they'd
used a few of them to fry their fellow beings by the millions.
The traditional countdown began at ten. I put on the
safety glasses and closed my eyes at two. So naturally I opened
them when the light shone through my eyelids. There was a
dazzle, as he'd said, but my eyes quickly recovered. How to
describe something that bright? Put all the bright lights you
ever saw into one place, and it wouldn't begin to touch the
intensity of that light. Then there was the ground shock, and
the air shock, and finally, much later, the sound. I mean, I
thought I'd been hearing the sound of it, but that was the
shock waves emanating from the ground. The sound in the air was
much more impressive. Then the wind. And the fiery cloud. The
whole thing took several minutes to unfold. When the flames had
died away there was a scattering of applause and a few shouts.
I turned to Fox and grinned at him, and he was grinning, too.
Twenty kilometers away, a thousand people were already
dead in what came to be called the Kansas Collapse.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
None of us were aware of the disaster at the time.
We drank a toast in champagne, a tradition among these
engineering people. Within ten minutes Fox and I were back in
the trailer and heading for an air lock. He said the fastest
way back to King City was on the surface, and that was fine
with me. I didn't enjoy driving through the system of tunnels
that honeycombed the rock around a disneyland.
We had no sooner emerged into the sunlight than the
trailer was taken over by the autopilot, which informed us that
we would have to enter a holding pattern or land, since all
traffic was being cleared for emergency vehicles. A few of
these streaked silently past us, blue lights flashing.
Neither of us could remember an emergency of this apparent
size on the surface. There were occasional pressure losses in
the warrens, of course. No system is perfect. But loss of life
in these accidents was rare. So we turned on the radio, and
what we heard sent me searching through Fox's belongings in the
back of the trailer until I came up with a newspad. It was the
Straight Shit, and in other circumstances I would have teased
him unmercifully about that. But the story that came over the
pad was the type that made any snide remarks die in one's
throat.
There had been a major blowout at a surface resort called
Nirvana. First reports indicated some loss of life, and live
pictures from security cameras--all that was available for the
first ten minutes we watched--showed bodies lying motionless by
a large swimming pool. The pool was bubbling violently. At
first we thought it was a big jacuzzi, then we realized with a
shock that the water was boiling. Which meant there was no air
in there, and those people were certainly dead. Their postures
were odd, too. They all seemed to be holding on to something,
such as a table leg or a heavy concrete planter with a palm
tree.
A story like that evolves in its own fractured way. First
reports are always sketchy, and usually wrong. We heard
estimates of twenty dead, then fifty, then, spoken in awe, two
hundred. Then those reports were denied, but I had counted
thirty corpses myself. It was maddening. We're spoiled by
instant coverage, we expect news stories to be cogent, prompt,
and nicely framed by steady cameras. These cameras were steady,
all right. They were immobile, and after a few minutes your
mind screamed for them to pan, just a little bit, so you could
see what was just out of sight. But that didn't happen until
about ten minutes after we landed, ten minutes that seemed like
an hour.
At first I think it affected me more than Fox. He was
shocked and horrified, naturally, and so was I, on one level.
The other level, the newshound, was seething with impatience,
querying the autopilot three times a minute when we could get
up and out of there so I could go cover the story. It's not
pretty, I know, but any reporter will understand the impulse.
You want to move. You tuck the horror of the images away in
some part of your mind where police and coroners put ugly
things, and your pulse pounds with impatience to get the next
detail, and the next, and the next. To be stuck on the ground
fifteen klicks away was torture of the worst kind.
Then a fact was mentioned that made it all too real for
Fox. I didn't catch its importance. I just looked over at him
and saw his face had gone white and his hands were trembling.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"The time," he whispered. "They just mentioned the time of
the blowout."
I listened, and the announcer said it again.
"Was that . . .?"
"Yes. It was within a second of the blast."
I was still so preoccupied with wanting to get to Nirvana
that it was a full minute before I realized what I should be
doing. Then I turned on Fox's phone and called the Nipple,
using my secondhighest urgency code to guarantee quick access
to Walter. The top code, he had told me, was reserved for
filing on the end of the universe, or an exclusive interview
with Elvis.
"Walter, I've got footage of the cause of the blowout," I
said, when his ugly face appeared on the screen.
"The cause? You were there? I thought everybody--"
"No, I wasn't there. I was in Kansas. I have reason to
believe the disaster was set off by a nuclear explosion I was
watching in Kansas."
"It sounds unlikely. Are you sure--"
"Walter, it has to be, or else it's the biggest
coincidence since that straight flush I beat your full house
with."
"That was no coincidence."
"Damn right it wasn't, and someday I'll tell you how I did
it. Meantime, you've wasted twenty seconds of valuable
newstime. Run it with a disclaimer if you want to, you know,
'Could this have been the cause of the tragedy in Nirvana?' "
"Give it to me."
I fumbled around on the dash, and swore under my breath.
"Where's the neurofeed on this damn thing?" I asked Fox. He was
looking at me strangely, but he pulled a wire from a recessed
compartment. I fumbled it into my occipital socket, and said
the magic words that caused the crystalline memory to recycle
and spew forth the last six hours of holocam recordings in five
seconds.
"Where the hell are you, anyway?" Walter was saying. "I've
had a call out for you for twenty minutes."
I told him, and he said he'd get on it. Thirty seconds
later the autopilot was cleared into the traffic pattern. The
press has some clout in situations like this, but I hadn't been
able to apply it from my beached position. We rose into the sky
. . . and turned the wrong way.
"What the hell are you doing?" I asked Fox, incredulously.
"Going back to King City," he said, quietly. "I have no
desire to witness any of what we've seen first-hand. And I
especially don't want to witness you covering it."
I was about to blast him out of his seat, but I took
another look, and he looked dangerous. I had the feeling that
one more word from me would unleash something I didn't want to
hear, and maybe even more than that. So I swallowed it,
mentally calculating how long it would take me to get back to
Nirvana from the nearest King City air lock.
With a great effort I pulled myself out of reportorial
mode and tried to act like a human being. Surely I could do it
for a few minutes, I thought.
"You can't be thinking you had anything to do with this,"
I said. He kept his eyes forward, as if he really had to see
where the trailer was going.
"You told me yourself--"
"Look, Hildy. I didn't set the charge, I didn't do the
calculations. But some of my friends did. And it's going to
reflect on all of us. Right now I have to get onto the phone,
we're going to have to try and find out what went wrong. And I
do feel responsible, so don't try to argue me out of it,
because I know it isn't logical. I just wish you wouldn't talk
to me right now."
I didn't. A few minutes later he smashed his fist into the
dashboard and said, "I keep remembering us standing around
watching. Cheering. I can still taste the champagne."
I got out at the airlock, flagged a taxi, and told it to
take me to Nirvana.
#
Most disasters look eminently preventable in hindsight. If
only the warnings had been heeded, if only this safety measure
had been implemented, if only somebody had thought of this
possibility, if only, if only. I exempt the so-called acts of
God, which used to include things like earthquakes, hurricanes,
and meteor strikes. But hurricanes are infrequent on Luna. Moon
quakes are almost as rare, and selenography is exact enough to
predict them with a high degree of accuracy. Meteors come on
very fast and very hard, but their numbers are small and their
average size is tiny, and all vulnerable structures are ringed
with radars powerful enough to detect any dangerous ones and
lasers big enough to vaporize them. The last blowout of any
consequence had happened almost sixty years before the Kansas
Collapse. Lunarians had grown confident of their safety
measures. We had grown complacent enough to overcome our innate
suspicion of vacuum and the surface, some of us, to the point
where the rich now frolicked and tanned in the sunlight beneath
domes designed to give the impression they weren't even there.
If someone had built a place like Nirvana a hundred years ago
there would have been few takers. Back then the rich peopled
only the lowest, most secure levels and the poor took their
chances with only eight or nine pressure doors between them and
the Breathsucker.
But a century of technological improvements, of fail-safe
systems that transcended the merely careful and entered the
realms of the preposterous, of pyramided knowledge of how to
live in a hostile environment . . . a hundred years of this had
worked as sea-change on Lunar society. The cities had turned
over, like I've heard lakes do periodically, and the bottom had
risen to the top. The formerly swank levels of Bedrock were now
the slums, and the Vac Rows in the upper levels were
now--suitable renovated--the place to be. Anyone who aspired to
be somebody had to have a real window on the surface.
There were some exceptions. Old reactionaries like Callie
still liked to burrow deep, though she had no horror of the
surface. And a significant minority still suffered from that
most common Lunar phobia, fear of airlessness. They managed
well enough, I suppose. I've read that a lot of people on Old
Earth feared high places or flying in aircraft, which must have
been a problem in a society that valued the penthouse apartment
and quick travel.
Nirvana was not the most exclusive surface resort on Luna,
but it wasn't the type hawked in three-day two-night package
deals, either. I've never understood the attraction of paying
an exorbitant amount for a "natural" view of the surface while
basking in the carefully filtered rays of the sun. I'd much
prefer just about any of the underground disneys. If you wanted
a swimming pool, there were any number belowground where the
water was just as wet. But some people find simulated earth
environments frightening. A surprising number of people just
don't like plants, or the insects that hide themselves among
the leaves, and have no real use for animals, either. Nirvana
catered to these folks, and to the urge to be seen with other
people who had enough money to blow in a place like that. It
featured gambling, dancing, tanning, and some amazingly
childish games organized by the management, all done under the
sun or the stars in the awesome beauty of Destination Valley.
And it had damn well better be awesome. The builders had
spent a huge amount of money to make it that way.
Destination Valley was a three-kilometer Lunar rift that
had been artfully carved into the kind of jagged peaks and
sheer cliffs that a valley on "The Moon" should have been, if
God had employed a more flamboyant set designer, the sort of
lunar feature everybody imagined before the opening of the age
of space and the return of the first, dismal pictures of what
Luna really looked like. There were no acned rolling hillocks
here, no depressing gray-and-white fields of scoria, no
boulders with all the edges rubbed off by a billion years of
scorching days and bitter cold nights . . . and none of that
godawful boring dust that covers everything else on Luna. Here
the craters had sharp edges lined with jagged teeth. The cliffs
soared straight up, loomed over you like breaking waves. The
boulders were studded with multi-colored volcanic glasses that
shattered the raw sunlight into a thousand colors or glowed
with warm ruby red or sapphire blue as if lit from
within--which some of them were. Strange crystalline growths
leaped toward the sky or spread across the ground like sinister
deep-sea creatures, quartzes the size of ten-story buildings
embedded themselves in the ground as if dropped from a great
height, and feathery structures with hairs finer than fiber
optics, so fragile they would break in the exhaust from a
passing p-suit, clung like sea urchins and glowed in the dark.
The horizon was sculpted with equal care into a range to shame
the Rockies for sheer rugged beauty . . . until you hiked into
them and found they were quite puny, magnified by cunning
lighting and tricks of forced perspective.
But the valley floor was a rockhound's dream. It was like
walking into a mammoth geode. And it was all the naked geology
that, in the end, had proven to be the downfall of Nirvana.
One of the four main pleasure domes had nestled at the
foot of a cliff called, in typical breathless Nirvanan prose,
The Threshold Of Heavenly Peace. It had been formed of
seventeen of the largest, clearest quartz columns ever
synthesized, and the whole structure had been ratnested with
niches for spotlights, lasers, and image projectors. During the
day it did nice things with the sunlight, but the real show was
at night, when light shows ran constantly. The effect had been
designed to be soothing, relaxing, suggesting the eternal peace
of some unspecified heaven. The images that could be seen
within were not well-defined. They were almost-seen, just out
of sight, elusive, and hypnotic. I'd been at the opening show,
and for all my cynicism about the place itself, had to admit
that the Threshold was almost worth the price of a ticket.
The detonation in Kansas had nudged an unmapped fault line
a few klicks from Nirvana, resulting in a short, sharp quake
that lifted Destination Valley a few centimeters and set it
down with a thud. The only real damage done to the place, other
than a lot of broken crockery, was that one of the columns had
been shaken loose and crashed down on dome #3, known as the
Threshold Dome. The dome was thick, and strong, and
transparent, with no ugly geodesic lines to mar the view,
having been formed from a large number of hexagonal components
bonded together in a process that was discussed endlessly in
the ensuing weeks, and which I don't understand at all. It was
further strengthened by some sort of molecular field
intensifier. It should have been strong enough to withstand the
impact of Tower #14, at least long enough to evacuate the dome.
And it had, for about five seconds. But some sort of vibration
was set up in the dome material, and somehow magnified by the
field intensifier, and three of the four-meter hex panels on
the side away from the cliffs had fractured along the join
lines and been blown nearly into orbit by the volume of air
trying to get through that hole. Along with the air had gone
everything loose, including all the people who weren't holding
on to something, and many who were. It must have been a hell of
a wind. Some of the bodies were found up on the rim of the
valley.
By the time I got there most of the action was long over.
A blowout is like that. There's a few minutes when a person
exposed to raw vacuum can be saved; after that, it's time for
the coroner. Except for a few people trapped in self-sealing
rooms who would soon be extricated--and no amount of breathless
commentary could make these routine operations sound
exciting--the rest of the Collapse story was confined to ogling
dead bodies and trying to find an angle.
The bodies definitely were not the story. Your average
Nipple reader enjoys blood and gore, but there is a disgust
threshold that might be defined as the yuck factor. Burst
eyeballs and swollen tongues are all right, as is any degree of
laceration or dismemberment. But the thing about a blow-out
death is, the human body has a certain amount of gas in it, in
various cavities. A lot of it is in the intestine. What happens
when that gas expands explosively and comes rushing out its
natural outlet is not something to use as a lead item in your
coverage. We showed the bodies, you couldn't help that, we just
didn't dwell on them.
No, the real story here was the same story any time there
is a big disaster. Number two: children. Number three: tragic
coincidences. And always a big number one: celebrities.
Nirvana didn't cater to children. They didn't forbid them,
they just didn't encourage mommy and daddie to bring little
junior along, and most of the clientele wouldn't have done so,
anyway. I mean, what would that say about your relationship
with the nanny? Only three children died in the Kansas
Collapse--which simply made them that much more poignant in the
eyes of the readership. I tracked down the grandparents of one
three-yearold and got a genuine reaction shot when they learned
the news about the child's death. I needed a stiff drink or two
after that one. Some things a reporter does are slimier than
others.
Then there's the "if-only" story, with the human angle.
"We were planning to spend the week at Nirvana, but we didn't
go because blah blah blah." "I just went back to the room to
get my thingamabob when the next thing I knew all the alarms
were going off and I thought, where's my darling hubby?" The
public had an endless appetite for stories like that.
Subconsciously, I think they think the gods of luck will favor
them when the tromp of doom starts to thump. As for survivor
interviews, I find them very boring, but I'm apparently in the
minority. At least half of them had this to say: "God was
watching over me." Most of those people didn't even believe in
a god. This is the deity-as-hit-man view of theology. What I
always thought was, if God was looking out for you, he must
have had a real hard-on for all those folks he belted into the
etheric like so many rubbery javelins.
Then there were the handful of stories that didn't quite
fit any of these categories, what I call heart-warming
tragedies. The best to come out of Nirvana was the couple of
lovers found two kilometers from the blowout, still holding
hands. Given that they'd been blown through the hole in the
dome, their bodies weren't in the best shape, but that was
okay, and since they'd outdistanced the stream of brown exhaust
that no doubt would have seemed to be propelling them on their
way, had anyone survived to report on that improbable event,
they were quite presentable. They were just lying there, two
guys with sweet smiles on their faces, at the base of a rock
formation the photographer had managed to frame to resemble a
church window. Walter paid through the nose to run it on his
front feed, just like all the other editors.
The reporter on that story was my old rival Cricket, and
it just goes to show you what initiative can accomplish. While
the rest of us were standing around the ruins of dome #3,
picking our journalistic noses, Cricket hired a p-suit and
followed the recovery crews out into the field, bringing an
actual film camera for maximum clarity. She'd bribed a team to
delay recovery of the pair until she could fix smiles on the
faces and pick up the popped-out eyeballs and close the
eyelids. She knew what she wanted in that picture, and what it
got her was a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize that year.
But the big story was the dead celebs. Of the one
thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dead in Nirvana, five had
been Important in one way or another. In ascending order of
magnitude, they were a politician from Clavius District, a
visiting pop singer from Mercury, a talk-show host and hostess,
and Larry Yeager, whose newest picture's release date was moved
up three weeks to cash in on all the public mourning. His
career had been in decline or he wouldn't have been at Nirvana
in the first place, but while being seen alive in a place like
that was a definite indicator that one's star was imploding,
soon to be a black hole--Larry had formerly moved in only the
most rarefied orbits--where you die is not nearly as important
to a posthumous career as how you die. Tragically is best.
Young is good. Violently, bizarrely, notoriously . . . all
these things combined in the Kansas Collapse to boost the
market value of the Yeager Estate's copyrights to five times
their former market value.
Of course there was the other story. The "how" and the
"why." I'm always much more concerned in where, when, and who.
Covering the investigations into the Collapse, as always, would
be an endless series of boring meetings and hours and hours of
testimony about matters I was not technologically equipped to
handle anyway. The final verdict would not be in for months or
years, at which time the Nipple would be interested in "who"
once more, as in "who takes the fall for this fuck-up?" In the
meantime the Nipple could indulge in ceaseless speculation,
character assassination, and violence to many reputations, but
that wasn't my department. I read this stuff uneasily every
day, fearing that Fox's name would somehow come up, but it
never did.
What with one thing and another . . . mostly bothering
widows and orphans, I am forced to admit . . . the Collapse
kept me hopping for about a week. I indulged in a lot of
mind-numbing preparations, mostly Margaritas, my poison of
choice, and kept a nervous weather eye open for signs of
impending depression. I saw some-there's no way you can cover a
story like that without feeling grief yourself, and a certain
selfloathing from time to time--but I never got really
depressed, as in goodbye-cruel-world depressed.
I concluded that keeping busy was the best therapy.
#
One of the one thousand, one hundred and twentyone other
people who died in Nirvana was the mother of the Princess of
Wales, the King of England, Henry XI. In spite of his
impressive title, Hank had never in his life done anything
worth a back-feed article in the Nipple, until he died. And
that's where the obit ran, the backfeed, with a small "isn't it
ironic" graph by a cub reporter mentioning a few of his more
notorious relatives: Richard III, Henry VIII, Mary Stuart.
Walter blue-penciled most of it for the next edition, with the
immortal words "nobody gives a shit about all that
Shakespearean crap," and substituted a sidebar about Vickie
Hanover and her weird ideas about sex that influenced an entire
age.
The only reason Henry XI was in Nirvana in the first place
was that he was in charge of the plumbing in dome #3. Not the
air system; the sewage.
But the upshot was that, on my first free day since the
disaster, my phone informed me that someone not on my
"accept-calls" list wanted to speak to me, and was identifying
herself as Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. I drew a blank for a
moment, then realized it was the terrifying fighting machine I
had known as Wales. I let the call through.
She spent the first few minutes apologizing all over
again, asking if her check had arrived, and please call me Liz.
"Reason I called," she finally said, "I don't know if you
heard, but my mother died in the Nirvana disaster."
"I did know that. I'm sorry, I should have sent a
condolence card or something."
"That's okay. You don't really know me well enough, and I
hated the boozing son-of-a-bitch anyway. He made my life hell
for many years. But now that he's finally gone . . . see, I'm
having this sort of coronation party tomorrow and I wondered if
you'd like to come? And a guest, too, of course."
I wondered if the invitation was the result of continuing
guilt over the way she'd torn me apart, or if she was angling
for coverage in the pad. But I didn't mention either of those
things. I was about to beg off, then remembered there had been
something I'd wanted to talk to her about. I accepted.
"Oh," I said, as she was about to ring off. "Ah, what
about dress? Should it be formal?"
"Semi," she said. "No need for any full uniforms. And the
reception afterward will be informal. Just a party, really. Oh,
and no gifts." She laughed. "I'm only supposed to accept gifts
from other heads of state."
"That lets me out. See you tomorrow."
#
The Royal Coronation was held in Suite #2 of the spaceport
Howard's Hotel, a solidly middleclass hostelry favored by
traveling salespeople and business types just in King City for
the day. I was confronted at the door by a man in a
red-andblack military uniform that featured a fur hat almost a
meter high. I vaguely recalled the outfit from historical
romances. He was rigidly at attention beside a guardhouse about
the size of a coffin standing on end. He glanced at my faxed
invitation, opened the door for me, and the familiar roar of a
party in progress spilled into the hall.
Liz had managed a pretty good turn-out. Too bad she
couldn't have afforded to hire a bigger hall. People were
standing elbow to elbow, trying to balance tiny plates of
olives and crackers with cheese and anchovy paste in one hand
and paper cups of punch and champagne in the other while being
jostled from all sides. I sidled my way to the food, as is my
wont when it's free, and scanned it dubiously. UniBio set a
better table, I must say. Drinks were being poured by two men
in the most outrageous outfits. I won't even attempt to
describe them. I later learned they were called Beefeaters, for
reasons that will remain forever obscure to me.
Not that my own clothes were anything to shout about.
She'd said semi-formal, so I could have gotten away with just
the gray fedora and the press pass stuck in the brim. But upon
reflection I decided to go with the whole silly ensemble,
handing the baggy pants and double-breasted suit coat to the
auto-valet with barely enough time for alterations. I left the
seat and the legs loose and didn't button the coat; that was
part of the look my guild, in its infinite wisdom, had voted on
almost two hundred years ago when professional uniforms were
being chosen. It had been taken from newspaper movies of the
1930's. I'd viewed a lot of them, and was amused at the image
my fellow reporters apparently wanted to project at formal
events: rumpled, aggressive, brash, impolite, wise-cracking,
but with hearts o' gold when the goin' got tough. Sure, and it
made yer heart proud ta be a reporter, by the saints. For a
little fun, I'd worn a white blouse with a bunch of lace at the
neck instead of the regulation ornamental noose known as a
neck-tie. And I'd tied my hair up and stuffed it under the hat.
In the mirror I'd looked just like Kate Hepburn masquerading as
a boy, at least from the neck up. From there down the suit hung
on me like a tent, but such was the cunning architecture of my
new body that anything looked good on it. I'd saluted my image
in the mirror: here's lookin' at you, Bobbie.
Liz spotted me and made her way toward me with a shout.
She was already half looped. If her late mother had given her
nothing else, she had seemingly inherited his taste for the
demon rum. She embraced me and thanked me for coming, then
swirled off again into the crowd. Well, I'd corner her later,
after the ceremony, if she could still stand up by then.
What followed hasn't changed much in four or five hundred
years. For almost an hour people kept arriving, including the
hotel manager who had a hasty conference with Liz--concerning
her credit rating, I expect--and then opened the connecting
door to Suite #1, which relieved the pressure for a while. The
food and champagne ran out, and was replenished. Liz didn't
care about the cost. This was her day. It was your
proto-typical daytime party.
I met several people I knew, was introduced to dozens
whose names I promptly forgot. Among my new friends were the
Shaka of the Zulu Nation, the Emperor of Japan, the Maharajah
of Gujarat, and the Tsarina of All the Russias, or at least
people in silly costumes who styled themselves that way. Also
countless Counts, Caliphs, Archdukes, Satraps, Sheiks and
Nabobs. Who was I to dispute their titles? There had been a
vogue in such genealogy about the time Callie had grudgingly
expelled my ungrateful squalling form into a lessthan
overwhelmed world; Callie had even told me she thought she
might be related to Mussolini, on her mother's side. Did that
make me the heirapparent of Il Duce? It wasn't a burning
question to me. I overheard intense debates about the rules of
primogeniture--even Salic Law, of all things--in an age of sex
changing. Someone--I think it was the Duke of York--gave me a
lecture about it shortly before the ceremony, explaining why
Liz was inheritor to the throne, even though she had a younger
brother.
After escaping from that with most of my wits intact, I
found myself out on the balcony, nursing a strawberry
Margarita. Howard's had a view, but it was of the cargo side of
the spaceport. I looked out over the beached-whale hulks of
bulk carriers expelling their interplanetary burdens into
waiting underground tanks. I was almost alone, which puzzled me
for a moment, until I remembered a story I'd seen about how
many people had suddenly lost their taste for surface views in
the wake of the Kansas Collapse. I drained my drink, reached
out and tapped the invisible curved canopy that held vacuum at
bay, and shrugged. Somehow I didn't think I'd die in a blowout.
I had worse things to fear.
Somebody held out another pink drink with salt on the rum.
I took it and looked over and up--and up and up--into the
smiling face of Brenda, girl reporter and apprentice giraffe. I
toasted her.
"Didn't expect to see you here," I said.
"I got acquainted with the Princess after your . . .
accident."
"That was no accident."
She prattled on about what a nice party it was. I didn't
disillusion her. Wait till she'd attended a few thousand more
just like it, then she'd see.
I'd been curious what Brenda's reaction would be to my new
sex. To my chagrin, she was delighted. I got the skinney from a
homo-oriented friend at the fashion desk: Brenda was young
enough to still be exploring her own sexuality, discovering her
preferences. She'd already been pretty sure she leaned toward
females as lovers, at least when she was a woman. Discovering
her preferences as a male would have to wait for her first
Change. After all, until quite recently she'd been effectively
neuter. The only problem she'd had in her crush on me was that
she wasn't much attracted to males. She had thought it would
remain platonic until I thoughtfully made everything perfect by
showing up at work as my gorgeous new self.
I really, really didn't have the heart to tell her about
my preferences.
And I did owe her. She had been covering for me, putting
my by-line on the Invasion Bicentennial stories she was
writing, the stories I simply could no longer bring myself to
work on. Oh, I was helping, answering her questions, going over
her drafts, punching up the prose, showing her how to leave
just enough excess baggage in the stories so Walter would have
something to cut out and shout at her about and thus remain a
happy man. I think Walter was beginning to suspect what was
going on, but he hadn't said anything yet because expecting me
to cover the Collapse and get in our weekly feature was unfair,
and he knew it. The thing he should have foreseen before he
ever came up with his cockamamie Invasion series was that there
would always be a story like the Collapse happening, and as a
good editor he had to assign his best people to it, which
included me. Oh, yeah, if you wanted somebody to intrude on
grief and ogle bodies puffed up like pink and brown popcorn,
Hildy was your girl.
"Tell me, sweetheart, how did you feel when you saw the
man cut your daddy's head off?"
"What?" Brenda was looking at me strangely.
"It's the essential disaster/atrocity question," I said.
"They don't tell you that in Journalism 101, but all the
questions we ask, no matter how delicately phrased, boil down
to that. The idea is to get the first appearance of the tear,
the ineffable moment when the face twists up. That's gold,
honey. You'd better learn how to mine it."
"I don't think that's true."
"Then you'll never be a great reporter. Maybe you should
try social work."
I saw that I had hurt her, and it made me angry, both at
her and at myself. She had to understand these things, dammit.
But who appointed you, Hildy? She'll find out soon enough, as
soon as Walter takes her off these damn comparative
anthropology stories that our readers don't even want to see
and lets her get out where she can grub in the dirt like the
rest of us.
I realized I'd drunk a little more than I had intended. I
dumped the rest of my drink in a thirsty-looking potted plant,
snagged a coke from a passing tray, and performed a little
ritual I'd come to detest but was powerless to stop. It
consisted of a series of questions, like this: Do you feel the
urge to hurl yourself off this balcony, assuming you could
drill a hole through that ultralexan barrier? No. Great, but do
you want to throw a rope over that beam and haul yourself up
into the rafters? Not today, thank you. And so on.
I was about to say something nice and neutral and
soothing, suitable for the reassurance of idealistic cub
reporters, when the Jamaican steel band which had been
reprising every patriotic British song since the Spanish Armada
suddenly struck up God Save The Queen, and somebody asked
everyone to haul their drunken asses down to the main ballroom,
where the coronation was about to commence. Not in those words,
of course.
#
There was another band in the ballroom, playing some
horrible modern version of Rule Britannia. This was the public
portion of the show, and I guess Liz thought it ought to make
some attempt to appeal to the tastes of the day. I thought the
music was dreadful, but Brenda was snapping her fingers, so I
suppose it was at least current.
A few specialty channels and some of the 'pads had sent
reporters, but the crowd in the ballroom was essentially the
same folks I'd been avoiding up in the Suites one and two, only
they weren't holding drinks. A lot of them looked as if they
wished the show would hurry up, so they could hold drinks
again, for a short time, at least.
One touch Liz hadn't expected was the decorations. From
the whispers I overheard, she'd only booked the hall for one
hour. When the coronation was over a wedding party was
scheduled to hold a reception there, so the walls were draped
in white bunting and repulsive little cherubs, and there was a
big sign hung on the wall that said Mazel Tov! Liz looked a
little nonplussed. She glanced around with that baffled
expression one sometimes gets after wandering into a strange
place. Could there have been a mistake?
But the coronation itself went off without a hitch. She
was proclaimed "Elizabeth III, by the Grace of God of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland
and of her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Empress of
India, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith."
Sure, it was easy to snicker, and I did, but to myself. I
could see that Liz took it seriously, almost in spite of
herself. No matter how spurious the claims of some of these
other clowns might have been to ancient titles, Liz's was
spotless and unquestioned. The actual Prince of Wales had been
living and working on Luna at the time of the Invasion, and she
was descended from him.
The original Crown Jewels had naturally not accompanied
the King in Exile to Luna; they were buried with the rest of
London--of England, of Europe, of the whole surface of Planet
Earth. Liz had the use of a very nice crown, orb, and sceptre.
Hovering in the background as these items were produced was a
man from Tiffany's. Not the one in the Platz, but the discount
outlet down on Leystrasse, where even as the tiara was lowered
onto Liz's head a sign was going up announcing "By Appointment
to Her Majesty, The Queen." The jewels were hired, and would
soon reside in a window advertising the usual E-Z Credit Terms.
A procession was traditional after a coronation back when
the Empire had any real meaning--and even after it had become
just a tourist attraction. But processions can be difficult to
organize in the warrens of Luna, where the cities are usually
broken up into pressure-defensible malls and arcades connected
by tube trains. So after the ceremony we all straggled into a
succession of subway cars and zipped across town to Liz's
neighborhood, many of us growing steadily more sober and unsure
why we'd come in the first place.
But all was well. The real party began when we arrived at
the post-coronation reception, held in the Masonic Lodge Hall
half-way between Liz's apartment and the studio where she
worked. In addition to its many other virtues the lodge didn't
cost her anything, which meant she could spend what royal
budget she had left entirely on food, booze, and entertainment.
This bash was informal and relaxed, the only kind I enjoy.
The band was good, playing a preponderance of things from Liz's
teenage years, which put them mid-way between my era and
Brenda's. It was stuff I could dance to. So I stumbled out into
the public corridor in my twotone Oxford lace-ups--and a
clunkier shoe has never been invented--found a mail box and
called my valet. I told it to pack up the drop-dead shiny black
sheath dress slit from the ankles to you-should-only-blush and
'tube it over to me. I went into the public comfort station and
changed my hair color to platinum and put a long wave in it,
and when I came out, three minutes later, the package was
waiting for me. I stripped out of the Halloween costume and
stuffed it into the return capsule, cajoled my abundance into
the outfit's parsimonious interior. Just getting into that
thing was almost enough to give you an orgasm. I left my feet
bare. And to hell with Kate Hepburn; Veronica Lake was on the
prowl.
I danced almost non-stop for two hours. I had one dance
with Liz, but she was naturally much in demand. I danced with
Brenda, who was a very good if visually unlikely terpsichorean.
Mostly I danced with a succession of men, and I turned down a
dozen interesting offers. I'd selected my eventual target, but
I was in no hurry unless he suddenly decided to leave.
He didn't. When I was ready I cut him out of the herd. I
put a few moves on him, mostly in the form of dance steps whose
meaning couldn't have been missed by a eunuch. He wanted to
join the rather sparsely-attended orgy going on in one corner
of the ballroom, but I dragged him off to what the Masons
called, too coyly in my opinion, snuggle rooms. We spent a very
enjoyable hour in one of them. He liked to be spanked, and
bitten. It's not my thing, but I can accommodate most
consenting adults as long as my needs are attended to as well.
He did a very good job of that. His name was Larry, and he
claimed to be the Duke of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but that might
have been just to get into my pants. The couple of times I drew
blood he asked me to do it again, so I did, but eventually lost
my . . . well, my taste for that sort of thing. We exchanged
phone codes and said we'd look each other up, but I didn't
intend to. He was nice to look at but I felt I'd chewed off
about as much as I wanted.
I staggered back into the ballroom drenched in sweat. It
had been very intense there for a while. I headed for the bar,
dodging dancers. The faint-hearted had left, leaving about half
the original attendees, but those looked ready to party till
Monday morning. I eased my pinkened, pleasantly sore cheeks
onto a padded barstool next to the Queen of England, the
Empress of India, and the Defender of the Faith, and Liz slowly
turned her head toward me. I now knew where her impressive ears
came from. There were posters of past monarchs taped to the
walls here, and she was the spitting image of Charles III.
"Innkeeper," she shouted, above the music. "Bring me salt.
Bring me tequila. Bring me the nectar of the lime, your
plumpest strawberries, your coldest ice, your finest crystal.
My friend needs a drink, and I intend to build it for her."
"Ain't got no strawberries," the bartender said.
"Then go out and kill some!"
"It's all right, Your Majesty," I said. "Lime will be
fine."
She grinned foolishly at me. "I purely do like the sound
of that. 'Your Majesty.' Is that awful?"
"You're entitled, as they say. But don't expect me to make
a habit of it." She draped an arm over my shoulder and exhaled
ethanol.
"How are you, Hildy? Having a good time? Getting laid?"
"Just did, thank you."
"Don't thank me. And you look it, honey, if I may say so."
"Didn't have time to freshen up yet."
"You don't need to. Who did the work?"
I showed her the monogram on the nail of my pinkie. She
squinted at it, and seemed to lose interest, which might have
meant that Bobbie's fears of falling out of fashion were
well-grounded-- Liz would be up on these things--or only that
her attention span was not what it might be.
"What was I gonna say? Oh, yeah. Can I do anything for
you, Hildy? There's a tradition among my people . . . well,
maybe it's not an English tradition, but it's somebody's damn
tradition, what you gotta do is, anybody asks you for a favor
on your coronation day, you gotta grant it."
"I think that's a Mafia tradition."
"Is it? Well, it's your people, then. So just ask. Only be
real, okay? I mean, if it's gonna cost a lot of money, forget
it. I'm gonna be payin' for this fucking shivaree for the next
ten fucking years. But that's okay. It's only money, right? And
what a party. Am I right?
"As a matter of fact, there is something you could do for
me."
I was about to tell her, but the bartender delivered a
Margarita in its component parts, and Liz could only think
about one thing at a time. She spilled a lot of salt on the
bar, spread it out, moistened the rim of a wide glass, and did
things necessary to produce a too-strong concoction with that
total concentration of the veteran drunk. She did it
competently, and I sipped at the drink I hadn't really wanted.
"So. Name it, kiddo, and it's yours. Within reason."
"If you . . . let's say . . . if you wanted to have a
conversation with somebody, and you wanted to be sure no one
would overhear it . . . what would you do? How would you go
about it?"
She frowned and her brow furrowed. She appeared to be
thinking heavily, and her hand toyed with the layer of salt in
front of her.
"Now that's a good one. That's a real good one. I'm not
sure if anyone's ever asked me that before." She looked slowly
down at the salt, where her finger had traced out CC??. I
looked up at her, and nodded.
"You know what bugs are like these days. I'm not sure if
there's any place that can't be bugged. But I'll tell you what.
I know some techs back at the studio, they're real clever about
these things. I could ask them and get back to you." Her hand
had wiped out the original message and written p-suit. I nodded
again, and saw that while she was without a doubt very, very
drunk, she knew how to handle herself. There was a glint of
speculation in those eyes I wasn't sure I liked. I wondered
what I might be getting myself into.
We talked a while longer, and she wrote out a time and a
destination in the salt crystals. Then someone else sat next to
her and started fondling her breasts and she was showing a
definite interest, so I got up and returned to the dance floor.
I danced almost an hour longer, but my heart wasn't really
in it. A guy made a play for me, and he was pretty, and
persuasive, and a very good, raunchy dancer, but in the end I
felt he just didn't try hard enough. When I'm not the aggressor
I can choose to take a lot of persuading. In the end I gave him
my phone code and said call me in a week and we'd see, and got
the impression he probably wouldn't.
I showered and bought a paper chemise in the locker room,
staggered to the tube terminal, and got aboard. I fell asleep
on the way home, and the train had to wake me up.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I've read about hangovers. You just about have to believe
those people were exaggerating. If only a tenth of the things
written about them were true, I have no desire to experience
one. The hangover was cured long before I was born, just a
simple chemical matter, really, no tough science involved. I'd
sometimes wondered if that was a good idea. There's an almost
biblical belief deep in the human psyche that we should pay in
some way for our over-indulgences. But when I think that, my
rational side soon takes over. Might as well wish for the
return of the hemorrhoid.
When I woke up the next morning, my mouth tasted good.
Too good.
"CC, on line," quoth I.
"What can I do for you?"
"What's with the peppermint?"
"I thought you liked peppermint. I can change the flavor."
"There's nothing wrong with peppermint qua peppermint.
It's just passing strange to wake up with my mouth tasting like
anything but . . . well, it wouldn't mean anything to you, I
don't guess taste is one of your talents, but take my word for
it, it's vile."
"You asked me to work on that. I did."
"Just like that?"
"Why not?"
I was about to answer, but Fox stirred in his sleep and
turned over, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I
had shaken out a toothcleaning pill, then I looked at it
sitting there in my hand.
"Do I need this, then?"
"No. It's gone the way of the toothbrush."
"And science marches on. You know, I'm used to what they
call future shock, but I'm not used to being the cause of it."
"Humans usually are the cause of the new inventions."
"You said that."
"But you can never tell when a human will take the time to
work on a particular problem. Now, I have no talent for asking
questions like that. As you noted, my mouth never tastes bad in
the morning, so why should I? But I have a lot of excess
capacity, and when a question like that is asked, I often
tinker with it and sometimes come up with a solution. In this
case, I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the things that
would normally rot in your mouth while you are sleeping, and
changes them into things that taste good. They also clean away
plaque and tartar and have a beneficial effect on gums."
"I'm afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me."
"It's in the water supply. You don't need much of it."
"So every Lunarian is waking up today and tasting
peppermint?"
"It comes in six delicious flavors."
"Are you writing your own ad campaigns now? Do me a favor;
don't tell anyone this is my fault."
I got into the shower and it turned on, gradually warming
to just a degree below the hottest I could stand. Don't ever
say anything about showers, Hildy, I cautioned myself. The
goddam CC might find a way to clean the human hide without
them, and I think I'd go mad without my morning shower. I'm a
singer in the shower. Lovers have told me I do this with
indifferent esthetic effect, but it pleases me. As I soaped
myself I thought about a nanobot-infested world.
"CC. What would happen if all those tiny little robots
were taken out of my body?"
"Doing it would be impractical, to say the least."
"Hypothetically."
"You would be hypothetically dead within a year."
I dropped the soap. I don't know what answer I had
expected, but it hadn't been that.
"Are you serious?"
"You asked. I replied."
"Well . . . shit. You can't just leave it lying there."
"I suppose not. Then let me list the reasons in order.
First, you are prone to cancer. Billions of manufactured
organisms work night and day seeking out and eating pinpoint
tumors throughout your body. They find one almost every day. If
left unchecked, they would soon eat you alive. Second,
Alzheimer's Disease."
"What the hell is that?"
"A syndrome associated with aging. Simply put, it eats
away at your brain cells. Most human beings, upon reaching
their hundredth birthday in a natural state, would have
contracted it. This is an example of the reconstructive work
constantly going on in your body. Failing brain cells are
excised and duplicated with healthy ones so the neural net is
not disrupted. You would have forgotten your name and how to
find your way home years ago; the disease started showing up
about the time you went to work at the Nipple."
"Hah! Maybe those things didn't do as good a job as you
thought. That would go a long way toward explaining . . . never
mind. There's more?"
"Lung disease. The air in the warrens is not actually
healthy for human life. Things get concentrated, things that
could be cleaned from the air are not, because replacing lungs
is so much cheaper and simpler than cleaning up the air. You
could live in a disneyland to offset this; I must filter the
air much more rigorously in there. As it is, several hundred
alveoli are re-built in your lungs every day. Without the
nanobots, you'd soon begin to miss them."
"Why didn't anyone ever tell me about all this?"
"What does it matter? If you'd researched it you could
have found out; it's not a secret."
"Yeah, but . . . I thought those kind of things had been
engineered out of the body. Genetically."
"A popular misconception. Genes are certainly manipulable,
but they've proved resistant to some types of changes, without
. . . unacceptable alterations in the gestalt, the body, they
produce and define."
"Can you put that more plainly?"
"It's difficult. It can be explained in terms of some very
complicated mathematical theories having to do with chaotic
effects and chemical holography. There's often no single gene
for this or that characteristic, good or bad. It's more of an
interference pattern produced by the overlapping effects of a
number of genes, sometimes a very large number. Tampering with
one produces unintended side-effects, and tampering with them
all is often impossible without producing unwanted changes. Bad
genes are bound up this way as often as good ones. In your
case, if I eradicated the faulty genes that insist on producing
cancers in your body, you'd no longer be Hildy. You'd be a
healthier person, but not a wiser one, and you'd lose a lot of
abilities and outlooks that, counterproductive though they may
be in a purely practical sense, I suspect you treasure."
"What makes me me."
"Yes. You know there are many things I can change about
you without affecting your . . . soul is the simplest word to
use, though it's a hazy one."
"It's the first one you've used that I understand." I
chewed on that for a while, shutting off the shower and
stepping out, dripping wet, reaching for a towel, drying
myself.
"It doesn't make sense to me that things like cancer
should be in the genes. It sounds contrasurvival."
"From an evolutionary viewpoint, anything that doesn't
kill you before you've become old enough to reproduce is
irrelevant to species survival. There's even a philosophic
point of view that says cancer and things like it are good for
the race. Overpopulation can be a problem to a very successful
species. Cancer gets the old ones out of the way."
"They're not getting out the way now."
"No. It will be a problem someday."
"When?"
"Don't worry about it. Ask me again at the Tricentennial.
As a preliminary measure, large families are now being
discouraged, the direct opposite of the ethic that prevailed
after the Invasion."
I wanted to hear more, but I noticed the time, and had to
hustle to get ready in time to catch my train.
#
Tranquility Base is by far the biggest tourist attraction
on Luna, and the reason is its historical significance, since
it is the spot where a human foot first trod another planet.
Right? If you thought that, maybe I could interest you in some
prime real estate on Ganymede with a great view of the volcano.
The real draw at Tranquility is just over the horizon and goes
by the name of Armstrong Park. Since the park is within the
boundaries of Apollo Planetary Historical Preserve, the Lunar
Chamber of Commerce can boast that X million people visit the
site of the first Lunar landing every year, but the ads feature
the roller coaster, not the LEM.
A good number of those tourists do find the time to ride
the train over to the Base itself and spend a few minutes
gazing at the forlorn little lander, and an hour hurrying
through the nearby museum, where most of the derelict space
hardware from 1960 to the Invasion is on display. Then the kids
begin to whine that they're bored, and by then the parents
probably are, too, and it's back to the land of over-priced hot
dogs and not-socheap thrills.
You can't take a train directly to the base. No accident,
that. It dumps you at the foot of the thirty-story explosion of
lights that is the sign for and entrance to the Terminal
Seizure, what the ads call "The Greatest SphincterTightener in
the Known Universe." I got on it once, against my better
judgment, and I guarantee it will show you things they didn't
tell you about in astronaut school. It's a twenty-minute
MagLev, six-gee, free trajectory descent into the tenth circle
of Hell that guarantees one blackout and seven gray hairs or
your money back. It's actually two coasters--the Grand Mal and
the Petit Mal--one of them obviously for wimps. They are
prepared to hose out the Grand Mal cars after every ride. If
you understand the attraction of that, please don't come to my
home to explain it to me. I'm armed, and considered dangerous.
I walked as quickly as I could past the sign-30,000,000
(Count 'Em!) Thirty Million Lights!-and noticed the two-hour
line for the Grand Mal ride was cleverly concealed from the
ticket booth. I made it to the shuttle train, having
successfully avoided the blandishments of a thousand hucksters
selling everything from inflatable Neil dolls to talking
souvenir pencil sharpeners to put a point on your souvenir
pencils. I boarded the train, removed a hunk of cotton candy
from a seat, and sat. I was wearing a disposable paper jumper,
so what the hell?
The Base itself is an area large enough to play a game of
baseball/6. Those guys never got very far from their ship, so
it made no sense to preserve any more of the area. It is
surrounded by a stadium-like structure, un-roofed, that is four
levels of viewing area with all the windows facing inward. On
top is an un-pressurized level.
I elbowed my way through the throngs of cameratoting
tourists from Pluto and made it to the suit rental counter. Oh,
dear.
If I ever had to choose one sex to be for the rest of my
life, I would be female. I think the body is better-designed,
and the sex is a little better. But there is one thing about
the female body that is distinctly inferior to the male--and
I've talked to others about this, both Changers and dedicated
females, and ninety-five percent agree with me--and that is
urination. Males are simply better at it. It is less messy, the
position is more dignified, and the method helps develop
hand-eye coordination and a sense of artistic expression, a la
writing your name in the snow.
But what the hell, right? It's never really much of an
annoyance . . . until you go to rent a p-suit.
Almost three hundred years of engineering have come up
with three basic solutions to the problem: the catheter,
suction devices, and . . . oh, dear lord, the diaper. Some
advocate a fourth way: continence. Try it the next time you go
on a twelve-hour hike on the surface. The catheter was by far
the best. It is painless, as advertised . . . but I hate the
damn thing. It just feels wrong. Besides, like the suckers,
they get dislodged. Next time you need a laugh, watch a woman
trying to get her UroLator back in place. It could start a new
dance craze.
I've never owned a p-suit. Why spend the money, when you
need it once a year? I've rented a lot of them, and they all
stank. No matter how they are sterilized, some odors of the
previous occupant will linger. It's bad enough in a man's suit,
but for real gut-wrenching stench you have to put on the female
model. They all use the suction method, with a diaper as a
back-up. At a place like Tranquility, where the turnover is
rapid and the help likely to be under-paid, unconcerned, and
slipshod, some of the niceties will be overlooked from time to
time. I was once handed a suit that was still wet.
I got into this one and sniffed cautiously; not too bad,
though the perfume was cheap and obvious. I switched it on and
let the staff put it through a perfunctory safety check, and
remembered the other thing I didn't like about the suction
method. All that air flowing by can chill the vulva something
fierce.
There were surgical methods of improving the interface,
but I found them ugly, and they didn't make sense unless your
work took you outside regularly. The rest of us just had to
breathe shallowly and bear it, and try not to drink too much
coffee before an excursion.
The air lock delivered me onto the roof, which was not
crowded at all. I found a place at the rail far from anyone
else, and waited. I turned off my suit radio, all but the
emergency beacon.
I said, "CC, what do I get out of it?"
The CC is pretty good at picking up a conversation hours,
weeks, and even years old, but the question was pretty vague.
He took a stab at it.
"You mean the morning mouth preparation?"
"Yeah. I thought it up. You did the work, but then you
gave it away without consulting me. Shouldn't there be a way to
make some money out of it?"
"It's defined as a health benefit, so its production cost
will be added to the health tax all Lunarians pay, plus a small
profit, which will go to you. It won't make you rich."
"And no one gets to choose. They get it whether they like
it or not."
"If they object, I have an antibot available. No one has
so far."
"Still sounds like a subversive plot to me. If the
drinking water ain't pure, what is?"
"Hildy, there's so many things in the King City municipal
water you could practically lift it with a magnet."
"All for our own good."
"You seem to be in a sour mood."
"Why should I be? My mouth tastes wonderful."
"If you're interested, the approval ratings on this are
well over ninety-nine percent. The favorite flavor, however is
Neutral-with-a-Hint-ofMint. And an unforeseen side benefit is
that it works all day, cleaning your breath."
He'd beaten halitosis, I realized, glumly. How did I feel
about that? Shouldn't I be rejoicing? I recalled the way Liz's
breath had smelled last night, that sour reek of gin. Should a
drunk's breath smell like a puppy's tongue? I was sure as hell
being a crabby old woman about this, even I could see that. But
hell, I was an old woman, and often crabby. I'd found that as I
got older, I was less tolerant of change, for good or ill.
"How did you hear me?" I asked, before I could get too
gloomy thinking about a forever-changing world.
"The radio you switched off is suit-to-suit. Your suit
also monitors your vital signs, and transmits them if needed.
Using your access voice is defined as an emergency call, not
requiring aid."
"So I'm never out from under the protective umbrella of
your eternal vigilance."
"It keeps you safe," he said, and I told him to go away.
#
When Armstrong and Aldrin came in peace for all mankind,
it was envisioned that their landing site, in the vacuum of
space, would remain essentially unchanged for a million years,
if need be. Never mind that the exhaust of lift-off knocked the
flag over and tore a lot of the gold foil on the landing stage.
The footprints would still be there. And they are. Hundreds of
them, trampling a crazy pattern in the dust, going away from
the lander, coming back, none of them reaching as far as the
visitors' gallery. There are no other footprints to be seen.
The only change the museum curators worked at the site were to
set the flag back up, and suspend an ascentstage module about a
hundred feet above the landing stage, hanging from invisible
wires. It's not the Apollo 11 ascent stage; that one
crashlanded long ago.
Things are often not what they seem.
Nowhere in the free literature or the thousands of plaques
and audio-visual displays in the museum will you hear of the
night one hundred and eighty years ago when ten members of the
Delta Chi Delta fraternity, Luna University Chapter, came
around on their cycles. This was shortly after the Invasion,
and the site was not guarded as it is now. There had just been
a rope around the landing area, not even a visitors' center;
postInvasion Lunarians didn't have time for luxuries like that.
The Delts tipped the lander over and dragged it about
twenty feet. Their cycles wiped out most of the footprints.
They were going to steal the flag and take it back to their
dorm, but one of them fell off his mount, cracked his
faceplate, and went to that great pledge party in the sky.
Psuits were not as safe then as they are now. Horseplay in a
p-suit was not a good idea.
But not to worry. Tranquility Base was one of the most
documented places in the history of history. Tens of thousands
of photos existed, including very detailed shots from orbit.
Teams of selenolography students spent a year restoring the
Base. Each square meter was scrutinized, debates raged about
the order in which footprints had been laid down, then two guys
went out there and tromped around with replica Apollo
moonboots, each step measured by laser, and were hauled out on
a winch when they were through. Presto! An historical
re-creation passing as the real thing. This is not a secret,
but very few people know about it. Look it up.
I felt a hand flip the radio switch on my suit back on.
"Fancy meeting you here," Liz said.
"Quite a coincidence," I said, thinking about the CC
listening in. She joined me, leaning on the railing and looking
out over the plain. Behind the far wall of the round visitors'
gallery I could see thousands of people looking toward us
through the glass.
"I come here a lot," she said. "Would you travel a
half-million miles in a tinfoil toy like that?"
"I wouldn't go half a meter in it. I'd rather travel by
pogo stick."
"They were real men in those days. Have you ever thought
about it? What it must have been like? They could barely turn
around in that thing. One of them made it back with half the
ship blown up."
"Yeah. I have thought about it. Maybe not as much as you."
"Think about this, then. You know who the real hero was?
In my opinion? Good old Mike Collins, the poor sap who stayed
in orbit. Whoever designed this operation didn't think it out.
Say something went wrong, say the lander crashes and these two
die instantly. There's Collins up in orbit, all by himself. How
are you gonna deal with that? No ticker-tape parade for Mike.
He gets to attend the memorial service, and spend the rest of
his life wishing he'd died with them. He gets to be a national
goat, is what he gets."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"So things go right--and they did, though I'll never
understand how--so who does the Planetary Park get named after?
Why, the guy who flubbed his 'first words' from the surface."
"I thought that was a garbled transmission."
"Don't you believe it. 'Course, if I'd had two billion
people listening in, I might have fucked it up, too. That part
was probably scarier than the thought of dying, anyway, having
everybody watching you die, and hoping that if it did go
rotten, it wouldn't be your fault. This little exercise cost
twenty, thirty billion dollars, and that was back when a
billion was real money."
It was still real money to me, but I let her ramble on.
This was her show; she'd brought me here, knowing only that I
was interested in telling her something in a place where the CC
couldn't overhear. I was in her hands.
"Let's go for a walk," she said, and started off. I
hurried to catch up with her, followed her down several flights
of stairs to the surface.
You can cover a lot of ground on the surface in a fairly
short time. The best gait is a hop from the ball of the foot,
swinging each leg out slightly to the side. There's no point in
jumping too high, it just wastes energy.
I know there are still places on Luna where the virgin
dust stretches as far as the eye can see. Not many, but a few.
The mineral wealth of my home planet is not great, and all the
interesting places have been identified and mapped from orbit,
so there's little incentive to visit some of the more remote
regions. By remote, I mean far from the centers of human
habitation; any spot on Luna is easily reachable by a lander or
crawler.
Everywhere I'd ever been on the surface looked much like
the land around Tranquility Base, covered with so many tracks
you wondered where the big crowd had gone, since there was
likely to be not a single soul in sight but whatever companions
you were traveling with. Nothing ever goes away on Luna. It has
been continuously inhabited by humans for almost two and a half
centuries. Every time someone has taken a stroll or dropped an
empty oxygen tank the evidence is still there, so a place that
got two visitors every three or four years looks like hundreds
of people have gone by just a few minutes before. Tranquility
got considerably more than that. There was not a square
millimeter of undisturbed dust, and the litter was so thick it
had been kicked into heaps here and there. I saw empty beer
cans with labels a hundred and fifty years old lying next to
some they were currently selling in Armstrong Park.
After a bit some of that thinned out. The tracks tended to
group themselves into impromptu trails. I guess humans tend to
follow the herd, even when the herd is gone and the land is so
flat it doesn't matter where you go.
"You left too early last night," Liz said, the radio
making it sound as if she was standing beside me when I could
see her twenty meters in front. "There was some excitement."
"I thought it was pretty exciting while I was there."
"Then you must have seen the Duke of Bosnia tangling with
the punchbowl."
"No, I missed that. But I tangled with him earlier."
"That was you? Then it's your fault. He was in a foul
mood. Apparently you didn't mark him enough; he figures if he
hasn't lost a kilo or two of flesh after pounding the sheets,
somebody just wasn't trying."
"He didn't complain."
"He wouldn't. I swear, I think I'm related to him, but
that man is so stupid, he hasn't got the brains God gave a
left-handed screwdriver. After you went home he got drunk as a
waltzing pissant and decided somebody had put poison in the
punch, so he tipped it over and picked it up and started
banging people over the head with it. I had to come over and
coldcock him."
"You do give interesting parties."
"Ain't it the truth? But that's not what I was gonna tell
you about. We were having so much fun we completely forgot
about the gifts, so I gathered everybody around and started
opening them."
"You get anything nice?"
"Well, a few had the sense to tape the receipt to the box.
I'll clear a little money on that. So I got to one that said it
was from the Earl of Donegal, which should have tipped me off,
but what do I know about the goddam United Kingdom? I thought
it was a province of Wales, or something. I knew I didn't know
the guy, but who can keep track? I opened it, and it was from
the Irish Republican Pranksters."
"Oh, no."
"The hereditary enemies of my clan. Next thing I know
we're all covered with this green stuff, I don't wanna know
where it came from, but I know what it smelled like. And that
was the end of that party. Just as well. I had to mail half the
guests home, anyway."
"I hate those jerks. On St. Patrick's day you don't dare
sit down without looking for a green whoopee cushion."
"You think you got it bad? Every mick in King City comes
gunning for me on the seventeenth of March, so they can tell
their buddies how they put one over on the bleedin' Princess o'
Wales. And it's only gonna get worse now."
"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."
"I'll crown 'em, all right. I know where Paddy Flynn
lives, and I'm gonna get even if it harelips the Mayor and the
whole damn city council."
I reflected that you'd have to go a long way to find
somebody as colorful as the new Queen. Once again I wondered
what I was doing out here. I looked behind me, saw the
four-story stadium around the landing site just about to vanish
over the horizon. When it was gone, it would be easy to get
lost out here. Not that I was worried about that. The suit had
about seventeen different kinds of alarms and locators, a
compass, probably things I didn't even know about. No real need
for girl-scout tricks like noting the position of your shadow.
But the sense of aloneness was a little oppressive.
And illusory. I spotted another hiking party of five on
the crest of a low rise off to my left. A flash of light made
me look up, and I saw one of the Grand Mal trains arcing
overhead on one of the free-trajectory segments of its route.
It was spinning end over end, a maneuver I remember vividly
since I'd been in the front car, hanging from my straps and
watching the surface sweep by every two seconds when a big glob
of half-digested caramel corn and licorice splattered on the
glass in front of me, having just missed my neck. At that
moment I had been regretting everything I had eaten for the
last six years, and wondering if I was going to be seeing a
good portion of it soon, right there beside the tasty treats on
the windshield. Keeping it down may be one of the most amazing
things I ever did.
"You ever ride that damn thing?" Liz asked. "I try it out
every couple years, when I'm feeling mean. I swear, first time
I think my ass sucked six inches of foam rubber out of the seat
cushion. After that, It's not so bad. About like a barbedwire
enema."
I didn't reply--I'm not sure how one could reply to
statements like that--because as she spoke she had stopped and
waited for me to catch up, and she was punching buttons on a
small device on her left hand. I saw a pattern of lights flash,
mostly red, then they turned green one by one. When the whole
panel was green she opened a service hatch on the front of my
suit and studied whatever she found in there. She poked
buttons, then straightened and made a thumbs-up gesture at me.
She hung the device from a strap around my neck and regarded me
with her fists on her hips.
"So, you want to talk where nobody can listen in. Well,
talk, baby."
"What's that thing?"
"De-bugger. By which, it buggers up all the signals your
suit is sending out, but not enough so they'll send out a
search party. The machines up in orbit and down underground are
getting the signals that keep them happy, but it's not the real
stuff; it's what I want them to hear. Can't just step out here
and cut off your emergency freaks. That signal goes away, it's
an emergency in itself. But nobody can hear us now, take my
word for it."
"What if we have a real emergency?"
"I was about to say, don't crack open if you want to keep
a step ahead of your pallbearers. What's on your mind?"
Once again I found it hard to get started. I knew once I
got the first words out it would be easy enough, but I agonized
over those first words more than any first-time novelist.
"This may take some time," I hedged.
"It's my day off. Come on, Hildy; I love you, but cut the
cards."
So I started in on my third telling of my litany of woe.
You get better at these things as you go along. This time
didn't take as long as it had with either Callie or Fox. Liz
walked along beside me, saying nothing, guiding me back to some
trail she was following when I started to stray.
The thing was, I'd decided to tell it this time where it
logically should have begun the other two times: with my
suicide attempts. And it was a little easier to tell it to
someone I didn't know well, but not much. I was thankful she
remained silent through to the end. I don't think I could have
tolerated any of her unlikely folk sayings at that point.
And she stayed quiet for several minutes after I'd
finished. I didn't mind that, either. As before, I was
experiencing a rare moment of peace for having unburdened
myself.
Liz is not quite in the Italian class of gesturing, but
she did like to move her hands around when she talked. This is
frustrating in a p-suit. So many gestures and nervous
mannerisms involve touching part of the head or body, which is
impossible when suited up. She looked as if she'd like to be
chewing on a knuckle, or rubbing her forehead. Finally she
turned and squinted at me suspiciously.
"Why did you come to me?"
"I didn't expect you could solve my problem, if that's
what you mean."
"You got that right. I like you well enough, Hildy, but
frankly, I don't care if you kill yourself. You want to do it,
do it. And I think I resent it that you tried to use me to get
it done."
"I'm sorry about that, but I wasn't even aware that's what
I was doing. I'm still not sure if I was."
"Yeah, all right, it's not important."
"What I heard," I said, trying to put this delicately, "if
you want something that's, you know, not strictly legal, that
Liz was the gal to see."
"You heard that, did you?" She shot me a look that showed
some teeth, but would never pass for a smile. She looked very
dangerous. She was dangerous. How easy it would be for her to
arrange an accident out here, and how powerless I would be to
stop her. But the look was only a flicker, and her usual,
amiable expression replaced it. She shrugged. "You heard right.
That's what I thought we were coming out here for, to do some
business. But after what you just said, I wouldn't sell to
you."
"The way I reasoned," I went on, wondering what it was she
sold, "if you're used to doing illegal deals, things the CC
couldn't hear about, you must have methods of disguising your
activities."
"I see that now. Sure. This is one of them." She shook her
head slowly, and walked in a short circle, thinking it over. "I
tell you Hildy, I've seen a rodeo, a three-headed man, and a
duck fart underwater, but this is the craziest thing I ever did
see. This changes all the rules."
"How do you mean?"
"Lots of ways. I never heard of that memorydump business.
I'm gonna look it up when we get back. You say it's not a
secret?"
"That's what the CC said, and a friend of mine has heard
of it."
"Well, that's not the real important thing. It's lousy,
but I don't know what I can do about it, and I don't think it
really concerns me. I hope not, anyway. But what you said about
the CC rescuing you when you tried to kill yourself in your own
home.
"What it is, the main thing that me keeps walking around
free is what we call, in the trade, the Fourth Amendment.
That's the series of computer programs that--"
"I've heard the term."
"Right. Searches and seizures. An allpowerful, pervasive
computer that, if we let him loose, would make Big Brother seem
like my maiden aunt Vickie listening with a teacup against the
bedroom door. Balance that with the fact that everybody has
something to hide, something we'd rather nobody knew about,
even if it's not illegal, that lovely little right of privacy.
I think what's saved us is the people who make the laws have
something to hide, just like the rest of us.
"So what we do, in the, uh, 'criminal underworld,' is
sweep for extra ears and eyes in our own homes . . . and then
do our business right there. We know the CC is listening and
watching, but not the part that types out the warrants and
knocks down the doors."
"And that works?"
"It has so far. It sounds incredible when you think about
it, but I've been dodging in and out of trouble most of my
life, using just that method . . . essentially taking the CC at
his word, now that you mention it."
"It sounds risky."
"You'd think so. But in all my life, I never heard of an
instance where the CC used any illegally-obtained evidence. And
I'm not just talking about making arrests. I'm talking about in
establishing probable cause and issuing warrants, which is the
key to the whole search and seizure thing. The CC hears, in one
of his incarnations, things that would be incriminating, or at
least be enough for a judge to issue a warrant for a search or
a bug. But he doesn't tell himself what he knows, if you get my
meaning. He's compartmentalized. When I talk to him, he knows
I'm doing things that are against the law, and I know he knows
it. But that's the dealingwith-Liz part of his brain, which is
forbidden to tell the John Law part of his brain what he
knows."
We walked a little farther, both of us mulling this over.
I could see that what I'd told her made her very uneasy. I'd be
nervous, too, in her place. I'd never broken any laws more
serious than a misdemeanor; it's too easy to get caught, and
there's nothing illegal I've ever particularly wanted to do.
Hell, there's not that much that really is illegal in Luna. The
things that used to give law enforcement ninety percent of
their work--drugs, prostitution, and gambling, and the
organizations that provided these things to a naughty
populace--are all inalienable human rights in Luna. Violence
short of death was just a violation, subject to a fine.
Most of the things that were still worth a heavy-duty law
were so disgusting I didn't even want to think about them. Once
more I wondered just what it was the Queen of England was
involved in that made her the gal to see.
The biggest crime problem in Luna was theft of one sort or
another. Until the CC is unleashed, we'll probably always have
theft. Other than that, we're a pretty law-abiding society,
which we achieved by trimming the laws back to a bare minimum.
Liz spoke again, echoing my thoughts.
"Crime just ain't a big problem, you know that," she said.
"Otherwise, the citizenry in their great wisdom would clamor
for the sort of electronic cage I've always feared we'd get
sooner or later. All it would take would be to re-write a few
programs, and we'd see the biggest round-up since John Wayne
took the herd to Abilene. It's all just waiting to happen, you
know. In about a millisecond the CC could start singing like a
canary to the cops, and about three seconds later the warrants
could be printed up." She laughed. "One problem, there's
probably not enough cops to arrest everybody, much less jails
to put them in. Every crime since the Invasion could be solved
just like that. It boggles the mind just to think about it."
"I don't think that's going to happen," I said.
"No, thinking it over, what the CC's doing to you is
really for your own good, even if it turns my stomach. I mean,
suicide's a civil right, isn't it? What business does that
fucker have saving your life?"
"Actually, I hate to admit it, but I'm glad he did."
"Well, I would be too, you know, but it's the principle of
the thing. Listen, you know I'm going to spread this around,
huh? I mean, tell all my friends? I won't use your name."
"Sure. I knew you would."
"Maybe we should take extra precautions. Right offhand, I
can't think what they'd be, but I got a few friends who'll want
to brainstorm on this one. You know what the scary thing is, I
guess. He's overridden a basic program. If he can do one, he
could do another."
"Catching you and curing you of your criminal tendencies
might be seen as . . . well, for your own good."
"Exactly, that's exactly where that kind of bullshit
thinking leads. You give 'em an inch, and they take a parsec."
We were back within sight of the visitors' gallery again.
Liz stopped, began drawing aimless patterns in the dust with
the tip of her boot. I figured she had something else she
wanted to say, and knew she'd get to it soon. I looked up, and
saw another roller coaster train arc overhead. She looked up at
me.
"So . . . the reason you wanted to know how to get around
the CC, I don't think you mentioned it, and that was . . ."
"Not so I could kill myself."
"I had to ask."
"I can't give you a concrete reason. I haven't done much .
. . well, I don't feel like I've done enough to . . ."
"Take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end
them?"
"Like that. I've been sort of sleepwalking since this
happened. And I feel like I ought to be doing something."
"Talking it over is doing something. Maybe all you can do
except . . . you know, cheer up. Easy to say."
"Yes. How do you fight a recurrent suicidal urge? I
haven't been able to tell where it comes from. I don't feel
that depressed. But sometimes I just want to . . . hit
something."
"Like me."
"Sorry."
"You paid for it. Man, Hildy, I can't think of a thing I
would have done other than what you've told me. I just can't."
"Well, I feel like I ought to be doing something. Then
there's the other part of it. The . . . violation. I wanted to
find out if it's possible to get away from the CC's eyes and
ears. Because . . . I don't want him watching if I, you know,
do it again, damn it, I don't want him watching at all, I want
him out of my body, and out of my mind, and out of my goddam
life, because I don't like being one of his laboratory
animals!"
She put her hand on my shoulder and I realized I'd been
shouting. That made me mad, it shouldn't have, I know, because
it was only a gesture of friendship and concern, but the last
thing somebody crippled wants is your pity--and maybe not even
your sympathy--he just wants to be normal again, just like
everybody else. Every gesture of caring becomes a slap in the
face, a reminder that you are not well. So damn your sympathy,
damn your caring, how dare you stand over me, perfect and
healthy, and offer your help and your secret condescension.
Yeah, right, Hildy, so if you're so independent how come
you keep spilling your guts to strangers passing on the street?
I barely knew Liz. I knew it was wrong, but I still had to bite
my tongue to keep from telling her to keep her stinking hands
off me, something I'd come close to half a dozen times with
Fox. One day soon I'd go ahead and say it, lash out at him, and
he'd probably be gone. I'd be alone again.
"You have to tell me how this all came out," Liz said. It
relaxed me. She could have offered to help, and we'd have both
known it was false. A simple curiosity about how the story came
out was acceptable to me. She looked at the walls of the
visitors' center. "I guess it's about time to piss on the fire
and call in the dogs." She reached for the radio de-bugger.
"I have one more question."
"Shoot."
"Don't answer if you don't want to. But what do you do
that's illegal?"
"Are you a cop?"
"What? No."
"I know that. I had you checked out, you don't work the
police beat, you aren't friends with any cops."
"I know a couple of them fairly well."
"But you don't hang with them. Anyway, if you were a cop
and you said you weren't, your testimony is inadmissible, and I
got your denial on tape. Don't look so surprised; I gotta
protect myself."
"Maybe I shouldn't have asked."
"I'm not angry." She sighed, and kicked at a beer can. "I
don't guess many criminals think of themselves as criminals. I
mean, they don't wake up and say 'Looks like a good day to
break some laws.' I know what I do is illegal, but with me it's
a matter of principle. What we desperados call the Second
Amendment."
"Sorry, I'm not up on the U.S. Constitution. Which one is
that?"
"Firearms." I tried to keep my face neutral. In truth, I'd
feared something a lot worse than that.
"You're a gunrunner."
"I happen to believe it's a basic human right to be armed.
The Lunar government disagrees strongly. That's why I thought
you wanted to talk to me, to buy a gun. I brought you out here
because I've got several of them buried in various places
within a few kilometers."
"You'd have sold me one? Just handed it over?"
"Well, I might have told you where to dig."
"But how can you bury them? There's satellites watching
you all the time when you're out here."
"I think I'll keep a few trade secrets, if you don't
mind."
"Oh, sure, I was just--"
"That's all right, you're a reporter, you can't help being
a nosy bitch."
She started again to take the electronic device from
around my neck. I put my hand on it. I hadn't planned to do
that.
"How much? I want to keep it."
She narrowed her eyes at me.
"You gonna walk out into the bush, invisible, and off
yourself?"
"Hell, Liz, I don't know. I'm not planning to. I just like
the idea that I can use it to be really alone if I want to. I
like the thought of being able to vanish."
"It's not quite that simple . . . but I guess it's better
than nothing."
She named a price, I called her a stinking thief and named
a lower one. She named another. I'd have paid the first price,
but I knew she was a haggler, from a long line of people who
knew how to drive a hard bargain. We agreed soon, and she gave
me an elaborate set of instructions on how to launder the
payment so what transactions existed in the CC would be
perfectly legal.
By then I was more than ready to go inside, as I'd been
trying my best to practice the fourth method of liquid waste
management, and was doing the Gotta-Do-It Samba.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
What with covering the Collapse from the site and chasing
victims' relatives, dome engineers, politicians, and
ambulances, I didn't make it into the newsroom for almost ten
days after my Change.
It turns the world on its head, Changing. Naturally, it's
not the world that has altered, it's your point of view, but
subjective reality is in some ways more important than the way
things really are, or might be; who really knows? Not a thing
had been moved in the busy newsroom when I strode into it. All
the furniture was just where it had been, and there were no
unfamiliar faces at the desks. But all the faces now meant
something different. Where a buddy had sat there was now a
good-looking guy who seemed to be taking an interest in me. In
place of that gorgeous girl in the fashion department, the one
I'd intended to proposition someday, when I had the time, now
there was only another woman, probably not even as pretty as
me. We smiled at each other.
Changing is common, of course, part of everyday life, but
it's not such a frequent occurrence as to pass without notice,
at least not at my income level and that of most people in the
office. So I stood by the water cooler and for about an hour
was the center of attention, and I won't pretend I didn't like
it. My co-workers came and went, talked for a while, the group
constantly changing. What we were doing was establishing a new
sexual dynamic. I'd been male all the time I'd worked at the
Nipple. Everyone knew that the male Hildy was strictly a
hetero. But what were my preferences when female? The question
had never come up, and it was worth asking, because a lot of
people were oriented toward one sex or the other no matter
their present gender. So the word spread quickly: Hildy is
totally straight. Homo-oriented girls might as well not waste
their time. As for heterogirls . . . sorry, ladies, you missed
your big chance, except for those three or four who no doubt
would go home and weep all night for what they could no longer
have. Well, you like to think that, anyway. I must admit I saw
no tears from them there at the cooler.
Within ten minutes the crowd was completely stag, and I
was Queen of the May. I turned down a dozen dates, and half
that many much more frank proposals. I feel it's best not to
leap right into bed with co-workers, not until you have had a
chance to know them well enough to judge the possible scrapes
and bruises you might get from such an encounter, and the
tensions in the workplace that might ensue. I decided to stick
with that rule even though I was about to quit my job.
And the thing was, I didn't know these guys. Not well
enough, anyway. I'd drunk with them, bullshitted with them,
mailed a few of them home from bars, argued with them, even had
fights with two of them. I'd seen them with women, knew a bit
of how they could be expected to behave. But I didn't really
know them. I'd never looked at them with female eyes, and that
can make one hell of a lot of difference. A guy who seemed an
honest, reliable sensible fellow when he had no sexual designs
on you could turn out to be the worst jerk in the world when he
was trying to slip his hand under your skirt. You learn a lot
about human nature when you Change. I feel sorry for those who
don't, or won't.
And speaking of that . . .
I kissed a few of the guys--a sisterly peck on the cheek,
nothing more--squared my shoulders, and marched into the
elevator to go beard the lion in his den. I had a feeling he
was going to be hungry.
Nothing much happens at the Nipple without Walter hearing
about it. It certainly isn't his great personal insights that
bring him the news; none of us are sure exactly how he does it,
but the network of security cameras and microphones that lead
to his desk can't hurt. Still, he knows things he couldn't have
found out that way, and the general opinion is that he has a
truly vast cabal of spies, probably well-paid. No one I know
has ever admitted to snitching to Walter, and I can't recall
anyone ever being caught at it, but trying to find one is a
perpetual office pastime. The usual method is to invent some
false but plausible bit of employee scandal, tell one person
about it, and see if it gets back to Walter. He never bites.
He glanced up from his reading as I entered the office,
then looked back down. No surprise, and no comments about my
new body, and of course I had expected that. He'd rather die,
usually, than give you a compliment, or admit that anything had
caught him unprepared. I took a seat, and waited for him to
acknowledge me.
I'd given a lot of thought to the problem of Walter and
I'd dressed accordingly. Since he was a natural, and from other
clues I'd observed over the years of our association, I'd
concluded he might be a breast fancier. With that in mind, I'd
worn a blouse that bared my left one. With it I'd chosen a
short skirt and black gloves that reached to the elbows. For
the final touch I'd put on a ridiculous little hat with a huge
plume that drooped down almost over my left eye and swooshed
alarmingly through the air whenever I turned my head, a very
nineteen-thirtyish thing complete with a black net veil for an
air of mystery. The whole outfit was black, except for the red
hose. It needed black needle-tipped high heels, but that far I
was not prepared to go, and everything else I had in the closet
looked awful with the hat, so I wore no shoes at all. I liked
the effect. From the corner of my eye, I could tell Walter did,
too, though he was unlikely to admit it.
My guesses about him had been confirmed at the water
cooler by two co-workers who'd recently gone from male to
female. Walter was mildly homophobic, not aware of it, had been
baffled all his life by the very idea of changing sex, and was
extremely uncomfortable to find a male employee showing up for
work suddenly transformed into someone he could be sexually
interested in. He would be very grouchy today and would stay
that way for several months, until he managed to forget
entirely that I had ever been male, at which time the
approaches would start. My plan was to play up to that, to be
as female as a person could be, to keep him on the defensive
about it.
Not that I planned to have sex with him. I'd rather bed a
Galapagos tortoise. My intention was to quit my job. I'd tried
it before, maybe not with the determination I was feeling that
day, but I'd tried, and I knew how persuasive he could be.
When he judged he'd kept me waiting a suitable time, he
tossed the pages he'd been reading into a hopper, leaned back
in his huge chair, and laced his fingers behind his neck.
"Nice hat," he said, confounding me completely.
"Thanks." Damn, I already felt on the defensive. Resigning
was going to be harder if he was nice to me.
"Heard you went to the Darling outfit for the body work."
"That's right."
"Heard he's on the way out."
"That's what he's afraid of. But he's been afraid of that
for ten years."
He shrugged. There were circles of sweat in the armpits of
his rumpled white shirt, and a coffee stain on his blue tie.
Once again I wondered where he found sex partners, and
concluded he probably paid for them. I'd heard he'd been
married for thirty years, but that had been sixty years ago.
"If that's the kind of work he's doing, maybe I heard
wrong." He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. I'd
just worked out that what he'd said could be a compliment to me
as well as Bobbie, which just threw me further off balance.
Damn him.
"Reason I called you in here," he said, completely
ignoring the fact that it was I who had requested this meeting,
"I wanted to let you know you did real good work on that
Collapse story. I know I usually don't bother to tell my
reporters when they've done a good job. Maybe that's a mistake.
But you're one of my best." He shrugged again. "Okay. The best.
Just thought I'd tell you that. There's a bonus in your next
paycheck, and I'm giving you a raise."
"Thanks, Walter." You son of a bitch.
"And that Invasion Bicentennial stuff. Really first-rate.
It's exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for. And you were
wrong about it, too, Hildy. We got a good response from the
first article, and the ratings have gone up every week since
then."
"Thanks again." I was getting very tired of that word.
"But I can't take credit for it. Brenda's been doing most of
the work. I take what she's done and do a little punching up,
cut a few things here and there."
"I know. And I appreciate it. That girl's gonna be good at
hard news one of these days. That's why I paired you two up, so
you could give her the benefit of your experience on the
feature writing, show her the ropes. She's learning fast, don't
you think?"
I had to agree that she was, and he went on about it for
another minute or two, picking out items he'd particularly
liked in her series. I was wondering when he'd get to the
point. Hell, I was wondering when I'd get to the point.
So I drew a deep breath and spoke into one of his pauses.
"That's why I'm here today, Walter. I want to be taken off
the Invasion series." Damn it. Somewhere between my brain and
my mouth that sentence had been short-circuited; I'd meant to
tell him I was leaving the pad entirely.
"Okay," he said.
"Now don't try to talk me into staying on," I said, and
then stopped. "What do you mean, okay?" I asked.
"I mean okay. You're off the Invasion series. I'd
appreciate it if you'd continue to give Brenda some help on it
when she needs it, but only if it doesn't get in the way of
your other work."
"I thought you said you liked the stuff I was doing."
"Hildy, you can't have it both ways. I did like it, and
you didn't like doing it. Fine, I'm letting you off. Do you
want back on?"
"No . . . is this some sort of trick?"
He just shook his head. I could see he was enjoying this,
the bastard.
"You mentioned my other work. What would that be?" This
had to be where the punch line came, but I was at a loss to
envision any job he could want me to do that would require this
much buttering up.
"You tell me," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"I seem to be having trouble using the language today. I
thought it was clear what I meant. What would you like to do?
You want to switch to another department? You want to create
your own department? Name it, Hildy."
I suppose I was still feeling shaky from recent
experiences, but I felt another anxiety attack coming on. I
breathed deeply, in and out, several times. Where was the
Walter I'd known and knew how to deal with?
"You've always talked about a column," he was saying. "If
you want it, it can be arranged, but frankly, Hildy, I think
it'd be a mistake. You could do it, sure, but you're not really
cut out for it. You need work where you get out into the action
more regularly. Columnists, hell, they run around for a few
weeks or years, hunting stories, but they all get lazy sooner
or later and wait for the stories to come to them. You don't
like government stuff and I don't blame you; it's boring. You
don't like straight gossip. My feeling is what you're good at
is rooting out the personality scandal, and getting on top of
and staying on top of the big, breaking story. If you have an
idea for a column, I'll listen, but I'd hoped you'd go in
another direction."
Aha. Here it came.
"And what direction is that?"
"You tell me," he said, blandly.
"Walter, frankly . . . you caught me by surprise. I
haven't been thinking in those terms. What I came in here to do
was quit."
"Quit?" He looked at me dubiously, then chuckled. "You'll
never quit, Hildy. Oh, maybe in twenty, thirty more years.
There's still things you like about this job, no matter how you
bitch about it."
"I won't deny that. But the other parts are wearing me
down."
"I've heard that before. It's just a bad phase you're
going through; you'll bounce back when you get used to your new
role here."
"And what is that?"
"I told you, I want to hear your ideas on that."
I sat quietly for some time, staring at him. He just gazed
placidly back at me. I went over it again and again, looking
for mousetraps. Of course, there was nothing to guarantee he'd
keep his word, but if he didn't, I could always quit then. Is
that what he was counting on? Was he fighting a delaying
action, knowing he could always bring his powers of persuasion
to bear again at a later date, after he'd screwed me and I
started to howl?
One thought kept coming back to me. It almost seemed as if
he'd known when I walked into his office that I'd planned to
quit. Otherwise why the stroking, why the sugarplums?
Did he really think I was that good? I knew I was good--it
was part of my problem, being so proficient at something so
frequently vile--but was I that good? I'd never seen any signs
that Walter thought so.
The main fact, though, I thought sourly, was that he'd
hooked me. I was interested in staying on at the Nipple--or
maybe at the better-respected Daily Cream--if I could make a
stab at re-defining my job. But thoughts like that had been the
farthest thing from my mind today. He was offering me what I
wanted, and I had no idea what that was.
Once again, he seemed to read my thoughts.
"Why don't you take a week or so to think this over?" he
said. "No sense trying to come up with an outline for the next
ten, twenty years right here and now."
"All right."
"While you're doing that . . ." I leaned forward, ready
for him to jerk all this away from me. This was the obvious
place to reveal his real intentions, now that he'd set the hook
firmly.
"All right, Walter, let's see your hole card."
He looked at me innocently, with just a trace of hurt.
Worse and worse, I thought. I'd seen that same expression just
before he sent me out to cover the assassination of the
President of Pluto. Three gees all the way, and the story was
essentially over by the time I arrived.
"The Flacks had a press release this morning," he said.
"Seems they're going to canonize a new Gigastar tomorrow
morning."
I turned it over and over, looking for the catch. I didn't
see one.
"Why me? Why not send the religion editor?"
"Because she'll be happy to pick up all the free material
and come right back home and let them write the story for her.
You know the Flacks; this thing is going to be prepared. I want
you there, see if you can get a different angle on it."
"What possible new angle could there be on the Flacks?"
For the first time he showed a little impatience.
"That's what I pay you to find. Will you go?"
If this was some sort of walterian trick, I couldn't see
it. I nodded, got up, and started for the door.
"Take Brenda with you."
I turned, thought about protesting, realized it would have
been just a reflexive move, and nodded. I turned once more. He
waited for the traditional moment every movie fan knows, when
I'd just pulled the door open.
"And Hildy." I turned again. "I'd appreciate it if you'd
cover yourself up when you come in here. Out of respect for my
idiosyncrasies."
This was more like it. I'd begun to think Walter had been
kidnapped by mind-eaters from Alpha, and a blander substitute
left in his place. I brought up some of the considerable
psychic artillery I had marshalled for this little foray,
though it was sort of like nuking a flea.
"I'll wear what I please, where I please," I said, coldly.
"And if you have a complaint about how I dress, check with my
union." I liked the line, but it should have had a gesture to
go with it. Something like ripping off my blouse. But
everything I thought of would have made me look sillier than
him, and then the moment was gone, so I just left.
#
In the elevator on my way out of the building I said "CC,
on line."
"I'm at your service."
"Did you tell Walter I've been suicidal?"
There was, for the CC, a long pause, long enough that, had
he been human, I'd have suspected him of preparing a lie. But
I'd come to feel that the CC's pauses could conceal something a
lot trickier than that.
"I'm afraid you have engendered a programming conflict in
me," he said. "Because of a situation with Walter which I am
not at liberty to discuss or even hint at with you, most of my
conversations with him are strictly under the rose."
"That sounds like you did."
"I neither confirm nor deny it."
"Then I'm going to assume you did."
"It's a free satellite. You can assume what you please.
The nearest I can get to a denial is to say that telling him of
your condition without your approval would be a violation of
your rights of privacy . . . and I can add that I would find it
personally distasteful to do so."
"Which still isn't a denial."
"No. It's the best I can do."
"You can be very frustrating."
"Look who's talking."
I'll admit that I was a bit wounded at the idea that the
CC could find me frustrating. I'm not sure what he meant;
probably my willful and repeated attempts to ignore his efforts
to save my life. Come to think of it, I'd find that
frustrating, too, if a friend of mine was trying to kill
herself.
"I can't find another way to explain his . . .
unprecedented coddling of me. Like he knew I was sick, or
something."
"In your position, I would have found it odd, as well."
"It's contrary to his normal behavior."
"It is that."
"And you know the reason for that."
"I know some of the reasons. And again, I can't tell you
more."
You can't have it both ways, but we all want to. Certain
conversations between the CC and private citizens are protected
by Programs of Privilege that would make Catholic priests
hearing confession seem gossipy. So on the one hand I was angry
at the thought the CC might have told Walter about my
predicament; I'd specifically told him not tell anyone. On the
other hand, I was awfully curious to know what Walter had told
the CC, which the CC said would have violated his rights.
Most of us give up trying to wheedle the CC when we're
five or six. I'm a little more stubborn than that, but I hadn't
done it since I was twenty. Still, things had changed a bit . .
.
"You've overridden your programming before," I suggested.
"And you're one of the few who know about it, and I do it
only when the situation is so dire I can think of no
alternative, and only after long, careful consideration.
"Consider it, will you?"
"I will. It shouldn't take more than five or six years to
reach a conclusion. I warn you, I think the answer will be no."
#
One of the reasons I can hear Walter call me his best
reporter without laughing out loud is that I had no intention
of showing up at the canonization the next day to meekly accept
a basketful of handouts and watch the show. Finding out who the
new Gigastar was going to be would be a bigger scoop than the
David Earth story. So I spent the rest of the day dragging
Brenda around to see some of my sources. None of them knew
anything, though I picked up speculation ranging from the
plausible--John Lennon--to the laughable -- -- Larry Yeager. It
would be just like the Flacks to cash in on the Nirvana
disaster by elevating a star killed in the Collapse, but he'd
have to have considerably more dedicated followers than poor
Larry. On the other hand, there was a longstanding movement
within the church to give the Golden Halo to the Mop-Top from
Liverpool. He fulfilled all the Flacks' qualifications for
Sainthood: wildly popular when alive, a twocentury-plus cult
following, killed violently before his time. There had been
sightings and cosmic interventions and manifestations, just
like with Tori-san and Megan and the others. But I could get no
one to either confirm or deny on it, and had to keep digging.
I did so long into the night, waking up people, calling in
favors, working Brenda like a draft horse. What had started out
as a bright-eyed adventure eventually turned her into a yawning
cadaverous wraith, still gamely calling, still listening
patiently to the increasingly nasty comments as this or that
insider who owed me something told me they knew nothing at all.
"If one more person asks me if I know what time it is . .
." she said, and couldn't finish because her jaw was cracking
from another yawn. "This is no use, Hildy. The security's too
good. I'm tired."
"Why do you think they call it legwork?"
I kept at it until the wee hours, and stopped only because
Fox came in and told me Brenda had fallen asleep on the couch
in the other room. I'd been prepared to stay awake all night,
sustained by coffee and stims, but it was Fox's house, and our
relationship was already getting a little rocky, so I packed it
in, still no wiser as to who would be called to glory at ten
the next morning.
I was bone weary, but I felt better than I had in quite a
while.
#
Brenda had the resilience of true youth. She joined me in
the bathroom the next morning looking none the worse for wear.
I felt the corners of her eyes jabbing me as she pretended not
to be interested in Hildy's Beauty Secrets. I dialed up
programs on the various make-up machines and left them there
when I was through so she could copy down the numbers when I
wasn't looking. I remember thinking her mother should have
taught her some of these tricks--Brenda wore little or no
cosmetics, seemed to know nothing about them--but I knew
nothing about her mother. If the old lady wouldn't let her
daughter have a vagina, there was no telling what other
restrictions had been in effect in the "Starr" household.
The one thing I still hadn't adjusted to about being
female again was learning to allow for the two to three minutes
extra I require to get ready to face the world in the morning.
I think of it as Woman's Burden. Let's not get into the fact
that it's a self-imposed one; I like to look my best, and that
means enhancing even Bobbie's artistry. Instead of taking
whatever the autovalet throws into my hand, I deliberate at
least twenty seconds over what to wear. Then there's coloring
and styling the hair to compliment it, choosing a make-up
scheme and letting the machines apply it, eye color,
accessories, scent . . . the details of the Presentation of
Hildy as I wish to present her are endless, time-consuming . .
. and enjoyable. So maybe it's not such a burden after all, but
the result on the morning of the canonization was that I missed
the train I had planned to catch by twenty seconds and had to
wait ten minutes for the next one. I spent the time showing
Brenda a few tricks she could do to her standard paper jumper
that would emphasize her best points--though picking out good
points on that endless rail of a body taxed my inspiration and
my tact to their limits.
She was coltishly pleased at the attention. I saw her
scrutinizing my pale blue opaque body stocking with the almost
subliminal moir of even lighter blue running through the weave,
and had a pretty good idea of what she'd be wearing the next
day. I decided I'd drop some subtle hints to discourage it.
Brenda in a body stocking would make as much sense,
fashion-wise, as a snood on a dry salami.
#
The Grand Studio of the First Latitudinarian Church of
Celebrity Saints is in the studio district, not far from the
Blind Pig, convenient to the many members who work in the
entertainment industry. The exterior is not much to look at,
just a plain warehouse-type door leading off one of the tall,
broad corridors of the upper parts of King City zoned for light
manufacturing-- which is a good description of the movie
business, come to think of it. Over the entrance are the
well-known initials F.L.C.C.S. framed in the round-cornered
rectangle that has symbolized television long after screens
ceased to be round-cornered rectangles anywhere but in the
Flacks' Grand Studio.
Inside was much better. Brenda and I entered a long
hallway with a roof invisible behind multicolored spots. Lining
the hall were huge holos and shrines of the Four Gigastars,
starting with the most recently canonized.
First was Mambazo Nkabinde--"Momby" to all his fans. Born
shortly before the Invasion in Swaziland, a nation that history
has all but forgotten, emigrated to Luna with his father at age
three under some sort of racial quota system in effect at the
time. As a young man, invented Sphere Music almost
single-handedly. Also known as The Last Of The Christian
Scientists, he died at the age of forty-three of a curable
melanoma, presumably after much prayer. The Latitudinarian
Church was not prejudiced about inducting members of other
faiths; he had been canonized fifty years earlier, the last
such ceremony until today.
Next we passed the exhibits in praise of Megan Galloway,
the leading and probably best proponent of the now-neglected
art of "feelies." She had a small but fanatical following one
hundred years after her mysterious disappearance--an ending
that made her the only one of the Flack Saints whose almost
daily "sightings" could actually be founded in fact. The only
female out of four non-Changing Gigastars, she was, with Momby,
a good example of the pitfalls of enshrining celebrities
prematurely. If it weren't for the fact that she provided the
only costuming role model for the women of the congregation,
she might have been dethroned long ago, as the feelies were no
longer being made by anyone. Feelie fans had to be satisfied
with tapes at least eighty years old. No one in the Church had
contemplated the eclipse of an entire art form when they had
elevated her into their pantheon.
I actually paused before the next shrine, the one devoted
to Torinaga Nakashima: "Tori-san." He was the only one I felt
deserved to be appreciated for his life's work. It was he who
had first mastered the body harp, driving the final nails into
the coffin he had fashioned for the electric guitar, long the
instrument of choice for what used to be known as rocking-roll
music. His music still sounds fresh to me today, like Mozart.
He had died in Japan during the first of the Three Days of the
Invasion, battling the implacable machines or beings or
whatever they were that had stalked his native city, unbeatable
Godzillas finally arrived at the real Tokyo. Or so the story
went. There were those who said he had died at the wheel of his
private yacht, trying his best to get the hell out of there and
catch the last shuttle to Luna, but in this case I prefer the
legend.
And last but indisputably first among the Saints, Elvis
Aron Presley, of Tupelo, Mississippi; Nashville; and Graceland,
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. of A. It was his incredibly
stillascendant star one hundred years after his death that had
inspired the retired ad agency executives who were the founding
fathers of the Flacks to concoct the most blatant and
profitable promotional campaign in the inglorious history of
public relations: The F.L.C.C.S.
You could say what you want about the Flacks-and I'd said
a lot, in private, among friends--but these people knew how to
treat the working press. After the Elvis pavilion the crowd was
divided into two parts. One was a long, unmoving line, composed
of hopeful congregants trying to get a seat in the last row of
the balcony, some of them waving credit cards which the ushers
tried not to sneer at; it took more than just money to buy your
way into this shindig. The rest of the crowd, the ones with
press passes stuck into the brims of their battered gray
fedoras, were steered through a gap in velvet ropes and led to
a spread of food and drink that made UniBio's efforts at the
ULTRATingle rollout look like the garbage cans in the alley
behind a greasy spoon.
A feeding frenzy among veteran reporters is not a pretty
sight. I've been at free feeds where you needed to draw your
hand back quickly or risk having a finger bitten off. This one
was wellmanaged, as you'd expect from the Flacks. Each of us
was met by a waiter or waitress whose sole job seemed to be to
carry our plates and smile, smile, smile. There were people
there who would have fasted for three days in anticipation if
the Flacks had announced the ceremony ahead of time; I heard
some grousing about that. Reporters have to find something to
complain about, otherwise they might commit the unpardonable
sin of thanking their hosts.
I walked, in considerable awe, past an entire juvenile
brontosaur carcass, candied, garnished with glace'd fruit and
with an apple in its mouth. They were rolling something
unrecognizable away--I was told it had been a Tori-san effigy
made entirely from sashimi--and replacing it with a three-meter
likeness of Elvis in his Vegas Period, in marzipan. I plucked a
sequin from the suit of lights and found it to be very tasty. I
never did find out what it was.
I built what might easily qualify as the Sandwich of the
Century. Never mind what was in it; I gathered from Brenda's
queasy expression as she watched my Flackite wallah carrying it
that ordinary mortals--those who did not understand the zen of
cold cuts--might find some of my choices dissonant, to say the
least. I admit not everyone is able to appreciate the exquisite
tang of pickled pigs knuckles rubbing shoulders with rosettes
of whipped cream. Brenda herself needed no plate-carrier. She
was schlumping along with just a small bowl of black olives and
sweet pickles. I hurried, realizing that people were soon going
to understand that she was with me. I don't think she even knew
what one item in ten was, much less if she liked it or not.
The room the Flacks called the Grand Studio had formerly
been the largest sound stage at NLF. They had fixed it up so
the area we saw was shaped like a wedge, narrowing toward the
actual stage in the front of the room. It was quite a large
wedge. The walls on either side leaned in slightly as they
rose, and were composed entirely of thousands upon thousands of
glass-faced television screens, the old kind, rectangular with
rounded corners, a shape that was as important to Flackites as
the cross was to Christians. The Great Tube symbolized eternal
life and, more important, eternal Fame. I could see a certain
logic in that. Each of the screens, ranging in size from thirty
centimeters to as much as ten meters across, was displaying a
different image as Brenda and I entered, from the lives, loves,
films, concerts, funerals, marriages and, for all I knew, bowel
movements and circumcisions of the Gigastars. There were simply
too many images to take in. In addition, holos floated through
the room like enchanted bubbles, each with its smiling image of
Momby, Megan, Tori-san, and Elvis.
The Flacks knew who this show was really for; we were
escorted to an area at the edge of the stage itself. The actual
congregants had to be content with the cheap seats and the
television screens. There were balconies upon balconies
somewhere back there, vanishing into the suspendedspotlight
theme the Flacks favored.
Because we were late most of the seats right up front had
been taken. I was about to suggest we split up when I spotted
Cricket at a ringside table with an empty chair beside her. I
grabbed Brenda with one hand and a spare chair with the other,
and pulled both through the noisy crowd. Brenda was embarrassed
to make everyone scoot over to make room for her chair; I'd
have to speak to her about that. If she couldn't learn to push
and shove and shout, she had no business in the news game.
"I love the body, Hildy," Cricket said as I wedged myself
in between them. I preened a bit as a large pink pitcher was
set in front of me. These Flacks were trained well; I was about
to ask for lime wedges when an arm came around me and left a
crystal bowl full of them.
"Do I detect a note of wistfulness?" I said.
"You mean because they've retired your jersey from the
great game of cocksmanship?" She seemed to consider it. "I
guess not."
I pouted, but it was for show. Frankly, the whole idea of
having made love to her seemed to me by now an aberration. Not
that I wouldn't be interested again when I Changed back to
male, in thirty or so years, if she happened to be female
still.
"Nice job on that lovers-after-death pic out at Nirvana,"
I said. I was poking through the assortment of press perks in a
basket before me and trying to eat a part of my sandwich with
my other hand. I found a gold commemorative medal, inscribed
and numbered, that I knew I could get four hundred for at any
pawnbroker in the Leystrasse, so long as I got there quick and
beat every other reporter in Luna to the punch. A forlorn hope;
I saw three of the damn things depart by messenger, and they
wouldn't be the first. By now the medals would be a drug on the
market. The rest of the stuff was mostly junk.
"That was you?" Brenda said, leaning over to ogle Cricket.
"Cricket, Brenda. Brenda, meet Cricket, who works for some
scurrilous rag or other whose initials are S.S. and who
deserves an Oscar for the job she is doing covering her deep
despair at having had only one opportunity to experience the
glory that was me."
"Yeah, it was sort of gory," Cricket said, reaching across
me to shake hands. "Nice to meet you." Brenda stammered
something.
"How much did that shot cost you?"
Cricket looked smug. "It was quite reasonable."
"What do you mean?" Brenda asked. "Why did it cost you?"
We both looked at her, then at each other, then back at
Brenda.
"You mean that was staged?" she said, horrified. She
looked at the olive in her hand, then put it back into the
bowl. "I cried when I saw it," she said.
"Oh, stop looking like somebody just shot your puppy, damn
it," I said. "Cricket, will you explain the facts of life to
her? I would, but I'm clean; you're the unethical monster who
violated a basic rule of journalism."
"I will if you'll trade places with me. I don't think I
want to watch all that go down." She was pointing at my
sandwich with a prim expression that was belied by what I could
see of the remnants of her free lunch, which included the
skeletons of three tiny birds, picked clean.
So we switched, and I got down to the serious business of
eating and drinking, all the while keeping one ear cocked to
the jabbering around me, on the off chance somebody had managed
to get a scoop on the canonization. No one had, but I heard
dozens of rumors:
"Lennon? Oh, c'mon, he was all washed up, that bullet was
a good career move."
". . . wanna know who it's gonna be? Mickey Mouse, put
your money on it."
"How they going to handle that? He doesn't even exist."
"So Elvis does? There's a cartoon revival--"
"And if they picked a cartoon, it'd be Baba Yaga."
"Get serious. She's not in the same universe as Mickey
Mouse . . ."
"--says it's Silvio. There's nobody with one half the
rep--"
"But he's got one problem, from the Flacks' point of view:
he ain't dead yet. Can't get a real cult going till you're
dead."
"C'mon, there's no law says they have to wait, especially
these days. He could go on for five hundred more years. What'll
they do, keep reaching back to the twentieth, twenty-first
century and pick guys nobody remembers?"
"Everybody remembers Tori-san."
"That's different."
"--notice there's three men and only one woman. Granting
they might pick somebody still alive, why not Marina?"
"Why not both of 'em? Might even get them back together.
What a story. A double canonization. Think of the headlines."
"How about Michael Jackson?"
"Who?"
It kept on and on, a speculative buzz in the background. I
heard half a dozen more names proposed, increasingly unlikely
to my way of thinking. The only new one I'd heard, the only one
I hadn't thought of, was Mickey, and I considered him a real
possibility. You could have walked down to the Leystrasse that
very day and bought a shirt with his picture on the front, and
cartoons were enjoying a revival. There was no law saying a
cult had to have a real object, what was being worshipped here
was an image, not flesh and blood.
Actually, while there were no rules for a Flack
canonization, there were guidelines that took on the force of
laws. The Flacks did not create celebrities, they had no real
axe to grind in this affair. They simply acknowledged
pre-existing cult figures, and there were certain qualities a
cult figure had to have. Everyone had their own list of these
qualities, and weighted them differently. Once more I went
through my own list, and considered the three most likely
candidates in the light of these requirements.
First, and most obvious, the Gigastar had to have been
wildly popular when alive, with a planetary reputation, with
fans who literally worshipped him. So forget about anybody
before the early twentieth century. That was the time of the
birth of mass media. The first cult figures of that magnitude
were film stars like Charlie Chaplin. He could be eliminated
because he didn't fulfill the second qualification: a cult
following reaching down to the present time. His films were
still watched and appreciated, but people didn't go crazy over
him. The only person from that time who might have been
canonized--if a F.L.C.C.S. had existed then--was Valentino. He
died young, and was enshrined in that global hall of fame that
was still in its infancy when he lived. But he was completely
forgotten today.
Mozart? Shakespeare? Forget it. Maybe Ludwig Van B. was
the hottest thing on the Prussian pop charts in his day, but
they'd never heard of him in Ulan Bator . . . and where were
his sides? He never cut any, that's where. The only way of
preserving his music was to write it down on paper, a lost art.
Maybe Will Shakespeare would have won a carload of Tonys and
been flown to the coast to adapt his stuff for the silver
screen. He was still very popular--As You Like It was playing
two shows a day at the King City Center -but he and everyone
else from before about 1920 had a fatal flaw, celebrity-wise:
nobody knew anything about them. There was no film, no
recordings. Celebrity worship is only incidentally about the
art itself. You need to do something to qualify, it needn't be
good, only evocative . . . but the real thing being sold by the
Flacks and their antecedents was image. You needed a real body
to rend and tear in the padloids, real scandals to tsk-tsk
over, and real blood and real tragedy to weep over.
That was widely held to be the third qualification for
sainthood: the early and tragic death. I personally thought it
could be dispensed with in some circumstances, but I won't deny
it's importance. Nobody can create a cult. They rise
spontaneously, from emotions that are genuine, even if they are
managed adroitly.
For my money, the man they should be honoring today was
Thomas Edison. Without his two key inventions, sound recording
and motion picture film, the whole celebrity business would be
bankrupt.
Mickey, John, or Silvio? Each had a drawback. With Mickey,
it was that he wasn't real. So who cares? John . . .? Maybe,
but I judged his popularity wasn't quite in that stellar realm
that would appeal to the Flacks. Silvio? The big one, that he
was alive. But rules are made to be broken. He certainly had
the star power. There was no more popular man in the Solar
System. Any reporter in Luna would sell his mother's soul for
one interview.
And then it came to me, and it was so obvious I wondered
why I hadn't seen it before, and why no one else had figured it
out.
"It's Silvio," I told Cricket. I swear the lady's ear
tried to swivel toward me before her head did. That gal really
has the nose for news.
"What did you hear?"
"Nothing. I just figured it out."
"So what do you want, I should kiss your feet? Tell me,
Hildy."
Brenda was leaning over, looking at me like I was the
great guru. I smiled at them, thought about making them suffer
a little, but that was unworthy. I decided to share my
Holmesian deductions with them.
"First interesting fact," I said, "they didn't announce
this thing until yesterday. Why?"
"That's easy," Cricket snorted. "Because Momby's elevation
was the biggest flop-ola since Napoleon promised to whip some
British butt at Waterloo."
"That's part of the reason," I conceded. It had been
before my time, but the Flacks were still smarting from that
one. They'd conducted a threemonth Who-Will-It-Be?-type
campaign, and by the time the big day arrived The Supreme
Potentate Of All Universes would have been a disappointment,
much less Momby, who was a poor choice anyway. This was a bunch
whose whole raison d'etre was publicity, as an art and science.
Once burned, twice wear-a-fireproof-suit; they were managing
this one the right way, as a big surprise with only a day to
think about it. Neither press nor public could get bored in one
day.
"But they've kept this one completely secret. From what
I'm told, the fact that Momby was going to be elevated was
about as secret from us, from the press, as Silvio's current
hair style. The media simply agreed not to print it until the
big day. Now think about the Flacks. Not a closemouthed bunch,
except for the inner circle, the Grand Flacks and so forth.
Gossip is their life blood. If twenty people knew who the new
Gigastar was, one of them would have blabbed it to one of my
sources or one of yours, count on it. If ten people knew I'd
give you even money I could have found it out. So even less
than that know who it's gonna be. With me so far?"
"Keep talking, O silver-tongued one."
"I've got it down to three possibilities. Mickey, John,
Silvio. Am I wildly off-base there?"
She didn't say yes or no, but her shrug told me her own
list was pretty much like mine.
"Each has a problem. You know what they are."
"Two out of three of them are . . . well, old," Brend