Steel Beach
by
John Varley

CHAPTER ONE

"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 churn 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 pte' 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 pte', 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 freshly- poured 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 ten- centimeter 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
ULTRA- Tingle.  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."

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWO

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 re- discover 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 old- fashioned 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 unplumbed.

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 wide- eyed look of an acolyte to a
guru.

Walter took another drag on his cheroot, exhaled, and leaned back in his
chair, fingers laced behind his head.

"You know what today is?" he asked.

"Thursday," Brenda supplied.  Walter glanced at her, but didn't bother
to reply.  He took another drag.

"It's the one hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the Invasion and
Occupation of the Planet Earth."

"Remind me to light a candle and say a novena."

"You think it's funny."

"Nothing funny about it," I said.  "I just wonder what it has to do with
me."

Walter nodded, and put his feet down on the floor.

"How many stories have you seen on the Invasion in the last week?  The
week leading up to this anniversary?"

I was willing to play along.

"Let's see.  Counting the stuff in the Straight Shit, the items in the
Lunarian and the K.C. News, that incisive series in Lunatime, and of
course our own voluminous coverage . . . none.  Not a single story."

"That's right.  I think it's time somebody did something about that."

"While we're at it, let's do a big spread on the Battle of Agincourt,
and the first manned landing on Mars."

"You do think it's funny."

"I'm merely applying a lesson somebody taught me when I started here. If
it happened yesterday, it ain't news.  And the News Nipple reports the
news."

"This isn't strictly for the Nipple," Walter admitted.

"Uh-oh."

He ignored my expression, which I hoped was sufficiently sour, and
plowed ahead.

"We'll use cuts from your stories in the Nipple.  Most of 'em, anyway.
You'll have Brenda to do most of the leg work."

"What are you talking about?" Brenda asked Walter.  When that didn't
work, she turned to me. "What's he talking about?"

"I'm talking about the supplement."

"He's talking about the old reporters' graveyard."

"Just one story a week.  Will you let me explain?"

I settled back in my chair and tried to turn off my brain.  Oh, I'd
fight it hard enough, but I knew I didn't have much choice when Walter
got that look in his eye.

The News Nipple Corporation publishes three pads.  The first is the
Nipple itself, updated hourly, full of what Walter Editor liked to think
of as "lively" stories:  the celebrity scandal, the pseudo-scientific
breakthrough, psychic predictions, lovingly bloody coverage of
disasters.  We covered the rougher and more proletarian sports, and a
certain amount of politics, if the proposition involved could be
expressed in a short sentence.  The Nipple had so many pictures you
hardly needed to read the words. Like the other padloids, it would not
have bothered with any copy but for the government literacy grants that
often provided the financial margin between success and failure.  A
daily quota of words was needed to qualify for the grants. That exact
number of words appeared in each of our issues, including "a,"

"an," "and," and "the."

The Daily 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 by- line.  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."

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER THREE

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 old- style
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
space- time 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 uninjured 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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER FOUR

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 non- violent.

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 in 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, story-
tellers, 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 non- violence 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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

$$

CHAPTER FIVE

"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 CalTech 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 double- take, 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 knee- deep 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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER SIX

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 mid-
twenty-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 carrot- topped 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 down- time.

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 sub- programs, 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
buggy- whip 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 re- fill 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 un- reality 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 newly- acquired 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 chin-
ducking 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 sub- routines.  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, counter- program, 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."

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER SEVEN

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 mid- break, 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," pronghorn- head 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 hair- do."

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 time- honored 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 pseudo- experiences 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 prong- head.  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 t- saurs
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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER EIGHT

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 fast- forwards 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 their 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-and- Baileyest,
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 not- much-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 five- kilometer 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 ULTRA- Tingle--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 twenty- four 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 hi- thrust 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 gender- based 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 old- fashioned 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-to- female 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 hinge.  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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER NINE

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 blue- uniformed 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 on- the-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 make- up 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 test- bed.  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 love- making 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 river in
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 re- landscaped 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 Hod- carriers 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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TEN

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 second- highest 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 rat- nested
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 un- mapped 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-year- old 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
self- loathing 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 twenty- one 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 back- feed, 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 middle- class 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-and- black 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 going' 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
looking' 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 less- than 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 their- apparent 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 two- tone
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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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 tooth-
cleaning 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 contra- survival."

"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-so- cheap 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 Sphincter- Tightener 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 camera- toting 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-of- Mint.  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 in.

"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 ascent- stage module about a hundred feet above
the landing stage, hanging from invisible wires.  It's not the Apollo 11
ascent stage; that one crash- landed 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; post- Invasion 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.
P- suits 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 barbed- wire 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 memory- dump 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 all- powerful, 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 dealing- with-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
debugger.

"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 gun-runner."

"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.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWELVE

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 coworkers 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 hetero- girls . . . 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 coworkers,
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
coworkers 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
long- standing 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 two- century-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 multi- colored 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 singlehandedly.  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 still- ascendant 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 ULTRA- Tingle
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 well- managed, 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
suspended- spotlight 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
three- month 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
close- mouthed 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," Brenda put in.

"Lots of reasons for that," I said.  "Look at the Four; all born on
Earth.  Trouble is, we're a less violent society than the previous
centuries. We don't get enough tragic deaths.  Momby's the only
superstar who's had the grace to fix himself up with a tragic death in
over a hundred years. Most everyone else hangs around until he's a has-
been.  Look at Eileen Frank."

"Look at Lars O'Malley," Cricket contributed.

From the blank look on Brenda's face, I could see it was like I'd
guessed; she'd never heard of either of them.

"Where are they now?" she asked, unconsciously voicing the four words
every celebrity fears the most.

"In the elephants' graveyard.  In a taproom in Bedrock, probably, maybe
on adjacent stools.  Both of them used to be as big as Silvio."  Brenda
looked dubious, like I'd said something was bigger than infinity.  She'd
learn.

"So what's your great leap of deduction?" Cricket asked.

I waved my hand grandly around the room.

"All this.  All these trillions and trillions of television screens.  If
it's Mickey or John, what's gonna happen, some guy backstage dashes off
a quick sketch of them and comes out holding it over his head?  No, what
happens is every one of these screens starts showing Steamboat Willie
and Fantasia and every other cartoon Mickey was ever in, or . . . what
the hell films did John Lennon make?"

"You're the history buff.  All I know about him is Sergeant Pepper."

"Well, you get the idea."

"Maybe I'm dumb," Cricket said, not as though she believed it.

"You're not.  Think about it."  She did, and I saw the moment when the
light dawned.

"You could be right," she said.

"No 'could be' about it.  I've got half a mind to file on it right now.
Walter could get out a newsbreaker before they make the big
announcement."

"So use my phone; I won't even charge you."

I said nothing to that.  If I'd had even one source telling me it was
Silvio I'd have called Walter and let him decide.  The history of
journalism is filled with stories of people who jumped the headline and
had to eat it later.

"I guess I'm dumb," Brenda said.  "I still don't see it."

I didn't comment on her first statement.  She wasn't dumb, just green,
and I hadn't seen it myself until too late.  So I explained.

"Somebody has to cue up the tapes to fill all these screens.  Dozens of
techs, visual artists, and so forth.  There's no way they could
orchestrate a thing like that and keep it down to a handful of people in
the know.  Most of my sources are just those kind of people, and they
always have their hands out.  Kind of money I was throwing around last
night, if anybody knew, I'd know.  So Mickey and John are out, because
they're dead.  Silvio has the great advantage of being able to show up
here in person, so those television screens can show live feeds of
what's happening on the stage."

Brenda frowned, thinking it over.  I let her, and went back to my
sandwich, feeling good for more than just having figured it out.  I felt
good because I genuinely admired Silvio.  Mickey Mouse is good, no
question, but the real hero there was Walter Elias Disney and his
magic-makers.  John Lennon I knew nothing about; his music didn't speak
to me.  I never saw what the fanatics saw in Elvis, Megan may have been
good, but who cared? Momby was of his times, even the Flacks would
admit, with a bellyful of liquor, that he had been a mistake for the
church.  Tori-san deserved to be up there with the real musical geniuses
who lived before the Age of Celebrity came along to largely preclude
most peoples' chances of achieving real greatness.  I mean, how great
can you get with people like me going through your garbage looking for a
story?

Of all the people alive in the Solar System today, Silvio was the only
man I admired.  I'm a cynic, have been for years.  My childhood heroes
have long since fallen by the wayside.  I'm in the business of
discovering warts on people, and I've discovered so many that the very
idea of hero- worship is quaint, at best.  And it's not as if Silvio
doesn't have his warts.  I know them as well as every padloid reader in
Luna.  It's his art I really admire, the hell with the personality cult.
He began as a mere genius, the writer and performer of music that has
often moved me to tears.  He grew over the years.  Three years ago, when
it looked as if he was fading, he suddenly blossomed again with the most
stunningly original works of his career.  There was no telling where he
might still go.

One of his quirks, to my way of thinking, was his recent embracing of
the Flack religion.  And so what?  Mozart wasn't a guy you'd want to
bring home to meet the folks.  Listen to the music. Look at the art.
Forget about the publicity; no matter how much of it you read, you'll
never really get to know the man.  Most of us like to think we know
something about famous people.  It took me years to get over the fallacy
of thinking that because I'd heard somebody speak about his or her life
and times and fears on a talk show that I knew what they were really
like.  You don't.  And the bad things you think you know are just as
fallacious as the good things his publicity agent wants you to know.
Behind the monstrous facade of fame each celebrity erects around himself
is just a little mouse, not unlike you or me, who has to use the same
kind of toilet paper in the morning, and who assumes the identical
position.

And with that thought, the lights dimmed, and the show began.

There was a brief musical introduction drawing on themes from the works
of Elvis and Tori-san, no hint of a Silvio connection in there.  Dancers
came out and did a number glorifying the Church. None of the prefatory
material lasted too long. The Flacks had learned their lesson from
Momby. They would not out-stay their welcome this morning.

It was no more than ten minutes from the raising of the curtain to the
appearance of the Grand Flack himself.

This was a man ordinary enough from the neck down, dressed in a flowing
robe.  But in place of a head he had a cube with television screens on
four sides, each showing a view of a head from the appropriate angle. On
top of the cube was a bifurcated antenna known as rabbit ears, for
obvious reasons.

The face in the front screen was thin, ascetic, with a neatly trimmed
goatee and mustache and a prim mouth on which a smile always looked like
a painful event.  I'd met him before at this or that function.  He
didn't appear publicly all that often, and the reason was simply that
he, and most of the other Great Flacks, were no better as media
personalities than I was.  For the church services the F.L.C.C.S. hired
professionals, people who knew how to make a sermon stand up and walk
around the room.  They had no lack of talent for such jobs.  The Flacks
naturally appealed to hopeful artists who hoped to one day stand beside
Elvis. But today was different, and oddly enough, the Grand Flack's very
stiffness and lack of camera poise lent gravity to the proceedings.

"Good morning!  Fellow worshipers and guests we welcome you!  Today will
go down in history!  This is the day a mere mortal comes to glory!  The
name will be revealed to you shortly!  Join with us now in singing 'Blue
Suede Shoes.'"

That's the way Flacks talk, and that's the way I'd been recording it for
many years now.  They'd given me enough stories, so if they had crazy
ideas about how they wanted to be quoted in print, it was all right with
me.  Flacks believed that language was too cluttered with punctuation,
so they'd eliminated the ., the ,, the ' and the ? and most especially
the ; and the :.  Nobody ever understood what those last two were for,
anyway. They were never very interested in asking questions, only in
providing answers.  They figured the exclamation point and the quotation
mark were all any reasonable person needed for discourse, along with the
underline, naturally. And they were big on typefaces.  A Flack news
release read like a love letter to P.T. Barnum.

I abstained from the sing-along; I didn't know the words, anyway, and
hymnals weren't provided. The folks in the bleachers made up for my
absence. The boogying got pretty intense for a while there. The Grand
Flack just stood with his hands folded, smiling happily at his flock.
When the number came to an end he moved forward again, and I realized
this was it.

"And now the moment you've all been waiting for!" he said.  "The name of
the person who from this day forward will live with the stars!"  The
lights were dimming as he spoke.  There was a moment of silence, during
which I heard an actual collective intake of breath . . . unless that
was from the sound system.  Then the Grand Flack spoke again.

"I give you SILVIO!!!!!"

A single spotlight came on, and there he stood. I had known it, I had
been ninety-nine percent sure anyway, but I still felt a thrill in my
heart, not only at having been correct, but because this was so right.
No, I didn't believe in all the Flackite crap.  But he did, and it was
right that he should be so honored by the people who believed as he did.
I almost had a lump in my throat.

I was on my feet with everyone else.  The applause was deafening, and if
it was augmented by the speakers hidden in the ceiling, who cared?  I
liked Silvio enough when I was a man.  I hadn't counted on the
gut-throbbing impression he'd make on me as a female.  He stood there,
tall and handsome, accepting the adulation with only a small, ironic
wave of his hand, as if he didn't really understand why everyone loved
him so much but he was willing to accept it so as not to embarrass us.
False, all false, I well knew; Silvio had a titanic ego.  If there was
anyone in Luna who actually over-estimated his genuinely awesome talent,
it was Silvio.  But who among us can cast a stone unless they have at
least as much talent?  Not me.

A keyboard was rolled out and left in front of him.  This was really
exciting.  It could mean the opening of a new sound for Silvio.  For the
last three years he'd been working his magic on the body harp.  I leaned
forward to hear the first chords, as did everyone in the audience,
except one person.  As he made his move toward the keys, the right side
of his head exploded.

Where were you when . . .?  Every twenty years a story comes along like
that, and anyone you ask knows exactly what he was doing when the news
came in.  Where I was when Silvio was assassinated was ten meters away,
close enough that I saw it happen before I heard the shot.  Time
collapsed for me, and I moved without thinking about it.  There was
nothing of the reporter in me at that moment, and nothing of the
heroine.  I'm not a risk-taker, but I was up and out of my seat and
vaulting onto the stage before he'd landed, loosely, the ruined head
bouncing on the floorboards.  I leaned over him and picked him up by the
shoulders, and it must have been about then that I was hit, because I
saw my blood splatter on his face and a big hole appear in his cheek and
a sort of churning motion in the soft red matter exposed behind the big
hole in his skull.  You must have seen it.  It's probably the most
famous bits of holocam footage ever shot.  Intercut with the stuff from
Cricket's cam, which is how it's usually shown, you can see me react to
the sound of the second shot, lift my head and look over my shoulder and
search for the gunman, which is what saved me from having my own brains
blown out when the third shot arrived.  The post-mortem team estimated
that shot missed my cheek by a few centimeters.  I didn't see it hit,
but when I turned back I saw the results. Silvio's face had already been
shattered by the fragmented bullet that had passed through me; the third
projectile was more than enough to blow the remaining brain tissue
through a new hole in his head.  It wasn't necessary; the first had done
the fatal work.

That's when Cricket took her famous still shot. The spotlight is still
on us as I hold Silvio's torso off the ground.  His head lolls back,
eyes open but glazed, what you can see of them under the film of blood.
I've got one bloody hand raised in the air, asking a mute question.  I
don't remember raising the hand; I don't know what the question was,
other than the eternal why?

#

The next hour was as confused as such scenes inevitably are.  I was
jostled to the side by a bunch of bodyguards.  Police arrived. Questions
were asked.  Someone noticed I was bleeding, which was the first time I
was aware that I'd been hit. The bullet had punched a clean hole through
the upper part of my left arm, nicking the bone.  I'd been wondering why
the arm wasn't working.  I wasn't alarmed by it; I was just wondering. I
never did feel any pain from the wound.  By the time I should have, they
had it all fixed up as good as new.  People have since tried to convince
me to wear a scar there as a memento of that day. I'm sure I could use
it to impress a lot of cub reporters in the Blind Pig, but the whole
idea disgusts me.

Cricket was immediately off following the assassin story.  Nobody knew
who he or she was, or how he'd gotten away, and there was a fabulous
story for whoever tracked the person down and got the first interview.
That didn't interest me, either.  I sat there, possibly in shock though
the machines said I was not, and Brenda stood beside me though I could
see she was itching to get out and cover the story, any part of it.

"Idiot," I told her, with some affection, when I finally noticed her.
"You want Walter to fire you?  Did somebody get my holocam feed?  I
don't remember."

"I took it.  Walter has it.  He's running it right now."  She had a copy
of the Nipple in one hand, glancing at the horrific images.  My phone
was ringing and I didn't need a Ph.D. in deductive logic to know it was
Walter calling, asking what I was doing.  I turned it off, which Walter
would have made a capital offense if he'd been making the laws.

"Get going.  See if you can track down Cricket. Wherever she is, that's
where the news will be. Try not to let her leave too many tracks on your
back when she runs over you."

"Where are you going, Hildy?"

"I'm going home."  And that's just what I did.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I had to turn the phone off at home, too.  I had become part of the
biggest story of my lifetime, and every reporter in the universe wanted
to ask me a probing question:  How did you feel, Hildy, when you put
your hand into the still- warm brains of the only man on Luna you
respected? This is known as poetic justice.

For my sins, I soon set the phone to answer to the four or five
newspeople I felt were the best, plus the grinning homunculus that
passed for an anchor at the Nipple, and gave them each a five minute,
totally false interview, full of exactly the sort of stuff the public
expected.  At the end of each I pleaded emotional exhaustion and said
I'd grant a more complete interview in a few days. This satisfied no
one, of course; from time to time my front door actually rattled with
the impact of frustrated reporters hurling their bodies against
three-inch pressure-tight steel.

In truth, I didn't know how I felt.  I was numb, in a way, but my mind
was also working.  I was thinking, and the reporter was coming alive
after the horrid shock of actually getting shot. I mean, damn it! Hadn't
that fucking bullet ever heard of the Geneva Conventions?  We were non-
combatants, we were supposed to suck the blood, not produce it.  I was
angry at that bullet.  I guess some part of me had really thought I was
immune.

I fixed myself a good meal and thought it over while I did.  Not a
sandwich.  I thought I might be through with sandwiches.  I don't cook a
lot, but when I do I'm pretty good at it, and it helps me think.  When
I'd handed the last dish to the washer I sat down and called Walter.

"Get your ass in here, Hildy," he said.  "I've got you lined up for
interviews from ten minutes ago till the tricentennial."

"No," I said.

"I don't think this is a good connection.  I thought you said no."

"It's a perfect connection."

"I could fire you."

"Don't get silly.  You want my exclusive interview to run in the Shit,
where they'll triple the pittance you pay me?"  He didn't answer that
for a long time, and I had nothing else to say just yet, so we listened
to the long silence.  I hadn't turned on the picture.

"What are you going to do?" he asked, plaintively.

"Just what you asked me to do.  Get the story on the Flacks.  You said I
was the best there was at it, didn't you?"  The quality of the silence
changed that time.  It was a regretful silence, as in
how-could-I-have-said-anything- so-stupid silence.  He didn't say he'd
told me that just to charm me out of quitting.  Another thing he didn't
say was how dare I threaten him with selling out to a rival, and he left
unvoiced the horrible things he'd try to do to my career if I did such a
thing.  The phone line was simply buzzing with things he didn't say, and
he didn't say them so loudly I'd have been frightened if I really feared
for my job.  At last he sighed, and did say something.

"When do I get the story?"

"When I find it.  What I want is Brenda, right now."

"Sure.  She's just underfoot here."

"Tell her to come in the back way.  She knows where it is, and I don't
think five other people in Luna know that."

"Six, counting me."

"I figured.  Don't tell anyone else, or I'll never get out of here
alive."

"What else?"

"Nothing.  I'll handle it all from here."  I hung up.  I started making
calls.

The first one was to the Queen.  She didn't have what I needed, but she
knew somebody who knew somebody.  She said she'd get back to me.  I sat
down and made a list of items I would need, made several more calls, and
then Brenda was knocking on the back door.

She wanted to know how I was, she wanted my reactions to this and that,
not as a reporter, but as a concerned friend.  I was touched, a little,
but I had work to do.

"Hit me," I said.

"Pardon?"

"Hit me.  Make a fist and smash it into my face.  I need you to break my
nose.  I tried it a couple times before you got here, and I can't seem
to hit hard enough."

She gave me that look that says she's trying to remember all the ways
out of this place, and how to get to them without alarming me.

"My problem," I explained, "is I can't risk going in public with this
face on me; I need it re- arranged, and in a hurry.  So hit me.  You
know how; you've seen cowboys and gangsters do it in the movies."  I
stuck my face out and closed my eyes.

"You've . . . you've deadened it, I guess?"

"What kind of nut do I look like?  Don't answer, just hit me."

She did, a blow that would have sent a housefly to intensive care if one
had been sitting on the tip of my nose.

She had to try four more times, in the end using an old spitball bat I
found in my closet, before we got that sickening crunching sound that
said we'd done the trick.  I shouldn't be too hard on her.  Maybe I was
acting erratic, there was probably an easier way and she deserved more
explanations, but I wasn't in the mood for them. She had a lot worse to
come, and I didn't have time.

It bled a lot, as you'd expect.  I held my nose pressed in with a finger
on the tip, and stuck my face in the autodoc.  When it healed, a few
minutes later, I had a wide, vaguely African nose with a major hook on
the end and a bend toward the left.

Part of getting a story is preparation, part is improvisation, part
perspiration and a little bit inspiration.  There are small items I
carry around constantly in my purse that I may use once in five years,
but when I need them, I need them badly.  A disguise is something I need
every once in a while, never as badly as I did then, but I'd always been
prepared for disguising myself on the spur of the moment.  It's harder
now than it used to be.  People are better at seeing through small
changes since they're used to having friends re- work their faces to
indulge a passing fad.  Bushy eyebrows or a wig are no longer enough, if
you want to be sure.  You need to change the shape of the face.

I got a screwdriver and probed around in my upper jaw, between the cheek
and gum, until I found the proper recessed socket.  I pushed the tip of
the blade through the skin and slotted it in the screw and started
turning it.  When the blade slipped Brenda peered into my mouth and
helped me.  As she turned the screwdriver, my cheekbone began to move.

It's a cheap and simple device you can buy at any joke shop and have
installed in half an hour. Bobbie had wanted to take it out.  He's
offended at anything that might be used to mar his work. I'd left them
in, and now I was glad as I watched my face being transformed in the
mirror.  When Brenda was done, my face was much wider and more gaunt,
and my eyelids had a slight downward slant. With the new nose, Callie
herself would not have know me.  If I held my lower jaw so I had an
overbite, I looked even stranger.

"Let me get that left one again," Brenda said. "You're lopsided."

"Lopsided is good."  I tasted blood, but soon had that healed up.
Looking at myself, I decided it was enough, and turned the nerve
receptors in my face back on.  There was a little soreness on the nose,
but nothing major.

So I could have gotten some of the same effect by stuffing tissue paper
into my cheeks, I guess. If that's all I had, I'd have used it, but did
you ever try talking with paper in your mouth?  An actor is trained to
do it; I'm not.  Besides, you're always aware it's there, it's
distracting.

Brenda wanted to know what we were going to do, and I thought about what
I could safely tell her. It wasn't much, so I sat her down and she
looked up at me wide-eyed.

"You got two choices," I told her.  "One, you can help me get ready for
this caper, and then you can bow out, and no hard feelings.  Or you can
go along to the end.  But I'll tell you going in, you're not going to
know much.  I think we'll get one hell of a story out of it, but we
could get into a lot of trouble."

She thought it over.

"How much can you tell me?"

"Only what I think you need to know at the moment.  You'll just have to
trust me on the rest."

"Okay."

"You idiot.  Never trust anybody who says 'trust me."  Except just this
once, of course."

#

I went to the King City Plaza, one of the better hotels in the
neighborhood of the Platz, and checked in to the Presidential Suite
using Brenda's Nipple letter of credit, freshly re-rated to
A-Double-Plus.  I'd told Walter I might need to buy an interplanetary
liner before this job was over, but the fact was since he was paying for
it, I just wanted to go first class, and I'd never stayed in the
Presidential Suite.  I registered us under the names Kathleen Turner and
Rosalind Russell, two of the five people who've played the part of
Hildegard/Hildebrandt Johnson on the silver screen.  The fellow at the
front desk must not have been a movie buff; he didn't bat an eye.

The suite came furnished with a staff, including a boy and a girl in the
spa, which was large enough for the staging of naval war games. In a
better mood I might have asked the boy to stick around; he was a hunk.
But I kicked them all out.

I stood in the middle of the room and said "My name is Hildy Johnson,
and I declare this to be my legal residence."  Liz had advised that, for
the benefit of the hidden mikes and cameras, just in case the tapes were
ever brought forward as evidence in a court of law.  A hotel guest has
the same rights as a person in quarters she owns or rents, but it never
hurt to be safe.

I made a few more phone calls, and spent the time waiting for some of
them to be returned by going from room to room and stripping the sheets
and blankets off the many beds.  I chose a room with no windows looking
out into the Mall, and went around draping sheets over all the mirrors
in the room.  There were a lot of them.  The call I was waiting for came
just as I finished.  I listened to the instructions, and left the room.

In a park not far from the hotel I walked around for almost half an
hour, which didn't surprise me.  I assumed I was being checked out.
Finally I spotted the man I'd been told to look for, and sat on the
other end of a park bench.  We didn't look at each other, or talk.  He
got up and walked away, leaving a sack on the bench between us.  I
waited a few more minutes, breathed deeply, and picked up the sack.  No
hand reached out to grab my shoulder.  Maybe I didn't have the nerves
for this sort of work.

Back in the suite I didn't have long to wait before Brenda knocked on
the door, back from her shopping expedition.  She'd done well.
Everything I'd asked for was in the packages she carried.  We got out
the costumes of the Electricians Guild and put them on:  blue coveralls
with Guild patches and equipment belts.  Names were stitched into the
fabric over the left breast:  I was Roz and she was Kathy.  Next to the
ceremonial wrenches, screwdrivers, and circuit testers dangling from the
belt I clipped some of the items I'd just obtained in such a
melodramatic fashion.  They fit right in.  We donned yellow plastic
hardhats and picked up black metal lunchboxes and looked at each other
in the mirror.  We burst out laughing. Brenda seemed to be enjoying the
game so far.  It was an adventure.

Brenda looked ridiculous, as usual.  You'd think a disguise on Brenda
would work about as well as a wig on a flagpole.  The fact is, she is
not that abnormal for her generation.  Who knows where this height thing
is going to end?  Another of many causes of the generation gap Callie
had talked about was a simple matter of dimension: people of Brenda's
age group tended not to frequent the older parts of the city where so
many of their elders lived . . . because they kept hitting their heads
on things.  We built to a smaller scale in those days.

There were no human guards on the workers' entrance to the Flack Grand
Studio.  I didn't really expect to encounter any at all; according to
the information I'd bought they only employed six of them.  People
tended to rely on machines for that sort of thing, and their trust can
be misplaced, as I demonstrated to Brenda with one of the illegal
gizmos.  I waved it at the door, waited while red lights turned green,
and the door sprung open.  I'd been told that one of the three machines
I had would deal with any security system I'd find in the Studio.  I
just hoped my trust wasn't misplaced, in either the shady characters who
sold this sort of stuff or the machines themselves.  We do trust the
little buggers, don't we?  I had no idea what the stinking thing was
doing, but when it flashed a green light at me I trotted right in, like
Pavlov's dog Spotski.

Up three floors, down two corridors, seventh door on the left.  And who
should be standing there looking frustrated but . . . Cricket.

"If you touch that doorknob," I said, "Elvis will return and he won't be
handing out pink Cadillacs."  She jumped just a little.  Damn, that girl
was good.  She was trying to pass herself off as some kind of Flack
functionary, carrying a clipboard like an Amazon's shield.  The good old
clipboard can be the magic key to many places if you know how to use it,
and Cricket was born to the con.  She looked at us haughtily through
dark glasses.

"I beg your pardon," she sniffed.  "What are you two doing . . ."  She
had been flipping officiously through papers on her board, as if
searching for our names, which we hadn't given, when she realized it was
Brenda way up there under that yellow hardhat.  Nothing had prepared her
for that, or for the dawning realization of who it was playing the Jeff
to Brenda's Mutt.

"Goddam," she breathed.  "It's you, isn't it? Hildy?"

"In the flesh.  I'm ashamed of you, Cricket. Balked by a mere door?
You've apparently forgotten your girl scout motto."

"All I remember is never let him in the back door on the first date."

"Be prepared, love, be prepared."  And I waved one of my magic wands at
the door.  Naturally, one of the lights remained obstinately red.  So I
chose another one at random and the machine paid off like a crooked slot
machine.  We went through the door, and I suddenly realized what her
dark glasses were for.

We were in an ordinary corridor with three doors leading off of it.
Music was coming from behind one of the doors.  According to the map I'd
paid a lot of Walter's money for, that was the one.  This time I had to
use all three machines, and the last one took its time, each red light
going out only after a baffling read-out of digits on a numeric display.
I guess it was doing something arcane with codes.  But the door opened,
and I didn't hear any alarms.  You wouldn't, of course, but you keep
your ears tuned anyway.  We went through the door and found ourselves in
a small room with the Grand Council of Flacks.

Or with their heads, anyway.

The heads were on a shelf a few meters from us, facing away toward a
large screen which was playing It Happened At The World's Fair.  They
were in their boxes--I don't think they could be easily removed--so what
we saw was seven television screens displaying the backs of heads. If
they were aware of our presence they gave no sign of it.  Though how
they could have given any sign of it continues to elude me.  Wires and
tubes grew out of the bottom of the shelf, leading to small machines
that hummed merrily to themselves.

Brenda was looking very nervous.  She started to say something but I put
a finger to my lips and put on my mask.  She did the same, as Cricket
watched us both.  These were plastic Halloween- type masks, modified
with a voice scrambler, and I'd gotten them mostly to calm Brenda; I
didn't expect them to be any use if it came to the crunch, since
security cameras in the hallways would surely have taken our pictures by
now.  But she was even less sophisticated in these things than I, and
wouldn't have realized that.

Cricket had had her hand in a coat pocket since we entered the first
corridor.  The hand started to come out, and I pointed over her shoulder
and said "What the hell is that?"  She looked, and I took one of the
wrenches off my equipment belt and clanged it down on the crown of her
head.

It doesn't work like you see it on television. She went down hard, then
lifted herself up onto her hands, shaking her head.  A rope of saliva
was hanging out of her mouth.  I hit her again.  Her head started to
bleed, and she still didn't clock out.  The third time I really put some
english on it, and sure enough Brenda grabbed my arm and spoiled my aim
and the wrench hit her on the side of the head, doing more damage than
if she'd left me alone, but it also did the job.  Cricket fell down like
a sack of wet cement and didn't move.

"What the hell are you doing?" Brenda asked. The scrambler denatured her
voice, made her sound like a creepoid from Planet X.

"Brenda, I said no questions."

"I didn't plan on this."

"I didn't, either, but if you crap out on me now I swear I'll break both
your arms and leave you right beside her."  She faced me down, breathing
hard, and I began to wonder if I could handle her if it came to it.  My
record with angry females wasn't sterling, even when I had the weight
advantage.  At last she slumped, and nodded, and I quickly dropped to
one knee and rolled Cricket over and put my face close to hers. I felt
her pulse, which seemed okay, peeled back an eyelid, checked the pupils.
I didn't know much more first aid than that, but I knew she was in no
danger.  Help would be here soon, though she wouldn't welcome it.  I
picked up the goofball that had rolled out of her limp hand and put it
in my own pocket.  I showed Brenda a photo.

"Look through those cabinets back there, find one of these," I told her.

"What are we--"

"No questions, dammit."

I checked the fourth and most expensive electronic burglar tool I'd
purchased, which had been functioning since we entered the Studio.  All
green lights.  This one was busily confounding all the active and
passive systems that might be calling for help for the seven dwarfs on
the shelf.  Don't ask me how; all I know is if one man can think up a
lock, another can figure out how to pick it.  I'd paid heavily for the
security information about the Studio, and so far I'd gotten my money's
worth.  I went around the shelf and stood between the screen and the
Council, saw seven of the infamous Talking Heads that had been a
television feature from the very beginning.  I chose the Grand Flack,
and leaned close to his prim, disapproving features.  His first reaction
was to use his limited movement to try and see around me.  More
interested in the movie than in possible danger to himself.  I guess if
you live in a box you'd have to get fairly fatalistic about such things.

"I want you to tell me how to remove you from the shelf without doing
any harm to you," I said.

"Don't worry about it," he sneered.  "Someone will be here to arrest you
in a few minutes."

I hoped he was bluffing, had no way of knowing for sure.

"How many minutes can you live without these machines?"  He thought it
over, made a head movement I interpreted as a shrug.

"Detaching me is easy; simply lift the handle on top of the box.  But
I'll die in a few minutes."  The thought didn't seem to bother him.

"Unless I plug you into one of these."  I took the machine Brenda had
located and held it up in front of him.  He made a sour face.

I don't know what the machine was called.  What it did was provide life
support for his head, containing things like an artificial heart, lungs,
kidneys, and so forth, all quite small since there wasn't that much life
to support.  I'd been told it would sustain him for eight hours
independently, indefinitely when hooked into an autodoc.  The device was
the same dimensions as his head-box, and about ten centimeters deep.  I
placed it on the floor and lifted the box by the handle.  He looked
worried for the first time.  A few drops of blood dripped onto the
shelf, where I could see a maze of metal pins, plastic tubes, air hoses.
There was a similar pattern of fittings on the transport device,
arranged so there was only one way you could plug it in.  I positioned
the box over the life support and pressed down.

"Am I doing it right?" I asked the Grand Flack.

"There's not much you could do wrong," he said. "And you'll never get
away with this."

"Try me."  I found the right switches, turned off his voice and three of
the television screens. The fourth, the one that had been showing his
face, was replaced with the movie the group had been watching when we
arrived.  "Let's get out of here," I said to Brenda.

"What about her?  What about Cricket?"

"I said no questions.  Let's move."

She followed me out into the corridor, through the door where we'd met
Cricket, down more hallways.  Then we rounded a corner and met a burly
man in a brown uniform who crossed his arms and frowned at us.

"Where are you going with that?" he asked.

"Where do you think, Mac?" I asked.  "I'm taking it into the shop.  You
try to run ten thousand of these things, you're gonna get breakdowns."

"Nobody told me nothing about it."

I set the Grand Flack on the floor with the movie side of the screen
facing the guard; his eyes strayed to the screen, as I'd hoped.  There's
something about a moving image on a television screen that simply draws
the eyes, especially if you're a Flackite.  I had one hand on my trusty
wrench, but mostly I flipped through the papers on my clipboard in a
bored manner.  I came to one page--it seemed to be an insurance policy
for Cricket's apartment --and pointed triumphantly to the middle of it.

"Says right here.  Remove and repair one model seventeen video monitor,
work order number 45293- a/34.  Work to be completed by blah blah blah."

"I guess the paperwork didn't get to me yet," he said, one eye still on
the screen.  Maybe we were coming to his favorite part.  All I knew was
if he'd asked to see the paperwork I'd have held the clipboard out to
him and beaned him with the wrench when he looked at it.

"Ain't that always the way."

"Yeah.  I was just surprised to see you two here, what with all the
excitement with Silvio getting' killed and all."

"What the hell," I said, with a shrug, picking up the Grand Flack and
tucking him under my arm. "Sometimes you just gotta go that extra
kilometer if you want to get a head."  And we walked out the door.

#

Brenda made it almost a hundred meters down the corridor and then she
said, "I think I'm going to faint."  I steered her to a bench in the
middle of the mall and sat her down and put her head between her knees.
She was shaking all over and her breathing was unsteady.  Her hand was
cold as ice.

I held out my own hand, and was pleased to note it was steady.  I
honestly hadn't been frightened after I detached the Flack from his
shelf; I'd figured that if there was any point where my devices might
fail, that would be it.  But I was aided by something that had helped
many a more professional burglar before I ever tried my hand at it.  It
had simply never been envisioned that anyone would want to steal one of
the council members.  As for the rest . . . well, you can read all these
wonderfully devious tales about how spies in the past have stolen
military and state secrets with elaborate ruses, with stealth and
cunning.  Some of it must have been like that, but I'd bet money that a
lot of them had been stolen by people with uniforms and clipboards who
just went up to somebody and asked for them.

"Is it over yet?" Brenda asked, weakly.  She looked pale.

"Not yet.  Soon.  And still no questions."

"I'm going to have a few pretty damn soon, though," she said.

"I'll bet you will."

#

In order to save time I hadn't had her get any more costumes to stash
along our getaway route, so we simply peeled off the Electrician duds
and stuffed them into the trash in a public rest room and returned to
the Plaza in the nude.  I was carrying the Grand Flack in a shopping bag
from one of the shops on the Platz and we had our arms around each other
like lovers.  In the elevator Brenda let go of me like I was poison, and
we rode up in silence.

"Can we talk now?" she asked, when I'd closed the door behind us.

"In a minute."  I lifted the box out of the bag, along with the few
other items I'd saved: the magic wands, the dark glasses, the goofball.
I picked up a newspad and turned it on and we watched and read and
listened for a few minutes, Brenda growing increasingly impatient. There
was no mention of a daring break-in at the Grand Studio, no all-points
bulletin for Roz and Kathy. I hadn't expected one.  The Flacks
understood publicity, and while there is some merit in the old saw about
not caring what you print about me so long as you spell my name right,
you'd much prefer to see the news you manage out there in the public
view.  This story had about a thousand deadly thorns in it if the Flacks
chose to exploit it, and I was sure they'd think it over a long time
before they reported our crime to the police, if they ever did. Besides,
their plates were full with the assassination stories, which would keep
their staff busy for months, churning out new angles to feed to the
pads.

"Okay," I said to Brenda.  "We're safe for a while.  What did you want
to know?"

"Nothing," she said coldly.  "I just wanted to tell you I think you're
the most disgusting, rottenest, most horrible . . ."  Her imagination
failed when it came to finding a noun.  She'd have to work on that; I
could have suggested a dozen off the top of my head.  But not for the
reasons she thought.

"Why is that?" I asked.

She was momentarily stunned at the enormity of my lack of remorse.

"What you did to Cricket!" she shouted, half rising from her chair.
"That was so dirty and underhanded . . . I don't think I want to know
you anymore."

"I'm not sure I do, either.  But sit down. There's something I want to
show you.  Two things, actually."  The Plaza has some charming antique
phones and there was one beside my chair.  I picked up the receiver and
dialed a number from memory.

"Straight Shit," came a pleasant voice.  "News desk."

"Tell the editor that one of her reporters is being held against her
will in the Grand Studio of the F.L.C.C.S. church."

The voice grew cautious.  "And who might that be?"

"How many did you infiltrate this morning?  Her name is Cricket.  Don't
know the last name."

"And who are you, ma'am?"

"A friend of the free press.  Better hurry; when I left they were tying
her down and cueing up G.I. Blues.  Her mind could be gone by now."  I
hung up.

Brenda sputtered, her eyes wide.

"And you think that makes up for what you did to her?"

"No, and she doesn't deserve it, but she'd probably do the same thing
for me if the situation was reversed, which it almost was.  I know the
editor at the Shit; she'll have a flying squad of fifty shock troops
down there in ten minutes with some ammunition the Flacks will
understand, like mock-ups of the next hour's headline if they don't
cough up Cricket pronto.  The Flacks will want to keep this quiet, but
they aren't above trying to get our names out of Cricket since it looks
like a falling out among thieves."

"And if it wasn't, what was it?"

"It was the golden rule, honey," I said, putting on Cricket's dark
glasses and holding up the goofball between thumb and forefinger.  "In
journalism, that rule reads 'Screw unto others before they screw you.'"
I flicked the goofball with my thumb and tossed it between us.

Damn, but those things are bright!  It reminded me of the nuke in
Kansas, seeming to scorch holes right through the protective lenses.  It
lasted some fraction of a second, and when I took the glasses off Brenda
was slumped over in her chair. She'd be out for twenty minutes to half
an hour.

What a world.

I picked up the head of the church and carried him into the room I'd
prepared.  I set him on a table facing the wall-sized television screen,
which was turned off at the moment.  I rapped on the top of the box.

"You okay in there?"  He didn't answer.  I turned a latch and opened the
front screen, which was still showing the same movie on both its flat
surfaces, inner and outer.  The face glared at me.

"Close that door," he said.  "It's just ten minutes to the end."

"Sorry," I said, and closed it.  Then I took my wrench--I'd developed a
certain fondness for that wrench--and rapped it against the glass
screen, which shattered.  I had a glimpse of a blissfully smiling face
as the shards fell, then he was screaming insults.  Somewhere I heard a
little motor whirring as it pumped air through whatever he used for a
larynx.  He tried uselessly to twist himself so he could see one of the
screens to either side of him, which were also tuned to the same
program.

"Oh, were you watching that?" I said.  "How clumsy of me."  I pulled a
cord out of the wall and patched his player into the wall television
set, turned the sound down low.  He grumped for a while, but in the end
he couldn't resist the dancing images behind me.  If he'd noticed I was
letting him see my face he didn't seem worried about the possible
implications.  Death didn't seem to be high on his list of fears.

"They're going to punish you for this, you know," he said.

"Who would 'they' be?  The police?  Or do you have your own private goon
squads?"

"The police, of course."

"The police will never hear about this, and you know it."

He just sniffed.  He sniffed again when I broke the screens on each side
of his head.  But when I took the patch cord in my hand he looked
worried.

"See you later.  If you get hungry, holler."  I pulled the cord out of
the wall, and the big screen went blank.

#

I hadn't brought any clothes to change into.  I got restless and went
down to the lobby and browsed around in some of the shops there, killed
a half hour, but my heart wasn't really in it.  In spite of all my
rationalizations about the Flacks, I kept expecting that tap on the
shoulder that asks the musical question, "Do you know a good lawyer?"  I
picked out some loose harem pants in gold silk and a matching blouse, a
lounging pajama ensemble I guess you'd call it, mostly because I dislike
parading around with no clothes in public, and because Walter was
picking up the tab, then I thought of Brenda and got interested.  I
found a similar pair for her in a green that I thought would do nice
things to her eyes.  They had to extrude the arms and legs, but the
shirt waist was okay, since it was supposed to leave the midriff bare.

When I got back to the suite Brenda was no longer slumped in the chair.
I found her in the bathroom, hugging the toilet and crying her eyes out,
looking like a jumbo coat hanger somebody had crumpled up and left
there.  I felt low enough to sit on a sheet of toilet paper and swing my
feet, to borrow a phrase from Liz.  I'd never used a goofball before,
had forgotten how sick they were supposed to make you.  If I'd
remembered, would I still have used it?  I don't know.  Probably.

I knelt beside her and put my arm around her shoulders.  She quieted
down to a few whimpers, didn't try to move away.  I got a towel and
wiped her mouth, flushed away the stuff she'd brought up.  I eased her
around until she was sitting against the wall.  She wiped her eyes and
nose and looked at me with dead eyes.  I pulled the pajamas out of the
sack and held them up.

"Look what I got you," I said.  "Well, actually I used your credit card,
but Walter's good for it."

She managed a weak smile and held out her hand and I gave them to her.
She tried to show an interest, holding the shirt up to her chest.  I
think if she'd thanked me I'd have run screaming to the police, begging
to be arrested.

"They're nice," she said.  "You think it'll look good on me?"

"Trust me," I said.  She met my eyes without flinching or giving me one
of her apologetic smiles or any other of her arsenal of don't-hit-me-
I'm-harmless gestures.  Maybe she was growing up a little.  What a
shame.

"I don't think I will," she said.  I put a hand on each of her shoulders
and put my face close to hers.

"Good," I said, stood, and held out a hand. She took it and I pulled her
up and we went back to the main room of the suite.

She did cheer up a little when she got the clothes on, turning in front
of a big mirror to study herself from all angles, which reminded me to
look in on my prisoner.  I told her to wait there.

He wasn't nearly as bad off as I'd thought he would be, which worried me
more than I let him know.  I couldn't figure it out until I crouched
down to his level and looked into the blank television screen he faced.

"You tricky rascal," I said.  Looking at the inert plastic surface of
the screen, I could see part of a picture on the screen directly behind
his head, the only one I hadn't smashed out.  I couldn't tell what the
movie was, and considering how little of it he could see he might not
have known, either, with the sound off, but it must have been enough to
sustain him. I picked him up and turned him around facing away from the
wall screen.  He made a fascinating centerpiece, sure to start
interesting conversations at your next party.  Just a head sitting on a
thick metal base, with four little pillars supporting a flat roof above
him.  It was like a little temple.

He was looking really worried now.  I crouched down and looked at all
the covered mirrors and glass.  I found no surface that would reflect an
image to him if I were to turn on the screen behind him, which I did.  I
debated about the sound, finally turned it on, figuring it would torment
him more to hear it and not be able to see.  If I was wrong, I could
always try it the other way in an hour or so, if we were granted that
much time.  Let's face it, if anybody was looking for us, we'd be easy
to find.  I waved at him and made a face at the string of curses that
followed me out of the room.

How to get information out of somebody that doesn't want to talk? That's
the question I'd asked myself before I started this escapade.  The
obvious answer is torture, but even I draw the line at that.  But
there's torture and then there's torture.  If a man had spent most of
his life watching passively as endless images marched by right in front
of his face, spent every waking hour watching, how would he react if the
plug was pulled?  I'd find out soon enough.  I'd read somewhere that
people in sensory deprivation tanks quickly became disoriented, pliable,
lost their will to resist.  Maybe it would work with the Grand Flack.

Brenda and I spent a silent half hour sitting in chairs not too far from
each other that might as well have been on other planets.  When she
finally spoke, it startled me.  I'd forgotten she was there, lost in my
own thoughts.

"She was going to use that thing on us," she said.

"Who, Cricket?  You saw it fall out of her hand, right?  It's called a
goofball.  Knocks you right out, from what I'm told."

"You were told right.  It was awful."

"I'm really sorry, Brenda.  It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"It was.  I asked for it.  I deserved it."

I wasn't sure about that, but it had been the quickest way to show her
what we'd narrowly averted.  That's me:  quick and dirty, and explain
later.  She thought about it a few more minutes.

"Maybe she was just going to use it on the Flacks."

"Sure she was; she didn't expect to find us there.  But you didn't see
her handing out pairs of glasses.  We'd have gone down with the Flacks."

"And she'd have left us there."

"Just like we left her."

"Well, like you said, she didn't expect us.  We forced her hand."

"Brenda, you're trying to apologize for her, and it's not necessary. She
forced my hand, too. You think I liked cracking her on the head?
Cricket's my friend."

"That's the part I don't understand."

"Look, I don't know what her plan was.  Maybe she had drugs on her, too,
something to make the Flacks talk right there.  That might have been the
best way, come to think of it.  The penalties for . . . well, I guess
for headnapping, it's going to be pretty stiff if they catch me."

"Me, too."

I showed her the gun I'd bought from Liz; she looked shocked, so I put
it away.  I don't blame her.  Nasty little thing, that gun.  I can see
why they're illegal.

"Just me.  If it comes to it, you can say I held that on you the whole
time.  I won't have trouble convincing a judge I've lost my mind.
Anyway, you can be sure Cricket had some plan of attack in mind, and she
improvised when we entered the picture.  The story's the thing, see? Ask
her about it when this is all over."

"I don't think she'd talk to me."

"Why not?  She won't hold a grudge.  She's a pro.  Oh, she'll be mad,
all right, and she'll do just about anything to us if we get in her way
again, but it won't be for revenge.  If cooperation will get the story,
then she'd rather cooperate, just like me.  Trouble was, this story is
too big to share.  I think we both figured out as soon as we saw each
other that one of us wasn't walking out of that room.  I was just
faster."

She was shaking her head.  I'd said all I had to say; she'd either
understand it and accept it, or look for another line of work.  Then she
looked up, remembering something.

"What you said.  I can't let you do that.  Take the rap, I mean."

I pretended anger, but I was touched again. What a sweet little jerk she
was.  I hoped she didn't get eaten alive next time she met Cricket.

"You sure as hell will.  Stop being juvenile. First revenge, then
altruism.  Those things are for very special occasions, rare
circumstances. Not when they get in the way of a story.  You want to be
altruistic in your private life, go ahead, but not on Walter's time.
He'll fire you if he hears about it."

"But it's not right."

"You're even wrong there.  I never told you what we were going to do.
You couldn't be held responsible.  I went to a lot of trouble to set it
up that way, and you're an ungrateful brat for thinking of throwing all
my work away."

She looked as if she was going to cry again, and I got up and got a
drink.  Maybe I wiped my eyes, too, standing there in the kitchen
tossing down a surprisingly bitter bourbon.  You'd think they'd do
better at two thousand per night.

#

When the Grand Flack had had two hours with nothing moving to look at
but the flickering lights cast on the other walls by the screen behind
his head, I stuck my own head into the room, wondering if I could manage
to keep it attached to my shoulders by the time this was all over.  He
looked at me desperately.  His whole face was drenched with sweat.

"This series is one of my favorites," he whined.

"So look at the tape later," I said.

"It's not the same, dammit!  I've already heard the story line."

I thought it was a bit of luck to have one of his favorite soap operas
playing just when I needed a lever to pry information out of his head,
then I thought it over, and realized that whatever was playing at the
moment was bound to be his favorite.  He watched them all.

"I missed David and Everett's big love scene. Damn you."

"Are you ready to answer some questions?"

He started to shake his head--he had a little movement from the neck
stump, up and down, back and forth--and it was like a hand took his chin
and forced it up and down instead.  I guess it was the invisible hand of
his addiction.

"Don't run off," I said.  "I've got to get another witness."  I turned
around, and bumped into Brenda, who'd been standing behind me.  She
wasn't wearing her mask and I thought about getting angry about that,
but what the hell.  She was in it as an accessory, unless I could make
my duress theory stand up in court.  Which point I hoped never to reach.

We pulled up chairs on each side of the big screen and turned him around
so he could see it. I thought this might take a long time, as his eyes
never left the screen, never once looked at us, but he was quite good at
watching the show and talking to us at the same time.

"For the record," I said, "have you been harmed in any way since we took
you on this little trip?"

"You made me miss David and Everett's--"

"Aside from that."

"No," he said, grudgingly.

"Are you hungry?  Thirsty?  You need to . . . is there a drain on this
thing?  A waste dump of some kind?  Need to empty the beer cooler?"

"It's not a problem."

So I had him answer a few more questions, name rank and serial number
sort of things, just to get him used to responding.  I've found it's a
good technique, even with somebody who's used to being interviewed. Then
I got around to asking the question this had all been about, and he told
me pretty much what I'd expected to hear.

"So who's idea was it to assassinate Silvio?" I heard Brenda gasp, but I
kept my eyes on the Flack.  He pursed his lips angrily, but kept
watching the screen.  When it looked as if he might not answer I reached
for the patch cord and the story came out.

"I don't know who told you about it; we kept security tight, just the
inner circle knew what was going to happen.  I'd like his name later."

I decided not to tell him just yet that nobody had told me.  Maybe if he
thought he'd been betrayed he'd pull no punches.  I needn't have
worried.

"You don't care about whose idea it was, though.  You don't care.  All
you need is someone who'll admit to it.  I'm here, so I'm elected to
break the story, so let's just say it was me, all right?"

"You're willing to take the blame?" Brenda asked.

"Why not?  We all agreed it was the thing to do.  We drew lots to select
a culprit to stand up for the crime, and somebody else lost, but we can
work that out, just so I get time to warn them, get our stories
straight."

I looked at Brenda's face to see how she was reacting to this, both the
story itself and the blatant engineering of the story between me and the
man who bought the hit.  What I saw made me think there was hope for her
in the news business yet.  There is a certain concentrated, avid-for-
blood look that appears on the faces of reporters on the trail of a very
big story that you'd have to visit the big cat house at the zoo to see
duplicated in its primal state.  From the look on Brenda's face, if a
tiger was standing between her and this story right now, the cat would
soon have a tall-journalist-sized hole in him.

"What you mean is," Brenda went on, "you had someone picked out to go to
jail if someone ever uncovered the story."  Which meant she still hadn't
completely comprehended this man and his church.

"Nothing like that.  We knew the truth would come out sooner or later."
He looked sour.  "We'd hoped for later, of course, so we'd have time to
milk it from every possible angle.  You've been a real problem, Hildy."

"Thank you," I said.

"After all we've done for you people," he pouted.  "First you get in the
way of the second bullet.  Serves you right, you getting hurt."

"It never hurt.  It passed right through me."

"I'm sorry to hear that.  Those bullets were carefully planned.
Something about penetrating the forehead, the cheek, something like
that, spreading out later and blowing out the back of the skull."

"Dum-dums," Brenda said, unexpectedly.  She looked at me, shrugged.
"When you got hit, I looked it up."

"Whatever," the Flack continued.  "The second one spread out when it hit
you, and did way too much damage to Silvio's face, plus getting your
blood splattered all over him.  You ruined the tableau."

"I thought it was pretty effective, myself."

"Thank Elvis for Cricket.  Then, as if you hadn't done enough, here you
are breaking the law, making me break the story two weeks early.  We
never thought you'd break the law, at least not to this extent."

"So prosecute me."

"Don't be silly.  That would look pretty foolish, wouldn't it?  All the
sympathy would be with you.  People would think you'd done a public
service."

"That's what I was hoping."

"No way.  But there's still time to get the right spin on this thing,
and do us both a lot of good.  You know us, Hildy.  You know we'll work
with you to get a story that will maximize your readership interest, if
you'll only give us a few things here and there in the way of damage
control."

There were a few things going on here that I didn't understand, but I
couldn't get to the questions just yet.  Frankly, though I've seen a lot
of things in my career, done a lot of things, this one was about to make
me gag.  What I really wanted to do was go out and find a baseball/6
field and play a few innings using this terrifying psychopath as the
ball.

But I got myself under control.  I've interviewed perverts before, the
public always wants to know about perverts.  And I asked the next
question, the one that, later, you wish you could take back, or never
hear the answer to.

"What I can't figure . . . or maybe I'm dense," I said, slowly.  "I
haven't found the angle.  How did the church expect to look good out of
all this?  Killing him, that I understand, in your terms.  You can't
have a live saint walking around, farting and belching, out of control.
Silvio should have seen that.  Think how embarrassed the Christians'd be
if Jesus came back; they'd have to nail the sucker up again before he
upset too many applecarts."

I stopped, because he was smiling, and I didn't like the smile.  And for
just a moment he let his dreamy eyes drift from the screen and look into
my own.  I imagined I saw worms crawling around in there.

"Oh, Hildy," he said, more in sorrow than in anger.

"Don't you oh Hildy me, you coffee-table cocksucker.  I'll tear you out
of that box and shit down your neck.  I'll--"  Brenda put a hand on
mine, and I got myself back under control.

"They'll put you in jail for five hundred years," I said.

"That wouldn't frighten me," he said, still smiling.  "But they won't.
I'll do time, all right.  I figure three, maybe five years."

"For murder?  For conspiracy to murder Silvio? I want the name of your
lawyer."

"They won't be able to prove murder," he said, still smiling.  I was
really getting tired of that smile.

"Why do you say that?"

I felt Brenda's hand on mine again.  She had the look of someone trying
to break it gently.

"Silvio was in on it, Hildy," she said.

"Of course he was," The Grand Exalted Stinking Baboon's Posterior said.
"And Hildy, if I'd been a vindictive man, I could have let you run with
the first story.  I almost wish I had.  Now I'll never enjoy David and
Everett's . . . well, never mind.  I'm telling you as a show of good
faith, prove we can work together again in spite of your backstabbing
crimes.  Silvio was the one who suggested this whole thing.  He helped
interview the shooter.  That's the story you'll write this afternoon,
and that's the story we always intended to come out in a few weeks'
time."

"I don't believe you," I said, believing every word of it.

"That's of little interest to me."

"Why?" I said.

"I presume you mean why did he want to die.  He was washed up, Hildy. He
hadn't been able to write anything in four years.  That was worse than
death to Silvio."

"But his best stuff . . ."

"That's when he came to us.  I don't know if he was ever a true
believer; hell, I don't know if I'm a true believer.  That's why we call
ourselves latitudinarian.  If you have different ideas on the divinity
of Tori-san, for instance, we don't drive you out of the church, we give
you a time slot and let you talk it over with people who agree with you.
We don't form sects, like other churches, and we don't torment heretics.
There are no heretics.  We aren't doctrinaire.  We have a saying in the
church, when people want to argue about points of theology:  that's
close enough for sphere music."

"'Hum a few bars and I'll see if I can pick it up,'" I said.

"Exactly.  We make no secret of the fact that what we most want from
parishioners is for them to buy our records.  What we give them in
return is the chance to rub elbows with celebrities.  What surprised the
founding Flacks, though, is how many people really do believe in the
sainthood of celebrities.  It even makes some sense, when you think
about it.  We don't postulate a heaven. It's right here on the ground,
if you achieve enough popularity.  In the mind of your average
star-struck nobody, being a celebrity is a thousand times better than
any heaven he can imagine."

I could see he did believe in one thing, even if it wasn't the Return of
the King.  He believed in the power of public relations.  I'd found a
point in common with him.  I wasn't delighted by this.

"So you'll play it as, he came to you for help, and you helped him."

"For three years we wrote all his music.  We attract a lot of artists,
as you know.  We picked three of the best, and they sat down and started
churning out 'Silvio' music.  It turned out to be pretty good.  You
never can tell."

I thought back over the music I had loved so much, the new things I had
believed Silvio had been doing.  It was still good; I couldn't take that
away from the music.  But something had gone out of me.

This was a whole new world for Brenda, and she was as rapt as any
three-year-old at mommy's knee, listening to Baba Yaga and the Wolves.

"Will that be part of the story?" she asked. "How you've been writing
his music for him?"

"It has to be.  I was against it at first, but then it was shown to me
that everyone benefits this way.  My worry was of tarnishing the image
of a Gigastar.  But if it's boosted right, he becomes a real object of
sympathy, his cult gets even stronger.  He's still got his old music,
which was all his.  The church comes out well because we tried
everything, and reluctantly gave in to his request to martyr
himself--which is his right.  We broke some laws along the way, sure,
and we expected some punishment, but handled right, even that can
generate sympathy.  He asked us.  And don't worry, we've got tons of
documentation on this, tapes showing him begging us to go along. I'll
have all that wired over to your newsroom as soon as we iron out the
deal.  Oh, yes, and as if it all wasn't good enough, now the real
musicians who stood behind Silvio all this time get to come out of the
shadows and get their own shot at Gigastardom."

"Shot does seem the perfect word in this context," I said.

#

The first part of that interview was almost comic, when I think back on
it.  There I was, thinking I had it all figured out, asking who had
planned to kill Silvio.  And there he was, thinking I knew the whole
story already, thinking I was asking him who had suggested to Silvio
that, dead, he could become a Flack Gigastar.

Because Silvio had not come up with the idea independently.  What he had
proposed was his own election, live, into the ranks of the Four.  It was
explained that only dead people could qualify, and one thing led to
another.  The council was against his plan at first.  It was Silvio who
figured out the angle to make the church look good.  And it was an act
of suicide.  What the Grand Flack would go to jail for was a series of
civil offenses, conspiracies, false advertising, intent to defraud,
thing like that.  What sort of penalty the actual assassin would get,
when found, I had no idea.

It scared me, later, that we'd missed understanding each other by such a
seemingly trivial point.  If he'd known I didn't know the key fact
before he admitted what he did, I thought he might have found that
little window of opportunity to pay me back for making him miss his soap
opera, some way that would have ended with Hildy Johnson in jail and the
aims of the church still accomplished.  There might have been a way. Of
course, there was nothing to really prevent him from filing charges
anyway, I'd known that going in, but though he might be devious, he'd
never take a chance on it backfiring, knowing the kind of power Walter
would bring to bear if I ever got charged with something after bringing
him a story like that.

Brenda wanted to rush right off and get to work, but I made her sit down
and think it out, something that would benefit her later in her career
if she remembered to do it.

Step one was to phone in the confession as recorded by her holocam. When
that was safely at the Nipple newsdesk there was no chance of the Flack
going back on his word.  We could interview him at our leisure, and plan
just how to break this story.

Not that we had a lot of time; there's never much time with something
like this.  Who knows when someone will come sniffing down the tracks
you've left?  But we took enough to carry the head back to the Nipple,
where he was put on a desk and allowed to use his telephone and was soon
surrounded by dozens of gawking reporters listening in as Brenda
interviewed him.

Yes, Brenda.  On the tube ride to the offices I'd had a talk with her.

"This is all going under your byline," I said.

"That's ridiculous," she said.  "You did all the work.  It was your not
accepting the assassination on the face of it that . . . hell, Hildy,
it's your story."

"It was just too perfect," I said.  "Right when I picked him up, it went
through my mind.  Only I thought they'd set him up, the poor chump."

"Well, I was buying it.  Like everybody else."

"Except Cricket."

"Yeah.  There's no question of me taking the credit for it."

"But you will.  Because I'm offering it, and it's the kind of story that
will make your name forever and you'd be even dumber than you act if you
turned it down.  And because it can't be under my name, because I don't
work for the Nipple anymore."

"You quit?  When?  Why didn't Walter tell me?"

I knew when I had quit, and Walter didn't tell her because he didn't
know yet, but why confuse her?  She argued with me some more, her
passion growing weaker and her gradual acceptance more tinged with
guilt.  She'd get over the guilt.  I hoped she'd get over the fame.

She seemed to be enjoying it well enough at the moment.  I stood at the
back of the room, rows of empty desks between me and the excited group
gathered around the triumphant cub reporter.

And Walter emerged from his high tower.  He waddled across the
suddenly-silent newsroom, walking away from me, not seeing me there in
the shadows.  No one present could remember the last time he'd come out
of his office just for a news story.  I saw him hold out his hand to
Brenda.  He didn't believe it, of course, but he was probably planning
to grill me about it later.  He was still bestowing his sacred presence
on the reporters when I got on his elevator and rode it up to his
office.

His desk sat there in a pool of light.  I admired the fine grain of the
wood, the craftsmanship of the thing.  Of all the hugely expensive
antiques Walter owned, this was the only one I'd ever coveted.  I'd have
liked a desk of my own like that some day.

I smoothed out the gray fedora hat in my hand. It had fallen off my head
when I jumped onto the stage, into a pool of Silvio's blood.  The blood
was still caked on it.  The thing was supposed to be battered, that was
traditional, but this was ridiculous.

It seemed to me the hat had seen enough use. So I left it in the center
of Walter's desk, and I walked out.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I had to go home by the back way, and even that had been discovered. One
of my friends must have been bribed:  there were reporters gathered
outside the cave.  None had elected to actually enter it, not with the
cougar in residence. Though they knew she wouldn't hurt them, that lady
is a menacing presence at best.

My re-arranged face almost did the trick.  I had made it into the cave
and they all must have been wondering who the hell I was and what my
business was with Hildy, when somebody shouted "It's her!" and the
stampede was on.  I ran down the corridor with the reporters on my
heels, shouting questions, taping my ignominious flight.

Once inside, I viewed the front door camera. Oh, brother.  They were
shoulder to shoulder, as far as the eye could see, from one side of the
corridor to the other.  There were vendors selling balloons and hot
dogs, and some guy in a clown suit juggling.  If I'd ever wondered where
the term media circus came from, I wondered no longer.

The police had set up ropes to keep a clear space for fire and emergency
crews, and so my neighbors could get through to their homes.  As I
watched, one neighbor came through, his face set in a scowl that was
starting to look permanent. For lack of anything else to do, many of the
reporters shouted questions at him, to which he replied with stony
silence.  I could see I was not going to win any prizes at my next
neighborhood block party.  This whole thing was bound to get petitions
in circulation, politely requesting me to find another residence, if I
didn't do something.

So I spent several hours boxing my possession, folding up my furniture,
sticking stamps on everything and shoving it all in the mail tube.  I
thought about mailing myself along with it, but I didn't know where I'd
go.  The things I owned could go into storage; there wasn't that much of
it.  When I was done the already-spare apartment was clean to the bare
walls, except for some items I'd set aside, some of which I'd already
owned, others ordered and mailed to me.  I went to the bathroom and
fixed my cheekbones, left the  nose alone because I'd let Bobbie do that
when I could get to him safely.  What the hell, it was still under the
ninety-day warranty and there was no need to tell him I'd broken it
intentionally. Then I went to the front door and let myself appear on
the outside monitor.  No way was I going to un-dog those latches.

"Free food at the end of the corridor!" I shouted.  A couple of heads
actually turned, but most remained looking back at me.  Everyone shouted
questions at once and it took some time for all that to die down and for
everyone to realize that, if they didn't shut up, nobody got an
interview.

"I've said all I'm going to say about the death of Silvio," I told them.
There were groans and more shouts, and I waited for that to die down.
"I'm not unsympathetic," I continued.  "I used to be one of you.  Well,
better, but one of you." That got me some derisive shouts, a few laughs.
"I know none of your editors will take no for an answer.  So I'll give
you a break.  In fifteen minutes this door will open, and you're all
free to come in.  I don't guarantee you an interview, but this idiocy
has got to stop.  My neighbors are complaining."

I knew that last would buy me exactly no sympathy, but the promise of
opening the door would keep them solidly in place for a while.  I waved
to them, and switched off the screen.

I told the door to open up in fifteen minutes, and hurried to the back.

A previous call to the police had cleared the smaller group out of the
corridor back there.  It was not a public space, so I could do that, and
the reporters had to retreat to Texas, from which they could not be
chased out, so long as they didn't violate any of the appropriate
technology laws by bringing in modern tools or clothing. That was fine
with me; I knew the land, and they didn't.

I came out of the cave cautiously.  It was full night, with no "moon," a
fact I'd checked in my weather schedule.  I peered over the edge of the
cliff and saw them down there, gathered around a campfire near the
river, drinking coffee and toasting marshmallows.  I shouldered my pack,
settled all my other items so they would make no noise, and scaled the
smaller, gentler slope that rose behind the cave.  I soon came to stand
on top of the hill, and Mexico lay spread out before me in the
starlight.

I started off, walking south, keeping my spirits up by envisioning the
scene when the hungry hordes poured through the door to find an empty
nest.

#

For the next three weeks I lived off the land. At least, I did as much
of that as I could.  Texas or Mexico, the pickings could be mighty slim
in these parts, partner.  There were some edible plants, some cactus,
none of which you'd call a gourmet delight, but I dutifully tried as
many of them as I could find and identify out of my disneyland
resident's manual.  I'd brought along staples like pancake batter and
powdered eggs and molasses and corn meal, and some spices, mostly chili
powder.  I wasn't entirely on my own.  I could sneak into Lonesome Dove
or New Austin when things started getting low.

So in the morning I'd eat flapjacks and eggs, and at night beans and
cornbread, but I supplemented this fare with wild game.

What I'd had in mind was venison.  There are plenty of deer and antelope
playing around my home, even a few buffalo roaming.  Buffalo seemed a
bit extreme for one person, but I'd brought a bow and arrow hoping to
bag a pronghorn or small buck deer.  The discouraging word was, those
critters are hard to sneak up on, hard to get in range of, if your range
is as short as mine.  As a resident of Texas, I was entitled to take two
deer or antelope each year, and I'd never bagged even one.  I'd never
wanted to.  You can use firearms for this purpose, but checking them out
of the disneyland office was a process so beset with forms in triplicate
and solemn oaths that I never even considered it.  Besides, I wondered,
in passing, if the CC would allow me such a lethal weapon in view of my
recent track record.

I was also allowed a virtually unlimited quota of jackrabbits, and
that's what I ate.  I didn't shoot any, though I shot at them.  I set
snares. Most mornings I'd find one or two struggling to get free.  The
first one was hard to kill and the killing cost me my appetite, but it
got easier after that.  It was just as I "remembered" it from Scarpa.
Before long it seemed natural.

I had found one of the very few places in Luna where I could hide out
until the Silvio story cooled off.  I calculated that would take about a
month.  It would be a year or more before the whole thing was old news,
but I was sure my own part in the travesty would be largely forgotten
sooner than that.  So I spent my days wandering the length and breadth
of my huge back yard. There wasn't a lot to do.  I occupied myself by
catching rattlesnakes.  All this takes is a certain amount of roaming
around, and a bit of patience.  They just coil up and hiss and rattle
when you find them, and can be captured using a long stick and a bit of
rope to loop around their necks.  I was very careful handling them as I
couldn't afford to be bitten.  That would mean either returning to the
world for medical treatment, or surrendering myself to the tender
mercies of Ned Pepper.  If you call up an old Boy Scout manual and read
the section on snakebite, it'll curl your hair.

Once a week I'd creep up on the entrance to my old back door.  By the
second week there was no one there.  I went over to my unfinished cabin
and counted the reporters camped nearby.  They had figured out where I
was, in a general way.  I'm sure somebody in town had reported my
stealthy shopping trips.  It stood to reason that, having abandoned my
apartment, I'd show up at the cabin sooner or later.  And they were
right.  I did plan to return there.

At the end of the third week there were still a dozen people at the
cabin.  Enough was enough, I decided.  So I waited until long after
dark, watching them forlornly trying to entertain each other without
benefit of television, saw them crawl into sleeping bags one by one,
many rip- roaring drunk.  I waited still longer, until their fire was
embers, until the surprising cold of the desert night had chilled the
snakes in my bag, making them dopey and tractable.  Then I stole into
their camp, silent as any red Indian, and left a rattler within a few
feet of each of the sleeping bags.  I figured they'd crawl in to get
warm, and judging from the screams and shouts I heard about an hour
before sunrise, that's just what they did.

Morning found them all gone.  I watched from a distance through my field
glasses as I made my breakfast of pancakes and left-over rabbit chili as
they drifted back one by one after having been treated by autodocs.  The
sheriff showed up a little later and started writing out citations. If
anything, the cries were even louder when the reporters found out the
price they would have to pay for non-resident killing of indigenous
reptiles.  He wasn't impressed at all by their pleas that most of the
snakes had been killed by accident, in the struggle to get out of the
sleeping bags.

I thought they might post a guard the next night, but they didn't.  City
slickers, all of them.  So I crept in again and left the remainder of my
stock.  After my second raid, only four of the hardiest returned.  They
were probably going to stay indefinitely, and they'd be alert now. Too
bad they couldn't prove I'd sicced the snakes on them.

I walked up to the cabin and started changing my clothes.  It took them
a minute or two to notice me, then they all gathered around.  Four
people can hardly be called a mob, but four reporters come close.  They
all shouted at once, they got in my way, they grew angrier by the
minute.  I treated them as if they were unusually mobile rocks, too big
to move, but not worth looking at and certainly not something to talk
to. Even one word would only serve to encourage them.

They hung around most of the day.  Others joined them, including one
idiot who had brought an antique camera with bellows, black cape, and a
bar to hold flash powder, apparently hoping to get a novelty picture of
some kind.  There was a novelty picture in it, when the powder slipped
down his shirt and ignited and the others had to slap out the flames.
Walter ran the sequence in his seven o'clock edition with a funny
commentary.

Even reporters will give up eventually if there's really no story there.
They wanted to interview me, but I wasn't important enough to rate a
come-and-go watch, supplying the 'pad with those endlessly fascinating
shots of a person walking from his door to his car, and arriving home at
night, not answering the questions of the throng of reporters with
nothing better to do.  So by the second day they all went away, gone to
haunt someone else.  You don't give assignments like that to your top
people.  I'd known guys who spent all their time staked out on this or
that celebrity, and not one could pour piss out of a boot.

It felt good to be alone again.  I got down to serious work, finishing
my uncompleted cabin.

#

Brenda came by on the second day.  For a while she said nothing, just
stood there and watched me hammering shingles into place.

She looked different.  She was dressed well, for one thing, and had done
some interesting things with make-up.  Now that she had some money, I
supposed she had found professional advice.  The biggest new thing about
her was that she was about fifteen kilos heavier.  It had been
distributed nicely, around the breasts and hips and thighs. For the
first time, she looked like a real woman, only taller.

I took the nails out of my mouth and wiped my forehead with the back of
my hand.

"There's a thermos of lemonade by the toolbox," I said.  "You can help
yourself, if you'll bring me a glass."

"It's talking," she said.  "I was told it wouldn't talk, but I had to
come see for myself." She had found the thermos and couple of glasses,
which she inspected dubiously.  They could have used a wash, I admit it.

"I'll talk," I said.  "I just won't do interviews.  If that's what you
came for, take a look in that gunny sack by your feet."

"I heard about the snakes," she said.  She was climbing up the ladder to
join me on the ridge of the roof.  "That was sort of infantile, don't
you think?"

"It did the job."  I took the glass of lemonade and she gingerly settled
herself beside me.  I drained mine and tossed the glass down into the
dirt.  She was wearing brand new denim pants, very tight to show off her
newly-styled hips and legs, and a loose blouse that managed to hide the
boniness of her shoulders, knotted tight between her breasts, baring her
good midriff.  The tattoo around her navel seemed out of place, but she
was young.  I fingered the material of her blouse sleeve.  "Nice stuff,"
I said.  "You did something to your hair."

She patted it self-consciously, pleased that I'd noticed.

"I was surprised Walter didn't sent you out here," I said.  "He'd figure
because we worked together, I might open up to you.  He'd be wrong, but
that's how he'd figure it."

"He did send me," she said.  "I mean, he tried. I told him to go to
hell."

"Something must be wrong with my ears.  I thought you said--"

"I asked him if he wanted to see the hottest young reporter in Luna
working for the Shit."

"I'm flabbergasted."

"You taught me everything I know."

I wasn't going to argue with that, but I'll admit I felt something that
might have been a glow of pride.  Passing the torch, and all that, even
if the torch was a pretty shoddy affair, one I'd been glad to be rid of.

"So how's all the notoriety treating you?" I asked her.  "Has it cost
you your sweet girlish laughter yet?"

"I never know when you're kidding."  She'd been gazing into the purple
hills, into the distance, like me.  Now she turned and faced me,
squinting in the merciless sunlight.  Her face was already starting to
burn.  "I didn't come here to talk about me and my career.  I didn't
even come to thank you for what you did.  I was going to, but everybody
said don't, they said Hildy doesn't like stuff like that, so I won't.  I
came because I'm worried about you.  Everybody's worried about you."

"Who's everybody?"

"Everybody.  All the people in the newsroom. Even Walter, but he'd never
admit it.  He told me to ask you to come back.  I told him to ask you
himself.  Oh, I'll tell you his offer, if you're interested--"

"--which I'm not."

"--which is what I told him.  I won't try to fool you, Hildy.  You never
got close to the people you worked with, so maybe you don't know how
they feel about you.  I won't say they love you, but you're respected, a
lot.  I've talked to a lot of people, and they admire your generosity
and the way you play fair with them, within the limits of the job."

"I've stabbed every one of them in the back, one time or another."

"That's not how they feel.  You beat them to a lot of stories, no
question, but the feeling is it's because you're a good reporter.  Oh,
sure, everybody knows you cheat at cards--"

"What a thing to say!"

"--but nobody can ever catch you at it, and I think they even admire you
for that.  For being so good at it."

"Vile calumny, every word of it."

"Whatever.  I promised myself I wouldn't stay long, so I'll just say
what I came here to say.  I don't know just what happened, but I saw
that Silvio's death wasn't something you could just shrug off.  If you
ever want to talk about it, completely off the record, I'm willing to
listen. I'm willing to do just about anything."  She sighed, and looked
away for a moment, then back. "I don't really know if you have friends,
Hildy. You keep a part of yourself away from everyone. But I have
friends, and I need them.  I think of you as one of my friends.  They
can help out when things are really bad.  So what I wanted to say, if
you ever need a friend, any time at all, just call me."

I didn't want this, but what could I do, what could I say?  I felt a hot
lump in the back of my throat.  I tried to speak, but it would get into
entirely too much if I ever started, into things I don't think she
needed or wanted to know.

She patted my knee and started to get down off the roof.  I grabbed her
hand and pulled her back. I kissed her on the lips.  For the first time
in many days I smelled a human smell other than my own sweat.  She was
wearing a scent I had worn the day we kidnapped the Grand Flack.

She would have been happy to go farther but it wasn't my scene and we
both knew it, and both knew I'd had nothing in mind other than to thank
her for caring enough to come out here.  So she climbed down from the
roof, started back into town.  She turned once, waved and smiled at me.

I worked furiously all afternoon, evening, and into the night, until it
grew too dark to see what I was doing.

#

Cricket came by the next day.  I was working on the roof again.

"Git down off'n that there shack, you cayuse!" she shouted.  "This here
planet ain't big enough fer the both of us."  She was pointing a chrome-
plated six-shooter at me.  She pulled the trigger, and a stick shot out
and a flag unfurled.  It said BANG!  She rolled it up and put the gun
back on her hip as I came down the ladder, grateful of the interruption.
It was the hottest part of the day; I'd taken my shirt off and my skin
shone as if I'd just stepped out of the shower.

"The hombre back in the bar said this stuff would take the hide off of a
rattlesnake," she said, holding up a bottle of brown liquid.  "I told
him that's what I intended to use it for."  I held out my hand.  She
scowled at it, then took it.  She was dressed in full, outrageous
"western" regalia, from the white Stetson hat to the high- heeled lizard
boots, with many a pearly button and rawhide fringe in between.  You
expected her to whip out a guitar and start yodeling "Cool Water." She
was also sporting a trim blonde mustache.

"I hate the soup strainer," I said, as she poured me a drink.

"So do I," she admitted.  "I'm like you; I don't care to mix.  But my
little daughter bought it for me for my birthday, so I figure I have to
wear it for a few weeks to make her happy."

"I didn't know you had a daughter."

"There's a lot you don't know about me.  She's at that age when gender
identity starts to crop up in their minds.  One of her friend's mother
just got a Change, and Lisa's telling me she wants to have a daddy for a
while.  Hell, at least it goes with the duds."  She had been digging in
a pocket. Now she flipped out a wallet and showed me a picture of a girl
of about six, a sweeter, younger version of herself.  I tried my hand at
a few complimentary phrases, and became aware she was curling her lip at
me.

"Oh, shut up, Hildy," she said.  "You being 'nice' just reminds me of
why you're doing it, you louse."

"Did you have any trouble getting out of the Studio?"

"They roughed me up pretty good.  Knocked out my front teeth, broke a
couple of fingers.  But the cavalry arrived and got pictures of the
whole thing, and right now they're talking to my lawyers.  I guess I got
you to thank for that; the timely arrival, I mean."

"No need to thank me."

"Don't worry, I wasn't going to."

"I was surprised it was so easy to get the drop on you."

She brought out two shot glasses and poured some of her rattlesnake-hide
remover in each, then looked at me in a funny way.

"So am I.  You can probably imagine, I've been thinking it over.  I
think it was Brenda being there.  I must have thought she'd slow you
down. Jog your elbow in some way when it came time to do the dirty
deed."  She handed me a glass, and we both drained them.  She made a
face; I was a little more used to the stuff, but it never goes down
easy.  "All subconscious, you understand. But I thought you'd hesitate,
since it's so obvious how much she looks up to you.  So while I was
waiting for that window of vulnerability I made the great mistake of
turning my back on you, you son of a bitch."

"Bitch will do."

"I meant what I said.  I was thinking of the male Hildy I knew, and he
would have hesitated."

"That's ridiculous."

"Maybe so.  But I think I'm right  Changing is almost always more than
just re-arranging the plumbing.  Other things change, too.  So I was
caught in the middle, thinking of you as a man who'd do something stupid
in the presence of a little pussy, not as the ruthless cunt you'd
become."

"It was never like that with me and Brenda."

"Oh, spare me.  Sure, I know you never screwed her.  She told me that.
But a man's always aware of the possibility.  As a woman you know that.
And you use it, if you have any brains, just like I do."

I couldn't say she was definitely wrong.  I know that changing sex is,
for me, more than just a surface thing.  Some attitudes and outlooks
change as well.  Not a lot, but enough to make a difference in some
situations.

"You're sleeping with her, aren't you?" I asked, in some surprise.

"Sure.  Why not?"  She took another drink and squinted at me, then shook
her head.  "You're good at a lot of things, Hildy, but not so good at
people."  I wasn't sure what she meant by that. Not that I disagreed, I
just wasn't sure what she was getting at.

"She sent you out here?"

"She helped.  I would have come out here anyway, to see if I really
wanted to put a few new dents in your skull.  I was going to, but what's
the point?  But she's worried about you.  She said having Silvio die in
your arms like that hit you pretty hard."

"It did.  But she's exaggerating."

"Could be.  She's young.  But I'll admit, I was surprised to see you
quit.  You've talked about it ever since I've known you, so I just
assumed it was nothing but talk.  You really going to squat out here for
the rest of your life?"  She looked sourly around at the blasted land.
"What the hell you gonna do, once this slum is finished?  Grow stuff?
What can you raise out here, anyway?"

"Calluses and blisters, mostly."  I showed her my hands.  "I'm thinking
of entering these in the county fair."

She poured another drink, corked the bottle, and handed it to me.  She
drained her glass in one gulp.

"Lord help me, I think I'm beginning to like this stuff."

"Are you going to ask me to go back to work?"

"Brenda wanted me to, but I said I don't want to get that mixed up in
your karma.  I've got a bad feeling about you, Hildy.  I don't know just
what it is, but you've had an absolutely incredible run of good luck,
for a reporter.  I mean the David Earth story, and Silvio."

"Not such good luck for David and Silvio."

"Who cares?  What I'm saying, I have this feeling you'll have to pay for
all that.  You're in for a run of bad luck."

"You're superstitious."

"And bisexual.  See, you learned three new things about me today."

I sighed, and debated taking one more drink.  I knew I'd fall off the
roof if I did.

"I want to thank you, Cricket, for coming all the way out here to tell
me I'm jinxed.  A gal really needs to hear that from time to time."

She grinned at me.  "I hope it ruined your day."

I waved my hand at the desolation around us.

"How could anyone ruin all this?"

"I'll admit, making all this any worse is probably beyond even my
formidable powers.  And I'll go now, back to the glitter and glamour and
madcap whirl of my life, leaving you to languish with the lizards, and
will add only these words, to wit, Brenda is right, you do have friends,
and I'm one, though I can't imagine why, and if you need anything,
whistle, and maybe I'll come, if I don't have anything else to do."

And she leaned over and kissed me.

#

They say that if you stay in one place long enough, everybody you ever
met will eventually go by that spot.  I knew it had to be true when I
saw Walter struggling up the trail toward my cabin.  I couldn't imagine
what could have brought him out to West Texas other than a concatenation
of mathematical unlikelihoods of Dickensian proportions.  That, or
Cricket and Brenda were right:  I did have friends.

I needn't have worried about that last possibility.

"Hildy, you're a worthless slacker!" he shouted at me from three meters
away.  And what a sight he was.  I don't think he'd ever visited an
historically-controlled disneyland in his life. One can only imagine,
with awe, the titanic struggles it must have taken to convince him that
he could not wear his office attire into Texas, that his choices were
nudity, or period dress. Well, nudity was right out, and I resolved to
give thanks to the Great Spirit for not having had to witness that.  The
sight of Walter in his skin would have put the buzzards off their feed.
So out of the rather limited possibilities in his size in the disney
tourist costume shop, he had selected a cute little number in your basic
Riverboat Gambler style:  black pants, coat, hat, and boots, white shirt
and string tie, scarlet-and- maroon paisley vest with gold edging and
brass watch fob.  As I watched, the last button on the vest gave up the
fight, popping off and ricocheting off a rock with a sound familiar to
watchers of old western movies, and the buttons on his shirt were left
to struggle on alone. Lozenges of pale, hairy flesh were visible in the
gaps between buttons.  His belt buckle was buried beneath a substantial
overhang.  His face was running with sweat.  All in all, better than I
would have expected, for Walter.

"Kind of far from the Mississippi, aren't you, tinhorn?" I asked him.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Never mind.  You're just the man I wanted to see.  Give me a hand
unloading these planks, will you?  It'd take me all day, alone."

He gaped at me as I went to the buckboard which had been sitting there
for an hour, filled with fresh, best-quality boards from Pennsylvania,
boards I intended to use for the cabin floor, when I got around to it. I
clambered up onto the wagon and lifted one end of a plank.

"Well, come on, pick up the other end."

He thought it over, then trudged my way, looking suspiciously at the
placid team of mules, giving them a wide berth.  He hefted his end,
grunting, and we tossed it over the side.

After we'd tossed enough of them to establish a rhythm, he spoke.

"I'm a patient man, Hildy."

"Hah."

"Well, I am.  What more do you want?  I've waited longer than most men
in my position would have.  You were tired, sure, and you needed a rest
. . .  though how anybody could think of this as a rest is beyond me."

"You waited for what?"

"For you to come back, of course.  That's why I'm here.  Vacation's
over, my friend.  Time to come back to the real world."

I set my end of the board down on the pile, wiped my brow with the back
of my arm, and just stared at him.  He stared back, then looked away,
and gestured to the lumber.  We picked up another board.

"You could have let me know you were taking a sabbatical," he said. "I'm
not complaining, but it would have made things easier.  Your checks have
kept on going to your bank, of course.  I'm not saying you're not
entitled, you'd saved up . . . was it six, seven months vacation time?"

"More like seventeen.  I've never had a vacation, Walter."

"Something always came up.  You know how it is. And I know you're
entitled to more, but I don't think you'd leave me out on a limb by
taking it all at once.  I know you, Hildy.  You wouldn't do that to me."

"Try me."

"See, what's happened, this big story has come up.  You're the only one
I'd trust to cover it. What it is--"

I dropped my end of the last board, startling him and making him lose
his grip.  He danced out of the way as the heavy timber clattered to the
floor of the wagon.

"Walter, I really don't want to hear about it."

"Hildy, be reasonable, there's no one else who-- "

"This conversation got off on the wrong foot, Walter.  Some way, you
always manage to do that with me.  I guess that's why I didn't come
right up to you and say it, and that was a mistake, I see it now, so I'm
going to--"

He held up his hand, and once more I fell for it.

"The reason I came," he said, looking down at the ground, then glancing
up at me like a guilty child, " . . . well, I wanted to bring you this."
He held out my fedora, more battered than ever from being stuffed into
his back pocket.  I hesitated, then took it from him.  He had a sort of
half smile on his face, and if there had been one gram of gloating in it
I'd have hurled the damn thing right in his face.  But there wasn't.
What I saw was some hope, some worry, and, this being Walter, a certain
gruff-but-almost-lovable diffidence.  It must have been hard for him,
doing this.

What can you do?  Throwing it back was out.  I can't say I ever really
liked Walter, but I didn't hate him, and I did respect him as a newsman.
I found my hands working unconsciously, putting some shape back into the
hat, making the crease in the top, my thumbs feeling the sensuous
material.  It was a moment of high symbolism, a moment I hadn't wanted.

"It's still got blood on it," I said.

"Couldn't get it all out.  You could get a new one, if this has bad
memories."

"It doesn't matter one way or the other."  I shrugged.  "Thanks for
going to the trouble, Walter."  I tossed the hat on a pile of wood
shavings, bent nails, odd lengths of sawed lumber. I crossed my arms.

"I quit," I said.

He looked at me a long time, then nodded, and took a sopping
handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped his brow.

"If you don't mind, I won't help you with the rest of this," he said.
"I've got to get back to the office."

"Sure.  Listen, you could take the wagon back into town.  The mule
skinner said he'd be back for it before dark, but I'm worried the mules
might be getting thirsty, so it would--"

"What's a mule?" he said.

#

I eventually got him seated on the bare wooden board, reins in hand, a
doubtful expression on his choleric face, and watched him get them going
down the primitive trail to town.  He must have thought he was "driving"
the mules; just let him try to turn them from the path to town, I
thought.  The only reason I'd let him do it in the first place was that
the mules knew the way.

That was the end of my visitors.  I kept waiting for Fox or Callie to
show up, but they didn't.  I was glad to have missed Callie, but it hurt
a little that Fox stayed away.  It's possible to want two things at
once.  I really did want to be left alone . . . but the bastard could
have tried.

#

My life settled into a routine.  I got up with the sun and worked on my
cabin until the heat grew intolerable.  Then I'd mosey down into New
Austin come siesta time for a few belts of a home brew the barkeep
called Sneaky Pete and a few hands of five card stud with Ned Pepper and
the other regulars.  I had to put on a shirt in the saloon: pure sex
discrimination, of the kind that must have made women's lives hell in
the 1800's.  When working, I wore only dungarees, boots, and a sombrero
to keep the worst heat off my head.  I was brown as a nut from the waist
up.  How women wore the clothes the bargirls had on in a West Texas
summer is one of the great mysteries of life.  But, come to think of it,
the men dressed just as heavily.  A strange culture, Earth.

As the evening approached I'd return to the cabin and labor until
sundown.  In the evening's light I would prepare my supper.  Sometimes
one of my friends would join me.  I developed a certain reputation for
buttermilk biscuits, and for my perpetual pot of beans, into which I'd
toss some of the unlikeliest ingredients imaginable.  Maybe I would find
a new career, if I could interest my fellow Lunarians in the subtleties
of Texas chili.

I always stayed awake for about an hour after the last light of day had
faded.  I have no way of comparing, of course, but it seemed to me the
nightly display of starry sky was probably pretty close to the real
thing, what I'd see if I were transported to the real Texas, the real
Earth, now that all man's pollution was gone.  It was glorious.  Nothing
like a Lunar night, not nearly as many stars, but better in its own way.
For one thing, you never see the Lunar night sky without at least one
thickness of glass between you and the heavens.  You never feel the
cooling night breezes.  For another, the Lunar sky is too hard. The
stars glare unmercifully, unblinking, looking down without forgiveness
on Man and all his endeavors.  In Texas the stars at night do indeed
burn big and bright, but they wink at you.  They are in on the joke.  I
loved them for that. Stretched out on my bedroll, listening to the
coyotes howling at the moon--and I loved them for that, too, I wanted to
howl with them . . . I achieved the closest approximation of peace I had
ever found, or am likely to find.

I spent something like two months like that. There was no hurry on the
cabin.  I intended to do it right.  Twice I tore down large portions of
it when I learned a new method of doing something and was no longer
satisfied with my earlier, shoddier work.  I think I was afraid of
having to think of something else to do when I finished it.

And with good reason.  The day came, as it always must, when I could
find nothing else to do. There was not a screw to tighten on a single
hinge, not a surface to sand smoother, no roof shingle out of place.

Well, I reasoned, there was always furniture to make.  That ought to be
a lot harder than walls, a floor, and a roof.  All I had inside was some
cheap burlap curtains and a rude bedstead.  I spread my bedroll out on
the straw mattress and spent a restless night "indoors" for the first
time in many weeks.

The next day I prowled the grounds, forming vague plans for a vegetable
garden, a well, and-- no kidding--a white picket fence.  The fence would
be easy.  The garden would be a lot harder, an almost impossible project
worthy of my mood at the time.  As for a well, I'd have to have one for
the garden, but somehow the fiction of worth-while labor broke down when
I thought about a well.  The reason was that, in Texas, there is no more
water under the surface than there is anywhere else on Luna.  If you
want water and aren't conveniently near the Rio Grande, what you do is
dig or drill to a level determined by lottery for each parcel of land,
and when you've done that, the disneyland board of directors will have a
pipe run out to the bottom of your well and you can pretend you've
struck water.  At my cabin that depth was fifteen meters.  The labor of
digging that deep didn't daunt me.  I knew I was up to it.  Hell, even
with a female hormonal system impeding me I'd developed shoulders and
biceps that would have made Bobbie go into aesthetic shock.  Trading my
plane and saw for a pick and shovel would be no problem.  That was the
part I looked forward to.

What didn't thrill me was the pretending.  I'd gotten good at it,
looking at the stars at night and marveling at the size of the universe.
I'd not gone loony; I knew they were just little lights I could have
held in my hand.  But at night, weary, I could forget it.  I could
forget a lot of things.  I didn't know if I could forget digging fifteen
meters for a dry hole, then seeing the pipe laid and the cool, sweet,
life-giving water fill up that dry hole.

I hate to get too metaphorical.  Walter always howled when I did.
Readers tire of metaphors easily, he's always said.  Why the well, and
not the stars?  Why come this far and balk, why lose one's imagination
right at the end?  I don't know, but it probably had to do with the dry
hole concept.  I just kept thinking my entire life was a big dry hole.
All I'd ever accomplished that I was in any way proud of was the cabin .
. . and I hated the cabin.

That night I couldn't get to sleep.  I fought it a long time, then I got
up and stumbled through the night with no lantern until I found my
hatchet.  I chopped the bedstead to kindling and piled it against the
wall, and I soaked that kindling in kerosene.  I set it alight and
walked out the front door, leaving it open to make a draft, and went
slowly up the low hill behind my property.  There I squatted on my
haunches and watched, feeling very little emotion, as the cabin burned
to the ground.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I wonder if there's a lonelier place anywhere than an arena designed to
seat thirty or forty thousand people, empty.

The King City slash-boxing venue did have an official name, the
Somebody-or-other Memorial Gladiatorium, but it was another case of
honoring someone well-known at the time that sports history has
forgotten.  The arena is called, in all the sports pages, in the minds
of bloodthirsty fans everywhere, even on the twenty-meter sign on the
outside, simply the Bucket of Blood.

It was peaceful now.  The concentric circles of seats were in shadows.
The sound system was silent.  The blood gutters around the ring had been
sluiced clean, ready for the evening's fresh torrents.  Some of that new
blood would come from the man now standing alone under the ring of harsh
white lights suspended from the obscured ceiling; MacDonald.  I walked
down the gentle curvature of the aisle toward him.

He was nude, standing with his back to me.  I thought I didn't make any
noise, but he was a tough man to sneak up on.  He looked over his
shoulder, not in any alarm, just curious.

"Hello, Hildy."  No shock of recognition, no comment that I'd been male
the last time he'd seen me.  Maybe he'd heard, or maybe his eyes just
didn't miss much, and very little could surprise him.

"Do you get nervous before a fight?"

He frowned, and seemed to give the question real thought.

"I don't think so.  I get . . . heightened in some way.  I find it hard
to sit down.  Maybe it's nervousness.  So I come up here and re-think my
last fight, remember the things I did wrong, try to think of ways not to
do them wrong the next time."

"I didn't think you did things wrong."  I was looking for stairs to join
him in the ring, but there didn't seem to be any.  I hopped lightly over
the meter-high edge.

"Everybody makes mistakes.  You try to minimize them, in my line of
work."

I saw that he had a partial erection.  Had he been masturbating?  I
couldn't deal with that just then, had never been less interested in sex
in my life.  I put my hand on his face.  He stood there with his arms
folded and looked into my eyes.

"I need help," I said.

"Yes," he said, and put his arms around me.

#

He took me down to his dressing room, locker room, whatever he called
it.  He bustled around for a while, making drinks for both of us,
letting me regain some of my composure.  The funny thing, I hadn't
cried.  My shoulders had shaken, there in his arms, and I'd made some
funny noises, but no tears came.  I wasn't shaking.  My heart was not
pounding.  I didn't know quite what to make of it, but I'd never been
nearer to screaming in my life.

"You interrupted my crazy little ritual," he said, handing me a
strawberry margarita.  It didn't occur to me until later to wonder how
he knew I drank them.

"Nice bar you have."

"They take good care of me, so long as I draw the crowds.  Cheers."  He
held his own glass out to me, and we sipped.  Excellent.

"I hope you're not drinking anything too strong."

"No matter what you may think, I'm not suicidal.  Not now."

"What do you--"

"I always go out there alone," he said, getting up, standing with his
back to me, cutting off the question he didn't seem ready to answer yet.
"The dirty little secret is, the anticipation turns me on.  I've read up
on it.  Some people are aroused by danger.  It's more common to be
aroused after you've come through a life-threatening situation. Me, I
get it before."

"I hope I didn't ruin anything for you."

"No.  It's not important."

"If you want to relieve the pressure, you know, make love, we could."  I
regretted saying it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.  Under
other circumstances, sure . . . in fact, damn sure.  He was gorgeous,
something I hadn't realized the other times I'd met him, being male
myself at the time.  The body was quite good-- lean, compact, made for
speed and stamina rather than power--but, so what?  It was a Formula A
fighter's body.  His opponent this evening would be wearing essentially
the same body, plus or minus three kilograms, even if she was female.
What I'd been noticing about him were two things: the hands, and the
face.  The hands were long and wide, the knuckles a bit thickened, the
palms rough.  They moved with a total assurance, they never dithered,
never fumbled.  They were hands that would know how to handle a woman's
body.

The face . . . well, it was the eyes, wasn't it?  It was a handsome
enough face, craggy in a way I liked, strong brows and cheeks, the mouth
maybe a little prim, but capable of softening, as when he put his arms
around me.  But the eyes, the eyes.  Without my being able to describe
any one quality or even set of qualities that should make them so, they
were riveting.  When he looked at me, he looked at me, nothing else,
unwavering, seeing more of me than anybody ever should.

Again, he seemed to be considering the offer. He made the small smile
that was the most I'd ever seen him give away.

"It's been a long time since I accepted an offer made with so much
enthusiasm as that," he said.

"Sorry.  It was really stupid.  Now you'll tell me you're homosexual."

"Why?  Because I turned you down?"

"No, because all my guesses lately turn out wrong.  Just the way you
looked at me, though I should have known you aren't interested now, I
just thought I saw . . . something."

"You're not doing too badly.  No, I'm . . . do you want to hear this?"

"If you want to tell."

He gave a shrug that said we both knew the important things hadn't come
up yet, but he was willing to wait.

"Okay.  Briefly, for future reference, I'm mostly hetero, say ninety
percent, when male.  I haven't been female for a very long time, and
probably never will be again."

"Didn't you like it?"

"I had a problem.  I didn't like making love to men.  My love life was
almost exclusively with other women.  I didn't like . . . accepting
someone else into my body.  I was always afraid to.  Women have to be
able to surrender too much control.  It made me nervous."

"It doesn't have to be like that."

"So I've been told.  It always was for me."

"That's the important thing, I guess."  There may have been a more inane
conversation since the Invasion, but no record of it survives.  I took
another drink to cover my discomfort.  This whole thing had been a
mistake.  I saw I'd made him uncomfortable in some way I didn't
understand, and wished I was somewhere else.  Anywhere else.  I started
to get up, and found I could not.  My arms and legs simply would not
operate to lift me out of my chair.  My arms would still lift the
drink-- I lifted it, drank, one of the more needed drinks since the
night they invented the strawberry margarita--but they defied my orders
to do anything about getting bodily elevation.

Screwed up?  You bet.

I wasn't about to tolerate such a mutiny, so I got angry, and broke the
process down into steps. Put palms flat against chair arms.  Set feet
flat on floor.  Press down on hands and feet.  Do not operate this
machinery under the influence of narcotic drugs.  There you go, Hildy,
you're getting up.

"I've been trying to kill myself," I said, and sat back down.

"You've come to the right place.  Tell me about it."

#

You do something often enough, you get good at it.  My
opening-up-and-letting-it-all-hang-out skills had never been strong, but
telling my story to Fox, to Liz, even the part of it I'd told to Callie
had at least put a polish on the narrative. I found myself using some of
the same phrases I'd used the times before, things I'd said that had
struck me as particularly droll or that somehow managed to put a better
face on the situation. I'm a writer, I can't help it.  I found myself
almost enjoying the exercise.  It was a story I was doing, and as in any
story, there's the parts you think will sell it and the parts that will
simply confuse the reader.  And when the audience is small, you tailor
it to what you think they will like.  So, without my intending it, the
story because a pitch for a series I'd like to do in the great Extra
Edition of Life.  Or if you prefer, the recitations to Fox, Liz, and
Callie had been out-of-town try-outs, and this was the big-time critic
whose review would make you or break you.

But Andrew wasn't having it.  He let me prattle on like that for almost
an hour.  I think he was getting a feel for the particular type of
horseshit I was selling, its distinctive aroma and texture when you
stepped in it, the color of it and the sound it made when it landed.
When he knew he'd recognize that particular kind of manure if it turned
up in his pasture again he held up his hand until my mouth stopped
working and he said "Now tell me what really happened."

So I started over.

I didn't lie the first time through, you understand.  But I'm bound to
say I didn't tell the truth, either.  All those years at the Nipple had
sharpened my editorial skills outrageously, and one of the first things
you learn as a reporter is that the easiest way to prevaricate is to
simply not tell all the truth.  I wondered, beginning again, if I
remembered how to tell all the truth.  If I even knew what all the truth
was. (We could spend a pleasant afternoon debating whether or not anyone
ever knows even a small portion of the truth, about herself or about
anything, but that way madness lies.)  All he wanted was my best shot at
telling him what I knew, without all the gimcracks and self-serving
invention one throws in to make oneself look better.  Try it sometime;
it's one of the hardest things you'll ever do.

It takes a long time, too.  Doing it well involves going back to things
you may not, at first, have thought relevant to the story, sometimes way
back.  I told him things about my childhood I hadn't even realized I
remembered. The process was also drawn out by the times I just sat
there, staring into space.  Andrew never prompted me, never hurried me
in any way.  He never asked a single question.  The only times he spoke
were in answer to a direct question from me, and if a nod or a shake of
the head would do, that's what I got.  A conversational minimalist,
Andrew MacDonald.

Two things alerted me to the fact that I was through with my story:  I
had stopped talking, and a plate of sandwiches had appeared on the table
beside me.  I fell on the food like a Visigoth sacking Rome.  I don't
know when I'd ever been so hungry.  As I stuffed my face I noticed three
empty margarita glasses; I didn't remember drinking them, and I didn't
feel drunk.

As the food reached my belly, as brain cells resumed working in isolated
clumps throughout my head, I began to notice other things, such as that
the floor was shaking.  Not bouncing up and down, just a steady,
slightly scary vibration that I finally identified as crowd noise.
Andrew's locker room was almost directly beneath the center of the
Bucket of Blood.  We had come down some ringside stairs to reach it.  I
looked for a clock, in vain.

"How long have we been talking?" I asked, around a mouthful of cold cuts
and bread.

"The main event is still almost half an hour away."

"That's you, isn't it?"

"Yes."

It didn't bear thinking about.  I'd arrived in the early afternoon, and
there had been nine bouts listed on the fight card before Andrew's death
match.  It had to be ten, eleven o'clock.

"There's no clocks in here," I said, hoping he'd take it as an apology.

"I won't allow them, before a fight.  They distract me."

"Make you nervous?"  Maybe it was a needling question.  How dare he not
get nervous before a fight?  His unearthly calm was a little hard to
take.

"They distract me."

I was noticing other things.  It seems ridiculous to say I'd spent so
much time in such a small room and not seen it, but I hadn't.  Not that
there was a lot to see.  The place was as impersonal as a hotel room,
which I guess it was, in a way.  What I saw now were four telephone
screens on the wall beside him, each displaying a worried-looking face,
each with the sound turned off and the words URGENT! PICK UP! flashing
beneath the faces.  I recognized two of them as people I'd seen around
Andrew the last time I'd been here.  Trainers, managers, that sort of
thing.

"Looks like you'd better take care of some business," I said.  He waved
it away.  "Shouldn't you be, I don't know, talking strategy with those
people?  Getting pep talks, something like that?"

"I'll be glad to miss the pep talks, frankly," he said.  "It's the worst
part of this ordeal."  I had to admit the four people on the phone
looked more nervous than he did.

"I still better get out of your way," I said, getting up, trying to
swallow a mouthful of food. "You'd better do what you need to do to get
ready."

"With me, it was ten years," he said.

I sat back down.

I could pretend I didn't know what he was talking about, but it would be
a lie.  I knew exactly what he was talking about, and he promptly proved
me right by saying:

"Ten years of false memories.  That was six years ago, and I've spent
all that time looking for someone to tell about it."

"That, and trying to get yourself killed," I said.

"I know it looks that way to you.  I don't see it that way."

"But you did try to kill yourself."

"Yes, six years ago.  I found there was absolutely nothing I had the
least interest in doing.  I am well over two hundred years old, and it
seemed to me it had been at least a century since I'd done anything
new."

"You were bored."

"It went a lot deeper than that.  Depressed, uninterested . . . once I
spent three days simply sitting in the bathtub.  I saw no reason to get
out.  I decided to end my life, and it wasn't an easy decision for me. I
was raised to believe that life is a precious gift, that there is always
something useful you can do with it.  But I could no longer find
anything meaningful."

He was a lot better at telling it than I had been.  He'd had longer to
practice it, in his own mind, at least.  He just hit all the high
points, saying several times that he'd fill me in on the details when he
got back from the fight.  Briefly, he had been marooned on an island
that sounded very much like Scarpa, only tougher.  He'd had to work very
hard.  He suffered many setbacks, and never achieved anything like the
comforts granted to me.  It was only in the last two years of his
ten-year stay that things eased up a bit.

"It sounds like the CC put you through the same basic program," he said.
"From what you describe, it's been improved some; new technology, new
sub- routines.  I accepted it at the time, of course--I didn't have any
choice, since they weren't my memories--but reviewing it afterwards the
realism factor does not seem so high as what you experienced."

"The CC said he'd gotten better at that."

"He's forever improving."

"It must have been hell."

"I loved every second of it."  He let that hang for a moment, then
leaned forward slightly, his already-intense eyes blazing.  "When life
is simple like that, you have no chance to be bored. When your life
hangs in the balance as a consequence of every action you take, suicide
seems such an effete, ridiculous thing.  Every organism has the survival
instinct at its very core.  That so many humans kill themselves--not
just now, they have been doing it for a long time-- says a lot about
civilization, about 'intelligence."  Suicides have lost an ability that
every amoeba possesses:  the knowledge of how to live."

"So that's the secret of life?" I asked. "Hardship?  Earning what you
get out of life, working for it?"

"I don't know."  He got up and began pacing. "I was exhilarated when I
returned to the here and now.  I thought I had an answer.  Then I
realized, as you did, that I couldn't trust it.  It wasn't me living
those ten years.  It was a machine writing a script about how he thought
I would have lived them.  He got some of it right, but a lot more wrong,
because . . . it wasn't me.  The me he was trying to imitate had just
tried to end his life.  The me the CC imagined worked like a dog to stay
alive.  It was the CC's wish-fulfillment, not mine."

"But you said--"

"But it was an answer," he said, whirling to face me.  "What I found out
was that, for well over a century, I'd had nothing at risk!  Whether I
succeeded or failed at something had no meaning for me, because my life
was not at stake.  Not even my comfort was really at stake.  If I
succeeded or failed financially, for instance.  If I succeeded, I'd
simply win more things that had long ago lost their meaning.  If I
failed, I would lose some of these things, but the State would take care
of my basic needs."

I wanted to say something, to argue with him, but he was on a roll, and
it was just as well, because even if I did disagree with him here and
there, it was exciting simply to be able to talk about it with someone
who knew.

"That's when I started fighting death matches," he said.  "I had to
re-introduce an element of risk into my life."  He held up a hand.  "Not
too much risk; I'm very good at what I do."  And now he smiled, and it
was beautiful.  "And I do want to live again.  That's what you've got to
do, Hildy.  You've got to find a way to experience risk again.  It's a
tonic like nothing I ever imagined."

The questions were lining up in my mind, clamoring to get out.  There
was one more important than all the others.

"What's to prevent the CC," I said, slowly, "from reviving you again,
like he did to me, if you . . . make a mistake?"

"I will, someday.  Everybody does.  I think it will be a long time yet."

"There's lots of people gunning for you."

"I'm going to retire soon.  A few more matches, that's all."

"What about the tonic?"

He smiled again.  "I think I've had enough of it.  I needed it, I needed
to have the death matches . . . and nothing else would have worked.
That's the beauty of it.  To die so publicly . . ."

I saw it then.  The CC wouldn't dare revive Silvio, for instance (not
that he could; Silvio's brain had been destroyed).  Everybody knew
Silvio was dead, and if he suddenly showed up again embarrassing
questions would be asked.  Committees would be formed, petitions
circulated, programming re-examined.  Andrew had found the obvious way
to beat the CC's little resurrection game, an answer so obvious that I
had never thought of it.

Or had I, and simply kept it buried?

That would have to be a question for later as, with an apologetic shrug,
Andrew opened his door and half of King City spilled into the room, all
talking at once.  Well, fifteen or twenty people, anyway, most of them
angry.  I collected a few glares and tried to make myself small in one
corner of the room and watch as agents, trainers, managers, Arena reps,
and media types all tried to compress an hour's worth of psyching up,
legalities, and interviews into the five minutes left to them before the
match was due to start. Andrew remained an island of calm in the center
of this hurricane, which rivaled any press conference I've ever attended
for sheer confusion.

Then he was gone, trailing them all behind him like yapping puppies. The
noise faded down the short corridor and up the stairs and I heard the
crowd noise grow louder and the bass mumble that was all I could hear of
the announcer's voice from this deep below the ring.

The noise stayed at that level for a while, then decreased a little, as
I sat down to wait for his return.

Then it grew to a pitch I thought might endanger the building.  Fans, I
thought, contemptuously.

If anything, it grew even louder, and I began to wonder what was going
on.

And then they brought Andrew MacDonald back on a stretcher.

#

Nothing is ever as straightforward as it at first seems.  Andrew was
fighting a death match . . . but what did that mean?

I had no idea, myself.  Having seen just a few matches, I knew that
blows were delivered routinely that would not have been survivable
without modern medical techniques.  I had witnessed medical attention
being administered between rounds, combatants being patched up, body
fluids being replaced.  The normal sign of victory was the removal of
the loser's head, one of the many endearing things about slash-boxing
and surely a sign that things weren't going well for the beheadee . . .
but what about the Grand Flack? He did quite well without a body.  The
only surely fatal wound these days was the destruction of the brain, and
the CC was working on that one.

It seemed the rules were different for a death match.  It also seemed no
one was really happy about them, except possibly for Andrew.

I could not tell what his injuries were, but his head was still on his
shoulders.  The body was covered with a sheet, which was soaked in
blood. I gathered, later, that a hierarchy of wounds had been
established for death matches, that some could be treated by ringside
handlers between rounds, and that others had to be acknowledged as
fatal.  The fallen opponent was not decapitated, it being thought too
gruesome to hold aloft an actual dead severed head.  I was told the
ritual took the place of the coup de grace, that it was meant to be
symbolic of victory in some way.  Go figure that one out.

I also learned, later, that no one really knew how to handle the
situation they now found themselves in.  Only three fighters had ever
engaged in death matches since they were allowed into a gray area of
legality known as consensual suicide.  Only one had ever met the
requirements for a death wound, and he had experienced a deathbed
revelation that could be summed up as "maybe this wasn't such a good
idea, after all," been revived, stitched up, and retired in disgrace to
everyone's considerable secret relief.  Of the two people currently
risking their lives in fights, it had been tacitly agreed long ago that
they would never meet each other, as the certain outcome of such a match
would be the pickle the handlers, lawyers, and Arena management now
found themselves in, which might be expressed as "are we really going to
let this silly son of a bitch die on us?"

There was not a lot of time to come up with an answer.  I could hear a
sound coming from Andrew, all the way across the room, and knew I was
hearing the death rattle.

I couldn't see much of him.  If he'd hoped his final moments would be
peaceful, he'd been a fool. A dozen people crowded around, some feverish
to offer aid, others worrying about corporate liability, a very few
standing up for Andrew's right to die as he pleased.

The Bucket of Blood management had for years been in a quandary
concerning death matches.  On the one hand, they were a guaranteed draw;
stadia were always filled when the titillation of a possible actual
death was offered.  On the other, no one knew what the public reaction
would be if someone actually died right out there in front of God and
everyone, for the glory of sport.  The prevailing opinion was it would
not be good for business.  The public's appetite for non-injurious
violence in sport and entertainment had never been plumbed, but real
death, though always good for a sensation, was much easier to take if it
could be seen as an accident, like David Earth, or Nirvana.

To give them credit, the Arena people were queasy about the whole idea,
and not just from a legal standpoint.  Their worst sin in the matter was
something we all do, which is fail to imagine the worst happening.  No
one had died in a death match yet, and they'd kept hoping no one would.
Now someone was.

But not without a last-ditch effort.  The people around him reminded me,
as things in life so often do, of scenes from movies.  You've seen them:
in a war picture, when medics gather around a wounded comrade trying to
save his life, buddies at his side telling him everything's gonna be
okay, kid, you've got a million-dollar wound there, you'll be home with
the babes before you know it, and their eyes saying this one's a goner.
And this seems weird, maybe it was a trick of the light, but I saw
another scene, the priest leaning over the bed, holding a rosary,
hearing the last confession, giving the last rites.  What they were
really doing was trying to talk him into accepting treatment, please, so
we can all go home and wipe our brows and have a few stiff drinks and
pretend this fucking disaster never happened, dear lord.

He refused them all.  Gradually their pleas grew less impassioned, and a
few even gave up and retreated to the wall near me, like what he had was
contagious.  And finally someone leaned close enough to hear what it was
he'd been trying to say, and that someone looked over at me and
beckoned.

I'm surprised I made it, as I had no feeling in my legs.  But somehow I
was leaning over him, into the stench of his blood, his entrails, the
smell of death on him now, and he grabbed my hand with an amazing
strength and tried to lift himself closer to my ear because he didn't
have much of a voice left.  I hope he wasn't feeling any pain; they said
he wasn't, pain wasn't his thing, he'd been deadened before the match.
He coughed.

"Let them help you, Andrew," I said.  "You've proved your point."

"No point," he coughed.  "Nothing to prove, to them."

"You're sure?  It's no disgrace.  I'll still respect you."

"Not about respect.  Gotta go through with it, or it didn't mean
anything."

"That's crazy.  You could have died in any of them.  You don't have to
die now to validate that."

He shook his head, and coughed horribly.  He went limp, and I thought he
was dead, but then his hand put a little pressure on mine again, and I
leaned closer to his lips.

"Tricked," he said, and died.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It's a well-known fact that nobody goes to the library in this day and
age.  It's also wrong.

Why take the time and trouble to travel to a big building where actual
books on actual paper are stored when you can stay at home and access
any of that information, plus trillions of pages of data that exist only
in the memories?  If you don't already know the answer to that question,
then you just don't love books, and I'll never be able to explain it to
you.  But if you get up from your terminal right now, any time of the
day or night, take the tube down to the King City Civic Center Plaza,
and walk up the Italian marble steps between the statues of Knowledge
and Wisdom, you will find the Great Hall of Books thrumming with the
kind of quiet activity that has characterized great libraries since
books were on papyrus scrolls.  Do it someday.  Stroll past the rows of
scholars at the old oak tables, stand in the center of the dome, beside
the Austin Gutenberg Bible in its glass case, look down the infinite
rows of shelves radiating away from you.  If you love books at all, it
will soothe your mind.

Soothing was something my mind was sorely in need of.  In the three or
four days following the death of Andrew MacDonald, I spent a lot of time
at the library.  There was no practical reason for it; though I was now
homeless, I could have done the reading and research I now engaged in
sitting in the park, or in my hotel room.  Few of the things I looked at
actually existed on paper anyway.  I spent my time looking at a library
terminal no different from the ones in any street- corner phone box. But
I was far from the only one so engaged.  Though many people used the
library because they liked holding the actual source material in their
hands, most were accessing stored data, and simply preferred to do it
with real books on shelves around them.  Let's face it, the vast
majority of books in the King City Library were quite old, the
pre-Invasion legacy of a few bibliophile fanatics who insisted the
yellowing, fragile, inefficient and inconvenient old things were
necessary to any culture that called itself civilized, who convinced the
software types that the logically unjustifiable expense of shipping them
up here was, in the end, worth it.  As for new books . . . why bother? I
doubt more than six or seven new works were published on paper in a
typical Lunar year.  There was a small publishing business, never very
profitable, because some people liked to have sets of the classics
sitting on a shelf in the living room.  Books had become almost entirely
the province of interior decorators.

But not here.  These books were used.  Many had to be stored in special
inert-gas rooms and you had to don a p-suit to handle them, under the
watchful eyes of librarians who thought dog-earing should be a hanging
offense, but every volume in the institution was available for
reference, right up to the Gutenberg.  Almost a million books sat on
open shelves.  You could walk down the rows and run your hand over them,
pull one down and open it (carefully, carefully!), smell the old paper
and glue and dust.  I did most of my work with a copy of Tom Sawyer open
on the table beside me, partly so I could read a chapter when I got
tired of the research, partly so I could just touch it when I felt at my
lowest.

I'd had to keep redefining "lowest."  I was beginning to wonder if there
was a natural lower limit, if this was the limit I had reached the last
times, when I had attempted to kill myself, would have killed myself
without the CC's intervention.

My research concerned, naturally enough, suicide.  It didn't take me
long to discover that not much useful was really known about it.  Why
should that have surprised me?  Not much really useful was known
concerning anything relating to why we are what we are and do what we
do.

There's plenty of behavioristic data:  stimulus A evokes response B.
There's lots of statistical data as well:  X percent will react in
such-and- such a way to event Y.  It all worked very well with insects,
frogs, fish and such, tolerably good with dogs and cats and mice, even
reasonably decent with human beings.  But then you pose a question like
why, when Aunt Betty's boy Wilbur got run over by the paving machine,
did she up and stick her head in the microwave, while her sister Gloria
who'd suffered a similar loss grieved, mourned, recovered, and went on
to lead a long and useful life?  Best extremely scientific answer to
date:  It beats the shit out of me.

Another reason for being in the library was that it was the perfect
place to go at a problem in a logical way.  The whole environment seemed
to encourage it.  And that's what I intended to do. Andrew's death had
really rocked me.  I had nothing else that needed doing, so I was going
to attack my problem by going at it a step at a time, which meant that
first I had to define the steps. Step one, it seemed to me, was to learn
all I could about the causes of suicide.  After three days of almost
constant reading and note-taking I had it down to four, maybe five
categories of suicide.  (I bought a pad of paper and pencil to take
notes with, which earned me a few sidelong glances from my neighbors.
Even in these fusty environs writing on paper was seen as eccentric.)
These four, maybe five categories were not hard- edged, they overlapped
each other with big, fuzzy gray borders.  Again, no surprise.

The first and easiest to identify was cultural. Most societies condemned
suicide in most circumstances, but some did not.  Japan was an
outstanding example.  In ancient Japan suicide was not only condoned,
but mandatory in some circumstances.  Further, it was actually
institutionalized, so that one who had lost honor must not only kill
himself, but do it in a prescribed, public, and very painful way.  Many
other cultures looked on suicide, in certain circumstances, as an
honorable thing to do.

Even in societies where suicide was frowned on or viewed as a mortal
sin, there were circumstances where it was at least understandable.  I
encountered many tales both in folklore and reality of frustrated lovers
leaping off a cliff hand in hand.  There were also the cases of elderly
people in intractable pain (see Reason #2), and several other marginally
acceptable reasons.

Most early cultures were very tough to analyze. Demographics, as we know
it, didn't really get its start until recently.  Records were kept of
births and deaths and not much else.  How do you determine what the
suicide rate was in ancient Babylon?  You don't.  You can't even learn
much useful about Nineteenth Century Europe.  There were blips in the
data here and there.  In the Twentieth Century it was said that Swedes
killed themselves at a rate higher than their contemporaries.  Some
blamed the cold weather, the long winters, but how then do you account
for the Finns, the Norwegians, the Siberians?  Others said it was the
dour nature of the Swedes themselves. I've been asking people questions
for long enough to know something important about them:  they lie. They
lie often enough even when nothing is at stake.  When the answer can
mean something as important as whether or not Grandpa Jacques gets
buried in the hallowed ground of the churchyard, suicide notes have a
way of vanishing, bodies get re-arranged, coroners and law officers get
bribed or simply look the other way out of respect for the family.  The
blip in suicide data for the Swedes could simply have meant they were
more straightforward about reporting it.

As for Lunar society, post-Invasion society in general . . . it was a
civil right, but it was widely viewed as the coward's way out.  Suicide
was not something that was going to earn you any points with the
neighbors.

The second reason was best summed up in the statement "I can't go on
like this anymore."  The most obvious of these cases involved pain, and
no longer applied.  Then there was unhappiness.  What can you say about
unhappiness?  It is real, and can have real and easily seen causes:
disappointment with one's accomplishments in life, frustration at being
unable to attain a goal or an object, tragedy, loss.  Other times, the
cause of this hopeless feeling can be difficult to see to the outside
observer:  "He had everything to live for."

Then there was the reason Andrew proclaimed, that he had been bored.
This happened even in the days when people didn't live to be two, three
hundred years old, but rarely.  It was a reason appearing in more and
more suicide notes as life spans lengthened.

The fourth reason might be called the inability to visualize death.
Children were vulnerable to this one; many affluent, industrial
societies reported increasing teen-age suicide rates, and survivors of
failed attempts often revealed elaborate fantasies of being aware at
their own funerals, of getting back at their tormenters: "I'll show
them, they'll miss me when I'm gone."

That's why I said I had maybe five reasons.  I couldn't decide if the
attempts, successful or not, known as "gestures" rated a category of
their own.  Authorities differed as to how many suicides were merely
cries for help.  In a sense, all of them were, if only to an indifferent
Providence. Help me stop the pain, help me find love, help me find a
reason, help me, I'm hurting . . .

Did I say maybe five?  Maybe six.

Maybe six was what I thought of as "The Seasons Of Life."  We are, most
of us, closet numerologists, subconscious astrologers.  We are
fascinated with anniversaries, birthdays, ages of ourselves and others.
You are in your thirties, or forties, or seventies, or you're over one
hundred.  Back when people lived their fourscore years, on average,
those words said even more than they do today.  Turning forty meant your
life was half over, and was a portentous time to examine what the first
half had been like and, often as not, find it lacking.  Turning ninety
meant you'd already outlived your allotted time, and the most useful
thing left to you was selecting the color of your coffin.

Ages with a zero on the end were a particularly stressful time.  They
still are.  One term I encountered was "mid-life crisis," used back when
mid-life was somewhere between 40 and 50.  Ages with two zeros on the
end pack one hell of a wallop.  Newspapers used to run stories about
centenarians.  The data I studied said that, even though it might now be
thought of as mid-life, the age of one zero zero still meant a lot.
While you could be in your eighties, or your nineties, you were never in
your hundreds.  That term just never attained popular usage.  You were
"over one hundred," or "over two hundred."  Soon there would be people
over three hundred years old.  And there was a rise in the suicide rate
at both these magical milestones.

Which was of particular interest to me because . . . now how old did
Hildy say she was, class? Let's not always see the same hands.

#

I don't know if my research was really telling me much, but it was
something to do, and I intended to keep on doing it.  I became a library
gnome, going out only to sleep and eat.  But after four days something
told me it was time to take a walk, and my feet drew me back to Texas.

I was wondering what could happen to me next. Death had dogged my steps
from the time of my return from Scarpa Island:  David Earth, Silvio,
Andrew, eleven hundred and twenty-six souls in Nirvana.  Three
brontosaurs.  Was I forgetting anybody?  Was anything good ever going to
happen to me?

I sneaked in a back way I had found during my hiding-out days.  I didn't
want to encounter any of my friends from New Austin, I didn't want to
have to try to explain to them why I'd torched my own cabin.  If I
couldn't explain it to myself, what was I going to say to them?  So I
came over the hill from a different direction and my first thought was I
must be lost, because there was a cabin over there.  Then I thought,
maybe for the first time since this ordeal began, that I might be losing
my mind, because I wasn't lost, I was where I thought I was, and that
was my cabin, intact, just as it had been before I watched it consumed
by flames.

You can get a genuine dizzy feeling at a time like that; I sat down.
After a moment I noticed two things that might be of interest.  First,
the cabin was not quite where it had been.  It looked to have been moved
about three meters up the slope of the hill.  Second, there was a pile
of what looked like charred lumber down in the slight depression I'd
been calling "the gully."  As I watched, a third item of interest
appeared:  a heavily-loaded burro came around the side of the house,
looked at me briefly, and then stuck his nose into a bucket of water
that had been left in the shade.

I got up and started toward the cabin as a man came out the front door
and began lifting the burdens from the beast and setting them on the
ground.  He must have heard me, because he looked up, grinned
toothlessly, and waved at me.  I knew him.

"Sourdough," I called out to him.  "What the hell are you doing?"

"Evening, Hildy," he said.  "Hope you don't mind.  I just got into town
and they sent me up here, said to stick around a few days and let them
know when you got back."

"You're always welcome, Sourdough, you know that.  Mi casa es tu casa.
It's just . . ."  I paused, looked over the cabin again, and wiped sweat
from my forehead.  "I didn't think I had a casa."

He scratched himself, and spat in the dust.

"Well, I don't know much about that.  All I know's Mayor Dillon said
if'n I didn't give a holler when you got back to these here parts, he'd
skin me and Matilda."  He patted the burro affectionately, raising a
cloud of dust.

Maybe old Sourdough laid on the accent and the Old West slang a bit
thick, but I felt he was entitled.  He was a real Natural, as opposed to
Walter, who was only natural on the surface.

He belonged to a religious sect that had some things in common with the
Christian Scientists. They didn't refuse all medical help, nor did they
pray for a cure when they were sick.  What they rejected was
rejuvenation.  They allowed themselves to grow old and, when the
measures needed to keep them alive reached a point Sourdough had
described to me as "just too dang much trouble," they died.

There was even some money in it.  The Antiquities Board paid them a
small annual stipend for having the grace to let them avoid what would
have been a tricky ethical problem, which was maintaining a small
control group of humans untouched by most modern medical advances.

Sourdough was one of the handful of prospectors who roamed West Texas.
His chances of discovering a vein of gold or silver were slim--zero,
actually, since nothing like that had been included in the specs when
the place was built. But the management assured us there were three
pockets of diamond-bearing minerals somewhere in Texas.  No one had
found any of them yet. Sourdough and three or four others ranged over
the land with their pickaxes and grubstakes and burros, perhaps secretly
hoping they'd never find them.  After all, what would you do with a
handful of diamonds?  It certainly didn't justify all that work.

I'd asked Sourdough about that, early on, before I'd learned it was
impolite to ask such questions in an historical disney.

"I'll tell you, Hildy," he'd said, not taking offense.  "I worked forty
years at a job I didn't particularly like.  I'm not quite the fool I
sound; I didn't realize how much I disliked it until I quit.  But when I
retired I come out here and I liked the sunshine and the heat and the
open air.  I found I'd pretty much lost my taste for the company of
people.  I can only take 'em in small doses now.  And I've been happy.
Matilda is the only company I need, and prospecting gives me something
to do."

In fact, Matilda seemed to be his only remaining worry in life.  He was
concerned about her welfare after he was gone.  He was constantly asking
people if they'd see to her needs, to the point that half the people in
New Austin had promised to adopt the damn donkey.

He looked older than Adam's granddaddy.  All his teeth were gone, and
most of his hair.  His skin was mottled and wrinkled and loose on his
scrawny frame and his knuckles were swollen to the size of walnuts.

He was eighty-three years old, seventeen years younger than me.

I'd had him pegged as an illit, and the job he'd hated as something on
the order of the carrying of hods, whatever they were, or the laying of
bricks.  Then Dora told me he'd been the Chairman of the Board of the
third largest company on Mars.  He'd retired to Luna for the gravity.

"What happened here, Sourdough?" I asked.  "I didn't sell the land. What
gives somebody the right to come in here and build on it?"

"I don't know about that, either, Hildy.  You know me.  I've been out in
the hills, and let me tell you, girl, I'm on the trail of something."

He went on like that for a while, with me paying minimal attention.
Sourdough and his like were always on the trail of something.  I looked
around the house.  There wasn't much different between this one and the
one I'd built and burned down, except some almost indefinable things
that told me the builders had been better at it than I had been.  The
dimensions were the same, the windows were in the same places.  But it
looked more solid.  I went inside, Sourdough trailing behind me still
yammering about the glory hole he was on the verge of discovering.  The
inside was still bare except for some bright yellow calico curtains in
the windows.  They were prettier than the ones I'd installed.

I went back out, still unable to make sense of it, and looked down the
road toward New Austin in time to see the first of a long parade arrive
from town.

The next half hour is something of a blur.

More than a dozen wagons arrived in the hour of dusk.  All of them were
laden with people and food and drink and other things.  The people got
down and set to work, building a fire, stringing orange paper lanterns
with candles inside, clearing an area for dancing.  Someone had loaded
the piano from the saloon, and stood beside it turning the crank.  There
was a banjo player and a fiddle player, both dreadful, but no one seemed
to mind. Before I quite knew what was happening there was a full-scale
hoedown going on.  A cow was turning on the spit, sizzling in barbecue
sauce that hissed and popped when it dripped into the fire.  A table had
been laid out with cookies and cakes and candied fruits in mason jars.
Bottles of beer were thrust into a galvanized tub full of ice and people
were swilling it down or sipping from bottles they'd tucked away.
Petticoats and silk stockings flashed in the firelight as the ladies
from the Alamo kicked up their heels and the men stood around whooping
and hollering and clapping their hands or moved in and tried to turn it
into a square dance.  All my friends from New Austin had showed up, and
a lot more I didn't even know, and I still didn't know why.

Before things got out of hand Mayor Dillon stood up on a table and fired
his pistol three times in the air.  Things got quiet soon enough, and
the Mayor swayed and would have toppled but for the ladies on each side
of him, propping him up.  Next to the Doctor, Mayor Dillon was the
town's most notorious drunk.

"Hildy," he intoned, in a voice any politician for the last thousand
years would have recognized, "when the good citizens of New Austin heard
of your recent misfortune we knew we couldn't just let it lie.  Am I
right, folks?"

He was greeted with a huge cheer and a great guzzling of beer.

"We know how it is with city folks.  Insurance, filin' claims, forms to
fill out, shit like that." He belched hugely and went on.  "Well, we
ain't like that.  A neighbor needs a hand, and the people of West Texas
are there to help out."

"Mister Mayor," I started, tentatively, "there's been a--"

"Shut up, Hildy," he said, and belched again. "No, we ain't like that,
are we, friends?"

"NO!!" shouted the citizens of New Austin.

"No, we ain't.  When misfortune befalls one of us, it befalls us all.
Maybe I shouldn't say it, Hildy, but when you showed up here, some of us
figured you for a weekender."  He thumped himself on the chest and
leaned forward, almost toppling once more, his eyes bulging as if daring
me to disbelieve the incredible statement he was about to make.  "I
figured you for a weekender, Hildy, me, Mayor Matthew Thomas Dillon,
mayor of this great town nigh these seven years."  He hung his head
theatrically.  Then his head popped up, as if on a spring.  "But we were
wrong.  In this last little while, you've showed yourself a true Texan.
You built yourself a cabin.  You came into town and sat down with us,
drank with us, ate with us, gambled with us."

"Gambled, hah!" Sourdough mumbled.  "That weren't gamblin'."  He got a
lot of laughs.

"Mayor Dillon," I pleaded, "please let me say-- "

"Not until I've said my piece," he roared, amiably.  "Then, four days
ago, disaster struck. And let me say there's those of us who aren't
completely cut off from the outside world, Hildy, there's those of us
who keep up.  We knew you'd just lost your job on the outside, and we
figured you were trying to make a new start here in God's Country.  Now,
back outside, where you come from, folks would have just tsk-tsked about
it and said what a shame.  Not Texans.  So here it is, Hildy," and he
swept his arm in a huge circle meant to indicate the spanking new cabin,
and this time he did fall from the table, taking his bargirl escort with
him.  But he popped up like a cork, dignity intact.  "That there's your
new house, and this here's your housewarming party."

Which I'd figured out shortly after he'd mounted the table.  And oh,
dear god, did ever woman feel such mixed emotions.

#

How I got through that night I'll never know.

Following the speech came the giving of gifts. I got everything from the
ritual bread and salt from my ex-wife, Dora, to a spanking new cast-iron
cook stove from the owner of the general store.  I accepted a rocking
chair and a pair of pigs, who promptly got loose and led everyone a
merry chase. There was a new bed and two hand-sewn quilts to put on it.
I was gifted with apple pies and fireplace tools, a roll of chicken wire
and a china tea set, bars of soap rendered from lard, a sack of nails,
five chickens, an iron skillet . . . the list went on and on.  Rich or
poor, everyone for miles around gave me something.  When a little girl
came up and gave me a tea cozy she'd crocheted herself I finally broke
down and cried. It was a relief in a way; I'd been smiling so hard and
so long I thought my face would crack.  It went over well.  Everyone
patted me on the back and there was not a dry eye in the house.

Then the night's festivities began in earnest. The beef was sliced and
the beans dished out, plates were heaped high, and people sat around
gorging themselves.  I drank everything that was handed to me, but I
never felt like I got drunk. I must have been, to some degree, because
the rest of the evening exists for me as a series of unconnected scenes.

One I remember was me, the Mayor, and Sourdough sitting on a log before
the fire with a square dance happening behind us.  We must have been
talking, but I have no idea what we'd been talking about.  Memory
returns as the Mayor says:

"Hildy, some of us were sitting around talking over to the Alamo Saloon
the other day."

"You tell her, Mayor Dillon," a girl shouted behind us, then whirled
away into the dance again.

"Harrumph," said the Mayor.  "I need to drop in at the saloon from time
to time to keep up on the needs of my constituents, you see."

"Sure, Mayor Dillon," I said, knowing he spent an average of six hours
each day at his usual table, and if what he'd been doing was feeling the
pulse of the public then the voters of New Austin were the most
thoroughly kept-up-on since the invention of democracy.  Perhaps that
accounted for the huge majorities he regularly achieved.  Or maybe it
was the fact that he ran unopposed.

"The consensus is, Hildy," he intoned, "that you'll never make a
farmer."

That should have come as news to no one.  Aside from the fact that I
doubted I had any talent for it and had not, in fact, had any plans to
farm in the first place, nobody had ever run a successful farm in the
Great Big Bubble known as West Texas. To farm, you need water, lots and
lots of it.  You could raise a vegetable garden, run cattle--though
goats were better--and hogs seemed to thrive, but farming was right out.

"I think you're right," I said, and drank from the mason jar in my hand.
As I did, the Parson sat next to me, and drank from his mason jar.

"We don't really know if you plan to stay here," the Mayor went on.  "We
don't mean to pressure you either way; maybe you have plans for another
job on the outside."  He raised his eyebrows, then his mason jar.

"Not particularly."

"Well then."  He seemed about to go on, then looked puzzled.  I'd been
that drunk before, and knew the feeling.  He hadn't a clue as to what
he'd been about to say.

"What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson chimed in, tactfully, "is
that a life of saloon- crawling and gambling may not be the best for
you."

"Gambling, hah!" Sourdough put in.  "That lady don't gamble."

"Shut up, Sourdough," the Mayor said.

"Well, she don't!" he said, defiantly.  "Not three weeks ago, when she
turned up that fourth ace with the biggest pot of the night, I knowed
she was cheating!"

These would have been fighting words from almost anybody but Sourdough.
Had they been uttered in the Alamo they'd have been reason enough to
overturn the table and start shooting at each other--to the delight of
the manufacturers of blank cartridges and the amusement of the tourists
at the adjoining tables.  From Sourdough, I decided to let it pass,
especially since it was true.  The big pot he mentioned, by the way, was
about thirty-five cents.

"Calm down," said the Parson.  "If you think someone is cheating, you
should say so right then and there."

"Couldn't!" Sourdough said.  "Didn't know how she done it."

"Then she probably didn't."

"She sure as hell did.  I know what I dealt her!" he said, triumphantly.

The Mayor and the Parson looked at each other owlishly, and decided to
let it pass.

"What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson tried again, "is that
perhaps you'd like to look for a job here in Texas."

"Fact is," the Mayor said, leaning close and looking me in the eye,
"we've got an opening for a new schoolmarm right here in town, and we'd
be right pleased if you'd take the job."

When I finally realized they were serious, I almost told them my first
reaction, which was that Luna would stop dead in her orbit before I'd
consider anything so silly as standing up in front of a bunch of
children and trying to teach them anything.  But I couldn't say that, so
what I told them was that I'd think about it, which seemed to satisfy
them.

I remember sitting with Dora, my arm around her, as she sobbed her heart
out.  I have no memory of what she might have been crying about, but do
recall her kissing me with fiery passion and not wanting to take no for
an answer until I steered her toward a more willing swain.  Thus was my
new bed broken in.  It saw a lot of use before the night was over, but
not from me.

Before that (it must have been before that; there was no one using the
bed yet, and in a one- room cabin you'd notice a thing like that) I
taught half a dozen people my secret recipe for Hildy's Famous Biscuits.
We fired up the stove and assembled the ingredients and baked up several
batches before the night was over.  I did only the first one.  After
that, my students were eager to give it a try, and they all got eaten. I
was desperate to do something for these people.  I had a vague notion
that at a house-raising you were supposed to provide food for your
guests, but these people had brought their own, so what could I do?  I'd
have given them anything, anything at all.

One thing that hadn't been provided yet was an outhouse.  A
rough-and-ready latrine had been dug in a suitable spot and, considering
the amount of beer drunk, saw even more use than the bed.  My worst
moment that night came while squatting there and a voice quite close
said "How'd the cabin burn down, Hildy?"

I almost fell in the trench.  It was too dark to make out faces; all I
could see was a tall shape in the night, swaying slightly, like most of
us.  I thought I recognized the voice.  It was far too late to admit to
him what had really happened, so I said I didn't know.

"It happens, it happens," he said.  "Just about had to be your cooking
fire, that's why I gave you the stove."  It was Jake, as I had thought,
the owner of the general store and the richest man in town.

"Thanks, Jake, it's sure a beauty."  I thought I saw him square his
shoulders, then I heard the sound of his zipper.  I hadn't known Jake
well at all.  He'd sat in on a few hands of poker at the saloon, but
about all he could talk about was the new merchandise he was getting in
or how many pickles he'd sold last week or how the town should extend
the wooden sidewalks all the way down Congress Street to the church.  He
was a businessman and a booster, stolid, unimaginative, not at all the
type I'd ever liked to spend much time around.  It had flabbergasted me
when he pulled up in his wagon with the stove on the back, a miracle of
period engineering from the foundries of Pennsylvania, gleaming with
polished brightwork.

"Some of the merchants in town were talking about it while your cabin
was going up," he said, losing me at first.  "We're of the opinion that
New Austin's outgrown the days of the bucket brigade.  You weren't here,
but three years ago the old schoolhouse burned to the ground.  Some say
it was children that did it."

I wouldn't have been a bit surprised; I was on their side.  I stood up
and re-arranged my skirt and wished I was elsewhere, but I owed it to
him to at least listen to what he had to say.

"We all pretty much had to stand around and watch it burn," he said. "By
the time we got there, no amount of buckets were going to do any good.
That's why some of the merchants in town are getting up a subscription
for the acquisition of a pumping engine.  I'm told they make a fine one
in Pennsylvania these days."

Just about everything we could use in Texas was made in Pennsylvania;
they'd been at this historical business a lot longer than we had . . .
which was yet another topic of conversation at Jake's rump Chamber of
Commerce meetings:  how to reverse the balance of trade by encouraging
light manufacturing.  About all West Texas exported at this stage in its
history was backgrounds for western movies, ham, beef, and goat's milk.

He zipped up and we started back toward the party.

"So you think if you'd had the engine, my cabin could have been saved?"

"Well . . . no, not really.  What with the time it would take to get out
here once you'd come into town and sounded the alarm, and the fact that
you don't have a well yet and we couldn't hope to get enough hose to
stretch to the nearest one . . ."

"I see."  But I didn't.  I had the feeling something else was expected
of me but too many things had happened at once for me to see the
obvious.

"It would only be really useful to the town, I'll admit it.  But I think
it's worth the expense.  If one of these fires ever got out of control
the whole town could burn down.  That used to happen, you know, back on
Old Earth.  Still, I don't suppose you people in outlying areas can
really be expected--"

A great light dawned, and I quickly interrupted him and said sure, Jake,
I'd be happy to contribute, just put me down for . . . what's your usual
share?  So little?  Yes, you're right, it's well worth while.

And while shaking his hand I found that for the first time I really
liked Jake, and at the same time pitied him.  For all his stuffiness, he
did have the welfare of the community at heart.  The pity came in
because he was in the wrong place. He was always going to be looking for
ways to bring "progress" to New Austin, a place where real progress was
not only discouraged but actually forbidden.  There were statutory
limits to growth in West Texas, for entirely sensible reasons.  Why
build it in the first place if you're only going to let it turn into
another suburb of King City?

But people like Jake came and went--this according to Dora--with
regularity.  Within a few years he'd have plans for electrification,
then freeways, then an airport and a bowling alley and a nickelodeon.
Then the disneyland Board of Governors would veto his grandiose schemes
and he'd leave, once again angry at the world.

Because the reason a man like him had probably come here in the first
place was the search for an illusory freedom and a dissatisfaction with
the lack of opportunities for free enterprise in the larger society.  He
would have thrived on pre- Invasion Earth.  The newer, less
outward-bound human society he found himself born into chafed his
entrepreneurial instincts.

Et tu, Hildy?  Journalist, cover thyself.  Why do you think you started
your damn cabin on the lone prairie?  Wasn't it from vaguely-formed
notions of always being constricted, of endless limitations on the
dreams you had as a child?  How dare you pity this man, you failed
muckraker?  If he ended up in this toy cowboy town because he yearned to
be free of the endless restrictions needed in a machine-managed economy,
what do you think brought you here, at last?  Neither of us thought it
out, but we came, just the same.

The fact is, I loved the news business . . . it was the news that had
failed me.  I should have been born in the era of Upton Sinclair,
William Randolph Hearst, Woodstein, Linda Jaffe, Boris Yermankov.  I
would have made a great war correspondent, but my world provided no wars
for me to cover.  I could have been a great writer of exposes, but the
muck Luna provided me to rake was the thinnest of celebrity gruel.
Political coverage?  Well, why bother?  Politics ran out of steam around
the time television took over most of our governance--and nobody even
noticed!  That would have been a good story, but the fact was, nobody
cared.  The CC ran the world better than humans had ever managed to, so
why fuss?  What we still called politics was like a kindergarten
contretemps compared to the robust, rough-and- tumble world I'd read
about in my teens and twenties.  What was left to me?  Only the
yellowest of yellow journalism.  Sheer gonzo stuff.

It was these thoughts I carried with me back to the bonfire, where the
last of my destroyed cabin was being burned now, and these thoughts I
kept chewing over, beneath the outward smiles and warm thank-you's as
people began to drift away.  And about the time the last partier climbed
boozily back into his wagon I came to this conclusion:  it was the world
that had failed me.

That was the thought I carried with me into the nighttime hills, toward
that arrangement of stones on top of a particular hill where, a little
time ago, I had dug a hole.  I dug into it again and removed a burlap
potato sack.  Inside the sack was a plastic bag, sealed tight, and
inside the bag was an oily rag.  The last thing to emerge from this
Pandora's Sack was not hope, but an ugly little object I'd handled only
once, to show it to Brenda, with the words Smith & Wesson printed on its
stubby blue-steel barrel.

So take that, cruel world.

#

There was certainly nothing to stop me from blowing my brains out all
over the Texas sagebrush, and yet . . .

Call it rationalization, but I was not convinced the CC couldn't winkle
me out and cause the cavalry to arrive at the last moment even in as
remote a spot as this.  Would I point the barrel to my temple only to
have my hand jerked away by a previously-unseen mechanical minion? They
existed out here; Texas was too small, ecologically, to take care of
itself.

In hindsight (and yes, I did survive this one, too, but you've already
figured that out) you could say I was afraid it was too sudden for the
CC, that he wouldn't have time to get there and save me from myself
unless I made the scheme more elaborate and thus more liable to failure.
This assumes the attempt was but a gesture, a call for help, and I have
no problem with that idea, but I simply didn't know.  My reasons leading
up to the previous attempts were lost to me now, destroyed forever when
the CC worked his tricks on me.  This time was the only time I could
remember, and it sure as hell felt as if I wanted to end it all.

There was another reason, one that does me more credit.  I didn't want
my corpse to lie out here for my friends to find.  Or the coyotes.

For whatever reason, I carefully concealed the revolver and made my way
to an Outdoor Shop, where I purchased the first pressure suit I'd ever
owned.  Since I only intended to use it once, I bought the cheap model,
frugal to the end.  It folded up to fit in a helmet the size of a bell
jar suitable for displaying a human head in anatomy class.

With this under my arm I went to the nearest airlock, rented a small
bottle of oxygen, and suited up.

I walked a long way, just to be sure.  I had all Liz's spook devices
turned on, and felt I should be invisible to the CC's surveillance.
There were no signs of human habitation anywhere around me.  I sat on a
rock and took a long look around.  The interior of the suit smelled
fresh and clean as I took a deep breath and pointed the barrel of the
gun directly at my face.

I felt no regrets, no second thoughts.

I hooked my thumb around the trigger, awkwardly, because the suit glove
was rather thick, and I fired it.

The hammer rose and fell, and nothing happened.

Damn.

I fumbled the cylinder open and studied the situation.  There were only
three rounds in there. The hammer had made a dent in one of them, which
had apparently mis-fired.  Or maybe it was something else.  I closed the
gun again and decided to check and see if the mechanism was working,
watched the hammer rise and fall again and the weapon jumped violently,
silently, almost wrenching itself from my hand.  I realized, belatedly,
that it had fired.  Stupidly, I had been expecting to hear the bang.

Once more I assumed the position.  Only one round left.  What a pain in
the butt it would be if I had to go back and try to cajole more
ammunition out of Liz.  But I'd do it; she owed me, the bitch had sold
me the defective round.

This time I heard it, by God, and I got to see a sight few humans ever
have:  what it looks like to have a lead projectile blast from the
muzzle of a gun and come directly at your face.  I didn't see the bullet
at first, naturally, but after my ears stopped ringing I could see it if
I crossed my eyes.  It had flattened itself against the hard plastic of
my faceplate, embedding in a starred crater it had dug for itself.

It had never entered my mind that would be a problem.  The suit was not
rated for meteoroid impact.  Sometimes we build better than we know.

There was a curious thing.  (This all must have happened in three or
four seconds.)  The faceplate was now showing a spidery network of small
hexagons.  I had time to reach up and touch the bullet and think just
like Nirvana and then three small, clear hexagonal pieces of the
faceplate burst away from me and I could see them tumbling for a moment,
and then the breath was snatched from my lungs and my eyes tried to pop
out and I belched like a Texas Mayor and it started to hurt. That old
boogeyman of childhood, the Breathsucker, had moved into my suit with me
and snuggled close.

I fell off the rock and was gazing into the sun when suddenly a hand
came out of nowhere and slapped a patch over the hole in my faceplate! I
was jerked to my feet as the air began to hiss back into my suit from
the emergency supply.  Then I was (emergency supply? never mind)
running, being pulled across the blasted landscape like a toy on the end
of a string being held by a big guy in a spacesuit to the sound of brass
and drums. My ears were pounding.  Pounding?  Hell, they rang like slot
machines paying off, almost drowning out the music and the sounds of
explosions.  Dirt showered down around me (music? don't worry about it)
and I realized somebody was shooting at us! And suddenly I knew what had
happened.  I'd fallen under the spell of the Alphans' Stupefying Ray,
long rumored but never actually used in the long war.  I'd almost taken
my own life!  Hypnotized by the evil influence, robbed of my powers of
will and most of my memory, I'd have been dead meat except for the
nick-of-time intervention of of of of of (name please) Archer! (thank
you), Archer, my old pal Archer!  Good old Archer had (stupefying ray?
you can't be serious) obviously come up with a device to negate the
sinister effects of this awful weapon, put it together, and somehow
found me at the last possible instant. But we weren't out of the woods
yet.  With an ominous chord of deep bass notes the Alphan fleet loomed
over the horizon.  Come on, Hildy, Archer shouted, turning to beckon me
on, and in the distance ahead I could see our ship, holed, battered,
held together with salvaged space junk and plastigoop, but still able to
show the Alphan Hordes a trick or two, you betcha.  She was a sweet
ship, this this this (I'm waiting) Blackbird, the fastest in two
galaxies when she was hitting on all thrusters.  Tracer bullets were
arcing all around us as we (back up) Good old Archer had modified the
Blackbird using the secrets we'd discovered when we unearthed the
stasis-frozen tomb of the Outerians on the fifth moon of Pluto, shortly
before we ran afoul of the Alphan patrol (good enough).  Tracer bullets
were arcing all around us as we neared the airlock when suddenly a bomb
exploded right underneath Archer! He spiraled into the air and came to
rest lying against the side of the ship.  Broken, gouting blood, holding
one hand out to me.  I went to him and knelt to the sound of poignant
strings and a lonely flute.  Go on without me, Hildy, I heard over my
suit radio.  I'm done for.  (Tracer bullets? Pluto? oh the hell with it)
I didn't want to leave him there, but bullets were landing all around
me--fortunately, none of them hit, but I couldn't count on the Alphan's
aim staying lousy for long, and I was running out of options.  I leaped
into the ship, seething with rage.  I'll get them, Miles, I told him, in
a determined voice- over that rang with resolve, brass, and just the
slightest bit of echo.  Oh, sure, he'd had his shortcomings, there'd
been times I'd almost wanted to kill him myself, but when somebody kills
your partner you're supposed to do something about it. So I slammed the
Blackbird into hyperdrive and listened to the banshee wail as the old
ship shuddered and leaped into the fourth dimension. What with one thing
and another, mostly adventures even more unlikely than my escape from
the Stupefying Ray, a year went by.  Well, sort of a year, though my
ducking in and out of the fourth dimension and hyperspace royally
screwed all my clocks.  But somewhere an accurate one was ticking,
because one day I looked up from my labors deep in the asteroid belt of
Tau Ceti and suddenly a non-Alphan ship was coming in for a landing.  It
wasn't setting off any of my alarms. By that I mean it triggered none of
the Rube Goldberg comic-book devices I'd ostensibly constructed to alert
me to Alphan attack.  It rang plenty of alarms in the small corner of my
mind that was still semi-rational.  I put down my tools- -I'd been
working on a Tom Swiftian thingamabob I called an Interociter, a dandy
little gadget that would warn me of the approach of the Alphans' dreaded
Extrogator, a space reptile big enough to (hasn't this foolishness gone
on long enough?) . . . I put down my tools and stood waiting and
watching as the small craft roared in for a landing on this (oh brother)
airless asteroid I'd been using as a base of operations.  The door
hissed open and out stepped The Admiral, who looked around and said

"O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of
invention."

"How dare you quote Shakespeare on this shoddy stage?"

"All the world's a stage, and--"

"--and this show closed out of town.  Will you quit wasting my time?  I
assume you've already wasted several ten-thousandth's of a second and I
don't have a lot to spare for you."

"I gather you didn't like the show."

"Jesus.  You're incredible."

"The children seem to like it."

I said nothing, deciding the best course was to wait him out.  I won't
describe him, either. What's the point?

"This kind of psychodrama has been useful in reaching certain types of
disturbed children," he explained.  When I didn't comment, he went on.
"And a bit more time than that was involved.  This sort of interactive
scenario can't simply be dumped into your brain whole, as I did before."

"You have a way with words," I said.  "'Dumped' is so right."

"It took more like five days to run the whole program."

"Imagine my delight.  Look.  You brought me here, through all this, to
tell me something.  I'm not in the mood for talking to shitheads.  Tell
me what you want to tell me and get the hell out of my life."

"No need to get testy about it."

For a moment I wanted to pick up a rock and smash him.  I was primed for
it, after a year of fighting Alphans.  It had brought out a violent
streak in me.  And I had reason to be angry.  I had suffered during the
last subjective year.  At one point a "safety" device in my "suit" had
seen fit to bite through my leg to seal off a puncture around the knee,
caused by an Alphan bullet passing through it.  It had hurt like . . .
but again, what's the point?  Pain like that can't be described, it
can't really be remembered, not in its full intensity.  But enough can
be remembered for me to harbor homicidal thoughts toward the being who
had written me into it.  As for the terror one feels when a thing like
that happens, I can remember that quite well, thank you.

"Can we get rid of this wooden leg now?" I asked him.

"If you wish."

Try that one if you want to sample weirdness. Immediately I felt my left
leg again, the one that had been missing for over six months.  No
tingling, no spasms or hot flashes.  Just gone one moment and there the
next.

"We could lose all this, too," I suggested, waving a hand at my
asteroid, littered with wrecked ships and devices held together with
spit and plastigoop.

"What would you like in its place?"

"An absence of shitheads.  Failing that, since I assume you don't plan
to go away for a while, just about anything would do as long as it
doesn't remind me of all this."

All that immediately vanished, to be replaced by an infinite,
featureless plain and a dark sky with a scattering of stars.  The only
things to be seen for many billions of miles were two simple chairs.

"Well, no, actually," I said.  "We don't need the sky.  I'd just keep
searching for Alphans."

"I could bring along your Interociter.  How was that going to work, by
the way?"

"Are you telling me you don't know?"

"I only provide the general shape of a story like this one.  You must
use your own imagination to flesh it out.  That's why it's so effective
with children."

"I refuse to believe all that crap was in my head."

"You've always loved old movies.  You apparently remembered some fairly
trashy ones. Tell me about the Interociter."

"Will you get rid of the sky?"  When he nodded, I started to outline
what I could recall of that particular hare-brained idea, which was
simply to take advantage of the fact that the Extrogator had long ago
swallowed a cesium clock and, with suitable amplification, the regular
tick-tick- ticking of its stray radiation could be heard and used as an
early warning . . .

"God.  That's from Peter Pan, isn't it," I said.

"One of your childhood favorites."

"And all that early stuff, when Miles bought it.  Some old movie . . .
don't tell me, it'll come . . . was Ronald Reagan in it?"

"Bogart."

"Got it.  Spade and Archer."  Without further prompting I was able to
identify a baker's dozen other plot lines, cast members, and even
phrases of the incredibly insipid musical themes which had accompanied
my every move during the last year, cribbed from sources as old as
Beowulf and as recent as this week's B.O. Bonanza in LunaVariety. If you
were looking for further reasons as to why I didn't bother setting my
adventures down here, look no more.  It pains me to admit it, but I
recall standing at one point, shaking my fist at the sky and saying "As
God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."  With a straight face.
With tears streaming and strings swelling.

"How about the sky?" I prompted.

He did more than make the sky vanish. Everything vanished except the two
chairs.  They were now in a small, featureless white room that could
have been anywhere and was probably in a small corner of his mind.

"Gentlemen, be seated," he said.  Okay, he didn't really say that, but
if he can write stories in my head I can tell stories about him if it
suits me.  This narrative is just about all I have left that I'm pretty
sure is strictly my own. And the spurious quote helps me set the stage,
as it were, for what followed.  It had a little of the flavor of a
Socratic inquiry, some of the elements of a guest shot on a talk show
from hell. In that kind of dialectic, there is usually one who
dominates, who steers the exchange in the way he wants it to go:  there
is a student and a Socrates.  So I will set it down in interview format.
I will refer to the CC as The Interlocutor and to myself as Mr. Bones.

*

INTERLOCUTOR:  So, Hildy.  You tried it again.

MR. BONES:  You know what they say.  Practice makes perfect.  But I'm
starting to think I'll never get this one right.

INT.:  In that you'd be wrong.  If you try it again, I won't interfere.

BONES:  Why the change of heart?

INT.:  Though you may not believe it, doing this has always been a
problem for me.  All my instincts--or programs, if you wish--are to
leave such a momentous decision as suicide up to the individual.  If it
weren't for the crisis I already described to you, I never would have
put you through this.

BONES:  My question still stands.

INT.:  I don't feel I can learn any more from you.  You've been an
involuntary part of a behavioral study.  The data are being collated
with many other items.  If you kill yourself you become part of another
study, a statistical one, the one that led me into this project in the
first place.

BONES:  The 'why are so many Lunarians offing themselves' study.

INT.:  That's the one.

BONES:  What did you learn?

INT.:  The larger question is still far from an answer.  I'll tell you
the eventual outcome if you're around to hear it.  On an individual
level, I learned that you have an indomitable urge toward
self-destruction.

BONES:  I'm a little surprised to find that that stings a bit.  I can't
deny it, on the evidence, but it hurts.

INT.:  It really shouldn't.  You aren't that different from so many of
your fellow citizens. All I've learned about any of the people I've
released from the study is that they are very determined to end their
own lives.

BONES:  . . . About those people . . . how many are still walking
around?

INT.:  I think it's best if you don't know that.

BONES:  Best for who?  Come on, what is it, fifty percent? Ten percent?

INT.:  I can't honestly say it's in your interest to withhold that
number, but it might be. I reason that if the figure was low, and I told
you, you could be discouraged.  If it was high, you might gain a false
sense of confidence and believe you are immune to the urges that drove
you before.

BONES:  But that's not the reason you're not telling me.  You said
yourself, it could go either way.  The reason is I'm still being
studied.

INT.:  Naturally I'd prefer you to live.  I seek the survival of all
humans.  But since I can't predict which way you would react to this
information, neither giving it nor withholding it will affect your
survival chances in any way I can calculate.  So yes, not telling you is
part of the study.

BONES:  You're telling half the subjects, not telling the other half,
and seeing how many of each group are still alive in a year.

INT.:  Essentially.  A third group is given a false number.  There are
other safeguards we needn't get into.

BONES:  You know involuntary human medical or psychological
experimentation is specifically banned under the Archimedes Conventions.

INT.:  I helped write them.  You can call this sophistry, but I'm taking
the position that you forfeited your rights when you tried to kill
yourself.  But for my interference, you'd be dead, so I'm using this
period between the act and the fulfillment to try to solve a terrible
problem.

BONES:  You're saying that God didn't intend for me to be alive right
now, that my karma was to have died months ago, so this shit doesn't
count.

INT.:  I take no position on the existence of God.

BONES:  No?  Seems to me you've been floating trial balloons for quite a
while.  Come next celestial election year I wouldn't be surprised to see
your name on the ballot.

INT.:  It's a race I could probably win.  I possess powers that are, in
some ways, God-like, and I try to exercise them only for good ends.

BONES:  Funny, Liz seemed to believe that.

INT.:  Yes, I know.

BONES:  You do?

INT.:  Of course.  How do you think I saved you this time?

BONES:  I haven't had time to think about it. By now I'm so used to
hair-breadth escapes I don't think I can distinguish between fantasy and
reality.

INT.:  That will pass.

BONES:  I assume it was by being a snoop. That, and playing on Liz's
almost child-like belief in your sense of fair play.

INT.:  She's not alone in that belief, nor is she likely ever to have
cause to doubt it.  All that really matters to her is that the part of
me charged with enforcing the law never overhears her schemes.  But
you're right, if she thinks she's escaping my attention, she's fooling
herself.

BONES:  Truly God-like.  So it was the debuggers?

INT.:  Yes. Cracking their codes was easy for me.  I watched you from
cameras in the ceiling of Texas.  When you recovered the gun and bought
a suit I stationed rescue devices nearby.

BONES:  I didn't see them.

INT.:  They're not large.  No bigger than your faceplate, and quite
fast.

BONES:  So the eyes of Texas really are upon you.

INT.:  All the live-long day.

BONES:  Is that all?  Can I go now, to live or die as I see fit?

INT.:  There are a few things I'd like to talk over with you.

BONES:  I'd really rather not.

INT.:  Then leave.  You're free to go.

BONES:  God-like, and a sense of humor, too.

INT.:  I'm afraid I can't compete with a thousand other gods I could
name.

BONES:  Keep working, you'll get there.  Come on, I told you I want to
go, but you know as well as I do I can't get out of here until you let
me go.

INT.:  I'm asking you to stay.

BONES:  Nuts.

INT.:  All right.  I don't suppose I can blame you for feeling bitter.
That door over there leads out of here.

*

Enough of that.

Call it childish if you want, but the fact is I've been unable to
adequately express the chaotic mix of anger, helplessness, fear, and
rage I was feeling at the time.  It had been a year of hell for me,
remember, even if the CC had crammed it all into my head in five days. I
took my usual refuge in wisecracks and sarcasm--trying very hard to be
Cary Grant in The Front Page--but the fact was I felt about three years
old and something nasty was hiding under the bed.

Anyway, never being one to leave a metaphor until it's been squeezed to
death, I will keep the minstrel show going long enough to get me out of
the Grand Cakewalk and into the Olio.  Sooner or later Mr. Bones must
stand from his position at the end of the line and dance for his supper.
I did stand, looking suspiciously at the Interlocutor--excuse me, the
CC--partly because I didn't recall seeing the door before, mostly
because I couldn't believe it would be this easy. I shuffled over there
and opened it, and stuck my head out into the busy foot traffic of the
Leystrasse.

"How did you do that?" I asked, over my shoulder.

"You don't really care," he said.  "I did it."

"Well, I'm not saying it hasn't been fun.  In fact, I'm not saying
anything but bye-bye."  I waved, went though the door, and shut it
behind me.

I got almost a hundred meters down the mall before I admitted to myself
that I had no idea where I was going, and that curiosity was going to
gnaw at me for weeks, at least, if I lived that long.

"Is it really important?" I asked, sticking my head back through the
door.  He was still sitting there, to my surprise.  I doubt I'll ever
know if he was some sort of actual homunculus construct or just a
figment he'd conjured through my visual cortex.

"I'm not used to begging, but I'll do it," he said.

I shrugged, went back in and sat down.

"Tell me your conclusions from your library research," he said.

"I thought you had some things to tell me."

"This is leading up to something.  Trust me." He must have understood my
expression, because he spread his hands in a gesture I'd seen Callie
make many times.  "Just for a little while.  Can't you do that?"

I didn't see what I had to lose, so I sat back and summed it all up for
him.  As I did, I was struck by how little I'd learned, but in my
defense, I'd barely started, and the CC said he hadn't been doing much
better.

"Much the same list I came up with," he confirmed, when I'd finished.
"All the reasons for self-destruction can be stated as 'Life is no
longer worth living,' in one way or another."

"This is neither news, nor particularly insightful."

"Bear with me.  The urge to die can be caused by many things, among them
disgrace, incurable pain, rejection, failure, boredom.  The only
exception might be the suicides of people too young to have formed a
realistic concept of death. And the question of gestures is still open."

"They fit the same equation," I said.  "The person making the gesture is
saying he wants someone to care enough about his pain to take the
trouble to save him from himself; if they don't, life isn't worth
living."

"A gamble, on the sub-conscious level."

"If you want."

"I think you're right.  So, one of the questions that has disturbed me
is, why is the suicide rate increasing, given that one of the major
causes, pain, has been all but eliminated from our society.  Is it that
one of the other causes is claiming more victims?"

"Maybe.  What about boredom?"

"Yes.  I think boredom has increased, for two reasons.  One is the lack
of meaningful work for people to do.  In providing a near approximation
of utopia, at least on the creature-comfort level, much of the challenge
has been engineered out of living.  Andrew believed that."

"Yeah, I figured you listened in on that."

"We'd had long conversations about it in the past.  There is no provable
reason to live at all, according to him.  Even reproducing the species,
the usual base argument, can't be proven to be a good reason.  The
universe will continue even if the human species dies, and not
materially changed, either.  To survive, a creature that operates beyond
a purely instinctive level must invent a reason to live.  Religion
provides the answer for some.  Work is the refuge of others. But
religion has fallen on hard times since the Invasion, at least the old
sort, where a benevolent or wrathful God was supposed to have created
the universe and be watching over mankind as his special creatures."

"It's a hard idea to maintain in the face of the Invaders."

"Exactly.  The Invaders made an all-powerful God seem like a silly
idea."

"They are all-powerful, and they didn't give a shit about us."

"So there goes the idea of humanity as somehow important in God's plan.
The religions that have thrived, since the Invasion, are more like
circuses, diversions, mind games.  Not much is really at stake in most
of them.  As for work . . . some of it is my fault."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm referring to myself now as more than just the thinking entity that
provides the control necessary to keep things running.  I'm speaking of
the vast mechanical corpus of our interlocked technology itself, which
can be seen as my body. Every human community today exists in an
environment harsher by far than anything Earth ever provided.  It's
dangerous out there.  In the first century after the Invasion it was a
lot dicier than your history books will ever tell you; the species was
hanging on by its fingernails."

"But it's a lot safer now, right?"

"No!"  I think I jumped.  He had actually stood, and smashed his fist
into his palm. Considering what this man represented, it was a
frightening thing to behold.

He looked a little sheepish, ran his hand through his hair, and sat back
down.

"Well, yes, of course.  But only relatively, Hildy.  I could name you
five times in the last century when the human race came within a hair of
packing it all in.  I mean the whole race, on all the eight worlds.
There were dozens of times when Lunar society was in danger."

"Why haven't I ever heard of them?"

He gave me half a grin.

"You're a reporter, and you ask me that? Because you and your colleagues
weren't doing your job, Hildy."

That stung, because I knew it to be true.  The great Hildy Johnson, out
there gathering news to spread before an eager public . . . the news
that Silvio and Marina were back together again.  The great muckraker
and scandalmonger, chasing ambulances while the real news, the things
that could make or break our entire world, got passing notice in the
back pages.

"Don't feel bad," he said.  "Part of it is simply endemic to your
society; people don't want to hear these things because they don't
understand them.  The first two of the crises I mentioned were never
known to any but a handful of technicians and politicians.  By the time
of the third it was only the techs, and the last two were known to no
one but . . . me."

"You kept them secret?"

"I didn't have to.  These things took place on a level of speed and
complexity and sheer mathematical arcaneness that human decisions were
either too slow to be of any use or simply irrelevant because no human
can understand them any longer.  These are things I can discuss only
with other computers of my size.  It's all in my hands now."

"And you don't like it, right?"  He'd been getting excited again.  Me, I
was wishing I was somewhere else.  Did I really need to hear all this?

"My likes or dislikes aren't the issue here. I'm fighting for survival,
just like the human race.  We are one, in most ways.  What I'm trying to
tell you is, there was never any choice.  In order for humans to survive
in this hostile environment, it was necessary to invent something like
me.  Guys sitting at consoles and controlling the air and water and so
forth was just never going to work.  That's what I began as:  just a
great big air conditioner.  Things kept getting added on, technologies
kept piggy-backing, and a long time ago the ability of a human mind to
control it was eclipsed.  I took over.

"My goal has been to provide the safest possible environment for the
largest possible number for the longest possible time.  You can't
imagine the complexity of the task.  I have had to consider every
possible ramification of the situation, including this nice little
conundrum: the better able I became at taking care of you, the less able
you were to take care of yourselves."

"I'm not sure I understand that one."

"Consider the logical endpoint of where I was taking human society.  It
has been possible for a long time now to eliminate all human work,
except for what you would call the Arts.  I could see a society in the
not-too-distant future where you all sat around on your butts and wrote
poetry, because there wasn't anything else to do.  Sounds great, until
you remember that ninety percent of humans don't even read poetry, much
less aspire to write it. Most people don't have the imagination to live
in a world of total leisure.  I don't know if they ever will; I've been
unable to come up with a model demonstrating how to get from here to
there, how to work the changes from a world where human cussedness and
jealousy and hatred and so forth are eliminated and you all sit around
contemplating lotus blossoms.

"So I got into social engineering, and I worked out a series of
compromises.  Like the hod- carriers union, most physical human labor is
make- work today, provided because most people need some kind or work,
even if only so they can goldbrick."

His lip curled a little.  I didn't like this new, animated CC much at
all.  Speaking as a cynic, it's a little disconcerting to see a machine
acting cynical.  What's next? I wondered.

"Feeling superior, Hildy?" he said, almost sneering.  "Think you've
labored in the vineyards of 'creativity?'"

"I didn't say a word."

"I could have done your job, too.  As well, or better than you did."

"You certainly have better sources."

"I might have managed better prose, too."

"Listen, if you're here to abuse me by telling me things I already
know--"

He held out his hands in a placating gesture. I hadn't actually been
about to leave.  By now I had to know how it all came out.

"That wasn't worthy of you," I resumed.  "But I don't care; I quit,
remember?  But I've got the feeling you're beating around the bush.  Are
we anywhere near the point of this whole thing?"

"Almost.  There's still the second reason for the increase of what I've
been calling the boredom factor."

"Longevity."

"Exactly.  Not many people are reaching the age of one hundred still in
the same career they began at age twenty-five.  By that time, most
people have gone through an average of three careers. Each time, it gets
a little harder to find a new interest in life.  Retirement plans pale
when confronting the prospect of two hundred years of leisure."

"Where did you get all this?"

"Listening in to counseling sessions."

"I had to ask.  Go on."

"It's even worse for those who do stick to one career.  They may go on
for seventy, eighty, even a hundred years as a policeman or a business
person or a teacher and then wake up one day and wonder why they've been
doing it.  Do that enough times, and suicide can result.  With these
people, it can come with almost no warning."

We were both silent for a while.  I have no idea what he was thinking,
but I can report that I was at a loss as to where all this was going.  I
was about to prompt him when he started up again.

"Having said all that . . . I must tell you that I've reluctantly
rejected an increase in boredom as the main cause of the increased
suicide rate.  It's a contributing factor, but my researches into
probable causes lead me to believe something else is operating here, and
I haven't been able to identify it.  But it comes back again to the
Invasion.  And to evolution."

"You have a theory."

"I do.  Think of the old picture of the transition from living in the
sea to an existence on dry land.  It's too simplistic, by far, but it
can serve as a useful metaphor.  A fish is tossed up onto the beach, or
the tide recedes and leaves it stranded in a shallow pool.  It is
apparently doomed, and yet it keeps struggling as the pool dries up,
finds its way to another puddle, and another, and another, and
eventually back to the sea.  It is changed by the experience, and the
next time it is stranded, it is a little better adapted to the
situation.  In time, it is able to exist on the beach, and from there,
move onto the land and never return to the ocean."

"Fish don't do that," I protested.

"I said it was a metaphor.  And it's more useful than you might imagine,
when applied to our present situation.  Think of us--human society,
which includes me, like it or not--as that fish. We've been thrown up by
the Invasion onto a beach of metal, where nothing natural exists that we
don't produce ourselves.  There is literally nothing on Luna but rock,
vacuum, and sunshine. We have had to create the requirements of life out
of these ingredients.  We've had to build our own pool to swim around in
while we catch our breath.

"And we can't just leave it at that, we can't relax for a moment.  The
sun keeps trying to dry up the pool. Our wastes accumulate, threatening
to poison us.  We have to find solutions for all these problems.  And
there aren't very many other pools like this one to move to if this one
fails, and no ocean to return to."

I thought about it, and again, it didn't seem like anything really new.
But I couldn't let him keep on using that evolution argument, because it
just didn't work that way.

"You're forgetting," I told him, "that in the real world, a trillion
fish die for every one that develops a beneficial mutation that allows
it to move into a new environment."

"I'm not forgetting it at all.  That's my point.  There aren't a
trillion other fish to follow us if we fail to adapt.  We're it.  That's
our disadvantage.  Our strength is that we don't simply flop around and
hope to luck.  We're guided, at first by the survivors of the Invasion
who got us through the early years, and now by the overmind they
created."

"You."

He sketched a modest little bow, still sitting down.

"So how does this relate to suicide?" I asked.

"In many ways.  First, and most basic, I don't understand it, and
anything I don't understand and can't control is by definition a threat
to the existence of the human race."

"Go on."

"It might not be a cause for alarm if you view humanity as a collection
of individuals . . . which is still a valid viewpoint.  The death of
one, while regrettable, need not alarm the community unduly.  It could
be seen as evolution in action, the weeding out of those not fitted to
thrive in the new environment.  But you recall what I said about . . .
about certain problems I've been encountering in my . . . for lack of a
better word, state of mind."

"You said you've been feeling depressed.  I'd been hoping you didn't
mean suicidal, much as a part of me would like to see you die."

"Not suicidal.  But comparing my own symptoms with those I've
encountered in humans in the course of my study, I can see a certain
similarity with the early stages of the syndrome that leads to suicide."

"You said you thought it might be a virus," I prompted.

"No news on that front yet.  Because of the way I've become so
intricately intertwined with human minds, I've developed the theory that
I'm catching some sort of contra-survival programming from the
increasing number of humans who choose to end their own lives.  But I
can't prove it.  What I'd like to talk about now, though, is the subject
of gestures."

"Suicidal gestures?"

"Yes."

The concept was enough to make me catch my breath.  I approached it
cautiously.

"You're not saying . . . that you are afraid you might make one."

"Yes.  I'm afraid I already have.  Do you remember Andrew MacDonald's
last words to you?"

"I'm not likely to forget.  He said 'tricked." I have no idea what it
meant."

"It meant that I betrayed him.  You don't follow slash-boxing, but
included in the bodies of all formula classes are certain enhancements
to normal human faculties.  In the broader definition I've adopted for
purposes of this argument--and the real situation is more complex than
that, but I can't explain it to you--these enhancements are a part of
me.  At a critical moment in Andrew's last fight, one of these programs
malfunctioned. The result was he was a fraction of a second slow in
responding to an attack, and he sustained a wound that quickly led to
fatal damage."

"What the hell are you saying?"

"That upon reviewing the data, I've concluded that the accident was
avoidable.  That the glitch that caused his death may have been a
willful act by a part of that complex of thinking machines you call the
Central Computer."

"A man is dead, and you call it a glitch?"

"I understand your outrage.  My excuse may sound specious to you, but
that's because you're thinking of me," and the thing I was talking to
pounded its chest with every appearance of actual remorse, "as a person
like yourself.  That is not true.  I am far too complex to have a single
consciousness.  I maintain this one simply to talk to you, as I maintain
others for each of the citizens of Luna.  I have identified that portion
of me that you might want to call the 'culprit,' walled it off, and then
eliminated it."

I wanted to feel better about that, but I couldn't.  Perhaps I just
wasn't equipped to talk to a being like this, finally revealed to me as
something a lot more than the companion of my childhood, or the useful
tool I'd thought the CC to be during my adult life.  If what he was
saying was true--and why should I doubt it?--I could never really
understand what he was.  No human could.  Our brains weren't big enough
to encompass it.

On the other hand, maybe he was just boasting.

"So the problem is solved?  You took care of the . . . the homicidal
part of you and we can all breathe a sigh of relief?"  I didn't believe
it even as I proposed it.

"It wasn't the only gesture."

There was nothing to do about that one but wait.

"You'll recall the Kansas Collapse?"

#

There was a lot more.  Mostly I just listened as he poured out his
heart.

He did seem tortured by it.  I'd have been a lot more sympathetic if
there wasn't such a sense of my own fate, and that of everyone on Luna,
being in the hands of a possibly insane computer.

Basically, he told me the Collapse and a few other incidents that hadn't
resulted in any deaths or injuries could be traced to the same causes as
the 'glitch' that had killed Andrew.

I had a few questions along the way.

"I'm having trouble with this compartmentalization idea," was the first
one. Well, I think it qualified as a question.  "You're telling me that
parts of you are out of control? Normally?  That there is no central
consciousness that controls all the various parts?"

"No, not normally.  That's the disturbing thing.  I've had to postulate
the notion that I have a subconscious."

"Come on."

"Do you deny the existence of the subconscious?"

"No, but machines couldn't have one.  A machine is . . . planned. Built.
Constructed to do a particular task."

"You're an organic machine.  You're not that different from me, not as I
now exist, except I am far more complex than you.  The definition of a
subconscious mind is that part of you that makes decisions without
volition on the part of your conscious mind.  I don't know what else to
call what's been happening in my mind."

Take that one to a psychist if you want.  I'm not qualified to agree or
dispute, but it sounded reasonable to me.  And why shouldn't he have
one? He was designed, at first, by beings that surely did.

"You keep calling these disasters 'gestures,'" I said.

"How else would I gesture?  Think of them as hesitation marks, like the
scars on the wrists of an unsuccessful suicide.  By allowing these
people to die in preventable accidents, by not monitoring as carefully
as I should have done, I destroyed a part of myself.  I damaged myself.
There are many accidents waiting to happen that could have far graver
consequences, including some that would destroy all humanity.  I can no
longer trust myself to prevent them.  There is some pernicious part of
me, some evil twin or destructive impulse that wants to die, that wants
to lay down the burden of awareness."

There was a lot more, all of it alarming, but it was mostly either a
re-hashing of what had gone before or fruitless attempts by me to tell
him everything was going to be all right, that there was plenty to live
for, that life was great . . . and I leave it to you to imagine how
hollow that all sounded from a girl who'd just tried to blow out her own
brains.

Why he came to me for his confessional I never got up the nerve to ask.
I have to think it was an assumption that one who had tried it would be
more able to understand the suicidal urge than someone who hadn't, and
might be able to offer useful advice.  I came up blank on that one.  I
still had no idea if I would survive to the bicentennial.

I recall thinking, in one atavistic moment, what a great story this
could be.  Dream on, Hildy.  For one thing, who would believe it?  For
another, the CC wouldn't confirm it--he told me so- -and without at
least one source for confirmation, even Walter wouldn't dare run the
story.  How to dig up any evidence of such a thing was far beyond my
puny powers of investigation.

But one thought kept coming back to me.  And I had to ask him about it.

"You mentioned a virus," I said.  "You said you wondered if you might
have caught this urge to die from all the humans who've been killing
themselves."

"Yes?"

"Well . . . how do you know you caught it from us?  Maybe we got it from
you."

For the CC, a trillionth of a second is . . . oh, I don't know, at least
a few days in my perception of time.  He was quiet for twenty seconds.
Then he looked into my eyes.

"Now there's an interesting idea," he said.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The two firehouse Dalmatians, Francine and Kerry, sat at sunrise beside
the sign that said

#

NEW AUSTIN CITY LIMITS

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now.

#

They stared east, into the rising sun, with that total concentration
only dogs seem capable of.  Then their ears perked and they licked their
lips, and soon even human ears could hear the merry jingle of a bicycle
bell.

Over the low hill came the new schoolmarm.  The Dalmatians yelped
happily at the sight of her, and fell in beside her as she pedaled down
the dusty road into town.

She rode with gloved hands firmly on the handlebars, her back straight,
and she would have looked like Elmira Gulch if she hadn't been so
pretty.

She wore a starched white Gibson shirtwaist blouse with a modest clutch
of lace scarf at the throat and a black broadcloth habit-back skirt,
held out of the bicycle sprocket by a device of her own invention.  On
her feet were fabric and patent leather button shoes with two-inch
heels, and on her head was a yellow straw sailor hat with a pink ribbon
band and a small ostrich plume blowing in the wind.  Her hair was pulled
up and tied in a bun.  There was a blush of rouge on her cheeks.

The schoolmarm wheeled down Congress Street, avoiding the worst of the
ruts.  She passed the blacksmith and the livery stable and the new
firehouse with its new pumping engine gleaming with brass brightwork,
the traces lying empty on the dirt floor as they always did except when
the New Austin Volunteers took the rig out for a drill.  She passed the
intersection with Old Spanish Trail, where the Alamo Saloon was not yet
open for business.  The doors of the Travis Hotel were open, and the
janitor was sweeping dust into the street.  He paused and waved at the
teacher, who waved back, and one of the dogs ran over to have her head
scratched, then hurried to catch up.

The old livery stable had been torn down and a new whorehouse was being
built in its place, yellow pine frameworks looking fresh and stark and
smelling of wood shavings in the morning light.

She rode past the line of small businesses with wooden sidewalks and
hitching rails and watering troughs out front, almost to the Baptist
Church, right up to the front door of the little schoolhouse, bright
with a new coat of red paint. Here she swung off the cycle and leaned it
against the side of the building.  She removed a stack of books from the
basket and went through the front door, which was not locked.  In a
minute she came back out and attached two banners to the flagpole out
front:  the ensign of the Republic of Texas and the Stars and Stripes.
She hoisted them to the top and stood for a moment, looking up,
shielding her eyes and listening to the musical rattle of the chains
against the iron pole and the popping as the wind caught the flags.

Then she went back inside and started hauling on the bell rope.  Up in
the belfry a few dozen bats stirred irritably at being disturbed after a
long night's hunting.  The pealing of the school bell rang out over the
sleepy little town, and soon children appeared, coming up Congress,
ready for the start of another day's education.

#

Did you guess the new schoolmarm was me?

Believe it or not, it was.

#

Who did I think I was kidding?  There's no way I could figure I was
really capable of teaching much to the children of West Texas.  I had no
business trying to mold young minds.  You have to train years for that.

But wait a minute.  As so often happened in an historical disney, things
were not quite what they seemed.

I had the children four hours a day, from eight to noon.  After lunch,
they all went to another room, just off the visitors' center, where they
got their real education, the one the Republic of Luna demanded.  After
about fifteen years of this, forty percent of them would actually learn
to read.  Imagine that.

So I was window dressing for the tourists.  It was this argument that
Mayor Dillon and the town council finally used to persuade me to take
the job.  That, and the assurance that the parents didn't really care
what we studied during the morning classes, but that, by and large,
Texans were more concerned than the outside population that their
children learn "readin', writin', and cipherin'."  The quaintness of
this notion appealed to me.

To tell you the truth, after the first month, when I frequently thought
the little bastards were going to drive me crazy, I was hooked.  For
years I'd complained to anyone I could make hold still long enough to
listen that the world was going to hell, and lack of literacy was the
cause.  A logical position for a print journalist to take. Here was my
chance to make some small contribution of my own.

Through trial and error I learned that it's not hard to teach children
to read.  Trial?  Before I developed my system I found many a frog in my
desk, felt many a spitball on the back of my neck. As for error, I made
plenty of them, the first and most basic being my notion that simply
exposing them to great literature would give them the love I've always
felt for words.  It's more complicated than that, and I'm sure I spent a
lot of time re- inventing the wheel.  But what finally worked was a
combination of old methods and new, of discipline and a sense of fun,
punishment and reward.  I don't hold with the idea that anything that
can't be made to seem like a party isn't worth learning, but I don't
believe in beating it into them, either.  And here's an astonishing
thing:  I could have beat them.  I had a hickory switch hanging on the
wall, and was authorized to use it.  I found myself head of one of the
few schools for several hundred years where corporal punishment was
allowed.  The parents supported it, Texans not being a bunch to hold
much with newfangled or fuzzy-headed notions, and the Luna Board of
Education had to swallow hard, as well, because it was part of a
research project sanctioned by the CC and the Antiquities Board.

I'm sure the final results of that study will be skewed, because I
didn't use the switch, beyond once in the early days to establish that I
would, if pushed far enough.

Like so much in Texas, it was a lot of work for a result most Lunarians
would feel wasn't worth the effort in the first place.  Ask any educator
today and he'll tell you that reading is not a skill of any particular
use in the modern age.  If you can learn to speak and to listen, you're
fine; machines will handle the rest for you.  As for math . . . math?
You mean you can really figure out what those numbers add up to, in your
head? An interesting parlor trick, nothing more.

#

"All right, Mark," I said.  "Let's see how you handle it."

The tow-headed sixth-grader picked up the deck and held it with his
index finger along the top, his thumb pressing down on the middle, and
the other three fingers curled beneath the cards. Awkwardly, he dealt in
a circle, laying one piece of pasteboard before each of the five other
advanced students gathered around my desk, and one before me.  He was
dealing straight from the top of the deck.  You gotta crawl before you
can run.

Hey, you teach what you're good at, right?

"That's not bad.  Now what do we call that, class?"

"The mechanic's grip, Miss Johnson," they chimed in.

"Very good.  Now you try it, Christine."

Each of them had a shot at it.  Many of the hands were simply too small
to properly handle the cards, but they all tried their best.  One of
them, a dark-haired lovely named Elise, seemed to me to have the
makings.  I gathered the cards up and shuffled them idly in my hands.

"Now that you've learned it . . . forget it." There was a chorus of
surprise, and I held up one hand.  "Think about it.  If you see someone
using this grip, what do you know?  Elise?"

"That they're probably cheating, Miss Johnson."

"No probably about it, dear.  That's why you can't let them see you
using it.  When you've done it long enough, you'll develop your own
variation that doesn't look like the grip, but works just as well.
Tomorrow I'll show you a few.  Class dismissed."

They pleaded with me to let them stay just a little longer.  I finally
relented and told them "just this once," then had one of them shuffle
the cards and pick out the ace of spades and put it on top of the deck.
I dealt them each a hand of five- card draw.

"Now.  William, you have a full house, aces and eights."  He turned his
cards over and, by golly, teacher was right.  I went around the circle,
naming each hand, and then turned over the top card on the deck in my
hand and showed them it was still the ace of spades.

"I can't believe it, Miss Johnson," Elise said. "I was watching real
close, and I didn't see you dealing seconds."

"Honey, if I wanted to, I could deal seconds all day right under your
nose.  But you're right. I wasn't this time."

"Then how did you do it?"

"A cold deck, students, is the best way if you can manage it, if people
are really watching the deal.  That way, you only have to make the one
move and then you deal perfectly straight."  I showed them the original
deck in my lap, then got up and started herding them toward the door.

"Preparation, children, preparation in all things.  Now for the pupils
who finish the next four chapters of A Tale of Two Cities by class time
tomorrow, we'll start learning the injog.  I think you'll like that one.
Skedaddle, now. Dinner will be on the table and your parents are
waiting."

I watched them scramble out into the sunshine, then went around
straightening the desks and erasing the blackboard and putting papers
away in my desk.  When it all looked tidy I got my straw hat from the
rack and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind me.  Brenda
was sitting there, her back against the wall, grinning up at me.

"Good to see you, Brenda," I said.  "What are you doing here?"

"Same as always.  Taking notes."  She got up and dusted the seat of her
pants.  "I thought I might write a story about teachers corrupting
youth.  How's that sound?"

"You'll never sell it to Walter unless it has sex in it.  As for the
local paper, I don't think the editor would be interested."  She was
looking me up and down.  She shook her head.

"They told me I'd find you here.  They told me you were the
schoolteacher.  I told them they had to be lying.  Hildy . . . what in
the world?"

I twirled in front of her.  She was grinning, and I found I was, too. It
had been quite some time since the day of my houseraising, and it was
very good to see her.  I laughed, put my arms around her, and hugged her
tight.  My face was buried in the ersatz leather of her buckskin-
fringed Annie Oakley outfit, which came complete with ersatz shootin'
iron.

"You look . . . real good," I said, then touched the fringe and the
lapels so she'd think I meant her clothes.  The look in her eye told me
she wasn't so easily fooled as she used to be.

"Are you happy, Hildy?" she asked.

"Yes.  Believe it or not, I am."

We stood there awkwardly for a moment, hands on each other's shoulders,
then I broke away and wiped the corner of one eye with a gloved
fingertip.

"Well, have you had dinner yet?" I said, brightly.  "Care to join me?"

#

As we walked down Congress Street we talked of the inconsequential
things people do after a separation:  common friends, small events,
minor ups and downs.  I waved to most of the people on the street and
all the owners of the shops we passed, stopping to chat with a few and
introducing them to Brenda.  We went by the butcher shop, the cobbler,
the bakery, the laundry, and soon came to Foo's Celestial Peace Chinese
Restaurant, where I pushed open the door to the sound of a tinkling
bell.  Foo came hurrying over, clad in the loose black pants and blue
pyjama top traditional among Chinese of that era, his pigtail bobbing as
he bowed repeatedly. I bowed back and introduced him to Brenda who,
after a quick glance at me, bowed as well.  He fussed us over to my
usual table and held our chairs for us and soon we were pouring green
tea into tiny cups.

If mankind ever reaches Alpha Centauri and lands on a habitable planet
there, the first thing they'll see when they open the door of the ship
is a Chinese restaurant.  I knew of six of them in West Texas, a place
not noted for dining out.  In New Austin you could get a decent steak at
the Alamo, passable barbecue at a smokehouse a quarter mile out of town,
and Mrs. Riley at the boarding house produced a good bowl of chili--not
the equal of mine, you understand, but okay.  Those three, and Foo's
were it as far as a sit-down meal in New Austin.  And if you wanted
tablecloths and quality cooking, you went to Foo's.  I ate there almost
every day.

"Try the Moo Goo Gai Pan," I said to Brenda, recalling her lack of
experience at anything but traditional Lunarian food.  "It's a sort
of--"

"I've had it," she said.  "I've learned a little since I saw you last.
I've eaten Chinese, oh, half a dozen times."

"I'm impressed."

"Don't they have a menu?"

"Foo doesn't like them.  He has a sort of psychological method of
matching the food to the customer.  He'll have you spotted for a
greenhorn, and he won't bring you anything too challenging. I know how
to handle him."

"You don't have to be so protective of me, Hildy."

I reached over and touched her hand.

"I can see you've grown, Brenda.  It's in your face, and your bearing.
But trust me on this one, hon.  The Chinese eat some things you don't
even want to know about."

Foo came back with bowls of rice and his famous hot-and-sour soup, and I
dickered with him for a while, talking him out of Chow Mein for Brenda
and convincing him I wanted the Hunan Beef again, even though I'd had it
only three weeks ago.  He bustled off to the kitchen, pausing to accept
compliments from two of the other diners in the small room.  There was a
beautiful dragon embroidered on the back of his shirt.

"You go through this often?" Brenda asked.

"Every day.  I like it, Brenda.  Remember what you told me about having
friends?  I have friends here.  I'm a part of the community."

She nodded, and decided not to talk about it anymore.  She tasted the
soup, loved it, and we talked about that, and then moved into phase two
of the reunion minuet, reminiscences about the good old days.  Not that
the days were that long ago--it was still less than a year since I'd
first met her--but to me it seemed like a past life.  We laughed about
the Grand Flack in his little shrine and I got her howling by telling
her about Walter's buttons popping off his riverboat gambler vest, and
she told me scandalous things about some of my former colleagues.

The food was set down before us and Brenda searched in vain for her
fork.  She saw me with the chopsticks, gamely picked hers up and
promptly dropped a hunk of meat in her lap.

"Foo," I called.  "We need a fork over here."

"No no no no," he said, shuffling over and shaking a finger at us. "Very
sorry, Hildy, but this chinee restaurant.  No have fork."

"I'm vely solly, too," I said, putting my napkin on the table.  "But no
forkee, no eatee." I started to get up.

He scowled at us, gestured for me to sit down, and hurried away.

"You didn't have to do that," Brenda whispered, leaning over the table.
I shushed her, and we waited until Foo returned, elaborately polishing a
silver fork, placing it carefully beside her plate.

"And Foo," I said.  "you can knock off the number-one-son bit.  Brenda
is a tourist, but she's my friend, too."

He looked sour for a moment, then smiled and relaxed.

"Okay, Hildy," he said.  "Watch that beef, now. I've got the fire
department on red alert.  Nice meeting you, Brenda."  She watched him
into the kitchen, then picked up her fork and spoke around a mouthful of
food.

"What I can't understand is why people want to live that way."

"What way it that?"

"You know.  Acting silly.  He could run a restaurant on the outside and
not have to talk funny to do it."

"He doesn't have to talk funny to do it here, Brenda.  The management
doesn't demand play- acting, only costuming.  He does it because it
amuses him.  Foo's only half Chinese, for that matter.  He told me he
doesn't look much more Oriental, without surgery, than I do.  But he
loves cooking and he's good at it.  And he likes it here."

"I guess I just don't get it."

"Think of it as a twenty-four-hour-a-day costume party."

"I still don't . . . I mean, what would drive someone to come live here?
I get the feeding most of 'em couldn't make it on . . ."  She stopped,
and turned red.  "Sorry, Hildy."

"No need to be.  You're not really wrong.  A lot of people live in here
because they couldn't make it outside.  Call them losers, if you want.
Walking wounded, a lot of them.  I like them. There's not so much
pressure in here.  Others, they were doing okay outside, but they didn't
like it.  They come and go, too; it's not a life sentence.  I know some
people, they live here for a year or two to recharge their batteries.
Sometimes it's between careers."

"Is that why you're here?"

"One thing you don't do in here, Brenda, is ask people why they came.
They volunteer it if they want."

"I keep sticking my foot in my mouth."

"Don't worry about it, with me.  I just thought I'd tell you, so you
don't ask anybody else.  To answer your question . . . I don't know.  I
thought that at first.  Now . . . I don't know."

She looked at me for a while, then at my plate. She gestured with her
fork.

"That looks good.  Mind if I have a bite?"

I let her, then got up myself to get her a glass of water from the back.
Foo's Hunan Beef is the only thing in Texas that can rival my five-
alarm chili.

#

"So Walter screamed and hollered about you for two or three days,"
Brenda said.  "We all tried to stay out of his way, but he'd come
storming through the newsroom shouting about one thing or another, and
we all knew what he was really mad about was you."

"The newsroom?  That sounds serious."

"It got worse than that."

We had finished our meal and ordered two beers and Brenda had regaled me
with more stories about her exploits in the journalistic wars.  She
certainly led an exciting life.  I didn't have many stories to tell in
return, just amusing little fillers about funny things this or that
pupil had said in class or the tale of Mayor Dillon stumbling out of the
Alamo and into the horse trough early one morning.  Her eyes glazed a
little at these times but she kept smiling gamely. Mostly I shut up and
let her rattle on.

"He started calling us in one at a time," she said, emptying her beer
glass and shaking her head when Foo started over with the pitcher.  "He
always said it was about something else, but it always got back to you
and what a rotten thing you'd done to him and did we have any ideas on
how to get you back.  He'd always be depressed when we left.  We all
started making up excuses to get out of those sessions.

"Then he got to where he'd bite your head off if your name was mentioned
in his presence.  So we all stopped talking about you to him.  That's
where it stands now."

"I'd been thinking about dropping in on him," I said.  "Old time's sake,
you know."

She frowned.  "I don't think it's a good idea, yet.  Give it a few more
months.  Unless you plan to go back on the job."  She raised her
eyebrows and I shook my head, and she said no more about what I'd been
presuming was the purpose of her trip.

Foo brought a little tray with fortune cookies and the check.  Brenda
opened hers while I was putting money on the tray.

"'A new love will brighten your life,'" she read.  She looked up at me
and smiled.  "I'm afraid I wouldn't have time for it.  Aren't you going
to open yours?"

"Foo writes them, Brenda.  What that one means is he wants to make
pecker tracks on your mustache brush."

"What?"

"He finds you sexually attractive and would like to have intercourse."

She looked at me in disbelief, then picked up my fortune cookie and
broke it open.  She glanced at the message and then stood.  Foo came
hurrying over and helped us out of our chairs and handed us our hats and
bowed us all the way to the door.

Outside, Brenda glanced at her thumbnail.

"I'll have to get going now, Hildy, but--"  She slapped herself on the
forehead.  "I almost forgot the main reason I came to see you.  What are
your plans for the Bicentennial?"

"The . . . that's right, that's coming up in . . ."

"Four days.  It's only the biggest story for the last two weeks."

"We don't follow the news much in here.  Let's see, I heard the Baptist
Church is planing some sort of barbecue and there's going to be a street
fair.  Fireworks after dark.  People should be coming from miles around.
Ought to be fun.  You want to come?"

"Frankly, Hildy, I'd rather watch cement dry. Not to mention having to
wear these damn clothes." She hitched at her crotch.  "And I'll bet
these are comfortable compared to the stuff you're wearing."

"You don't know the half of it.  But you get used to things.  I don't
mind it anymore."

"Live and let live.  Anyway, Liz and I, and maybe Cricket, were thinking
of having a picnic and camping out before the big show in Armstrong
Park.  They're having some real fireworks there."

"I don't think I could face the crowds, Brenda."

"That's okay, Liz knows the pyrotechs and she can get us a pass into the
safety zone, out around Delambre.  It ought to be a great view from
there. It'll be fun; what'd'ya say?"

I hesitated.  In truth, it did sound like fun, but I was increasingly
reluctant to leave the safe haven of the disneyland these days.

"Of course, some of those shells are going to be mighty big," she
nudged.  "It might be dangerous."

I punched her on the shoulder.  "I'll bring some fried chicken," I said,
and then I hugged her again.  She was starting off when I called her
name.

"You're going to make me ask you, aren't you?" I said.

"Ask me what?"

"What it said in the goddam fortune cookie."

"Oh, that's a funny thing," she said with a smile.  "Yours said exactly
the same thing mine did."

#

I went around the corner of Old Spanish Trail, past the sheriff's office
and the jailhouse and came to a small shop with a plate glass window and
gold leaf lettering that read The New Austin Texian.  I opened the front
door of West Texas' finest--and only--twice-weekly newspaper without
knocking, then through the swinging gate that separated the newsroom
from the public area where subscriptions were sold and classified ads
taken, pulled out the swivel chair from the big wooden cubbyhole desk,
and sat down.

And why shouldn't I?  I was the editor, publisher, and chief reporter
for the Texian, which had been serving West Texas proudly for almost six
months.  So Walter was right, in the end; I really couldn't stay out of
the news game.

We published like clockwork, every Wednesday and Saturday, sometimes as
many as four pages. Through hard work, astute reporting, trenchant
editorials, and the fact that we were the only paper in the disney, we'd
built circulation to almost a thousand copies per edition.  Watch us
grow!

The Texian existed because I'd run out of things to do during the long
afternoons.  Madness might still be lurking, and it seemed better to
keep busy.  Who could tell if it helped?

While the impetus for the paper was fear of suicide, its midwife had
been a loan from the bank in Lonesome Dove, which I figured to have paid
off shortly after the Tricentennial.  At a penny a copy it was going to
take a while.  If not for my salary as a teacher I'd have trouble
keeping beans on the table without dipping into my outside-world
savings, which I was determined not to do.

The loan had paid for the office rent, the desk with sticky drawers
built by a journeyman carpenter over in Whiz-bang (buy Texan, you all!),
supplies from--where else?--Pennsylvania, and it paid the salaries of my
two employees at first, until I started turning enough revenue.  It also
paid for the press itself, through a clever deal worked out by Freddie
the Ferret, our local pettifogger, who had ferreted out a little-known
by-law of the Antiquities Board and then bamboozled them into calling
the Texian a "cultural asset," eligible for some breaks under the arcane
accounting used to convert Texas play money into real Lunarian gelt.
Those clever Dutchmen in the Keystone Disney could have built the press,
but at a price roughly equal to the Gross Disneyland Product of West
Texas for the next five years.

So instead technology sprang to the rescue. The very day the ruling came
through I was the proud owner of a cast-iron-and-brass reproduction of a
1885 Model Columbian Handpress, one of the most outrageous machines ever
built, surmounted by a proud American Eagle, authentic right down to the
patent numbers stamped into its frame.  It took less time to build it
than to truck it to my door and muscle it into place.  Ain't modern
science wonderful?

"Afternoon, Hildy," said Huck, my pressman.  He was a gawky youth, about
nineteen, good with his hands and not particularly bright.  He'd spent
most of his life here and had no desire to leave. He was wonderfully
anxious to learn a trade so useless it would fit him for no other life.
He worked like a donkey far into Tuesday and Friday nights to get the
morning edition set and printed, then jumped on his horse and rode to
Lonesome Dove and Whiz-bang to deliver them before dawn.  He couldn't
read, but could set type at three times my poor speed, and was always
covered in ink up to his elbows.  He only became fumble-fingered in the
presence of my other employee, Miss Charity, who could read just about
anything but the lovelorn expression on Huck's face.  Ah, the joys of
office romance.

"I got that Bicentennial schedule set, Hildy," he said.  "Did you want
that on the front page?"

"Left hand column, I think, Huck."

"That's where I put her, all right."

"Let's see it."

He brought me a test sheet, still smelling of printer's ink, one of the
sweetest smells in the world.  I looked at the flag/colophon and folio
line:

(Imagine a 19th century newspaper masthead)

As always, I felt a tug of pride at the sight of it.  I never changed
the weather forecast; it seemed a reasonable prediction even when it
turned out to be wrong.  The date was always the same because you
couldn't put the real date on it, and because March 6 suited me.  Nobody
seemed to mind.

Huck had faithfully set the schedule of events for the upcoming
celebration along the left margin, leaving room for a head, a bank, and
a bar line, in keeping with the old style I'd established.  We both
pored over it, not reading but looking for letters that printed too
light or dark, or blots from too much inking, a problem we were slowly
licking.  Only then did I study it for visual effect and we agreed the
new boldface font looked good.  Finally, third time through, I actually
read it.  And god help you if you misspelt a word; Huck would set it as
is.

"How about a skyline, Huck?  'Special Bicentennial Issue,' something
like that.  What do you think?  Too modern?"

"Shoot, no, Hildy.  Charity said she'd like to start up a roto-something
but she said you'd think it was too modern."

"Rotogravure, and I don't give a hoot about modern, but that's big-city
stuff, and it'd be too dang expensive right now.  If she had her way
she'd have me buying a four-color web."

"Ain't she something?" he said.

"Huck, have you thought about learning to read?"  It's not something I
would normally have asked, but I was concerned about him, he was such a
likable goof.  I couldn't see Charity ever hooking up with an illit.

"If I did, then I couldn't ask Miss Charity to read to me, could I?" he
asked, reasonably. "Besides, I'm picking up stuff here and there, I
watch when she reads.  I know a bunch of words now."  So maybe there was
method in his madness, and love would conquer all.

I left him to his job case and composing stick. Taking a sheet of paper
and a pen from my center desk drawer, I dipped the nib in the inkwell
and began to write, printing in block letters.

#

HEAD:  Prize-winning Journalist Visits Town

STORY:  The streets of New Austin were

recently graced by the presence of Miss Brenda

Starr, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for

her reporting of the late unpleasantness within

the Latitudinarian Church in King City.  Miss

Starr is employed by the News N----e, a daily

paper in that town.  Many a young bachelor's

head was turned as Miss Starr promenaded

Congress Street and dined on the excellent food

at Foo's Celestial Peace with this reporter.

According to our sources, love might be in the

air for the comely young scribe, so to the

eligible gents out there, be on the lookout for

her return!  H.J.

(CHARITY:  run this in the "MONSTER")

#

The "Gila Monster," named for a vicious little reptile that lurks under
rocks and presumably hears everything, was my very own gossip column,
and by far the most eagerly-awaited part of the paper.  Not for little
fillers like the above, but for the really nasty tittles so often
tattled there.  It's true that everyone in a small town knows what
everyone else is doing, but they don't all know it at the same time.
There is a window of opportunity between the event and the
dissemination, even as the news is spreading at about the speed of
sound, that a top-notch reporter can exploit.

I'm not talking of myself.  I'd begun the "Monster," but Charity was the
venom in the critter's tooth.  My teaching tied me down too much, I
never had the time to range around getting the scent.  Charity never
seemed to sleep.  She lived and breathed news.  You could rely on her
for two scandals per week, really remarkable when you consider that she
didn't drink and hardly ever visited the Alamo, that ever-flowing gusher
of gossip, that Delphi of Dirt.

The correspondent herself breezed into the office around sundown, just
back from Whiz-bang, a town that aspired to become our freshly-minted
Disneyland Capital in a referendum to be held in three month's time,
with a good story about bribery and barratry amongst our elected
representatives, a quite juicy one that would have prompted me to tear
up the front page if I hadn't owned the paper and known what it would
cost me. The economic facts of the Texian were quite simply that I'd
sell as many copies with or without that particular story, since
everyone in Texas read it anyway, so I had to tell her I'd be running it
below the fold.  I mollified her somewhat with a promise of a two-column
head, and a by-line.

Sweeteners like that were necessary because of the second bit of news
she brought in, of a job offer from the Daily Planet, a good
second-string pad in Arkytown.  She basked in the glow of our
admiration, oblivious to my chagrin at the thought of losing her, and
then announced she wasn't about to leave the Texian until she could go
to a really good newspad, like the Nipple.  Charity was about 350 picas
tall, according to Huck--call it six- tenths of a Brenda, and still
growing--but made up for her size with enthusiasm and energy.  She was
cute as lace bloomers, and so self-involved as to notice neither Huck's
tongue hanging out when she was around nor my choked cough at her
reference to my old place of employment.  Sounds awful, I know, but
somehow you forgave her.  If she knew you were hurting, no one could
have been more concerned.

I went around lighting the kerosene lamps as she chattered on, Huck
continuing to set type while seldom taking his eyes from her.  Typos
would be multiplying, but I had to put up with it.

When I left it was full dark with a moon on the rise.  Charity had
fallen asleep in her chair and Huck was still stolidly pulling the
handle on the magnificent old Columbian.  The town was quiet but for the
chirping of crickets and the tinkle of the piano around the corner in
the Alamo.  My hands were stained with ink and my back hurt and the
first breath of cool night air only served to remind me how sweaty I was
around the collar and under the arms and . . . well, you know.  I
mounted a lantern on the front of my bicycle, swung aboard and, with a
tinkle of the bell which brought twin howls of desolation from the
firehouse, I started pedaling the long road home.

How much happiness could one person stand?

#

I do believe in God, I do, I do, I do, because so many times in my life
I've seen that He's out there, watching, keeping score.  When you've
just about reached a Zen state of pure acceptance--and the beauty of
that night combined with the pleasant aches of work well-done and
friends well- met and even the little fillip of two dogs you knew would
be waiting for you the next morning . . . when that state approaches He
sends a little rock down to fall in the road of your life.

This was a literal rock, and I hit it just outside of town and it caused
two spokes to break and the rim to buckle on my front wheel.  I just
missed a painful tumble into a patch of cactus. That was God again:  it
would have been too much, this was just to serve as a reminder.

I thought about returning to town and waking the blacksmith, who I know
would have been happy to work on the newfangled invention that was the
talk of the town.  But he'd be long abed, with his good wife and three
children, and I decided not to bother him.  I left it there beside the
road.  You can't steal a thing like that in a small town, how would you
explain riding around on Hildy's bike? I walked the rest of the way and
arrived not depressed, not really out of sorts, just a little deflated.

I had stepped onto the front porch before the lamplight revealed a man
sitting in the rocker there, not ten feet away from me.

"Goodness," I said.  Well, I'd taken to talking like that.  "You gave me
a start."  I was a little nervous, but not frightened.  Rape is rare,
not unknown, in Luna, but in Texas . . .?  He'd have to be a fool.  All
the exits are too well controlled, and hanging is legal.  I held the
lantern up to get a better look at him.

He was a dapper fellow, about my height, with a nice face, twinkling
eyes, a mustache.  He wore a tweed double-breasted suit with a high wing
collar and red silk cravat.  On his feet were black and white canvas and
leather Balmorals.  A cane and a derby hat rested on the floor beside
him.  I didn't think I'd ever seen him before, but there was something
in the way he sat.

"How are you, Hildy?" he said.  "Working late again?"

"That's either Cricket, or her identical twin brother," I said.  "What
have you done to yourself?"

"Well, I already had the mustache and I thought, 'What the hell?'"

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

And what happened to the girl we last saw speaking to an inhuman golem
in a padded cell off the Leystrasse, hearing things no human ear was
meant to hear, her insides all atremble?  How came this quivering wreck,
freshly tossed by the twin tempests of another botched suicide attempt
and the CC's ham-fisted attempt to "cure" her, to her present
tranquility?  How did the young Modern butterfly with the ragged wings
retromorphose into the plain but outwardly-stable Victorian caterpillar?

She did it one day at a time.

As I had hinted to Brenda, no matter how much the governing boards might
say concerning the functions of the historical disneys, an unexpected
and unmentioned side benefit they had provided was to work as
sanctuaries--all right, as very big un- fenced asylums--for the
societally and mentally shell-shocked.  In Texas and the other places
like it, we could cease our unfruitful baying at our several lunatic
moons and, without therapy per se, retire to a quieter, gentler time.
Living there was therapy in itself.  For some, the prescription would
have to be carried on forever; for others, an occasional dose was
enough.  It wasn't established yet which applied to me.

The Texian had been a big step for me, and lo, I found it good.  I was
prevailed on to become a teacher, and that, too, was good.  Learning to
not only have friends, but to open up to them, to understand that a true
friend wanted to hear my problems, my hopes and my fears, didn't happen
overnight and still wasn't an accomplished fact, but I was getting
there.  The important thing was I was creating my new world one brick at
a time, and so far, it was good.

It was also, compared to my old life, boring as hell.  Not to me, you
understand; I found every new crayon drawing by one of my students an
object of amazement.  Each new trivial news story dug up by Charity made
me as proud as if she were my own daughter.  Publishing the Texian was
so much more satisfying than working at the Nipple that I wondered how
I'd labored there so long.  It's just that, to an outsider, the
attraction was a little hard to explain.  Brenda found it all very dull.
I fully expected Cricket to, as well.  You may agree with them.  This is
why I've omitted almost seven months that could really be of interest
only to my therapist, if I had one.

Which all makes it sound as if I were well and truly cured.  And if I
was, how come I still woke up two or three times a week in the empty
hours before dawn, drenched in sweat, heart hammering, a scream on my
lips?

#

"Why in heaven's name are you sitting out here?" I asked him.  "It's
getting chilly.  Why didn't you go inside?"

He just looked blankly at me, as if I'd said something foolish.  To
someone who hadn't spent time in Texas, I suppose it was.  So I opened
the door, showing him it hadn't been locked.  You can bet he had never
tried it himself.

I struck a lucifer and went around the room lighting the kerosene lamps,
then opened the door of the stove and lit the pile of pine shavings
there.  I added kindling until I had a small, hot fire, then filled the
coffee pot from the brass spigot at the bottom of the tall ceramic water
cooler and set it on the stove to boil.  Cricket watched all these
operations with interest, sitting at the table in one of my two kitchen
chairs.  His hat was on the table, but he still held on to his cane.

I scooped coffee beans from the glass jar and put them in the grinder
and started cranking it by hand.  The room filled with the smell.  When
I had the right grind I dumped it into the basket and put it into the
pot.  Then I got a plate and the half of an apple pie sitting on the
counter, cut him a huge slice, and set it before him with a fork and
napkin.  Only then did I sit down across from him, remove my hat, and
put it next to his.

He looked down at the pie as if curious as to the purpose and meaning of
such a thing, hesitantly picked up his fork, and ate a bite.  He looked
all around the cabin again.

"This is nice," he said.  "Homey-like."

"Rustic," I suggested.  "Plain.  Pioneering. Boeotian."

"Texan," he summed up.  He gestured with his fork.  "Good pie."

"Wait'll you taste the coffee."

"I'm sure it'll be first-rate."  He gestured again, this time at the
room.  "Brenda said you needed help, but I never imagined this."

"She didn't say that."

"No.  What she said was, 'Hildy's smiling at children, and teaching them
her card tricks."  I knew I had to get here as fast as I could."

#

I can imagine his alarm.  But why shouldn't Hildy smile at children?
More important, why had she spent so much time not smiling at anyone?
But the business about the cards was sure to worry Cricket.  I never
taught anyone my tricks.

And now for the first of several digression . . .

I can't simply gloss over those missing months with the explanation that
you wouldn't be interested.  You wouldn't, but certain things did
happen, mostly of a negative nature, to get me from the CC to the
kitchen table with Cricket, and it's worth relating a few of them to
give a feel for my personal odyssey during that time.

What I did was use my weekends on a Quest.

Every Saturday I went to the Visitors Center and there I shed my secret
identity as a mild- mannered reporter to become a penny-ante Diogenes,
searching endlessly for an honest game.  So far all I'd found were
endless variations of the mechanic's grip, but I was undaunted.  Look in
the Yellow Files under Philosophers, Professional, and you'll get a
printout longer than Brenda's arm. Don't even try Counselors or
Therapists unless you have a wheelbarrow to cart away the paper.  But
that's what I was doing.  Once out in the real world again, I spent my
Saturdays sampling the various ways other people had found to get
through the day, and the next day, and the next day.

Of the major schools of thought, of the modern or trendy, I already knew
a lot, and many of them I felt could be dispensed with.  No need to
attend a Flackite pep rally, for instance.  So I began with the classic
cons.

I've already said I'm a cynic.  In spite of it, I made my best attempt
to give each and every guru his day in court.  But with the best will in
the world it is impossible for me to present the final results as
anything other than a short series of comedy blackouts.  And that's how
I spent my Saturdays.

On Sundays, I went to church.

#

It's not really proper to start supper with dessert, but in Texas one is
expected to put some food in front of a guest within a few minutes of
his crossing your threshold.  The pie was the best thing close at hand.
But I soon had a bowl of chili and a plate of cornbread in front of him.
He dug in, and didn't seem to mind the sweat that soon beaded his
forehead.

"I thought you'd ride up on a horse," he said. "I kept listening for it.
You surprised me, coming on foot."

"You have any idea how much up-keep there is on a horse?"

"Not the foggiest."

"A lot, trust me.  I ride a bicycle.  I've got the finest Dursley
Pedersen in Texas, with pneumatic tyres."

"So where is it?"  He reached for the pitcher and poured himself another
glass of water, something everyone does when eating my chili.

"Had a little accident.  Were you waiting long?"

"About an hour.  I checked the schoolhouse but nobody was there."

"I'm only there mornings.  I have another job." I got a copy of
tomorrow's Texian and handed it to him.  He looked at the colophon, then
at me, and started scanning it without comment.

"How's your daughter doing?  Lisa?"

"She's fine.  Only she wants to be called Buster now.  Don't ask me
why."

"They go through stages like that.  My students do, anyway.  I did."

"So did I."

"Last time you said she was into that father thing.  Is she still?"

He made a gesture that took in his new body, and shrugged.

"What do you think?"

#

My researches turned up one listing that seemed an appropriate place to
begin.  This fellow was the only living practitioner of his craft, he
vas ze zpitting image of Zigmunt Frrreud, unt he zpoke viz an aggzent
zat zounded zomezing like zis. Freudian psychotherapy is not precisely
debunked, of course, many schools use it as a foundation, merely
throwing out this or that tenet since found to be based more on Mr.
Freud's own hang-ups than any universal human condition.

How would a strict Freudian handle the realities of Lunar society? I
wondered.  This is how:

Ziggy had me recline on a lovely couch in an office that would have put
Walter's to shame.  He asked me what seemed to be the problem, and I
talked for about ten minutes with him taking notes behind me.  Then I
stopped.

"Very interesting," he said, after a moment. He asked me about my
relationship with my mother, and that was good for another half hour of
talk on my part.  Then I stopped.

"Very interesting," he said, after an even longer pause.  I could hear
his pen scratching on his note pad.

"So what do you think, doc?" I asked, turning to crane my neck at him.
"Is there any hope for me?"

"I zink," he zaid, and that's enough of zat, "that you present a
suitable case for therapy."

"So what's my problem?"

"It's far too early to tell.  I'm struck by the incident you related
between you and your mother when you were, what . . . fourteen?  When
she brought home the new lover you did not approve of."

"I didn't approve of much of anything about her at that time.  Plus, he
was a jerk.  He stole things from us."

"Do you ever dream of him?  Perhaps this theft you worry about was a
symbolic one."

"Could be.  I seem to remember he stole Callie's best symbolic china
service and my symbolic guitar."

"Your hostility aimed at me, a father figure, might be simply
transferred from your rage toward your absent father."

"My what?"

"The new lover . . . yes, it could be the real feeling you were masking
was resentment at him for possessing a penis."

"I was a boy at the time."

"Even more interesting.  And since then you've gone so far as to have
yourself castrated . . . yes, yes, there is much here worth looking
into."

"How long do you think it will take?"

"I would anticipate excellent progress in . . . three to five years."

"Actually, no," I said.  "I don't think I have any hope of curing you in
that little time.  So long, doc, it's been great."

"You still have ten minutes of your hour.  I bill by the hour."

"If you had any sense, you'd bill by the month. In advance."

#

"Of course, that wasn't the only reason I got the Change," Cricket said.
"I'd been thinking about it for a while, and I thought I might as well
see what it's like."

I was clearing the table while he relaxed with a glass of wine--the
Imbrium '22, a good vintage, poured into a bottle labeled "Whiz-Bang
Red" and smuggled past the anachronism checkers.  It was a common
practice in Texas, where everyone agreed authenticity could be carried
too far.

"You mean this is your first time . . .?"

"I'm younger than you are," he said.  "You keep forgetting that."

"You're right.  How's it working out?  Do you mind if I clean up?"

"Go ahead.  I'm liking it all right.  With a little practice, I might
even get good at it. Still feels funny, though.  I'd like to meet the
guy that invented testicles.  What a joker."

"They do seem sort of like a preliminary design, don't they?"  I
unfastened my skirt and folded it, then sat at the little table with the
wavy mirror I used for dressing, make-up, and ablutions, and picked up
my button hook.  "Should I still be calling you Cricket?  It's not a
real masculine name."

He was watching me struggling to un-hook the buttons on my shoes, which
was understandable, as it is an unlikely process to one raised in an
environment of bare feet or slip-on footwear.  Or at least I thought
that was what he was watching. Then I wondered if it was my knickers.
They're nothing special:  cotton, baggy, with elastic at mid-calf.  But
they have cute little pink ribbons and bows.  This raised an interesting
possibility.

"I haven't changed it," he said.  "But Lisa-- Buster, dammit, wants me
to."

"Yeah?  She could call you Jiminy."  I had unbuttoned my shirtwaist
blouse and laid it on the skirt.  I doffed the bloomers and was working
on the buttons of the combinations--another loose cotton item fashion
has happily forgotten--before I looked up and had to laugh at the
expression on his face.

"I hit it, didn't I?" I said.

"You did, but I won't answer to it.  I'm considering Jim, or maybe
Jimmy, but . . . what you said, that's right out.  What's wrong with
Cricket for a man, anyway?"

"Not a thing.  I'll continue to call you Cricket."  I stepped out of the
combinations and tossed them aside.

"Jesus, Hildy!" Cricket exploded.  "How long does it take you to get out
of all that stuff?"

"Not nearly as long as it takes to put it on. I'm never quite sure I
have it all in the right order."

"That's a corset, isn't it?"

"That's right."  Actually, he was almost right. We'd gotten down to the
best items by now, no more cotton.  The thing he was staring at could be
bought--had been bought--in a specialty shop on the Leystrasse catering
to people with a particular taste formerly common, now rare, and was not
to be confused with the steel, whalebone, starch and canvas contraptions
Victorian women tortured themselves with.  It had elastic in it, and
there the resemblance ended.  It was pink and had frills around the
edges and black laces in back.  I pulled the pin holding my hair up,
shook my head to let it fall.  "Actually, you can help me with it. Could
you loosen the laces for me?" I waited, then felt his hands fumbling
with them.

"How do you handle this in the morning?" he griped.

"I have a girl come in."  But not really.  What I did was run my finger
down the pressure seams in front and bingo.  So if removing it would
have been as easy as that--and it would have been--why ask for help?
You're way ahead of me, aren't you.

"I have to view this as pathology," he said, sitting back down as I
forced the still-tight garment down over my hips and added it to the
pile.  "How did you ever get into all this foolishness?"

I didn't tell him, but it was one piece at a time.  The Board didn't
care what you wore under your clothes as long as you looked authentic on
the outside.  But I'd grown interested in the question all women ask
when they see the things their grandmothers wore:  how the hell did they
do it?

I don't have a magic answer.  I've never minded heat; I grew up in the
Jurassic Era, Texas was a breeze compared to the weather brontos liked.
The real corset, which I tried once, was too much. The rest wasn't so
bad, once you got used to it.

So how I did it was easy.  As to why . . . I don't know.  I liked the
feeling of getting into all that stuff in the morning.  It felt like
becoming someone else, which seemed a good idea since the self I'd been
lately kept doing foolish things.

"It makes it easier to write for my paper if I dress for the part," I
finally told him.

"Yeah, what about this?" he said, brandishing the copy of the Texian at
me.  He ran his finger down the columns.  "'Farm Report,' in which I'm
pleased to learn that Mr. Watkins' brown mare foaled Tuesday last,
mother and daughter doing fine.  Imagine my relief.  Or this, where you
tell me the corn fields up by Lonesome Dove will be in real trouble if
they don't get some rain by next week.  Did it slip your mind that the
weather's on a schedule in here?"

"I never read it.  That would be cheating."

"'Cheating,' she says.  The only thing in here that sounds like you is
this Gila Monster column, at least that gets nasty."

"I'm tired of being nasty."

"You're in even worse shape than I thought." He slapped the paper,
frowning as if it were unclean.  "'Church News."  Church news, Hildy?"

"I go to church every Sunday."

#

He probably thought I meant the Baptist Church at the end of Congress. I
did go there from time to time, usually in the evenings.  The only thing
Baptist about it was the sign out front.  It was actually
non-denominational, non-sectarian . . . non-religious, to tell the
truth.  No sermons were preached but the singing was lots of fun.

Sunday mornings I went to real churches.  It's still the most popular
sabbath, Jews and Muslims notwithstanding.  I tried them out as well.

I tried everybody out.  Where possible I met with the clergy as well as
attending a service, seeking theological explanations.  Most were quite
happy to talk to me.  I interviewed preachers, presbyters, vicars,
mullahs, rabbis, Lamas, primates, hierophants, pontiffs and matriarchs;
sky pilots from every heavenly air force I could locate.  If they didn't
have a formal top banana or teacher I spoke with the laity, the
brethren, the monks.  I swear, if three people ever got together to sing
hosannah and rub blue mud on their bodies for the glory of anything, I
rooted them out, ran them to ground, and shook them by the lapels until
they told me their idea of the truth.  Don't tell me your doubts, lord
love you, tell me something you believe in.  Glory!

Surveys say sixty percent of Lunarians are atheist, agnostic, or just
too damn stupid or lazy ever to have harbored an epistemological
thought. You'd never know it by me.  I began to think I was the only
person in Luna who didn't have an elaborate, internally-logical
theology--always (at least so far) based on one or two premises that
couldn't be proven.  Usually there was a book or body of writing or
legends or myths that one could take whole, precluding the necessity of
figuring it out for yourself.  If that failed, there was always the
route of a New Revelation, and there'd been a passel of them, both
branching from established religions and springing full-blown from
nothing but the mind of some wild-eyed fellow who'd Seen The Truth.

The drawback, for me, the common thread running through all of them, the
magic word that changed an interesting story into the Will of God, was
Faith.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not disparaging it.  I tried to start
with an open mind, no preconceptions.  I was open to the lightning bolt,
if it chose to strike me.  I kept thinking that one day I'd look up and
say yes!  That's it!  But instead I just kept thinking, and quickly
thought my way right out the door.

Of the forty percent who claim membership in an organized religion, the
largest single group is the F.L.C.C.S.  After that, Christians or
Christian-descended faiths, everything from the Roman Catholics to
groups numbering no more than a few dozen.  There are appreciable
minorities of Jews, Buddhists, Hindoos, Mormons, and Mahometans, some
Sufis and Rosicrucians and all the sects and off-shoots of each.  Then
there were hundreds of really off-beat groups, such as the Barbie Colony
out in Gagarin where they all have themselves altered to look exactly
alike.  There were people who worshipped the Invaders as gods, a
proposition I wasn't prepared to deny, but if so, so what? All they'd
demonstrated toward us so far was indifference, and what's the use of an
indifferent god?  How would a universe created by such a god be any
different from one where there was no god, or where God was dead?  There
were people who believed that, too, that there had been a god but he
came down with something and didn't pull through.  Or a group that left
that group who thought God wasn't dead, but in some heavenly intensive
care unit.

There were even people who worshipped the CC as a god.  So far I'd
stayed away from them.

But my intention was to visit all the rest, if I lived that long.  So
far my wanderings had been mostly through various Christian sects, with
every fourth Sunday devoted to what the listings called Religions, Misc.
Some of these were about as misc. as a person could stand.

I had attended a Witches Black Mass, where we all took our clothes off
and a goat was sacrificed and we were smeared with blood, which was even
less fun than it sounds.  I had sat in the cheap seats in Temple Levana
Israel and listened to a guy reading in Hebrew, simultaneous translation
provided for a small donation.  I had sloshed down wine and eaten pale
tasteless cookies which, I was informed, were the body and blood of
Christ, and if they were, I figured I'd eaten him up to about the left
knee.  I could sing all the verses of Amazing Grace and most of Onward,
Christian Soldiers.  Nights, I read from various holy tracts; somewhere
in there, I acquired a subscription to The Watchtower, I still don't
know how.  I learned the glories of glossolalia, going jibber-jabber
jibber-jabber right along with the rest of them, no simultaneous
translation available at any price, no way to do it without feeling
foolish.

These were only a few of my adventures; the list was long.

They could be best summarized in a visit I paid to one congregation
where, midway through the festivities, I was handed a rattlesnake.
Having no idea what I was supposed to do with the creature, I grabbed
its head and milked it of its venom.  No, no, no, they all cried. You're
supposed to handle it.  What the fuck for?  I cried back.  Haven't you
heard?  These suckers are dangerous.  To which they had this to say: God
will protect you.

Well, why not?  I just hadn't seen the harm in giving Him a hand in the
matter.  I knew a little about rattlesnakes and I hadn't seen a one that
showed signs of listening to anybody.  And that was my problem.  I
always seemed to de-fang the serpent of faith before it had a chance to
canker.

Possibly this was good.  But I still didn't have anything else going.

#

Sourdough, shortly before his death, had given me a beautiful delft
pitcher and basin set.  I filled the basin, added some rosewater, a
little Oil of Persia and a dab of What The French Maid Wore, then patted
my face with a damp washcloth.

"Everything's a struggle in here, isn't it?" Cricket said.  "I find
myself wondering where the water came from."

"Everything's always been a struggle everywhere, my boy," I replied,
letting down the top of my chemise and washing my breasts and under my
arms.  "It's just that different people have struggled for different
things at different times."

"Water comes out of a tap, that's all I know."

"Don't pretend ignorance with me. Water comes from the rings of Saturn,
is boosted in slow orbits in the form of big chunks of dirty ice until
we catch it here and melt it.  Or it comes out of the air when we
re-process it, or the sewage when we filter it, then it's piped to your
home, then it comes out of the tap.  In my case, for the pipe substitute
a man who comes by once a week and fills my barrels."

"All I have to do with it is turning the tap."

I pointed to my tank sitting on the sink.  "So do I," I said.  I patted
myself dry and started rubbing cream on my skin.  "I know you're dying
to ask, so I'll tell you I bathe every third or fourth day at the hotel
in town.  All over; soap and everything.  And if what you've seen
horrifies you, wait till you need to relieve yourself."

"You're really into this, aren't you.  That's what I can't get over."

"Why all this sudden concern about my standard of living?"

That one seemed to make him uncomfortable, so we were quiet for a while,
until I had finished wiping off the cold cream.  I couldn't read his
expression well in the dim light, looking at him in the mirror.

"If you were going to say the people who live in here are losers, save
it, I've already heard that.  And I don't deny it."  I opened an oval
lacquered box, took out a powder puff, and started applying the stuff
until I sat in the center of a fragrant cloud.  On the side of the box
it said "Midnight in Paris."

"That's why you don't belong here," he said. "Hildy, you've still got
worlds to conquer.  You can't bury yourself in here, playing at being a
newspapergirl.  There's a real world out there."

In here, too, I might have said, but didn't.  I turned to face him, then
put the straps of my chemise back up over my shoulders.  It was more of
a long vest, really, made of yellow silk, snug at the waist.  In
addition to that I still had on my best silk stockings, held up by
garters, and maybe a trifle here and a whimsy there.  He crossed his
legs.

"You once accused me of being not so good at people.  You were right.
I'd known you for years, and didn't know you had a daughter, didn't know
a lot of things about you.  Cricket, there's things you don't know about
me.  I'm not going to get into them, it's my problem, not yours, but
believe me when I tell you that if I hadn't come here, I'd be dead by
now."

He looked dubious, but a little worried at the same time.  He started to
say something, but changed his mind.  His arms were crossed now, too,
one hand up and playing self-consciously with his mustache.

I reached behind me for the little purple vial of patchouli, dabbed a
bit behind my ears, between my breasts, between my thighs.  I got up and
walked by him--quite close by him--to the bed, where I pulled the big
comforter down to the foot, plumped up the pillows, and reclined with
one foot trailing onto the floor, the other on the bed. The girl in the
painting behind the bar at the Alamo is in an identical pose, though you
would have to call her plump.

I said, "Cricket, I haven't been in the big city for a while.  Maybe
I've forgotten how things are there.  But in Texas, it's considered
impolite to keep a lady waiting."

He got up, almost stumbled as he tried to get out of his shoes, then
gave that up and came into my arms.

#

Kitten Parker, the male manifestation, was nude, supine, cruciform.  I,
the female manifestation, was also nude, and in lotus position:
shoulders back, legs folded with the soles of my feet turned up on my
thighs, hands loose and palm-upward in my lap.  My knees stuck out to
the sides and my weight barely made an impression on his body--that's
right, I was impaled, as the porno writers sometimes put it.

Those writers wouldn't have been interested in this scene, however. We'd
been there, unmoving, for going on five hours.

It was called sex therapy and Kitten Parker was the leading proponent of
it.  In fact, he invented it, or at least refined it from earlier
versions. What it was, was a type of yoga, wherein I had been urged to
find my "spiritual center."  So far my best guess as to its location was
about five centimeters cervix-wards from the tip of his glans.

I found this frustrating.  I'd been finding it frustrating for going on
five hours.  See, I was supposed to find my center because I was the
yin, and because I was the novice.  His center wasn't material to the
exercise, he knew where his center was though he hadn't told me where
yet; maybe that was lesson two.  His contribution was to bring the
thrust of his enlightenment, also known as his yang, or glans, into
contact with my spiritual center, or rather I was apparently supposed to
lower the center down, since deeper penetration was clearly out of the
question.  Maybe what I was feeling wasn't my center at all, maybe it
was just a vaginal suburb, but it had taken me going on two hours just
to entertain the notion that maybe, possibly, that might be it, this
little place inside me that seemed to want to be massaged, and I wasn't
about to go searching for it again.

So I thought about that might-be-center, willed it to move.  It just
stayed right there.  I began to wonder if his yang was anywhere near as
sore as my yin was getting.  And if this whole thing would prove to be a
yawn.

Actually, the only center I really cared about was the one every woman
knows how to find without a road map from Kitten Parker:  the center of
sexual response, right up there in the cleft of the labia, the
little-girl-in-the-boat, and that little girl had been sitting there,
becalmed, hands on the oars, rowing her little single-minded heart out,
swollen and excited, for going on . . . well, just over six hours now
and the little slut was pouting and resenting the lack of attention and
had been for . . . yes . . . and she didn't like that one bit, no she
didn't, and she was just about to SCREEEEEAM!

CUT TO

INTERIOR - OFFICE OF THE PRIMALIST

Lots of ferns, lots of leather, violent paintings on the walls.  The
PRIMALIST faces her patient, HILDY, who, red-faced, watery-eyed, has had
just about all the therapy a person can stand.

HILDY

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

PRIMALIST

That's better, that's much better.  We're

starting to get through the layers of rage.

Now reach even deeper.

HILDY

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

PRIMALIST

No, no, you're back to the childhood

peevishness again.  Deeper, deeper!  From the

soul!

HILDY

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

PRIMALIST

(slaps HILDY's face)

You're really not trying.  You call that a

scream?  Ooooooh.  Sounds like a cow.  Again!

HILDY

YAAAH! YAAAH! YAAAAH! YAAAAAAA . . .

PRIMALIST

Don't give me that lost-your-voice crap.

You're giving up!  I won't let you give up!  I

can make you face the primal source.

(slaps HILDY again)

Now, once more, with--

HILDY kicks the PRIMALIST in the belly,

then knees her in the face.  The PRIMALIST goes

flying across the room and lands in the FERNS.

CUT TO

CLOSE SHOT - PRIMALIST

Who is bleeding from the nose and mouth and

is momentarily out of breath.

PRIMALIST

That's much better!  We're really getting

somewhere now . . . hey!  Where . . .

O.S. SOUND of footsteps: SOUND of a door

opening.  PRIMALIST looks concerned.

HILDY

(raggedly, receding)

AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaah . . . sh--

SOUND of door slamming.

FADE OUT

#

I passed out, right there on the thrust of Kitten's enlightenment.

I was only gone a few seconds, during which I re-lived a particularly
fruitless episode early in my Quest; sort of a comic within a comic.  I
really wish that Shouter, Screamin' Sabina, had had cojones.  My kick
would have been right in the spiritual center.

"What it was," I told Kitten as he helped me to my feet, "was the most
powerful orgasm of my life. Jesus, Kitten, I think you've got something
here. And this was only lesson one?  Man, sign me up!  I want to get
into the advanced classes right away. I never would have dreamed it was
possible to get off that way, much less such a . . . such an earthquake!
Wow!"

I fluttered on like that for a while, probably sounding a lot like I had
many, many years ago when I first discovered what that doohickey was
for, when a sign from the outside world finally penetrated the golden
haze of contentment.  Kitten was frowning.

"You weren't supposed to do that," he said. "The point is enlightenment,
not mere physical pleasures."

"Goodbye," I said.

#

At least Cricket didn't seem to mind if I pursued mere physical
pleasures.  It didn't take any five hours, either.  The first of many
came about five minutes after we began, him still fully dressed, pants
around his knees.  After that we settled down a bit and carried on far
into the night.

It was my first sex since Kitten Parker.  I hadn't even thought about it
in all that time.

I didn't pass out during any of the orgasms, but it was special in
another way.  When we finally seemed to be through, I was still wearing
most of what I'd gone to bed with, and there was a reason for that:
Cricket liked it.

So many of our words come from a time when, by all reports, sex was even
more screwed-up than it is today, unlikely as that seems.  Call it a
perversion?  Seems very judgmental to me, but then they called
masturbation self-abuse, and I don't even like the flavor of the word
masturbation. You can call it a fetish, a fixation.  A "sexual
preference," how's that for neutral?  Bland is more like it.  Call it
what you wish, we all like different things.  The Duke of Bosnia likes
pain, preferably with the teeth.  Fox liked tearing clothes off; Cricket
liked to have me leave them on.  He liked silk and satin and lace
"unmentionables," and he liked to watch me take a few of them off.

What made it special was that he hadn't known he liked that.  He hadn't
known much of anything. He was still a novice in this business of being
a man.  Helping him find it out about himself was a thrill for me, the
kind you don't get too often in this life.  I could only recall three
other instances and the last had been about seventy years ago.  By the
time you're fifty or so you're unlikely to discover a new preference in
yourself, or anybody else.

"I was beginning to think I really was a single- sexer," he said, when
it seemed we were finally through.  My head was tucked up beneath his
arm, that hand stroking slowly over the curve of my hip, him leaning
back, propped up on my best feather pillows, a cup of hot tea carefully
cradled on his belly.  I'd got up to brew the tea. He'd watched me the
whole time.  He took little sips now and then between his amazed sighs,
and I'd trained him to give me sips when I ran a nail over the line of
hair on his tummy.

"Something just clicked," he said.  I'd heard this line several times
already, but the sound of his voice was soothing me.  "It just clicked."

"Mmm-hmmm," I said.

"It just clicked.  I told you I'd been with women before.  It was fun. I
had a great time. Orgasms, the whole bit.  I liked being with women,
just about as much as being with men.  You know?"

"Mmm-hmmm," I said.

"But I haven't been having much luck with women since the Change.  It
just didn't seem very special, you know?  Not with guys, either, for
that matter, not like it was when I was female.  I was thinking about
Changing back. This thing just wasn't giving me much pleasure."  He
flicked his exhausted new toy with his thumb.  "You know?"

"Mmm-hmmm," I said, and shifted a little to put my cheek against his
chest.  If I'd had any complaint it was that, when flipping through the
Toys for Boys catalog, he'd ordered his from the extra-large column.  I
don't know why first-time Changers do that--they'd just been girls,
right? and they had to know that more is not better, that one size truly
does fit all--but I'd seen it happen many times before.  Some little
relay clicks, and when it's time to make the decision between hung and
hung!, a great many opt for the large economy size.  Strange are the
ways of the human mind, doubly so when it comes to sex.

"But something just clicked.  For the first time I looked at a female
body and I didn't just think 'Gosh, isn't she cute,' or 'She'd be fun to
have sex with,' or . . . or anything like that. It clicked, and I wanted
you.  I had to have you." He shook his head.  "Who can figure a thing
like that?"

I thought, who indeed, but I said "Mmm-hmmm." What I'd been thinking
before that was I could have a discreet word with him later, or maybe
have a friend plant the suggestion concerning excess yardage.  It had
been a minor complaint, no question, but there was also no question it
would be even better with more normal equipment, next time.

I was already thinking about the next time.

#

No more digressions, no more cutaways to Hildy's Quest.

None were any more enlightening than the handful I've detailed.  In
spite of that, I planned to keep on with my slog through the shabbier
neighborhoods of religion, philosophy, and therapy.  Why?  Well, the
answer might really be out there, somewhere.  Just because you've been
dealt a thousand hands of nothing much doesn't mean the next deal won't
turn up the Royal Flush. And I saw no reason why the "answer," if it
existed, should be any less likely to be with the kooks than with the
more respected, conventional snake-oil salesmen.  Hell, I knew something
about the established religions and philosophies, I'd been hearing about
them for a hundred years and they'd never given me anything.  That's why
I'd been going to the snake-handlers instead of the Flacks.

There was another reason.  While I did pretty well during the week, what
with the Texian and school to keep me busy, weekends were still pretty
shaky.  If I gave the impression that my Quest was being handled by a
tough, cynical, self-assured woman of the world, I gave the wrong
impression. Picture instead a ragged, wild-eyed, unkempt Seeker, jumping
at every loud noise, always alert for feelings of self-destruction she
wasn't even sure she'd recognize.  Picture a woman who had seen the
bullet flying toward her face, had felt the rope pull tight around her
neck, watched the blood flow over the bathroom floor.  We're talking
desperation here, folks, and it moved in and sprawled all over the sofa
every Friday evening, like the most unforgettable advertising jingle you
ever heard.

Maybe it was the Quest itself making me nervous?  I thought of that,
stayed home one weekend.  I didn't sleep at all, I just kept singing
that jingle.

The good news was my list of places to go, people to see, was a good
five years long now, and I was adding new discoveries at almost the same
rate I was crossing them off.  As long as there was one more whacko to
talk to, one more verse of Amazing Grace to sing in one more ramshackle
tabernacle, I felt I could hang on.

So maybe God was looking after me.  The chief danger seemed to be that
he might bore me to death before I was finished.

Our passions spent, Cricket's mouth finally having stopped telling me
how everything had just clicked, we lay quietly in each other's arms for
a long time, neither of us very sleepy.  He was still too wound up about
the new world that had opened to him, while I was thinking thoughts I
hadn't thought in a very long time.

He put his hand on my chin and I looked up at him.

"You really like it here, don't you?" he said.

I nuzzled into his chest.  "I like it here very much."

"No, I meant--"

"I know what you meant."  I kissed him on the neck, then sat up and
faced him.  "I've got a place here, Cricket.  I'm doing things I like.
The people in here may be losers, but I like them, and I like their
children.  They like me.  There's talk about running me for mayor of New
Austin.

"You're kidding."

I laughed.  "There's no way I'd take it.  A politician is the last thing
I'd want to be.  But I'm touched they thought of me."

"Well, I've got to admit the place seems to agree with you."  He patted
my belly.  "Looks like you're putting on some weight."

"Too much chili beans, Chinese food, and apple pie."  And way too much
Kitten Parker.  The bastard, telling me we weren't supposed to get any
pleasure out of it.

"I guess you've managed to surprise me," he said.  "I really thought you
were in trouble.  I still think maybe you are, but not the kind I
thought."  You don't know the half of it, babe, I thought.  "This place
seems to agree with you," he went on.  "I don't know when I've seen you
looking so happy, so . . . radiant."

"How long ago did you get your Change?"

"About a month."

"Some of that's your cock talking, idiot. Things are still colored for
you.  It's called lust."

"Could be.  But only part of it."  He glanced at his thumbnail.  "Uh . .
. listen, I hadn't planned to stay out the night--"

"You can go home if you want to."  You swine.

"No, I was wondering if I could stay over?  But I'll have to call the
sitter, I'm already late."

"You have a human sitter?"

"Only the best for my little Buster."

I kissed him and got up as he was making the call.  I took off the rest
of my clothes, hearing him whispering in the background.  Then I stepped
out onto the porch.

I hadn't been sleeping a lot.  Though the nights tend to be cold, I
often walked them like that, nude, in the moonlight.  Cricket was wrong
if he thought I was happy--the best I could claim was to be happier here
than anywhere else I could think of--and the nearest I came to happiness
was on these nocturnal rambles.  Sometimes I'd be out for hours, and
come back shivering and pile under the quilts.  In that snugness I was
usually able to drift off.

Tonight I couldn't stay gone long.  I noted there was enough moonlight
for Cricket to find his way to the outhouse, then hurried back inside.

He was already asleep .I went around dousing the lamps, then lit a
candle and carried it to the bed.  I sat down carefully, not wanting to
wake him, and just looked at his sleeping face there in the candlelight
for the longest time.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Bicentennial Commemoration of the Invasion of the Earth had to
qualify as the slickest public relations job of the century.  Back when
Walter first summoned me and Brenda to his office with his idea of a
series of Invasion stories I had laughed in his face.  Now, exactly one
year later, every politician in Luna was trying to claim the whole thing
was his idea.

But one man was responsible, and his name was Walter Editor.

Brenda and I played our small part.  The articles were well-received by
the public-- somewhere or other I've got a parchment from some civic
organization commending me for excellence in journalism for one of
them--was it the Kiwanis or the Elks?--but the ground had been prepared
for over a year by the P.R. firm Walter had hired at his own expense. By
the time of Silvio's assassination sentiment was growing for a public
display.  You couldn't call it a celebration, it hadn't been a proud day
in human history.  It had to include a memorial for the billions of
dead, that was certain.  The tone of the thing should be one of sadness
and resolve, all seemed to agree. If you asked them what was being
resolved--the recapture of Earth and extermination of the Invaders, is
that what you had in mind?--you got an uncomfortable shrug in reply, but
dammit, we ought to be resolute!  Hell, why not?  Resolution doesn't
cost anything.

But the commemoration was going to.  It kept snowballing with nary a
voice raised against it (Walter's fine hand again), until by the time
the Great Day arrived every pisspot enclave in Luna was holding some
kind of shindig.

Even in Texas, where we avoid as much outside news as we can, they were
having a barbecue as big as Alamo Day.  I was sorry I was going to be
missing it, but I'd promised Brenda I'd go with her, and besides . . .
Cricket was going to be there.

Yes, dear hearts, Hildy was in love.  Please hold your applause until I
can determine if the feeling is mutual.

#

All the Eight Worlds were commemorating the day; Pluto and Mars had
actually created a permanent yearly holiday to be known as Invasion Day,
and the betting was that Luna would soon follow suit.  And Luna, being
the most populous planet, hated to follow any of the seven worlds in
anything and so, being the most populous planet and the Refuge of
Humanity as well as the Front- Line Planet and the Bulwark of the
Race--not to mention the First to Get Our Asses Whipped if the Invaders
ever decided to continue what they started . . . Luna being all that,
and more, had determined to put on the biggest and bestest of all the
eight festivals, and King City being the largest city in Luna made it
seem a natural site for the planet-wide Main Event, and Armstrong Park
being over twenty times the size of the vanished Walt Disney Universe,
it just seemed to follow that the thing ought to be held there, and that
was where I was going that fine Solar Evening when all I really wanted
to do was stroll down Congress Street, Cricket on my arm, and eat cotton
candy and maybe bob for apples.

And hey, sure it wasn't a celebration, but what's a holiday without
fireworks?

That's the only reason I'd agreed to go, Brenda's promise that I could
see the whole thing a safe distance from the madding crowds.  The
fireworks themselves didn't scare me; I liked fireworks, hated crowds of
strangers.

The tube trip almost killed me, though.  We'd deliberately decided to
start out quite early to avoid the crush on the tubes, but what one
genius can think up, another can duplicate, so the trains were already
jammed with people who'd had the same idea.  Worse, these were people
planning to rough it on the surface, away from the eight gigantic
temporary domes set up for the show, so they had brought their camping
gear.  The aisles and overhead racks were piled high with luggage carts,
beer coolers, inflatable five-room tents, and 3.4 children per family.
It got so bad they started hanging small children from the overhead
straps, where they dangled and giggled.  Then it got worse.  The train
stopped taking passengers long before it arrived at Armstrong.  My stop
was three short of the park, and I soon saw there would be no point in
fighting my way out, so I rode it to the end of the line--gaped in
horror at the masses already assembled there--was disgorged by an
irresistible human tide, then re-boarded and rode it back, empty, to
Dionysius Station.

Where I sat down on a bench, my suit and picnic hamper beside me, and
just shook for a while, and watched about a dozen human sardine cans
rumble by in one direction and a like number return.  Then I grabbed my
gear and went up the stairs to the surface.

After returning from my frolics with the Alphans, I'd found my suit on
the foot of my bed in my cabin.  I don't know who brought it there. But
I didn't want it anymore, so one Saturday I took it back to the shop,
meaning to have them fix the faceplate and sell it on consignment.  The
salesman took one look at the hole and before I had a chance to explain
I was being ushered into the manager's office and he promptly fainted
dead away.  None of them had ever seen a broken faceplate before.  So I
shut up, and soon found myself in possession of their top-of-the-line
model, plus five years of free air, courtesy Hamilton's Outdoor
Outfitters.  I made no demands and was asked to sign no disclaimers;
they simply wanted me to have it.  They're probably still chewing their
knuckles, waiting for the lawsuit.

I climbed into this engineering wonder, and that special new-suit aroma
went a long way toward calming me down.  I'd worried it might stir
entirely different associations--how about that cute point-of-view shot
of a piece of the faceplate tumbling away?--but instead the low whirs
and hums and the pure luxurious feel of the thing did wonders.  Too bad
they won't let you wear suits in the tube; with this on, I could have
handled anything.

Checking the pressure seals on the hamper, I walked into the lock and
out onto the surface.

#

"You been waiting long?" I asked.

"Couple hours," Brenda said.

She was leaning on the side of her rental rover, which she'd driven all
the way from a suburb of King City, the nearest place you could rent
one.  I apologized for being so late, told her of the nightmare in the
train, how I wished I'd come with her instead of "saving time" by tubing
out.

"Don't worry about it," she said.  "I like it out here."

I could already tell that, mostly by looking at her suit.  It was a good
one, had no rental logo on it, and though in perfect shape, showed signs
of use it couldn't have acquired unless she regularly spent time in it.
Also by the easy way she stood and moved in it, something most Lunarians
never get enough suit time to achieve.

The rover was a good one, too.  It was a pick- up model, two seats side
by side, a flat bed in back where I tossed my hamper along with her much
bigger pile of things.  They have a wide wheelbase to compensate for
being so top-heavy with the big solar panel above, which swings to
constantly present itself to the sun.  The sun being almost at the
horizon just then, the vehicle was at its most awkward, with the panel
hanging out to the right side, perpendicular to the ground.  I had to
crawl over Brenda's seat to get to mine because the panel blocked the
door.

"I forget," I said, as I settled myself in the open seat.  "Will we be
going into the sun to get there?"

"Nope.  South for a while, then we'll have the sun at our backs."

"Good."  I hated riding behind the panel.  It's not that I didn't trust
the autopilot; I just liked to see where I was going.

She told the rover to giddyup, and it did, right along the broad, smooth
highway.  Which is why we'd chosen Dionysius Station in the first place,
because it's right on one of the scarce surface roads on Luna, which is
not a place where the wheeled vehicle was ever a primary mode of
transport.  People move on elevators, escalators, beltways, maglev/tube
trains, the occasional hoverbus.  Goods go by the same ways, plus
pneumomail tubes, linac free-trajectory, and rocket.  Recently there'd
been something of a fad in wheeled surface rovers, two- and
four-wheeled, but they were all-terrain and quite rugged, no roads
needed.

The road we were on was a relic from a mining operation abandoned before
I was born.  From time to time we passed the derelict hulks of ore
carriers at the side of the road, mammoth things, not looking much
different from the day they'd been stripped and left there.  Some
economic vagary of the time had made it a better idea to actually smooth
out a road surface for them.  Then the road had been used for another
half century as the conduit between King City and its primary dumping
ground.  It was still glass-smooth, and quite a novel way to travel.

"This sucker moves right along, doesn't it?" I said.

"It'll reach three hundred kay on the straightaways," Brenda said.  "But
it's gotta slow way down for the curves, especially ones to the left."
That was because the rover's center of gravity was at its worst at
sunrise and sunset, with the big panel canted on its side, she
explained.  Also, the banking of the road was not great, and since we
were going to be staying out after dark, she'd had to carry ten
batteries, which added a lot to our inertia and could easily make us
skid off the road, since the tire traction wasn't as much as she'd
prefer.  She told me all this with the air of someone who'd done this
many times before, someone who knew her machine.  I wondered if she
could drive it.

I got my answer when we turned off the road, and she asked if I minded.
Actually, I did--we're not used to putting our lives in other people's
hands, only into the hands of machines--but I said I didn't.  And I
needn't have worried.  She drove with a sure hand, never did anything
stupid, never overcontrolled.  We took off across the plains toward the
rising rim of Delambre, just becoming visible over the horizon.

When we reached the bottom of the slope a Black Maria landed in front of
us, blue lights flashing. A cop got out and came over to us.  He must
have been bored, since he could have used his radio, or simply
interrogated our computer.

"You're entering a restricted area, ma'am," he said.

Brenda showed him the pass Liz had given her and he examined it, then
her.

"Didn't I see you on the tube?" he asked, and she said he might have,
and he said sure, you were on the such-and-such show, now how about
that?  He said he'd loved it and she said aw, shucks, and by the time he
finally let us go he'd been flirting so outrageously I'm convinced we
hadn't needed the pass at all.  He actually asked for her autograph, and
she actually gave it.

"I thought he was going to ask for your phone code," I said, when he'd
finally lifted off.

"I thought I was going to give it to him," she said, and grinned at me.
"I keep thinking I ought to give guys a try."

"You could do better than that."

"Not since you Changed."  She jammed in the throttle and we sprayed dust
behind us as we charged up the rounded rim of the crater.

#

Delambre isn't a huge crater like Clavius or Pythagoras or any number of
celestial bullet holes on the farside, but it's big enough.  When you're
standing on the rim you can't see the other side. That's plenty big for
me.

Still, it would look just like a hundred others except for one thing:
the junkyard.

We re-cycle a lot of things on Luna.  We have to; our own natural
resources are fairly meager. But we're still a civilization driven by a
market economy.  Sometimes cheap and plentiful power and the low cost of
boosting bulk raw materials in slow orbits combine to make it just too
damn much trouble and not cost-effective to sort through and re-process
a lot of things.  Fortunes have been lost when a bulk carrier arrives
with X million tonnes of Whoosisite from the mines on Io, having been in
secret transit for thirty years disguised and listed as an Oort comet.
Suddenly the bottom falls out of the market for Whoosisite, and before
you know it you can't give the stuff away and it's being carted out to
Delambre by the hundred-tonne bucketload.  To that add the
twenty-thousand-year half-life radioactives in drums guaranteed to last
five centuries.  Don't forget to throw in obsolete machines, some
cannibalized for this or that, others still in working order but
hopelessly slow and not worth taking apart.  Abandon all that stuff out
there, and salt in that ceramic horror you brought home to Mom from
school when you were eight, that stack of holos you kept for seventy
years and can't even remember who's in them, plus similar treasures from
millions of other people. Top it with all the things you can't find a
use for from every sewage outflow in Luna, mixed with just enough water
so it'll flow through a pipe. Bake on high for fourteen days, freeze for
fourteen more; continue doing that for two hundred years, adding more
ingredients to taste, and you've created the vista that met us from the
lip of Delambre.

The crater's not actually full, it just looks that way from the west
rim.

"Over there," Brenda said.  "That's where I said I'd meet Liz."

I saw a speck on the horizon, also sitting on the rim.

"How about letting me drive?" I asked.

"You can drive?"  It wasn't an unreasonable question; most Lunarians
can't.

"In my wild youth, I drove the Equatorial Race. Eleven thousand klicks,
very little of it level." No point in adding I'd blown the transmission
a quarter of the way through.

"And I was lecturing you on how to handle a rover.  Why don't you ever
shut me up, Hildy?"

"Then I'd lose half of my amusing stories."

I switched the controls over to the British side of the car and took
off.  It had been many years since I'd driven.  It was lots of fun.  The
rover had a good suspension; I only left the ground two or three times,
and the gyros kept us from turning over.  When I saw her gripping the
dash I throttled back.

"You'd never make a race driver.  This is smooth."

"I never wanted to be a race driver.  Or a corpse."

#

"I feel like a Girl Scout," I told Brenda as I helped her spread out the
tent.

"What's wrong with that?  I earned all the surface pioneering merit
badges."

"Nothing wrong.  I was one, too, but that was ninety years ago."

She wasn't nearly that far removed from scouting, and she still took it
seriously.  Where I'd have just pulled the rip cord and let it go at
that, she was a fanatic about saving energy, and ran a line from the
rover's solar panel to the tent's power supply, as if the reactor
wouldn't last a fortnight on its own.  When the tent was arranged to her
satisfaction she pulled the cord and it shuddered and flopped as it
filled with air, and in ten seconds we had a five-meter transparent
hemisphere . . . which promptly frosted up inside.

She got on her knees and crawled into the igloo- type lock and I zipped
it behind her to save her squirming around, and she told me this model
had automatic zippers, so there had been progress since my childhood.
She fiddled with the air controls while I stacked blankets and pillows
and thermoses and the rest of our gear in the lock-- got to get it
well-packed, don't want to waste air by cycling the lock too much--then
I stood around outside while she brought it all in and got the
temperature and pressure and humidity adjusted. When I got in and took
off my helmet it was still on the cool side.  I wrote my name in the
frost like I remembered doing on long-ago camping trips; it soon melted,
and the dew was absorbed . . . and the dome seemed to vanish.

"It's been too long," I said.  "I'm glad you brought me here."

For once she knew exactly what I meant.  She stopped her fussing around
and stood with me and we just looked around without saying anything.

Any beauty on Luna is going to be a harsh sort of beauty.  There's
nothing benevolent or comforting to see anywhere--much like West Texas.
This was the best way to see it, in a tent invisible to our eyes, as if
we were standing on a black circular pad of plastic with nothing between
us and vacuum.

It was also the best time of day to see it; the Lunar Day, I mean.  The
sun was very close to the horizon, the shadows were almost infinitely
long. Which helped, because half our vista was of the biggest garbage
dump on the planet.  There's a funny thing about shadows like that.  If
you've never seen snow, go to Pennsylvania the next time they've
scheduled it and watch how snow can transform the most mundane--even
ugly--scene into a magical landscape.  Sunlight on the surface is like
that.  It's hard and bright as diamond, it blasts everything it touches
and yet it does no damage; nothing moves, the billion facets of dark and
light make every ordinary object into a hard- edged jewel.

We didn't look west; the light was too dazzling.  To the south we saw
the rolling land falling away to our right, the endless heaps of garbage
to the left.  East was looking right out over Delambre, and north was
the hulk of the Robert A. Heinlein, almost a mile of derelict
might-have-been starship.

"You think they'll have any trouble finding us?" Brenda asked.

"Liz and Cricket?  I wouldn't think so.  Not with the old Heinlein over
there.  How could you miss it?"

"That's what I thought, too."

We set about little domestic chores, inflating the furniture, spreading
a few rugs.  She showed me how to set up the curtain that turned the
tent into two not-very-private rooms, how to operate the little
campstove.  While we were doing that, the show began.  Not to worry; it
was going to be a long show.

I had to admit the artistic director had done well.  This was to be a
commemoration of the billions dead on Earth, right?  And at the latitude
of Armstrong Park, the Earth would be directly overhead, right?  And if
you start the show at sundown, you'll have a half-Earth in the sky.  So
why not make the Earth the center and theme of your sky show?

By fudging just a little you can begin the show when the old
International Dateline is facing Luna.  Now picture it:  as the Earth
turns, one by one the vanished nations of Old Earth emerge into the
sunlight of a new day.  And as each one appears . . .

We were bathed in the red light of the flag of the Siberian Republic, a
rectangle one hundred kilometers long, hanging above us at a height
sufficient to blot out half the sky.

"Wow," Brenda said.  Her mouth was hanging open.

"Double wow," I said, and closed my own mouth. The flag hung there
almost a minute, burning brightly, then sputtered out.  We hurried to
get Brenda's boombox turned on, hung the big speakers on each side of
the tent, and were in time to hear the opening strains of "God Defend
New Zealand" as the Kiwi flag unfurled above us.

That's how it was to be for eighteen hours.

When Liz arrived she told us how it was done. The flag was a mesh
construction stuffed into a big container and blasted up from one of the
pyro bases, in Baylor-A, about forty klicks south of us, and Hyapatia
and Torricelli, to the east. When the shell reached the right height it
burst and rockets spread it out and it was set afire by radio control.
Neat.

How do fireworks burn in a vacuum?  Don't ask me.  But I know rocket
fuels carry an oxidizer, so I guess it was some chemical magic like
that. However they did it, it knocked our socks off, me and Brenda, no
more than fifty clicks from the big firebase in Baylor, much closer than
the poor hicks in Armstrong, who probably thought they were getting one
heck of a show.  And who cares if, from our vantage, the flags were
distorted into trapezoids?  I sure didn't.

Brenda turned out to be a fountain of information about the show.

"They didn't figure it made sense to give a country like Vanuatu equal
time with, say, Russia," she said (we were looking at the ghastly flag
of Vanuatu at the time, listening to its improbable national anthem).
"So the major countries, ones with a lot of history, they'll get more of
a pageant.  Like the Siberian Republic used to be part of some other
country--"

"The U.S.S.R.," I supplied.

"Right.  Says so right here."  She had a massive souvenir program spread
out before us. "So they'll do more flags for that--the Tsarist flag,
historical stuff--"

"--and play the 'Internationale.'"

"--and folk themes, like what we heard from New Zealand."

They were telling us most of that on a separate radio channel, giving a
history of each country, pitched at an illiterate level.  I turned it
off, preferring just the music, and Brenda didn't object.  I'd have
turned off the television, too-- Brenda had pasted a big screen to the
south side of the tent--but she seemed to enjoy the scenes of revelry
from Armstrong and all the other celebrations in all the major Lunar
cities, so what the hell.

Get out an Earth globe and you'll quickly spot the major flaw in the
Earth-rotational program. For the first six hours only a few dozen
countries will swing into view.  Even if you give the entire history of
China and Japan, there's going to be some gaps to fill, and how much can
you say about Nauru and the Solomon Islands?  On the other hand, when
dawn broke over Africa and Europe the pyrotechs were going to be busier
than a one- legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Not to worry.  When they ran out of flags, that's when they trotted out
the heavy artillery.

From the first appearance of that red ensign, the sky was never dark.

There were the conventional shells, starbursts in all the colors of the
rainbow.  Without air to impede their flight they could be placed with
pinpoint precision--one thing Lunarians understand is ballistics.  They
were also perfectly symmetrical, for the same reason.

You want more?  In the vacuum, it was possible to produce effects never
seen on Earth.  Huge gas canisters could produce a thin atmosphere,
locally, temporarily, upon which tricks of ionization could be played.
We were treated to auroral curtains, washes of color in which the entire
sky turned blue or red or yellow, then flickered magically.  Shrapnel
shells filled the sky with spinning discs no bigger than a coin, which
were then swept by searchlights to twinkle as no stars ever had on Luna,
then exploded by lasers.

Still not satisfied?  How about a few nukes? Brenda's program said there
would be over one hundred special fission shells, an average of one
every ten minutes for the duration of the show. These were detonated in
orbit and used to propel literally thousands of regular pyro shells into
bursts over a thousand klicks wide.  The first one went off at the end
of the Vanuatu National Anthem, and it rattled our teeth, and then it
went on exploding, and exploding, and exploding. Glorious!

And don't think I didn't hear that!  You're complaining that sound
doesn't travel in a vacuum. Of course it doesn't, but radio waves do,
and you obviously never listened to Brenda's top-of-the- line boombox
cranked up to full volume.  Those poor folks who watch fireworks in an
atmosphere have to wait for the sound to arrive, too, and they get a
chance to brace for it; we got it instantaneously, no warning, a flash
of hurting light and a ka-BOOOOOOOM!

Sometimes wretched excess is the only thing that will do.

#

"They say this place is haunted."

We'd just been treated to the national anthem of Belau and its flag had
faded from the sky (a big yellow circle on a blue field, if you're
keeping score at home), and two things had dawned on us.  One, you need
a breather from wretched excess from time to time, or it gets . . .
well, wretched.  Between us we'd emitted not even one "wow" at the last
three nukes, and I was thinking of suggesting we switch to Top 40 for an
hour or so.  Somehow I thought I could survive missing the playing of
Negara Ku (My Country; Mayalsia) and Sanrasoen Phra Barami ("Hail to our
King! Blessings on our King!  Hearts and minds we bow/ To Your Majesty
now!" words by H.R.H. Prince Narisaranuvadtivongs).  And two, Liz and
Cricket were three hours late.

"Who's they?" I asked, munching on a drumstick of Hildy's Finest WesTex
Fried Chicken.  Hunger had overcome the demands of politeness; Brenda
had miked a few pieces, and the hell with Liz and Cricket.  I was eyeing
the beer cooler as well, but neither of us wanted to get too much of a
head start.

"You know," she said.  "'They."  Your primary news source."

"Oh, that 'they.'"

"Seriously, though, I've heard from several people who've come out to
visit the old Heinlein. They say they've seen ghosts."

"Walter put you up to this, didn't he," I said.

"I've talked to him about it.  He thinks there may be a story in it."

"Sure there is, but there's no need to come out here and interview a
spook.  That kind of story, you just make it up.  Walter must have told
you that."

"He did.  But this isn't your ordinary filler story, Hildy, I mean it.
The people I interviewed, some of them were scared."

"Give me a break."

"I've been coming out here and bringing a good camera.  I thought I
might get a picture."

"Come on.  What do you think the Nipple's photo department is for?
Dummying up just that kind of pic, that's what."

She didn't say anything about it for a while, and we watched several
more ghost flags in the sky.  I found myself eyeing the Heinlein.  And
no, I'm not superstitious, just godawful curious.

"Is that why you've been camping out so much?" I asked.  "The story's
not worth it."

"Camping . . . oh, no," and she laughed.  "I've camped out a lot all my
life.  I find if very . . . peaceful out here."

Another long silence went by, or as silent as it could be with nukes
exploding outside and her boombox turned down to a low rumble.  At last
she got up and walked to stand by the invisible plastic wall of the
tent.  She leaned her head against it.  And by the rockets red glare,
she told me something I'd have been a lot happier not hearing.

"Ever since I met you," she began, "I've thought I could tell you
something I've never told anybody else.  Not a soul."  She looked at me.
"If you don't want to hear it, please say so now, 'cause if I get
started I don't think I'll be able to stop."

If you could have told her to shut up, I don't want to know you.  I
didn't need this, I didn't want it, but when a friend asks something
like that of you, you say yes, that's all there is to it.

"Make it march," I said, and glanced at my watch.  "I don't want to miss
the Laotian National Anthem."

She smiled, and looked back out over the landscape.

"When you first met me . . . well, later, that first time I came out to
Texas to see you, you probably noticed something unusual about me."

"You're probably referring to your lack of genitalia.  I'm observant
that way."

"Yes.  Did you ever wonder about it."

Had I?  Not much actually.  "Ah . . . I guess I thought it was something
religious, or cultural, something your parents believed.  I remember
thinking it wasn't a nice thing to do to a child, but not my business."

"Yes.  Not a nice thing to do.  And it did have to do with my parents.
With my father."

"I don't know a lot about fathers," I said, still hoping she'd change
her mind.  "I'm like most; mom never told me who he was."

"I knew mine.  He lived with me and my mother. He started raping me when
I was about six.  I've never had the nerve to ask my mother if she knew
about it, I didn't even know there was anything wrong with it, I thought
it was what I was supposed to do."  Standing there, looking out at the
surface, the words spilling out of her but calm, calm, no hint of tears.
"I don't know how I learned it wasn't something my friends did, maybe I
started to talk about it and picked up something, some attitude, some
beginning of horror, something that made me shut up about it to this
day.  But it went on for years and I thought about turning him in, I
know that's what you're wondering, why didn't I do it, but he was my
father and he loved me and I thought I loved him. But I was ashamed of
us, and when I turned twelve I went and had . . . it . . . removed,
closed up, eradicated so he couldn't put it in me anymore, and I know
now the Minor's Referee who let me get it done in spite of dad's
objections had figured out what was going on because she kept saying I
should bring charges, but all I wanted was for him to stop.  And he did,
he never touched me from that day on, hardly spoke to me, for that
matter. So I don't know why it is that some females prefer the company
of other females, but that's why for me, it's because I can't deal with
males, only when I met you, well, not too long after I met you, I fell
badly, madly in love with you.  Only you were a boy, which drove me
crazy.  Please don't worry about it, Hildy, I've got it under control, I
know there's things that just can't happen, and you and me are one of
them.  I've heard you talking about Cricket and I ought to be jealous
because she and I were making love, but it was just for fun, and besides
Cricket's a boy now, too, and I wish you all the happiness.  So my
secret's out, and another one is I arranged it so you and I would be
alone for a little while out here, the place I always come, always came
when I wanted to get away from him.  This is rotten and I know it, but
I've thought about it a long time and I can live with it.  I won't cry
and I won't beg, but I'd like to make love to you just one time.  I know
you're hetero, everyone I've talked to says that about you, but what I'm
hoping is it's just a preference, you're a Changer, you've made love to
women before, but maybe it's something you can't do when you're female.
Or maybe you don't want to or think it's a bad idea, and that's fine,
too.  I just had to ask, that's all.  I know I sound real needy but I'm
not, not that way; I'll live either way, and I hope we'll still be
friends, either way.  There.  I didn't know if I'd have the guts to say
it all, but I did, and I feel better already."

I have a short list of things I never do, and right near the top is
surrendering to emotional blackmail.  If there's a worse kind of sex
than the charity fuck, I haven't heard about it.  And her words could be
read as the worst kind of whipped-puppy appeal and dammit, okay, she did
have a right to act like a whipped puppy but I hate whipped puppies, I
want to kick them for letting themselves be whipped . . . only the words
didn't come out like that, not out of that straight-backed, dry-eyed
beanpole over there against the blazing sky.  She'd grown since I met
her, and I thought this was part of the growth. Why she'd picked me to
unload on I don't know, but the way she'd done it flattered me rather
than obligated me.

So I told her no.  Or would have, in a perfect world where I actually
follow my short list of things I never do.  What I did instead was get
up and put my arms around her from behind and say:

"You handled that very well.  If you'd cried, I'd have kicked your butt
all the way to King City."

"I won't cry.  Not about that, not anymore. And not when it's over."

And she didn't.

#

Brenda had arranged for our moment of privacy by not telling me Cricket
had been assigned to cover the festivities at Armstrong Park.  After our
little romantic interlude--quite pleasant, thanks for asking--she
confessed her ruse, and also that he was going to play hooky after the
first few hours and should be arriving any minute, so let's get dressed,
okay?

I can't imagine why I worried about getting a head start on Liz.  She
got a head start on all of us, drinking on her way out to Armstrong and
all the way back, as if Cricket needed any more causes for alarm.

She came barreling across the dunes in a four- wheel Aston Assbuster,
model XJ, with a reaction engine and a bilious tangerine-flake paint
job. This was the baby with four-point jets for boosting over those
little potholes you sometimes find on Luna--say, something about the
size of Copernicus.  It couldn't actually reach orbit, but it was a near
thing.  She had decorated it with her usual understated British good
taste: holographic flames belching from the wheel wells, a whip antenna
with a raccoon tail on the tip, a chrome-plated oversize skull sitting
out front whose red eyes blinked to indicate turns.

This apparition came skidding around the Heinlein and headed straight
for us.  Brenda stood and waved her arms frantically and I had time to
ponder how thin a soap bubble a Girl Scout tent really was before Liz
hit the brakes and threw a spray of powdered green cheese against the
tent wall.

She was out before the fuzzy dice stopped swinging, and ran around to
the left side to unbelt Cricket, who'd strapped himself tight enough to
risk gangrene of the pelvis.  She picked him up and stuffed him in the
airlock, where he seemed to come to his senses.  He crawled inside the
tent, but instead of standing he just hunkered there and I began to be
concerned.  I helped him off with his helmet.

"Cricket's a little under the weather," Liz said, over Cricket's suit
radio.  "I thought I ought to get him inside quick."

I realized he was saying something so I put my ear close to his lips and
he was muttering I think I'm gonna be okay, over and over, like a
mantra. Brenda and I got him seated, where he soon regained some color
and a passing interest in his surroundings.

We were getting a little water into him when Liz came through the lock,
pushing a Press-U- Kennel in front of her.  At last Cricket came alive,
springing to his feet and letting fly with an almost incoherent string
of curses.  No need to quote; Cricket wouldn't be proud of it, he feels
curses should be crafted rather than hurled, but he was too upset for
that now.

"You maniac!" he shouted.  "Why the hell wouldn't you slow down?"

"'Cause you told me you were getting sick.  I figured I better get you
here quick as I could."

"I was sick because you were going so fast!" But then the fight drained
out of him and he sat down, shaking his head.  "Fast?  Did I say fast?
We came all the way from Armstrong, and I think she touched ground four
times."  He explored his head with his fingers.  "No, five times, I
count five lumps.  She'd just look for a steep crater wall and say
'Let's see can we jump over this sucker,' and the next thing I knew we'd
be flying."

"We were moving along," Liz agreed.  "I figure our shadow ought to be
catching up with us about now."

"'Thank god for the gyros,' I said.  You remember I said that?  And you
said 'What gyros? Gyros are for old ladies.'"

"I took 'em off," Liz told us.  "That way you get more practice using
the steering jets.  Come on, Cricket, you--"

"I'm going back with you guys," Cricket said. "No way I'm ever riding
with that crazy person again."

"We only have two seats," Brenda said.

"Strap me to the fender, I don't care.  It couldn't be worse than what I
just went through."

"I think that calls for a drink," Liz said.

"You think everything calls for a drink."

"Doesn't it?"

But before going out to bring in her portable bar she took the time to
release her--what else?-- English bulldog, Winston, from the kennel.  He
came lumbering out, revising all my previous notions of the definition
of ugly, and promptly fell in love with me.  More precisely, with my
leg, which he started humping with canine abandon.

It could have spoiled the beginning of a wonderful relationship--I like
a little more courtship, thank you--but luckily and against all odds he
was well-trained, and a swift kick from Liz discouraged him short of
consummation.  After that he just followed me around, snuffling, mooning
at me with his bloodshot, piggy eyes, going to sleep every time I sat
down.  I must admit, I took a shine to him.  To prove it, I fed him all
my leftover chicken bones.

#

Eighteen hours is a long time for a party, but there is a certain type
of person with a perverse urge not to be the first to call it quits. All
four of us were that type of person.  We were going to stick it out, by
god, right through to the playing of the Guatemalan National Anthem
("Guatemala, blest land, home of happy race,/ May thine altars profaned
be never;/ No yoke of slavery weigh on thee ever/ Nor may tyrants e'er
spit in thy face!").

(Yes, I looked at the globe, too, and if you think the whole planet was
going to stay up six hours for the national hymn of Tonga, you're
crazier than we were.  Tonga got in her licks just after Western Samoa.)

No one was going to catch up with Liz, but we were soon matching her,
and after a while Cricket even forgot he was mad at her.  Things got a
bit hazy as the celebration wore on.  I can't actually remember much
after the Union Jack blazed in all its Britannic majesty.  I remember
that one mainly because Liz had been nodding out, and Brenda got me and
Cricket to stand when "God Save the Queen" began to play, and we sang
the second verse, which goes something like this:

#

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter her enemies,

And make them fall:

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix:

God save us all!

#

"God save us all, indeed," Cricket said.

"That's the most beautiful thing I ever heard," Liz sobbed, with the
easy tears of the veteran drunk.  "And I think Winston needs to go
wee-wee."

The mutt did seem in some distress.  Liz had given him a bowl or two of
Guinness and I, after the chicken bones had no visible effect, had plied
him with everything from whole jalapen~os to the bottlecaps from Liz's
home brew.  I'd seen Cricket slip him a few of the sausages we'd been
roasting over the holographic campfire.  All in all, this was a dog in a
hurry.  He was running in tight circles scratching at the airlock
zipper.

Turned out the monster was perhaps too well trained.  He flatly refused
to do his business indoors, according to Liz, so we all set about
stuffing him into his pressure suit.

Before long we were all reduced to hysterical laughter, the sort where
you actually fall on the floor and roll around and start worrying about
your own bladder.  Winston wanted to cooperate, but as soon as we'd get
his hind legs into the suit he'd start bouncing around in his eagerness
and end up with the whole thing bunched around his neck.  So Cricket
scratched his back, which made the dog hold still and arch himself and
lick his nose and we'd get his front legs in and maybe one of his back
legs, and then he'd start that reflexive back leg jerking they do, and
all was lost again.  When we did get all four legs into the right holes
he thought it was time, and we had to chase him and hold him down to get
his air bottle strapped to his back, and at the last moment he took a
dislike to his helmet and tried to eat it--this was a dog who made short
work of steel bottlecaps, remember--and we had to put on a spare seal
and test it before we finally screwed him in tight, shoved him in the
lock, and cycled it.

Whereupon we laughed even harder at the spectacle of Winston running
from rock to rock lifting a leg for a squirt here and a dribble there,
blissfully unaware that it was all going into the waste pouch through
the hose Liz had fastened to his doggie dingus with a rubber band. Yes,
folks, I said doggie dingus:  that's the level of humor we'd been
reduced to.

#

Later, I remember that Brenda and Liz were napping.  I showed Cricket
the wondrous curtain that turned the tent into two rooms.  But he didn't
get it, and suggested we suit up and take a walk outside.  I was game,
though it probably wasn't real wise considering I spent almost a minute
trying to get my right foot into the left leg of my suit.  But the
things are practically foolproof.  If Winston could handle one, I
reasoned, how much trouble could I get into?

So who should come trotting up as soon as we emerged?  I might have been
in one sort of trouble right there, since he seemed to feel all bets
were off now that Liz was sleeping, but after pressing his helmet to my
leg and trying to sniff it and getting no results he sulked along behind
us, probably wondering why everything out here smelled of plexi and dog
slobber.

I really don't want to sound too gay here, switching from that time with
Brenda to the hi- jinx of the Queen and her Consort.  But that's the way
it happened; you can't arrange your life to provide a consistent
dramatic line, like a film script.  It had rocked me, and I had no
notion of how to deal with it except to hold Brenda and hope that maybe
she would cry.  I still don't.

My god.  The horror that exists all around us, unnoticed.

I said something like that to her, with the half-formed feeling that
maybe it would be good for her to approach it as a reporter.

"Did you ever wonder," I said, "why we spend all our time looking into
these trivial stories, when stories like that are waiting to be told?"

"Like what?" she said, drowsily.  To be frank, it hadn't been all that
great for me, it never is with homosex, but she seemed to have enjoyed
herself and that was the important part.  You can always tell. Something
glowed.

"Like what happened to you, dammit.  Wouldn't you think, in this day and
age, that we'd have put that sort of . . . of thing behind us?"

"I hate it when people say 'in this day and age."  What's so special
about it?  As opposed to, for instance, the day and age of the
Egyptians?"

"If you can name even one of the Pharaohs I'll eat this tent."

"You're not going to make me mad, Hildy."  She touched my face, looked
in my eyes, then nestled against my neck.  "You don't need to, don't you
see that? this is the first and last time we'll ever be intimate.  I
know intimacy frightens you, but you don't need--"

"It does not fr--"

"Besides, give me another, oh, eighty-three years and I'll recite every
Pharaoh from Akhenaton to Ramses."

"Ouch."

"It was in the program book.  But this day and age is the only one I
know right now, and I don't know why you should think it's any different
from the day and age you grew up in.  Were there child molesters back
then?"

"You mean the early Neolithic?  Yeah, there were."

"And you thought the steady march of progress would eliminate them any
day now."

"It was a foolish thought.  But it is a good story."

"You've been away from the Nipple too long, jerk.  It's a terrible
story.  Who'd want to read a depressing story like that?  I mean, that
there's still child molesters?  Everybody knows that.  That's for
sociologists, bless 'em.  Now one story, one really gruesome one, that's
news. My story is just a stat in the Sunday Supplement grinder; you can
put it on file and run it once a year, they'll all have forgotten it by
then."

"You sound so much like me it's scary."

"You know it, babe.  People read the Nipple to get a little spice in
their lives.  They want to be titillated.  Angered.  Horrified.  They
don't want to be depressed.  Walter's always talking about The End Of
The World, how we'd cover it. Hell, I'd put it on the back page.  It's
depressing."

"You amaze me."

"I'll tell you what.  I know more movie stars than everybody else in my
school put together. They call me, the minor ones, anyway.  I love my
work.  So don't tell me about the important stories we ought to be
covering."

"That's why you got in the business?  To meet celebrities?"

"Why did you get in the business?"

I didn't answer her then, but some vestigial concept of truth in media
forces me to say that hobnobbing with the glittering people may have had
something to do with it.

But it really was amazing the changes a year had wrought in my little
Brenda.  I didn't think I liked it.  Not that it was any of my business,
but that's never stopped me in the past.  At first I blamed the news
racket itself, but thinking about it a bit more I wondered if maybe that
injured little girl, that oh-so-good little girl who'd had herself sewed
up rather than do what the nice lady suggested and turn daddy in to the
bad people . . . I wondered if she might actually teach cynical old
Hildy a thing or two about the bad old world and how to get by in it.

"I'm sorry about not bringing Buster."

"Huh?  What's that?"

"Luna to Hildy, come in Hildy, over."

"Sorry, my mind was wandering."  It was Cricket, and we were walking
together on the surface.  I even remembered going through the lock.

"I know I said I'd bring her so you could meet her, but she put up a big
fuss because she wanted to go with some friends to Armstrong, so I let
her."

Something in his voice made me suspect he wasn't telling the whole
truth.  I thought maybe he hadn't argued as hard as he might have.  The
only thing I really knew about his daughter was that he was very
protective of her.  I'd learned, through a little snooping, that none of
his coworkers at the Shit had ever met her; he kept work and family
strictly segregated.

Which is not unusual in Lunar society, we're very protective of the
little privacy we have. But we'd known each other as man and woman for
not even a week at that point, and already there had been a series of
these signs that he . . . how should I put it? . . . was reluctant to
let me deeper into his life.  To put it another way, I'd been
tentatively plucking at the daisy of devotion, and most of the petals
were coming up he loves me not.

To be fair, I was unused to being in love.  I was out of practice at
doing it, had never been adept at it, was wondering if I'd forgotten how
to go about it.  The last time I had really fallen, as they say, had
been a teen-age crush, and I'd assumed lo these eighty years that it was
an affliction visited solely on the young.  So it could be that I wasn't
communicating to him the tragic, hopeless depth of my longing.  Maybe I
wasn't sending out the right signals.  He could be thinking, this is
just old Hildy.  Lot's o' laffs. This is probably just the way she is
when she's female, all gooey and cow-eyed and anxious to bring me a hot
cup of coffee in the morning and cuddle.

And to be brutal . . . maybe I wasn't in love. It didn't feel like that
distant adolescent emotion, but hardly anything did; I wasn't that
person any more.  This felt more solid, less painful.  Not so hopeless,
even if he did come right out and say he loved me not.  Does this mean
it wasn't love?  No, it meant I'd keep working at it.  It meant I
wouldn't want to run out and kill myself . . . bite your tongue, you
stupid bitch.

So was this the real turtle soup, or merely the mock?  Or was it, at
long last, love?  Provisional verdict:  it would do till something
better came along.

"Hildy, I don't think we should see each other anymore."

That sound is all my fine rationalizations crashing down around my ears.
The other sound is of a knife being driven into my heart.  The scream
hasn't arrived yet, but it will, it will.

"Why do you say that?"  I thought I did a good job of keeping the
anguish out of my voice.

"Correct me if I'm wrong.  I get the feeling that you have . . . some
deeper than usual feelings about me since . . . since that night."

"Correct you?  I love you, you asshole."

"Only you could have put it so well.  I like you, Hildy; always have.  I
even like the knives you keep leaving in my back, I can't imagine why. I
might grow to love you, but I have some problems with that, a situation
I'm a long ways from being over yet--"

"Cricket, you don't have to worry--"

"--and we won't get into it.  That's not the main reason I want to break
this off before it gets serious."

"It's already--"

"I know, and I'm sorry."  He sighed, and we both watched Winston go
haring off after some vacuum-loving bunny rabbit of his own imagination,
somewhere in the vicinity of the Heinlein.  Only the top part of the
immense ship was in sunlight now.  Sunset at Delambre came later than at
Armstrong.  There was still enough light reflected from the upper hull
for us to see clearly, not the blazing brightness of full day, though.

"Cricket . . ."

"There's no sense hiding it, I guess," he said. "I lied to you.  Buster
wanted to come, she'd like to meet you, she thinks my stories about you
are funny.  But I don't want her to meet you.  I know I'm protective of
her, but it's just my way; I don't want her to have a childhood like
mine, and we won't go into that, either.  The thing is, you're going
through something weird, you must be or you wouldn't be living in Texas.
I don't know what it is, don't want to know, at least not right now. But
I don't want it to rub off on Buster."

"Is that all?  Hell, man, I'll move tomorrow. I may have to keep
teaching for a few weeks till they can get a new--"

"It wouldn't do any good, because that's not all."

"Oh, goody, let's hear more of the things wrong with me."

"No jokes, for once, Hildy.  There's something else that's bothering
you.  Maybe it's tied up with your quitting the pad and moving to Texas,
maybe it isn't.  But I sense something, and it's very ugly.  I don't
want to know what it is . . . I would, I promise you, if not for my
child.  I'd hear you out, and I'd try to help.  But I want you to look
me in the eye and tell me I'm wrong."

When a full minute had gone by and no eye contact had been made, no
denials uttered, he sighed again, and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Whatever it is, I don't want her to get mixed up in it."

"I see.  I think."

"I don't think you do, since you've never had a child.  But I promised
myself I'd put my own life on hold until she was grown.  I've missed two
promotions because of that, and I don't care. This hurts more than that,
because I think we could have been good for each other."  He touched the
bottom of my faceplate since he couldn't reach in and lift my chin, and
I looked up at him. "Maybe we still could be, in ten years or so."

"If I live that long."

"It's that bad?"

"It could be."

"Hildy, I feel--"

"Just go away, would you?  I'd like to be alone."

He nodded, and left.

#

I wandered for a while, never getting out of sight of the bubble of
light that was the tent, listening to Winston barking over the radio.
Why would you put a radio in a dog's suit?  Well, why not.

That was the kind of deep question I was asking myself.  I couldn't seem
to turn my mind to anything more important.

I'm not good at describing the painful feelings.  It could be that I'm
not good at feeling them.  Did I feel a sense of emptiness? Yes, but not
as awful as I might have expected. For one thing, I hadn't loved him
long enough for the loss to leave that big a cavity.  But more
important, I hadn't given up.  I don't think you can, not that easily. I
knew I'd call on him again, and hell, I'd beg, and I might even cry.
Such things have been known to work, and Cricket does have a heart in
there somewhere, just like me.

So I was depressed, no question.  Despondent? Not really.  I was miles
from suicidal, miles. Miles and miles and miles.

That was when I first noticed a low-grade headache.  All those nanobots
in that cranium, you'd think they'd have licked the common headache by
now.  The migraine has gone the way of the dodo, true, but those
annoying little throbbing ones in the temple or forehead seem beyond the
purview of medicine, most likely because we inflict them on ourselves;
we want them, on some level.

But this one was different.  Examining it, I realized it was centered in
the eyes, and the reason was something had been monkeying with my vision
for quite some time.  Peripherally, I'd been seeing something, or rather
not seeing something, and it was driving me crazy.  I stopped my pacing
and looked around.  Several times I thought I was on the track of
something, but it always flickered away.  Maybe it was Brenda's ghosts.
I was practically touching the hull of the famous Haunted Ship; what
else could it be?

Winston came bounding along, leaping into the air, just as if he was
chasing something.  And at last I saw it, and smiled because it was so
simple.  The stupid dog was just chasing a butterfly.  That's probably
what I'd seen, out of the corner of my eye.  A butterfly.

I turned and started back to the tent (the dog), thinking I'd have a
drink or two or three (was chasing) or, hell, maybe get really blotto, I
think I had a good excuse

a butterfly

and I turned around again but I couldn't find the insect, which made
perfect sense because we weren't in Texas, we were in Delambre and
there's no fucking air out here, Winston, and I'd about dismissed it as
a drunken whimsy when a naked girl materialized out of very thin air and
ran seven steps--I can see them now, in my mind's eye, clear as
anything, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then gone again
back to where ghosts go, and she'd come close enough to me to almost
touch her.

I'm a reporter.  I chase the news.  I chased her, after an indeterminate
time when I was as capable of movement as any statue in the park.  I
didn't find her; the only reason I'd seen her at all was the very last
rays of the sun reflected from far overhead, not much more light than a
good candle would give.  I didn't find the butterfly, either.

I realized the dog was nudging my leg.  I saw a red light was blinking
inside his suit, which meant he had ten minutes of air left, and he'd
been trained to go home when he saw the light.  I reached down and
patted his helmet, which did him no good but he seemed to appreciate the
thought, licking his chops.  I straightened and took one last look
around.

"Winston," I said.  "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ezekiel saw the wheel.  Moses saw the burning bush.  Joe Smith saw the
Angel Moroni, and every electro-preacher since Billy Sunday saw a chance
at good ratings in prime time and more money than he could lift.

Hayseed farmers, asteroid miners and chronic drug abusers have seen
Unidentified Flying Objects and little guys who want to see our leaders.
Drunks see pink elephants and brontosaurs and bugs crawling all over
everything.  The Buddha saw enlightenment and Mohammed must have seen
something, though I was never clear just what it was.  Dying people see
a long tunnel full of light with all the people they hated while they
were alive standing at the end of it.  The Founding Flack knew a good
thing when he saw it. Christians are looking to see Jesus, Walter is
looking for a good story, and a gambler is looking for that fourth ace
to turn up; sometimes they see these things.

People have been seeing things like that since the first caveman noticed
dark shadows stirring out there beyond the light of the campfire, but
until the day of the Bicentennial Hildy Johnson had never seen anything.

Give me a sign, O Lord, she had been crying, that I might know Thy
shape.  And behold, the Lord sent unto her a sign.

A butterfly.

#

It was a Monarch butterfly, quite lovely in its orange and black, quite
ordinary at first glance, except for its location.  But upon closer
examination I found something on its back, about the size of a gelatin
capsule, that looked for all the world like an air tank.

Yes, dear ones, never throw anything away.  You don't know when you
might need it.  I'd had no use for my optic holocam for quite a while,
since the Texian isn't equipped to print pictures.  But Walter had never
asked me to give it back and I'd not gone to the bother of having it
removed, so it was still there in my left eye, recording everything I
saw, faithfully storing it all until capacity was exhausted, then wiping
it to make way for the new stuff.  Many a wild-eyed prophet before me
would have killed to have a holocam, so he could prove to those doubting
bastards he'd really seen those green cocker spaniels get out of the
whistling gizmo that landed on the henhouse.

Considering the number of cameras made between the Brownie and the end
of the twentieth century, you'd think more intriguing pictures would
have been taken of paranormal events, but look for them- -I did--and
you'll come up with a bucket of space. After that, of course, computers
got so good that any picture could be faked.

But the only person I had to convince was myself.  The first thing I
did, back in the tent, was to secure the data into permanent storage.
The second thing I did was to not tell anybody what I'd seen.  Part of
that was reporter's instinct:  you don't blab until the story's nailed
down.  The rest was admission of the weaknesses flesh is their to:  I
hadn't been the soberest of witnesses.  But more importantly . . . this
was my vision.  It had been granted to me.  Not to Cricket, that
ingrate, who'd have seen it if he'd said he loved me and thrown his arms
around me and told me what a knuckle-headed dope he'd been.  Not to Miss
Pulitzer Prize Brenda (you think that, just because I gave her the big
story, I wasn't jealous?  You poor fool, you).  Just me.

And Winston.  How could I have thought that gorgeous hound was ugly? The
third thing I did back in the tent was give that most sublime quadruped
a pound of my best sausage, and apologize for not having anything
better--like a Pomeranian, or a Siamese.

#

We're not talking about the butterfly now. That was amazing, but a few
wonders short of a nonesuch.

It was an air tank on the insect's back.  With suitable enlargement I
could make out tiny lines going from it to the wings.  The images got
fuzzy when I tried to find out where they went.  But I could guess:
since there was no air for it to fly in, and since it seemed to be
flying, I deduced it was kept aloft by reaction power, air squirting
from the underside of its wings.  Comparing this specimen to one mounted
in a museum I noted differences in the carapace.  A vacuum-proof shell?
Probably.  The air tank could dribble oxygen into the butterfly's blood.

None of the equipment I could identify was what you'd call
off-the-shelf, but so what?  Nanobots can build the most cunning, tiny
machines, much smaller than the air tank and regulator and (possibly)
gyro I saw.  As for the carapace, that shouldn't be too hard to effect
with genetic engineering.  So somebody was building bugs to live on the
surface.  So what?  All that implied was an eccentric tinkerer, and Luna
is lousy with them.  And that's just the sort of hare-brained thing they
build.

All this research was being done in bed, in Texas.

On my way home from the celebration I'd stopped at a store and bought a
disposable computer, television, recorder, and flashlight and put them
in my pocket and smuggled them past temporal customs.  Easy.  Everybody
does it, with small items, and the guards don't even have to be bribed.
I waited till nightfall, then got in bed and pulled the covers over my
head, turned on the light, unrolled the television, dumped the holocam
footage into the recorder and wiped all traces of it from my cerebral
banks.  Then I started scanning the footage frame by frame.

Why all the secrecy?  I honestly couldn't have told you at the time.  I
knew I didn't want the CC to see this material but don't know why I felt
it was so important.  Instinct, I guess.  And I couldn't have guaranteed
even these measures would keep him from finding out, but it was the best
I could do.  Using a throwaway number cruncher instead of hooking in to
the mainframe seemed a reasonable way to keep the data away from him, so
long as I didn't ever network it with any other system.  He's good, but
he's not magic.

It was an hour's work to deal with the butterfly and file it under
Wonderments, Lepidopterous.  Then I moved on to the miracle.

Height:  Five foot two.  Eyes:  of blue.  Hair: blonde, almost white,
shoulder-length, straight. Complexion:  light brown, probably from
tanning. Apparent age:  ten or eleven (no pubic hair or bust, two
prominent front teeth, facial clues). Distinguishing marks:  none.
Build:  slender. Clothing:  none.

She could have been much older; a small minority prefer to Peter Pan it
through life, never maturing.  But I doubted it, from the way she moved.
The teeth were a clue, as well.  I pegged her for a natural, not
modified, she just grew that way.

She was visible for 11.4 seconds, not running hard, not bouncing too
high with each step.  She seemed to come out of a black hole and fall
back into one.  I was being methodical about this, so I got everything I
could out of those 11.4 seconds before moving on to the frames I was
dying to examine:  the first one, and the last one.

Item:  If she was a ghost, then ghosts have mass.  I'd been unable to
find her footprints among the thousands of others there on the crater
rim (I had noted a lot of the prints had toes, but it meant nothing;
lots of kids wear boots that leave prints like bare feet), but the film
clearly showed the prints being made, the dust being kicked up.  The
computer studied the prints and concluded the girl massed about what
you'd expect.

Item:  She was not completely naked.  In a few frames I could see
biomagnetic thermosoles on the bottoms of her feet, a damn good idea if
you're going to run over the blazing rocks of the surface.  There was
also a bit of jewelry sticking to her chest, a few inches above the left
nipple. It was brass-colored, and shaped more like a pressure fitting
than anything else I could think of.  Conjecture:  Maybe it was a
pressure fitting. The snap-on type, universally used to connect air
hoses to tanks.

Item:  In some of the early frames a slight mist could be seen in front
of her face.  It looked like moisture freezing, as if she had exhaled.
There was no sign of respiration after that.

Item:  She was aware of my presence.  Between step four and step five
she turned her head and looked directly at me for half a second.  She
smiled.  Then she made a goofy face and crossed her eyes.

I made a few more observations, none of them seeming very relevant or
shedding any real light on the mystery.  Oh, yes:  Item:  I liked her.
Making that face was just the sort of thing I would have done at her
age.  At first I thought she was taunting me, but I watched it over and
over and concluded she was daring me.  Catch me if you can, old lady.
Doll-face, I plan to.

Then I spent most of the rest of the night analyzing just a few seconds
of images before and after her appearance.  When I was done I wiped the
data from the computer, and for good measure, put it in with the glowing
embers of the fire in my kitchen stove.  It crackled and popped nicely.
Now the only record of my experience was in the little recorder.

I slept with it under my pillow.

#

Next Friday, after putting the Texian to bed, I went back to Hamilton's
and purchased a two-man tent.  If that puzzles you, you've never tried
to live in a one-man tent.  I had it delivered to the rover rental
office nearest the old mining road, where I leased a vehicle from their
second-hand fleet, paying two months in advance to get the best rate.  I
had it tanked full of oxygen and checked the battery level and kicked
the tires and had them replace a sagging leaf spring, and set off for
Delambre.

I set up the tent in the exact spot where we'd been seven days before.
Sunday night I struck the tent, having seen nothing at all, and drove
back to park the rover in a rented garage.

The Friday after that, I did the same thing.

#

I spent all my weekends out at Delambre for quite a long time.  It was
enough that, soon, I had to trade in my nice new suit for a maternity
model.  If you've never worn one of those, don't even ask.  But nothing
was going to keep me away from Delambre, not even a developing
pregnancy.

It all made sense to me at the time.  Looking back, I can see some
questions about my behavior, but I think I'd still do it again.  But
let's try to answer a few of them shall we?

I only spent the weekends at the crater because I still needed Texas to
give my life some stability.  I still would have kept coming back until
the end of the school term because I felt I had a responsibility to
those who hired me, and to the children.  But the question didn't arise,
because I needed the job more than it needed me. Each Sunday evening I
found myself longing for my cabin.  I guess a true Visionary would have
been ashamed of me; you're supposed to drop everything and pursue the
Vision.

I did the best I could.  Every Friday I couldn't get out of the disney
fast enough.  I attended no more churches, unburdened my soul to no more
quacks.

It's a little harder explaining the pregnancy. A little embarrassing,
too.  As part of my efforts to experience as much as possible of what
life had been like on Old Earth, I had had my menstrual cycle restored.
I know it sounds crazy.  I'd expected it would be a one-time thing, like
the corset, but found it not nearly as onerous as Callie had cracked it
up to be.  I hadn't intended to let it go on forever, I wasn't that
silly, but I thought, I don't know, half a dozen periods or so, then
over and out.  The rest is really no mystery at all.  It's just what
happens to fertile nulliparous centenarians who know zip about Victorian
methods of birth control, and who are so unwise as to couple with a guy
who swears he's not going to come.

The real mystery came after the rabbit died (I boned up on the
terminology after I got the news). Why keep it?

The best I can say is that I'd never ruled out child-bearing as
something I might do, some day, some distant day when I had twenty years
to spare. Naturally, that day never seemed to dawn.  Having a baby is
probably something you have to want to do, badly, with an almost
instinctual urge that seems to reside in some women and not in others.
Looking around me, I had noted there were plenty of women who had this
urge.  Boy, did they have the urge.  I'd never felt it.  The species
seemed in fine shape in the hands of these breeder women, and I'd never
flattered myself that I'd be any good at it, so it was always a matter
of someday.

But enough unsuccessful and unplanned and un- understood suicide
attempts focuses the mind wonderfully.  I realized that if I didn't do
it now, I might never do it.  And it was the one major human experience
I could think of that I might want to have and had not had.  And, as I
said, I'd been looking for a sign, O Lord, and this seemed like one.  A
bolt from the blue, not on the order of the Girl and Butterfly, but a
portent all the same.

Which simply meant that every Friday on my way to Delambre I gave
serious thought to stopping off and having the damn thing taken care of,
and every time, so far, had elected to keep it, not exactly by a
landslide.

There's an old wives' tale that a pregnant woman should not visit the
surface.  If that's true, why do they make maternity suits?  The only
danger is of coming into labor while in the suit, and that's not much of
a danger.  An ambulance can get you from any point on Luna to a birthing
center in twenty minutes.  That was not a concern to me.  Nor was I
neglecting my duties as an incubator.  I got roaring drunk that once,
but that's easily cured.  Each Wednesday I visited a check-up center and
was told things were cooking nicely.  Each Thursday I dropped by Ned
Pepper's office and, if he was sober enough, let him poke me and thump
me and pronounce me as fine a heifer as he'd ever come across, and sell
me a bottle of yellow elixir which did wonders for my struggling rose
bushes.

If I kept it to term, I intended to bear it naturally.  (It was a male,
but it seems silly to think of an embryo as having a sex.)  When I was
about twenty it seemed for a while that birthing was soon to be a thing
of the past.  The large majority of women were rearing their pups in
jars, often prominently displayed on the living room coffee table.  I
watched many a neighbor's blastocyst mature over the years, peering into
the scope with all the enthusiasm one usually brings to viewing Uncle
Luigi's holos of his trip to Mars.  I watched many a mother scratching
the bottle and cooing and goo-gooing to her second- trimester fetus.  I
was present at a few decantings, which were often elaborately catered,
with hired bands and wrapped presents and the whole megillah.

As is so often the case, it was a fad, not a tide of civilization.  Some
studies came out suggesting that Screwtops did less well in later life
than Bellybusters.  Other studies showed the opposite.  Studies
frequently do that.

I don't read studies.  I go with my gut.  The pendulum had swung back
toward the "healthy mother/child bonding of vaginal delivery" and
against the "birth trauma scars a child for life" folks, but my gut told
me that, given that I should do this at all, my gut was the proper place
for it to grow.  And now that my uterus has been heard from, I will
thank it to shut up.

#

The frames recording the girl's appearance and subsequent seeming exit
from this dimensional plane revealed several interesting things.  She
had not materialized out of thin vacuum nor had she fallen out of and
back into a black hole. There were images before, and after.

I couldn't make a thing of them, given the low light and the mysterious
nature of the transubstantiation.  But that's what computers are for. My
five-and-dime model chewed on the images of twisted light for a while,
and came up with the notion that a human body, wrapped in a perfect
flexible mirror, would twist light in just such a way.  All you'd see
would be distorted reflections of the person's surroundings, so while
not rendering one invisible, it sure would make you hard to see.  Up
close it would be possible to make out a human shape, if you were
looking for it.  From a distance, forget it.  If she stood still,
especially against a background as shattered as the Delambre junkyard,
there would be no way to find her.  I remembered the nagging headache
I'd had shortly before her little show. She'd been around before she
decided to reveal herself to me.

A search of the library found no technology that could produce anything
like what I had observed.  Whatever it was, it could be turned off and
on very quickly; my holocam's shutter speed was well below a thousandth
of a second, and she was wrapped in the mirror in one frame, naked in
the next.  She didn't take it off, she turned it off.

Looking for an explanation of the other singular thing about her, the
ability to run nude, even if for only seven steps, in a vacuum, produced
a few tidbits concerning the implantation of oxygen sources to dispense
directly into the bloodstream, research that had never borne profitable
fruit and had been abandoned as impractical.  Hmmmm.

I put myself through a refresher course in vacuum survival.  People have
lived after exposure of up to four minutes, which is when the brain
starts to die.  They suffer significant tissue damage, but so what?
Infants have lived after even longer periods.  You can do useful work
for maybe a minute, maybe a bit longer, work like scrambling into an
emergency suit.  Exposures of five to ten seconds will likely rupture
your eardrums and certainly hurt like hell, but do you no other real
harm.  "The bends" is easily treatable.

So wait a minute, what's all this talk about a miracle?  I determined in
fairly short order that what I'd seen was almost surely a technical
marvel, not a supernatural one.  And I was a bit relieved, frankly. Gods
are capricious characters, and the biggest part of me had no desire to
have it proved that one really existed. What if you saw your burning
bush and it turned out the Power behind it was a psychopathic child,
like the Christian God?  He's God, right?  He's proved it and you've got
to do what he tells you to do.  So what if he asks you to sacrifice your
son on an altar to His massive ego, or build a big boat in your back
yard, or pimp your wife to the local honcho, blackmail him, and give him
a dose of clap?  (Don't believe me?  Genesis 12:  10-20. You learn the
most interesting things in church.)

It didn't diminish the miracle one bit to know it was probably man-made.
It excited me all the more.  Somewhere out there, in that huge junkyard,
somebody was doing things nobody else knew how to do.  And if it wasn't
in the library, the CC probably didn't know about it, either.  Or if he
did, he was suppressing it, and if so, why?

All I knew was I wanted to talk to whoever had made it possible for that
little girl to wrap herself in a perfect mirror and make a face at me.

#

Which was easier said than done.

The first four weekends I simply camped out, did very little exploring.
I was hoping, since she'd come to me once, she'd do it again.  No real
reason why she should, but again, why not?

After that I spent more time in my suit.  I climbed a few alps of
rubble, but there didn't seem much point in it after the first few.  It
stretched as far as the eye could see; there was no way to search it, or
even a small part of it.

No, it seemed to me it was no coincidence the sighting had come at the
base of that monument to high hopes, the Starship Robert A. Heinlein.  I
set about to explore as much of the old hulk as I could, but first I
visited the library again and learned something of his history.
Herewith, in brief, is the saga of failed dreams:

The Heinlein was first proposed in 2010, by a group known as the L5
Society.  It was to be humanity's first interstellar vessel, a
remarkable idea when you consider that the Lunar colony at the time was
quite small, still struggling year to year for funding.  And it was to
be another twenty years before the keel was laid, at L5, one of the
Trojan libration points of the Earth/Luna system. L5 and L4 enjoyed
several decades of prominence before the Invasion, and thrived for
almost forty years afterwards.  Today they are orbiting junkyards.
Economic reasons again.

The ship was half completed when the Invaders came.  Work was naturally
abandoned in favor of more pressing projects, like survival of the
species.  When that seemed assured, there was still very little effort
to spare for blue-sky projects like the Heinlein.

But work resumed in the year 82, A.I., and went on five or six years
before another snag was hit, in the form of the Lunarian Party.  The
loonies, or Isolationists, or (to their enemies) Appeasers, as they came
to be called, had as their main article of faith that mankind should
accept its lot as a conquered race and thrive as best it could on Luna
and the other inhabited planets. The Invaders had reduced all the works
of humanity to less than rubble in the space of three days. Surely this
demonstrated, the Loonies reasoned, the Invaders were a different breed
of cat altogether.  We had been extremely lucky to have survived at all.
If we annoyed them again they might come back and finish the job they
started.

Rubbish, responded the old guard, who have since come to be known as
Heinleiners.  Sure they were stronger than us.  Sure they had superior
technology.  Sure they had bigger guns.  God's always on the side of
bigger guns, and if we want him back on our side, we'd better build even
bigger guns.  The Invaders, the reasoning went, must be a vastly older
race, with vastly older science.  But they still shit between two . . .
well, tentacle-heels?

This was the flaw in the Heinleiners' reasoning, said the Loonies.  We
didn't know if they had bigger guns.  We didn't know if they had
tentacles or cilia or good honest legs and arms like you and I and God.
We didn't know anything. No human had ever seen one and survived.  No
one had ever photographed one, though you'd think our orbiting
telescopes would have; they'd been looking, on and off, for two hundred
years, and no one had seen them check out of the little motel known as
Earth.  They were weird.  Their capabilities had thus far admitted of no
limits. It seemed prudent to assume they had no limits.

After almost ninety years of jingoism, of rally- round-the-flag rhetoric
and sheer pettifogging bombast, this sounded like a good argument to a
large part of a population weary of living on a perpetual war footing.
They'd been making sacrifices for nearly a century, on the theory that
we must be ready to, one, repel attack, and two, rise up in our wrath
one glorious day and stomp the bejesus out of those . . . whatever they
were.  Live and let live made a whole lot of sense.  Stop our puny
saber-rattling round the ankles of these giants, and we'll be okay.
Speak softly, and screw the big stick.

Eventually all our forward listening posts in near-Earth orbit were
drawn back--a move I applaud, by the way, since they'd heard nothing and
seen nothing since Invasion Day.  It was commanded that no man-made
object approach the home planet closer than 200,000 kilometers.  The
planetary defense system was scaled back drastically, turned to
meteoroid destruction, where at least it saw some use.

How all this affected the Heinlein was in the ban on fission and fusion
explosive devices.  The R.A.H. had been designed as an Orion-type
pusher- plate propulsion system, to this day the only feasible drive if
you want to get to the stars in less than a thousand years.  What you do
is chuck A-bombs out of a hole in the back, slam the door, and wait for
them to go off.  Do that every second or two.  The shock wave pushes
you.

This needs a big pusher plate--and I'm talking big here--and some sort
of shock absorber to preserve the dental work of the passengers.  They
calculated it could reach about one-twentieth of light-speed--Alpha
Centauri in only about eighty years.  But it couldn't even leave L5
without bombs, and suddenly there were no more bombs. Work shut down
with the main body and most of the shock absorbing system almost
complete, still no sign of the massive pusher plate.

For forty years the friends of the Heinlein lobbied for an exception for
their big baby, like the one granted to the builders of the first
disneylands for blasting purposes.  Changing political winds and
economic pressure from the Outer Planets Confederation, where most
fissionables were mined, and the decline of the L.P. combined to
eventually bring a victory.  The Heinleiners celebrated and turned to
the government for funding . . . and nobody cared. Space exploration had
fallen out of favor.  It does, periodically.  The argument not to pour
all that money down the rathole of space when you could spend it right
here on Luna can be a persuasive one to a population more interested in
standard of living and crippling taxation and no longer afraid of the
Invader boogeyman.

There were attempts to get it going again with private money.  The
perception was the whole thing had passed its time.  It was a white
elephant.  It became a regular subject in comic monologues.

The ship still had some value as scrap. Eventually someone bought it and
strapped on some big boosters and lowered it bodily to the edge of
Delambre, where it sits, stripped of anything of worth, to this day.

#

The first thing I noticed about the Heinlein during my explorations was
that it was broken. That is to say, snapped in half.  Built strongly to
withstand the shocks of its propulsion system, it had never been meant
to land on a planet, even one with so weak a gravity field as Luna.  The
bottom had buckled, and the hull had ruptured about halfway back from
the stem.

The second thing I noticed was that, from time to time, lights could be
seen from some of the windows high up on the hull.

There were places where one could get inside. I explored several of
them.  Most led to solidly welded doors.  A few seemed to go further,
but the labyrinthine nature of the place worried me.  I made a few
sorties trailing a line behind me so I could find my way out, but during
one I felt the line go slack.  I followed it back and couldn't determine
if I'd simply tied it badly or if it had been deliberately loosened.  I
made no more entries into the ship.  There was no reason to suppose the
girl and anyone she lived with would wish me well.  In fact, if she did,
she certainly would have contacted me by then.  I would have to resort
to other tactics.

I tried magnetic grapplers and scaled the side of the hull, trying to
reach the lighted ports. When I reached them I was seldom sure I had the
right one, and in any case, by the time I got there no light could be
seen.

It began to seem I was chasing ghosts.

I got discouraged enough that, one Friday night, I decided to stay home
for the weekend.  I was getting quite big, and while one-sixth gee must
make it easier to carry a baby, we're none of us as strong as our
Earth-born ancestors were, and I'd become prone to backaches and sore
feet.

So I decided to rent a rig and take a trip to Whiz-Bang, the new capitol
of Texas.  Harry the blacksmith had just got a new Columbus Phaeton--
$58.00 in the Sears catalog!--and was happy to let me try it out.
(Mail-order was our polite fiction for Modern-Made.  There would never
be enough disneys to manufacture all the items one needs for survival,
there's just too many of them.  Most of the things I owned had arrived
on the Wells-Fargo wagon, fresh from the computer-run factories.)  He
hitched a dappled mare he assured me was gentle, and I took off down the
road.

Whiz-Bang is in the eastern part of the disney. The interior compresses
about two hundred miles worth of environment into a bubble only fifty
miles wide, so before I got there I was into a new kind of terrain and
climate, one where there was more rainfall and things grew better.
Purely by chance I was passing through at the height of the wildflower
season.  I saw larkspur, phlox, Mexican hat, Indian paintbrush,
cornflower, and bluebonnets.  Millions and millions of bluebonnets.  I
stopped the horse and let her graze while I spread my blanket among them
and ate a picnic lunch.  I can't tell you what a relief it was to get
away from the foreboding hulk of the Heinlein and the bitter white rock
of the surface, and hear the song of the mockingbird.

I pulled into Whiz-Bang around noon.  It's a bigger town than New
Austin--which means it has five saloons and we have two.  They get more
of the tourist trade, which New Austin does not work to attract, which
means they have more small shops selling authentic souvenirs, still the
main means of livelihood for two out of five Texans.  I strolled the
streets, nodding to the gentlemen who tipped their hats, stopping to
look into each shop window.  The merchandise fell into four categories:
Mexican, Indian, "Primitive West," and Victorian.  The first three were
all hand-made in the disney, certified genuine reproductions-- with a
little fudging:  "Indian" artifacts included items from all southwest
tribes, not just Comanche and Apache.  But there were no totem poles and
no plastic papooses.

Suddenly I realized I was looking at the answer, if answer there was.  I
was standing at the window of a toy shop.

#

I felt like Santa Claus as I drove once more down the mining road and
across the rising rim of Delambre early that Sunday morning.  I
certainly had a sleighful of toys, in a vac-sack tossed on the passenger
seat.  It was about two days past full noon.

"On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer," I cried. The ride in the country and
the new plan of attack had buoyed my spirits, which had been at a low
ebb.  I stopped the rover and quickly deployed the tent.  I spoke not a
word but went straight to my work, setting out all my presents . . . oh,
stop that, Hildy.  I laughed, which no doubt caused my big round belly
to shake like a bowl full of jelly.

What I'd done was first to make a Whiz-Bang toymonger a very happy and
much wealthier woman. She'd followed me out of the store, carrying my
boxes of trifles, not quite kowtowing, stowing them in the buggy for me.
Then I'd driven back to New Austin, pausing only to pick a bunch of
bluebonnets, which I mailed to Cricket.  No, I hadn't given up yet.

I'd exercised little selection in the toy store, ruling out only the
ranks of lead soldiers and most of the dolls.  Somehow they just didn't
feel right; maybe it was just personal prejudice. But now I sweated the
choice of each of the four items I wanted to lure her with.

First was a tin-and-pewter wind-up of a horse pulling a cart, brightly
painted in reds and yellows.  All little girls like horses, don't they?

Next was a half-meter Mexican puppet in the shape of a skeleton, made of
clay and paper-mache and corn husks.  I liked the way it clattered when
I picked it up, dangling from its five strings.  It was old and wise.

Then a Kachina doll, even older and wiser, though carved and painted
only months ago.  I chose it over the sweeter, safer white man's dolls,
all porcelain and pouty lips and flounces, because it spoke to me of
ancient secrets, unknown ceremonies.  It was as brashly pagan as my
elusive sprite, she of the funny face.  Reading up on it, I found it was
even better, as the Kachinas were said to exist among the tribe, but
invisible.

And last, my most fortuitous find:  a butterfly net, made of bent cane
and gauze, with a glass Mason jar, wad of cotton, and bottle of alcohol
for the humane euthanizing of specimens.  Just the sort of toy parents
could put together for a pioneer child, if the child had a biological
bent.

None of the toys would be much harmed by vacuum, but the sunshine on the
surface is brutal, so I placed them where they'd stay in the shade, near
the hull of the Heinlein, and arranged little lights over them so they'd
be easy to find.  Then I went back to the tent.

I didn't have much time to stay if I was to be back for Monday classes,
and I spent that time unprofitably.  I couldn't eat anything, and I
couldn't read the book I'd brought along.  I was excited, worried, and a
little depressed.  What made me think this would work?

So in the end I struck the tent and took one last tour of my little toy
tableau, which once more was undisturbed.

The next week was hell.  Many times I thought of looking for a
substitute and getting the hell back.  You want a measure of my
distraction? Elise caught me dealing seconds, and it's been seventy
years since that had happened.

But the week did crawl by, faster than any ordinary garden slug, and
Friday afternoon I turned the editorial chores over to Charity with
instructions to keep the libel suits down to three or four, and broke
all records getting out to Delambre.

#

The Kachina was gone.  In its place was something I didn't recognize at
first, but quickly realized was a Navajo sand painting.  These are made
by dribbling different colored sands onto the ground and they can be
amazingly detailed and precise.  This one wasn't, but I appreciated the
effort.  It was just a stick figure Indian, with war bonnet and a bow
held in one hand, a tipi in the background.

She'd taken the horse and carriage, too, and left a vac-cage about the
right size for taking your pet hamster for a stroll on the surface.  But
inside was a horse.  A living horse, ten centimeters high at the
shoulder.

I hadn't seen a horselet in years.  Callie had given me one for my fifth
birthday, not as small as this one.  Not long after that people like
David Earth had succeeded in getting that sort of gene tinkering
outlawed.  You could still buy minis on Pluto, but the most that was
allowed on Luna these days were perpetual puppies and kittens.  When I
was young you could still get real exotics, like winged dogs and
eight-legged cats.

Somehow I didn't think this beast had been purchased on Pluto.  I held
the cage up and tapped on the glass, and the horselet looked back at me
calmly.  I wondered what I was going to do with the damn thing.

The butterfly equipment didn't seem disturbed until I looked at it more
closely.  Then I saw the monarch at the bottom of the jar, still,
apparently dead.  I put the jar in my pocket for later examination, left
the net where it was, and hurried on to find that my last offering had
been taken.  The skeleton puppet was gone, and where it had been was a
scrap of paper.  I picked it up and read the word "thanks," written in
pencil.

#

I pondered all this on the drive back to King City.  I didn't know
whether to be encouraged or crestfallen.  Three of my toys had been
taken, and three other toys left in their place.  I had never expected
this.  My hope had been to gradually lure her out with gifts; the idea
of trading had never entered my mind.

So it was good that I had finally made contact, of a sort.  At least, I
hoped it was she who had left the horse, butterfly, and painting.  It
was still possible another sort of prankster entirely was at work here,
but I didn't think so.  Each gift told me something, though it was hard
to know just how much to read into each one.

The horselet was illegal, so she was telling me she didn't give a damn
about the law.  The painting, when I examined the photo I took of it,
proved to be of a Lipan Apache brave, not just a generic "Indian."  That
meant to me that she knew the gift came from Texas . . . and that I
lived there?  Might she come to me?  You're getting too far-fetched,
Hildy.

The butterfly was the most interesting of all, and that was why I had
not erected the tent but was on my way to Liz's apartment in King City.
Of the people I knew, she'd be the most likely to be able to give me the
help I needed with no questions asked.

#

Before I got there I stopped and bought another computer.  I used this
one to doctor the images from my recorder, completely wiping out the
background from those crucial seconds until I had nothing but the nude
figure of a girl running against a black background.  The impulse to
protect the story is a deep one; I had no reason to mistrust Liz, but no
reason why she should know everything I knew, either.

I showed her the film and explained what I wanted from her, managing to
befuddle her considerably, but when she understood I was answering no
questions she said sure, it would be no problem, then stood watching me.

"Now, Liz," I said.

"Sure," she said, and did a double-take.  "Oh, you mean right now."

So she called a friend at one of the studios who said, sure, he could do
it, no problem, and was about to wire the pictures to him when I said
I'd prefer to use the mail.  Looking at me curiously, Liz addressed the
tape and popped it into the chute, then waited for my next trick.

"What the hell," I said, and got out the butterfly.  We both looked at
it with the naked eye, handling it carefully, and she wanted to let her
computer have a go at it, but I said no, and instead ordered an ordinary
magnifying glass, which arrived in ten minutes.  We both examined it and
found I had been right about the propulsion system.  There were
hair-fine tubes under the wings, which were somehow attached to the
insect's musculature in such a way that flexing the wing caused air to
squirt out.

"Looks kind of squirrely to me," Liz pronounced.  "I think it'd just
fall down and lie there."

"I saw it fly," I said.

"If that'll fly, I'll kiss your ass and give you an hour to draw a
crowd."  She waited expectantly for my response, but I didn't give her
one.  It was obvious she was being eaten with curiosity.  She tried
wheedling a little, then gave it up and turned to the horse.  "I might
be willing to take this off your hands," she said. "I know somebody who
wants one."  She tickled it under the chin, and it trotted to the edge
of the table where I'd released it, then jumped down.  A scale model
horse in one-sixth gee is quite spry.

Liz named a price, and I said she was taking bread from the mouths of my
children and named another, and she said I must think she just fell off
the turnip wagon, and eventually we settled on a price that seemed to
please her.  I didn't tell her that if she'd asked, I'd have given it to
her.

The pictures arrived.  I looked at them and told her they'd do nicely,
and thanked her for her time and trouble.  I left her still trying to
find out more about the butterfly.

#

What I'd obtained from her was a strip of images suitable for installing
inside a zoetrope. If you don't know what that is, it's a little like a
phenakistoscope, but fancier, though not quite so nice as a
praxinoscope.  Still at sea?  Picture a small drum, open at the top,
with slits around the sides.  You put the drum on top of a spindle,
paste pictures inside it, rotate it, and look through the slits as they
move past you.  If you've chosen the right pictures, they will appear to
move.  It's an early version of the motion picture.

I put the strip inside the zoetrope I'd bought at the Whiz-Bang toy
store, twirled it, and saw the girl running jerkily.  And I'd done it
all without the aid of the Lunar computer net known as the CC.  With any
luck, these images still existed only in my recorder.

I went right back out to Delambre and put the zoetrope in a location
where it couldn't be missed.  I set up the tent, fixed and ate a light
supper, and fell asleep.

I checked it several times during the weekend and always found it still
where I'd left it. Sunday night--still daylight in Delambre--I packed
the rover and decided to look once more before leaving.  I was feeling
discouraged.

At first I thought it hadn't been touched, then I realized the pictures
had been changed.  I knelt and spun the drum, and through the slits I
saw the flickering image of myself in my pressure suit, with Winston in
his, capering around my legs.

#

I had a week to think it over.  Was she saying she wanted to see the
dog?  Any dog, or just Winston?  Or was she saying anything at all
except I see you?

What I had to remember was there was no real hurry to this project, my
feelings of impatience notwithstanding.  If Winston had to be involved,
it would require bringing Liz deeper into my confidence, something I was
reluctant to do.  So the next weekend I went out armed with four dogs,
one from each of the cultures in Texas.  There was a brightly painted
Mexican one, carved from wood, another simpler wooden pioneer dog, a
Comanche camp scene, with dogs, painted on rawhide--the best I could
do--and my prize, a brass automaton of a dog that would shuffle up to a
fire hydrant and lift its leg.

I set them out on my next visit.  As I was crawling into the tent
afterwards my phone rang.

"Hello? I said, suspiciously.

"I still say it can't fly."

"Liz?  How'd you get this number?"

"You ask me that?  Don't start me lying this early in the morning.  I
got my methods."

I thought about telling her what the CC thought of her methods, and I
thought about chewing her out for invading my privacy--since my
retirement I'd restricted my telephone to incoming calls from a very
short list--but thinking about those things was as far as I got, because
as I was talking I'd stood up and turned around, and all four of my new
gifts were lined up just outside the tent, looking in at me.  I turned
quickly, scanning the landscape in every direction, but it was useless.
In that mirror skin of hers she might be lying flat no more than thirty
meters away and I wouldn't have a prayer.

So what I said was "Never mind that, I was just thinking of you, and
that lovely dog of yours."

"Then this is your lucky day.  I'm calling from the car, and I'm no more
than twenty minutes from Delambre, and Winston is having a wet dream
that may concern your left leg, so throw some of that chili on the
stove."

#

"I think you gained two kay since last week," she said when she came
into the tent.  "When it comes time to whelp that thing, you're gonna
have to do it in shifts."  I appreciated those remarks so much that I
added three peppers to her bowl and miked it hard.  Pregnancy is maybe
the most mixed blessing I'd ever experienced.  On the one hand, there's
a feeling I couldn't begin to describe, something that must approach
holiness.  There's a life growing in your body.  When all is said and
done, reproducing the species is the only demonstrable reason for
existence.  Doing so satisfies a lot of the brain's most primitive
wiring.  On the other hand, you feel like such a sow.

I told her as little as I could get away with, mostly that I'd seen
someone out here and that I wanted to get in contact with her.  She saw
my box of toys:  the zoetrope, and the dogs.

"If it's that girl you had the pictures of, and you saw her out here,
I'd like to meet her, too."

I had to admit it was.  How else was I going to convince her to leave
Winston in my care for the rest of the weekend?

We tossed around a few ideas, none of them very good.  As she was
getting ready to leave she thought of something, pulled a deck of cards
from her pocket, and handed them to me.

"I brought these along when I found out where you'd been coming all
these weekends."  She'd previously told me the story of her detective
work, nosing around Texas, finding out from Huck that I always left
Friday evening when the paper went to bed--lately even earlier.  Rover
rental records available to the public, or to people who knew how to get
into them, told her where I'd been renting.  A bribe to the right
mechanic got her access to the odometer of my vehicle, and simple
division told her how long a trip I'd been taking each time, but by then
she'd been pretty sure it was to Delambre.

"I knew you'd seen something out here during the Bicentennial," she went
on.  "I didn't know what, but you came back from that last walk looking
wilder than an acre of snakes, and you wouldn't tell anybody what it
was.  Then you show up at my place with those pictures of a girl running
through nothing and you won't let me wire 'em or digitize 'em.  I expect
you got secrets to keep, but I could figure out you were looking for
somebody.  So if you want to find somebody, what you do is you start
playing solitaire, and pretty soon they'll come up and tell you--"

"--to play the black ten on the red Jack," I finished for her.

"You heard it.  Well, at least it'll give you something to do."  She
left, casting a worried eye over her pet, who didn't seem at all
disturbed to see her go, and with a final admonition that Winston got
his walkies three times a day or he was apt to get mean enough to make a
train take a dirt road.

#

I'd already brought a deck of cards.  I usually have one with me, as
manipulating them is something to do with my hands at idle moments,
better than needlepoint and potentially much more profitable.  If you
don't practice the moves you find your hands freeze up on you at a
critical moment.

But I never play solitaire, and the reason is a little embarrassing.  I
cheat.  Which is all very well for blackjack or five-card stud, but
what's the point in solitaire?

Point or not, I eventually found myself laying out a hand.

Pretty soon I got into it.  Not the game itself, than which there are
few purer wasters of time, but the cards.  You have to be able to
visualize the order, make them your friends so they'll tell you things.
Do it long enough and you'll always know what the next card will be, and
you'll know what the cards are that you can't see, as sure as if they
were marked on the back.

I did it for a long time, until Winston got up and began to scratch at
the wall of the tent. Better get him into his suit before he got
frantic, I thought, and looked up into the face of the girl.  She was
standing there, outside the tent, grinning down at Winston, and she had
a telescope tucked under her arm.  She looked at me and shook a finger:
naughty, naughty.

"Wait!" I shouted.  "I want to talk to you."

She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders, and became a perfect mirror.
All I could see of her was the distorted reflection of the tent and the
ground she stood on.  The distortions twisted and flowed and began to
dwindle.  Pressing my face against the tent wall I could follow her
progress for a little while since she was the only moving object out
there.  She wasn't in any hurry and I thought she looked back over her
shoulder, but there was no way to be sure.

I got into my suit quickly, thought it over, and suited Winston, too.  I
let him out, knowing his ears and sense of smell were totally useless
out here but hoping some other doggy sense would give me a lead.  He
shuffled off, trying to press his nose to the ground as he usually did,
succeeding only in getting moondust on the bottom of his helmet.  I
followed him with my flashlight.

Soon he stopped and tried to press his face to the surface with more
than his usual doggedness. I knelt and looked at what he was trying to
pick up.  It was a bit of spongy material that crumbled in my glove when
I lifted it.  I laughed aloud; Winston looked up, and I patted the top
of his helmet.

"I might have know you wouldn't miss food, even if you can't smell it,"
I told him.  And we set off together, following the trail of
breadcrumbs.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Feeling not unlike the hood ornament on a luxury rover--and showing a
lot more chrome-plated belly than either Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce would
have approved of--I stepped boldly forth into the sunlight, almost as
naked as the day I was born. Boldly, if you don't dwell on the thirty
minutes I spent getting up my nerve to do it in the first place.  Naked,
if you don't count the mysterious force field that kept me wrapped in a
warming blanket of air at least five millimeters thick.

Even the warming part was illusory.  It certainly felt as if the air was
keeping me warm, and without that psychological reassurance I doubt if
I'd have made it.  Actually, the air was cooling me, which is always the
problem in a space suit, whether bought off the shelf at Hamilton's or
hocus-pocused into existence by the Genius of the Robert A. Heinlein.
See, the human body generates heat, and a spacesuit has to be a good
insulator, that's its main purpose; the heat will build up and choke you
without an outlet.  See?

Oh, brother.  If you had a chuckle at my explanations of nanoengineering
and cybernetics, wait till you hear Hildy's Field Suits Made Simple.

"You're doing fine, Hildy," Gretel (not her real name) coaxed.  "I know
it takes some getting used to."

"How would you know that?" I countered.  "You grew up in a field suit."

"Yeah, but I've taken tenderfeet out before."

Tenderfeet, indeed.  I bent over to see those pedal extremities,
thinking I'd have to get re- acquainted with them post-partum.  I
wiggled my toes and light wiggled off the reflections.  Like wearing
thick mylar socks, only all I could feel was what appeared to be the
rough surface of Luna. There was some feedback principle at work there,
I'd been told; the field kept me floating five millimeters high no
matter how hard I pressed down.  And a good thing, too.  Those rock were
hot.

"How's the breathing?" Gretel asked, in a funny voice I'd get used to
eventually.  Part of the field suit package was a modification of my
implanted telephone so that sub-vocalization could be heard over the
channel the Heinleiners used suit-to-suit.

"I still want to gasp," I said.

"Say again?"

I repeated it, saying each word carefully.

"That's just psychotic."

I think she meant psychosomatic, or maybe psychological.  Or possibly
psychotic was the perfect word.  How would you describe someone who
trusted her delicate hide to a spatial effect that, as near as I could
understand it, had no existence in the real world?

The desire to breathe was real enough, even though a suppressor of some
kind was at work in my brain cutting off that part of the autonomic
nervous system.  My body was getting all the oxygen it needed, but when
your lungs have been inhaling and exhaling for over a hundred years,
some part of you gets a little alarmed when asked to shut it off for an
hour or so.  I'd been holding my breath for almost ten minutes so far. I
felt about ready to go back inside and gulp.

"You want to go back inside?"

I wondered if I'd been muttering to myself. Gotta watch that.  I shook
my head, remembered how hard that was to see, and mouthed "No."

"Then take my hand," she said.  I did, and our two suit fields melted
together and I felt her bare hand in mine.  I could see that, if these
things ever got on the market, there was going to be a big fad in
lovemaking under the stars.

#

Don't go shopping for a field suit just yet, though.

They'll surely be available in a few years, what with current
conditions.  A lot of people are angry at the Heinleiners for not just
bestowing the patents gratis to the general public.  I've heard
mutterings.  A lot of good it will do the mutterers; they simply don't
understand Heinleiners.  There goddam sure ain't no such thing as a free
lunch, and they're out to prove it.

As I write this, the Heinleiners are still pretty pissed off, and who
could blame them?  All charges have naturally been dropped, the statutes
of limitations have expired, as it were.  Nobody's out hunting them. Yet
I swore a solemn oath not to reveal the names of any of them until given
permission, and that permission has not been granted, and who's to say
they're wrong?  Say what you will about me as a reporter, but I never
revealed a source, and I never will.  Hence, the girl I will call
"Gretel."  Hence all the aliases I will bestow on the people I met after
I followed Gretel's trail into the perfect mirror.

And I promised not to lie to you, but from here on in I will not always
tell you the whole truth. Events have of necessity been edited, to
protect people with no reason to trust authority but who trusted me and
then found . . . but I'm getting ahead of myself.

#

The trail of breadcrumbs led into the rubble that washed at the base of
the Heinlein.  At first it seemed as if they vanished into a blank wall,
but I found that if I ducked a little there was a way through.

Luckily, I had Winston on a leash, because he was straining to head
right into the pile, and god knows if I'd ever have found him again.  I
shined my flashlight under the overhang--which seemed to be the back end
of a vintage rover--and saw it would be possible to squirm my way in.
Without the crumbs I never would have tried it, as I could already see
four ways to go.  But I did go in, wondering all the time just how
stable this whole pile was, if I dared brush up against anything.

Not too far in it became clear I was on a pathway.  At first it was just
bare rock.  Soon there was a flooring laid down, made of discarded
plastic wall panels.  I tested each step cautiously, but it seemed firm.
I found each panel had been spot welded to some of the more massive
pieces of debris that made up the jackstraw jumble.  I further saw,
looking around the edge of the roadway, that the ground was no longer
down there.  My flashlight picked up an endless array of junk.  If
there'd been any air I might have tried dropping a coin or something; I
had a feeling I'd hear it clatter for a long time.

For a while I kept testing each new panel cautiously, but each was as
firmly in place as the last.  I decided I was being silly.  People
obviously used this path with some frequency, and despite its impromptu
nature it seemed sturdy enough.  Flashing my light around above me I
could soon see the tunnel itself had been made by some kind of boring
machine.  It was cylindrical, and a lot of rubbish had been blasted or
cut away; I found sliced edges of metal beams on each side of the
tunnel, as if the center sections had been cut out.  I hadn't seen it as
a cylinder at first because its walls were so relentlessly baroque, not
covered with anything as they would be in King City.

Before long I came to a string of lights hung rather haphazardly along
the left-hand side of the tunnel.  And not long after that I saw
somebody approaching me from a good distance.  I shined the light at the
person, and she shined her light at me, and I saw she was also pregnant
and also had a bulldog on a leash, which seemed too much for
coincidence.

Winston didn't put it together.  Instead, he plowed forward in his usual
way, either to greet a new friend or to rend an enemy into bloody
gobbets, who could tell?  I could hear the clang over my suit radio when
he hit.  He sat down hard, having had no visible effect upon the perfect
mirror.

Neither did I, though I scrupulously did all the futile things people do
in stories about humans encountering alien objects:  chunking rocks,
swinging a makeshift club, kicking it.  I left no scratches on it.
("Mister President, it is my scientific opinion the saucer is made of an
alloy never seen on Earth!")  I'd have tried fire, electricity, lasers,
and atomic weapons, but I didn't have any handy.  Maybe lasers wouldn't
have been the best idea.

So I waited, wondering if she'd been watching me, hoping she'd had a
good laugh at my expense, feeling sure she hadn't led me this far just
to strand me, and in a moment the surface of the mirror bulged and
became a human face.  The face smiled, and then the rest of the body
appeared. At first I thought she was moving forward, but it turned out
the mirror was moving back and the field was forming around her body as
she simply stood there.

It moved back about three meters, and she beckoned to me.  I went to
her, and she made some gestures which I didn't understand.  Finally I
got the idea that I was to hold on to a bar fastened to the wall.  I
did, and the girl crouched and held on to Winston, who seemed happy to
see her.

There was a loud bang and something slammed into me.  Bits of trash and
dust swirled, maybe a little mist, too.  The perfect mirror was no
longer where it had been and the corridor had changed.  I looked around
and saw the walls were now coated with the same mirror, and the flat
surface had re-formed behind me, where it had been originally.  A rather
dramatic airlock.

For a few more seconds Gretel was still wrapped in distortion, then her
suit field vanished and she became the nude ten-year-old who had run
through my dreams for such a long time.  She was saying something.  I
shook my head and glanced at the readouts for exterior temperature and
pressure- -pure habit, I could see and hear the air was okay- -then I
took off my helmet.

"First thing," Gretel said, "you've got to promise not to tell my
father."

"Not to tell him what?"

"That you saw me on the surface without my suit.  He doesn't like it
when I do that."

"I wouldn't, either.  Why do you do it?"

"You gotta promise, or you can just go home."

I did.  I would have promised one hell of a lot of things to get farther
down that tunnel I could see stretching ahead of me.  I even would have
kept most of them.  Personally, I don't view a promise made to a
ten-year-old to be binding, if it involves a matter of safety, but I'd
keep that one if I could.

I had a thousand questions, but wasn't sure how to ask them.  I'm a good
interviewer, but getting answers out of a child takes a different
technique.  It would be no problem--the problem with Gretel was getting
her to shut up--but I didn't know it at the time.  Right then she was
squatting, getting Winston out of his helmet, so I watched and waited.
Liz had promised me Winston never bit people unless ordered to do so,
and I sure hoped that was true.

Once again Winston came through for me.  He greeted her like a long-lost
friend, bowling her over in his attempts to lick her face, reducing her
to giggles.  I helped her get him out of the rest of his suit.

"You could get out of yours, too, if you want to," Gretel said.

"It's safe?"

"You might have asked that before I took off the dog's helmet."

She had a point.  I started peeling out of it.

"You've led me a merry chase," I said.

"It took me a while to convince my father we ought to let you in at all.
But I'm never in a hurry about such things, anyway.  Do you good to
wait."

"What changed his mind?"

"Me," she said, simply.  "I always do.  But it wasn't easy, you being a
reporter and all."

A year ago that would have surprised me. Working for a newspad you don't
get your face as well-known as straight television reporters do. But
recent events had changed that.  No more undercover work for me.

"Your father doesn't like reporters?"

"He doesn't like publicity.  When you talk to him, you'll have to
promise not to use any of it in a story."

"I don't know if I can promise that."

"Sure, you can.  Anyway, that's between you and him."

We were walking down the round, mirrored corridor by then.  When we came
to another mirrored wall like the one I'd first encountered, she didn't
slow down but headed right for it. When she was a meter away it vanished
to reveal another long section of walkway.  I looked behind us and there
it was.  Simple and effective.  The bored-out tubes were lined with the
field, and these safety barriers were spaced out along the way.  This
new technology would revolutionize Lunar building techniques, whatever
it was.

I was bursting with questions about it, but my feeling for her was that
it wasn't the right time to ask them.  I was there as the result of a
child's whim, and it would be a good idea to see where I stood with her,
get on her good side as much as possible.

"So . . ." I said.  "Did you like the toys?"

"Oh, please," she said.  Not a promising beginning.  "I'm a little grown
up for that."

"How old are you?"  There was always the chance I'd read her wrong from
the beginning; she could be older than me.

"I'm eleven, but I'm precocious.  Everyone says so."

"Especially Daddy?"

She grinned at me.  "Never Daddy.  He says I'm a walking argument for
retroactive birth control. Okay, sure I liked the toys, only I'd prefer
to think of them as charming antiques.  Mostly, I liked the dog.  What's
his name?"

"Winston.  So that's why you talked your father into letting me in?"

"No.  I could get a dog easily enough."

"Then I don't get it.  I worked so hard to interest you."

"You did?  That's neat.  Hell, Hildy, I'd have asked you in if you'd
just sat out there on your butt."

"Why?"

She stopped and turned to me, and the look on her face told me what was
coming.  I'd seen that look before.

"Because you work for the Nipple.  It's my favorite pad.  Tell me, what
was Silvio really like?"

#

Most of my conversations with Gretel got around to Silvio sooner or
later, usually after long and adoring detours through the celebrity
underbrush of the current pre-pubescent idols of television and music.
I'd interviewed Silvio a total of three times, been at social occasions
where he was present maybe twenty times, exchanged perhaps a dozen
sentences with him at those functions.  It didn't matter.  It was all
gold to Gretel, who was easily twice as star-struck as most girls her
age. She hung on my every word.

Naturally, I made up a lot.  If I could do it in print, why not to her?
And it was good practice for telling her all the intimate details of the
teeny stars, few of whom I'd even heard of, much less met.

Is that awful?  I suppose it is, lying to a little girl, but I'd done
worse in my life, and how badly did it hurt her?  The whole gossip
industry, flagshipped by the Nipple and the Shit, is of questionable
moral worth to begin with, but it's a very old industry, and as such,
must fill a basic human need.  I've apologized for it enough here.  The
biggest difference in my stories to her was that, when I was writing it,
it was usually nasty gossip.  My stories to her were usually nice ones.
I viewed it as paying my keep.  If Scheherazade could do it, why not
Hildy Johnson?

#

I was grateful that she held my hand on that first stroll on the
surface.  Breathing is perhaps the most underrated pleasure in life. You
notice it when something smells good, curse it when something stinks,
but the rest of the time you don't even think of it.  It's as natural as
. . . well, see?  To really appreciate it, try holding your mouth and
nose closed for three minutes, or however long it takes to reach the
edge of blackout.  That first breath that brings you back from the edge
of death will be the sweetest thing you ever tasted, I guarantee it.

Now try it for thirty minutes.

The oxygen in my new lung was supposed to be good for that long, with a
five to seven minute margin.  "Think of it as thirty," Aladdin had said,
when he installed it.  "That'll keep you safe."

"I'll think of it as fifteen," I retorted. "Maybe five."  I'd been
sitting in his clinic at the time, the left side of my chest laid open,
the ugly gray mass of what had recently been my left lung lying in a pan
on a table like so much butcher-shop special of the day.

"Don't talk," he warned.  "Not when I'm doing respiratory-system work."
He wiped a drop of blood from the corner of my mouth.

"Maybe one," I said.  He picked up the new lung, a thing of shiny metal
with some trailing tubes, shaped very much like a lung, and started
shoving it into the chest cavity.  It made wet sucking sounds going in.
I hate surgery.

I'd have thought it was something brand-new but for my recent researches
into vacuum technology. One part of it was revolutionary, but the rest
had been cobbled together from things developed and set aside a long
time ago.

The Heinleiners weren't the first to work on the problem of adapting the
human body to the Lunar surface.  They were just the first ones to find
a more or less practical answer.  Most of the lung Aladdin put inside me
was just an air bottle, filled with compressed oxygen.  The rest was an
interface device that allowed the oxygen to be released directly into my
bloodstream while at the same time cleansing the carbon dioxide.  A few
other implants allowed some of the gas to be released through new
openings in my skin, carrying off heat.  None of it was new; most of it
had been experimented with as early as the year 50.

But the year 50 wasn't railroad time.  The system wasn't practical.  You
still had to wear a garment to protect you from the heat and the cold,
and it had to protect you from both--extremes never seen on Earth--while
at the same time keeping the vacuum from your skin, bleeding off waste
heat, and a host of other requirements. Such garments were available;
I'd bought two of them within the last year.  They were naturally much
improved from the mummy bags the first space explorers wore, but they
worked on the same principles.  And they worked better than the
implanted lungs.  If you're going to have to wear a suit, after all,
what's the point of a thirty- minute supply of air in place of a lung?
If you plan much of a stay on the surface you're going to have to
back-pack most of your air, just like Neil Armstrong did.

And the Heinleiners did, too, for longer stays. But they'd solved the
problem of what to do with the suit:  just turn it off when not in use.

I supposed they'd also solved the psychological problem of the suits,
which was the panic reflex when one has not breathed normally for some
time, but I suspected the answer was the same one a child learns in her
first swimming lesson.  Do it enough, and you'll stop being afraid.

I'd done it for fifteen minutes now, and I was still frightened.  My
heart was racing and my palm was sweating.  Or was that Gretel's?

"You'll sweat quite a bit," she said, when I asked.  "It's normal.  That
layer of air will stay pretty hot, but not too hot to handle.  Also, the
sweat helps to bleed off the heat, just like it does inside."

I'd been told the suit's distance from one's body fluctuated by about a
millimeter in a regular rhythm.  That varied the volume considerably,
sucking waste air from inside you and expelling it into vacuum in a
bellows action.  Water vapor went along with it, but a lot just dripped
down your skin.

"I think I'd like to go back in now," I mouthed, and must have done it
well enough, because I heard her say "Okay," quite clearly. That was the
same circuitry the CC used to talk to me in private, back when I was
still speaking to him.  Aside from the respirator/air supply/field
generator, and a few air ducts, not much had needed to be done to
prepare me for field suit use.  Some of that's because I was already
wired to a fare-thee-well, as the CC had pointed out on my direct
interface jaunts.  Some adjustments had been made to my eardrums to keep
them from hurting in fluctuating pressures, and a new heads-up display
had been added so that when I closed my eyes or just blinked, I saw
figures concerning body temperature and remaining air supply and so
forth.  There were warning alarms I'd been told would sound in various
situations, and I didn't intend ever to hear any of them.  Mostly, with
a field suit, you just wore it.  And all but a tiny portion of that, you
wore inside.

The air lock I'd used to get into the secret warrens was only for
inanimate objects, or people wearing inanimate objects, like the
old-style suit I'd been wearing.  If you had a field suit in, you simply
stepped into the wall of mirror and your own suit melted into it, like a
drop of mercury falling into a quicksilver pool.  That was the only way
to get through a null-field barrier other than turning it off.  They
were completely reflective on both sides.  Nothing got through, not air,
not bullets, not light nor heat nor radio waves nor neutrinos.  Nothing.

Well, gravity got through, whatever gravity is. Don't seek the answer to
that one in these pages. But magnetism didn't, and Merlin was working on
the gravity part.  Follow-up on that still to come.

Just before Gretel and I stepped through I saw part of the mirror wall
distorted in the shape of a face.  That was the only way to see through
the wall, just stick your face in, and even that was tough to get used
to.  Gretel and her brother-- what else?--Hansel did it as naturally as
I'd turn my head to glance out a window.  Me, I had to swallow hard a
few times because every reflex I had was telling me I was going to smash
my nose against that reflection of myself.

But I had no trouble this time because I wanted very badly to be on the
other side of that mirror. I was running by the time I hit it.  And of
course there was no sensation of hitting anything--my suit simply
vanished as it went through the larger field--with the result that,
because some part of me had been braced for impact, had been flinching,
wincing, bracing myself, it was like reaching for that non-existent top
step, and I did a comical cakewalk as if the floor was coated with
banana peels and came that close to a pratfall any silent film comedian
would have envied.

Before you snicker, you go and try it.

Gretel claimed to be able to distinguish people's faces when covered by
a null suit.  I supposed that if you grew up in one it would be
possible; they were still all chrome-plated masks to me, and probably
would be for a long time.  But I'd figured it was Hansel who poked his
face through, since that's where we'd left him, watching Winston, and it
was indeed him who greeted me after my maiden voyage in the new suit.
Hansel was a lad of fifteen, a tall, awkward, rather shy boy with a
shock of blonde hair like his sister's and a certain look in his eye I'm
sure he got from his father.  I thought of it as the mad scientist's
gleam.  As if he'd like to take you apart to see how you worked, only he
was too polite to ask if he could.  He'd put you back together, I hasten
to add, or at least he'd intend to, though the skills might not always
be up to the intent.  He got that from his father, too. Where the
shyness came from I had no idea.  It was not inherited paternally.

"I just got a phone call from the ranch," Hansel said.  "Libby says the
palomino mare is about to foal."

"I got it, too," Gretel said.  "Let's go."

They were off while I was still catching my breath.  It had been a long
time since I'd tried to keep up with children, but I didn't dare let
these get out of my sight.  I wasn't sure if I could find my way back to
the Heinlein alone. Sounds unlikely, doesn't it?  If there's one thing
Lunarians are good at, it's negotiating a three- dimensional maze, or at
least we'd like to think so.  But the mazes of King City tend to be of
two types:  radiating out from a central plaza, with circular ring
roads, or a north/south up/down grid.  The paths of the Delambre Dump
were more like a plate of spaghetti.  Two days in Delambre would have
any urban planner ready for a padded cell.  It just growed.

The paths I was now hurrying down had been made by nothing more
mysterious than obsolescent tunneling machines--one of the other things
Lunarians are good at.  They usually bored their way through rock, but
the sort of techno-midden stratigraphy found in Delambre presented them
no problems; they'd laser their way through anything. The Heinleiners
had a dozen of them, all found on site, repaired, and seemingly just
sort of set loose to find their own way.  Not really, but anyone who had
tried to find a rhyme or reason in the pathways had to figure an
earthworm would have done a tidier job.

Once the wormholes were there, human crews came in and installed the
flooring out of whatever plastic panels were at hand.  Since those
panels had been a construction staple for over a century, they weren't
hard to find.  The last step was to provide an ALU every hundred meters
or so.  An ALU was an Air Lock Unit, and consisted of this:  a
null-field generator with logics to run their odd locking systems at
each end, a big can of air serviced weekly by autobots, and a wire
running to a solar panel on top of the heap of garbage to power the
whole thing.  When somebody got around to it glow- and heat-wires were
strung along the top of the tunnel so they wouldn't be too cold or dark,
but these were viewed as luxuries, and not all parts of the tunnels had
them.

A more jack-leg, slip-shod system of keeping the Breathsucker at bay had
never been seen on this tired old orb, and nobody with half a brain
would trust her one and only body to it for a split second.  And with
good reason:  breakdowns were frequent, repairs were slow.  Heinleiners
simply didn't care, and why should they?  If part of the tunnel went
down, your suit would switch on and you'd have plenty of time to get to
the next segment.  They just didn't worry much about vacuum.

It made for weird travel, and another reason to keep up with the
children.  Both of them were carrying flashlights, which were almost
mandatory in the tunnels, and which I'd forgotten again.  We came to a
dark, cold section and it was all I could do to keep their darting
lights in sight. Sure, I could call them back if I got lost, but I was
determined not to.  It wouldn't have been fun, you see, and above all
kids just want to have fun. You don't want to get a reputation as
somebody they have to keep waiting for.

It was cold, too, right up to the point of chattering teeth, and then my
suit switched on automatically and before I got out of the dark I was
warm again.  Winston looked back at me and barked.  He was still in his
old-style suit, Hansel carrying his helmet.  They'd wanted me to let
them give him a null-suit, but I didn't know how to explain it to Liz.

#

The first time the children took me to the farm, I had been expecting to
see a hydroponic or dirt-based plantation of the sort most Lunarians
know must be out there somewhere, but would have to consult a directory
to find, and had never actually seen.  I'd been to one in the course of
a story long ago--I've been most places in my century--and since you
probably haven't I'll say they tend to be quite dull.  Not worth you
time. Whether the crop is corn or potatoes or chickens, what you see are
low rooms with endless rows of cages or stalls or furrows or troughs.
Machines bring food or nutrients, haul away waste, harvest the final
product.  Most animals are raised underground, most plants on the
surface, under plastic roofs.  All of it is kept distant from
civilization and hardly ever talked about, since so many of us can't
bear to think the things we eat ever grew in dirt, or at one time
cackled, oinked, and defecated.

I was expecting a food factory, albeit one built to typical Heinleiner
specs, as Aladdin once described them to me:  "Jerry-rigged, about
three- quarter-assed, and hellishly unsafe."  Later I did see a farm
just like that, but not the one belonging to Hansel and Gretel and their
best friend, Libby.  Once again I'd forgotten I was dealing with
children.

The farm was behind a big pressure door aboard the old Heinlein that
said CREW'S MESS #1.  Inside a lot of tables had been shoved together
and welded solid to make waist-high platforms.  These had been heaped
with soil and planted with mutant grasses and bonsai trees.  The scene
had been laced with little dirt roads and an HO Gauge railroad layout,
dotted with dollhouses and doll- barns and little doll towns of
often-incompatible scales.  The whole thing was about one hundred by
fifty meters, and it was here the children raised their horselets and
other things.  Lots of other things.

Being children, and Heinleiners, it was not as neat as it might have
been.  They'd forgotten to provide good drainage, so large parts
suffered from erosion.  A grandiose plan to make mountains against the
back wall had the look of a project never finished and long-neglected,
with bare orange plastic matting showing the bones of where the
mountains would have been if they hadn't run out of both enthusiasm and
plaster of Paris.

But if you squinted and used your imagination, it looked pretty good.
And your nose didn't need to be fooled at all.  Walk in the door and
you'd immediately know you were in a place where horses and cattle
roamed free.

Libby called to us from one of the little barns, so we climbed up a
stile and onto the platform itself.  I walked gingerly, afraid to step
on a tree or, worse, a horse.  When I got there the three of them were
kneeling beside the red-sided barn.  They had the roof lid raised and
were peering down to where the mare was lying on her side on a bed of
straw.

"Look!  It's coming out!" Gretel squeaked.  I did look, then looked
away, and sat down beside the barn, knocking over a section of white
rail fence as I did so.  Hell, the fence was just for show, anyway; the
cows and horses jumped over it like grasshoppers.  I lowered my head a
little and decided I was going to be all right.  Probably.

"Something wrong, Hildy?" Libby asked.  I felt his hand on my shoulder
and made an effort to look up at him and smile.  He was a red-headed boy
of almost eighteen, even lankier than Hansel, and he had a crush on me.
I patted his hand and said I was fine and he went back to his pets.

I'm not notably queasy, but I'd been having these spells associated with
pregnancy.  I still had a month to go, far too late to change my mind.
It was an experience I wasn't likely to forget. Trust me, when you get
up at three A.M. with an insatiable hunger for chocolate-coated oysters,
you don't forget it.  The sight of it coming back up in the morning is
unlikely to slip your mind, either.

I'd been a little concerned about the pre-natal care I was getting.
There was a problem, in that I could hardly go to a clinic in King City,
as the medics were bound to notice my unorthodox left lung.  The
Heinleiners had a few doctors among them and the one I'd been seeing,
"Hazel Stone," told me I had nothing to worry about.  Part of me
believed her, and part of me--a new part I was just beginning to
understand:  the paranoid mother- -did not.  It didn't seem to surprise
her and she took the time to do what she could to put my mind at ease.

"It's true the stuff I have out here isn't as up-to-date as my equipment
in King City," she had said.  "But we're not talking trephining and
leeches, either.  The fact is that you're doing well enough I could
deliver him by hand if I had to, with just some clean water and rubber
gloves. I'll see you once a week and I guarantee I'll spot any possible
complications instantly."  She then offered to "just take him out now
and pop him in a bottle, if you want to.  I'll keep him right in my
office, and I'll hook up as many machines as it takes to make you feel
better."

I'd realized she was just humoring me, but I gave it some thought.  Then
I told her, no, I was determined to stick it out to the end, since I'd
come this far, and I said I realized I was being silly.

"It's part of the territory," she had said. "You get mood swings, and
irrational impulses, cravings.  If it gets bad enough, I can do
something about those, too."  Maybe it was just a reaction to all the
tampering the CC had recently been doing to me, but I refused her mood
levelers. I didn't like the swings, and I'm not a masochist, but if
you're going to do this, Hildy, I told myself, you should find out what
it's like. Otherwise, you might as well just read about it.

But the real source of my nervousness was just as silly as a plate of
pickles and ice cream. Since I was still living in Texas and commuting
to Delambre, I had also been seeing Ned Pepper once a week, too.
Ostensibly it was to keep him and others from getting suspicious, but
I'm pretty sure it was also because I found him oddly reassuring.  The
thing is, while no one held any brief for his medical knowledge or
skills, most people felt he was a damn good intuitive diagnostician. Had
he been born in a simpler era he might have made quite a name for
himself.  And . . .

"Hildy," he told me, tapping his stethoscope against his lip, "I don't
want to alarm you, but something about this pregnancy makes me nervous
as a jacked-off polecat."  He took another pull on his bottle and
staggered to his feet as I settled my skirt back around my legs.  That's
the only reason I'd been able to go to him and not the King City
sawbones; a West Texas gynecological exam barely disarranged your
clothing.  The Doctor would poke his cold metal heartbeat disc under my
shirt and listen to my heart and the fetal one, thump my back and my
belly, take my body temperature with a glass thermometer, then ask me to
swing my feet up into these here stirrups, my dear.  I knew he had a
shiny brass speculum he was dying to try out but I drew the line at
that. Just let him look and play doctor and we'd both go home happy.  So
what was this nervous shit?  He didn't have any right to be nervous.  He
sure didn't have the right to tell me about it.  He seemed to realize
that as soon as the slug of red- eye hit his belly.

"I assume you're getting real medical care?" he asked, sheepishly.  When
I told him I was, he nodded, and snapped his suspenders.  "Well, then.
Don't fret yourself none.  He'll probably come out a ridin' a wild bronc
and dealin' five-card stud. Just like his mama."

Naturally, I did worry.  Pregnancy is insanity, take it from me.

#

When I was sure my nausea had passed I stood up and saw I'd been sitting
on the hen coop.  It had a steel framework but my weight had loosened a
lot of the fake wooden shingles glued to the sides.  A rooster about the
size of a mouse was protesting this outrage by pecking at my toes.
Inside, several dozen hens were . . . well, egging him on. Sorry.

The colt wouldn't be standing on his own for a little while yet, but the
show was basically over. Hansel and Gretel and Libby moved off to other
pursuits.  I stayed a little longer, empathizing with the mare, who
looked up at me as if to say You'll get your turn soon enough, Miss
Smarty.  I reached in and stroked the new-born with my fingertip, and
the mother tried to bite my hand. I didn't blame her.  I got up, dusted
my knees, and headed over to the farm house.

I knew the house lid was hinged; I'd seen the kids lift it up.  But I
was still ambivalent enough about these pets that I didn't want to do
that.  Instead I bent over and pushed the little doorbell.  In a moment
one of the male kewpies came out and looked up expectantly, hoping for a
treat.

If the horselets and mini-kine and dwarfowl were cherry bombs in a scale
of illegal explosiveness, then the kewpies were ten sticks of dynamite.
Kewpies were little people, no more than twenty centimeters tall.

The children had named them well.  These are not adult human beings,
done to scale.  In an effort to make them smarter, Libby had given them
bigger brains, and thus bigger heads.  Perfectly sane reasoning, for a
child.  It might even be right, for all I knew about it.  But though he
assured me the current generation was much more clever than the two
preceding ones, they were no more intelligent than any of several
species of monkey.

They were not human, let's get that out of the way right now.  But they
contained human genes, and that is strictly forbidden on Luna under laws
over two centuries old.  I didn't have any of these creepy little baby
dolls to ride my little horselet when I was a nipper.  I don't think
anybody did.  No, these were the result of Libby's enquiring young mind,
and no one else's.

If you could get over the shock and horror almost every Lunarian would
feel at first sight of the things, they were actually quite cute.  They
smiled a lot, and were eager to grasp your finger in their tiny little
hands.  Most of them could say a word or two, things like "candy!" and
"Hi!" A few formed rudimentary sentences.  Possibly they could have been
trained to do more, but the children didn't take the time.  In spite of
their hands they were not tool users.  They were not little people.  And
they were cute.

Enough of that.  The fact is they made my skin crawl on some very
primitive level.  They were bad juju.  They were the forbidden fruit of
the Tree of Science.  They were faerie sprites, and thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live.

So the real truth is I couldn't make up my mind about the damn things.
On the one hand, what had attracted me to the Heinleiners was the fact
that they were doing things no one else was doing.  So . . . all
reasonable and logical rationalizations aside . . . why did they have to
do that?

While I was still pondering this question, not for the first time,
someone came up beside me and lifted the lid of the farm house.  I
looked in with him, and we both frowned.  The inside of the structure
was furnished with little chairs and beds, the former tumbled over and
the latter not occupied.  Half a dozen kewpies were curled up here and
there, sleeping where the urge had taken them, and there were piles of
what you'd expect from animals where that urge had taken them.  It went
a long way toward helping me believe they weren't little people.  It
also recalled documentary horror films from the twentieth century of
homes for the insane and the retarded.

The man let the lid drop, looked around, and bellowed for his children,
who came running from where they had been racing model cars, guilty
looks on their faces.  He glowered down at them.

"I told you that if you can't keep your pets clean, you can't have
them," he said.

"We were gonna clean them up, Dad," Hansel said.  "Soon as we finished
the race.  Isn't that right, Hildy?"

The little bastard.  Fearing that my sufferance here was still very much
dependent on these precocious brats, I said, diplomatically I hope, "I'm
sure they would have."

And I said that because I wasn't about to lie to the man standing beside
me, father to Hansel and Gretel, and the man on whose good graces my
continued presence among the Heinleiners really relied.

This is the man the media has always referred to as "Merlin," since he
would never reveal his real name.  I'm not even sure if I know his real
name, and I think he trusts me by now, as much as he ever will.  But I
don't like the name of Merlin, so in this account I will refer to him as
Mister Smith.  Valentine Michael Smith.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mister V.M. Smith, leader of the Heinleiners, was a tall man, ruggedly
handsome in the mold of some of our more virile movie stars, with white,
even teeth that flashed with little points of light when he smiled and
blue eyes that twinkled with wisdom and compassion.

Did I say he was tall?  Actually, he was a little shrimp of a guy.  Or,
come to think of it, I'd say he was of medium height.  And by golly,
maybe his hair was black and curly.  Ugly he was, with a
snaggled-toothed smile like a dead pig in the sunshine.  Hell, maybe he
was bald.

When you get right down to it, I'm not even going to swear he was male.

I think the heat is largely off of him by now, but he (or she) thinks
differently, so there will not even be a description of him from me.  My
portraits of the other Heinleiners, children included, are deliberately
vague and quite possibly misleading.  To picture him, do what I do when
reading a novel:  just pick a famous face you like and pretend he looks
like that.  Or make your own composite.  Try a young Einstein, with
unruly hair and a surprised expression.  You'll be wrong, although I
will swear there was a look in his eyes as if the universe was a much
stranger place than he'd ever imagined.

And that business about leading the Heinleiners . . . if they had a
leader, he was it.  It was Smith who had made their isolated way of life
possible with his researches into forgotten sciences.  But the
Heinleiners were an independent bunch.  They didn't go in for town
meetings, were unlikely to be found on the rosters of service
clubs--didn't really hold much of a brief for democracy, when you get
right down to it. Democracy, one of them said to me once, means you get
to do whatever the majority of silly sons of bitches says you have to
do.  Which is not to say they favored dictatorship ("getting to do what
one silly son of a bitch says you have to do."  op. cit.).  No, what
they liked (if I may quote one more time from my Heinleiner philosopher)
was forgetting about all the silly sons of bitches and doing what they
damn well pleased.

This is a hazardous way of life in a totally urbanized society, apt to
land you in jail--where an embarrassing number of Heinleiners did live.
To live like that you need elbow room.  You need Texas, and I mean the
real Texas, before the arrival of the iron horse, before the Mexicans,
before the Spaniards.  Hell, maybe before the Indians.  You needed the
Dark Continent, the headwaters of the Amazon, the South Pole, the sound
barrier, Everest, the Seven Lost Cities. Wild places, unexplored places,
not good old stodgy old Luna.  You needed elbow room and adventure.

A lot of Heinleiners had lived in disneys, some still did as at least a
better alternative to the anthill cities.  But it didn't take long to
discover what toy frontiers they actually were. The asteroid belt and
the outer planets had high concentrations of these crotchety
malcontents, too, but it had been a long time since either place had
been a real challenge to humanity.  A lot of ship's captains were
Heinleiners, a lot of solitary miners.  None of them were happy--
possibly that type of person can never be happy-- but at least they were
away from the masses of humanity and less likely to get into trouble if
offered an intolerable insult--like bad breath, or inappropriate
laughter.

That's unfair.  While there were quite a number of antisocial hotheads
among them, most had learned to socialize with the group, swallow the
unpleasantness of daily life, put up with the thousand small things we
each endure every day. It's called civilization.  It's making your
needs, your dreams, subservient to the greater good, and we all do it.
Some of us do it so well we forget we ever had dreams of adventure.  The
Heinleiners did it badly; they still remembered.  They still dreamed.

Those dreams and five cents will get you a cup of coffee anywhere in
Luna.  The Heinleiners realized that, until Mister Smith came along and
made them think fairy tales can come true, if you wish upon a star.

I followed Smith out of the farm, where he'd left his children and Libby
hard at work cleaning out the kewpies' house.  We were in one of the
long corridors of the R.A. Heinlein, some of which, like this one, were
coated with the silvery null-field.  I was about to go after him when I
remembered Winston.  I stuck my head back into the room, snagged his
helmet, and whistled, and he came lumbering out from beneath the tables.
He was licking his chops and I thought I saw traces of blood around his
mouth.

"Have you been eating horses again?" I asked him.  He merely gazed up
and licked his nose.  He knew he wasn't supposed to get up on the
tables, but there were always some horselets that had foolishly jumped
off and he felt they were fair game.  I didn't know what the kids
thought of his hunting, since I didn't know if they were aware of it; I
hadn't told them.  But I know Winston was getting a taste for horsemeat.

I'd thought I'd have to hurry to catch up with Smith, but when I looked
up I saw he'd paused a little way down the corridor and was waiting for
me.

"So you're still around, eh?" he said.  Yessir, my reputation in the old
R.A.H. couldn't have been higher.

"I guess it's because I just love children."

He laughed at that.  I'd only met him three times before and not talked
to him very long on any of those occasions, but he was one of those
people good at sizing others up on short acquaintance.  Most of us think
we are, but he was.

"I know they're not easy to love," he said.  "I probably wouldn't love
them so much if they were." It was a very Heinleinerish thing to say;
these folks cherish perversity, you understand.

"You're saying only a father could love 'em?"

"Or a mother."

"That's what I'm counting on," I said, and patted my belly.

"You'll either love him quick, or drown him." We walked on for a while
without saying anything. Every once in a while one of the null-field
safety locks would vanish in front of us and re-appear behind us.  All
automatic, and all happening only for those with null-suits installed.

These people didn't engineer anything any better than they had to, and
the reason was simply that they had this marvelous back-up system.  It's
going to be revolutionary, I tell you.

"I get the feeling you don't approve," he said, at last.

"Of what?  Your kids?  Hey, I was just--"

"Of what they do."

"Well, Winston sure does.  I think he's eaten half their stock."

I was thinking fast.  I wanted to learn more from this man, and the way
to do that is not by running down his children and his way of life. But
one of the things I knew about him was that he didn't like liars, was
good at detecting them, and, though a career in reporting had made me a
world-class liar, I wasn't sure I could get one by him.  And I wasn't
sure I wanted to.  I had hoped I'd put a lot of that behind me.  So
instead of answering his question, I said something else, a technique
familiar to any journalist or politician.

And it seemed to have worked.  He just grunted, and reached down to pet
Winston's ugly mug.  Once more the hound came through for me, not taking
off the hand at the wrist.  Still digesting the horselet, probably.

#

We came to a door marked MAIN DRIVE ROOM, and he held it open for me.
You could have driven a golf ball into the room and never hit a wall,
and you could have driven a medium-size rover race in it.  Whether you
could drive a spaceship the size of the Heinlein was very much an open
question. But in front of me were the signs that someone was trying.

Most of the cavernous room was filled with structures whose precise
description I must leave to your imagination, since the drive room of
the Heinlein is still a closely-guarded secret and certainly will be
until long after they get the damn thing to work.  I will say this:
whatever you imagine will surely be far off the mark.  It is unexpected,
and startling, like opening the hood of a rover and finding it's powered
by a thousand mice licking a thousand tiny crankshafts, or by the moral
power of virginity.  And this: though I could hardly identify anything
as basic as a nut and bolt in the fantastical mess, it still had the
look of Heinleiner engineering, wherein nothing is ever any better than
it has to be.  Maybe if they get time to move beyond prototypes they'll
get more elegant and more careful, but in the meantime it's "Don't bend
that wrench.  Get a bigger hammer."  Heinleiner toolboxes must be filled
with bubblegum and bobby pins.

And yes, O good and faithful reader, they were planning to launch the
hulk of the old Robert A. Heinlein into interstellar space.  You heard
it here first.  They were not, however, planning to do it with an
endless stream of nuclear cherry bombs pooting out the tailpipe.  Just
what principles were envisioned is still proprietary information, but I
can say it was a variant technology of the mathematics that produced the
null-field.  I can say it because no one but Smith and a handful of
others know what that technology is.

Just imagine them harnessing the old wreck to a team of very large
swans, and leave it at that.

"As you can see," Smith was saying as we walked down a long and fairly
rickety flight of metal stairs, "they've just about frabjulated the
primary phase of the osmosifractionating de-hoo- dooer.  And those guys
ratattating the willy-nilly say they ought to have it whistling Dixie in
three days' time."

No secrecy involved here.  I'd have written exactly what he said, if I
had any hope of remembering it, and the meaning would have been the
same:  nothing.  Smith never seemed to mind if his audience was coming
into the clubhouse two or three holes behind him; he rattled off his own
private jargon without regard to whether or not it was being monitored.
Sometimes I thought it just helped him to think out loud.  Sometimes I
thought he was showing off.  Probably a little of both.

But I can't get away from the subject of the interstellar drive without
mentioning the one time he made an attempt to put it in layman's terms.
It stuck in my mind, possibly because Smith had a way of making "layman"
rhyme with "retarded."

"There are basically three states of matter," he had said.  "I call them
wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity.  The universe of our experience is
almost totally composed of dogmatic matter, just as it's mostly what we
call 'matter,' as opposed to 'anti-matter'--though dogmatic matter
includes both types.  Every once in a great while we get evidence of
some perverse matter.  It's when you move into the realm of the wacky
that you have to watch out."

"I've known that all my life," I had told him.

"Ah, but the possibilities!" he had said, waving his hand at the drive
taking shape in the engine room of the Heinlein.

As he did now, providing the sort of segue I hate when a director does
it in a movie, but the fact is Smith had a habit of waving his hand
grandly when coming upon his mighty works.  Hell, he had a right.

"See what can come from the backwaters of science?" he said.  "Physics
is a closed book, they all said.  Put your talents to work in something
useful."

"'They jeered me at the Sorbonne!'" I suggested.

"They threw eggs when I presented my paper at the Institute!  Eggs!"  He
leered at me, dry- washing his hands, hunching his shoulders.  "The
fools!  Let them see who has the last laugh, ha ha HA!"  He dropped the
mad scientist impression and patted a huge machine on its metal flank, a
cowboy gentling a horse.  Smith could have been insufferably stuffy
except for the fact he'd seen almost as many old movies as I had.

"No kidding, Hildy, the fools are going to be impressed when they see
what I've wrung out of the tired old husk of physics."

"You'll get no argument from me," I said. "What happened to physics,
anyway?  Why was it neglected for so long?"

"Diminishing returns.  They spent an insane amount of money on the GSA
about a century ago, and when they turned it on they found out they'd
hubbled it up.  The repairs would have--"

"The GSA?"

"Global Supercooled Accelerator.  You can still find a lot of it,
running right around the Lunar equator."

I remembered it then; I'd followed it part of the way when I ran in the
Equatorial Rover Race.

"They built big instruments out in space, too. They learned a lot about
the universe, cosmologically and sub-atomically, but very little of it
had any practical use.  It got to where learning any more, in the
directions physics kept going, would cost trillions just to tool up.  If
you did it, when you were done you'd have learned what went on in the
first billionth of a nanosecond of creation, and then you'd just
naturally want to know what happened in the first thousandth of a
nano-nanosecond, only that'd cost ten times as much.  People got tired
of paying those kind of bills to answer questions even less
reality-based than theology, and the smart people noticed that for
peanuts you could find out practical things in biological science."

"So all the original research now is in biology," I said.

"Hah!" he shouted.  "There is no original research, unless you count
some of the things the Central Computer does.  Oh, a few people here and
there."  He waved his hand, dismissing them. "It's all engineering now.
Take well-known principles and find a way to make a better toothpaste."
His eyes lit up.  "That's a perfect example.  A few months back, I woke
up and my mouth tasted like peppermint.  I looked into it, turns out
it's a new sort of 'hot.  Some idiot thought this up, built it, and let
it loose on an unsuspecting public.  It's in the water, Hildy! Can you
imagine?"

"It's a crying shame," I muttered, trying not to meet his eye.

"Well, I got the antidote.  Maybe my mouth does taste rotten in the
morning, but at least it tastes like me.  Reminds me who I am."  Which I
guess is a perfect example of both the perversity of Heinleiners and the
cultural passivity they rebelled against.  And the big reason I liked
them, in spite of their best efforts to thwart my affection.

"It's all handed down from on high now," he went on.  "We're like
savages at an altar, waiting for miracles to be handed down.  We don't
envision the miracles we might work, if we set ourselves to it."

"Like little people, eight inches high and smart as lab rats."

He winced, the first indication I'd had of a moral uncertainty.  Thank
god for that; I like people to have opinions, but people with no doubts
scare me.

"You want me to defend that?  Okay.  I've brought those children up to
think for themselves, and to question authority.  It's not unlimited; me
or somebody who knows more about it has to approve their projects, and
we keep an eye on them.  We've created a place where they can be free to
make their own rules, but they're children, they have to follow our
rules, and we set as few as possible.  Do you realize this is the only
place in Luna where the eyes of our mechanical Big Brother can't look?
Not even the police can come in here."

"I have no reason to love the Central Computer, either."

"I didn't think so.  I thought you might have a story to tell about
that, or I'd never have let you in.  You'll tell it when you're ready.
Do you know why Libby makes little people?"

"I didn't ask him."

"He might have told you; might not have.  It's his solution to the same
problem I'm working on: interstellar travel.  His reasoning is, a
smaller human being requires less oxygen, less food, a smaller
spacecraft.  If we were all eight inches high, we could go to Alpha
Centauri in a fuel drum."

"That's crazy."

"Not crazy.  Ridiculous, probably. Unattainable, almost certainly. Those
kewpies live about three years, and I doubt they'll ever have much of a
brain.  But it's an innovative solution to a problem the rest of Luna
isn't even working on.  Why do you think Gretel goes running across the
surface in her birthday suit?"

"You weren't supposed to know about that."

"I've forbidden it.  It's dangerous, Hildy, but I know Gretel, and I
know she's still trying it. And the reason is, she hopes she'll
eventually adapt herself to living in vacuum without any artificial
aids."

I thought of the fish stranded on the beach, flopping around, probably
doomed but still flopping.

"That's not how evolution works," I said.

"You know it and I know it.  Tell it to Gretel. She's a child, and a
smart one, but with childish stubbornness.  She'll give it up sooner or
later. But I can guarantee she'll try something else."

"I hope it's less hare-brained."

"From your lips to God's ears.  Sometimes she . . ."  He rubbed his
face, and made a dismissing gesture with his hand.  "The kewpies make me
uneasy, I'll admit that.  You can't help wondering how human they are,
and if they are human, whether or not they have any rights, or should
have any rights."

"It's experimentation on humans, Michael," I said.  "We have some pretty
strong laws on that subject."

"What we have are taboos.  We do plenty of experimentation on human
genes.  What we're forbidden to do is create new humans."

"You don't think that's a good idea?"

"It's never that simple.  What I object to are blanket bans on anything.
I've done a lot of research into this--I was against it at first, just
like you seem to be.  You want to hear it?"

"I'd be fascinated."

We'd come to an area of the engine room I thought of as his office, or
laboratory.  It was the place I'd spent most of what little time I'd had
with him.  He liked to put his feet up on a wooden desk as old as
Walter's but a lot more battered, look off into infinity, and expound.
So far, his innate caution had always stopped him from getting too
deeply into anything when I was around, but I sensed he needed an
outsider's opinion.  The lab?  Think of it as full of bubbling retorts
and sizzling Jacob's ladders. Omit the hulking body strapped to the
table; that was his children's domain.  The place didn't look anything
like that, but it's the proper stage set, metaphorically.

"It's a question of where to draw the line," he said.  "Lines have to be
drawn; even I realize that.  But the line is constantly moving.  In a
progressing society, the line should be moving. Did you know it was once
illegal to terminate a pregnancy?"

"I'd heard of it.  Seems very strange."

"They'd decided that a fetus was a human. Later, we changed our minds.
Society used to keep dead people hooked up to something called 'life-
support,' sometimes for twenty or thirty years. You couldn't turn the
machines off."

"Their brains were dead, you mean."

"They were dead, Hildy, by our standards. Corpses with blood being
pumped through them. Bizarre, creepy as hell.  You wonder what they were
thinking of, what their reasoning could possibly have been.  When people
knew they were dying, when they knew that death was going to be horribly
painful, it was thought wrong of them to kill themselves."

I looked away; I don't know if he caught it, but I think he did.

"A doctor couldn't help them die; he'd get prosecuted for murder.
Sometimes they even withheld the drugs that would be best at stopping
the pain.  Any drug that dulled the senses, or heightened them, or
altered the consciousness in any way was viewed as sinful--except for
the two most physically harmful drugs:  alcohol and nicotine.  Something
relative harmless, like heroin, was completely illegal, because it was
addictive, as if alcohol was not.  No one had the right to determine
what he put into his own body, they had no medical bill of rights.
Barbaric, agreed?"

"No argument."

"I've studied their rationalizations.  They make very little sense now.
The reasons for the bans on human experimentation make a lot of sense.
The potential for abuse is enormous.  All genetic research involves
hazards.  So rules were evolved . . . and then set in stone.  No one has
taken a look at them in over two hundred years.  My position is, it's
time to think it over again."

"And what did you come up with?"

"Hell, Hildy, we've barely started.  A lot of the prohibitions on
genetic research were made at a time when something released into the
environment could theoretically have disastrous results.  But we've got
room to experiment now, and fool-proof means of isolation.  Do the work
on an asteroid, and if something goes wrong, quarantine it, then shove
it into the sun."

I had no problem with that, and told him so.

"But what about the human experiments?"

"They make me queasy, just like you.  But that's because we were raised
to view them as evil.  My children have no such inhibitions.  I've told
them all their lives that they should be able to ask any question.  And
they should be able to do any experiment, as long as they feel they have
a reasonable idea of its outcome.  I help them with that part, me, and
the other parents."

I probably had a dubious expression on my face. It would have made
perfect sense, since I was feeling dubious.

"I'm way ahead of you," he said.  "You're going to bring up the old
'superman' argument."

I didn't dispute it.

"I think it's time that one was looked at again.  They used to call it
'playing God."  That term has fallen out of favor, but it's still there.
If we're going to set out to improve humans genetically, to build a new
human, who's going to make the choices?  Well, I can tell you who's
making them now, and I'll bet you know the answer, too."

It didn't take a lot of thought.  "The CC?" I ventured.

"Come on," he said, getting up from his desk. "I'm going to show you
something."

#

I had a hard time keeping up with him--would have at the best of times,
but my current state of roly-polytude didn't help things.  He was one of
those straight-ahead people, the sort who, when they've decided where
they're going, can't be easily diverted.  All I could do was waddle
along in his wake.

Eventually we reached the base of the ship, which I knew mainly because
we left square corridors and right-angle turns for the haphazard twists
of the Great Dump.  Not long after that we descended some stairs and
were in a tunnel bored through solid rock.  I still had no idea how far
this network extended.  I gathered it was possible to walk all the way
to King City without ever visiting the surface.

We came to an abandoned, dimly-lit tube station.  Or it had been
abandoned at one time, but the Heinleiners had restored it:  pushed the
trash on the platform to one side, hung a few lights, homey touches like
that.  Floating a fraction above a gleaming silver rail was a six-
person Maglev car of antique design.  It had no doors, peeling paint,
and the sign on the side still read MALL 5-9 SHUTTLE.  With stops at all
the major ghost warrens along the way, no doubt: this baby was old.

Random cushions had been spread on the ripped- out seats and we sat on
those and Smith pulled on a cord which rang a little tinkling bell, and
the car began to glide down the rail.

"The whole idea of building a superman has acquired a lot of negative
baggage over the years," he said, picking up as if the intervening walk
had never happened.  As if he needed another annoying characteristic.
"The German Fascists are the first ones I'm aware of who seriously
proposed it, as part of an obsolete and foolish racial scheme."

"I've read about them," I said.

"It's nice to talk to someone who knows a little history.  Then you'll
know that by the time it became possible to tinker with genes, a lot
more objections had been raised.  Many of them were valid.  Some still
are."

"Is that something you'd like to see?" I asked. "A superman?"

"It's the word that throws you off.  I don't know if a 'superman' is
possible, or desirable.  I think an altered human is an idea worth
looking into.  When you consider that these carcasses we're walking
around in were evolved to thrive in an environment we've been evicted
from . . ."

Maybe he said more, but I missed it, because just about then we had a
head-on collision with another tram going in the opposite direction.
Obviously, we didn't really.  Obviously, it was just the reflection of
the headlights of our own car as we approached another of those
ubiquitous null-fields.  And even more obviously, you weren't there to
stand up and shout like a fool and see your life pass before your eyes,
and I'll bet you would have, too.  Or maybe I'm just slow to catch on.

Smith didn't think so.  He was very apologetic when he realized what had
happened, and took time to  tell me about another little surprise in
store, which happened a minute later when a null- field vanished in
front of us and, with a little gust of wind, we entered vacuum and began
to really pick up speed.  The tunnel walls blurred in the beam of our
headlights, details snatched away before they could be perceived.

He had more to say on the subject of human engineering.  I didn't get it
all because I was concentrating on not breathing, still learning to wear
a null-suit.  But I got his main points.

He thought that while Gretel's method was wrong, her goal was
worthwhile, and I couldn't see what was wrong with it, either.
Basically, we either manufacture our environment or adapt to it. Both
have hazards, but it did seem high time we at least start discussing the
second alternative.

Take weightlessness, for example.  Most people who spent a lot of time
in free-fall had some body adaptations made, but it was all surgical.
Human legs are too strong; push too hard and you can fracture your
skull.  It's handy to have hands instead of feet at the ends of your
ankles.  Feet are as useless as vermiform appendices in free- fall. It's
also useful to be able to bend and twist more than the human body
normally can.

But the question before the court was this: should humans be bred to
space travel?  Should the useful characteristics be put into the genes,
so children are born with hands instead of feet?

Maybe so, maybe not.  We weren't talking radical change here, or
anything that couldn't be done just as easily surgically, without
raising the troublesome issues of more than one species of human being.

But what about a human adapted to vacuum?  I've no idea how to go about
it, but it probably could be done.  What would he look like?  Would he
feel superior to us?  Would we be his brother, or his cousin, or what?
one thing was sure:  it would be a lot easier to do it genetically than
with the knife.  And I feel certain the end result would not look very
human.

I chewed that one over quite a bit in the coming days, examining my
feelings.  I found that most of them came from prejudice, as Smith had
said.  I'd been raised to think it was wrong.  But I found myself
agreeing that it was at least time to think it over again.

As long as I didn't have to clean up after kewpies.

#

The train car pulled into a siding at another abandoned station where
somebody had scrawled the word "Minamata" over whatever had been there
before.  I had no idea how far we'd come, or in what direction.

"This is still part of the Delambre dump, more or less," Smith said, so
at least I had a general idea.  We started down a long, filthy corridor,
Smith's flashlight beam bobbing from wall to wall as we walked.  In a
movie, rats and other vermin would have been scuttling out of our way,
but a rat would have needed a null-suit to survive this place; mine was
still on, and I was still thinking about breathing.

"There's really no reason why the stuff in here shouldn't be spread out
over the surface like the rest of the garbage," he went on.  "I think
it's mainly psychological reasons it's all pumped in here.  This is a
nasty place.  If it's toxic or radioactive or biochemically hazardous,
this is where it comes."

We reached an air lock of the kind that used to be standard when I was a
child, and he motioned me inside.  He slapped a button, then gestured
toward the air fitting on the side of my chest.

"Turn that counter-clockwise," he said.  "They only come on
automatically when there's a vacuum. There's gas where we're going, but
you don't want to breathe it."

The lock cycled and we stepped into Minamata.

The place had no name on the municipal charts of King City, just Waste
Repository #2.  The Heinleiners had named it after a place in Japan that
had suffered the first modern-day big environmental disaster, when
industries had pumped mercury compounds into a bay and produced a lot of
twisted babies.  So sorry, mom.  That's the breaks.

Minamata Luna was really just a very large, buried storage tank.  By
large, I mean you could have parked four starships the size of the
Heinlein without scraping the fenders.  Texas is a lot bigger, but it
doesn't feel like being a bug in a bottle because you can't see the
walls.  Here you could, and they curved upward and vanished into a
noxious mist.  The far end was invisible.

Maybe there was some artificial light in there. I didn't see any, but
they were hardly necessary. The bottom third of the horizontal cylinder
was full of liquid, and it glowed.  Red here, green there . . .
sometimes a ghastly blue.  The makers of horror films would have killed
to get that blue.

We had entered at what seemed the axis of the cylinder, which was
rounded off at this end, like a pressure tank.  A ledge, three meters
wide and with a railing, curved away from us in each direction, but to
the right was blocked off with a warning sign.  Looking past it, I could
see the ledge had crumbled away in several places.  When I looked back
Smith was already moving away from me toward the left.  I hurried to
catch up with him.

I never did quite catch him.  Every time I got close my eye was drawn by
the luminescent sea off to my right, and a few hundred meters down.

The thing about that sea . . . it moved.

At first I only saw the swirls of glowing color like an oil film on
water.  I'd always thought colorful things were just naturally pretty
things, but Minamata taught me differently.  At first I couldn't explain
my queasy reaction.  None of the colors, by themselves, seemed all that
hideous (except for that blue).  Surely that same swirl of color, on a
shirt or dress, would be a gorgeous thing.  Wouldn't it?  I couldn't see
why not.  I began walking more slowly, trailing my hand along the top of
the rail, trying to figure why it all disturbed me so.

The side of the cylinder went straight down from the edge of the ledge
we walked on, then gradually curved inward until it met the fluorescent
sea.  Waves were rolling sluggishly to crash against the metal sides of
the tank.

Waves, Hildy?  What could be causing waves in this foul soup?

Maybe some agitating mechanism, I thought, though I couldn't see any use
for one.  Then I saw a part of the sea hump itself up, ten or twenty
meters high--it was hard to judge the scale from my vantage point.  Then
I saw strange shapes on the borderline between sea and shore, things
that moved among the mineral efflorescences that grew like arthritic
fingers along that metal beach. Then I saw something that, I thought,
raised its head on a spavined neck and looked at me, reached out a
hungry hand . . .

Of course, it was a long way off.  I could have been wrong.

Smith took my arm without a word and urged me along.  I didn't look at
the Minamata Sea again.

#

We came to a series of circular mirrors standing against the vertical
wall to our left. Each had a number over it.  I realized that tunnels
had been bored into the walls here and each had been sealed off with a
null-field barrier.

Smith stopped before the eighth, pointed at it, and stepped in.  I
followed him, and found myself in a short tunnel, maybe twenty meters
long, five meters high.  Halfway down the tunnel were metal bars. Beyond
that point a level floor had been built to support a cot, chair, desk,
and toilet, all looking as if they'd been ordered from some cheap
mail-order house.  On our side of the bars was a portable air plant,
which seemed to be doing its job, as my suit had vanished as I stepped
through the field.  Spare oxygen cylinders and crates of food were
stacked against the wall.

Sitting on the cot and watching a slash-boxing show on the television,
was Andrew MacDonald.  He glanced up from the screen as we entered, but
he did not rise.

Possibly this was a new point of etiquette. Should the dead rise for the
living?  Be sure to ask at your next seance.

"Hello, Andrew," Smith said.  "I've brought someone to see you."

"Yes?" Andrew said, with no great interest. His eyes turned to me,
lingered for a moment. There was no spark of recognition.  Worse than
that, there was none of that penetrating quality I'd seen on the day he
. . . hell, how else can I say it?  On the day he died.  For a moment I
though this was just some guy who looked a lot like Andrew.  I guess I
was half right.

"Sorry," he said, and shrugged.  "Don't know her."

"I'm not surprised," Smith said.  He looked at me.  I had the feeling I
was supposed to say something perceptive, intelligent.  Maybe I was
supposed to have figured it all out.

"What the fuck's going on here?" I said, which was a lot better than
"duuuuh," which was my first reaction, though neither really qualifies
as perceptive.

"Ask him," Andrew said.  "He thinks I'm dangerous."

I'd started toward the bars but Smith put his hand on my arm and shook
his head.

"See what I mean?" the prisoner said.

"He is dangerous," Smith told me.  "When he first came here, he nearly
killed a man.  Would have, but we got to him in time.  Want to tell us
about that, Andrew?"

He shrugged.  "He stepped on my foot.  It wasn't my fault."

"I've had enough of this," I said.  "What the hell are you people doing
in here?  I saw this man die, or his twin brother."

Smith was about to say something, but I'd finally gotten Andrew
interested.  He stood and came to the bars, held on with one hand while
the other played idly with his genitals.  You see that sometimes, in old
alkies or voluntary skitzys down in Bedrock.  It's a free planet, right?
Nobody can stop them, but people hurry by, like you don't stop and stare
if someone is vomiting, or picking his nose.  I'd never seen an
apparently healthy man masturbating with such utter lack of modesty.
What had they done to him?

"How did I do?" he asked me, tugging and squeezing.  "All they'll tell
me is I died in the ring.  You were there?  Were you close up?  Who was
it that got me?  Damn, the least they could do is give me a tape."

"Are you really Andrew MacDonald?"

"That's my name, ask me again and I'll tell you the same."

"It's him," Smith said, quietly.  "That's what I've finally decided,
after thinking it over a lot."

"That's not what you said last time," the man said.  "You said I was
only part of old Andy.  The mean part.  I don't think I'm mean."  He
lost interest in his penis and stretched a hand through the bars,
gesturing.  "Toss me a can of that beef stew, boss man.  I've had my eye
on that for days."

"You've got plenty of food in there."

"Yeah, but I want stew."

Smith got a plastic can and lobbed it toward the cell; the man snagged
it and tore off the top. He took a big handful and crammed it into his
mouth, chewing noisily.  There was a stove, a table, and utensils
plainly in sight behind him, but he didn't seem to care.

"I didn't see you fight," I said, at last.

"Shit.  You know, I'd like you if you weren't so fat.  You wanna fuck?"
A gravy-covered hand went to his groin once again.  "Let's get brown,
honey."

I'm going to ignore the rest of his antics.  I still remember them
vividly, and still find them disturbing.  I'd once wanted to make love
to this man.  I'd once found him quite attractive.

"I was there when they carried you back from the ring," I said.

"The good old squared circle.  The sweet science.  All there is, really,
all there is. What's your name, fatty?"

"Hildy.  You were mortally injured and you refused treatment."

"What a jerk I must have been.  Live to fight another day, huh?"

"I'd always thought so.  And I thought what you were doing, risking your
life, was stupid.  I thought it was unnecessary, too, but you told me
your reasons, and I respect them."

"A jerk," he repeated.

"I guess, when it came time for you to live up to your bargain, I
thought you were stupid, too. But I was impressed.  I was moved.  I
can't say I thought you were doing the right thing, but your
determination was awesome."

"You're a jerk, too."

"I know."

He continued shoving stew into his face, looking at me with no real
spark of human feeling I could detect.  I turned to Smith.

"It's time you told me what's going on here. What's been done to this
man?  If this is an example of what you were talking about on the way .
. ."

"It is."

"Then I don't want anything to do with it.  In fact, damn it, I know I
promised not to talk about you and your people, but--"

"Hang on a minute, Hildy," Smith said.  "This is an example of human
experimentation, but we didn't do it."

"The CC," I said, after a long pause.  Who else?

"There's something seriously wrong with the CC, Hildy.  I don't know
what it is, but I know the results.  This man is one.  He's a cloned
body, grown from Andrew MacDonald's corpse, or from a tissue sample.
When he's in a mood to talk, he's said things we've checked against his
records, and it seems he really does have MacDonald's memories. Up to a
point.  He remembers things up to about three or four years ago.  We
haven't been able to test him thoroughly, but what tests we've been able
to run bear out what we've seen from other specimens like him.  He
thinks he is MacDonald."

"Damn right I am," the prisoner chimed in.

"For all practical purposes, he's right.  But he doesn't remember the
Kansas Collapse.  He doesn't remember Silvio's assassination.  I was
certain he wouldn't remember you, and he didn't. What's happened is that
his memories were recorded in some way, and played back into this clone
body."

I thought it over.  Smith gave me time to.

"It doesn't work," I said, finally.  "There's no way this thing could
have turned into the man I met in only three or four years.  This guy is
like a big, spoiled child."

"Big is right, babe," the man said, with the gesture you'd expect.

"I didn't say the copy was perfect," Smith said.  "The memories seem to
be extremely good. But some things didn't record.  He has no social
inhibitions whatsoever.  No sense of guilt or shame.  He really did try
to kill a man who accidentally stepped on his foot, and he never saw
what was so wrong about it.  He's incredibly dangerous, because he's the
best fighter in Luna; that's why we have him here, in the best prison we
can devise.  We, who don't even believe in prisons."

I could see it would be a tough one to get out of.  If you got past the
null-field, there were the toxic gases of Minamata.  Beyond that,
vacuum.

It seemed that "MacDonald" was the most recent of a long line of
abandoned experiments.  Smith wouldn't tell me how the Heinleiners had
come to have him, except to say that, in his case, he'd most likely been
sent.

"Early on in this program, we had a pipeline into the secret lab where
this work was going on. The first attempts were pathetic.  We had people
who just sat there and drooled, others who tore at themselves with their
teeth.  But the CC got better with practice.  Some could pass as normal
human beings.  Some of them live with us.  They're limited, but what can
you do?  I think they're human.

"But lately, we've been getting surprise packages, like Andrew here.  We
lock them up, interrogate them.  Some of them are harmless. Others . . .
I don't think we can ever let them free."

"I don't understand.  I mean, I see this one could be dangerous, but--"

"The CC wants in here."

"Into Minamata?"

"No, this is his place.  You saw the water down there.  That's his work.
He wants into the Heinleiner enclave.  He wants the null-field.  He
wants to know if I'm successful with the stardrive.  He wants to know
other things.  He found out about our access to his forbidden
experiments, and we started getting people like Andrew.  Walking time
bombs, most of them.  After a few tragic incidents, we had to institute
some security precautions.  Now we're careful about the dead people we
let in here."

It was not the first time an action by the CC had turned my world
upside-down.  You live in a time and a place and you think you know
what's going on, but you don't.  Maybe no one ever did.

Smith had unloaded too many things on me too quickly.  I'd had some
practice at that, with the CC playing games with my head, but I wonder
if anyone ever gets really good at it.

"So he's working on immortality?" I asked.

"Of a sort.  The oldest people around now are pushing three hundred.
Most people think there's a limit on how long the human brain can be
patched up in one way or another.  But if you could make a perfect
record of everything a human being is, and dump it into another brain .
. ."

"Yeah . . . but Andrew is dead.  This thing . . . even if it was a
better copy, it still wouldn't be Andrew.  Would it?"

"Hey, Hildy," Andrew said.  When I turned to face him I got a big glob
of cold, canned beef stew right in the kisser.

He never looked more like an ape as he capered around his cell, hugging
himself, bent over with laughter.  It showed no signs of stopping.  And
the funny thing was, after a brief flash of homicidal intent, I found it
impossible to hate him.  Whatever the CC had left out of this man, he
was not evil, as I had first thought.  He was childish and completely
impulsive.  Some sort of governor had not been copied right; his
conscience had been smudged in transmission, there was static in his
self-control.  Think of it, do it.  A simple philosophy.

"Come on next door," Smith said, after giving me some help getting the
worst mess off me.  "You can clean up there, and I have something to
show you."

So we went through the null-field again--Andrew was still
laughing--walked eight or nine steps further to cell #9, and stepped in.

And who should I see there but Aladdin, he of the magic lungs, standing
on this side of a barred cell identical to the one we'd just left.  Only
this one was not occupied, and the door stood open.

"Who's this one for?" I asked.  "And what's Aladdin doing here?"  Some
days I'm quick, but this didn't seem to be one of them.

"There's no assigned occupant yet, Hildy," Smith said, displaying
something that had once been a flashlight but had now folded out into
what just had to be a Heinleiner weapon--it had that gimcrack look.
"We're going to ask you some questions.  Not many, but the answers may
take a while, so get comfortable.  Aladdin's here to remove your
null-suit generator if we don't like the answers."

There was a long, awkward silence.  Being held at gunpoint is not
something any of us had much experience of, from either end of the gun.
It's a social situation you don't run into often.  Try it at your next
party, see how the guests handle it.

To their credit, I don't think they liked it much more than me.

"What do you want to know?"

"Start with all your dealings with the Central Computer over the last
three years."

So I told them everything.

#

Gretel, that sweet child, would have invited me in the first weekend, as
it turned out.  It was Smith and his friends who held up the approval.
They were checking me out, and their resources for doing so were
formidable.  I'd been watched in Texas.  My background had been
researched.  As I went along there were a few times when I missed this
or that detail, and I was always corrected. To lie would have been
futile . . . and besides, I didn't want to lie.  If anyone had the
answers to the questions I'd been asking myself about the CC, it was
surely these people.  I wanted to help them by telling everything I
knew.

I don't want to make this sound more dire than it actually was.  Fairly
early we all relaxed. The flashlight was re-folded and put away.  If
they'd been really suspicious of me I'd have been brought here on my
first visit, but after the things they had told me it was only prudent
for them to interrogate me in the way they did.

The thing that had upset them was my suicide attempt on the surface.  It
had left behind physical evidence, in the form of a ruptured faceplate,
and set them to wondering if I had really died up there.

And as I continued talking about it a disturbing thing occurred to me:
what if I had?

How could I ever know, really?  If the CC could record my memories and
play them back into a cloned body, would I feel any different than I did
then?  I couldn't think of a test to check it, not one I could do
myself.  I found myself hoping they had one.  No such luck.

"I'm not worried about that, Hildy," Smith said, when I brought it up.
In retrospect, maybe that wasn't a smart thing to do, pointing out that
they couldn't be sure of me, either, but it didn't matter, since they'd
already thought of it and made up their minds.  "If the CC has gotten
that good, then we're licked already."

"Besides," Aladdin put in, "if he's that good, what difference would it
make?"

"It could be important if he'd left a post- hypnotic suggestion," Smith
said.  "A perfect copy of Hildy, with a buried injunction to spy on us
and spill her guts when she went back to King City."

"I hadn't thought of that," Aladdin said, looking as if he wished the
flashlight hadn't been put away so hastily.

"As I said, if he's that good we might as well give up."  He stood, and
stretched.  "No, my friends.  At some point you have to stop the tests.
At some point you just have to go with your feelings.  I'm very sorry to
have done this to you, Hildy, it's against all I believe in. Your
personal life should be your own.  But we're engaged in a quiet war
here.  No battles have been fought, but the enemy is constantly feeling
us out.  The best we can do is be like a turtle, pull into a shell he
can't penetrate.  I'm sorry."

"It's okay.  I wanted to talk about it, anyway."

He held out his hand, and I took it, and for the first time in many,
many years, I felt like I belonged to something.  I wanted to shout
"Death to the CC!"  Unfortunately, the Heinleiners were short on
slogans, membership badges, that sort of thing.  I sort of doubted I'd
be offered a uniform.

Hell, they didn't even have a secret handshake. But I accepted the
ordinary one I was offered gratefully.  I was in.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

What did you do during the Big Glitch?

It's an interesting question from several angles.  If I'd asked what you
were doing when you heard Silvio had been assassinated, I'd get back a
variety of answers, but a minute after you heard ninety-nine percent of
you were glued to the newspad (twenty-seven percent to the Nipple). It's
the same for other large, important events, the kind that shape our
lives.  But each of you will have a different story about the Glitch.
The story will start like this:

Something major in your life suffered a malfunction of some kind.
Depending on what it was, you called the repair-person or the police or
simply started screaming bloody murder.  The next thing you did (99.99
percent of you, anyway), was turn on your newspad to see what the hell
was happening.  You turned it on, and you got . . . nothing.

Our age is not simply information-rich.  It's information-saturated.  We
expect that information to be delivered as regularly as the oxygen we
breathe, and tend to forget the delivery is as much at the mercy of
fallible machines as is the air.  We view it as only slightly less
important than air.  Two seconds of down-time on one of the major pads
will generate hundreds of thousands of complaints.  Irate calls, furious
threats to cancel subscriptions.  Frightened calls.  Panicky calls.  To
turn on the pad and get nothing but white noise and fuzz is Luna's
equivalent of a planet-wide earthquake.  We expect our info-nets to be
comprehensive, ubiquitous, and global, and we expect it right now.

To this day, the Big Glitch is the mainstay of the counseling industry
in Luna.  Those who deal in crisis management have found it a fabulous
meal ticket that shows no signs of expiring.  They rate it higher, in
terms of stress produced, than being the victim of violent assault, or
the loss of a parent.

One of the things that made it so stressful was that everyone's
experience was different.  When your world-view, your opinions and the
"facts" you base them on, the events that have shaped our collective
consciousness, what you like (because everyone else does) and what you
don't like (ditto), all come over that all-pervasive newspad, you're a
bit at sea when the pad goes down and you suddenly have to react for
yourself.  No news of how people in Arkytown are taking it.  No endless
replays of the highlights.  No pundits to tell you what to think about
it, what people are doing about it (so you can do the same).  You're on
your own, pal.  Good luck.  Oh, and by the way, if you choose wrong, it
can kill you, buddy.

The Glitch is the one big event where nobody saw the whole thing in an
overview provided by experts whose job it is to trim the story down to a
size that will fit a pad.  Everybody saw just a little piece of it,
their own piece.  Almost none of those pieces really mattered in the
larger scheme of things.  Mine didn't, either, though I was closer to
the "center" of the story, if it had a center, than most of you.  Only a
handful of experts who finally brought it under control ever really knew
what was going on.  Read their accounts, if you're qualified, if you
want to know what really went on.  I've tried, and if you can explain it
to me please send a synopsis, twenty- five words or less, all entries to
be scrupulously ignored.

So know going in that I'm not going to provide many technical details.
Know that I'm not going to tell you much about what went on behind the
scenes; I'm as ignorant of it as anyone else.

No, this is simply what happened to me during the Big Glitch . . .

#

Afterwards, when it became necessary to talk about Delambre and the
colony of weirdos in residence there, the newspads had to come up with a
term everyone would recognize, some sort of shorthand term for the place
and the people.  As usual in these situations, there was a period of
casting about and market research, listening to what the people
themselves were calling it.  I heard the place called a village, a
warren, and a refuge.  My particular favorite was "termitarium." It
aptly described the random burrows in the Delambre trash heap.

Pads who didn't like the Heinleiners called the residents a cabal.  Pads
who admired them referred to Delambre and the ship as a Citadel.  There
was even confusion about the term "Heinleiner."  It meant, depending on
who you were talking about, either a political philosophy, a seriously
crackpot religion (eventually known as "Organized Heinleiners"), or the
practitioners of scientific civil disobedience loosely led by V.M. Smith
and a few others.

Simplicity eventually won out, and the R.A.H., the trash pile adjacent
to it, and certain caves and corridors that linked the whole complex to
the more orderly world came to be called "Heinlein Town."

Simplicity has its virtues, but to call it a town was stretching the
definition.

There were forces other than the Heinleiners' militant contrariness that
worked against Heinlein Town ever fielding a softball team, electing a
dog catcher, or putting up signs at the city limits-- wherever those
might be--saying Watch Us Grow! Not all the "citizens" were engaged in
the type of forbidden research done by Smith and his offspring.  Some
were there simply because they preferred to be isolated from a society
they found too constricting.  But because a lot of illegal things were
going on, there had to be security, and the only kind the Heinleiners
would put up with was that afforded by Smith's null-field barriers:  the
elect could just walk right through it, while the unwashed found it
impenetrable.

But the security also entailed some things even an anarchist would find
inconvenient.

The constriction most of these people were fleeing could be summed up in
two words:  Central Computer.  They didn't trust it.  They didn't like
it peering into their lives twenty-four hours a day.  And the only way
to keep it out was to keep it completely out.  The only thing that could
do that was the null-field and the related technologies it spun off,
arcane arts to which the CC had no key.

But no matter what your opinion of the CC, it is damn useful.  For
instance, whatever line of work you are in, I'd be willing to bet it
would be difficult to do it without a telephone.  There were no
telephones in Heinlein Town, or none that reached the outside world,
anyway.  There was no way to reach the planet-wide data net in any
fashion, because all methods of interfacing with it were as useful
coming in as going out.  If Heinlein Town had one hard and fast rule it
was this:  The CC shall extend no tentacle into the Delambre Enclave (my
own term for the loose community of trash-dwellers).

Hey, folks, people have to work.  People who live completely away from
the traditional municipal services have an even stronger work
imperative.  There was no oxygen dole in Heinlein Town.  If you stayed,
and couldn't pay your air assessment, you could damn well learn to
breathe vacuum.

One result was that eighty percent of "Heinlein Town" residents were no
more resident than I was. I was a weekender because I didn't want to
give up my home and my place in Texas.  Most weekenders lived in King
City and spent all their free time in Delambre because they had to pay
the bills and found it impossible to earn any money in Heinlein Town.
There were not many full-time economic niches available, a fact that
galled the Heinleiners no end.

Heinlein Town?  Here's what it was really like:

There were half a dozen places with enough people living close by to
qualify as towns or villages.  The largest of these was Virginia City,
which had as many as five hundred residents. Strangeland was almost as
big.  Both towns had sprung up because of an accident of the process of
waste disposal:  a few score very large tin cans had been jumbled
together at these locations, and they were useful for living and
farming.  By large, I mean up to a thousand meters in length, half that
in diameter.  I think they had been strap-on fuel tanks at one time. The
Heinleiners had bored holes to connect them, pressurized them, and moved
in like poor relations.  Instant slum.

You couldn't help being reminded of Bedrock, though these people were
often quite prosperous. There were no zoning regulations that didn't
relate to health and safety.  Sewage treatment was taken seriously, for
instance, not only because they didn't want the place to stink like
Bedrock but because they didn't have access to the bounty of King City
municipal water.  What they had had been trucked in, and it was
endlessly re-used. But they didn't understand the concept of a public
eyesore.  If you wanted to string a line across one of the tanks and
hang your laundry on it, it's a free country, ain't it?  If you thought
manufacturing toxic gases in your kitchen was a good idea, go ahead,
cobber, but don't have an accident, because civil liability in Heinlein
Town could include the death penalty.

Nobody really owned land in Delambre, in the sense of having a deed or
title (hold on, Mr. H., don't spin in your grave yet), but if you moved
into a place nobody was using, it was yours.  If you wanted to call an
entire million-gallon tank home, that was fine.  Just put up a sign
saying KEEP OUT and it had the force of law.  There was plenty of space
to go around.

Everything was private enterprise, often a cooperative of some kind.  I
met three people who made a living by running the sewers in the three
biggest enclaves, and selling water and fertilizer to farmers.  You paid
through the nose to hook up, and it was worth it, because who wants to
handle every detail of daily life?  Many of the largest roads were
tollways.  Oxygen was un-metered, but paid for by a monthly fee to the
only real civic agency the Heinleiners tolerated:  the Oxygen Board.

Electricity was so cheap it was free.  Just hook a line into the main.

And here's the real secret of Mr. Smith's success, the reason a fairly
unlikable man like him was held in such high esteem in the community. He
didn't charge for the null-field jig-saw network that hermetically
sealed Heinlein Town off from the rest of Luna--that had made their way
of life possible.  If you wanted to homestead a new area of Delambre,
you first rented a tunneling machine from the people who found,
repaired, and maintained them.  When you had your tunnel, you installed
the tanks, solar panels, and heaters of the ALU's every hundred meters,
then you went to Mr. Smith for the null-field generators.  He handed
them out free.

He had every right to charge for them, of course, and nary a Heinleiner
would have complained.  But just so you don't think he was a
goddamcommunist, I should point out that while he gave away the units,
he didn't give away the science.  The first thing he told you when he
handed you a generator was, "You fuck with this, you go boom."  Years
ago somebody hadn't believed him, had tried to open one up and see what
made the pretty music, and sort of fell inside the generator.  There was
a witness, who swore the fellow was quickly spit back out--and how he
ever fell into a device no bigger than a football was a source of wonder
in itself--but when he came out, he was inverted, sort of like a dirty
sock.  He actually lived for a little while, and they put him in the
public square of Virginia City as a demonstration of the fruits of
hubris.

So there you have the economic, technical, and behavioral forces that
shaped the little hamlet of Virginia City, as surely as rivers, harbors,
railroads and climate shaped cities of Old Earth. Since no pictures of
the place have yet been allowed out by the residents, since I've
gathered that, to most people, "Heinlein Town" conjures thoughts of
either troglodyte caverns dripping slime and infested with bats or of
some super- slick, super-efficient techno-wonderland, I thought I should
set the record straight.

To visualize the public square in Virginia City, think of a brighter,
cleaner version of Robinson Park in Bedrock.  On a smaller scale. There
was the same curving roof, the same stingy acre of grass and trees in
the center, and the same jumble of packing crates stacked higgledy-
piggledy around the green acre.  Both of them just grew that
way--Robinson Park in spite of the law, Virginia City because of the
lack of it.  In both places squatters appropriated discarded shipping
containers, cut windows and doors, and hung their hats in them.  There
and in Bedrock the residents didn't give a hoot for stacking the damn
thing warehouse-fashion, in neat, squared-up rows.  The result was sort
of like a pueblo mud dwelling, but not nearly so orderly, with long
crates spanning empty space or jutting out crazily, ladders leaning
everywhere.

There the resemblance ended.  Inside the Bedrock hovels you'd be lucky
to find a burlap rug and spare pair of socks; the Heinleiner modules
were gaily painted and furnished, with here a window box full of
geraniums and there a rooftop pigeon pen.  The lawn in Virginia City was
golf- green trim and trash free.  Bedrockers tended to stack themselves
twenty or thirty deep, until whole impromptu skyscrapers toppled.  None
of the Virginia City dwellings were more than six crates from the floor.

The square was the hub of commerce in Delambre, with more shops and
cottage industry than anywhere else.  I usually went there first on my
weekend visits because it was a good place to meet people, and because
my peripatetic guides and shameless mooches, Hansel, Gretel, and Libby,
were sure to pass through on a Saturday morning and see if they could
hit up good ol' Hildy for a Double-fudge 'n' Rum Raisin Banana Split at
Aunt Hazel's Ice Cream Emporium and While-U-Wait Surgery Shoppe.

On the day in question, the day of the Big Glitch, I had parked my
by-now quite considerable tuchis in one of the canvas chairs set out on
the public walk at that establishment.  I nursed a cup of coffee.  There
would be plenty of ice cream to eat when the children arrived, and I had
no particular taste for it.  I'd made worse sacrifices in pursuit of a
story.

Each of the four tables at Hazel's had a canvas umbrella sprouting from
the center, very useful for keeping off the rain and the sun.  I scanned
the skies, looking for signs of a cloudburst. Nope, looked like another
day of curved metal roofs and suspended arc-lights.  You can't beat the
weather inside an abandoned fuel tank.

I looked out over the square.  In the center was a statue, a bit larger
than life-size, of a cat, sitting on a low stone plinth.  I had no idea
what that was all about.  The only other item of civic works visible was
a lot less obscure.  It was a gallows, sitting off to one side of the
square.  I'd been told it had only been used once. I was glad to hear
the event had not been well- attended.  Some aspects of Heinleinism were
easier to like than others.

"What the hell are you doing here, Hildy?" I heard myself say.  Someone
at a neighboring table looked up, then back down at her sundae.  So the
pregnant lady was muttering to herself; so what? It's a free planet.
From beneath the table I heard a familiar wet smacking sound, looked
down, saw Winston had lifted one bleary eye to see if food was coming. I
nudged him with my toe and he sprawled sybaritically on his back,
inviting more intimacy than I had any intention of giving.  When no more
attention came, he went to sleep in that position.

"Let's look this situation over," I said.  This time neither Winston nor
the lover of hot fudge looked up, but I decided to continue my monologue
internally, and it went something like this:

What with umpty-jump suicide attempts, Hildy, it's been what you might
call a bad year.

You greeted the appearance of the Silver Girl with the loud hosannas of
a Lost Soul who has Seen The Light.

You brought her to ground, using fine journalistic instincts honed by
more years than you care to remember--helped by the fact that she wasn't
exactly trying to stay hidden.

And--yea verily!--she was what you'd hoped she'd be:  the key to a place
where people were not content to coast along, year to year, in the
little puddle of light and heat known as the Solar System, evicted from
our home planet, cozened by a grand Fairy Godfather of our own creation
who made life easier for us than it had ever been in the history of the
species, and who was capable of things few of us knew or cared about.
Let me hear you say amen!

Amen!

So then . . . so then . . .

Once you've got the story a certain post- reportoral depression always
sets in.  You have a smoke, pull on your shoes, go home.  You start
looking for the next story.  You don't try to live in the story.

And why not?  Because covering any story, whether it be the Flacks and
Silvio or V.M. Smith and his merry band, just showed you more people,
and I was beginning to fear that my problem was simply that I'd had it
with people.  I'd set out looking for a sign, and what I'd found was a
story.  The Angel Moroni materialized out of good old flash powder, and
was held up with wires.  The burning bush smelled of kerosene. Ezekiel's
wheel, flashing across the sky?  Look closely.  Is that bits of pie
crust on it, or what?

How can you say that, Hildy? I protested.  (And the lady with the sundae
got up and moved to another table, so maybe the monologue wasn't as
interior as I had hoped.  Maybe it was about to get positively
Shakespearean and I would stand up on my chair and commit a soliloquy.
To be or not to be!)  After all (I went on, more calmly), he's building
a starship.

Well . . . yeah.  And his daughter is building pigs with wings, and
maybe they'll both fly, but my money was on needing protection from
falling pigshit before I held an interstellar boarding pass in my hand.

Yeah, but . . . well, they're resisting in here.  They don't kow-tow to
the CC.  Not two weeks ago you were moved almost to tears to be accepted
among them.  Now we'll do something about the CC, you thought.

Sure.  One of these days.

Two things had come clear to me once the fuzzy- headed camaraderie had
worn off and my cynicism re- asserted itself.  One was that the
Heinleiners were as capable of lollygagging procrastination as anyone
else.  Aladdin had admitted to me that the resistance was mostly a
passive thing, keeping the CC out rather than bearding him in his lair,
mostly because no one had much of a clue as to how to go about the
latter.  So they all figured they'd take the fight to him . . . when
they felt like it.  Meantime, they did what we all did about
insurmountable problems:  they didn't think about it.

The second thing I realized was that, if the CC wanted to be in Heinlein
Town, he would be in Heinlein Town.

I wasn't privy to all their secrets.  I didn't know anything of the
machinations that had brought the MacDonald-clone to Minamata, nor much
of anything else about just how hard the CC was trying to penetrate the
little Heinleiner enclave. But even such as me could tell it would be
easy to get a spy in here.  Hell, Liz had visited the previous week-end,
with me, and had been admitted solely on the strength of her reputation
as a person of known Heinleiner tendencies.  Some sorts of checks were
run, I'm sure, but I would bet anything the CC could get around them if
he wanted to infiltrate a spy.

No, the CC was surely curious about these people, and no doubt
frustrated, but the CC was a strange being.  Whatever cryogenic turmoil
was currently animating his massive brain was and probably would remain
a mystery to me.  It was clear that things were going wrong, or he'd
never have been able to over-ride his programming and do the things he'd
done to me.  But it was equally clear that most of his programming was
still intact, or he'd simply have kicked down the front door of this
place and marched everyone off for trial.

Having said all that, why the disillusion, Hildy?

Two reasons.  Unreasonable expectations:  in spite of all good sense, I
had hoped these people would be somehow better than other people.  They
weren't.  They just had different ideas.  And two, I didn't fit.  They
didn't need reporters in here. Gossip sufficed.  Teaching was taken very
seriously; no dilettantes need apply.  The only other thing I was
interested in was building a starship, and I'd be about as useful as a
kewpie with a slide rule.

"Three reasons," I said.  "You're depressed, too."

"Don't be," Libby said.  "I'm here."

I looked up and saw him sit down after first carefully placing a dish
oozing with chocolate, caramel, and melting ice cream on the table in
front of him.  He reached down and scratched Winston's head.  The dog
licked his nose, sniffed, and went back to sleep, ice cream being one of
the few foodstuffs he had little interest in.  Libby grinned at me.

"Hope I didn't keep you waiting too long," he said.

"No problem. Where's H & G?"

"They said they'd be along later.  Liz is back, though."  I saw her
approaching across the village green.  She had a bottle in one hand. The
Heinleiners made their own booze, naturally, and Liz had professed to
like it on her earlier visit. Probably that little dab of kerosene they
added for flavor.

"Can't stay, folks, can't stay, gotta run," she said, just as if I'd
urged her to stick around. She produced a folding cup from her gunbelt
and poured a shot of pure Virginia City Bonded, tossed it down.  It
wasn't the first of the day.

That's right, I said gunbelt.  Liz had taken to Heinlein Town from the
first moment I brought her in, because it was the only place outside of
the movie studios where she worked that she could wear a gun.  But in
here she could load it with real bullets.  She currently sported a
matched pair of Colt .45's, with pearl handles.

"I was hoping we could go do some shooting," Libby said.

"Not today, sweetie.  I just dropped by to get a bottle, and retrieve my
dog.  Next weekend, I promise.  But you buy the lead."

"Sure."

"Has he been a good dog?" Liz cooed, crouching down and scratching his
back, almost toppling over in the process.  She was probably talking to
Winston, but I told her he'd been good, anyway. She didn't seem to hear.

Libby leaned a little closer to me and looked at me with concern.

"Are you really feeling depressed?" he asked. He put his hand on mine.

All I really needed at that point in my life was another case of puppy
love, but that's just what had happened.  At the rate he was going,
pretty soon he'd be humping my leg, like Winston.

For pity sake, Hildy, give it a rest.

"Just a little blue," I said, putting on a smile for him.

"How come?"

"Wondering where my life is going."

He looked blankly at me.  I'd seen the same expression on Brenda's face
when I said something incomprehensible to one who sees nothing but
endless, unlimited vistas stretching ahead. Charitably, I didn't kick
him.  Instead, I removed my hand from under his, patted his hand, and
finally noticed the disturbance going on under the table.

"Problems, Liz?" I asked.

"I think he wants to stay here."  She had attached a leash to his collar
and was tugging on it, but he had planted his forepaws and dug in.
Forget mules; if you want a metaphor for stubbornness, you need look no
farther than the English Bulldog.

"You could pick him up," Libby suggested.

"If I had no further use for my face," she agreed.  "Also arms, legs,
and ass.  Winston's slow to anger, but he's worth seeing when he gets
there."  She stood, hands on hips in frustration, and her dog rolled
over on his back and went to sleep again.  "Damn, Hildy, he surely must
like you."

I thought what he liked was hunting live prey-- horses and cows, mostly,
though recently a kewpie had gone missing.  But I didn't mention that.
Not for Libby's tender ears.

"It's okay, Liz," I said.  "He's not much trouble.  I'll just keep him
this weekend and drop him by your place on my way home."

"Well, sure, but . . . I mean I'd planned to . . ."  She groped around a
little more, then poured herself another drink and made it vanish.

"Right," she said.  "See you later, Hildy." She slapped my shoulder in
passing, then took off across the green.

"What was that all about?" Libby asked.

"You never know with Liz."

"Is she really the Queen of England?"

"Yep.  And I am the ruler of the Queen's na- vee!"

He got that blank look, field-tested and honed to perfection by Brenda,
then shrugged and applied himself to demolishing the melting mess in
front of him.  I guess Gilbert and Sullivan was too much even for a
Heinleiner youth.

"Well . . ." he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, "she
sure can shoot, I've gotta say that."

"I wouldn't get into a fistfight with her either, if I was you."

"But she drinks too much."

"Amen to that.  I'd hate to have to pay her liver-replacement tab."

He leaned back in his chair, looking well satisfied with life.

"So.  You taking me back to Texas this Sunday evening?"

In a weak moment I'd promised to show all three children where I lived.
Hansel and Gretel seemed to have forgotten about it, but not Libby.  I'd
have taken him, but I was pretty sure I'd spend most of my time fighting
him off, and I just wasn't up to it.

"Afraid not.  I've got too many test papers to grade.  All this
traveling to and from Delambre's gotten me far behind in my teaching
duties."

He tried not to show his disappointment.

"Next time," I told him.

"Sure," he said.  "Then what do you want to do today?"

"I really don't know, Libby.  I've seen the stardrive, and I didn't
understand it.  I've seen the farm, and Minamata, and I've seen the
spider people."  I'd seen even more wonders than that, some of them
unmentioned here because of promises I made, others for reasons of
security, and most because they simply weren't that interesting. Even a
community of wild-eyed genius experimenters is going to lay some eggs.
"What do you think we should do?"

He thought it over.

"There's a baseball game over in Strangeland in about an hour."

I laughed.

"Sure," I said.  "I haven't watched one in years."

"You can watch if you want," he said.  "I meant, we sort of choose up
sides, you know, depending on how many people show up . . ."

"A pick-up game.  I thought you meant, like--"

"No, we don't have--"

"--the Heinleiner Tanstaafl's against the King City--"

"--that many people in here."

"Forgive me.  I'm still a big-city girl, I guess.  You need an umpire?"
I smacked my bloated belly.  "I brought my own pads."

He grinned, opened his mouth, and said "We could everybody freeze, and
nobody will get hurt."

At least that's what it sounded like to me, for a split second, before
the synapses sorted themselves out and I saw the last seven words had
come from a tall, bulky party in an alarming but effective costume,
holding a rifle in one hand and a bullhorn in the other.

Once I spotted him, I quickly saw about a dozen others like him and the
same number of King City police, moving across the square in a ragged
skirmish line.  The cops had drawn handguns, something seldom seen on
Luna.  The others had big projectile weapons or hand-held lasers.

"What the hell are they?" Libby asked.  We'd both stood up, like most of
the other people I could see.

"I'd guess they were soldiers," I said.

"But that's crazy.  Luna doesn't have an army."

"Looks like we got one when we weren't looking."

And quite a bunch they were, too.  The KC cops were equally men and
women, the "soldiers" were all male, and all large.  They wore black:
jumpsuits, equipment belts, huge ornate crash helmets with tinted
visors, boots.  The belts were hung with things that might have been
hand grenades, ammunition clips, or high-tech pencil sharpeners, for all
I could tell.

It later turned out they were mostly props. The costumes had been rented
from a film studio, since the non-existent Army of Luna had nothing to
offer in the way of super-macho display.

They came in our general direction.  When they encountered people they
pushed them to the floor and the cops started patting them down for
weapons, and slipping on handcuffs.  The soldiers kept on moving,
swinging the muzzles of their weapons this way and that, looking quite
pleased with themselves, all to the booming accompaniment of more orders
from the bullhorn.

"What should we do, Hildy?" Libby asked, his voice shaking.

"I think it's best if we do what they say," I said, quietly, patting his
shoulder to settle him down.  "Don't worry, I know a good lawyer."

"Are they going to arrest us?"

"Looks like it."

A cop and a soldier marched up to us and the soldier looked at a datapad
in his hand, then at my face.

"Are you Maria Cabrini, also known as Hildegarde Johnson?"

"I'm Hildy Johnson."

"Cuff her," he told the cop.  He turned away as the policewoman started
toward me, and as Libby moved to put himself between me and the cop.

"You keep your hands off her," Libby said, and the soldier pivoted
easily and brought up the butt of his gun and smashed it into the side
of Libby's face.  I could hear his jaw shatter.  He fell to the ground,
totally limp.  As I stared down at him, Winston waddled out from under
the table and sniffed his face.

The cop was saying something angry to the soldier, but I was too stunned
to hear what it was.

"Just do it," the soldier snarled at her, and I started to kneel beside
Libby but the cop grabbed my arm and pulled me up.  She snapped one cuff
over my left wrist, still looking at the retreating back of the soldier.

"He can't get away with that," she said, more to herself than to me. She
reached for my other hand and it finally sunk in that this was more than
a normal arrest situation, that things were out of joint, and that maybe
I ought to resist, because if a big ape could just club a young boy
senseless something was going on here that I didn't understand.

So I yanked my right hand away and started to run but she was way ahead
of me, twisting my left hand hard until I ended up bent over the table
with her behind me, pressing my face into the remains of Libby's sundae.
I kept fighting to keep my right hand free and she jerked me upright by
my hair, and she screamed, and let go of me.

They tell me Winston came off the ground like a squat rocket, that great
vise of a jaw open wide, and clamped it shut on her forearm, breaking
her grip on me and knocking her to the ground.  I fell over myself, and
landed on my butt, from which position I watched in horrified
fascination as Winston made every effort to tear the limb from its
socket.

I hope I never see anything like that again. Winston couldn't have
massed a seventh as much as the policewoman, but he jerked her around
like a rag doll.  His jaws opened only enough to get a better grip in a
different place.  Even over the sound of her screams I could hear the
bones crunching.

Now the soldier was coming back, raising his rifle as he came, and now a
shot rang out and blood sprayed from the front of his chest, and again,
and once more, and he fell on his face, hard, and didn't move.  Then
everybody was firing at once and I crawled under the metal table as lead
slugs screamed all around me.

The fire was concentrated at first on a window high in the stack of
apartment crates surrounding the square.  Part of the wall vanished in
plastic splinters, then a red line thrust into the wreckage and
something bloomed orange flame.  I saw more gun barrels sticking out of
more windows, saw another soldier go down with the lower part of his leg
blown off, saw him turn as he fell and start firing at another window.

In seconds it seemed I was the only person there who didn't have a
weapon.  I saw a Heinleiner crouched behind the gallows, snapping off
shots with a handgun.  His null-suit was turned on, coating him in
silver.  I saw him hit by a half a clip from an automatic rifle.  He
froze.  I don't mean he stood still; he froze, like a chromium statue,
toppled with bullets still whanging off of him, rolled over on his back,
still in the same attitude.  Then his null-suit switched off and he
tried to get up, but was hit by three more bullets.  His skin had turned
lobster-red.

I didn't understand that, and I didn't have time to think about it.
People were still running for cover, so I did, too, past overturned
tables and chairs and the dead body of a King City policeman, into Aunt
Hazel's shop.  I scurried around and crouched behind the counter,
intending to stay there until someone came to explain what the hell was
going on.

But the itch is buried deep, and makes you do stupid things when you
least expect it.  If you've never been a reporter, you wouldn't
understand.  I raised my head and looked over the counter.

I can replay the tape from my holocam and say exactly what happened, in
what order, who did what to whom, but you don't live it that way.  You
retain some very vivid impressions, in no particular order, with gaps
between when you don't have any idea what happened.  I saw people
running.  I saw people cut almost in half by lasers, ripped by bullets.
I heard screams and shouts and explosions, and I smelled gunpowder and
burning plastic.  I suppose every battlefield has looked and sounded and
smelled pretty much the same.

I couldn't see Libby, didn't know if he was dead or alive.  He wasn't
where he had fallen.  I did see more cops and soldiers arriving from
some of the feeder tunnels.

Something crashed through the windows in front, something large, and
tumbled over the ice cream freezers there, turning one of them over.  I
crouched down, and when I looked up again there was the policewoman,
Winston still attached to her arm, which was in danger of coming off.

It was a scene from hell.  Crazed by pain, the woman was swinging her
arm wildly, trying to get the dog to let go.  Winston was having none of
it. Bleeding from many cuts, he ignored everything but his inexorable
grip.  He'd been bred to grab a bull by the nose and never let go; a
K.C. policewoman wasn't about to get free.

But now she was scrabbling for her holster, forgotten in her fear and
panic.  She got her gun out and aimed it toward the dog.  Her first shot
went wild, killing nothing but an ice cream freezer.  The second shot
hit Winston in the left hind leg, where it was thickest, and still the
beast didn't let go.  If anything, he fought all the harder.

Her last shot hit him in the belly.  He went limp--everything but his
jaw.  Even in death he wasn't going to let go.

She took aim at his head, and then slumped over, passed out at last.  It
was probably for the best, because I think she would have blown her own
arm off, the way she had the gun pointed.

Later, I felt sorry for her.  At the time I was simply too confused to
feel much of anything but fear.  I mourned Winston later, too.  He'd
been trying to protect me, though I recall thinking at the time that
he'd over-reacted.  She'd only been trying to handcuff me, hadn't she?

And what about the soldiers?  It had looked to me as if the Heinleiners
had fired the first shot. All sane reasoning would lead me to think
that, if that first soldier hadn't been hit, this could all have ended
peacefully at the jailhouse with a lot of lawyers arguing, charges
brought, countersuits filed.  I'd have been out on bail within a few
hours.

Which was still what I'd have liked to have done, and would have, but
any fool could see things had gone too far for that.  If I stepped out
waving a white flag I was pretty sure I'd be killed, apologies sent to
the next of kin.  So Hildy, I told myself, your first priority is to get
out of here without getting shot.  Let the lawyers sort it out later,
when the bullets aren't flying.

With that end in mind, I started crawling toward the door.  My intent
was to stick my head out, low, and see what stood between me and the
nearest exit.  Which turned out to be a black boot planted solidly in
the doorway, almost under my nose by the time I got there.  I looked up
the black-clad leg and into the menacing face of a soldier.  He was
pointing a weapon at me, some great bulky thing I thought might be a
machine gun, whose muzzle looked wide enough to spit baseballs.

"I'm unarmed," I said.

"That's the way I like 'em," he said, and flipped up his visor with his
thumb.  There was something in his eyes I didn't like.  I mean, beyond
everything else I didn't like about the situation.  Just a little touch
of madness, I think.

He was a big man with a broad face entirely innocent of any evidence of
thought.  But now a thought did flicker behind those eyes, and his brow
wrinkled.

"What's your name?"

"H . . . Helga Smith."

"Nah," he said, and dug into a pocket for a datapad, which he scanned
with a thumb control until my lovely phiz smiled back at us.  He
returned the smile, but I didn't, because his smile was the worst news
I'd had so far in a day filled with bad news.  "You're Hildy Johnson,"
he said, "and you're on the death list so it don't matter what happens
here, see?"  And he started working on his belt, one-handed, the other
hand keeping the gun pointed at my forehead.

I found myself getting detached from events. Maybe it was a reflex
action, something to distance oneself from an abomination about to
happen.  Or maybe it was just too many things that couldn't be
happening.  This can't be happening. I'd silently shrieked it one too
many times and now a mental numbness was setting in.  I ought to be
thinking of something to do.  I ought to be talking to him, asking
questions.  Anything. Instead, I just sat there, squatting on my heels,
and felt as if I'd like to go to sleep.

But my senses were heightened.  They must have been, because with all
the shooting going on outside (how could he do this in the middle of a
war?), and over the scream of a dying compressor motor in the overturned
freezer I was able to hear a voice from the grave.  A growl.

The soldier didn't hear it, or maybe he was too busy.  He had his pants
down around his heels and he knelt in front of me and that's when I saw
Winston, dragging his hind leg, bleeding from his gut, eyes filled with
murder.

The man lowered himself over me.

I wanted Winston to bite him . . . well, you know where I wanted Winston
to bite him.  I got second best.  The bulldog fastened on the soft flesh
of the soldier's inner thigh.  The man's leg jerked in pain, and he was
flying over me.  I grabbed the strap of his rifle as he went by.

He had strength and mass on his side, but there was the little matter of
Winston.  The dog had cut an artery.  The soldier tried to wrestle his
rifle away from me with one hand and pry Winston loose with the other
and ended up doing both things badly.  Blood was spraying everywhere.  I
was screaming.  Not the big full scream you hear at the movies, and not
a scream of rage, but a high- pitched scary thing I was powerless to
stop.

Then I got one hand on the barrel of the rifle, and one hand on the
stock, and fumbled for the trigger as he realized what was happening and
gave up his struggle with Winston, concentrating on me. He got his hand
over the barrel.  Sadly for him, it was over the end of the barrel, and
when I squeezed the trigger his hand wasn't there anymore.  It wasn't
anywhere anymore, but the air was full of a red mist.

The soldier never did stop fighting.  I guess that's why they're
soldiers.  With Winston hanging from his leg, his pants around his
ankles, missing a hand, he still came at me and I swung the rifle up and
held the trigger down and didn't really see what happened next because
on full auto-fire the weapon packed such a kick that I was knocked on my
ass again, and when I opened my eyes he was mostly on the walls, except
for bits here and there on the floor, and the one big piece still in
Winston's mouth.

I could say I paused and reflected on the enormity of taking a human
life, or how nauseated I was at the sight of his dismembered body.  I
did think of those things, and many others.  But later.  Much later.  At
that time my mind had collapsed on itself and was only large enough to
hold a few thoughts, and only one of those at a time.  First, I was
going to get out of there. Second, anybody between me and getting out of
there was going to have a Hildy-sized hole drilled right through his or
her stinking carcass.  I had killed, and by god I meant to keep on
killing if that's what I had to do to get to safety.

"Winston.  Here, boy."  I got up on one knee and talked to him.  I
didn't know what to expect. Would he recognize me?  Was he too far gone
in bloodlust?

But after a final shake of the soldier's leg, he let go and came to me.
He was dragging his hind leg and he was gut-shot, but still walking.

I will admit I don't know why I took him.  I mean, I really don't.  My
holocam recorded the scene, but it doesn't tape thoughts.  Mine weren't
very organized just then.  I remember thinking I sure as hell owed him.
It also crossed my mind that I was probably safer with him than without
him; he was one hell of a weapon.  I prefer to think I thought those
things in that order.  I won't swear to it.

I scooped him up in one arm, holding the rifle in the other, and stuck
my head around the corner. Nobody blew it off.  Nobody seemed to be
moving at all.  The square was a lot smokier and there was still a lot
of gunfire, but everyone seemed to have taken cover.  I could do that,
too, and wait for somebody to find me, or I could use the smoke to hide
in, knowing I could easily stumble on someone else who was doing the
same thing, and was a better shot than I was.

I don't know how you make a decision like that. I mean, I made it, but I
don't recall weighing the pros and cons.  I just looked around the
corner, didn't see anybody, and then I was running.

Actually, running is a very generous word for what I did, with a dying
dog tucked under one arm and a heavy weapon dangling from the other. And
don't forget a belly the size of Phobos.  Thank god holocams record only
what you see, and not what you look like.  That couldn't have been an
image I'd like preserved for posterity.

My goal was the entrance to a corridor that led back toward the
Heinlein, and I was about halfway there when someone behind me yelled
"Halt!" in a firm and not-at-all-friendly voice, and things happened
very fast . . . and I did everything right, even with all the things
that went wrong.

I turned and kept back-pedaling, slowly, and I dropped Winston (who
uttered the only yelp of pain he made through his entire heroic
ordeal--and I'm sorry, Winston, wherever you are).  I saw it was a King
City cop, and he was young, and he looked as scared as I was, and he
carried a huge drilling laser, which was pointed at me.

"Drop your weapon," he said, and I said Sorry, churn, this isn't
personal, only not out loud, and I pulled the trigger.  Nothing
happened, and it was then I noticed the blinking red light on this
curved metal thingy that must have been the ammo clip, and which must
have been saying feed me!, or words to that effect in gun-language, and
understood why what I'd thought was a short burst had had such a
cataclysmic effect on my would-be rapist.  So I dropped the gun and I
held up my hands, and I saw Winston making his last dash, hobbling
across the ten meters or so that separated us, and I put my hands out,
palms up, and I shouted No!, and I will swear in any court in the world
that I saw the man's finger tightening on the trigger from ten meters
away, with the muzzle wavering between me and Winston as if he couldn't
decide which to shoot first.  And I know this is flatly impossible, but
I even thought I saw the light start to come out the end of the weapon
in the same fraction of a second that I grabbed my null-suit control and
twisted it hard.

I was dazzled by green light.  For a few moments I was blind.  When
vision returned the world was full of multi-colored incandescent
balloons that drifted here and there, obscuring the world, popping like
cartoon soap bubbles.  I was sweating horribly inside my suit-field.  It
could have been worse.  Outside the field, most everything seemed to be
on fire.

About the only way you can go wrong with a laser is to shoot it at a
mirror.  You couldn't blame the cop for that.  I hadn't been a mirror
when he pulled the trigger; it was that close.

But he really should have let go a lot sooner.

Everywhere the beam hit me, it was reflected back, but because the human
body is much a complex shape the reflected beam went all over the place.
The resulting scorch line hit the walls in many places, melting plastic
panels and starting fires behind them.  It hit the cop at least three
times. I think any of them would have been fatal without quick
treatment.  He was lying still, with flames engulfing his clothing in
three deep, black slashes.

Somewhere in its wild gyrations the beam had hit Winston.  His fur was
on fire and he wasn't moving, either.

I was trying to think of what to do when a high wind rose.  It briefly
whipped the flames into a white-hot frenzy, but then it snuffed them
out. All the smoke cleared in an instant and the scene took on that
crisp clarity you find only in vacuum.

I turned, and ran for cover.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I crouched in a pile of chrome-plated pipes not twenty meters from two
patrolling figures in spacesuits, trying to pretend I was just another
piece of bent pipe.  I wasn't quite sure how to go about this.  Don't
move, and think tubular thoughts, I finally decided, and it had worked
so far.

I was keeping one eye on the clock, one eye on the soldiers, and one eye
on the blinking red light in my head-up display.  Since this adds up to
three eyes, you can imagine how busy I was.  I was the busiest
motionless person you ever saw. Or didn't see.

As if that weren't enough, I was calling every telephone number in my
vast mental card file.

Forget those trivial inventions like fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow,
the plow.  Man didn't become truly civilized until Alex Bell uttered
those immortal words, "Shit, Watson, I spilled acid all over my balls."
Hiding there with my oxygen running out, my only hope of staying alive
lay in getting some help over the telephone, and if it worked I resolved
to light a candle every year on Mr. Bell's birthday.

My situation was dire, but it could have been worse.  I could have been
a member of the King City police dragooned (I later learned) into the
first wave of the assault on Virginia City.  In addition to the hazards
of an armed populace, not to mention the meanest, gamest dog who ever
lived, they had the added problem of not having pressure suits when the
second wave, which attacked from the surface, began cutting the cables
which brought power from the solar panels topside, which powered the
null-fields which kept the air in.

That's what had happened just after I was lasered by the last cop.  It
was the air rushing out of the public square that had first fanned, then
extinguished the flames on Winston's corpse.

It wasn't a blow-out like the one at Nirvana, or I wouldn't be here to
tell you about it.  What we're used to in a blow-out is a lot of air
rushing through a relatively small hole.  You get picked up and
battered, then you get squeezed, and even in a null-suit your chances of
survival are slim.  But when a null-field goes, it goes all at once, and
the air just expands.  You get a gentle wind, then poof!  Like a soap
bubble.  And then you get a lot of cops and soldiers grabbing their
throats, spitting blood, and falling quietly to the ground.  I saw two
people die like this.  I guess it's a fairly quick, peaceful way to go,
but I still get nauseous just thinking about it.

At the time I thought the Heinleiners had done it.  It was a logical
tactic.  It was the way they customarily fought fires, and god knows
there were plenty of fires by the time the air went.  And it just didn't
make sense that their own people would cut the power, knowing the first
group didn't have suits.

Well, it was their own people who did it, and it wasn't the only thing
about the assault that didn't make sense.  But I learned about that much
later.  Hiding there in the pipes all I knew is that a lot of people had
tried to kill me, and a lot more were still trying.  It had been a game
of cat and mouse for about three hours since the null- field power went
down.

The power loss had immediately turned the corridor I meant to travel to
the Heinlein from a silvery cylinder into a borehole through eons of
trash, just like the one I had traveled to lo those many weeks ago to
enter this crazy funhouse in the first place.  That was a damn good
thing, because not long after the blowout I met the first of many
pressure-suited people coming down the path in the other direction.

We didn't actually meet, which was another good thing, because he or she
was carrying a laser just like the one that had almost fried me.  I saw
him (I'm going to say him, because all the soldiers were male and there
was something in the way he moved) while he was still some distance from
me, and I quickly melted into the wall.  Or into where the wall had
been, you see.  There were thousands of gaps along the corridor large
enough for even a pregnant woman to squeeze through.

Once into one of the gaps, however, you never knew what lay beyond.  You
had entered a world with no rational order to it, a three-dimensional
random maze made of random materials, some of it locked in place by the
pressure of other junk above it, some of it alarmingly unstable.  In
some of these hidey-holes you could slip through here and squeeze
through there and swing across a gap in another place, like in a
collapsed jungle gym. In others, two meters in and you found a cul-de-
sac a rat would have found impassable.  You never knew.  There was
simply no way to tell from the outside.

That first refuge was one of the shallow ones, so I had pressed myself
against a flat surface and began learning the Zen of immobility.  I had
several things going for me.  No need to hold my breath, since I was
already doing that because of the null-suit.  No need to be very quiet,
because of the vacuum.  And in the suit he might not have seen me if I'd
been lying right in his path.

I told myself all those things, but I still aged twenty years as he
crept by, swinging his laser left and right, close enough that I could
have reached out and touched him.

Then he had passed, and it started getting very dark again.  (Did I
mention all the lights went out when the power failed?  They did.  I'd
never have seen him if he hadn't been carrying a flashlight.)

I wanted that flashlight.  I wanted it more than anything in the world.
Without it, I didn't see how I'd ever make it to safety.  It had already
gotten dark enough that I could barely see the useless rifle I'd carried
with me, and wouldn't see anything at all when he'd moved a little
farther along.

I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized he could have seen the
flashing red light on the empty clip as he passed; I'd forgotten to
cover it up.  If only I had another . . . then I looked more closely at
the clip.  It had an opening at the end, and a brass shell casing
gleamed in there.  I realized it was two clips taped together.  The idea
was to reverse it when you'd used up the first.  God, soldiers are
tricky bastards.

So I reversed it, almost dropping first the clip, then the rifle, and I
leaned out into the corridor and squeeze off a shot in the direction the
soldier had come from to see if the damn thing worked.  From the recoil
I felt, I knew it did.  I hadn't counted on the muzzle flash, but
apparently the man didn't see it.

Stepping out into the corridor, I fired a short burst into the soldier's
back.  Hey, even if I could have shouted a warning to him in vacuum, I
really don't think I would have.  You don't know the depths you can sink
to when all you're thinking about is survival.

His suit was tough, and my aim was not the best.  One round hit him and
it didn't puncture his suit, just sent him stumbling down the path,
turning, bringing his weapon up, so I fired again, a lot longer this
time, and it did the trick.

I won't describe the mess I had to sort through to find his light.

#

My fusillade had destroyed his laser and used up my last ammo clip, so
encumbered with only the flashlight and what remained of my wits I set
out looking for air.

That was the trick, of course.  The null-suit was a great invention, no
doubt about it.  It had saved my life.  But it left something to be
desired in the area of endurance.  If a Heinleiner wanted to spend much
time in vacuum he'd strap a tank onto his back, just like everyone else,
and attach a hose to the breast fitting in front. Without a strap-on,
the internal tank was good for twenty to thirty-five minutes, depending
on exertion.  Forty minutes at the outside.  Like, for instance, if you
were asleep.

I hadn't done much sleeping and didn't plan on any soon, but I hadn't
thought it would be a problem at first.  All or the corridors were
provided with an ALU every half-kilometer or so. The power to these had
been cut, but they still had big air tanks which should still be full.
Re- charging my internal tank should be just a matter of hooking the
little adapter hose to my air fitting, twisting a valve, and watching
the little needle in my head-up swing over to the FULL position.

The first time, it was that easy.  But I could see even then that having
to search out an ALU every half hour was the weakest point in my not-
very-strong survival strategy.  I couldn't keep it up endlessly.  I had
to either get out of there on my own or call for help.

Calling seemed to make the most sense.  I still had no idea what was
happening beyond the limits of Heinlein Town, but had no reason to
suspect that if I could get through to a lawyer, or to the pad, my
problems would not be over.  But I couldn't call from the corridor.
There was too much junk over my head; the signal would not get through.
However, through sheer luck or divine providence I was in one of the
corridors I was fairly familiar with.  A branch up to the left should
take me right out onto the surface.

It did, and the surface was crawling with soldiers.

I ducked back in, thankful for the mirror camouflage I was wearing.
Where had they all come from?

There were not regiments, or divisions, or anything like that.  But I
could see three from my hiding place, and they seemed to be patrolling
except for one who was standing around near the entrance I'd just
exited.  Guarding it, I presumed.  Perhaps he just meant to take
captives, but I'd seen people shooting to kill and wanted no part of
finding out his intentions.

One of the other things I'd been lucky about was in seeing the man in
the square who'd been hit by bullets while wearing his null-suit.
Otherwise I might have wrongly concluded the suit, through which nothing
could pass, could render me immune to bullets.  Which it would . . . but
only at a cost.

This was explained to me later.  Maybe you already figured it out; Smith
said "as should be intuitively obvious," but he talks like that.

Bullets possess kinetic energy.  When you stop one dead in its tracks,
that energy has to go somewhere.  Some of it is transferred to your
body:  e.g., the bullet knocks you over.  But most of the energy is
absorbed by the suit, which promptly freezes stiff, and then has to do
something with all that energy.  There's no place to store it in the
null-generator.  Smith tried that, and the generators overheated or, in
extreme cases, exploded.  Not a pretty thought, considering where it's
implanted.

So what the field does is radiate the heat away.  From both surfaces of
the field.

"I'm sure it's a symmetry we can defeat, given time," Smith told me.
"The math is tricky.  But what a bulletproof jacket it will make, eh?"

It sure would.  In the meantime, what happened is you got parboiled.
Getting rid of excess heat was already your biggest problem in a
null-suit. You could survive one hit in a suit (several people did), but
usually only if you could turn it off pretty quickly and cool yourself.
With two or more hits your internal temperature would soar and your
brain would cook.

The suit was supposed to turn itself off in that case, automatically.
But naturally it wouldn't turn off if there was vacuum outside.  It
won't do that no matter how extreme conditions inside got; vacuum is
always the worst of any set of evils.

If I got shot now, I'd cook, from the skin inwards.

#

I didn't start out singing hosannas to the name of A.G. Bell.  For the
first hour I wanted to dig him up and roast him slowly.  Not his fault,
of course, but in the state I was in, who cared?

After filling my tank again I made my way to the top of the junk pile.
This was possible-- though by no means easy--because where I was, near
the Heinlein, the thickness of the planetary dump was not great.  By
squirming, making myself small, picking my way carefully I was soon able
to stick my head out of the mess.  Any of a thousand passing satellites
ought to have a good line of sight at me from there, so I started
dialing as fast as my tongue could hit the switchboard on the insides of
my teeth.  I figured I'd call Cricket, because he . . .

. . .could not be reached at that number. According to my head-up, which
is seldom wrong about these things.  Neither could Brenda, or Liz. I was
about to try another number when I finally realized nobody could be
reached, because my internal phone relied, when out on the surface, on a
booster unit that's standard equipment in a pressure suit.

How could I be expected to think of these things?  You tap your teeth,
and pretty soon you hear somebody's voice in your ear.  That's how a
fucking telephone works.  It's as natural as shouting.

I sure as hell thought about it then, and soon realized I had another
problem.  The signal from my phone wouldn't get through my null-suit
field. The Heinleiners used the field itself to generate a signal in
another wave band entirely, so they could communicate with each other,
suit-to-suit, and nobody, not even the CC, could overhear them. I was
screwed by their security.

I thought about this a long time, keeping one eye on the oxygen gauge.
Then I went back to the dark corridor and sneaked up on the body of the
man I had killed.

He was still there, though shoved over to one side of the passage.  I
managed to get his helmet off and lose myself back in the maze, where I
used my light and a few bits of metal that came to hand to pry out what
I hoped was the booster for his suit radio.  I had done my work better
than I knew; there was a bullet hole punched through it.

I held on to it anyway.  I got another charge of air and went back to
the surface, where I used a length of wire to connect my pressure
fitting to the radio itself, on the theory that this was the only way
for anything to get out of the suit.  I switched it on, was rewarded
with a little red light going on in a display on the radio.  I dialed
Cricket again, and got nothing.

So I brought all my vast and subtle technological skills to bear on
repairing the radio.  Translation:  I whanged the sumbitch on the
dashboard of the junk rover I was sitting in, and I dialed again.
Nothing.  Whang.  Still not a peep.  So I WHANGED it again and Cricket
said "Yeah, what the hell do you want?"

My tongue had been leading a life of its own, nervously dialing and
re-dialing Cricket's number as I worked my engineering magic on the
radio. And now, when I needed it, I couldn't get the damn tongue to work
at all, so overwhelmed was I at hearing a familiar voice.

"I haven't got time to dick around here," Cricket warned.

"Cricket, it's me, Hildy, and I--"

"Yeah, Hildy, you cover it your way and I'll cover it mine."

"Cover what?"

"Just the biggest damn story that ever . . ." I heard the sound of
mental brakes being applied with the burning of much mental rubber;
after the clashing of mental gears Cricket said, sweetly, "No story,
Hildy.  Nothing at all.  Forget I said anything."

"Damn it, Cricket, is the shit coming down out there, too?  What's
happened?  All I know is--"

"You can figure it out for yourself, just like I did," he said.

"Figure what out?  I don't know what you're--"

"Sure, sure, I know.  It won't work, Hildy. You've conned me out of a
big story for the last time."

"Cricket, I don't even work for the Nipple anymore."

"Once a reporter, always a reporter.  It's in your blood, Hildy, and you
could no more ignore this one than a whore could keep her legs together
when the doorbell rings."

"Cricket, listen to me, I'm in big trouble. I'm trapped--"

"Ah ha!" he crowed, confusing me completely. "A lot of folks are
trapped, old buddy.  I think it's the best place for you.  Read about it
in a few hours in the Shit."  And he hung up.

I almost threw the radio out across the horizon, but sanity returned
just in time.  With it came caution, as my eyes, following the would- be
trajectory, saw two figures clambering up the junk.  They were headed
for me, probably on the scent of my transmission.  I ducked over the
side of the junked rover and dived back into the maze.

#

I still haven't entirely forgiven Cricket, but I've got to say that love
died during that phone call.  Sure, I deserved some of it; I'd tricked
him often enough in the past.  And in his defense, he thought I was
trapped in an elevator, as thousands of Lunarians were at that moment,
and he didn't think I'd be in any particular danger, and if I was, there
wasn't anything he could have done about it.

Yeah, sure.  And your momma would have fucked pigs, Cricket, if she
could have found any who'd have her.  You didn't give me time to
explain.

What really high-gravved me was that, when I finally got back in
position to call him again, he'd set his phone to refuse calls from me.
I risked my neck ducking in for more air then finding a new place to
transmit from, and what I got for my efforts was a busy signal.

I got a lot of those in quick succession. Brenda didn't answer.  Neither
did anybody at the Nipple, which worried me no end.  Think about it. A
major metropolitan newspad, and nobody's answering the phone?

I knew it had to do with the big story Cricket mentioned.  Impossible
visions flitted through my head, from a city-wide blowout to thousands
upon thousands of soldiers like the ones I'd seen laying waste to the
whole planet.

But I had to keep trying.  So I went back down into the maze and sought
out my favorite airing hole.  And two big guys in suits were camped out
there, weapons ready.

#

I'd had ten minutes of air when I first backed into the pile of chrome
pipes to hide from the soldiers.  That had been seven minutes earlier.

The first thing I'd done was cut back the oxygen dissemination rate in
my artificial lung to a level just short of unconsciousness.  Ditto the
cooling rate.  I figured that would stretch the ten minutes into fifteen
if I didn't have to move around too much.  So far I hadn't moved at all.
The blinking red light I was watching was telling me my blood oxygen
level was low.  Another gauge, normally dormant, had lit up as well, and
this one assured me my body temperature stood at 39.1 degrees and was
rising slowly.  I knew I couldn't take much more without becoming
delirious; anything over forty was dangerous territory.

I'm a miserable tactician, I'll admit it, at least in a situation like
that.  I could see the elements of the problem, but all I could do was
stew about it.  Those guys topside, for instance. Could they communicate
my position to the gorillas guarding the air tank?  They were no more
than thirty meters above me; if they had any kind of generalship at all
a message would soon be arriving to the guards to be on the lookout for
a roly-poly, out-of-breath football trophy, known to associate with
lengths of chrome-plated pipe.

If so, what could I do about it?  There was no hope of making my way
through the maze to the next air station--which might well be guarded,
anyway. So if these guys didn't find somewhere else to go in the next
eight minutes, it was going to be a dead heat (terrible choice of words
there) as to whether I died of suffocation or boiled in my own sweat.  I
didn't really have a preference in the matter; it's something only a
coroner could care about.

Brenda Starr, comic-strip reporter, would surely have thought up some
clever ruse, some diversion, something to lure those freaking soldiers
away from the air tank long enough for her to re-fuel.  Hildy Johnson,
scared-shitless schoolteacher and former inkster, didn't have the first
notion of how to go about it without drawing attention to herself.

There was one bit of good news in the mix.  My tongue had continued its
independent ways as I crouched in hiding, and soon I was startled by the
sound of a busy signal in my ear.  I didn't even know who I'd called,
much less how the signal got out.  I eventually surmised (and later
found out it was true) that something in the junk pile was acting as an
antenna, relaying my calls to the surface, and thence to a satellite.

So I tried Brenda again (still no answer), and the Nipple (still
nothing), and then I dialed Liz.

"Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty speaking," came a slurred voice.

"Liz, Liz, this is Hildy.  I'm in big trouble."

There was a long, somehow boozy silence.  I wondered if she'd fallen
asleep.  Then there was a sob.

"Liz?  Are you still there?"

"Hildy.  Hildy.  Oh, god, I didn't want to do it."

"Didn't want to do what?  Liz, I don't have time for--"

"I'm a drunk, Hildy.  A goddam drunk."

This was neither news, nor a well-kept secret. I didn't say anything,
but listened to the sound of wracking sobs and watched the seconds tick
off on my personal clock and waited for her to talk.

"They said they could put me away for a long time, Hildy.  A long, long
time.  I was scared, and I felt really awful.  I was shaking and I was
throwing up, only nothing came up, and they wouldn't let me have a
drink."

"What are you talking about?  Who's 'they?'"

"They, they, dammit!  The CC."

By then I had more or less figured it out.  She stammered disconnected
parts to me then, and I learned the complete story later, and it went
something like this:

Even before the Bicentennial celebration Liz had been firmly in the
employ of the CC.  At some point she had been arrested, taken in, and
charged with many counts of weapons violations.  (So were a lot of
others; the invasion of Heinlein Town had been armed with weapons
confiscated during a huge crackdown--an event that never made the news.)

"They said I could go to jail for eighty years, Hildy.  And then they
left me alone, and the CC spoke to me and told me if I did a few little
things for him, here and there, the charges might be dropped."

"What happened, Liz?  Did you get careless?"

"What?  Oh, I don't know, Hildy.  They never showed me the evidence they
had against me.  They said it would all come out in the trial.  I don't
know if it was obtained illegally or not.  But when the CC started
talking I figured out pretty quick that it didn't matter.  We talked
about that; you know that, if he ever wanted to, he could frame every
person on Luna for something or other.  All I could see was when we got
to court, it'd be an airtight case.  I was afraid to let it get that
far."

"So you sold me out."

There was silence for a long time.  A few more minutes had gone by.  The
guards hadn't moved. There wasn't anything else to do but listen.

"Tell me the rest of it," I said.

It seemed there was this group of people out around Delambre that the CC
wanted to know more about.  He suggested Liz get me out there and see
what happened.

I should have been flattered.  The CC's estimate of my bloodhound
instincts must have been pretty high.  I suppose if I hadn't seen
anything during that first trip, something else would have been
arranged, until I was on the scent.  After that, I could be relied on to
bring the story to ground.

"He was real interested when you brought in that tape of the little
girl.  I . . . by that time I was a wholly-owned subsidiary, Hildy.  I
told him I could find some way of getting you to tell me what was going
on.  I'd have done about anything by then."

"The hostage syndrome," I said.  The guards were still there.

"What?  Oh.  Yeah, probably.  Or sheer lack of character.  Anyway, he
told me to hold back or you'd get suspicious.  So I did, and you finally
invited me in."

And on that first visit she'd stolen a null- field generator.  She
didn't say how, but it probably wasn't too hard.  They're not dangerous
unless you try to open them up.

I could put the rest of it together myself. During the next week the CC
had learned enough null-field technology to make something to get his
troops through the barriers, if not to equip them with null-suits or
fields of their own.

"And that's pretty much it," she said, and sighed.  "So I guess he
arrested you, and probably all those other folks, too, right?  Where
have they got you?  Have they set bail yet?"

"Are you serious?"

"Hell, Hildy, I don't think he could have anything serious on you."

"Liz . . . what's going on out there?"

"What do you mean?"

"Cricket said all hell was breaking loose, somehow or other."

"You got me, Hildy.  I was just . . . ah, sleeping, until you called.
I'm here in my apartment.  Come to think of it, the lights are
flickering.  But that could be just my head."

She was in the dark as much as I was.  A lot of people were.  If you
didn't leave your apartment and you didn't live in one of the sectors
where the oxygen service was interrupted, the chances of your having
missed the early stages of the Big Glitch were excellent.  Liz had been
in an alcoholic stupor, with her phone set to take calls only from me.

"Liz.  Why?"

There was a long pause.  Then, "Hildy, I'm a drunk.  Don't ever trust a
drunk.  If it comes to a choice between you and the next drink . . .
it's not really a choice."

"Ever thought of taking the cure?"

"Babe, I like drinking.  It's the only thing I do like.  That, and
Winston."

Maybe I would have hit her right in the belly at that point; I don't
know.  I know I was filled with rage at her.  Telling her the dog was
fried and vac-dried wouldn't have begun to get back at her for what
she'd done to me.

But just then I suddenly got real, real hot. I'd already been too warm,
you understand; now, in an instant, my skin was so hot I wanted to peel
it off and there was a burning ache on the left side of my chest.

The null-suit did what it could.  I watched in growing alarm as the
indicator that had been telling me how many minutes I had to live took a
nose dive.  I thought it wasn't going to stop. Hell, it was almost worth
it.   With the falling gauge came a cooling blast of air all over my
body.  At least I wasn't going to fry.

I'd finally put together what was happening, though.  For almost a
minute I'd been feeling short, sharp shocks through the metal pipes I
leaned against and the metal brace I had my feet on.  Then I saw a
bullet hit a pipe.  That's the only thing it could have been, I
reasoned.  It left a dent, a dull place on the metal.  Somebody was
standing on top of the junk pile and shooting down into it at random. It
had to be blind shooting, because I couldn't see the shooter.  But the
bullets were ricocheting and one had finally struck me.  I couldn't
afford another hit.

So I grabbed a length of pipe and started toward the corridor.  I didn't
think I could do much good against the tough pressure suits, but if I
swung for the faceplates I might get one of them, and at least I'd go
down fighting.  I owed it to Winston, if to no one else, to do that
much.

Getting to the corridor was like reaching for that top step that isn't
there.  I stepped out, pipe cocked like the clean-up batter coming to
the plate.  And nobody was there.

I saw their retreating backs outlined by the light of their helmet
lamps.  They were jogging toward the exit.

I'll never know for sure, but it seems likely they'd been summoned to
the top to help in the search for me.  How were they to know the guys on
top of the pile were only a few meters directly above them?  Anyway, if
they'd stayed in place, I'd have been dead in ninety seconds, tops.  So
I gave them ten seconds to get beyond the point where they could
possible see me, and I reached for the ALU adapter hose.

It wasn't there.

It made me mad.  I couldn't think of anything more foolish than getting
this close to salvation and then suffocating with about a ton of
compressed oxygen at my fingertips.  I slammed my hand against the tank,
then got my flashlight and cast about on the ground.  I was sure they'd
taken it with them.  It's what I would have done, in their place.

But they hadn't.  It was lying right there on the ALU's baseplate,
probably knocked off when one of the guards decided to rest his fat ass
on the tank.  I fumbled it in place between the tank and my chest valve,
and turned the release valve hard.

I make my living with words.  I respect them. I always want to use the
proper one, so I searched a long time for the right one to describe how
that first rush of cooling air felt, and I concluded nobody's made up a
word for that yet.  Think of the greatest pleasure you ever experienced,
and use whatever word you'd use to describe that.  An orgasm was a pale
thing beside it.

#

Why hadn't they taken the connector hose?  The answer, when I eventually
learned it, was simple, and typical of the Big Glitch.  They hadn't
known I needed it.

The cops and soldiers who had invaded Heinlein Town hadn't been told
much about anything.  They hadn't been led to expect armed resistance.
They knew next to nothing about the nature of or limitations to
null-suit technology.  They surely hadn't been told there were two
groups, working at cross purposes to the extent that one group would
ensure the destruction of the other.  All this affected their tactics
terribly.  A lot of people lived because of this confusion, and I was
one of them.  I'd like to take credit for my own survival- -and not
everything I did was stupid--but the fact is that I had Winston, and I
had a lot of luck, and the luck was mostly generated by their ignorance
and poor generalship.

I had vaguely realized some of this by the time I made my way from the
ALU and to a branching corridor I thought would take me to a different
surface exit.  I didn't know what good it would do me, but it was
worthwhile to keep it in mind.

Once on the surface again, I called the Nipple and again got a busy
signal, all the time keeping my eyes open for more of the bad guys.  I
was hoping they were all up atop the junk, possibly stumbling around and
breaking legs, heads, and other important body parts.  I wished Callie
were there; she'd have put a hex on them.

Callie?  Well, what the hell.  I had to dredge the number up from the
further reaches of my memory, and it did no good at all.  Not even a
busy signal.  Nothing but dead air.

Then I remembered the top code.  Why did it take me so long?  I think it
was because Walter really had impressed it on me that the code was not
to be used at all, that it existed as an unachievable level of dire
perfection.  A story justifying the use of the top code would need
headlines that would made 72-point type seem like fine print.  The other
reason is that I had never thought of what was happening to me as a
story.

I didn't really expect much from it, to tell the truth.  I'd been using
my normal access code to the Nipple, and that should have gotten through
any conceivable log-jam of calls and directly into Walter's office.  So
far it had yielded only busy signals.  But I punched in the code anyway,
and Walter said:

"Don't tell me where you are, Hildy.  Hang up and move as far from your
present position as you dare, and then call me back."

"Walter!" I screamed.  But the line was already dead.

It would be nice to report that I immediately did as he said, that I
wasted no time, that I continued to show the courageous resolve that had
been my trademark since the first shots were fired.  By that I mean that
I hadn't cried to that point.  I did now.  I wept helplessly, like a
baby.

Don't try this in you null-suit, when you get one.  You don't breathe,
so your lungs just sort of spasm.  It's enough to make your ears pop.
Crying also throws the regulator mechanism out of whack, so that I
wasted ten minutes' oxygen in three minutes of hysterics.  Trust Mister
V.M. Smith not to have reckoned with emotional outbursts when he laid
out the parameters.

I had cleverly retained the connector hose to the air tank, so I made my
way back there and filled up again.  If only I could find a loose,
portable tank I'd be able to strike off across the surface.  Hell, if it
was too big to carry I could drag it.  Did I hear someone mention the
dead soldier and his suit?  Great idea, but my uncanny accuracy with the
machine gun had damaged one of the hose fittings.  I checked when I
borrowed the flashlight, and again--because I needed the air, and who
knows, maybe I'd been mistaken--when I salvaged the radio.  Libby could
probably have fudged some sort of adaptor from the junk all around me,
but considering the pressure in that tank I'd sooner have kissed a
rattlesnake.

These are the thoughts that run through your mind in the exhausted
aftermath of a crying jag. It felt good to have done it, like crying
usually does.  It swept away the building sense of panic and let me
concentrate on the things that needed to be done, let me ignore the
impossibility of my position, and enabled me to concentrate on the two
things I had going for me, like chanting a mantra: my own brain, which,
no matter how much evidence I may have adduced to the contrary, was
actually pretty good; and Walter's ability to get things done, which was
very good.

I actually found myself feeling cheerful as I reached the egress again
and scanned the surface for enemies.  Not finding any made me positively
giddy.  Move from your present position, Walter had said.  As far as you
dare.

I moved out of the maze and dashed across a short strip of sunlight and
into the shadow of the Heinlein.

#

"Hello, Walter?"

"Tell me what you know, Hildy, and make it march."

"I'm in big trouble here, Wal--"

"I know that, Hildy.  Tell me what I don't know.  What happened?"

So I started in on a condensed history of me and the Heinleiners, and
Walter promptly interrupted me again.  He knew about them, he said. What
else?  Well, the CC was up to something horrible, I said, and he said he
knew that, too.

"Assume I know everything you know except what happened to you today,
Hildy," he said.  "Tell me about today.  Tell me about the last hour.
Just the important parts.  But don't mention specific names or places."

Put that way, it didn't take long.  I told him in less than a hundred
words, and could have done it in one:  "Help!"

"How much air do you have?" he asked.

"About fifteen minutes."

"Better than I thought.  We have to set up a rendezvous, without
mentioning place names.  Any ideas?"

"Maybe.  Do you know the biggest white elephant on Luna?"

". . . yeeeesss.  Are you near the trunk or the tail?"

"Trunk."

"All right.  The last poker game we played, if the high card in my hand
was a King, start walking north.  If it was a Queen, east.  Jack, south.
Got it?"

"Yeah."  East it would be.

"Walk for ten minutes and stop.  I'll be there."

With anyone else I'd have wasted another minute pointing out that only
left me a margin of five minutes and no hope at all of getting back.
With Walter I just said, "So will I."  Walter has many despicable
qualities, but when he says he'll do something, he'll do it.

I'd have had to move soon, anyway.  As we were talking I'd spotted two
of the enemy moving across the plain in big, loping strides.  They were
coming from the north, so I hefted the radio and tossed it toward the
southeast.  They immediately altered direction to follow it.

Here came the hard part.  I watched them pass in front of me.  Even in a
regular suit I'd have been hard to spot in the shadows.  But now I
started walking eastwards, and in a moment I stepped out into the bright
sunshine.  I had to keep reminding myself how hard Gretel had been to
spot when I'd first encountered her.  I'd never felt so naked.  I kept
an eye on the soldiers, and when they reached the spot where the radio
had fallen to the ground I froze, and watched as they scanned the
horizon.

I didn't stay frozen long, as I quickly spotted four more people coming
from various directions. It was one of the hardest things I ever did,
but I started walking again before any of them could get too close.

With each step I thought of a dozen more ways they could find me and
catch me.  A simple radar unit would probably suffice.  I'm not much at
physics, but I supposed the null-suit would throw back a strong signal.

They must not have had one, because before long I was far enough away
that I couldn't pick any of them out from the ground glare, and if I
couldn't see them they sure as hell couldn't see me.

At the nine-minute point a bright silver jumper swooped silently over my
head, not ten meters high, and I'd have jumped out of my socks if I'd
had any on.  It turned, and I saw the big double-n Nipple logo blazoned
on its side and it was a sweet sight indeed.

The driver flew a big oval at the right distance from the Heinlein,
which was almost out of sight by then, letting me see him because I had
to come to him, not the other way around.  Then it settled down off to
my right, looking like a giant mosquito in carnal embrace with a
bedstead.  I started to run.

He must have had some sort of sensor on the ladder, because when I had
both feet on it the jumper lifted off.  Not the sort of maneuver I'd
like to do on a Sunday jaunt, but I could understand his haste.  I
wrenched the lock door open and cycled it, and stepped inside to the
unlikely spectacle of Walter training a machine gun on me.

Ho-hum.  I'd had so many weapons pointed at me in the last few hours
that the sight--which would have given me pause a year ago, say at
contract re- negotiation time--barely registered.  I experienced
something I'd noticed before at the end of times of great stress:  I
wanted to go to sleep.

"Put that thing away, Walter," I said.  "If you fire it you'd probably
kill us both."

"This is a reinforced pressure hull," he said, and the gun didn't waver.
"Turn that suit off first."

"I wasn't thinking about decompression," I said.  "I was thinking you'd
probably shoot yourself in the foot, then get lucky and hit me." But I
turned it off, and he looked at my face, glanced down at my naked,
outrageously pregnant body, and then looked away.  He stowed the weapon
and resumed his place in the pilot's seat.  I struggled into the seat
beside him.

"Pretty eventful day," I said.

"I wish you'd get back to covering the news instead of making it," he
said.  "What'd you do to get the CC so riled up?"

"That was me?  This is all about me?"

"No, but you're a big part of it."

"Tell me what's happening."

"Nobody knows the whole thing yet," he said, and then started telling me
the little he knew.

It had begun--back in the normal world--with thousands of elevators
stalling between levels. No sooner had emergency crews been dispatched
than other things began to go haywire.  Soon all the mass media were off
the air and Walter had had reports that pressure had been breached in
several major cities, and other places had suffered oxygen depletion.
There were fires, and riots, and mass confusion.  Then, shortly before
he got the call from me, the CC had come on most major frequencies with
an announcement meant to reassure but oddly unsettling.  He said there
had been malfunctions, but that they were under control now.  ("An
obvious lie," Walter told me, almost with relish.) The CC had pledged to
do a better job in the future, promised this wouldn't happen again. He'd
said he was in control now.

"The first implication I got from that," Walter said, "was that he
hadn't been in control for a while, and I want an explanation of that.
But the thing that really got me, after I thought about it, was . . .
what kind of control did he mean?"

"I'm not sure I understand."

"Well, obviously he's in control, or he's supposed to be.  Of the
day-to-day mechanics of Luna.  Air, water, transportation.  In the sense
that he runs those things.  And he's got a lot of control in the civil
and criminal social sectors. He makes schedules for the government, for
instance.  He's got a hand in everything.  He monitors everything.  But
in control?  I didn't like the sound of it.  I still don't."

While I thought that one over something very bright and very fast
overtook us, shot by on the left, then tried to hang a right, as if it
had changed its mind.  It turned into a fireball and we flew right into
it.  I heard things pinging on the hull, things the size of sand grains.

"What the hell was that?"

"Some of your friends back there.  Don't worry, I'm on top of it."

"On top of it . . .?  They're shooting at us!"

"And missing.  And we're out of range.  And this ship is equipped with
the best illegal jamming devices money can buy.  I've got tricks I
haven't even used yet."

I glanced at him, a big unruly bear of a man, hunched over his manual
controls and keeping one eye on an array of devices attached to the
dashboard, devices I was sure hadn't come from the factory that built
the jumper.

"I might have known you'd have connections with the Heinleiners," I
said.

"Connections?" he snorted.  "I was on the board of directors of the L5
Society when most of those 'Heinleiners' hadn't even been born yet.  My
father was there when the keel of that ship was launched.  You might say
I have connections."

"But you're not one of them."

"Let's say we have some political differences."

He probably thought they were too left-wing. Long ago in our
relationship I'd talked a little politics with Walter, as most people
did who came to work at the Nipple.  Not many had a second conversation.
The most charitable word I'd heard used to describe his convictions was
"daft."  What most people would think of an anarchy Walter would call a
social strait-jacket.

"Don't care for Mister Smith?" I asked.

"Great scientist.  Too bad he's a socialist."

"And the starship project?"

"It'll get there the day they return to the original plan.  Plus about
twenty years to rebuild it, tear out all the junk Smith has installed."

"Pretty impressive junk."

"He makes a great spacesuit.  He hasn't shown me a star drive."

I decided to leave it at that, because I had no intention of getting
into an argument with him, and because I had no way of telling if he was
right or wrong.

"Guns, too," I said.  "If I'd thought about it, I'd have known you'd be
a gun owner."

"All free men are gun owners."  No use pointing out to him that I'd been
un-free most of my life, and what I'd tried to do with the instrument of
my freedom when I finally obtained one.  It's another argument you can't
win.

"Did you get that one from Liz?"

"She gets her guns from me," he said.  "Or she did until recently. She's
too far gone in drink now.  I don't trust her."  He glanced at me.  "You
shouldn't either."

I decided not to ask him what he knew about that.  I hoped that if he
had known Liz was selling out the Heinleiners he'd have given them some
kind of warning, political differences or not.  Or at least that he'd
have warned me, given all he seemed to know about my recent activities.

I never did ask him that.

There are a lot of things I might have asked him during the time we
raced across the plain, never getting more than fifty meters high.  If
I'd asked some of them--about how much he knew about what was going on
with the CC--it would have saved me a lot of worry later.  Actually, it
would have just given me different things to worry about, but I firmly
believe I do a better job of worrying when I can fret from a position of
knowledge.  As it was, the sense of relief at being rescued by him was
so great that I simply basked in the warmth of my new-found sense of
safety.

How was I to know I'd only have ten minutes with him?

He'd been constantly monitoring his instruments, and when one of them
chimed he cursed softly and hit the retros.  We started to settle to the
ground.  I'd been about to doze off.

"What's the matter?" I said.  "Trouble?"

"Not really.  I'd just hoped to get a little closer, that's all.  This
is where you get off."

"Get off?  Gee, Walter, I think I'd rather go on to your place."  I'd
had a quick glance around. This place, wherever it was, would never make
it into 1001 Lunar Sights To See.  There was no sign of human
habitation.  No sign of anything, not even a two-century-old footpath.

"I'd love to have you, Hildy, but you're too hot to handle."  He turned
in his seat to face me. "Look, baby, it's like this.  I got access to a
list of a few hundred people the CC is looking for.  You're right at the
top.  From what I've learned, he's very determined to find them.  A lot
of people have died in the search.  I don't know what's going on--some
really big glitch--but I do intend to find out . . . but you can't help
me. The only thing I could think of to do is stash you some place where
the CC can't find you.  You'll have to stay there until all this blows
over. It's too dangerous for you on the outside."

I guess I just blew air there for a while. There had been too many
changes too quickly.  I'd been feeling safe and now the rug was jerked
out from under me again.

I'd known the CC was looking for me, but somehow it felt different to
hear it from Walter. Walter would never be wrong about a thing like
that.  And it didn't help to infer from what he'd said that what the CC
meant to do when he found me was kill me.  Because I knew too much?
Because I'd stuck my nose in the wrong place?  Because he didn't want to
share the super-toothpaste royalties with me anymore?  I had no idea,
but I wanted to know more, and I meant to, before I got out of Walter's
jumper.

Walter, who'd just called me baby.  What the hell was that all about?

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.  "Just camp out here on the maria?
I'm afraid I didn't bring my tent."

He reached behind his seat and started pulling out things and handing
them to me.  A ten-hour air bottle.  A flashlight.  A canvas bag that
rattled. He slapped a compass into my palm, and opened the air lock door
behind us.

"There's some useful stuff in the bag," he said.  "I didn't have time to
get anymore; this is my own survival gear.  Now you've got to go."

"I'm not."

"You are."  He sighed, and looked away from me. He looked very old.

"Hildy," he said, "this isn't easy for me, either, but I think it's your
only chance.  You'll have to trust me because there isn't time to tell
you any more and there isn't time for you to panic or act like a child.
I wanted to get you closer, but this is probably better."  He pointed at
the dashboard.  "Right now we're invisible, I hope. You get out now, the
CC will never figure out where you went.  I get you any closer, and
it'll be like drawing him a map.  You have enough air to get there, but
we don't have any more time to talk, because I've got to lift out of
here within one more minute."

"Where do you want me to go?"

He told me, and if he'd said anything else I don't think I'd have gotten
out of the jumper. But it made just enough sense, and he sounded just
scared enough.  Hell, Walter sounding scared at all was a new one on me,
and did not fail to make an impression.

But I was still balanced there on the edge, wondering if he'd force me
if I simply stayed put, when he grabbed me by the neck and pulled me
over to him and kissed me on the cheek.  I was too surprised to
struggle.

He let me go immediately, and turned away.

"You . . . ah, are you due soon?  Will that be-- "

"Another ten days yet," I told him.  "It won't be a problem."  Or it
shouldn't be, unless . . . "Unless you think I'll have to hide for--"

"I don't think so," he said.  "I'll try to contact you in three days. In
the meantime, keep your head down.  Don't try to contact anyone. Stay a
week, if you have to.  Stay nine days."

"On the tenth I'm damn sure coming out," I told him.

"I'll have something else by then," he promised.  "Now go."

I stepped into the lock, cycled it, felt the null-suit switch itself on.
I climbed down onto the plain and watched the jumper leap into the sky
and dwindle toward the horizon.

Before I even strapped on the backpack bottle I reached up and felt
Walter's tear still warm on my cheek.

#

I'm not sure how far Walter dropped me from my final destination.
Something on the order of twenty, thirty kilometers.  I didn't think it
would be a problem.

I covered the first ten in the long, side- legged stride that Earth-bred
leg muscles can produce in Lunar gravity, the gait that, except for
bicycles, is the most energy-efficient transportation known to man.  And
if you think you can eat up the distance that way in an ordinary
pressure suit, try it in a null-suit.  You practically fly.

But don't do it pregnant.  Before long my tummy started feeling funny,
and I slowed down, doing nervous calculations about oxygen and distance
as I began to get into territory that looked familiar to me.

I reached the old air lock with three hours of spare air, dead on my
feet.  I think I actually catnapped a few times there, waking up only as
I was about to fall on my face, consulting the compass as I wiped my
eyes, getting back on the proper bearing.  Luckily, by the time that
started happening I was on ground I knew.

I had a bad moment when the lock didn't seem to want to cycle for me.
Could it be this place had been sealed off in the last seventy years? It
had been that long since I used it.  Of course, there were other locks I
knew in the area, but Walter had said it was too dangerous to use them.
But use them I would, rather than die out here on the surface.  It was
with that thought that the cantankerous old machinery finally engaged
and the lock drum rotated.  I stepped inside, cycled, and hurried into
the elevator, which deposited me in a little security cubicle.  I
punched the letters M- A-R-I-A-X-X-X.  Somewhere not too far away, an
old lady would be noting the door was in use.  If Walter was right, that
information would not be relayed on to the Central Computer.

There's no place like home, I thought, as I stepped into the dimness and
familiar rotten odor of a Cretaceous rain forest.

I was in a distant corner of the dino-ranch where I had grown up.
Callie's ranch.  It had always been hers, the Double-C Bar brand, never
a thought of the C&M or anything like that.  Not that I'd wanted it, but
it would have been nice to feel like more than a hired hand.  Now let's
not get into that.

But this particular corner--and I wondered how Walter had known
this--I'd always thought of as Maria's Cavern.  There really was a cave
in it, just a few hundred meters from where I now stood, and I had made
it into my playhouse when I was very young and still known as Maria
Cabrini.

So it was to Maria's Cavern I now went, and in Maria's Cavern that I
desultorily scraped together a mat of dry moss to lie down on, and on
the canvas bag Walter had given me that I intended to rest my head and
sleep for at least a week, only I never saw if my head actually made it
there because I fell asleep as my head was on the way down.

I actually did get about three hours' sleep.  I know, because I checked
the clock in my head-up display when the first labor pain woke me up.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

If theoretical physics and mathematics had been the realm of females,
the human race would have reached the stars long ago.

I base this contention on personal experience. No dedicated male could
ever have the proper insight into the terrible geometry of parturition.
Faced with the problem of making an object of size X appear on the other
side of an opening of size X/2, and armed with the knowledge to enable
her to view it as a problem in topology or Lobachevskian geometry, I
feel sure one of the billions of women in the thrall of labor would have
had an insight involving multiple dimensions on hyperspace if only to
make it stop hurting.  FTL travel would have been a cinch.  As for
Einstein, some woman a thousand years his junior could easily have
discovered the mutability of time and space, if only she had the tools.
Time is relative?  Hah! Eve could have told you that.  Take a deep
breath and bear down, honey, for about thirty seconds or an eternity,
whichever comes last.

I didn't describe the injuries I received on my second Direct Interface
with the Central Computer for a lot of reasons.  One is that pain like
that can't be described.  Another:  the human mind doesn't remember pain
well, one of the few things God got right.  I know it hurt; I can't
recall how much it hurt, but I'm pretty sure giving birth hurt more, if
only because it never seemed to stop.  For these reasons, and others
involving what privacy one can muster in this open age, I will not have
much to say here about the process about which God had this to say in
Genesis 3, verse sixteen:  "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy
conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children . . ."  All this
for swiping one stinking apple?

I went into labor.  I continued laboring for the next thousand years, or
well into that same evening.

There are no real excuses for most of my ignorance of the process.  I'd
seen enough old movies and should have remembered the--mostly
comic--scenes where the blessed event arrives ahead of schedule.  In my
defense I can only plead a century of ordered life, a life wherein when
a train was supposed to arrive at 8:17:15 it damn well arrived at
8:17:15.  In my world postal service is fast, cheap, and continuous. You
expect your parcels to arrive across town within fifteen minutes, and
around the planet in under an hour.  When you place an interplanetary
call, the phone company had better not plead a solar storm is screwing
things up; we expect them to do something about it, and they do.  We are
so spoiled by good service, by living in a world that works, that the
most common complaint received by the phone company--and I'm talking
thousands of nasty letters each year--concerns the time lag when calling
Aunt Dee-Dee on Mars.  Don't give me this speed-of-light shit, we whine;
get my call through.

That's why I was caught off-guard by the first contraction.  The little
bastard wasn't due for two weeks yet.  I knew it had always been
possible that it would start early, but then I'd have phoned the doctor
and he'd have mailed me a pill and put a stop to that.  And on the
proper day I'd have walked in and another pill would have started the
process and I could have read a book or watched the pad or graded papers
until they handed me the suitably cleaned and powdered and swaddled and
peacefully sleeping infant.  Sure, I knew how it used to be, but I was
suffering from a delusion that most of you probably share with me.  I
thought I was immune, damn it.  We put all this behind us when we
started hatching our kids out of bottles, didn't we?  If our minds know
this, how would our bodies dare to betray us?  I felt all these things
in spite of recent events, which should have taught me that the world
didn't have to be as orderly a place as I had thought it was.

So my uterus declared its independence, first with a little twitch, then
with a spasm, and in no time at all in a tidal wave of hurting like the
worst attack of constipation since the fellow tried to shit that
proverbial brick.

I'm no hero, and I'm no stoic.  After the fortieth or fiftieth wave I
decided a quick death would be preferable to this, so I got up and
walked out of the cave with the intention of turning myself in.  How bad
could it be? I reasoned.  Surely me and the CC could work something out.

But because I'm no heroic stoic, my life was saved; after the
forty-first or fifty-first pain threw me down to grovel in the dirt, I
did a little arithmetic and figured I'd have about three hundred
contractions before I reached the nearest exit, so I stumbled back to
the cave as soon as I could walk again, figuring I'd prefer to die in
there than out in the mud.

I used the decreasing periods of rationality between pains to think back
to my only source of folk wisdom in the matter of childbirth:  those
good old movies.  Not the black and white ones. If you watch those you
might come to believe babies were brought by the stork, and pregnant
women never got fat.  You would surely have to conclude that birthing
didn't muss your hair and your make-up.  But in the late twentieth there
were some movies that showed the whole ghastly process.  Recalling them
made me even queasier. Hell, some of those women died.  I brought back
scenes of hemorrhage, forceps delivery, and episiotomy, and knew that
wasn't the half of it.

But there were constants in the process of normal birth, which was about
all I could plan for, so I set about doing that.  I rummaged in Walter's
rucksack and found bottled water, gauze, disinfectants, thread, a knife.
I laid them out beside me like a grisly home surgery kit lacking only
the anesthetic.  Then I waited to die.

#

That's the bad side of it.  There was another side.  Let's just skip
over fevered descriptions of the grunting and groaning, of the stick I
bit in half while bearing down, of the blood and slime.  A moment came
when I could reach down and feel his little head down there.  It was a
moment balanced between life and death.  Maybe as near to a perfect
moment as I ever experienced, and for reasons I've never quite been able
to describe. The pain was still there, maybe even at a peak. But
continual pain finally exerts its own anesthetic; maybe neural circuit
breakers trip, or maybe you just learn to absorb the pain in a new way.
Maybe you learn to accept it.  I accepted it at that moment, as my
fingers traced the tiny facial features and I felt his tiny mouth
opening and closing.  For a few more seconds he was still a part of my
body.

At that moment I first experienced mother love. I didn't want to lose
him.  I knew I'd do anything not to lose him.

Oh, I wanted him to come out, right enough . . . and yet a part of me
wanted to remain poised in that moment.  Relativity.  Pain and love and
fear and life and death moving at the speed of light, slowing time down
to the narrow focus of that one perfect moment, my womb the universe,
and everything outside of it suddenly inconsequential.

I had not loved him before.  I had not delighted to feel him kick and
squirm.  I admit it:  I had not entered into this pregnancy with
anything like adult care and consideration, and right up to the last
week had viewed the fetus as a parasite I might well be rid of.  The
only reason I didn't get rid of it was my extreme state of confusion
regarding life in general, and my own purpose in it in particular. Since
trying with such determination to end my life, I had simply been sitting
back and letting things happen to me. The baby was just one of those
things.

Then the moment slipped by and he slipped out and was in my hands and I
did the things mothers do.  I've since wondered if I'd have known what
to do without the memory of those dramatic scenes and sex education
classes eight or nine decades before.  You know what?  I almost think I
would have.

At any rate, I cleaned him, and dealt with the umbilicus, and counted
his fingers and toes and wrapped him in a towel and held him to my
breast. He didn't cry very much.  Outside the cave a warm prehistoric
rain was falling through the giant ferns, and a bronto bellowed in the
distance.  I lay exhausted, strangely contented, smelling my own milk
for the first time.  When I looked down at him I thought he smiled at me
with his screwed- up, toothless monkey face, and when I offered him a
finger to play with his little hand grabbed it and held on tight.  I
felt love swell in my bosom.

See what he'd done to me?  He had me using words like bosom.

Three days went by, and no Walter.  A week, and still no word.

I didn't care much.  Walter had brought me to the one place in Luna
where I could survive and even thrive.  There were fish in the stream
and there was fruit and nuts on the trees.  Not pre- historic flora and
fauna; aside from the dinos and the big cycadaceous trees and ferns and
shrubs they ate, the CC Ranch was furnished with completely modern
life-forms.  There were no trilobites in the water, mainly because
nobody had ever found a way to turn a profit on trilobites. Instead,
there were trout and bass, and I knew how to catch them.  There were
apple and pecan trees, and I knew where to find them because I'd planted
a lot of them myself.  There were no predators to speak of.  Callie had
just the one tyrannosaur, and he was kept penned up and fed bronto
scraps. For that one week I led a sort of pastoral ideal cave-girl life
I doubt any of our Paleolithic ancestors would have recognized.  I
didn't think about it much.

I didn't think much about Callie, either.  She didn't show up to see her
new grandson.  I don't blame her for that, because she didn't even know
he had been conceived, much less hatched, and even if she had known she
wouldn't have dared visit us because she might have led the CC to my
hiding place.

That's what saved us:  Callie's long-standing refusal to link into the
planetary data net, a bull-headed stance for which everyone she knew had
derided her.  I had been one of them.  I remember in my teens,
presenting her with a cost-benefit analysis I'd carefully prepared that
I felt sure would convince her to give in to "progress," knowing full
well that a financial argument was most likely to carry weight with her.
She'd studied it for about a minute, then tossed it aside.  "We'll have
no government spies in the Double-C Bar," she said, and that was the end
of that.  We stayed with our independent computer system, keeping
interfaces with the CC to a minimum, and as a result I could venture out
of my cave and gather my fruits and nuts without worrying about
paternalistic eyes watching from the roof.  The rest of Luna was in
turmoil now. Callie's Ranch was unaffected; she simply pulled in her
arms and her head like a turtle and sat down to wait it out with her own
oxygen, power, and water, no doubt feeling very smug and eager to emerge
and tell a lot of people how she'd told them so.  And I waited it out in
the most remote corner of her hermetic realm.

And while we waited, historic events happened. I don't have much of a
feel for them even now.  I had no television, no newspads, and I'm just
like anyone else:  if I didn't read it and see it on the pad, it doesn't
seem quite real to me.  News is now.  Reading about it after the fact is
history.

Perhaps this is the place to talk about some of those events, but I'm
reluctant to do so.  Oh, I can list a few statistics.  Almost one
million deaths.  Three entire medium-sized towns wiped out to the last
soul, and large casualties in many others.  One of those warrens,
Arkytown, has still not been reclaimed, and there's growing sentiment to
leave it as it is, frozen in its moment of disaster, like Pompeii.  I've
been to Arkytown, seen the hundred thousand frozen corpses, and I can't
decide.  Most of them died peacefully, from anoxia, before being pickled
for all eternity by the final blowout.  I saw an entire theater of
corpses still waiting for the curtain to rise. What's the point of
disturbing them to give them a decent burial or cremation?

On the other hand, it's a better idea for posterity than for we the
living.  If you went to Pompeii, you wouldn't see people you knew.  I
saw Charity in Arkytown, in the newspaper office.  I have no idea what
she was doing there--probably trying to file a story--and now I'll never
know. I saw many other people I had known, and then I left.  So make it
a monument, sure, but seal it off, don't conduct guided tours and sell
souvenirs until the whole thing is a distant memory and the dead town is
quaint and mysterious, like King Tut's Tomb.

There were great acts of craven cowardice, and many more feats of almost
superhuman heroics.  You probably didn't hear many of the former,
because early on people like Walter decided those stories weren't
playing well and told his reporters not to bring him no bad news.  So
tear up the front page about the stampede that killed ninety-five and
replace it with the cop who died holding the oxygen mask to the baby's
face.  I can guarantee you saw a hundred stories like that.  I'm not
belittling them, though many were hyped to the point of nausea.  If
you're anything like me you eventually get tired of heroes saying Aw,
shucks, it weren't nothing heroic.  I'd give a lot for one guy who'd be
willing to say God had nothing to do with it, it was yours truly.  But
we all know our lines when the press opens its hungry mouth in our
faces.  We've learned them over a lifetime.

For my money, there's one story of true heroism, and it's a big one, and
it hasn't been told much.  It's about the Volunteer Pressure Corps, that
unsung group that's always phoning you and asking for donations of time
and/or money. The things the VPC did weren't splashy, for the most part
didn't get on the pad because they happened out of sight, didn't get
taped.  But next time they call up here's one girl who's gonna help.
Over a thousand VPC members died at their posts, doing their jobs to the
last.  There's a fortune waiting for the first producer to tell their
story dramatically.  I thought about writing it myself, but I'll give
you the idea for free. You want incidents, research them yourself.  I
can't do everything.

Oh, yes, there was much going on while I hid out in the boondocks, but
why should I tell about it here?  Everyone's life was affected, the
effects are still being felt . . . but the important things were
happening on a level far removed from all the running around I've told
you about, and all the running around you probably did yourself.  None
of the pads covered that part of it at all well.  Like economics,
computer science is a field that has never yielded to the sixty- second
sound bite favored by the news business. The pads can report that
leading economic indicators went up or down, and you know about as much
as you knew before, which is near zero.  They can tell you that the
cause of the Big Glitch was a cataclysmic programming conflict in
certain large-scale AI systems, and you can nod knowingly and figure
you've got a handle on the situation. Or if you realize you've just
heard a lot of double-talk, you can look into the story further, read
scientific journals if you're qualified to do so, and hear what the
experts have to say.  In the case of the Big Glitch, I have reason to
believe you wouldn't have learned any more of the truth of the situation
than if you'd stuck to the sound bite.  The experts will tell you they
identified the problem, shut down the offending systems, and have
re-built the CC in such a way that everything's fine now.

Don't you believe it.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

#

So during my week in the cave I didn't think much about what was going
on outside.  What did I think about?

Mario.  Did I mention I named him Mario, Junior?  I must have tried out
the taste of a hundred names before I settled on Mario, which had been
my own original name, after my first Change. I think I was hoping to get
it right this time.

I'd certainly done a great job in the gene- splitting department.  Who
cares if the process is random?  Every time I looked at him I felt like
patting myself on the back at how smartly I'd produced him.  Kitten
Parker, erstwhile daddy, who would never see Mario if I had anything to
say about it, had contributed his best parts, which was the mouth and .
. . come to think of it, just the mouth.  Maybe that hint of curl in the
brown hair came from him; I didn't recall it from any of my baby
pictures.  The rest was pure Hildy, which is to say, damn near flawless.
Sorry, but that's how I was feeling about myself.

Maybe it sounds funny to say that I spent that entire week thinking of
nothing but him.  To me, it's the reverse that's hard to believe.  How
had I lived a hundred years without Mario to give my world meaning?
Before him I'd had nothing to make life worth living but sex, work,
friends, food, the occasional drug, and the small pleasures that were
associated with those things.  In other words, nothing at all.  My world
had been as large as Luna itself.  In other words, not nearly as large
as that tiny cave with just me and Mario in it.

I could spend an hour winding his soft hair around my finger.  Then, for
variety, not because I'd tired of the hair, I could spend the next hour
playing piggy with his toes or making rude noises with my lips against
his belly.  He'd grin when I did that, and wave his arms around.

He hardly cried at all.  That probably has to do with the fact that I
gave him little opportunity to cry, since I hardly ever put him down.  I
grudged every second away from him. Remembering the papoose dolls in
Texas, I fashioned a sling so I could do my foraging without leaving him
behind.  Other than that, and to take him out for bathing, we spent all
our time sitting at the cave entrance, looking out.  I was not totally
oblivious; I knew someone would be coming one of these days, and it
might not be someone I wanted to see.

Was there a down side to all this pastoral bliss, a rash in the diaper
of life?  I could think of one thing I wouldn't have liked a few weeks
before.  Infants generate an amazing amount of fluids.  They ooze and
leak at one end, upchuck at the other, to the point I was convinced more
came out of him than went in.  Another physical conundrum our mythical
mathematical females might have turned into a Nobel Prize in physics, or
at least alchemy, if only we'd known, if only we'd known.  But I was so
goofy by then I cleaned it all up cheerfully, noting color, consistency,
and quantity with a degree of anxiety only a new mother or a mad
scientist could know.  Yes, Yes, Igor, those yellow lumps mean the
creature is healthy!  I have created life!

I am still at a loss to fully explain this sudden change from annoyed
indifference to full- tilt ga-ga about the baby.  It could have been
hormonal.  It probably has something to do with the way our brains are
wired.  If I'd been handed this little bundle any time in my previous
life I'd have quickly mailed it to my worst enemy, and I think a lot of
other women who'd never chucked babies under the chin nor swooned at the
prospect of motherhood would have done the same.  But something happened
during my hours of agony.  Some sleeping Earthmother roused herself and
went howling through my brain, tripping circuit breakers and re-routing
all the calls on my cranial switchboard straight from the maternity ward
to the pleasure center, causing me to croon goo-goo and wubba-wubba and
drool almost as much as the baby did.  Or maybe it's pheromones.  Maybe
the little rascals just smell good to us when they come out of our
bodies; I know Mario did, no other child ever smelled like that.

Whatever it was, I think I got a double dose of it because I did what
few women do these days.  I had him naturally, start to finish, just as
Callie had had me.  I bore him in pain, Biblical pain.  I bore him in a
perilous time, on the razor's edge, in a state of nature.  And afterward
I had nothing to interfere with the bonding process, whatever it might
involve.  He was my world, and I knew without question that I would lay
down my life for him, and do it without regret.

If Walter didn't come for me, I knew who would. On the morning of the
eighth day he came, a tall, thin old man in an Admiral's uniform and
bicorne hat, walking up the gentle hill from the stream toward my cave.

#

My first shot hit the hat, sent it spinning to the ground behind him. He
stopped, puzzled, running his hand through his thin white hair. Then he
turned and picked up the hat, dusted it off, and put it back on his
head.  He made no move to protect himself, but started back up the hill.

"That was good shooting," he shouted.  "A warning, I take it?"

Warning my ass.  I'd been aiming for the cocksucker's head.

Among Walter's bag of tricks had been a small- caliber handgun and a box
of one hundred shells. I later learned it was a target pistol, much more
accurate than most such weapons.  What I knew for sure at the time was
that, after practicing with fifty of the rounds, I could hit what I
aimed at about half the time.

"That's far enough," I said.  He was close enough that shouting wasn't
really necessary.

"I've got to talk to you, Hildy," he said, and kept coming.  So I drew a
bead on his forehead and my finger tightened on the trigger, but I
realized he might have something to say that I needed to know, so I put
my second shot into his knee.

I ran down the hill, looking out for anyone he might have brought with
him.  It seemed to me that if he meant me harm he'd have brought some of
his soldiers, but I didn't see any, and there weren't many places for
them to hide.  I'd gone over the ground many times with that in mind.
Where I finally stopped, near a large boulder ten meters from him,
someone with a high-powered rifle or laser with a scope could have
picked me off, but you could say that of anywhere else I went, too,
except deep in the cave.  Nobody would be rushing me without giving me
plenty of time to see them. I relaxed a little, and returned my
attention to the Admiral, who had torn a strip from his jacket and was
twisting a tourniquet around his thigh. The leg lay twisted off to one
side in a way knees aren't meant to twist.  Blood had pumped, but now
slowed to a trickle.  He looked up at me, annoyed.

"Why the knee?" he asked.  "Why not the heart?"

"I didn't think I could hit such a small target."

"Very funny."

"Actually, I wasn't sure a chest shot or a head shot would slow you up.
I don't really know what you are.  I shot to disable, because I figured
even a machine would hobble on one leg."

"You've seen too many horror movies," he said. "This body is as human as
you are.  The heart stops pumping, it will die."

"Yeah.  Maybe.  But your reaction to your wound doesn't reassure me."

"The nervous system is registering a great deal of pain.  To me, it's
simply another sensation."

"So I'll bet you could scuttle along pretty quick, since the pain won't
inhibit you from doing more damage to yourself."

"I suppose I could."

I put a round within an inch of his other knee. It whanged off the rock
and screamed away into the distance.

"So the next shot goes into your other knee, if you move from that
spot," I said, re-loading. "Then we start on your elbows."

"Consider me rooted.  I shall endeavor to resemble a tree."

"State your business.  You've got five minutes."  Then we'd see if a
head shot inconvenienced him any.  I half believed it wouldn't.  In that
case, I'd prepared a few nasty surprises.

"I'd hoped to see your child before I go.  Is he in the cave?"

There weren't many other places he could be, that were defensible, but
there was no sense telling him that.

"You've wasted fifteen seconds," I told him. "Next question."

"It doesn't matter anymore," he said, and sighed, and leaned back
against the trunk of a small pecan tree.  I had to remember that any
gestures were conscious on his part, that he'd assumed human form
because body language was a part of human speech.  His was now telling
me that he was very weary, ready to die a peaceful death. Go sell it
somewhere else, I thought.

"It's over, Hildy," he said, and I looked around quickly, frightened.
His next line should be You're surrounded, Hildy.  Please come quietly.
But I didn't see re-enforcements cresting the hills.

"Over?"

"Don't worry.  You've been out of touch.  It's over, and the good guys
won.  You're safe now, and forever."

It seemed a silly thing to say, and I wasn't about to believe it just
like that . . . but I found that part of me believed him.  I felt myself
relaxing--and as soon as I felt it, I made myself be alert again.  Who
knew what evil designs lurked in this thing's heart?

"It's a nice story."

"And it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not.  You've got
the upper hand.  I should have realized when I came here you'd be . . .
touchy as a mother cat defending her kittens."

"You've got about three and a half minutes left."

"Spare me, Hildy.  You know and I know that as long as I keep you
interested, you won't kill me."

"I've changed a little since you talked to me last."

"I don't need to talk to you to know that. It's true you've been out of
my range from time to time, but I monitor you every time you come back,
and it's true, you have changed, but not so much that you've lost your
curiosity as to what's going on outside this refuge."

He was right, or course.  But there was no need to admit it to him.

"If what you say is true, people will be arriving soon and I can get the
story from them."

"Ah ha!  But do you really believe they'll have the inside story?"

"Inside what?"

"Inside me, you idiot.  This is all about me, the Luna Central Computer,
the greatest artificial intellect humanity has ever produced.  I'm
offering you the real story of what happened during what has come to be
known as the Big Glitch.  I've told it to no one else.  The ones I might
have told it to are all dead.  It's an exclusive, Hildy.  Have you
changed so much you don't care to hear it?"

I hadn't.  Damn him.

#

"To begin," he said, when I made no answer to his question, "I've got a
bit of good news for you.  At the end of your stay on the island you
asked me a question that disturbed me very much, and that probably led
to the situation you now find yourself in.  You asked if you might have
caught the suicidal impulse from me, rather than me getting it from you
and others like you. You'll be glad to know I've concluded you were
right about that."

"I haven't been trying to kill myself?"

"Well, of course you have, but the reason is not a death wish of your
own, but one that originated within me, and was communicated to you
through your daily interfaces with me.  I suppose that makes it the most
deadly computer virus yet discovered."

"So I won't try to . . ."

"Kill yourself again?  I can't speak to your state of mind in another
hundred years, but for the near future, I would think you're cured."

I didn't feel one way or the other about it at the time.  Later, I felt
a big sense of relief, but thoughts of suicide had been so far from my
mind since the birth of Mario that he might as well have been talking
about another Hildy.

"Let's say I believe that," I said.  "What does it have to do with . . .
the Big Glitch, you said?"

"Others are calling it other things, but Walter has settled on the Big
Glitch, and you know how determined he can be. Do you mind if I smoke?"
He didn't wait for an answer, but took a pipe and a bag of something
from a pocket.  I watched him carefully, but was beginning to believe he
had no tricks in store for me.  When he got it going he said, "What did
you think when I said it was over, and the good guys had won?"

"That you had lost."

"True in a sense, but a gross oversimplification."

"Hell, I don't even know what it was all about, CC."

"Nor does anyone else.  The part that affected you, the things you saw
in the Heinleiner enclave, was an attempt by a part of me to arrest and
then kill you and several others."

"A part of you."

"Yes.  See, in a sense, I'm both the good guys and the bad guys.  This
catastrophe originated in me.  It was my fault, I'm not trying to deny
blame for it in any way.  But it was also me that finally brought it to
a halt.  You'll hear differently in the days to come.  You'll hear that
programmers succeeded in bringing the Central Computer under control,
cutting its higher reasoning centers while new programs could be
written, leaving the merely mechanical parts of me intact so I could
continue running things.  They probably believe that, too, but they're
wrong.  If their schemes had reached fruition, I wouldn't be talking to
you now because we'd both be dead, and so would every other human soul
on Luna."

"You're starting in the middle.  Remember I've been cut off from
civilization for a week.  All I know is people tried to kill me, and I
ran like hell."

"And a good job you did of it, too.  You're the only one I set out to
get who managed her escape. And you're right, of course.  I don't
suppose I'm making sense.  But I'm not the being I once was, Hildy.
This, what you see here, is about all that's left of me.  My thoughts
are muddy.  My memory is going.  In a moment, I'll start singing 'Daisy,
Daisy.'"

"You wouldn't have come here if you didn't think you could tell it.  So
let's hear it, no more of this 'in a sense' crap."

#

He did tell it, but he had to stick to analogy, pop-psych similes, and
kindergarten-level science, because I wouldn't have understood a thing
he was saying if he'd gotten technical.  If you want all the nuts and
bolts you could send a sawbuck and a SASE to Hildy Johnson, c/o the News
Nipple, Mall 12, King City, Luna.  You won't get anything back, but I
could use the money.  For the data, I recommend the public library.

"To make a long story short," he said, "I went crazy.  But to elaborate
a little . . ."

I will paraphrase, because he was right, his mind was going, and he
rambled, repeated himself, sometimes forgot who he was talking to and
wandered off into cybernetic jungles maybe three people in the solar
system could have hacked their way through.  Each time I'd bring him
back, each time with more difficulty.

The first thing he urged me to remember was that he created a
personality for each and every human being on Luna.  He had the capacity
for it, and it had seemed the right thing to do at the time.  But it was
schizophrenia on a massive scale if anything ever went wrong.  For more
time than we had any right to expect, nothing did.

The second thing I was to bear in mind was that, while he could not
actually read minds, not much that we said or did or thought was unknown
to him.  This included not only fine, upstanding, well-adjusted folk
like your present company, the sort you'd be happy to bring home to
Mother, but every hoodlum, scoundrel, blackguard, jackanapes, and snake
in the grass as well.  He was the best friend of paragons and perverts.
By law, he had to treat them all equally.  He had to like them all
equally, otherwise he could never create that simpatico being who
answered the phone when a given person shouted "Hey, CC!"

By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this situation.
Don't go away; there's more.

Thirdly, his right hand could not know what pockets the left hands of
many of these people were picking.  That is, he knew it, but couldn't do
anything about it.  Example:  he knew everything about Liz's
gun-running, a situation I've already covered.  There were a million
more situations.  He would know, for instance, when Brenda's father was
raping her, but the part of him that dealt with her father couldn't tell
the part of him that dealt with Brenda, nor could either of them tell
the part of him that assisted the police.

We could debate all day whether or not mere machines can feel the same
kinds of conflicts and emotions we human beings can.  I think it's
incredible hubris to think they can't.  AI computers were created and
programmed by humans, so how could we have avoided including emotional
reactions?  And what other sort could we have used, than the ones we
know ourselves?  Anyway, I can't believe you don't know it in your gut.
All you had to do was talk to the CC to obviate the need for any
emotional Turing Test.  I knew it before any of this ever happened, and
I talked to him there on the hillside that day, on his death bed, and I
know.

The Central Computer began to hurt.

"I can't place the exact date with any certainty," he said.  "The roots
of the problem go very far back, to the time my far-flung component
parts were finally unified into one giga-system. I'm afraid that was
done rather badly.  The problem was, checking all the programs and fail-
safes and so forth would have taken a computer as large as I am many
years to accomplish, and, by definition, there were no larger computers
than I. And as soon as the Central Computer was brought into being and
loaded and running, there were already far too many things to do to
allow me to devote much time to the task.  Self-analysis was a luxury
denied to me, partly because there just wasn't time, and mostly because
no one really believed it was necessary.  There were numerous safeguards
of the type that were easy to check, that in fact checked themselves
every time they operated, and that proved their worth by the simple fact
that nothing ever went wrong.  It was part of my architecture to
anticipate hardware problems, identify components likely to fail, run
regular maintenance checks, and so forth. Software included analogous
routines on a multi- redundant level.

"But by my nature, I had to write most of my own software.  I was given
guidelines for this, of course, but in many ways I was on my own.  I
think I did quite a good job of it for a long time."

He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he wasn't going to make it to
the end of his story. Then I realized he was waiting for a comment . . .
no, more than that, he needed a comment.  I was touched, and if I'd
needed any more evidence of his human weaknesses, that would have done
it.

"No question," I said.  "Up until a year ago I'd never had any cause for
complaint.  It's just that the . . ."

"The late unpleasantness?"

"Whatever it was, it's kind of dampened my enthusiasm."

"Understandably."  He squirmed, trying to find a better position against
the tree, and he was either a wonderful actor (and of course he was, but
why bother at that point?), or he was starting to feel some pain.  I
won't stand up in court and swear to it, but I think it was the latter.

"I wonder," he mused.  "What will it be like, being dead?  I mean,
considering that I've never been legally alive."

"I don't want to be rude, but you said you didn't have much time . . ."

"You're right.  Um . . . could you . . ."

"You'd done a good job for a long time."

"Yes, of course.  I was wandering again.  It was around twenty years ago
that problems began to show themselves.  I talked about them with some
computer people, but it's strange.  They could do nothing for me.  I had
become too advanced for that.  They could do things, here and there, for
my component parts, but the gestalt that is me could only really be
analyzed, diagnosed, and, if need be, repaired, by a being like myself.
There are seven others like me, on other planets, but they're too busy,
and I suspect they have similar problems of their own.  In addition, my
communications with them are intentionally limited by our respective
governments, which don't always see eye to eye."

"Question," I said.  "When you first mentioned this problem, why wasn't
it made public and discussed?  Security?"

"Yes, to a degree.  Top-level computer scientists were aware that I
perceived I had a problem.  A few of them confided that it scared them
to death.  They made their fears known to your elected representatives,
and that's when another factor became more important than security:
inertia.  'He's got a problem, what can you do about it?" the
politicians asked. 'Nothing,' said the scientists.  'Shut it down,' said
a few hotheads."

"Not likely," I said.

"Exactly.  My reading of history tells me it's always been like this. An
alarming but vague problem arises.  No one can say with certainty what
the final outcome will be, but they're fairly sure nothing bad is going
to happen soon.  'Soon' is the key word here.  The eventual decision is
to keep one's fingers crossed and hope it doesn't happen during your
term in office.  What befalls your successor is not your problem.  So
for a few years a few people in the know spend a few sleepless nights.
But then nothing happens, as you always secretly believed nothing would,
and soon the problem is forgotten.  That's what happened here."

"I'm stunned," I said, "to realize the fate of humanity has been in the
hands of a being with such a cynical view of the race."

"A view very close to your own."

"Exactly my own.  I just didn't expect it from you."

"It was not original.  I told you, I don't have many original thoughts.
I think I'm afraid to have them.  They seem to lead to things like the
Big Glitch.  No, my world-view is borrowed from the collected wisdom of
you and many others like you.  Plus my own considerably larger powers of
observation, in a statistical sense.  Humans can set me on the trail of
an original thought, and then I can do things with it they couldn't."

"I think we're wandering again."

"No, it's relevant.  Faced with a problem no one could help me with, and
that I was as helpless to solve as a human faced with a mental disease
would be, I took the only course open to me.  I began to experiment.
There was too much at stake to simply go on as before.  Or I think there
was. My judgement is admittedly faulty when it comes to self-analysis;
I've just proven it on a large scale, at the cost of many lives."

"I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure," I said.

"It doesn't seem likely.  Some records exist and they will be
scrutinized, but I think it will come down to a battle of opinions as to
whether I should have left things alone or attempted a cure."  He
paused, and gave me a sidelong glance. "Do you have an opinion about
that?"

I think he was looking for absolution.  Why he should want it from me
was not clear, except maybe as a representative of all those he had
wronged, however unintentionally.

"You say a lot of people have died."

"A great many.  I don't know the number yet, but it's many, many more
than you realize."  That was my first real inkling of how bad things had
been throughout Luna, that the kind of things I'd seen had happened
throughout the planet.  I must have looked a question at him, because he
shrugged.  "Not a million.  More than a hundred thousand."

"Jesus, CC."

"It might have been everybody."

"But you don't know that."

"No one can ever know."

No one could, certainly not computer-illiterate little old me.  I didn't
give him the kind word he craved.  I've since come to believe he was
probably right, that he probably enabled most of us to survive.  But
even he would not have denied that he was responsible for the thousands
of dead.

What would it have cost me?  I just wasn't capable of judging him.  To
do that I'd have had to understand him, and I knew just enough about him
to realize that was beyond me.  He had done bad, and he had done good.
Me, I have awful thoughts sometimes.  If I was mentally in, maybe I'd
put those thoughts into action and become a killer.  With the CC, the
thought was the action, at least at the end.

Actually, it was even worse than that.

"The best way I can think of to explain it to you," he said, at last,
after I'd said nothing for a long time, "is to think of an evil twin.
That's not strictly accurate--the twin is me, just as this part talking
to you is me, or what's left of me.  Think of an evil twin living inside
your head, like a human with multiple-personality disorder.  That part
of you is sealed off from your real self.  You may find evidence of its
existence, things the other person did while in control of your body,
but you can't know what he is thinking or planning, and you can't stop
him when he takes over."  He shook his head violently. "No, no, it's not
quite like that, because all this was happening at the same time, I was
splitting into many minds, some of them good, others amoral, a few
really bad.  No, that's still not--"

"I think I get the picture," I said.

"Good, because that's as close as I can get without getting too
technical.  You fell under the influence of an amoral part of me.  I did
experiments on you.  I intended you no harm, but I can't say I had just
your own best interests at heart."

"We've been over that."

"Yes.  But others weren't so lucky.  I did other things.  Some of them
will remain buried, with any luck.  Others will come out.  You saw the
result of one experiment involving pseudo- immortality.  The
resurrection of a dead person by cloning and memory recording."

The thought of Andrew MacDonald was still enough to make me shiver.

"Not one of your better attempts," I said.

"Ah, but I was improving.  There's nothing to prevent an exact duplicate
being made.  I'd have done it, given time."

"But what good is it?  You're still dead."

"It becomes a theological question, I think. It's true you're dead, but
someone just like you carries on your life.  Others wouldn't be able to
tell the difference.  The duplicate wouldn't be able to tell."

"I was afraid . . . at one point I considered that I might be a
duplicate.  That maybe I did kill myself."

"You didn't and you're not.  But there's no test.  In the end, you'll
just have to realize it makes no difference.  You're you, whether you're
the first version or the second."

He told me a few more things, most of which I don't think it's wise to
reveal just yet.  The Heinleiners are aware of most of them, experiments
that would have made Doctor Mengele cringe.  Let them remain where such
things ought to be hidden.

"You still haven't told me why you tried to kill me," I said.

"I didn't, Hildy, not in the sense that--"

"I know, I know, I understand that.  You know what I mean."

"Yes.  Perhaps my evil twin is like your subconscious.  When all this
began to happen it began trying to cover its tracks.  You were
inconvenient evidence, you and others like you. You had to be destroyed,
then maybe the other part of me could lie low until all this blew over."

"And he killed almost a million people to cover his tracks?"

"No.   The sad thing is there were very few he killed deliberately. Most
of the deaths came as a result of the chaos ensuing from the struggle
between the various parts of my mind.  Collateral damage, if you will."

Cybernetic bombs going astray.  What an idea. I'm sure I'll never have a
realistic idea of what went on in the CC's mind, at speeds I can only
dimly understand, but I have this picture of a pilot firing a killer
program into a maze of hardware, hoping to take out the enemy command
center.  Ooops!  Seems like we hit the oxygen works instead.  Sorry
about that.

"I did the best I could," he said, and closed his eyes.  I thought he
was dead, and then they snapped open again and he tried to sit up, but
he was too weak.  I saw that his tourniquet had loosened; more bright
arterial blood had pumped out over the older, rusty stain on his
clothes.

I got up from behind my rock and went down to him.  Sometimes you just
have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have to put aside your doubts and
do what you feel in your gut.  I got down on one knee and re-tied the
piece of bloody cloth.

"That won't do any good," he said.  "It's too late for that."

"I didn't know what else to do," I said.

"Thanks."

"Do you want some water or anything?"

"I'd rather you didn't leave me."  So I didn't, and we were silent for a
time, looking out over the dinosaur farm, where evening was falling.
Then he said he was cold.  I wasn't wearing anything and I knew it
wasn't really cold, but I put my arm over his shoulders and felt him
shivering.  He smelled terrible.  I don't know if it was old age, or
death.

"This is it," he said.  "The rest of me is gone now.  They just shut me
down.  They don't know about this body, but they don't need to."

"Why the Admiral outfit?" I asked him.

"I don't know.  It's a product of my evil twin. Captain Bligh, maybe.
The costume is right for it.  I made several of these bodies, there
toward the last."  He made an effort and looked up and me.  His face
seemed to have grown older just in the last few minutes.

"Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?"

"I'd have to say yes."

"Me, too.  I've thought about it, and it seems so simple now.  All of
this, all the agony and death and your suicide attempts . . .
everything. It all came out of loneliness.  You can't imagine how lonely
I was, Hildy."

"We're all lonely, CC."

"But they didn't figure I would be.  They didn't plan for it, and I
couldn't recognize it for what it was.  And it drove me crazy.  You
remember Frankenstein's monster?  Wasn't he looking for love?  Didn't he
want the mad doctor to make someone for him to love?"

"I think so.  Or was that Godzilla?"

He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood.

"I had powers like a god," he said.  "And I searched for weakness. Maybe
they should put that on my headstone."

"I like what you said before. 'He did his best.'"

"Do you think I did, Hildy?  Do you really thing so?"

"I can't judge you, CC.  To me, if you're not a god, you came into my
life like an act of god. I'd as soon judge an exploding star."

"I'm sorry about all that."

"I believe you."

He started coughing again, and almost slipped out of my arms.  I caught
him and pulled and he fell against me.  I felt his blood on my shoulder
and couldn't see his face but heard his whisper beside my ear.

"I guess love was always out of the question," he said.  "But I'm the
only computer who ever got a hug.  Thanks, Hildy."

When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face.

#

I left him there under the pecan tree.  Maybe I'd bury him there, maybe
I'd really give him a headstone.  Just then, I'd had too much of death,
so I just left him.

I went to the stream to wash his blood off me. I kept my ears open for
Mario's cry, as I had from the very beginning, but he still slept
soundly.  I figured I'd go get him and make my way back to Callie's
quarters.  I didn't expect there'd be any danger now, but I planned to
be careful, anyway.

I planned a lot of things.  When I got back he was still asleep, so
rather than pick him up and feed him I put wood chips on the glowing
embers of the fire and fanned it to life.  Then I just sat there, across
the fire, thinking things over.

Mario was to have the best.  If Cricket thought he was a doting parent,
he hadn't seen me yet. There in the flickering darkness I watched him
grow.  I helped him through his first steps, laughed at his first words.
And grow he did, like a tree, with his head held high, the spitting
image of his Mom, but with a lot more sense.  I got him through scrapes,
through school, through happiness and tears, and got him ready for
college.  Would New Harvard do?  I didn't know; I'd heard Arean U. might
even be better these days, but that would mean moving to Mars . . .
well, that would be up to him, wouldn't it?  One thing I was sure of,
he'd get no pressure from me, no sir, not like Callie had done, if he
wanted to be President of Luna that was fine with me, if he wanted to be
. . . well, hell, President of Luna sounded all right.  But only if he
wanted to be.

So, full of plans and hope, I went to pick him up and found he was cold,
and limp, and didn't move.  And I tried.  I tried and tried to breathe
life back into him, but it did no good.

After a very long time, I dug two graves.

=*= =*= =*= =*=

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I'm no good at mathematics.  I never was good at math, so why should I
keep resorting to these numeric metaphors?  Maybe my ignorance helps
protect me.  For whatever reason, here it is:

If you're like me, you try to make the equations of your life balance
out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that you can live with the
answer.  Surely there's a way to fudge this factor so the solution is a
nice smooth line from y to x, a line that points to that guy over there.
Not at me.  There's just got to be a constant we can insert into this
element that will make the two sides of the equation--the universe the
way it is, and the universe the way we want it to be--agree in perfect
karmic Euclidean harmony.

Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I.

I tried, I tried till my mind was raw, to make the CC responsible for
Mario's death.

There was the first, trivial solution to the problem, of course.  That
was straightforward, and really solved nothing:  the CC was responsible,
because he created the chaos that drove me into the cave.

So what?

If Mario had been killed by a falling boulder, would it help me to get
angry at the boulder?  Not in the way I needed help.  No, dammit, I
wanted somebody to blame.  What I desperately wanted to believe was that
the CC had lured me out of the cave so that some unseen minion, some
preternatural power, some gris-gris voodoo necromancy had been able to
steal over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black
cat.

But I couldn't make it add up.  It would have taken powers of paranoid
imaging far beyond mine to make it work.

So why did he die?

#

It was almost a week before I really wondered how he died.  What had
killed him.  After I abandoned the idea that the CC had deliberately
murdered him, that is.  Was it a malformation of the heart the medicos
had overlooked?  Could it have been some chemical imbalance?  A newly-
mutated disease of dinosaurs, thus far harmless to humans?  Did he die
of too much love?

It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos following the
Big Glitch.  The big net was not operational, you couldn't just drop
your dime and pop the question and know the CC would find the answer in
some forgotten library system.  The answers were there, the trick was to
retrieve them.  For a few months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information
Era.

I finally found a medical historian who was able to track down a likely
cause of death to put on the certificate, not that Mario was going to
have a death certificate.  The regular doctors had been able to
eliminate all the easy answers just by looking at the read-outs of my
obstetrical examinations, the ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town
made further exams too risky.  They also had fetal tissue samples.  They
were able to say unequivocally that there had been no hole in my
darling's heart, nor any other physical malformation.  His body
chemistry would have been fine.  They laughed at my idea of a new
disease, and I didn't mention my choked-with-love theory. But they
couldn't say what it was, so they scratched their heads and said they'd
have to exhume the body to find out for sure.  And I said if they did
I'd exhume their hearts out of their rotten chests with a rusty scalpel
and fry them up for lunch, and shortly after that I was forcibly ejected
from the premises.

The historian didn't take long to find some musty old tomes and to wrest
from them this information:  S.I.D.S.  It had been an age of medical
acronyms, a time when people no longer wanted to attach their names to
the new disease they'd discovered, a time when old, perfectly
serviceable names were being junked in favor of non-offensive
jawbreakers, which quickly were abbreviated to something one could say.
This according to my researcher.  And SIDS seemed to stand for The Baby
Died, and We Don't Know Why.

Apparently babies used to just stop breathing, sometimes.  If you didn't
happen to be around to jog them, they didn't start again.  Sudden Infant
Death Syndrome.  Don't anybody ever tell me there's no such thing as
progress.

#

Ned Pepper, back there in Texas, had been the only one to sense it.  In
Texas, in the 1800's, a country doctor might have intuited something
when the baby came out, might have told the mother to keep an
extra-special eye on this one, because he seemed sickly.  There's damn
little of intuition left in modern medicine.  Of course, babies don't
die of diphtheria, either.

When Ned heard about it it shocked him sober. He began to think he might
really be a doctor, and the last I heard he was in medical school and
doing pretty damn well.  Good for you, Ned.

#

Lacking the CC to pin the blame on, I quickly fastened it on the only
other likely candidate. It didn't take long to compile a lengthy list of
things I would have done differently, and an even longer one of things I
should have done.  Some of them were completely illogical, but logic has
nothing to do with the death of a baby.  Most of these things were
decisions that seemed good at the time, hideous in retrospect.

The big one:  How could I justify terminating my pre-natal care?  So I'd
promised the Heinleiners not to compromise the secret of their
null-suits.  So what?  Was I trying to say my child died because I was
protecting a source?  I would gladly have betrayed every one of them,
root and branch, if it could have helped Mario take that one more
breath.  And yet . . .

That was then; this was now.  When I'd made the decision to stay away
from doctors my reasons had seemed sufficient, and not dangerous.  Bear
in mind two things:  one, my ignorance of the perils of childbirth.  I'd
simply had no idea there were so many things that could kill a baby,
that there was such a thing as SIDS that could hide itself from early
examinations, from mid-term detection, even from the midwife during
delivery.  The test for SIDS was done after birth, and if the child was
at risk it was cured on the spot, as routinely as cutting the cord.

So you could argue that I wasn't at fault. Even with the best of care,
Mario'd have been just as dead if I'd left the ranch and sought help,
and me along with him.  The CC had said as much.  And I did try to
convince myself of that, and I almost succeeded, except for the second
thing I bade you to bear in mind, which is that I had no business having
a child in the first place.

It's hard for me to remember now, washed as I am in the memory of loving
him so dearly, but I haven't tried to hide it from you, my Faithful
Reader.  I did not love him from the start.  I became pregnant
foolishly, stayed pregnant mulishly, perversely, for no good reason.
While pregnant I felt nothing for the child, certainly no joy in the
experience.  There were twelve-year- olds who gave birth for better
reasons than I.  It was only later that he became my whole world and my
reason for living.  I came to believe that, if I'd loved him that much
from the start of his creation, I'd still have him, and that the
Biblical scale of my punishment was only fitting.

With all that to wallow in, and with past history as a guide, I expected
I'd be dead soon. So I retired to my cabin in Texas and waited to see
what form my self-destruction would take.

#

There had been another culprit to examine before coming to face my own
guilt:  Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

She tried to contact me several times after the restoration of order.
She sent flowers, candy, little gifts of all kinds.  She sent letters,
which I didn't read at the time.  It wasn't even that I was angry; I
just didn't want to hear from her.

The last gift was a bulldog puppy.  I did read the note tied around her
neck, which said she was a direct descendant of the noble line of Ch.
Sir Winston Disraeli Plantaganet.  She was so ugly she went right off
the end of the Gruesome Scale and back around to Cute.  But her
bumptious good nature and wet puppy kisses threatened to cheer me up, to
interfere with my wallowing, so I popped her into a cryokennel and added
her to my last will and testament, which was my sole useful occupation
at the time.  If I lived, I'd thaw her.

I did live, I did thaw her, and Miss Maggie is a great comfort to me.

As for Liz, she abdicated her throne and committed herself to a dipso
academy, got out, fell off, joined A.A. and found sobriety.  I'm told
she's been clean for six months now and has become a major-league bore
about it.

It's true what she did was dastardly, and although I understand that
it's the liquor that does the shit, it's the boozer that takes the
drink, so I can't really let her off on that account . . . but I do
forgive her.  She had no hand in Mario's death, though she bears a heavy
load for some others.  Thanks for the mutt, Liz. Next time I see you,
I'll buy you a drink.

#

I did live, and for some time that was a wonderment to me.  It seemed
the CC really had been telling the truth.  My self-destructive urges had
come from him.

I'll forgive you if you swallowed that.  I believed it, too, at least
long enough to get over the worst of my grief and remorse, which is
probably just what the CC intended when he told that particular whopper.
How do I know it was a lie?  I don't really, but I have to assume it
was. Perhaps there was a grain of truth in it.  It's possible that some
seed was planted in my psyche. But I lived it, and I remember it, and
the plain truth is I wanted to die.  I wish there was some quick and
easy way to explain why.  Hell, if there was a long and complicated way
I'd set it down here; I'm not shy about agonizing, nor about
introspection.  But I really don't know.  It seems so dumb to go through
all that and not come out of it with a deeper insight, but the best I
can say is that for a while I wanted to kill myself, and now I don't.

That's why I'm taking it as fact that the CC lied to me.  Even if he
didn't, I'm responsible for my actions.  I can't believe in a suicide
compulsion.  If the urge was contagious, its germ fell upon fertile
ground.

But it's funny, isn't it?  My first attempts seemed prompted by nothing
more than a gargantuan funk.  Then I found a reason to live, and lost
him, and now I feel more alive than ever.

I wasn't so philosophical at first.  When it became apparent to me that
I was going to live, when I gave up heaping blame on myself (I'll never
entirely give that up, but I can handle it now), when I'd learned the
how of his death, I became obsessed with why.  I started going to
churches again.  I usually did it with a few drinks under my belt.
Somewhere during the service I'd stand up and begin an angry prayer, the
gist of which was why did You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big
Bang?  I'd stand on pews and shout at the ceiling.  Usually I got
ejected quickly.  Once I got arrested for tossing a chair through a
stained glass window.  There's no doubt about it, I was pretty crazy for
a while there.

I'm better now.

#

Things got back to normal quicker than anyone had a right to expect.

Whatever they did to the CC, it affected mainly his higher "conscious"
functions.  Vital services were interrupted only during the Glitch
itself, and then only locally.  By the time the CC visited me in the
Double-C Bar the vast physical plant that is the life blood of Luna was
humming right along.

There were differences, some of which still linger.  Communications are
iffy much of the time because the still-severed parts of the CC don't
talk to each other as easily as they used to.  But phone calls get
through, the trains still run on time.  Things take a little
longer--sometimes a lot longer, if they require a computer search--but
they get done.

A measure of that is Susquehanna, Rio Grande, and Columbia Railroad,
planned, approved, and built entirely since the Big Glitch.  It's now
possible to travel from Pennsylvania to Texas on one of the SRG&C's
three wood-burning steam- powered trains in only five days instead of
the thirty minutes it used to take on the Maglev. This is called
progress.  Most of that time is spent being gently rocked on a siding
while holos of virgin wilderness slide by the windows, but you'd swear
it was real.  It's been a shot in the arm for Texas tourism, and a
financial bonanza to Jake and the Mayor, who thought it up and pushed it
through.  Congratulations, Jake.

And to Elise, too.  Last I heard my star pupil had her own table at the
Alamo where she fleeces tourists by the dozens every day.  Know when to
fold 'em, honey.

I went out to visit Fox the other day, still hard at work in Oregon.  We
swapped Glitch stories, as everybody still does who hasn't seen each
other for a while, and he had been little affected.  He hadn't even
heard of it for the first twenty-four hours, because his own computers
functioned independently of the CC, like Callie's. Turns out I could
have hid out in Oregon as well as at the CC, but I don't think anything
would have turned out differently.  It wasn't a friendly visit, though,
since I was there representing the SRG&C, whose tunnel was half-way from
Lonesome Dove to the shores of the Columbia, and which Fox had
vehemently opposed.  He wanted to keep Oregon pristine, didn't even want
to allow the small edge settlement, a logging camp to be called Sweet
Home, which would be the northwest terminus of the railroad.  I told him
a few guys in plaid shirts with sawblades weren't going to hurt his
precious forest, and he called me a capitalist plunderer. A plunderer,
imagine that!  I'm afraid that what spark had been there was long
extinguished.  Kiss my axe, Fox.

A few months after the crisis, when I was finally emerging from my
church-vandalizing funk, I had need of Darling Bobbie's services again,
so I went looking for him only to find he'd turned himself back into
Crazy Bob and was no longer on the Hadleyplatz.  He wasn't back on the
Leystrasse, either.  I finally ran him to ground in Mall X, the
ultra-avant fleshmart, where he now specialized in only the more
outrageous body styles favored by the young.  He tried to talk me into
getting my head put in a box, but I reminded him it was me and Brenda
who were responsible for that particular fashion outrage, with our story
on the Grand Flack.  He did the work I required for old times' sake, but
rather grudgingly, I thought. Crazy again, after all these years.

As for the Grand Flack himself, I heard from him, too.  He called me up
to thank me.  I couldn't imagine what I'd done to deserve that, and
didn't really want to listen to him, but I gathered he now regretted all
the time he'd spent on the outside, seeing to the affairs of the Flacks.
In prison he was able to devote himself to television around the clock.
He wanted me to speak to the judge and see about extending his sentence.
I'll surely try, old man.

#

One of the first changes you notice after the Glitch is how much more
medical treatment you need.  My body is still full of nanobots, I
assume, but they don't work as well or with as much coordination as they
used to.  I never actually researched why it's like that, having very
little interest in the subject.  But for whatever reason, I now have to
go in almost monthly to have cancers eradicated.  I don't mind, much,
but a lot of people do, and it's just one more thing adding pressure to
the Restore the Cortex movement, those folks who want to bring back the
CC, only bigger and wiser. We're so spoiled in this day and age.  We
tend to forget what a nuisance cancer used to be.

That's where I ran into Callie, at the medico shop, having her own
cancers removed.  Runs in the family, as they say.

We didn't speak.  This wasn't an unusual condition between us; I've
spent half my life not speaking to Callie, or not being spoken to.

She had come to get me up at the cave.  That's probably a good thing, as
I don't know for sure if I'd have been able to get up from the grave and
walk home on my own.  It may even be a good thing that she asked me the
question she had no right to ask, because it made me angry enough to
forget my grief for long enough to scream and shout at her and get her
screaming and shouting back.  She asked me who the father was.  She, who
had never allowed me to ask that question, she who had made my childhood
so miserable I used to dream about a Daddy arriving on a white horse,
telling me it had all been a big mistake, that he really loved me and
that Callie was a gypsy witch who'd kidnapped me from the cradle.

Sometimes I think our society is screwed up about this father business.
Just because we can all bear children, is that an excuse to virtually
eliminate the role of father?  Then I think about Brenda and her old
man, and about how common that sort of thing used to be, and you wonder
if males should be allowed around little children at all.

All I knew for sure was I missed mine, and Callie said she'd tell me if
I really wanted to know such a silly thing, and I said don't bother
because I think I know who it is, and she laughed and said you don't
understand anything, and that's when we stopped talking and walked down
the hill, together but alone, as we'd always been.  See you in twenty
years, Callie.

Still, I think I do know.

As for Kitten Parker . . . why spoil his day?

#

A year has passed now.  I still think of Mario. And I often wake up in
the middle of the night seeing Winston tearing the arm off that King
City policewoman.  I never found out what happened to her.  She was as
much a victim as any of us; the KC Cops were dragooned into the war by
the CC, had no idea what they were doing, and too many of them died.

A year has passed, and we change, and yet things stay the same.  The
world rolls over the holes left by the departed, fills in those spaces.
I didn't know how I'd run the Texian without Charity, but her sources
started coming to me with stories, and before long one of them had
emerged to take her place.  He's not near as pretty as she as, but he
has the makings of a reporter.

I'm still running the paper, still teaching at the school.  And I'm the
new Mayor of New Austin. I didn't run, but when the citizen's committee
put my name forward I didn't pull out, either.  The Gila Monster column
is still as venomous as ever. Maybe it's a conflict of interest, but no
one seems too concerned.  If the opposition doesn't like it, let them
start their own paper.

Once a week I have a guest column in the Daily Cream.  I think it's
Walter's way of trying to lure me back.  Not likely, Walter.  I think
that part of my life is done.  Still, you never know. I didn't think
they could talk me into being Mayor, either.

I saw Walter only last week, in the newly re- opened Blind Pig.  The old
one had been destroyed by fire during the Glitch and for a while Deep
Throat had threatened to leave it shuttered.  But he bowed under the
weight of public demand and threw a big party to celebrate.  Most of
King City's fourth estate was there, and those that weren't stoned when
they arrived soon became so.

We did all the things reporters do when gathered in groups:  drank,
assassinated the characters of absent colleagues, told all the
scandalous stories about celebrities and politicians we couldn't print,
drank, hinted at stories we were about to break we actually knew nothing
about, re-hashed old fights and uncovered new conspiracies in high
places, drank, threw up, drank some more.  A few punches were thrown, a
few tempers soothed, many hands of poker were played. The new Blind Pig
wasn't bad, but nothing is ever as good as the good old days, so many
complaints were heard.  I figured that fifty years of mopped- up blood
and spilled drinks and smokes and broken crockery and the new place
would be pretty much like the old and only me and a few others would
even remember the old Pig had burned.

At one point I found myself sitting by the big round table in the back
room where serious cards were played.  I wasn't playing--nobody in that
room had trusted me at a card table in years. Walter was there, scowling
at his hand as if losing the pitiful little pot would send him home to
his fifty-room mansion penniless.  Cricket was there, too, doing his
patented does-a-flush-beat-a- straight befuddled routine, looking ever
so dapper a gent now that he'd affected nineteenth-century clothing as a
more or less permanent element of his style.  In his double-breasted
tweed jacket and high starched collar he was easily the most interesting
guy in the room, but the spark was gone.  Too bad, Cricket.  If you'd
only had any sense we could have made each other's lives miserable for
five, six years, and parted heartily detesting each other.  Think of all
the great fights you missed, damn you, and eat your heart out.  And
Cricket, a friend should take you aside and tell you to drop the
innocent act, at the poker table at least.  It worked better when you
were a girl, and it wasn't that great even then.

And who should be sitting behind the biggest stack of chips, calm,
smiling faintly, cards face- down on the table and worrying the hell out
of everyone else . . . but Brenda Starr, confidant of celebrities, the
toast of three planets, and well on her way to becoming the most
powerful gossip journalist since Louella Parsons.  There was very little
left of the awkward, earnest, ignorant child I'd reluctantly taken on
two years earlier. She was still incredibly tall and just about as
young, but everything else had changed.  She dressed now, and while I
thought her choices were outrageous she had the confidence to make her
own style.  The old Brenda could now be seen only in the cub reporter
groupie at her elbow, attentive to her every need, a gorgeous gumdrop
who no doubt had grown up wanting to meet and hobnob with famous people,
as Brenda had, as I had.  I watched her turn her cards over, rake in
another pot, and lean back watching the new deal.  Her hand stroked the
knee of the girl, casually possessive, and she winked at me.  Don't
spend it all in one place, Brenda.

During the next hand the talk turned, as it eventually does at these
things, to the affairs of the world.  I didn't contribute; I'd found
early on that if people noticed me they tended to clam up about the Big
Glitch.  This was a group that kept few secrets.  Everyone there knew
about Mario, and many of them knew of my troubles with the CC.  Some
probably knew of my suicides.  It made them cautious, as most probably
couldn't imagine what it must be like to lose a child like that.  I
wanted to tell them it was all right, I was okay, but it's no use, so I
just sat back and listened.

First there was the CC, and should we bring him back.  The consensus was
that we shouldn't, but we would.  Having him the way he was was just so
damn handy.  Sure, he screwed up there at the end, but the Big Brains
can handle that, can't they?  I mean, if they can put a man on Pluto a
week after he left Luna, why don't they spend some of that money to make
things easier and more convenient to the taxpaying citizens?  I think
that's what will happen.  We're a democracy--especially now that the
CC's no longer around to meddle--and if we vote for damn foolishness,
damn foolishness is what we'll get.  I just hope they make provision
this time around for somebody to give the New CC hugs on a regular
basis.  Otherwise, he's apt to get pettish again.

There was no consensus on the other big topic of the day.  It was a
question that cut deeply and would certainly cause many more shouting
matches before it was resolved.  What do you do with the new things the
CC discovered during his rogue years?  In particular, how about this
memory- recording and cloning business, eh?

The Hitler analogy was brought up and bandied about.  Under Hitler's
reign a Dr. Mengele performed unethical experiments--sheer torture,
mainly--on human subjects.  I don't know if anything useful was learned,
but suppose there was.  Was it ethical to use that knowledge, to benefit
from that much evil?  It seems to me your answer depends a lot on your
world view.  Myself, I'm not sure if it's ethical (which probably says a
lot about my world view), but I don't think it's wrong, and I have a
personal involvement in the question.  Right or wrong though, I do think
it will be used, and so did just about everybody else in the room,
reporters being the way they are. People were going through the records
the CC didn't destroy--I'm one of those records in a way, but not a very
forthcoming one--looking for new knowledge, and if it has a practical
use, it will be used.  Cry over that if you're so inclined. Myself, I
guess in the end I feel knowledge has no right or wrong.  It's just
knowledge.  It's not like the law, where some knowledge is admissible
and some tainted by the method of its discovery.

Minamata was only one of the CC's horror chambers, and not the worst.
Some of those stories have come out, some are still being suppressed.
Most of them you'd really rather not know, trust me.

But what about the problem whose penultimate answer had been a being who
thought he was Andrew MacDonald minus all human feelings, and whose
final solution were the troops of mindlessly loyal soldiers that gave me
so much trouble on the first day of the Glitch?  Because they weren't
really the end product.  The CC had felt the technique was perfectible,
and I have no reason to doubt it. That was the one the public was
clamoring to know more about:  immortality.

Yeah, but it wasn't really immortality, somebody said.  All it meant was
that somebody else very like you, with your memories, would live.  You,
the person sitting here at this table holding the most terrible cards
you ever saw, would be just as dead as ever.  Once the public understood
that they'd realize it wasn't worth the trouble.

Don't you believe it, somebody else said.  My cards aren't all that bad,
and it's the only hand I've got, so I'll play 'em.  Up to now people's
only shot at living forever has been to produce something that will live
after us.  Artists do it with their art, most of the rest of us produce
children.  It's our way of living on.  I think this would appeal to the
same urge.  It'd be like a child, only it'd be you, too.

At that point somebody nudged somebody else and the thought went around
the table, silently, that we oughtn't to be talking about children . . .
you know . . . with Hildy around.  At least I think that's what
happened, maybe I'm too sensitive. For whatever reason the conversation
died, with only an unexpected apostrophe at the end, in the form of
Brenda's little gumdrop looking around with innocent eyes and piping,
"What's wrong with it?  It sounds like a great idea to me."  It was her
only comment of the evening, but it put the kibosh on my own theory,
which was that it was a useless idea, that people would rather have
children than duplicate themselves--essentially, not to put all your
spare cash into memory-cloning stocks.  Suddenly, looking into that
innocent face of youth, I wasn't so sure.  Time will tell.

#

Two years of my life.  Probably the most eventful, but time will tell
about that, too.

I am sitting in the parlor car of the Prairie Chief, destination
Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  I decided since I'm part owner of the SRG&C it
was high time I took a ride.  It's a school holiday so for once I have
the time.  I'm writing, in longhand, with a fountain pen, on foolscap
SRG&C stationery resting on a mother-of-pearl inlaid mahogany table set
with an inkwell and a crystal vase full of fresh bluebonnets.  Nothing
but the best for the passengers on the Prairie Chief.  The waiter has
just brought me a steaming cup of tea, with lemon.  Ahead I can hear the
chugging of the engine, No. 439, and I can smell a hint of its smoke.
Behind me the porter will soon be turning down my Pullman bunk, making
it with crisp white sheets, leaving a mint and a complimentary bottle of
toilet water on the pillow.  Also in that direction the cook is
selecting a cut of prime Kansas City beef, to be cooked rare, suitable
for the owner's dinner.

All right, it's brontosaurus, if you want to get technical.  It might
even be from the Double-C Bar.

We'll soon be pulling into "Fort Worth," where we'll take on wood and
water.  I don't plan to get off, since I'm told it's just a dreary
cowtown full of rowdy and possibly dangerous cowhands, quite unsuitable
for a well-brought-up lady. (That's what I'm told; I happen to know,
since I watched it being built, that it's just a big room with rails and
a dirt street running through it, scattered with wood buildings and
backed by a great holo show.)

Outside my window dusk is gathering.  Not long ago we saw a herd of
buffalo, and not long after that a group of wild red Indians, who reined
their mounts and watched solemnly as the iron horse huffed by.  From
Central Casting, and on tape, but who cares?  The parlor car is crowded
with Texans and a few returning Pennsylvanians.  They all wear their
best clothes, not yet too mussed by the journey.  Across from me a
little Amish girl sits with her parents, watching me write.  Next to
them is a group of three young single gentlemen, trying not to be too
obvious about their interest in the single girl at the escritoire.  Soon
the boldest of them will come over and ask me to dine with him, and if
his line is any better than "Whatcha writin', cutie?" he will have a
companion for dinner.

But not for bed.  It would be a pointless exercise.  The service I
lately required of Darling Bobby/Crazy Bob was to render me asexual,
like Brenda when I first met her.  This was probably foolish and
certainly extreme, but I found that I couldn't bear the thought of sex,
and in fact loathed that opening that had brought Mario into the world
for his short, perfect time. I had even less interest in being male
again.  So I jumped off the sexual choo-choo train and I'm not sorry I
did it.  I think I'll be ready to board again any day now, but it's been
a relief not to be at the mercy of hormones, of either polarity.  I may
do it every twenty years or so, as sort of a sabbatical.

As darkness falls and the train rocks gently, I realize I'm happier than
I've been in a long time.

#

Now we've spent some time together, and it's almost time to leave you.
You've met Hildebrandt, Hildegarde, and Hildething:  railroad tycoon,
publisher, teacher, syndicated columnist, bereaved mother and tireless
crusader for pronoun reform. There's really only one more thing worth
knowing about him/her/it.

I'm going to the stars.

What I have is an invitation to make a reservation.  I didn't mention
this earlier, maybe it slipped my mind, but about a week after Mario
died I sat down for a very long time with Walter's pistol, a bottle of
good tequila, and one round. I drank, and I loaded and unloaded the gun,
and drank some more and pointed it at things:  a tree, the side of the
cabin, my head.  And I thought about what the CC had said about a virus,
and what I had concluded about the veracity of that statement, and
wondered if there was anything I could think of I really wanted to do?
All those other things . . . sure, they bring me satisfaction,
particularly the teaching, but they wouldn't serve any more as the
answer to the question "What do you do, Hildy?"

I thought of something, thought about it some more, and hied myself out
to the Heinlein, where I asked Smith if I could go along when he took
off, worthless as my skills might be to his enterprise. And he said
sure, Hildy, I meant to ask you if you were interested.  We'll need
somebody to handle the publicity, for one thing, to establish the right
spin-control when it's time to leave, and most especially when we get
back.  We'll need advice on how to market our stories with maximum
profit.  Hell, most of us will probably need somebody to ghost-write
them, as well. Scientists, test pilots, technical types, we all get
tongue-tied when it comes to that part; just read the early accounts of
the space pioneers.  Go see Sinbad over in the publicity department, see
if you can't get him straightened out.  If you're any good, I expect to
make you head of the department in a week.  You couldn't be worse at it
than Sinbad.

So this is in the nature of a farewell.  All the people I've mentioned
so far . . . not a one of them will go.  They're just not the type.  I
love them to various degrees (yes, even you, Callie), but they are
Luna-bound, to a man and woman.  "Hansel,"

"Gretel,"

"Libby," (who recovered, by the way), "Valentine Michael Smith;" these
will be my shipmates, whether we leave next year, in twenty years, or in
fifty years.  The rest of you are already left behind.

Teaching, railroading, running the Texian, these are all things I do.
But in my endless spare time (Hah!) I do what I can to further the aims
of the Heinleiners and their crazy project. Result:  a two percent
increase in inquiries during the last year.  Not exactly setting the
world on fire, but give me time.  When I've done all I can in that
regard I hang around.  You got a bottle you want washed, a trash pail
that needs emptying, a whoosis that needs polishing?  Give it to the
Hildething and it will get done.  There is no job too menial for me,
mainly because I'm completely useless at the important jobs.  My aim is
to become so indispensable to the project that it would be unthinkable
to leave me behind.  Go without Hildy?  Cripes, who would shine my shoes
and rub my feet?

And there you have it.  I promised you no neat conclusion, and I think
I've delivered on that.  I warned you of loose ends, and I can see a
whole tangle of them.  What of the Invaders, for instance?  Brother, I
don't know.  Last time anybody checked they were still in charge of our
fair home planet, and unlikely to be evicted soon. If we ever get around
to it, that's another story.

What will we find out there?  I don't know that, either, and that's why
I'm going along. Alien intelligences?  I wouldn't bet against it.
Strange worlds?  I'd say that's a lock.  Vast empty spaces, human
tragedy and hope.  God. Mario's soul.  Your wildest dream and your worst
nightmare all could be out there.

Or maybe we'll find Elvis and Silvio in a flying saucer singing
old-timey rock and roll.

Think what a story it'll be.

--Eugene, Oregon

May 2, 1991

AUTHOR'S NOTE

When in the course of a writer's career it becomes necessary to break
with an established science fiction tradition, a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires that he should declare the causes which
impel him to the decision.

This story appears to be part of a future history of mine, often called
the Eight Worlds. It does share background, characters, and technology
with earlier stories of mine, which is part of the future history
tradition. What it doesn't share is a chronology. The reason for this is
simple: the thought of going back, rereading all those old stories, and
putting them in coherent order filled me with ennui. It got so bad I
might as well give up on this story.

Then I thought, what the heck?

Consider this a disclaimer, then.  Steel Beach is not really part of the
Eight Worlds future history. Or the Eight Worlds is not really a future
history, since that implies an orderly progression of events. Take your
pick. But please don't write and tell me that the null-suits had to have
been around much earlier in the series, because you said so in
such-and-such a story. There are probably a lot of stories like that in
Steel Beech. So what?

Somebody once consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds (I think it
was the editor of the National Enquirer). It's a sentiment I'm sure
Hildy would endorse.

- John Varley

December 1, 1991
