äÖÏÎ ÷ÁÒÌÉ. èÏÌÏÄÎÙÊ ÐÌÑÖ (engl) John Varley. Steel beach --------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (C) 1991 by John Varley. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only. --------------------------------------------------------------- STEEL BEACH by John Varley 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 chum in the water, we start to feed. Five minutes into the ULTRA-Tingle presentations (that's how they insisted it be spelled, with caps) I could see this turkey would be of interest only to the trades. I'm sure my beefy buddy up front was tickled down to the tips of his muscle-bound toes. There were a dozen nude, genderless dancers on stage now, caressing each others' bodies and posing artistically. Blue sparks flew from their fingertips. "That's it for me," I said to Cricket. "You sticking around?" "There's a drawing later. Three free conversions--" "--to the fabulous ULTRA-Tingle System," the salesman said, finishing her sentence for her. "Win free sex," I said. "What's that?" "Walter says it's the ultimate padloid headline." "Shouldn't it have something about UFO's in it?" "Okay. 'Win Free Sex Aboard a UFO to Old Earth.'" "I'd better stick around for the drawing. My boss would kill me if I won and wasn't around to collect." "If I win, they can bring it around to the office." I got up, put my hand on a massive shoulder, leaned down. "Those pecs could use some more work," I told the gorilla hybrid, and got out in a hurry. # The foyer had been transformed since my arrival. Huge blue holos of ULTRA-Tingle convertees entwined erotically in the corners, and long banquet tables had been wheeled in. Men in traditional English butler uniforms stood behind the tables polishing silver and glassware. It's known as perks. I seldom turn down a free trip in the course of my profession, and I never turn down free food. I went to the nearest table and stuck a knife into a pÂte' sculpture of Sigmund Freud and spread the thick brown goo over a slice of black bread. One of the butlers looked worried and started toward me, but I glared him back into his place. I put two thick slices of smoked ham on top of the pÂte', spread a layer of cream cheese, a few sheets of lox sliced so thin you could read newsprint through it, and topped it all off with three spoonfuls of black Beluga caviar. The butler watched the whole operation in increasing disbelief. It was one of the all-time great Hildy sandwiches. I was about to bite into it when Cricket appeared at my elbow and offered me a tulip glass of blue champagne. The crystal made an icy clear musical note when I touched it to the rim of her glass. "Freedom of the press," I suggested. "The fourth estate," Cricket agreed. # The UniBio labs were at the far end of a new suburb nearly seventy kilometers from the middle of King City. Most of the slides and escalators were not working yet. There was only one functioning tube terminal and it was two kilometers away. We'd come in a fleet of twenty hoverlimos. They were still there, lined up outside the entrance to the corporate offices, ready to take us back to the tube station. Or so I thought. Cricket and I climbed aboard. "It distresses me greatly to tell you this," the hoverlimo said, "but I am unable to depart until the demonstration inside is over, or until I have a passenger load of seven individuals." "Make an exception," I told it. "We have deadlines to meet." "Are you perhaps declaring an emergency situation?" I started to do just that, then bit my tongue. I'd get back to the office, all right, then have a lot of explaining to do and a big fine to pay. "When I write this story," I said, trying another tack, "and when I mention this foolish delay, portraying UniBio in an unfavorable light, your bosses will be extremely upset." "This information disturbs and alarms me," said the hoverlimo. "I, being only a sub-program of an incompletely-activated routine of the UniBio building computer, wish only to please my human passengers. Be assured I would go to the greatest lengths to satisfy your desires, as my only purpose is to provide satisfaction and speedy transportation. However," it added, after a short pause, "I can't move." "Come on," Cricket said. "You ought to know better than to argue with a machine." She was already getting out. I knew she was right, but there is a part of me that has never been able to resist it, even if they don't talk to me. "Your mother was a garbage truck," I said, and kicked it in the rubber skirt. "Undoubtedly, sir. Thank you, sir. Please come back soon, sir." # "Who programmed that toadying thing?" I wondered, later. "Somebody with a lot of lipstick on his ass," Cricket said. "What are you so sour about? It's just a short walk. Take in the scenery." It was a rather pleasant place, I had to admit. There were very few people around. You grow up with the odor of people all around you, all the time, and you really notice it when the scent is gone. I took a deep breath and smelled freshlypoured concrete. I drank the sights and sounds and scents of a new-born world: the sharp primary colors of wire bundles sprouting from unfinished walls like the first buds on a bare bough, the untarnished gleam of copper, silver, gold, aluminum, titanium; the whistle of air through virgin ducts, undeflected, unmuffled, bringing with it the crisp sharpness of the light machine oil that for centuries has coated new machinery, fresh from the factory . . . all these things had an effect on me. They meant warmth, security, safety from the eternal vacuum, the victory of humanity over the hostile forces that never slept. In a word, progress. I began to relax a little. We picked our way through jumbles of stainless steel and aluminum and plastic and glass building components and I felt a peace as profound as I suspect a Kansas farmer of yesteryear might have felt, looking out over his rippling fields of wheat. "Says here they've got an option where you can have sex over the telephone." Cricket had gotten a few paces ahead of me, and she was reading from the UniBio faxpad handout. "That's nothing new. People started having sex over the telephone about ten minutes after Alexander Graham Bell invented it." "You're pulling my leg. Nobody invented sex." I liked Cricket, though we were rivals. She works for The Straight Shit, Luna's second largest padloid, and has already made a name for herself even though she's not quite thirty years old. We cover many of the same stories so we see a lot of each other, professionally. She'd been female all the time I'd known her, but she'd never shown any interest in the tentative offers I had made. No accounting for taste. I'd about decided it was a matter of sexual orientation--one doesn't ask. It had to be that. If not, it meant she just wasn't interested in me. Altogether unlikely. Which was a shame, either way, because I'd harbored a low-grade lust for her for three years. "'Simply attach the Tinglemodem (sold separately) to the primary sensory cluster,'" she read, "'and it's as if your lover were in the room with you.' I'll bet Mr. Bell didn't figure on that." Cricket had a child-like face with an upturned nose and a brow that tended to wrinkle appealingly when she was thinking--all carefully calculated, I have no doubt, but no less exciting because of that. She had a short upper lip and a long lower one. I guess that doesn't sound so great, but Cricket made it work. She had one green, normal eye, and the other one was red, without a pupil. My eyes were the same except the normal one was brown. The visible red eyes of the press never sleep. She was wearing a frilly red blouse that went well with her silver-blonde hair, and the second badge of our profession: a battered gray fedora with a card reading PRESS stuck into the brim. She had recently had herself heeled. It was coming back into fashion. Personally, I tried it and didn't like it much. It's a simple operation. The tendons in the soles of the feet are shortened, forcing your heels up in the air and shifting the weight to the balls of the feet. In extreme cases it put you right up on your toes, like a ballerina. Like I said, a rather silly fad, but I had to admit it produced attractive lines in the calf, thigh, and buttock muscles. It could have been worse. Women used to cram their feet into pointed horrors with tencentimeter heels and hobble around in a one-gee field to get more or less the same effect. It must have been crippling. "Says there's a security interlock available, to insure fidelity." "What? Where's that?" She gave me the faxpad reference. I couldn't believe what I was reading. "Is that legal?" I asked her. "Sure. It's a contract between two people, isn't it? Nobody's forced to use it." "It's an electronic chastity belt, that's what it is." "Worn by both husband and wife. Not like the brave knight off to the Crusades, getting laid every night while his wife looks for a good locksmith. Good for the goose, good for the gander." "Good for nobody, if you ask me." Frankly, I was shocked, and not much shocks me. To each his or her own, that's basic to our society. But ULTRA-Tingle was offering a coded security system whereby each partner had a password, unknown to the other, to lock or unlock his or her partner's sexual response. Without the password, the sexual center of the brain would not be activated, and sex would be about as exciting as long division. To use it would require giving someone veto power over my own mind. I can't imagine trusting anyone that much. But people are crazy. That's what my job's all about. "How about over there?" Cricket said. "Over where? I mean, what about it?" She was headed toward a patch of green, an area that, when completed, would be a pocket park. Trees stood around in pots. There were great rolls of turf stacked against one wall, like a carpet shop. "It's probably the best spot we'll find." "For what?" "Have you forgotten your offer already?" she asked. To tell the truth, I had. After this many years, it had been made more in jest than anything else. She took my hand and led me onto an unrolled section of turf. It was soft and springy and cool. She reclined and looked up at me. "Maybe I shouldn't say it, but I'm surprised." "Well, Hildy, you never really asked, you know?" I felt sure I had, but maybe she was right. My style is more to kid around, make what used to be known as a pass. Some women don't like that. They'd rather have a direct question. I stretched out on top of her and we kissed. We disarranged some of my clothes. She wasn't wearing enough to worry about. Soon we were moving to rhythms it had taken Mother Nature well over a billion years to compose. It was awkward, messy, it lacked flexibility and probably didn't show much imagination. It sure wasn't ULTRATingle. That didn't prevent it from being wonderful. "Wow," she whispered, as I rolled off her and we lay side by side on the grass. "That was really . . . obsolete." "Not nearly as obsolete as it was for me." We looked at each other and burst out laughing. After a while, she sat up and glanced at the figures displayed on her wrist. "Deadline in three hours," she said. "Me, too." We heard a low hum, looked up, and saw our old friend the hoverlimo headed in our direction. We ran to catch it, leaped over the rubber skirt and landed with seven others, who grumbled and groused and eventually made room for us. "I am overjoyed to transport you," said the hoverlimo. "I take that back about the garbage truck," I said. "Thank you, sir." =*= =*= =*= =*= 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 rediscover the art of psychic infibulation! Who but UniBio could raise impotence into the realm of integrated circuits, elevate frigidity from aberration to abnegation? You don't believe me? Here's how it works: (to come: *insert UniBio faxpad #4985 ref. 6- 13.*) You may ask yourself: Whatever happened to oldfashioned trust? Well, folks, it's obsolete. Just like the penis, which UniBio assures us will soon go the way of the Do-do bird. So those of you who still own and operate a trouser-snake, better start thinking of a place to put it. No, not there, you fool! That's obsolete, too! (no thirty) # The vocabulary warning light was blinking wildly on the nail of my index finger. It turned on around paragraph seven, as I had known it would. But it's fun to write that sort of thing, even if you know it'll never make it into print. When I first started this job I would have gone back and worked on it, but now I know it's better to leave something obvious for Walter to mess with, in the hope he'll leave the rest alone. Okay, so the Pulitzer Prize was safe for another year. # King City grew the way many of the older Lunar settlements had: one bang at a time. The original enclave had been in a large volcanic bubble several hundred meters below the surface. An artificial sun had been hung near the top, and engineers drilled tunnels in all directions, heaping the rubble on the floor, pulverizing it into soil, turning the bubble into a city park with residential corridors radiating away from it. Eventually there were too many people for that park, so they drilled a hole and dropped in a medium-sized nuclear bomb. When it cooled, the resulting bubble became Mall Two. The city fathers were up to Mall Seventeen before new construction methods and changing public tastes halted the string. The first ten malls had been blasted in a line, which meant a long commute from the Old Mall to Mall Ten. They started curving the line, aiming to complete a big oval. Now a King City map had seventeen circles tracing out the letter J, woven together by a thousand tunnels. My office was in Mall Twelve, level thirty-six, 120 degrees. It's in the editorial offices of The News Nipple, the padloid with the largest circulation in Luna. The door at 120 opens on what is barely more than an elevator lobby wedged between a travel agency and a florist. There's a receptionist, a small waiting room, and a security desk. Behind that are four elevators that go to actual offices, on the Lunar surface. Location, location, and location, says my cousin Arnie, the real estate broker. The way I figure it, time plays a part in land values, too. The Nipple offices were topside because, when the rag was founded, topside meant cheap. Walter had had money even way back then, but he'd been a cheap son of a bitch since the dawn of time. He got a deal on the seven-story surface structure, and who cared if it leaked? He liked the view. Now everybody likes views, and the fine old homes in Bedrock are the worst slums in King City. But I suspect one big blow-out could turn the whole city topsy-turvy again. I had a corner office on the sixth floor. I hadn't done much with it other than to put in a cot and a coffeemaker. I tossed my hat on the cot, slapped the desk terminal until it lighted up, and pressed my palm against a read-out plate. My story was downloaded into the main computer in just under a second. In another second, the printer started to chatter. Walter prefers hard copy. He likes to make big blue marks on it. While I waited I looked out over the city. My home town. The News Nipple Tower is near the bottom of the J of King City. From it you can see the clusters of other buildings that mark the sub-surface Malls. The sun was still three days from rising. The lights of the city dwindled in the distance and blended in with the hard, unblinking stars overhead. Almost on the horizon are the huge, pearly domes of King City farms. It's pretty by night, not so lovely by day. When the sun came up it would bathe every exposed pipe and trash pile and abandoned rover in unsympathetic light; night pulled a curtain over the shameful clutter. Even the parts that aren't junk aren't all that attractive. Vacuum is useful in many manufacturing processes and walls are of no use for most of them. If something needed to be sheltered from sunlight, a roof was enough. Loonies don't care about the surface. There's no ecology to preserve, no reason at all to treat it as other than a huge and handy dumping ground. In some places the garbage was heaped to the third story of the exterior buildings. Give us another thousand years and we'll pile the garbage a hundred meters deep from pole to pole. There was very little movement. King City, on the surface, looked bombed out, abandoned. The printer finished its job and I handed the copy to a passing messenger. Walter would call me about it when it suited him. I thought of several things I could do in the meantime, failed to find any enthusiasm for any of them. So I just sat there and stared out over the surface, and presently I was called into the master's presence. # Walter Editor is what is known as a natural. Not that he's a fanatic about it. He doesn't subscribe to one of those cults that refuse all medical treatment developed since 1860, or 1945, or 2020. He's not impressed with faith healing. He's not a member of Lifespan, those folks who believe it's a sin to live beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, or the Centenarians, who set the number at one hundred. He's just like most of the rest of us, prepared to live forever if medical science can maintain a quality life for him. He'll accept any treatment that will keep him healthy despite a monstrously dissolute life style. He just doesn't care how he looks. All the fads in body styling and facial arrangement pass him by. In the twenty years I have known him he has never changed so much as his hair style. He had been born male--or so he once told me--one hundred and twenty-six years ago, and had never Changed. His somatic development had been frozen in his mid-forties, a time he often described to all who would listen as "the prime of life." As a result, he was paunchy and balding. This suited Walter fine. He felt the editor of a major planetary newspaper ought to be paunchy and balding. An earlier age would have called Walter Editor a voluptuary. He was a sensualist, a glutton, monstrously self-indulgent. He went through stomachs in two or three years, used up a pair of lungs every decade or so, and needed a new heart more frequently than most people change gaskets on a pressure suit. Every time he exceeded what he called his "fighting weight" by fifty kilos, he'd have seventy kilos removed. Other than that, with Walter what you saw was what he was. I found him in his usual position, leaning back in his huge chair, big feet propped up on the antique mahogany desk whose surface displayed not one item made after 1880. His face was hidden behind my story. Puffs of lavender smoke rose from behind the pages. "Sit down, Hildy, sit down," he muttered, turning a page. I sat, and looked out his windows, which had exactly the same view I'd seen from my windows but five meters higher and three hundred degrees wider. I knew there would be three of four minutes while he kept me waiting. It was one of his managerial techniques. He'd read in a book somewhere that an effective boss should keep underlings waiting whenever possible. He spoiled the effect by constantly glancing up at the clock on the wall. The clock had been made in 1860 and had once graced the wall of a railway station somewhere in Iowa. The office could be described as Dickensian. The furnishings were worth more than I was likely to make in my lifetime. Very few genuine antiquities had ever been brought to Luna. Most of those were in museums. Walter owned much of the rest. "Junk," he said. "Worthless." He scowled and tossed the flimsy sheets across the room. Or he tried to. Flimsy sheets resist attaining any great speed unless you wad them up first. These fluttered to the floor at his feet. "Sorry, Walter, but there just wasn't any other-- " "You want to know why I can't use it?" "No sex." "There's no sex in it! I send you out to cover a new sex system, and it turns out there's no sex in it. How can that be?" "Well, there's sex in it, naturally. Just not the right kind. I mean, I could write a story about earthworm sex, or jellyfish sex, but it wouldn't turn anybody on but earthworms and jellyfish." "Exactly. Why is that, Hildy? Why do they want to turn us into jellyfish?" I knew all about this particular hobbyhorse, but there was nothing to do but ride it. "It's like the search for the Holy Grail, or the Philosopher's Stone," I said. "What's the Philosopher's Stone?" The question had not come from Walter, but from behind me. I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I turned, and saw Brenda, cub reporter, who for the past two weeks had been my journalistic assistant--pronounced "copy girl." "Sit down, Brenda," Walter said. "I'll get to you in a minute." I watched her dither around pulling up a chair, folding herself into it like a collapsible ruler with bony joints sticking out in all directions, surely too many joints for one human being. She was very tall and very thin, like so many of the younger generation. I had been told she was seventeen, out on her first vocational education try-out. She was eager as a puppy and not half as graceful. She irritated the hell out of me. I'm not sure why. There's the generational thing. You wonder how things can get worse, you think that these kids have to be the rock bottom, then they have children and you see how wrong you were. At least she could read and write, I'll give her that. But she was so damnably earnest, so horribly eager to please. She made me tired just looking at her. She was a tabula rasa waiting for someone to draw animated cartoons on. Her ignorance of everything outside her particular upper-middle class social stratum and of everything that had happened more than five years ago was still un-plumbed. She opened the huge purse she always carried around with her and produced a cheroot identical to the one Walter was smoking. She lit up and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. Her smoking dated to the day after she met Walter Editor. Her name dated to the day after she met me. Maybe it should have amused or flattered me that she was so obviously trying to emulate her elders; it just made me angry. Adopting the name of a famous fictional reporter had been my idea. Walter gestured for me to go on. I sighed, and did so. "I really don't know when it started, or why. But the basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much to do with each other, why should we have sex with our reproductive organs? The same organs we use for urination, too, for that matter." "'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" Walter said. "That's my philosophy. The old-fashioned system worked for millions of years. Why tamper with it?' "Actually, Walter, we've already tampered with it quite a bit." "Not everybody." "True. But well over eighty percent of females prefer clitoral relocation. The natural arrangement didn't provide enough stimulation during the regular sex act. And just about that many men have had a testicle tuck. They were too damn vulnerable hanging out there where nature put them." "I haven't had one," he said. I made note of that, in case I ever got into a fight with him. "Then there's the question of stamina in males," I went on. "Back on Earth, it was the rare male over thirty who could consistently get an erection more than three or four times a day. And it usually didn't last very long. And men didn't have multiple orgasms. They just weren't as sexually capable as women." "That's horrible," Brenda said. I looked at her; she was genuinely shocked. "That's an improvement, I'll have to admit," Walter said. "And there's the entire phenomenon of menstruation," I added. "What's menstruation?" We both looked at her. She wasn't joking. Walter and I looked at each other and I could read his thoughts. "Anyway," I said, "you just pointed out the challenge. Lots of people get altered in one way or another. Some, like you, stay almost natural. Some of the alterations aren't compatible with others. Not all of them involve penetration of one person by another, for instance. What these newsex people are saying is, if we're going to tamper, why not come up with a system that is so much better than the others that everyone will want to be that way? Why should the sensations we associate with 'sexual pleasure' be always and forever the result of friction between mucous membranes? It's the same sort of urge people had about languages back on Earth, back when there were hundreds of languages, or about weights and measures. The metric system caught on, but Esperanto didn't. Today we have a few dozen languages still in use, and more types of sexual orientation than that." I settled back in my chair, feeling foolish. But I'd done my part. Now Walter could get on with whatever he had in mind. I glanced at Brenda, and she was staring at me with the wideeyed look of an acolyte to a guru. Walter took another drag on his cheroot, exhaled, and leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head. "You know what today is?" he asked. "Thursday," Brenda supplied. Walter glanced at her, but didn't bother to reply. He took another drag. "It's the one hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of the Planet Earth." "Remind me to light a candle and say a novena." "You think it's funny." "Nothing funny about it," I said. "I just wonder what it has to do with me." Walter nodded, and put his feet down on the floor. "How many stories have you seen on the Invasion in the last week? The week leading up to this anniversary?" I was willing to play along. "Let's see. Counting the stuff in the Straight Shit, the items in the Lunarian and the K.C. News, that incisive series in Lunatime, and of course our own voluminous coverage . . . none. Not a single story." "That's right. I think it's time somebody did something about that." "While we're at it, let's do a big spread on the Battle of Agincourt, and the first manned landing on Mars." "You do think it's funny." "I'm merely applying a lesson somebody taught me when I started here. If it happened yesterday, it ain't news. And the News Nipple reports the news." "This isn't strictly for the Nipple," Walter admitted. "Uh-oh." He ignored my expression, which I hoped was sufficiently sour, and plowed ahead. "We'll use cuts from your stories in the Nipple. Most of 'em, anyway. You'll have Brenda to do most of the leg work." "What are you talking about?" Brenda asked Walter. When that didn't work, she turned to me. "What's he talking about?" "I'm talking about the supplement." "He's talking about the old reporters' graveyard." "Just one story a week. Will you let me explain?" I settled back in my chair and tried to turn off my brain. Oh, I'd fight it hard enough, but I knew I didn't have much choice when Walter got that look in his eye. The News Nipple Corporation publishes three pads. The first is the Nipple itself, updated hourly, full of what Walter Editor liked to think of as "lively" stories: the celebrity scandal, the pseudo-scientific breakthrough, psychic predictions, lovingly bloody coverage of disasters. We covered the rougher and more proletarian sports, and a certain amount of politics, if the proposition involved could be expressed in a short sentence. The Nipple had so many pictures you hardly needed to read the words. Like the other padloids, it would not have bothered with any copy but for the government literacy grants that often provided the financial margin between success and failure. A daily quota of words was needed to qualify for the grants. That exact number of words appeared in each of our issues, including "a," "an," "and," and "the." The Daily Cream was the intellectual appendix to the swollen intestine of the Nipple. It came free to every subscriber of the pad--those government grants again--and was read by about one in ten, according to our more optimistic surveys. It published thousands of times more words per hour, and included most of our political coverage. Somewhere between those two was the electronic equivalent of the Sunday supplement, published weekly, called Sundae. "Here's what I want," Walter went on. "You'll go out and cover your regular beats. But I want you to be thinking Sundae while you do that. Whatever you're covering, think about how it would have been different two hundred years ago, back on Earth. It can be anything at all. Like today, sex. There's a topic for you. Write about what sex was like back on Earth, and contrast it to what it's like now. You could even throw in stuff about what people think it's gonna be like in another twenty years, or a century." "Walter, I don't deserve this." "Hildy, you're the only man for it. I want one article per week for the entire year leading up to the bicentennial. I'm giving you a free hand as to what they're about. You can editorialize. You can personalize, make it like a column. You've always wanted a column; here's your chance at a byline. You want expensive consultants, advisors, research? You name it, you got it. You need to travel? I'm good for the money. I want only the best for this series." I didn't know what to say to that. It was a good offer. Nothing in life is ever exactly what you asked for, but I had wanted a column, and this seemed like a reasonable shot at it. "Hildy, during the twentieth century there was a time like no other time humans have seen before or since. My grandfather's great-grandfather was born in the year the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. By the time he died, there was a permanent base on Luna. My grandfather was ten when the old man died, and he's told me many times how he used to talk about the old days. It was amazing just how much change that old man had seen in his lifetime. "In that century they started talking about a 'generation gap.' So much happened, so many things changed so fast, how was a seventy-year-old supposed to talk to a fifteen-year-old in terms they both could understand? "Well, things don't change quite that fast anymore. I wonder if they ever will again? But we've got something in common with those people. We've got kids like Brenda here who hardly remember anything beyond last year, and they're living side by side with people who were born and grew up on the Earth. People who remember what a one-gee gravity field was like, what it was to walk around outside and breathe free, un-metered air. Who were raised when people were born, grew up, and died in the same sex. People who fought in wars. Our oldest citizens are almost three hundred now. Surely there's fifty-two stories in that. "This is a story that's been waiting two hundred years to be told. We've had our heads in the sand. We've been beaten, humiliated, suffered a racial set-back that I'm afraid . . . " It was as if he suddenly had heard what he was saying. He sputtered to a stop, not looking me in the eye. I was not used to speeches from Walter. It made me uneasy. The assignment made me uneasy. I don't think about the Invasion much--which was precisely his point, of course--and I think that's just as well. But I could see his passion, and knew I'd better not fight it. I was used to rage, to being chewed out for this or that. Being appealed to was something brand new. I felt it was time to lighten the atmosphere a little. "So how big a raise are we talking about here?" I asked. He settled back in his chair and smiled, back on familiar ground. "You know I never discuss that. It'll be in your next paycheck. If you don't like it, gripe to me then." "And I have to use the kid on all this stuff?" "Hey! I'm right here," Brenda protested. "The kid is vital to the whole thing. She's your sounding board. If a fact from the old days sounds weird to her, you know you're onto something. She's contemporary as your last breath, she's eager to learn and fairly bright, and she knows nothing. You'll be the middle man. You're about the right age for it, and history's your hobby. You know more about old Earth than any man your age I've ever met." "If I'm in the middle . . . " "You might want to interview my grandfather," Walter suggested. "But there'll be a third member of your team. Somebody Earth-born. I haven't decided yet who that'll be. "Now get out of here, both of you." I could see Brenda had a thousand questions she still wanted to ask. I warned her off with my eyes, and followed her to the door. "And Hildy," Walter said. I looked back. "If you put words like abnegation and infibulation in these stories, I'll personally caponize you." =*= =*= =*= =*= 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 oldstyle scale they used there. During the day it had been well over a hundred. I positioned the plank on two sawhorses near what would be the front porch when I was finished. I squatted and looked down its length. This was a one-by-ten--inches, not centimeters--which meant it actually measured about nine by seven eighths, for reasons no one had ever explained to me. Thinking in inches was difficult enough, without dealing in those odd ratios called fractions. What was wrong with decimals, and what was wrong with a one-by-ten actually being one inch by ten inches? Why twelve inches in a foot? Maybe there was a story in it for the bicentennial series. The plank had been advertised as ten feet long, and that measurement was accurate. It was also supposed to be straight, but if it was they had used a noodle for a straightedge. Texas was the second of what was to be three disneylands devoted to the eighteenth century. Out here west of the Pecos we reckoned it to be 1845, the last year of the Texas Republic, though you could use technology as recent as 1899 without running afoul of the anachronism regulations. Pennsylvania had been the first of the triad, and my plank, complete with two big bulges in the width and a depressing sag when held by one end, had been milled there by "Amish" sawyers using the old methods. A little oval stamp in a corner guaranteed this: "Approved, Lunar Antiquities Reproduction Board." Either the methods of the 1800's couldn't reliably produce straight and true lumber, or those damn Dutchmen were still learning their craft. So I did what the carpenters of the Texas Republic had done. I got out my plane (also certified by the L.A.R.B.), removed the primitive blade, sharpened it against a home-made whetstone, re-attached the blade, and began shaving away the irregularities. I'm not complaining. I was lucky to get the lumber. Most of the cabin was made of rough-hewn logs notched together at the ends, chinked with adobe. The board had turned gray in the heat and sun, but after a few strokes I was down to the yellow pine interior. The wood curled up around the blade and the chips dropped around my bare feet. It smelled fresh and new and I found myself smiling as the sweat dripped off my nose. It would be good to be a carpenter, I thought. Maybe I'd quit the newspaper business. Then the blade broke and jammed into the wood. My palm slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile. I shouted a few words rarely heard in 1845, and some uncommon even in the 23rd century. I hopped around on one foot. Another lost art, hopping. "It could have been worse," a voice said in my ear. It was either incipient schizophrenia, or the Central Computer. I bet on the CC. "How? By hitting both feet?" "Gravity. Consider the momentum such a massive object could have attained, had this really been West Texas, which lies at the bottom of a spacetime depression twenty-five thousand miles per hour deep." Definitely the CC. I examined my hand. Blood was oozing from it, running down my forearm and dripping from the elbow. But there was no arterial pumping. The foot, though it still hurt like fire, was not damaged. "You see now why laborers in 1845 wore work boots." "Is that why you called, CC? To give me a lecture about safety in the work place?" "No. I was going to announce a visitor. The colorful language lesson was an unexpected bonus of my tuning in on--" "Shut up, will you?" The Central Computer did so. The end of a splinter protruded from my palm, so I pulled on it. I got some, but a lot was still buried in there. Others had broken off below skin level. All in all, a wonderful day's work. A visitor? I looked around and saw no one, though a whole tribe of Apaches could have been hiding in the clumps of mesquite. I had not expected to see any sign of the CC. It uses the circuitry in my own head to produce its voice. And it wasn't supposed to manifest itself in Texas. As is often the case, there was more to the CC than it was telling. "CC, on-line, please." "I hear and obey." "Who's the visitor?" "Tall, young, ignorant of tampons, with a certain puppy-like charm--" "Oh, Jesus." "I know I'm not supposed to intrude on these antique environments, but she was quite insistent on learning your location, and I thought it better for you to have some forewarning than to--" "Okay. Now shut up." I sat in the rickety chair which had been my first carpentry project. Being careful of the injured hand, I pulled on the work boots I should have been wearing all along. The reason I hadn't was simple: I hated them. There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly smooth floors and carpets and a majority of bare-foot people, hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else's toes. Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune. I stood and was about to head into town when the CC spoke again. "If you leave those tools out and it rains, they will combine with the oxygen in the air in a slow combustion reaction." "Rust is too poor a word for you, right? It rains out here . . . what? Once every hundred days?" But my heart wasn't in it. The CC was right. If button-up torture devices were expensive, period tools were worth a king's ransom. My plane, saw, hammer and chisel had cost a year's salary. The good news was I could re-sell them for more than I paid . . . if they weren't rusted. I wrapped them in an oiled cloth and stowed them carefully in my toolbox, then headed down the trail toward town. # I was in sight of New Austin before I spied Brenda, looking like an albino flamingo. She was standing on one leg while the other was turned around so the foot was at waist level, sole upward. To do it she had twisted at hip and knee in ways I hadn't thought humanly possible. She was nude, her skin a uniform creamy white. She had no pubic hair. "Hi, there, seven foot two, eyes of blue." She glanced at me, then pointed at her foot, indignantly. "They don't keep these paths very tidy. Look what it did to my foot. There was a stone, with a sharp point on it." "They specialize in sharp points around here," I said. "It's a natural environment. You've probably never seen one before." "My class went to Amazon three years ago." "Sure, on the moving walkway. While I'm at it, I'd better tell you the plants have sharp points, too. That big thing there is a prickly pear. Don't walk through it. That thing behind you is a cactus, too. Don't step on it. This bush has thorns. Over there is cenizo. It blooms after a rain; real pretty." She looked around, possibly realizing for the first time that there was more than one kind of plant, and that they all had names. "You know what they're all called?" "Not all. I know the big ones. Those spiky ones are yucca. The tall ones, like whips, those are ocotillo. Most of those short bushes are creosote. That tree is mesquite." "Not much of a tree." "It's not much of an environment. Things here have to struggle to stay alive. Not like Amazon, where the plants fight each other. Here they work too hard conserving water." She looked around again, wincing as her injured foot touched the ground. "No animals?" "They're all around you. Insects, reptiles, mostly. Some antelope. Buffalo further east. I could show you a cougar lair." I doubted she had any idea what a cougar was, or antelope and buffalo, for that matter. This was a city girl through and through. About like me before I moved to Texas, three years ago. I relented and went down on one knee. "Let me see that foot." There was a ragged gash on the heel, painful but not serious. "Hey, your hand is hurt," she said. "What happened?" "Just a stupid accident." I noticed as I said it that she not only lacked pubic hair, she had no genitals. That used to be popular sixty or seventy years ago, for children, as part of a theory of the time concerning something called "delayed adolescence." I hadn't seen it in at least twenty years, though I'd heard there were religious sects that still practiced it. I wondered if her family belonged to one, but it was much too personal to ask about. "I don't like this place," she said "It's dangerous." She made it sound like an obscenity. The whole idea offended her, as well it should, coming as she did from the most benign environment ever created by humans. "It's not so bad. Can you walk on that?" "Oh, sure." She put her foot down and walked along beside me, on her toes. As if she weren't tall enough already. "What was that remark about seven feet? I've got two feet, just like everyone else." "Actually, you're closer to seven-four, I'd guess." I had to give her a brief explanation of the English system of weights and measures as used in the West Texas disneyland. I'm not sure she understood it, but I didn't hold it against her, because I didn't, either. We had arrived in the middle of New Austin. This was no great feat of walking; the middle is about a hundred yards from the edge. New Austin consists of two streets: Old Spanish Trail and Congress Street. The intersection is defined by four buildings: The Travis Hotel, the Alamo Saloon, a general store and a livery stable. The hotel and saloon each have a second story. At the far end of Congress is a white clapboard Baptist church. That, and a few dozen other ramshackle buildings strung out between the church and Four Corners, is New Austin. "They took all my clothes," she said. "Naturally." "They were perfectly good clothes." "I'm sure they were. But only contemporary things are allowed in here." "What for?" "Think of it as a living museum." I'd been headed for the doctor's office. Considering the time of day, I thought better of it and mounted the steps to the saloon. We entered through the swinging doors. It was dark inside, and a little cooler. Behind me, Brenda had to duck to get through the doorway. A player piano tinkled in the background, just like an old western movie. I spotted the doctor sitting at the far end of the bar. "Say, young lady," the bartender shouted. "You can't come in here dressed like that." I looked around, saw her looking down at herself in complete confusion. "What's the matter with you people?" she shouted. "The lady outside made me leave all my clothes with her." "Amanda," the bartender said, "you have anything she could wear?" He turned to Brenda again. "I don't care what you wear out in the bush. You come into my establishment, you'll be decently dressed. What they told you outside is no concern of mine." One of the bar girls approached Brenda, holding a pink robe. I turned away. Let them sort it out. Ever since moving to Texas, I'd played their games of authenticity. I didn't have an accent, but I'd picked up a smattering of words. Now I groped for one, a particularly colorful one, and came up with it. "I hear tell you're the sawbones around these parts," I said. The doctor chuckled and extended his hand. "Ned Pepper," he said, "at your service, sir." When I didn't shake his hand he frowned, and noticed the dirty bandage wrapped around it. "Looks like you threw a shoe, son. Let me take a look at that." He carefully unwrapped the bandage, and winced when he saw the splinters. I could smell the sourness of his breath, and his clothes. Doc was one of the permanent residents, like the bartender and the rest of the hotel staff. He was an alcoholic who had found a perfect niche for himself. In Texas he had status and could spend most of the day swilling whiskey at the Alamo. The drunken physician was a cliche' from a thousand horse operas of the twentieth century, but so what? All we have in reconstructing these past environments is books and movies. The movies are much more helpful, one picture being equal to a kilo-word. "Can you do anything with it?" I asked. He looked up in surprise, and swallowed queasily. "I guess I could dig 'em out. Couple quarts of rye--maybe one for you, too--though I freely admit the idea makes me want to puke." He squinted at my hand again, and shook his head. "You really want me to do it?" "I don't see why not. You're a doctor, aren't you?" "Sure, by 1845 standards. The Board trained me. Took about a week. I got a bag full of steel tools and a cabinet full of patent elixirs. What I don't have is an anaesthetic. I suppose those splinters hurt going in." "They still hurt." "It's nothing to how it'd hurt if I took the case. Let me . . . Hildy? Is that your name? That's right, I remember now. Newspaperman. Last time I talked to you you seemed to know a few things about Texas. More than most weekenders." "I'm not a weekender," I protested. "I've been building a cabin." "No offense meant, son, but it started out as an investment, didn't it?" I admitted it. The most valuable real estate in Luna is in the less-developed disneylands. I'd quadrupled my money so far and there were no signs the boom was slowing. "It's funny how much people will pay for hardship," he said. "They warn you up front but they don't spend a lot of time talking about medical care. People come here to live, and they tell themselves they'll live authentic. Then they get a taste of my medicine and run to the real world. Pain ain't funny, Hildy. Mostly I deliver babies, and any reasonably competent woman could do that herself." "Then what are you good for?" I regretted it as soon as I said it, but he didn't seem to take offense. "I'm mostly window dressing," he admitted. "I don't mind it. There's worse ways of earning your daily oxygen." Brenda had drifted over to catch the last of our conversation. She was wrapped in a ridiculous pink robe, still favoring one foot. "You fixed up yet?" she asked me. "I think I'll wait," I said. "Another lame mare?" the doctor asked. "Toss that hoof up here, little lady, and let me take a look at it." When he had examined the cut he grinned and rubbed his hands together. "Here's an injury within my realm of expertise," he said. "You want me to treat it?" "Sure, why not?" The doctor opened his black bag and Brenda watched him innocently. He removed several bottles, cotton swabs, bandages, laid it all out carefully on the bar. "A little tincture of iodine to cleanse the wound," he muttered, and touched a purplish wad of cotton to Brenda's foot. She howled, and jumped four feet straight up, using only the un-injured foot. If I hadn't grabbed her ankle she would have hit the ceiling. "What the hell is he doing?" she yelled at me. "Hush, now," I soothed her. "But it hurts." I gave her my best determined-reporter look, grabbing her hand to intensify the effect. "There's a story in here, Brenda. Medicine then and now. Think how pleased Walter will be." "Well, why doesn't he work on you, too?" she pouted. "It would have involved amputation," I said. And it would have, too; I'd have cut off his hand if he laid it on me. "I don't know if I want to--" "Just hold still and I'll be through in a minute." She howled, she cried, but she held still enough for him to finish cleaning the wound. She'd make a hell of a reporter one day. The doctor took out a needle and thread. "What's that for?" she asked, suspiciously. "I have to suture the wound now," he said. "If suture means sew up, you can suture yourself, you bastard." He glared at her, but saw the determination in her eyes. He put the needle and thread away and prepared a bandage. "Yes sir, it was hard times, 1845," he said. "You know what caused people the most trouble? Teeth. If a tooth goes bad here, what you do is you go to the barber down the street, or the one over in Lonesome Dove, who's said to be quicker. Barbers used to handle it all; teeth, surgery, and hair cutting. But the thing about teeth, usually you could do something. Yank it right out. Most things that happened to people, you couldn't do anything. A little cut like this, it could get infected and kill you. There was a million ways to die and mostly the doctors just tried to keep you warm." Brenda was listening with such fascination she almost forgot to protest when he put the bandage over the wound. Then she frowned and touched his hand as he was about to knot it around her ankle. "Wait a minute," she said. "You're not finished." "I sure as hell am." "You mean that's it?" "What else do you suggest?" "I still have a hole in me, you idiot. It's not fixed." "It'll heal in about a week. All by itself." It was clear from her look that she thought this was a very dangerous man. She started to say something, changed her mind, and glared at the bartender. "Give me some of that brown stuff," she said, pointing. He filled a shot glass with whiskey and set it in front of her. She sipped it, made a face, and sipped again. "That's the idea, little lady," the doctor said. "Take two of those every morning if symptoms persist." "What do we owe you, doc?" I asked "Oh, I don't think I could rightly charge you . . . " His eyes strayed to the bottles behind the bar. "A drink for the doctor, landlord," I said. I looked around, and smiled at myself. What the hell. "A drink for the house. On me." People started drifting toward the bar. "What'll it be, doc?" the bartender asked. "Grain alcohol?" "Some of that clear stuff," the doctor agreed. # We were a quarter mile out of town before Brenda spoke to me again. "This business about covering up," she ventured. "That's a cultural thing, right? Something they did in this place?" "Not the place so much as the time. Out here in the country no one cares whether you cover up or not. But in town, they try to stick to the old rules. They stretched a point for you, actually. You really should have been wearing a dress that reached your ankles, your wrists, and covered most of your neck, too. Hell, a young lady really shouldn't have been allowed in a saloon at all." "Those other girls weren't wearing all that much." "Different rule. They're 'Fallen flowers.'" She was giving me a blank look again. "Whores." "Oh, sure," she said. "I read an article that said it used to be illegal. How could they make that illegal?" "Brenda, they can make anything illegal. Prostitution has been illegal more often than not. Don't ask me to explain it; I don't understand, either." "So they make a law in here, and then they let you break it?" "Why not? Most of those girls don't sell sex, anyway. They're here for the tourists. Get your picture taken with the B-girls in the Alamo Saloon. The idea of Texas is to duplicate what it was really like in 1845, as near as we can determine. Prostitution was illegal but tolerated in a place like New Austin. Hell, the Sheriff would most likely be one of the regular customers. Or take the bar. They shouldn't have served you, because this culture didn't approve of giving alcoholic drinks to people as young as you. But on the frontier, there was the feeling that if you were big enough to reach up and take the drink off the bar, you were big enough to drink it." I looked at her frowning intently down at the ground, and knew most of this was not getting through to her. "I don't suppose you can ever really understand a culture unless you grew up in it," I said. "These people were sure screwed up." "Probably so." We were climbing the trail that led toward my apartment. Brenda kept her eyes firmly on the ground, her mind obviously elsewhere, no doubt chewing over the half-dozen crazy things I'd told her in the past hour. By not looking around she was missing a sunset spectacular even by the lavish standards of West Texas. The air had turned salmon pink when the sun dipped below the horizon, streaked by wispy curls of gold. Somehow the waning light made the surrounding rocky hills a pale purple. I wondered if that was authentic. A quarter of a million miles from where I stood, the real sun was setting on the real Texas. Were the colors as spectacular there? Here, of course, the "sun" was sitting in its track just below the forced-perspective "hills." A fusion tech was seeing to the shut-down process, after which the sun would be trucked through a tunnel and attached to the eastern end of the track, ready to be lit again in a few hours. Somewhere behind the hills another technician was manipulating colored mirrors and lenses to diffuse the light over the dome of the sky. Call him an artist; I won't argue with you. They've been charging admission to see the sunsets in Pennsylvania and Amazon for several years now. There's talk of doing that here, too. It seemed unlikely to me that nature, acting at random, could produce the incredible complexity and subtlety of a disneyland sunset. # It was almost dark by the time we reached the Rio Grande. The entrance to my condo was on the south, "Mexican" side of the river. West Texas is compressed, to display as wide a range of terrain and biome as possible. The variety of geographical features that, on Earth, spread over five hundred miles and included parts of New Mexico and Old Mexico here had been made to fit within a sub-lunar bubble forty miles in diameter. One edge duplicated the rolling hills and grassland around the real Austin, while the far edge had the barren rocky plateaus to be found around El Paso. The part of the Rio Grande we had reached mimicked the land east of the Big Bend in the real river, an area of steep gorges where the water ran deep and swift. Or at least it did in the brief rainy season. Now, in the middle of summer, it was no trick to wade across. Brenda followed me down the forty-foot cliff on the Texas side, then watched me splash through the river. She had said nothing for the last few miles, and she said nothing now, though it was clear she thought someone should have stopped this massive water leak, or at least provided a bridge, boat, or helicopter. But she sloshed her way over to me and stood waiting as I located the length of rope that would take us to the top. "Aren't you curious about why I'm here?" she asked. "No. I know why you're here." I tugged on the rope. It was dark enough now that I couldn't see the ledge, fifty feet up, where I had secured it. "Wait till I call down to you," I told her. I set one booted foot on the cliff face. "Walter's been pretty angry," she said. "The deadline is just--" "I know when the deadline is." I started up the rope, hand over hand, feet on the dark rocks. "What are we going to write about?" she called up at me. "I told you. Medicine." I had knocked out the introductory article on the Invasion Bicentennial the night after Brenda and I got the assignment. I thought it had been some of my best work, and Walter had agreed. He'd given us a big spread, the cover, personality profiles of both of us that were--in my case, at least--irresistibly flattering. Brenda and I had then sat down and generated a list of twenty topics just off the tops of our heads. We didn't anticipate any trouble finding more when the time came. But since that first day, every time I tried to write one of Walter's damnable articles . . . nothing happened. Result: the cabin was coming along nicely, ahead of schedule. Another few weeks like the past one and I'd have it finished. And be out of a job. I crested the top of the cliff and looked down. I could just see the white blob that was Brenda. I called down to her and she swarmed up like a monkey. "Nicely done," I said, as I coiled the rope. "Did you ever think what that would have been like if you weighed six times what you weigh now?" "Oddly enough, I have," she said. "I keep trying to tell you, I'm not completely ignorant." "Sorry." "I'm willing to learn. I've been reading a lot. But there's just so much, and so much of it is so foreign . . . " She ran a hand through her hair. "Anyway, I know how hard it must have been to live on the Earth. My arms wouldn't be strong enough to support my weight down there." She looked down at herself, and I thought I could see a smile. "Hell, I'm so lunified I wonder if my legs could support my weight." "Probably not, at first." "I got five friends together and we took turns trying to walk with all the others on our shoulders. I managed three steps before I collapsed." "You're really getting into this, aren't you?" I was leading the way down the narrow ledge to the cave entrance. "Of course I am. I take this very seriously. But I'm beginning to wonder if you do." I didn't have an answer to that. We had reached the cave, and I started to lead her in when she pulled back violently on my hand. "What is that?" She didn't need to elaborate; I came through the cave twice a day, and I still wasn't used to the smell. Not that it seemed as bad now as it had at first. It was a combination of rotting meat, feces, ammonia, and something else much more disturbing that I had taken to calling "predator smell." "Be quiet," I whispered. "This is a cougar den. She's not really dangerous, but she had a litter of cubs last week and she's gotten touchy since then. Don't let go of my hand; there's no light till we get to the door." I didn't give her a chance to argue. I just pulled on her hand, and we were inside. The smell was even stronger in the cave. The mother cougar was fairly fastidious, for an animal. She cleaned up her cubs' messes, and she made her own outside the cave. But she wasn't so careful about disposing of the remains of her prey before they started to get ripe. I think she had a different definition of "ripe." Her own fur had a rank mustiness that was probably sweet perfume to a male cougar, but was enough to stun the unprepared human. I couldn't see her, but I sensed her in a way beyond sight or hearing. I knew she wouldn't attack. Like all the large predators in disneylands, she had been conditioned to leave humans alone. But the conditioning set up a certain amount of mental conflict. She didn't like us, and wasn't shy about letting us know. When I was halfway through the cave, she let fly with a sound I can only describe as hellish. It started as a low growl, and quickly rose to a snarling screech. Every hair on my body stood at attention. It's sort of a bracing feeling, once you get used to it; your skin feels thick and tough as leather. My scrotum grew very small and hard as it tried its best to get certain treasures out of harm's way. As for Brenda . . . she tried to run straight up the backs of my legs and over the top of my head. Without some fancy footwork on my part we both would have gone sprawling. But I'd been ready for that reaction, and hurried along until the inner door got out of our way with a blast of light from the far side. Brenda didn't stop running for another twenty meters. Then she stopped, a sheepish grin on her face, breathing shallowly. We were in the long, utilitarian hallway that led to the back door of my condo. "I don't know what got into me," she said. "Don't worry," I said. "Apparently that's one of the sounds that is part of the human brain's hard wiring. It's a reflex, like when you stick your finger in a flame, you don't think about it, you instantly draw it back." "And you hear that sound, your bowels turn to oatmeal." "Close enough." "I'd like to go back and see the thing that made that sound." "It's worth seeing," I agreed. "But you'll have to wait for daylight. The cubs are cute. It's hard to believe they'll turn into monsters like their mother." # I hesitated at the door. In my day, and up until fairly recently, you just didn't let someone enter your home lightly. Luna is a crowded society. There are people wherever you turn, tripping over your feet, elbowing you, millions of intrusive, sweaty bodies. You have to have a small place of privacy. After you'd known someone five or ten years you might, if you really liked the person, invite her over for drinks or sex in your own bed. But most socializing took place on neutral ground. The younger generation wasn't like that. They thought nothing of dropping by just to say hello. I could make a big thing of it, driving yet another wedge between the two of us, or I could let it go. What the hell. We'd have to learn to work together sooner or later. I opened the door with my palm print and stepped aside to let her enter. She hurried to the washroom, saying something about having to take a mick. I assumed that meant urinate, though I'd never heard the term. I wondered briefly how she'd accomplish that, given her lack of obvious outlet. I could have found out--she left the door open. The young ones were no longer seeking privacy even for that. I looked around at the apartment. What would Brenda see here? What would a pre-Invasion man see? What they wouldn't see was dirt and clutter. A dozen cleaning robots worked tirelessly whenever I was away. No speck of dust was too small for their eternal vigilance, and no item could ever be out of its assigned place longer than it took me to walk to the tube station. Could someone read anything about my character from looking at this room? There were no books or paintings to give a clue. I had all the libraries of the world a few keystrokes away, but no books of my own. Any of the walls could project artwork or films or environments, as desired, but they seldom did. There was something interesting. Unlimited computer capacity had brought manufacturing full circle. Primitive cultures produced articles by hand, and no two were identical. The industrial revolution had standardized production, poured out endless streams of items for the "consumer culture." Finally, it became possible to have each and every manufactured item individually ordered and designed. All my furniture was unique. Nowhere in Luna would you find another sofa like that . . . like that hideous monstrosity over there. And what a blessing that was, I mused. Two of them might have mated. Damn, but it was ugly. I had selected almost nothing in this room. The possibilities of taste had become so endless I had simply thrown up my hands and taken what came with the apartment. Maybe that was what I'd been reluctant to let Brenda see. I supposed you could read as much into what a man had not done to his environment as what he had done. While I was still pondering that--and not feeling too happy about it--Brenda came out of the washroom. She had a bloody piece of gauze in her hand, which she tossed on the floor. A low-slung robot darted out from under the couch and ate it, then scuttled away. Her skin looked greased, and the pinkish color was fading as I watched. She had visited the doc. "I had radiation burns," she said. "I ought to take the disneyland management to court, get them to pay the medical bill." She lifted her foot and examined the bottom. There was a pink area of new skin where the cut had been. In a few more minutes it would be gone. There would be no scar. She looked up, hastily. "I'll pay, of course. Just send me the bill." "Forget it," I said. "I just got your lead. How long were you in Texas?" "Three hours? Four at the most." "I was there for five hours, today. Except for the gravity, it's a pretty good simulation of the natural Earthly environment. And what happened to us?" I ticked the points off on my fingers. "You got sunburned. Consequences, in 1845: you would have been in for a very painful night. No sleep. Pain for several days. Then the outer layer of your skin would slough off. Probably some more dermatological effects. I think it might even have caused skin cancer. That would have been fatal. Research that one, see if I'm right. "You injured the sole of your foot. Consequence, not too bad, but you would have limped for a few days or a week. And always the danger of infection to an area of the body difficult to keep clean. "I got a very nasty injury to my hand. Bad enough to require minor surgery, with the possibility of deep infection, loss of the limb, perhaps death. There's a word for it, when one of your limbs starts to mortify. Look it up. "So," I summed up. "Three injuries. Two possibly fatal, over time. All in five hours. Consequences today: an almost negligible bill from the automatic doc." She waited for me to go on. I was prepared to let her wait a lot longer, but she finally gave in. "That's it? That's my story?" "The lead, goddamit. Personalize it. You went for a walk in the park, and this is what happened. It shows how perilous life was back then. It shows how lightly we've come to regard injury to our bodies, how completely we expect total, instant, painless repairs to them. Remember what you said? 'It's not fixed!' You'd never had anything happen to you that couldn't be fixed, right now, with no pain." She looked thoughtful, then smiled. "That could work, I guess." "Damn right it'll work. You take it from there, work in more detail. Don't get into optional medical things; we'll keep that for later. Make this one a pure horror story. Show how fragile life has always been. Show how it's only in the last century or so that we've been able to stop worrying about our health." "We can do that," she said. "We, hell. I told you, this is your story. Now get out of here and get to it. Deadline's in twenty-four hours." I expected more argument, but I'd ignited her youthful enthusiasm. I hustled her out the door, then leaned against it and heaved a sigh of relief. I'd been afraid she'd call me on it. # Not long after she left I went to the doc and had my own hand healed. Then I ran a big tubful of water and eased myself into it. The water was so hot it turned my skin pink. That's the way I like it. After a while I got out, rummaged in a cabinet, and found an old home surgery kit. There was a sharp scalpel in it. I ran some more hot water, got in again, lay back and relaxed completely. When I was totally at peace with myself, I slashed both my wrists right down to the bone. =*= =*= =*= =*= 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 nonviolent. The modern sports fan would be shocked at the violence of sports as it existed on Earth. Take for example one of the least violent sports, one we still practice today, the simple foot race. Runners rarely completed a career without numerous injuries to knees, ankles, muscles, or spine. Sometimes these injuries could be repaired, and sometimes they couldn't. Every time a runner competed, he faced the possibility of injury that would plague him for the rest of his life. In the days of the Romans, athletes fought each other with swords and other deadly weapons--not always voluntarily. Crippling injury or death was certain, in every match. Even in later, more "enlightened" days, many sports were little more than organized mayhem. Teams of athletes crashed into each other with amazing disregard for the imperfect skills of contemporary healers. People strapped themselves into ground vehicles or flying machines and raced at speeds that would turn them into jelly in the event of a sudden stop. Crash helmets, fist pads, shoulder, groin, knee, rib, and nose protectors tried to temper the carnage but by their mere presence were testimony to the violent potential in all these games. Did I hear someone protesting out there? Did someone say our modern sports are much more violent than those of the past? What a ridiculous idea. Modern athletes typically compete in the nude. No protection is needed or wanted. In most sports, bodily damage is expected, sometimes even desired, as in slash boxing. A modern athlete just after a competition would surely be a shocking sight to a citizen of any Earth society. But modern sports produce no cripples. It would be nice to think this universal non-violence was the result of some great moral revolution. It just ain't so. It is a purely technological revolution. There is no injury today that can't be fixed. The fact is, "violence" is a word that no longer means what it used to. Which is the more violent: a limb being torn off and quickly re-attached with no ill effects, or a crushed spinal disc that causes its owner pain every second of his life and cannot be repaired? I know which injury I'd prefer. That kind of violence is no longer something to fear, because (discuss Olympic games, influence of local gravity in venues) (mention Deathmatches) (Tie to old medicine article?)(ask Brenda) # I hastily scribbled the last few lines, because I saw Brenda returning with the popcorn. "What're you doing?" she asked, resuming her seat. I handed her the page. She scanned it quickly. "Seems a little dry," was her only comment. "You'll hype it up some," I told her. "This is your field." I reached over and took a kernel of popcorn from her, then took a big bite out of it. She had bought the large bag: a dozen fist-sized puffs, white and crunchy, dripping with butter. It tasted great, washed down with the big bottle of beer she handed me. While I was writing there had been an exhibition from some children's slash-boxing school. The children were filing out now, most of them cross-hatched with slashes of red ink from the training knives they used. Medical costs for children were high enough without letting them practice with real knives. The ringmaster appeared and began hyping the main event of the evening, a Deathmatch between the champion Manhattan Mugger and a challenger known as One Mean Bitch. Brenda leaned toward me and spoke out of the side of her mouth. "Put your money on the Bitch," she said. "If she's gonna win, what the hell are we doing here?" "Ask Walter. This was his idea." The purpose of our visit to the fights was to interview the Manhattan Mugger--also known as Andrew MacDonald--with an eye toward hiring him as our Earth-born consultant on the bicentennial series. MacDonald was well over two hundred years old. The trouble was, he had elected to fight to the death. If he lost, his next interview would be with St. Peter. But Walter had assured us there was no way his man was going to lose. "I was talking to a friend out at the concessions," Brenda went on. "There's no question the Mugger is the better fighter. This is his tenth Deathmatch in the last two years. What this guy was saying is, ten is too much for anybody. He said the Mugger was dogging it in the last match. He won't get away with that against the Bitch. He says the Mugger doesn't want to win anymore. He just wants to die." The contestants had entered the ring, were strutting around, showing off, as holo pictures of their past bouts appeared high in the air and the announcer continued to make it sound as if this would be the fight of the century. "Did you bet on her?" "I put down fifty, for a kill in the second." I thought that over, then beckoned to a tout. He handed me a card, which I marked and thumbed. He stuck the card in the totaliser on his belt, then handed me the marker. I pocketed it. "How much did you invest?" "Ten. To win." I didn't tell her it was on the Mugger. The contestants were in their "corners," being oiled down, as the announcer continued his spiel. They were magnificent specimens, competing in the highest body-mass class, matched to within a kilogram. The lights flashed on their glistening browned skins as they shadow-boxed and danced, skittish as race horses, bursting with energy. "This bout is being conducted under the sporting by-laws of King City," the announcer said, "which provide for voluntary Deathmatches for one or both parties. The Manhattan Mugger has elected to risk death tonight. He has been advised and counseled, as required by law, and should he die tonight, it will be deemed a suicide. The Bitch has agreed to deliver the coup de grace, should she find herself in a position to do so, and understands she will not be held responsible in any way." "Don't worry about it!" the Mugger shouted, glaring at his opponent. It got a laugh, and the announcer looked grateful for the interruption in the boring paragraphs the law required him to read. He brought them out to the middle of the ring and read them the rule--which was simply to stop fighting when they heard the bell. Other than that, there were no rules. He had them shake hands, and told them to come out fighting. #