"The first stinking round. I can't believe it."
     Brenda  was  still  complaining,  half  an  hour after the
finish of the match. It had not been a contest  that  would  go
down in history.
     We were waiting in the reception area outside the entrance
to the  locker  rooms. MacDonald's manager had told us we could
go in to see him as soon as the pit crew had  him  patched  up.
Considering  the  small  amount  of  damage  he had suffered, I
didn't expect that to be too much longer.
     I heard a commotion and turned to see the Cyclone emerging
into a small group of dedicated fans, mostly children.  He  got
out a pen and began signing autographs. He was dressed in black
shirt  and  pants, and had a bulky brace around his neck, which
seemed a small enough inconvenience for a man  whose  head  had
been  rolling  around  the  ring  an hour earlier. He'd wear it
until the new muscles had been conditioned  enough  to  support
his  head.  I figured that wouldn't be long; the brain of a man
in his profession couldn't weigh all that much.
     The door opened again and MacDonald's manager beckoned  to
us.
     We  followed  him  down a dim corridor lined with numbered
doors. One of them was open and I  could  hear  moaning  coming
from  it. I glanced in as we passed. There was a bloody mess on
a high table, with half a dozen pit crew clustered around.
     "You don't mean to tell me . . . "
     "What?" Brenda said, and glanced into the room. "Oh. Yeah,
she fights without nerve deadening."
     "I thought--"
     "Most fighters turn  their  pain  center  way  down,  just
enough  so they know when they've been hit. But a few feel that
trying to avoid real pain makes them quicker on their feet."
     "It sure would make me quicker."
     "Yeah, well, obviously it wasn't enough tonight."
     I was glad I'd had only the one piece of popcorn.
     The Manhattan Mugger was sitting in  a  diagnostic  chair,
wearing  a robe and smoking a cheroot. His left leg was propped
up and being worked on by one of his trainers. He  smiled  when
he saw us, and held out his hand.
     "Andy MacDonald," he said. "Pardon me for not getting up."
     We  both  shook  his  hand, and he waved us into seats. He
offered us drinks, which a member of his entourage brought us.
     Then Brenda launched into a breathless recap of the match,
full of glowing praise for his martial skills. You'd never have
known she just lost fifty on him. I sat back and waited,  fully
expecting  we'd  spend  the  next  hour talking about the finer
points of slash boxing. He was smiling faintly as  Brenda  went
on  and on, and I figured I had to say something, if only to be
polite.
     "I'm not a sports fan," I said,  not  wishing  to  be  too
polite,  "but it seemed to me your technique was different from
the others I saw tonight."
     He took a long drag on  his  cheroot,  then  examined  the
glowing  tip  as he slowly exhaled purple smoke. He transferred
his gaze to me, and some of the heat  seemed  to  go  with  it.
There was a deepness to his eyes I hadn't noticed at first. You
see  that sometimes, in the very old. These days, of course, it
is usually the only way you can tell someone is old.  MacDonald
certainly  had  no other signs of age. His body looked to be in
its mid-twenties, but he'd had little choice in  its  features,
given  his profession. Slash boxers inhabit fairly standardized
bodies, in nine different formulas or weight classes, as a  way
of minimizing any advantage gained by sheer body mass. His face
seemed  a bit older, but that could have been just the eyes. It
wasn't old enough for age to have impressed  a  great  deal  of
character   on   it.  Neither  was  it  one  of  those  generic
"attractive" faces about half the population seem to prefer.  I
got  the  feeling  this  was  pretty much the way he might have
looked  in  his  youth,  which-I  remembered,  with  a   little
shock--had been spent on Earth.
     The  Earth-born  are  not  precisely  rare. The CC told me
there were around ten thousand of them still  alive.  But  they
look  like  anyone  else,  usually,  and  tend  not to announce
themselves. There were some who made a big  thing  about  their
age--the perennial talk-show guests, storytellers, professional
nostalgics--but  by  and  large  the Earth-born were a closeted
minority. I had never wondered why before.
     "Walter said you'd talk me into joining  this  project  of
his," MacDonald said, finally, ignoring my own comment. "I told
him he was wrong. Not that I intend to be stubborn about it; if
you  can  give  me a good reason why I should spend a year with
you two, I'd like to hear it."
     "If you know  Walter,"  I  countered,  "you'll  know  he's
possibly  the  least perceptive man in Luna, where other people
are concerned. He thinks I'm enthusiastic about  this  project.
He's wrong. As far as I know, Walter is the only one interested
in this project. It's just a job to me."
     "I'm  interested,"  Brenda piped up. MacDonald shifted his
gaze to her, but didn't feel the need to leave it there long. I
had the feeling he had learned all he needed to know about  her
in that brief look.
     "My style," he said, "is a combination of ancient fighting
techniques   that   never   got   transplanted  to  Luna.  Some
well-meaning but foolish people passed a law a  long  time  ago
banning  the  teaching  of these oriental disciplines. That was
back when the conventional wisdom was we ought to live together
in peace, not ever fight each other again, certainly  not  ever
kill each other. Which is a nice idea, I guess.
     "It  even  worked,  partially. The murder rate is way, way
down from what it was in any human society on Earth."
     He took another long drag on  his  smoke.  His  attendants
finished their work on his leg, packed up, and left us alone. I
began  to wonder if that was all he had to say, when he finally
spoke again.
     "Opinions shift. You live as long as I  have,  you'll  see
that over and over."
     "I'm not as old as you, but I've seen it."
     "How old are you?" he asked.
     "One  hundred.  Three  days ago." I saw Brenda look at me,
open her mouth to say something, then close it again.  Probably
I'd  get  chewed  out  for not telling her so she could throw a
centennial birthday party for me.
     MacDonald looked  at  me  with  even  more  interest  than
before, narrowing those disturbing eyes.
     "Feel any different?"
     "You mean because I'm a hundred years old? Why should I?"
     "Why,  indeed. It's a milestone, certainly, but it doesn't
really mean anything. Right?"
     "Right."
     "Anyway, to get back to the question  .  .  .  there  were
always those who felt that, with natural evolutionary processes
no  longer  working,  we  should  make some attempt to foster a
certain amount  of  aggressiveness.  Without  sanctioning  real
killing,  we  could  at least learn how to fight. So boxing was
re-introduced, and that eventually led to the blood sports  you
see today."
     "This  is  just  the  sort of perspective Walter wants," I
pointed out.
     "Yes. I didn't say I didn't have the perspective you need.
I'm just curious as to why I should use it for you."
     "I've been thinking that one over, too," I said. "Just  as
an  exercise,  you  understand.  And you know, I can't think of
anything that's likely to convince a man in  the  middle  of  a
protracted  suicide  to  put  it  off for a year and join us in
writing a series of useless stories."
     "I used to be a reporter, you know."
     "No, I didn't."
     "Is that what you think I'm doing? Committing suicide?"
     Brenda looked at him earnestly. I could  almost  feel  her
concern.
     "If  you  get killed in the ring, that's what they'll call
it," she said.
     He got up and went to a small bar at the side of the room.
Without asking what we wanted, he poured  three  glasses  of  a
pale  green liqueur and brought them back to us. Brenda sniffed
it, tasted, then took a longer drink.
     "You can't  imagine  the  sense  of  defeatism  after  the
Invasion," he said. It was apparently impossible to keep him on
any  subject, so I relaxed to the inevitable. As a reporter you
learn to let the subject talk.
     "To call it a war is a perversion of the word. We  fought,
I suppose, in the sense that ants fight when the hill is kicked
over.  I  suppose ants can fight valiantly in such a situation,
but it hardly matters to the man who kicked the hill. He barely
notices what he has done. He may not even have had  any  actual
malice  toward  ants;  it  might  have  been  an accident, or a
side-effect of another project, like plowing a field.  We  were
plowed under in a single day.
     "Those  of  us here in Luna were in a state of shock. In a
way, that state of shock lasted many decades. In a way  .  .  .
it's still with us today."
     He took another drag on his cheroot.
     "I'm  one  of  those  who  was  alarmed at the nonviolence
movement. It's great, as an ideal, but I feel it leaves us in a
dead end, and vulnerable."
     "You mean evolution?" Brenda asked.
     "Yes. We shape  ourselves  genetically  now,  but  are  we
really  wise  enough  to know what to select for? For a billion
years the selection was done naturally. I wonder if  it's  wise
to junk a system that worked for so long."
     "Depends on what you mean by 'worked,'" I said.
     "Are you a nihilist?"
     I shrugged.
     "All  right. Worked, in the sense that life forms got more
complex. Biology seemed to be working toward something. We know
it wasn't us-the Invaders proved there are things out  there  a
lot  smarter  than  we  are.  But  the  Invaders were gas giant
beings, they must have evolved on a planet like Jupiter.  We're
hardly  even  related. It's commonly accepted that the Invaders
came to  Earth  to  save  the  dolphins  and  whales  from  our
pollution.  I  don't  know  of  any proof of that, but what the
hell. Suppose it's true. That means the  aquatic  mammals  have
brains  organized  more  like  the  Invaders  than like us. The
Invaders don't see us as truly intelligent, any more than other
engineering species, like bees, or corals, or  birds.  True  or
not,  the Invaders don't really have to concern us anymore. Our
paths don't cross; we have no interests in common.  We're  free
to  pursue  our  own  destiny  . . . but if we don't evolve, we
don't have a destiny."
     He looked from one of us to the other and back again. This
seemed pretty important to him.  Personally,  I'd  never  given
much thought to the matter.
     "There's  something  else," he went on. "We know there are
aliens out there. We know space travel is  possible.  The  next
time we meet aliens they could be even worse than the Invaders.
They might want to exterminate us, rather than just evict us. I
think  we  ought  to keep some fighting skills alive in case we
meet some disagreeable critters we can fight."
     Brenda sat up, wide-eyed.
     "You're a Heinleiner," she said.
     It was MacDonald's turn to shrug.
     "I don't attend services, but I agree with a lot  of  what
they say. But we were talking about martial arts."
     Is that what we were talking about? I'd lost track.
     "Those  arts  were  lost for almost a century. I spent ten
years studying  thousands  of  films  from  the  twentieth  and
twenty-first  centuries,  and  I  pieced  them back together. I
spent another twenty years teaching myself until I felt  I  was
adept.  Then  I became a slash boxer. So far, I'm undefeated. I
expect to remain that way  until  someone  else  duplicates  my
techniques."
     "That  would  be  a  good  subject for an article," Brenda
suggested. "Fighting, then and now. People  used  to  have  all
kinds  of  weapons, right? Projectile weapons, I mean. Ordinary
citizens could own them."
     "There was one country in the twentieth century that  made
their  possession  almost  mandatory. It was a civil right, the
right to own firearms. One of the weirder civil rights in human
history, I always thought. But I'd have owned one, if I'd lived
there. In an armed society, the unarmed man must  be  a  pretty
nervous fellow."
     "It's   not   that   I   don't  find  all  this  perfectly
fascinating," I said, standing and stretching my arms and  legs
to get the circulation going again. "I don't, but that's beside
the  point.  We've  been  here  about half an hour, and already
Brenda has suggested plenty of  topics  you  could  be  helpful
with. Hell, you could write them yourself, if you remember how.
So how about it? Are you interested, or should we start looking
for someone else?"
     He leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at me.
     Before  long  I  began  to  wonder when the theremin music
would begin. A look like that belonged in a horror  holo.  Eyes
like  that  should  be set in a face that begins to sprout hair
and fangs, or twist like putty into some Nameless Evil Thing. I
mentioned before how  deep  his  eyes  seemed.  They  had  been
reflecting pools compared to this.
     I  don't  wish  to  be  superstitious.  I  don't  wish  to
attribute powers to MacDonald simply because he had attained  a
venerable  age.  But, looking at those eyes, one could not help
but think of all the things they had seen, and  wonder  at  the
wisdom  that  might have been attained. I was one hundred years
old, which is nothing to sneer at in the longevity  department,
or  hadn't  been  until recent human history, but I felt like a
child being judged by his grandfather, or maybe by God himself.
     I didn't like it.
     I tried my best to return the gaze--and there was  nothing
hostile  in  it,  no challenge being issued to me. If a staring
match was in progress, I was the only one competing. But before
long I had to turn away. I studied  the  walls,  the  floor,  I
looked  at  Brenda  and  smiled  at  her--which startled her, I
think. Anything to avoid those eyes.
     "No," he said, at last. "I  don't  think  I'll  join  this
project, after all. I'm sorry to have wasted your time."
     "No problem," I said, and got up and started for the door.
     "What  do  you mean, 'after all,'" Brenda asked. I turned,
wondering if I  could  get  away  with  grabbing  her  arm  and
dragging her away.
     "I  mean,  I  was considering it, despite everything. Some
aspects of it were beginning to look like fun."
     "Then what changed your mind?"
     "Come on, Brenda," I  said.  "I'm  sure  he  has  his  own
reasons, and they're none of our business." I took her arm, and
tugged at it.
     "Stop  it,"  she  said,  annoyed. "Stop treating me like a
child." She glared at me until I let her go. I suppose it would
have been unkind to point out that she was a child.
     "I'd really like to know," she told MacDonald.
     He looked at her, not unkindly, then looked away,  seeming
embarrassed.  I  simply  report the fact; I have no idea why he
might have been embarrassed.
     "I only work with survivors,"  he  said,  quietly.  Before
either  of  us  had  a  chance  to reply he was on his feet. He
limped slightly as he went to the door and held it open for us.
     I got up and jammed my hat on my head. I  was  almost  out
the door when I heard Brenda.
     "I  don't  understand,"  she  was  saying. "What makes you
think I'm not a survivor?"
     "I didn't say you weren't," he said.
     I turned on him.
     "Brenda," I said, slowly. "Correct me if I'm wrong. Did  I
just  hear  myself accused of not being a survivor by a man who
risks his life in a game?"
     She didn't  say  anything.  I  think  she  realized  that,
whatever was going on here, it was between him and me. I wished
I knew what it was, and why it had made me so angry.
     "Risks  can  be  calculated," he said. "I'm still alive. I
plan to stay that way."
     Nothing good lasts forever. Brenda piped up again.
     "What is it about Hildy that makes you--"
     "That's  none  of  my  business,"  he  interrupted,  still
looking at me. "I see something in Hildy. If I were to join you
two, I'd have to make it my business."
     "What  you  see,  pal,  is a man who takes care of his own
business, and doesn't let some gal with a knife do it for him."
     Somehow that didn't come out like I'd intended. He  smiled
faintly.  I turned and stomped out the door, not waiting to see
if Brenda followed.
     #
     I lifted my head from the bar. Everything was too  bright,
too  noisy.  I  seemed  to  be on a carousel, but what was that
bottle doing in my hand?
     I kept tightly focused on the  bottle  and  things  slowly
stopped  spinning.  There  was  a  puddle  of whiskey under the
bottle, and under my arm, and the side of my face was wet.  I'd
been lying in the puddle.
     "If  you throw up on my bar," the man said, "I'll beat you
bloody."
     Swinging my gaze toward him was a major  project.  It  was
the  bartender, and I told him I wasn't going to throw up, then
I almost choked and staggered toward  the  swinging  doors  and
made a mess in the middle of Congress Street.
     When  I was done I sat down there in the road. Traffic was
no problem. There were a few horses and wagons tied  up  behind
me, but nothing moved on the dark streets of New Austin. Behind
me  were  the  sounds  of  revelry, piano music, the occasional
gunshot as the tourists sampled life in the old west.
     Somebody was holding a drink before my  face.  I  followed
the  arm  up  to  bare  shoulders,  a  long neck, a pretty face
surrounded by curly black hair. Her lipstick was black  in  the
dim light. She wore a corset, garters, stockings, high heels. I
took  the  drink and made it vanish. I patted the ground beside
me and she sat, folding her arms on her knees.
     "I'll remember your name in a minute," I said.
     "Dora."
     "Adorable Dora. I want to rip off your clothes  and  throw
you into bed and make passionate love to your virginal body."
     "We already did that. Sorry about the virginal part."
     "I want you to have my babies."
     She kissed my forehead.
     "Marry me, and make me the happiest man in the moon."
     "We  did  that,  too,  sweetheart.  It's a shame you don't
remember it." She held her hand out to me  and  I  saw  a  gold
wedding ring with a little diamond chip. I squinted at her face
again. There was some kind of filmy aura around it . . .
     "That's a bridal veil!" I shouted. She was looking dreamy,
smiling up at the stars.
     "We  had  to  sober  the  parson  up,  then go bang on the
jeweler's door and send somebody around to find Silas  to  open
the  general store for my gown, but we got it done. The service
was right there in the Alamo, Cissy was my maid  of  honor  and
old Doc stood up for you. All the girls cried."
     I must have looked dubious, because she laughed and patted
me on the back.
     "The  tourists  loved it," she said. "It's not every night
we get as colorful as that."  She  twisted  the  ring  off  her
finger and handed it to me. "But I'm too much of a lady to hold
you  to vows you made while not in your right mind." She peered
closer at me. "Are you back in your right mind?"
     I was back enough to remember that any marriage  performed
by  the  "parson"  in  "Texas"  was not legally binding in King
City. But to get an idea of how far gone I'd been,  I'd  really
been worried for a moment there.
     "A whore with a heart of gold," I said.
     "We  all have our parts to play. I've never seen the 'town
drunk' done better. Most people omit the vomit."
     "I  strive   for   authenticity.   Did   I   do   anything
disgraceful?"
     "You  mean  aside  from  marrying  me?  I don't mean to be
unkind, but your fourth consummation of our marriage was pretty
disgraceful. I won't spread it around;  the  first  three  were
rather special."
     "What do you mean?"
     "Well, the tongue work was some of the best I've--"
     "No, I mean . . . "
     "I  know  what  you  mean.  I  know there's a word for it.
Inability, immobility . . . a limp cock."
     "Impotence."
     "That's it. My grandmother told me about it, but  I  never
expected to see it."
     "Stick  with  me,  honey,  and  I'll  show  you  even more
wonders."
     "You were pretty drunk."
     "You've finally said something boring."
     She shrugged. "I can't swap repartee with a cynic like you
forever."
     "Is that what I am? A Cynic?":
     She shrugged again, but I thought I saw  some  concern  in
her  expression.  It  was hard to tell, with just moonlight and
swimming eyeballs.
     She helped me to my feet, brushed me  off,  kissed  me.  I
promised  to  call on her when I was in town. I don't think she
believed me. I had her point me toward the edge  of  town,  and
started home.
     #
     Morning  was  smearing up the sky like pale pink lipstick.
I'd been hearing the rippling of the river for some time.
     My efforts at reconstructing the day had brought back some
broad outlines. I recalled taking the tube from  the  Arena  to
Texas,  and I knew I'd spent some time working on the cabin. In
there somewhere I saw myself throwing finished  lumber  into  a
ravine. I remembered seriously thinking of burning the cabin to
the  ground.  The next thing I knew I was sitting at the bar in
the Alamo Saloon, tossing down one drink  after  another.  Then
the  clouds rolled in and the memory transcription ended. I had
a hazy picture of the Parson swaying slightly as he  pronounced
us  man  and  wife.  What  a  curious phrase. I supposed it was
historically accurate.
     I heard a sound, and looked up from the rocky path.
     A pronghorn antelope was standing not ten feet in front of
me. He held his head high, alert and proud, but not  frightened
of  me.  His  chest was snowy white and his eyes were moist and
brown and wise. He was the most  beautiful  thing  I  had  ever
seen.
     On  his  worst day he was ten times better than I had ever
been. I sat down on the path and cried  for  a  while.  When  I
looked up, he was gone.
     I  felt calm for the first time in many years. I found the
cliff face, located the climbing rope, and  hoisted  myself  to
the  top.  The  sun was still below the horizon but there was a
lot of yellow in the sky now. My hands toyed with the rope. How
did it go . . . the rabbit goes in the hole, the dog chases the
rabbit around the tree, two, three, four . . .
     After several tries, I got it right. I slipped  it  around
my  neck and looked down the cliff. Your acceleration is low in
Luna, but your body mass is constant. You need a big drop,  six
times what would do on Earth. I tried to do the calculations in
my head but kept losing track.
     To  be on the safe side, I picked up a large rock and held
it tightly to my chest. Then I jumped. You get plenty  of  time
for  regrets,  but I had none. I remember looking up and seeing
Andrew MacDonald looking down at me.
     Then came the jerk.
        =*= =*= =*= =*=

     $$

        CHAPTER FIVE














     "If you're going to build a barn for brontosaurs," I  told
Brenda,  "You'd  better make the ceiling at least twenty meters
high."
     "And why is that, Mr. Bones?"
     Where she'd learned about minstrel shows I  had  no  idea,
but  she'd  been using the term for a while now, whenever I got
into  lecture  mode--which,  considering  the  state   of   her
ignorance, was most of the time. I wasn't going to let it annoy
me.
     She  was  looking up at the ceiling, which was twenty-five
meters above us. Myself, I wasn't  looking  up  all  that  much
lately.  For  several  days  I'd  had  a persistent and painful
stabbing pain in my neck whenever I turned my head in a certain
position. I kept meaning to visit the medico and get it  fixed,
but it would spontaneously remit for a few hours and I'd forget
to make an appointment. Then it would creep up and stab me when
I least expected it.
     "Brontosaurs  are  not  real bright. When they get alarmed
they raise their heads and rear up on their hind legs to take a
look around. If the ceiling is too low they smash  their  teeny
heads against it and stun themselves."
     "You've spent time around dinosaurs?"
     "I  grew  up  on  a  dinosaur ranch." I took her elbow and
steered her out of the way of a manure loader. We watched as it
scooped up a pile of watermelon-sized pellets.
     "What a stench."
     I  said  nothing.  The  smell  had  both  good   and   bad
associations for me. It took me back to my childhood, where one
of my jobs had been operating the manure loader.
     Behind  us,  the massive doors to the swamp began rumbling
open, letting in a blast of air even hotter and more humid than
that inside the barn. In a moment a long neck poked inside  the
door,  ending  in an almost negligible, goofy-looking head. The
neck kept coming in for a very long  time  before  the  massive
body  made  its  entrance.  By  then  another head and neck had
appeared.
     "Let's get back here out  of  the  way,"  I  suggested  to
Brenda.  "They won't step on you if they see you, but they tend
to forget where you are not long  after  they  look  away  from
you."
     "Where are they going?"
     I pointed toward the open gate across from us. The sign on
it said "Mating Pen Number One."
     "Mating  season's  just  about over. Wait till Callie gets
them  penned  up,  then  we  can  take  a  look.  It's   pretty
interesting."
     One  of  the  brontosaurs  made  a mournful honk and moved
along a little faster. In one-sixth gee, even a thunder  lizard
could  be sprightly. I doubt they set any speed records back on
Old Earth. In fact, I wondered how they stood up at all, out of
the water.
     The reason for the  burst  of  speed  was  soon  apparent.
Callie  entered  the  barn,  mounted  on a tyrannosaur. The big
predator responded instantly  to  every  touch  of  the  reins,
hurrying  to block an attempted retreat by the male, rearing up
and baring its teeth when it looked as if the female might make
a stand. The big herbivores waddled  quickly  into  the  mating
pen. The doors closed automatically behind them.
     The  thing the ancient paleontologists had never got right
about dinosaurs was their color. You'd think the examples of so
many modern reptiles might have given them a hint. But  if  you
look  at old artists' conceptions of dinosaurs, the predominant
colors were mud-brown and khaki-green. The real item  was  much
different.
     There  are  several  strains of b-saur but the type Callie
prefers are called Cal Tech Yellowbellies, after the  lab  that
first produced them. In addition to the canary undersides, they
range from that old reliable mud-brown on their backs to a dark
green, emerald green, and kelly green on their sides and necks.
They have streaks of iridescent violet trailing back from their
eyes, and white patches under their throats.
     Tyrannosaurs,  of course, are predominately red. They have
huge, dangling wattles under their necks, like  iguanas,  which
can be puffed up to make an outrageous booming mating call. The
wattles are usually deep blue, though purple and even black are
not unknown.
     You  can't  ride  a  t-saur  like a horse; the back is too
steep. There are different methods, but Callie preferred a sort
of narrow platform she could either sit or stand on,  depending
on   what  she  was  doing.  It  strapped  around  the  beast's
shoulders. Considering the amount of lizard still rising  above
that point, she spent most of her time on her feet, barely able
to peer over the head.
     "It looks unstable," Brenda said. "What if she falls off?"
     "You  don't  want to do that," I told her. "They're likely
to snap at you if you come in view suddenly. But  don't  worry;
this one is muzzled."
     An  assistant  leaped  up to join Callie in the saddle. He
took the reins from her and she jumped to the  ground.  As  the
t-saur  was  being  ridden out the barn door she glanced at us,
did a doubletake, and waved  at  me.  I  waved  back,  and  she
gestured  for  us to come over. Not waiting, she started toward
the breeding pen.
     I was about to join her when something poked  through  the
metal  railing behind us. Brenda jumped, then relaxed. It was a
brontosaur pup looking for a treat. Looking into  the  dim  pen
behind  us,  I  could  see  several dozen of the elephant-sized
young ones, most of them snugged into the  mud,  a  few  others
gathered around the feeding trough.
     I  turned  out  my pockets to show the brute I didn't have
anything on me. I used to carry  chunks  of  sugar-cane,  which
they love.
     Brenda didn't have any pockets to turn out, for the simple
reason  that  she  wasn't wearing any pants. Her outfit for the
day was knee-length soft leather  boots,  and  a  little  black
bolero  top.  This  was  intended  to  let me know that she had
acquired  something   new:   primary   and   secondary   sexual
characteristics. I was fairly sure she hoped I'd suggest we put
them  to  use  one of these days soon. I'd first caught on that
she had a crush on me when she learned that Hildy  Johnson  was
not  my born name, but one I had selected myself after a famous
fictional reporter from a play called The Front Page. Soon  she
was "Brenda Starr."
     I  must  say  she  looked more reasonable now. Neuters had
always made me nervous. She had not  gone  overboard  with  the
breasts.  The  pubic  hair  was natural, not some of the wilder
styles that come and go.
     But I was in no mood to try it out. Let her find  a  child
of her own age.
     #
     We  joined  Callie  at the breeding pen, climbed up to the
top of the ten-meter gate and stood with her, looking over  the
top rail at the nervously milling behemoths.
     "Brenda,"  I said, "I'd like you to meet Calamari Cabrini.
She owns this  place.  Callie,  meet  Brenda,  my  .  .  .  uh,
assistant."
     The  women reached across me to shake hands, Brenda almost
losing her balance on the slippery steel bars. All three of  us
were  dripping  wet. Not only was it hot and humid in the barn,
but ceiling sprinklers drenched the  place  every  ten  minutes
because  it was good for the skins of the livestock. Callie was
the only one  who  looked  comfortable,  because  she  wore  no
clothes.  I  should  have remembered and worn less myself; even
Brenda was doing better than me.
     Nudity was not a sometime thing for Callie. I'd known  her
all  my  life, and in that time had never seen her wear so much
as a pinky  ring.  There  was  no  big  philosophy  behind  her
life-long  naturism.  Callie went bare simply because she liked
it, and hated picking out clothes in the morning.
     She was looking good, I thought, considering that,  except
for  Walter,  she  took  less  notice  of her body's needs than
anyone I knew. She never did any preventive maintenance,  never
altered  anything  about  her  appearance. When something broke
down she had it  fixed  or  replaced.  Her  medico  bills  were
probably  among  the  smallest  in Luna. She swore she had once
used a heart for one hundred and twenty years.
     "When it finally gave out," she had told me,  "the  medico
said the valves could have come out of a forty-year-old."
     If  you  met her on the street, you would know immediately
that she was Earth-born. During her childhood, humans had  been
separable  into  many  "races,"  based  on  skin  color, facial
features, and type of hair. Post-Invasion eugenics had  largely
succeeded  in blending these so that racial types were now very
rare. Callie had been one of  the  white,  or  Caucasian  race,
which  dominated  much  of  human  history  since  the  days of
colonization and  industrialization.  Caucasian  was  a  pretty
slippery  term. Callie's imperious nose would have looked right
at home on an old Roman coin. One  of  Herr  Hitler's  "Aryans"
would  have  sneered  at her. The important racial concept then
was "white," which meant not-black, not-brown.
     Which was a laugh, because  Callie's  skin  was  burned  a
deep, reddish-brown from head to toe, and looked as leathery as
some  of her reptiles. It was startling to touch it and find it
actually quite soft and supple.
     She was tall--not like Brenda, but certainly tall for  her
age--and  willowy,  with  an unkept mane of black hair streaked
with white. Her most startling feature was her pale blue  eyes,
a gift from her Nordic father.
     She released Brenda's hand and gave me a playful shove.
     "Mario, you never come see me anymore," she chided.
     "The  name  is Hildy now," I said. "It has been for thirty
years."
     "You prove my point.  I  guess  that  means  you're  still
working for that bird-cage liner."
     I   shrugged,   and   noticed   Brenda's   uncomprehending
expression.
     "Newspads used to be printed out  on  paper,  then  they'd
sell the paper," I explained. "When people were through reading
it,  they'd  use  it  on the bottoms of their birdcages. Callie
never abandons a clich, no matter how dated."
     "And why should I?  The  clich  business  has  suffered  a
radical  decline  since  the Invasion. What we need are new and
better clichs, but nobody seems to  be  writing  them.  Present
company excepted, of course."
     "From  Callie, that's almost a compliment," I told Brenda.
"And nobody would line a birdcage with the Nipple, Callie.  The
stories would put the birds right off their food."
     She  considered  it.  "I  don't think so, Mario. If we had
electronic birds, your newspad would be the perfect liner.
     "Could be. I do find it useful for wrapping my  electronic
fish."
     Most of this had gone right over Brenda's head, of course.
But she  had  never  been  one to let a little ignorance bother
her.
     "To catch the shit?" she said.
     We both looked at her.
     "At the bottom of the birdcage," she explained.
     "I think I like her," Callie said.
     "Of course you do. She's an empty vessel,  waiting  to  be
filled with your tall tales of the old days."
     "That's  one  reason.  You've  been  using her as your own
personal birdcage liner. She needs my help."
     "She doesn't seem to mind."
     "But I do," Brenda said, unexpectedly. Callie and I looked
at her again.
     "I know I don't know much about ancient history." She  saw
Callie's  expression, and squirmed. "Sorry. But how much do you
expect me to know about things that happened hundreds of  years
ago? Or care?"
     "It's  okay,"  Callie  said. "I may not have used the word
'ancient'--I still think of the Roman  Empire  when  that  word
comes up--but I can see it must seem ancient to you. I said the
same  thing  to  my  parents when they talked about things that
happened before I was born. The difference is, when I was young
the  old  eventually  had  the  good  manners  to  die.  A  new
generation   took  over.  Your  generation  faces  a  different
situation. Hildy seems very old to you, but I'm more than twice
his age, and I don't have any plans to die.  Maybe  that's  not
fair to your generation, but it's a fact."
     "The gospel according to Calamari," I said.
     "Shut  up,  Mario.  Brenda,  it's  never  going to be your
world. Your generation will never take over from us.  It's  not
my  world anymore, either, because of you. All of us, from both
generational extremes, have to run this world  together,  which
means  we  have  to  make the effort to understand each other's
viewpoints. It's hard for me, and I know it must  be  hard  for
you.    It's    as    if    I    had    to    live    with   my
great-great-great-great-grandparents, who grew  up  during  the
industrial revolution and were ruled by kings. We'd barely even
have a language in common."
     "That's okay with me," Brenda said. "I do make the effort.
Why doesn't he?"
     "Don't worry about him. He's always been like that."
     "Sometimes he makes me so mad."
     "It's just his way."
     "Yoo-hoo, ladies. I'm here."
     "Shut  up,  Mario.  I  can read him like a book, and I can
tell he likes you. It's just that, the more he likes  you,  the
worse he tends to treat you. It's his way of distancing himself
from affection, which he's not sure he's able to return."
     I could see the wheels turning in Brenda's head and, since
she was not stupid, just ignorant, she eventually followed that
statement  out  to  its logical--if you believed the premise in
the first place--conclusion, which was that  I  must  love  her
madly,   because   I   treated   her   very   badly.  I  looked
ostentatiously around at the walls of the barn.
     "It must be hanging in your office," I said.
     "What's that?"
     "Your degree in psychology. I didn't even  know  you  went
back to school."
     "I've  been  in  school  every day of my life, jerk. And I
sure wouldn't need a degree to see through you. I spent  thirty
years learning how to do that." There was more, something about
how  just  because  I  was a hundred years old now, I shouldn't
think I'd changed so much. But it was all in Italian, so I only
got the gist.
     Callie gets a modest yearly stipend from  the  Antiquities
Preservation Board for staying fluent in Italian--something she
would  have  done  anyway, since it was her native language and
she had firm ideas about the extinction of human knowledge. She
had tried to teach it to me but I had no aptitude beyond a  few
kitchen  words.  And  what  was the point? The Central Computer
stored  hundreds  of  languages  no  one  spoke  anymore,  from
Cheyenne  to  Tasmanian,  including  all the languages that had
suffered a drastic drop in popularity because  they  never  got
established  on  Luna  before the Invasion. I spoke English and
German, like most everybody else, with a little Japanese thrown
in. There were sizable groups of Chinese speakers, and Swahili,
and Russian. Other than that, languages were preserved by study
groups of a few hundred fanatics like Callie.
     I doubt Brenda even knew there was an Italian language, so
she listened to Callie's tirade with a  certain  wariness.  Ah,
yes, Italian is a fine language for tirades.
     "I guess you've known each other a long time," Brenda said
to me.
     "We go way back."
     She nodded, unhappy about something. Callie shouted, and I
turned  to  see  her jump down into the breeding pen and stride
toward the crew of helpers, who were chivying  the  two  brutes
into final mating position.
     "Not  yet, you idiots," she shouted. "Give them time." She
reached the group of people  and  started  handing  out  orders
right and left. Callie had never been able to find good help. I
had  been  part  of that help for a great many years, so I know
what I'm talking about. It took me a long time to realize  that
no  one would ever be good enough for her; she was one of those
people who never believed anyone could do a job as well as  she
could  do  it herself. The maddening thing was, she was usually
right.
     "Back off, they're not ready yet. Don't rush them. They'll
know when it's time. Our job is to facilitate, not initiate."If
I have any skills as a lover," I told Brenda, "it's because  of
that."
     "Because of her?"
     "'Give  them  time.  We're  not on a schedule here. Show a
little finesse.' I heard that so many times I guess I  took  it
to heart."
     And it did take me back, watching Callie working the stock
again.  Of  the  major brontosaur ranchers in Luna, she was the
only one who didn't use  artificial  insemination  at  breeding
time.  "If  you  think  helping  a pair copulate is tough," she
always said, "try getting a  semen  sample  from  a  brontosaur
bull."
     And  there  was  a  rough  sort  of  poetry about dinosaur
mating, particularly brontosaurs.
     Tyrannosaurs went about it as you might  expect,  full  of
sound  and  fury. Two bulls would butt heads over a prospective
mate until one staggered away like a dusted-up nerg  addict  to
nurse  an epic headache. I don't suppose the victor fared a lot
better except for the chance to grapple the tiny  claw  of  his
lady fair.
     Brontosaurs  were  more dainty. The male would spend three
or four days doing his dance,  when  he  remembered  to.  These
creatures  had  short  attention  spans,  even when in heat. He
would rear up on his hind legs and do a  comical  samba  around
and  around  the  female. She typically showed minimal interest
for the first  two  days.  Then  the  seduction  moved  to  the
love-bite  stage,  with the male nipping her around the base of
the tail while she placidly chewed her cud.  When  she  finally
began  rearing  up with him, it was time to bring them into the
mating pen to pitch some serious woo.
     That was going on now. The two of them  were  facing  each
other on their hind legs, doing a little neck-weaving, a little
foreleg pawing. It could still be another hour before they were
ready,  a  condition  signaled  by  the emergence of one of the
bull's two hemi-penes.
     Nobody ever told me why a reptile needs two penises.  Come
to think of it, I never asked. There are limits to curiosity.
     "So how long were you involved with Callie?"
     "What's  that?"  Brenda had drawn me out of my reverie, as
she had a habit of doing.
     "She said thirty years. That's a long time. You must  have
been real serious about her."
     All  right,  so  I'm dense. But I finally got it. I looked
out at the primal scene: two Mesozoic  monsters,  here  through
the  grace  of  modern genetic science, and a thin brown woman,
likewise.
     "She's not my lover. She's my mother.  Why  don't  you  go
down  there  with  her?  She'll see you don't get hurt, and I'm
sure she'll be happy to tell you more than you ever  wanted  to
know about brontosaurs. I'm going to take a break."
     I  noticed  as  we climbed down the gate on opposite sides
that Brenda looked happier than I'd seen her all day.
     #
     I assume the mating  went  off  without  any  trouble.  It
usually does when Callie's in charge. I imagine the mating that
produced  me  was equally well-planned and carried out. Sex was
never a big deal to Callie.  Having  me  was  her  nod  in  the
direction  of  duty.  But  I have no siblings, despite powerful
societal pressure toward large  families  at  the  time  of  my
birth. Once was apparently enough.
     Paradoxically,  I  know I didn't spend any time in a Petri
dish, though it would have made the whole process  much  easier
for her if she'd availed herself of any of the medical advances
that could, today, make procreation, gestation, and parturition
about  as  personally  involving  as  a  wrong  number  on  the
telephone. Callie had conceived me  the  old-fashioned  way:  a
random  spermatozoan  hitting  the jackpot at the right time of
the month. She had carried me to full term, and had borne me in
pain, just like God promised  Eve.  And  she  had  hated  every
minute  of it. How do I know that? She told me, and anyone else
who would listen. She told me an average of three times  a  day
throughout my childhood.
     It  wasn't  so  much the pain that had bothered her. For a
woman who could shoulder a reproductive organ almost as big  as
she  was and guide it into a cloaca of a filthiness that had to
be seen to be disbelieved, while standing kneedeep in  dinosaur
droppings,  Callie had an amazing streak of prissiness. She had
hated the bloodiness of childbirth, the smells  and  sensations
of it.
     #
     Callie's office was cool. That's what I'd had in mind when
I went up there, simply to cool off. But it wasn't working. All
that had  happened  was  that  the  sweat on my body had turned
clammy. I was breathing hard, and my hands  weren't  steady.  I
felt  on  the edge of an anxiety attack, and I didn't know why.
On top of all that, my neck was hurting again.
     And why hadn't I mentioned the purpose of our  visit?  I'd
told myself it was because she was too busy, but there had been
plenty  of  time  while  the  three  of  us  stood on the gate.
Instead, I'd let her prattle on about the  good  old  days.  It
would have been a perfect opportunity to brace her about taking
the  job  as  the  Earth-born  member  of  our  little  team of
time-travelers. After holding forth about the generational  gap
she would have looked silly turning us down. And I knew Callie.
She  would love the job, would never admit loving it, and would
only accept it if she could be tricked into making it  look  as
if  she had come up with the idea herself, as a favor to me and
Brenda.
     I got up and moved to the windows. That didn't help, so  I
walked  to  the  opposite  wall. No improvement. After I'd done
that three or four times I realized I was pacing. I rubbed  the
back  of my neck, drifted over to the windows again, and looked
out and down.
     Callie's office windows overlook the  barn  interior  from
just beneath the roof. There's a stairway leading to a verandah
"outside"-actually,  within  the  small  disneyland that is her
ranch. I was looking out over the  breeding  pens  I  had  just
left.  Callie  was there, pointing something out to Brenda, who
stood  beside  her  watching  the  spectacle  of   two   mating
brontosaurs.  Standing  just behind them was someone who looked
familiar. I squinted, but it didn't help, so I grabbed the pair
of binoculars on a hook beside the window.
     I focused in on the  tall,  red-headed  figure  of  Andrew
MacDonald.

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

        CHAPTER SIX












     I  remembered leaving Callie's ranch. I recalled wandering
for a while, taking endless downscalators until there  were  no
more;  I  had  reached  the  bottom  level.  That  struck me as
entirely too metaphorical, so I  took  an  infinite  number  of
upscalators  and  found my way to the Blind Pig. I don't recall
what I was thinking all those  hours,  but  in  retrospect,  it
couldn't have been pretty.
     You  might  say  the  next thing I recall is waking up, or
coming to, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. It  wouldn't
convey  the  nature  of  the  experience.  It  felt more like I
reconstructed myself from far-flung bits--no, that implies some
effort on my part. The bits  reconstructed  themselves,  and  I
became  self-aware  in  quantum  stages.  There was no dividing
line, but eventually I knew I was in a back room  of  the  Pig.
This  was considerable progress, and here my own will took over
and I looked around to learn more about my surroundings. I  was
facing  downward,  so that's where I first turned my attention.
What I saw there was a woman's face.
     "We'll never solve the problem of the head shot  until  an
entirely  new  technology comes along," she said. I had no idea
what this meant. Her hair was spread out  on  a  pillow.  There
were  outspread  hands  on  each  side  of  her face. There was
something odd about her eyes, but I couldn't put my  finger  on
it.  I suppose I was in a literal frame of mind, because having
thought that, I touched one of her eyeballs with the tip of  my
finger.  It  didn't seem to bother her much. She blinked, and I
took my finger away.
     There was an important discovery: when I touched her  eye,
one  of  the  hands  had  moved. Putting these data together, I
concluded that the hands bracketing her face were my  hands.  I
wiggled  a  finger, testing this hypothesis. One of the fingers
down there wiggled. Not the one I had intended,  but  how  much
exactitude could I expect? I smiled, proud of myself.
     "You  can  encase  the  brain  in metal," she said. "Put a
blood bag on the anti-camera side of the head,  fire  a  bullet
from  the  camera's  pee-oh-vee.  And  ka-chow! The bullet goes
whanging  off  the  metal  cover,  ka-blooey,  the  blood   bag
explodes,  and  if  you're  lucky it looks like the bullet went
through the head and spread tomato sauce all over the  wall  in
back of the guy."
     I felt large.
     Had  I  taken large pills? I couldn't remember, but I must
have. Normally I don't, as they aren't really much of a thrill,
unless you get your kicks by imagining yourself to be the  size
of  an  interplanetary  liner.  But you can mix them with other
drugs and get interesting effects. I must have done that.
     "You can make it look even more real by putting teeny tiny
charges in back of the eyeballs.  When  the  bullet  hits,  the
charges  go  off,  and  the  eyeballs  are blown out toward the
camera, see? Along with a nice blood haze, which is a  plus  in
masking whatever violations of realism are going on behind it."
     Something  was  rubbing  against my ears. I turned my head
about  as  quickly  as  they  rotate  the  big  scope  out   in
Copernicus,  and  saw a bare foot. At first I thought it was my
foot, but I knew from reports flown in by carrier  pigeon  that
my  own feet were about three kilometers behind me, at the ends
of my legs, which were stretched out straight. I turned my head
the other way, saw another foot. Hers, I concluded.  The  first
was probably hers, too.
     "But  that damn steel case. Crimony! I can't tell you what
a--you should pardon the expression-headache that thing can be.
Especially when nine out of ten directors will insist the  head
shot  has  to  be in slomo. You give the chump a false forehead
full of maxfactor #3 to guarantee a juicy wound,  you  annodize
the  braincase in black so--you hope--it'll look like a hole in
the head when the skin's ripped away,  and  what  happens?  The
damn  bullet  rips  through  everything, and there it is in the
dailies. A bright, shiny spot of metal right down there at  the
bottom  of  the  hole.  The  director  chews  you out, and it's
Re-take City."
     Was I aboard a ship? That might account  for  the  rocking
motion. But I remembered I was in the Blind Pig, and unless the
bar  had  been cut from its steel catacomb and embarked bodily,
it seemed unlikely we were at sea. I  decided  I  still  needed
more  data.  Feeling  adventurous, I looked down between myself
and the woman's body.
     For a moment the view made no sense at all. I could see my
own legs, and my feet, as if through a reversed telescope. Then
I couldn't see them any more. Then I could  again.  Where  were
her  legs?  I  couldn't  see them. Oh, yes, since her feet were
tickling my ears, her legs must  be  those  things  against  my
chest. So she was on the floor, on her back. And that explained
the other activity I saw. I stopped my up and down motion.
     "I don't want to do this," I told her.
     She  kept talking about the difficulties of a head shot. I
realized that she was at least as detached from our coupling as
I was. I stood up and looked around the room. She never  missed
a  syllable. There were a pair of pants on the floor; they were
a million sizes too small for me, but they were probably  mine.
I  held them, lifted each leg with gargantuan deliberation, and
presto! The pants did fit. I stumbled  through  a  curtain  and
into the main room of the Pig.
     It  was  maybe twenty steps to the bar. In that distance I
shrank alarmingly. It was not an unpleasant  sensation,  though
at  one  point  I had to hold the back of a barstool to keep my
balance. Pleased with myself, I gingerly climbed onto a leather
stool.
     "Bartender," I said, "I'll have another of the same."
     The fellow behind the bar was known as Deep Throat, for  a
famous  clandestine  news source. He probably had another name,
but no one knew it, and we all thought it was fitting it should
be that way. He nodded and was moving away, but someone sat  on
the stool next to mine and reached over to grab his arm.
     "Hold  the  heavy  stuff this time, okay?" she said. I saw
that it was Cricket. She smiled at me, and  I  smiled  back.  I
shrugged,  then  nodded  to  Deep  Throat's enquiring look. His
customers' state of sobriety is not his concern. If you can sit
at the bar--and pay--he'll serve you.
     "How you doing, Hildy?" Cricket asked.
     "Never  better,"  I  said,  and  watched  my  drink  being
prepared. Cricket shut up for the time being. I knew there were
more questions to come. What are friends for?
     The  drink  arrived, in one of the Pig's hologlasses. It's
probably the only bar in Luna that still uses them.  They  date
back   to  the  midtwenty-first  century,  and  they're  rather
charming. A chip in the thick  glass  bottom  projects  a  holo
picture  just  above  the  surface of the drink. I've seen them
with rolling dolphins, windsurfers,  a  tiny  water  polo  team
complete  with  the sound of a cheering crowd, and Captain Ahab
harpooning the Great White Whale. But the most popular glass at
the Pig is the nuclear explosion at Bikini  Atoll,  in  keeping
with  the  way Deep Throat mixes the drinks. I watched it for a
while. It starts with a very  bright  light,  evolves  into  an
exquisitely  detailed  orange  and  black  mushroom  cloud that
expands until it is six inches high, then blows away.  Then  it
blows up again. The cycle takes about a minute.
     I  was  watching the tiny battleships in the lagoon when I
realized I'd seen the show about a  dozen  times  already,  and
that  my  chin  was  resting on the bar. To enhance the view, I
suppose. I sat up straight, a little embarrassed. I glanced  at
Cricket,  but  she  was making a great show of producing little
moist rings with the bottom of her glass. I wiped my brow,  and
swiveled on my stool to look at the rest of the room.
     "The usual motley crew," Cricket said.
     "The  motliest,"  I  agreed.  "In  fact, the word 'motley'
might have been coined simply to describe this scene."
     "Maybe we should retire the word. Give it a place of honor
in the etymological  hall  of  fame,  like  Olympic  champions'
jerseys."
     "Put  it  right  next to motherhood, love, happiness . . .
words like that."
     "On that note, I'll buy you another drink."
     I hadn't finished the first, but who was counting?
     There have always been unwritten rules in journalism, even
at the level on which I practice it. Often it is only the  fear
of  a  libel  suit  that  stays us from printing a particularly
scurrilous story. On Luna the laws are pretty  strict  on  that
subject.  If  you  defame  someone,  you'd  better have sources
willing to testify before the CC. But more often you hold  back
on  printing  something  everyone  knows  for a subtler reason.
There is a symbiotic relationship between us and the people  we
cover.  Some would say parasitic, but they don't understand how
hungry for publicity a politician or celebrity can  be.  If  we
stick  to  the  rules  concerning  "off the record" statements,
things told us on "deep background," and  so  forth,  everybody
benefits.  I  get sources who know I won't betray them, and the
subject of my stories gets the public exposure he craves.
     Don't look for the Blind Pig Bar And Grill in  your  phone
memory.  Don't expect to find it by wandering the halls of your
neighborhood mall. If you should somehow discover its location,
don't expect to be let in unless you know  a  regular  who  can
vouch  for  you.  All  I'll  say  about  it is that it's within
walking distance of three major movie production  studios,  and
is reached through a door with a totally misleading sign on it.
     The  Blind  Pig  is  the place where journalists and movie
people  can  mix  without  watching  their  mouths.  Like   its
political  counterpart  over  by  City  Hall,  the Huey P. Long
Memorial Gerrymandering Society, you can  let  your  hair  down
without  fear  of  reading  your words in the padloids the next
morning--at least, not for attribution. It's  the  place  where
gossip, slander, rumor, and
        =*= =*= =*= =*=
     character  assassination  are  given  free rein, where the
biggest stars can mix with  the  lowliest  stagehands  and  the
slimiest  reporters and not have to watch their tongues. I once
saw a grip punch a  ten-million-per-picture  celebrity  in  the
nose,  right there in the Pig. The two fought it out until they
were exhausted, went back to the set, and behaved as if nothing
had happened. That same punch, thrown in the studio, would have
landed the grip on the pavement in  microseconds.  But  if  the
star had exercised his clout for something that happened in the
Pig,  and  Deep  Throat heard about it, the star would not have
been welcome again. There's not many places  people  like  that
can go and socialize without being bothered. Deep Throat seldom
has to banish anyone.
     A  reporter once broke confidence with a producer, printed
a story told to him in the Pig. He never returned, and he's not
a reporter anymore. It's hard to cover the  entertainment  beat
without access to the Pig.
     Places  like  the  Pig  have existed since Edison invented
Hollywood. The ambiance is dependent on what is  shooting  that
day.  Just then there were three popular genres, two rising and
one on its way out, and all three were represented  around  the
room.  There  were  warriors from Samurai Japan, taking a break
from    The    Shogun    Attacks,    currently    lensing    at
Sentry/Sensational   Studios.   A   contingent   of  people  in
old-fashioned  spacesuits  were   employed   at   North   Lunar
Filmwerks,  where  I'd  heard  Return Of The Alphans was behind
schedule and over budget and facing an uncertain reception,  as
the  box  office  for  Asteroid  Miner/Space Creature films had
turned soft in recent months. And a bunch in bandannas,  cowboy
hats  and  dirty  jeans had to be extras from The Gunslinger V.
Westerns were in the middle of their fourth  period  of  filmic
popularity,  two of them coming in my own lifetime. TG,V, as it
was known to the trade, had been doing location  work  not  far
from my cabin in West Texas.

        =*= =*= =*= =*=
     In  addition,  there were the usual scattering of costumes
from other eras, and  quite  a  number  of  surgically  altered
gnomes,  fairies,  trolls,  and so forth, working in low-budget
fantasy and children's  shorts.  There  was  a  group  of  five
centaurs  from  a  long-running  sci-fi series that should have
been axed a dozen Roman numerals ago.
     "Why don't you just move the brain?" I heard Cricket  say.
"Put it somewhere else, like the stomach?"
     "Oh,  brother.  Sure,  why not? It's been done, of course,
but it's not worth the trouble. Nerve tissue is the hardest  to
manipulate,  and  the brain? Forget it. There's twelve pairs of
cranial nerves you've got to extend through the neck  and  down
to  the  abdomen,  for one thing. Then you have to re-train the
gagman--a couple of days,  usually--so  the  time  lag  doesn't
show.  And  you don't think that matters? Audiences these days,
they've seen it all, they're sophisticated. They want  realism.
We  can  make  a  fake  brain easy enough and stuff it into the
gagman's skull in place of the one we re-located, but audiences
will spot the  fact  that  the  real  brain's  not  where  it's
supposed to be."
     I  turned on my stool and saw my new friend was sitting on
the other side of Cricket, still holding forth about  her  head
shots.
     "Why  not  just  use manikins?" Cricket asked, showing she
hadn't spent much time on  the  entertainment  beat.  "Wouldn't
they be cheaper than real actors?"
     "Sure.  A  hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe you've never heard
of the Job Security Act, or unions."
     "Oh."
     "Damn right.  Until  a  stunt  performer  dies,  we  can't
replace  him  with  a  machine. It's the law. And they die, all
right--even with your brain in  a  steel  case,  it's  a  risky
profession--but  we  don't  lose more than two or three a year.
And there's  thousands  of  them.  Plus,  they  get  better  at
surviving the longer they work, so there's a law of diminishing
returns.  I  can't win." She swiveled, leaned her elbows on the
bar, looked out at the tables and sneered.
     "Look at them. You can always spot gagmen.  Look  for  the
ones  with  the vacant faces, like they're wondering where they
are. They pick up a piece of shrapnel in the head; we cut  away
a  little  brain  tissue and replace it with virgin cortex, and
they forget a  little.  Start  getting  a  little  vague  about
things.  Go home and can't remember the names of the kids. Back
to work the next day, giving me more  headaches.  Some  of  'em
have very little left of their original brains, and they'd have
to  look at their personnel file to tell you where they went to
school.
     "And centaurs? I could build you a robot  centaur  in  two
days,  you couldn't tell it from the real thing. But don't tell
the Exotics Guild. No,  I  get  to  sign  'em  to  a  five-year
contract,  surgically  convert  'em  at  great  cost  to the FX
budget, then put 'em through three months of kinesthetic  rehab
until they can walk without falling on their faces. And what do
I  get?  A stumblebum who can't remember his lines or where the
camera is, who  can't  walk  through  a  scene  muttering,  for
chrissake,  without  five  rehearsals.  And  at the end of five
years, I get to pay to convert 'em back."  She  reached  around
and  got  her drink, which was tall and had little tadpole-like
creatures swimming in it. She took a long pull  on  it,  licked
her  lips.  "I tell you, it's a wonder we get any pictures made
at all."
     "Nice to see a woman happy  in  her  work,"  I  said.  She
looked over at me.
     "Hildy," Cricket said, "have you met Princess Saxe-Coburg?
She's chief of special effects at NLM."
     "We've met."
     The  Princess  frowned at me, then recognition dawned. She
got off her stool and came toward me, a  little  unsteady.  She
put her nose inches from mine.
     "Sure.  You pulled out on me a few minutes ago. Not a nice
thing to do to a lady."
     At that range, I could see what was odd  about  her  eyes.
She  was  wearing  a pair of antique projection contacts, small
round flat-TV screens that floated over  the  cornea.  I  could
make  out  the  ring  of solar cells that powered them, and the
flyspeck chip that held the memory.
     They'd been introduced just before the  Invasion  under  a
variety  of  trade  names,  but  the one that stuck was Bedroom
Eyes. After all, though they could reflect quite a  variety  of
moods,  if you were close enough to see the little pictures the
mood you were looking for was probably sexual arousal. The more
modest models would show a turned-back bed,  a  romantic  scene
from  an  old  movie, or even, god help us, waves crashing on a
beach.  Others  made  no  pretensions,  getting  right  to  the
erection  or spread thighs. Of course, they could reflect other
moods, as well, but people were seldom  close  enough  to  make
them out.
     I'd  never  seen projection contacts worn by someone quite
as stoned as the Princess was. What they were projecting was an
interesting illusion: it was as if I were looking  through  two
holes  into  a  hollow head. Remnants of an exploded brain were
collapsed at the bottom. Cracks in the skull let in light.  And
swinging  from  stray  synapses  like  vines in a jungle were a
menagerie of cartoon characters,  from  Mickey  Mouse  to  Baba
Yaga.
     The  image  disturbed me. I wondered why anyone would want
to do that to their brain. From wondering why  she  would  want
to,  I quickly got to why I would want to, and that was leading
me quickly to a place I didn't want to go.  So  I  turned  away
from  her  and saw Andrew MacDonald sitting at the other end of
the bar like a carrottopped Hibernian albatross.
     "Did you know she's the Princess of  Wales?"  Cricket  was
saying. "She's first in line to the throne of England."
     "And  Scotland,  and Wales," said the Princess. "Hell, and
Ireland, and Canada and India. I might  as  well  re-claim  the
whole Empire while I'm at it. If my mother ever dies, it'll all
belong  to  me.  Of  course,  there's  the little matter of the
Invaders."
     "Up the British," Cricket said,  and  they  clinked  their
glasses together.
     "I  met  the  King  once,"  I said. I drained my drink and
slammed it down on the bar. Deep Throat caused  it  to  vanish,
and began concocting another.
     "Did you really?"
     "He  was  a  friend of my mother. In fact, he's a possible
candidate to be my father. Callie has never told me  and  never
will,  but they were friendly together at about the right time.
So, if you apply modern laws of bastardy, I might have a  claim
that   supersedes   yours."   I  glanced  at  MacDonald  again.
Albatross? Hell, the man was more than a  bird  of  evil  omen,
more  than  a  stormy  petrel  or  a  croaking  raven.  He  was
Cassandra. He was a tropical depression, bad  breath,  a  black
cat  across  my  path. Everywhere I turned, there he was, a dog
humping my leg. He was a ladder in the stocking of my life.  He
was snake eyes.
     I hated him. I felt like punching him in the nose.
     "Watch  what  you  say," the Princess cautioned. "Remember
what happened to Mary, Queen of Scots."
     I punched her in the nose.
     She walked backward a few rubber-legged  steps,  then  sat
down on the floor. In the ensuing silence, Cricket whispered in
my ear.
     "I think she was kidding," she said.
     For  a few moments the whole place was quiet. Everyone was
watching us expectantly; they love a good brawl  at  the  Blind
Pig. I looked at my clenched fist, and the Princess touched her
bloody  nose  with  her  hand, then looked at her palm. We both
looked up at the same time and our eyes met. And she  came  off
the  floor  and launched herself at me and started breaking all
the bones in my body that she could reach.
     My hitting her had nothing to do  with  anything  she  had
said or done; at that moment in my life I would have hit anyone
standing next to me. But I'd have been a lot better off hitting
Cricket.  In  the  Princess  of  Wales,  I'd  picked  the wrong
opponent. She was taller than me and out-massed me.  There  was
probably a ten-centimeter difference in reach between us, and I
was on the short end of it. But most importantly, she had spent
the  last  forty  years  staging cinematic fights, and she knew
every trick in the book, and a lot  that  never  got  into  the
book.
     I'm  tempted  to  say  I got in two or three good punches.
Cricket says I did, but it might have been  just  to  raise  my
spirits.  The  truth is I can't remember much from the time her
horrid white teeth first filled my vision to the time I  ripped
a meter-long gash in the carpet with my face.
     To  get  to  the  carpet  I'd first had to smash through a
table full of drinks. I used my face for that, too. Before  the
table  I  had  been flying, rather cleverly, I thought, and the
first real fun I'd had in many long minutes, but how I came  to
be  flying  was a point I was never too clear on. It seems safe
to say that the Princess hurled me in some manner,  holding  on
to  some part of my anatomy and then releasing it; Cricket said
it was my ankle, which would  account  for  the  room  whirling
around  so  quickly just before I flew. Before that I had vague
memories of the bar mirror shattering, people scattering, blood
spattering. Then I crashed through the table.
     I rolled over and spit out carpeting. Horses were  milling
nervously  all  around  me. Actually it was the centaur extras,
whose table I'd just ruined. I resolved to buy them all a round
of drinks. Before I  could  do  that,  though,  there  was  the
Princess  again,  lifting me by the shoulder and drawing back a
bloody fist.
     Then someone took hold of her arm  from  behind,  and  the
punch  never  landed.  She  stood  up  and  turned  to face her
challenger. I let my head rest against the ruins of a chair and
watched as she tried to punch Andrew MacDonald.
     There was really no point in it. It took her a  long  time
to  realize  it,  as  her  blood was up and she wasn't thinking
straight. So she kept throwing  punches,  and  they  kept  just
missing,  or  hitting  him harmlessly on the elbows or glancing
off his shoulders. She tried kicking, and the kicks were always
just a little off their target.
     He never threw a punch. He didn't have to. After  a  time,
she was standing there breathing hard. He wasn't even sweating.
She straightened and held up her hands, palms outward.
     I  must  have  dozed off for a moment. Eventually I became
aware of the Princess, Cricket, and MacDonald, three indistinct
round faces hanging above me like a pawnbroker's sign.
     "Can you move your legs?" MacDonald asked.
     "Of course I can move my legs." What a silly question. I'd
been moving my legs for a hundred years.
     "Then move them."
     I did, and MacDonald frowned deeper.
     "His back's probably broken," said Wales.
     "Must have happened when he landed on the railing."
     "Can you feel anything?"
     "Unfortunately, yes." By that time most of the drugs  were
wearing  off, and everything from the waist up was hurting very
badly. Deep Throat  arrived  and  lifted  my  head.  He  had  a
painkiller in his hand, a little plastic cube with a wire which
he  plugged into the socket at the base of my skull. He flicked
the switch, and I felt a lot better. I looked down and  watched
as  they  removed the splintered chair leg which had pierced my
hip.
     Since that wasn't a particularly diverting sight, I looked
around the room. Already cleaning robots were picking up broken
glassware and replacing shattered tables;  Deep  Throat  is  no
stranger  to brawls, and he always keeps a supply of furniture.
In another few minutes there would be no sign that I had almost
destroyed the place  five  minutes  ago.  Well,  I  had  almost
destroyed  the place, in the sense that it was my hurtling body
that had done most of the damage.
     I felt myself being lifted. MacDonald and Wales had made a
hammock with their arms. It was like riding in a sedan chair.
     "Where are we going?"
     "You're not in  any  immediate  danger,"  MacDonald  said.
"Your  back  is broken, and that should be fixed soon, so we're
taking you across the corridor to the NLF Studios. They have  a
good repair shop there."
     The Princess got us past the gate guard. We passed about a
dozen sound stage doors, and I was brought into the infirmary.
     Which  was  jammed  like  Mainhardt's  Department Store on
Christmas Eve. It seemed NLF was doing a big  scene  from  some
war  epic,  and most of the available beds were taken by maimed
extras  patiently  waiting  their   turn,   counting   up   the
triple-time salary they drew for injured downtime.
     The  room  had  been  dressed  as a field hospital for the
picture,  apparently  doing  double  duty  when  not   actually
treating   cinematic  casualties.  I  pegged  it  as  twentieth
century--a vintage season for wars--maybe World War Two, or the
Vietnam conflict, but it could easily have been the  Boer  War.
We  were  under  a canvas roof and the place was cluttered with
hanging IV bottle props.
     MacDonald returned from  a  conference  with  one  of  the
technicians and stood looking down at me.
     "He  says  it'll  be  about half an hour. I could have you
taken to your own practitioner if you  want  to;  it  might  be
quicker."
     "Don't  bother.  I'm  in  no hurry. When they patch me up,
I'll probably just get up and do something foolish again."
     He didn't say anything.  There  was  something  about  his
demeanor  that  bothered me--as if I needed anything else about
him to bother me.
     "Look," I said. "Don't ask me to explain why I did  it.  I
don't even know myself."
     Still he said nothing.
     "Either  spit  it  out, or take your long face and park it
somewhere else."
     He shrugged.
     "I just have a problem  with  a  man  attacking  a  woman,
that's all."
     "What?"  I  was  sure  I  had misunderstood him. He wasn't
making any sense. But when he  didn't  repeat  his  astonishing
statement, I had to assume I'd heard him correctly.
     "What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
     "Nothing,  of  course.  But  when  I  was  young,  it  was
something you simply didn't do.  I  know  it  no  longer  makes
sense, but it still bothers me to see it."
     "I'll be sure to tell the Mean Bitch you feel that way. If
they've put her back together after your last bout, that is."
     He looked embarrassed.
     "You  know, that was a problem for me, early in my career.
I  wouldn't  fight  female  opponents.  I  was  getting  a  bad
reputation  and missing a lot of important match-ups because of
it. When some competitors started getting sex changes simply so
they could have a go at me, I realized  how  ridiculous  I  was
being.  But  to  this  day  I  have  to  psych myself something
terrible to get into the  ring  with  someone  who's  currently
female."
     "That's  why  you never hit . . . does the Princess have a
first name?"
     "I don't know. But you're wrong. I wanted to stop her, but
I didn't want to hurt her. Frankly, you had it coming."
     I looked away, feeling terrible. He was right.
     "She's feeling bad about it, though.  She  said  she  just
couldn't seem to stop, once she got going."
     "I'll send her the repair bill. That should cheer her up."
     Cricket   arrived   from  somewhere.  She  had  a  lighted
cigarette which she placed in my mouth, grinning.
     "Got it from the prop department," she said. "They  always
used to give these to wounded soldiers. I can't imagine why."
     I puffed on it. It wasn't tobacco, thank god.
     "Cheer  up,"  Cricket  said. "You tore up her fists pretty
good."
     "I'm clever that way; I pounded them to hamburger with  my
chin."
     I  suddenly felt an alarming urge to cry. Holding it back,
I asked both of them to leave me alone for a while.  They  did,
and  I  lay  there  smoking, studying the canvas ceiling. There
were no answers written there.
     Why had the taste of life turned so bitter for me  in  the
last weeks?
     #
     I  had  sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was
bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way  to
bend.
     "How'd you find me?" I asked her.
     "I'm a reporter, remember? It's my business to find things
out."
     I  thought of several cutting replies, but something about
the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I  had
vague  memories  of  how  badly that could hurt, when it wasn't
returned.
     And to give her her due,  she  was  improving.  Maybe  she
would be a reporter, some day.
     "You  needn't have bothered. It's not like I'm badly hurt.
The head injuries were minimal."
     "I'm not surprised. It would  take  a  lot  to  hurt  your
head."
     "The  brain  wasn't injured at . . ." I stopped, realizing
she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty  feeble,  it
hardly  qualified  as  a joke -- -- she might never master that
skill--but it was something. I grinned at her.
     "I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor . .  .
what was it you called him?"
     "Sawbones.  Pillroller.  Quack.  Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech.
Lazarmonger."
     Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the
terms away for later research.
     I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical
practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening
thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies
than most humans down the ages, we don't fear injury and we can
turn off pain and we generally treat flesh  and  bone  as  just
items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in
the  most  primitive  level  of our brain stands up on its hind
legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a  galloping  anxiety
attack  that  the  painkiller  plugged  into  my medulla wasn't
dealing with at all. I have no idea if  Brenda  realized  this,
but  her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was
glad she was there. I took her hand.
     "Thanks for coming," I said. She squeezed  my  hand,  then
looked away.
     #
     Eventually  the  planned  casualties stopped streaming in,
and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged  me  in
to   a  dozen  machines,  studied  the  results,  huddled,  and
murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered,  as  if
the  medical  computer  was  not  entirely  in  control  of  my
diagnosis and treatment.
     They came to a decision, which was  to  turn  me  onto  my
stomach.  I  surmised  they had concluded it would be easier to
reach my broken spine  that  way.  I'd  better  not  ever  hear
medicos called overpaid blood-monkeys again.
     They  began to carve. I couldn't feel it, but I could hear
some  really  disgusting  sounds.  You  know   those   wet-muck
special-effect  sounds  they  use  in the movies when someone's
being disemboweled? They could have recorded them right over my
broken back. At one point something thumped  to  the  floor.  I
peered  over  the  edge  of  the bed: it looked like a raw soup
bone. It was hard to believe it had once belonged to me.
     They pow-wowed again,  cut  some  more,  brought  in  more
machines.  They  made  sacrifices  to  the gods of Aesculapius,
Mithradates, Lethe, and Pfizer. They studied the entrails of  a
goat.  They tore off their clothes, joined hands, and danced in
a healing circle around my prone carcass.
     Actually, I wished they had done any of those  things.  It
would  have  been a lot more interesting than what they did do,
which was mostly stand around and watch the automatic  machines
mend me.
     All  there  was  to look at was an antique machine against
the wall, a few feet from my face. It had a glass screen and  a
lot of knobs on it. Blue lines were crawling across the screen,
blipping into encouraging peaks now and then.
     "Can  I  get  you  anything?" the machine asked. "Flowers?
Candy? Toys?"
     "A new head might do the trick." It was the CC talking, of
course. It can throw its voice pretty much  where  it  pleases,
since  it  was  talking  directly  to  the hearing center of my
brain. "How much will this cost me?"
     "There's no final cost-estimate yet. But Wales has already
requested the bill be sent to her."
     "Maybe what I meant was--"
     "How badly are you hurt? How shall I  put  it.  There  are
three  bones  in the middle ear, called the Malleus, the Incus,
and the Stapes. You'll be happy to hear that not one  of  these
six bones was broken."
     "So I'll still be able to play the piano."
     "Just  as badly as ever. In addition, several minor organs
emerged unscathed. Almost half a square meter of epidermis  can
be salvaged."
     "Tell  me.  If  I'd  come  to  this  place . . . I mean, a
hospital like this one is pretending to be-- "
     "I know what you mean."
     "--with only primitive surgical techniques . . .  would  I
have survived?"
     "It's  unlikely.  Your  heart is intact, your brain is not
badly damaged, but the rest of your injuries are comparable  to
stepping  on  a land mine. You'd never walk again, and you'd be
in great pain. You would come to wish you had not survived."
     "How can you tell that?"
     The CC said nothing,  and  I  was  left  to  ponder.  That
usually doesn't do much good, where the CC is concerned.
     We all deal with the CC a thousand times a day, but almost
all of  that  is  with  one of its subprograms, on a completely
impersonal level. But apart from the  routine  transactions  of
living,  it  also  generates  a  distinct personality for every
citizen of Luna, and is always there  ready  to  offer  advice,
counsel,  or  a shoulder to cry on. When I was young I spoke to
the  CC  extensively.  He  is  every  child's  ideal  imaginary
playmate.  But  as  we  grow  older  and  make  more real, less
tractable   and   entirely   more   willful   and   frustrating
relationships,  contacts  with  the  CC  tend to fall off. With
adolescence  and  the  discovery  that,  in  spite   of   their
shortcomings, other people have a lot more to offer than the CC
ever  will, we cut our ties even further until the CC is just a
very intelligent, unobtrusive servant, there to ease us through
the practical difficulties of life.
     But the  CC  had  now  intruded,  twice.  I  found  myself
wondering, as I seldom had in the past, what was on its mind.
     "I guess I've been pretty foolish," I ventured.
     "Perhaps  I  should  call  Walter, tell him to tear up the
front page."
     "All right. So it isn't news. So I've  had  things  on  my
mind."
     "I was hoping you'd like to talk about that."
     "Maybe we ought to talk about what you said before."
     "Concerning  your  hypothetical suffering had you incurred
these injuries in, say, 1950?"
     "Concerning your  statement  that  I  might  prefer  being
dead."
     "It  was merely an hypothesis. I observe how little anyone
today is equipped to tolerate pain, having never experienced an
appreciable amount of it. I note that even the  people  on  Old
Earth,  who  were  no strangers to it, often preferred death to
pain. I conclude that many people today would not hold life  so
dear as to endure constant, unrelenting agony."
     "So it was just a general observation."
     "Naturally."
     I  didn't  believe  that, but there was no point in saying
so. The CC would get to the point in its own way,  in  its  own
time. I watched the crawling lines on the machine and waited.
     "I   notice   you're  not  taking  notes  concerning  this
experience. In fact, you've taken very few notes  lately  about
anything."
     "Watching me, are you?"
     "When I've nothing better to do."
     "As  you  certainly  know, I'm not taking notes because my
handwriter is broken. I haven't had  it  repaired  because  the
only  guy who still works on them is so swamped that he said he
might get around to mine this coming August. Unless  he  leaves
the business to start a career in buggywhip repair."
     "There  actually  is  a woman who does that," the CC said.
"In Pennsylvania."
     "No kidding? Nice to see such a vital skill  won't  vanish
completely."
     "We  try to foster any skill, no matter how impractical or
useless."
     "I'm sure our grandchildren will thank us for it."
     "What are you using to write your stories?"
     "Two methods, actually. You get this soft clay brick, see,
and you use a pointed stick to impress little triangles  in  it
in different combinations. Then you put it on the oven to bake,
and  in  four  or  five  hours there you are. The original hard
copy. I've been trying to think of a name for the process."
     "How about cuneiform?"
     "You mean it's been done? Oh, well. When I  get  tired  of
that,  I  get  out  the  old  hammer  and chisel and engrave my
deathless prose on rocks. It saves me carrying those ridiculous
paper sheets into Walter's office; I just lob them  across  the
newsroom and through his window."
     "I don't suppose you'd consider Direct Interface again."
     Was that what this was all about?
     "Tried it," I said. "Didn't like it."
     "That  was  over  thirty  years  ago," the CC pointed out.
"There have been some advances since then."
     "Look," I said, feeling irritable and  impatient.  "You've
got  something on your mind. I wish you'd just come out with it
instead of weaseling around like this."
     It said nothing for a moment. That moment stretched into a
while, and threatened to become a spell.
     "You want me to  direct  interface  for  some  reason,"  I
suggested.
     "I think it might be helpful."
     "For you or me?"
     "Both  of us, possibly. There can be a certain therapeutic
value in what I intend to show you."
     "You think I need that?"
     "Judge for yourself. How happy have you been lately?"
     "Not very."
     "You could try this, then. It can't  hurt,  and  it  might
help."
     So  what  was  I  doing  at the moment so important that I
couldn't take a few minutes off to chin with the CC?
     "All right," I said. "I'll interface with  you,  though  I
think  you  really  ought  to  buy  me  dinner and some flowers
first."
     "I'll be gentle," the CC promised.
     "What do I have to do? You need to plug me in somewhere?"
     "Not for years now. I can use my regular connections  into
your  brain.  All  you need to do is relax a little. Stare into
the oscilloscope screen; that could be helpful."
     I did, watching the blue lines peak and trough,  peak  and
trough.  The screen started to expand, as if I were moving into
it. Soon all I could see was one crawling line,  which  slowed,
stopped,  became  a single bright dot. The dot got brighter. It
grew and grew. I felt the heat of it on my face, it was blazing
down from a blue tropical sky. There was a moment of vertigo as
the world seemed to spin around me--my body staying  firmly  in
place--until  I was lying not on my stomach but on my back, and
not on the snowy white sheets of the repair shop at North Lunar
Filmwerks but on cool wet beach  sand,  hearing  not  the  soft
mutterings  of  the  medicos  but the calls of seagulls and the
nearby hiss and roar of surf. A  wave  spent  its  last  energy
tickling my feet and washing around my hips. It sucked a little
sand  out  from  under  me. I lifted my head and saw an endless
blue ocean trimmed with white breakers. I got to  my  feet  and
turned  around,  and saw white sandy beach. Beyond it were palm
trees, jungle rising away from me  to  a  rocky  volcanic  peak
spouting  steam.  The  realism  of the place was astonishing. I
knelt and scooped up a handful of sand. No  two  grains  looked
alike.  No  matter  how  close  I brought the sand grains to my
eyes, the illusion never broke  down  and  the  endless  detail
extended  to  deeper  and  deeper  realms. Some sort of fractal
magic, I supposed. I walked down the beach for a bit, sometimes
turning  to  watch  the  cunning  way  water  flowed  into   my
footprints,  erasing  the edges, swirling, bubbling. I breathed
deeply of the saline air. I like this place already. I wondered
why the CC had brought me here. I decided it would tell  me  in
its  own  time,  so  I walked up the beach and sat under a palm
tree to wait for the CC to present itself. I waited for several
hours, watching the surf, having to move twice as the sun crept
across the sky. I noticed that my skin had reddened in my brief
time in the sunlight. I think I drifted off to sleep from  time
to  time,  but  when  you're alone it's hard to be sure. In any
event, the CC didn't show. Eventually I got thirsty.  I  walked
down  the  beach  for several kilometers before discovering the
outlet of a small stream of fresh water. I  noticed  the  beach
kept  curving  off to the right; probably an island. In time it
got dark--very quickly, and one part of my mind concluded  this
simulacrum  that  really  existed only as a set of equations in
the data banks of the CC was intended to be  somewhere  in  the
Earthly tropics, near the equator. Not that the information did
me any good. It didn't get cold, but I soon found that when you
haven't  any  clothes or bedding, sleep can be a sandy, chilly,
thoroughly uncomfortable project. I woke up again and again  to
note the stars had moved only a little. Each time I would shout
for  CC  to  show  itself, and each time only the surf answered
back. Then I awoke with the sun already high above the horizon.
My left side had the beginnings of a painful radiation burn. My
right side was chilled. My hair was full of sand. Little  crabs
scuttled  away  as  I sat up, and I was appalled to realize I'd
been thinking about catching and eating one. I was that hungry.
But there was something of interest down by the water.  In  the
night,  a  large,  steel-banded wooden trunk had washed ashore,
along with a lot of splintered wood and some tattered pieces of
canvas. I concluded there had been a  shipwreck.  Perhaps  that
was  the justification for my presence here in the first place.
I dragged the chest across the sand to a place where  it  would
be  in  no danger of washing back to sea, thought about it, and
salvaged all the wood and canvas, as well. I smashed  the  lock
on  the  trunk and upon opening it, found it was waterproof and
contained a wide variety  of  things  useful  to  the  computer
castaway:  books,  tools,  bolts  of  cloth, packages of staple
foods like sugar and flour, even some bottles of a good  Scotch
whiskey. The tools were better than the things I had been using
in  Texas.  At  a  guess,  they  might  have been made with the
technology of the  late  nineteenth  century.  The  books  were
mostly  of  the  how-to variety--and there was the man himself,
Robinson Crusoe, by DeFoe. All the books were bound in leather;
none had a copyright date later than 1880. I used  the  machete
to  lop the ends off a cocoanut and munched thoughtfully at the
delicious white meat while paging through books  that  told  me
how  to tan hides, where to obtain salt, how to treat wounds (I
didn't like the  sound  of  that  one  very  much),  and  other
vigorous pioneer skills. If I wanted to make boots, I'd be able
to  do  it. If I wanted to build an outrigger canoe and seek my
fortune on the blue Pacific (I was assuming this was the  south
seas),  the  information  was  at my fingertips. If I wanted to
chip  flint  arrowheads,  construct  an   earthen   dam,   make
gunpowder,  fricassee  a  monkey,  or battle savages, the books
would  show  me  how,  complete   with   cunning   lithographed
illustrations.  If I wanted to stroll the Clarkestrasse in King
City, or even Easter parade down Fifth Avenue in Little Old New
York, I was shit out of luck.  There  seemed  little  point  in
lamenting this fact, and the CC wasn't returning my calls, so I
set  to work. I explored the area for a likely spot to use as a
campsite. That night I slept under  a  canvas  awning,  wrapped
loosely  in  a  length of flannel from the chest. It was a good
thing, too. It rained off and on most  of  the  night.  I  felt
oddly  at  peace,  lying  in  the moonlit darkness (there was a
charming notion: Luna looked tiny and dim compared  to  a  full
Earth) listening to the rain falling on the canvas. Perhaps the
simple  pleasures  are  the  best. For the next several weeks I
worked very hard. (I didn't seem bothered by the gravity, which
was six times what I had endured for a century. Even  the  fact
that  things  fell much faster and harder than I'd been used to
all my life never bothered me. My reflexes had been adjusted by
the Almighty Landlord of this semi-conducting realm.)  I  spent
part  of  each day working on a shelter. The rest of the time I
foraged. I found good sources of bananas and breadfruit to  add
to  my  all-cocoanut  diet.  I  found  mangos  and guavas, many
varieties of edible roots, tubers, leaves,  seeds.  There  were
spices  available to one equipped with the right book to use in
their identification. The little scuttling  crabs  proved  easy
enough  to  catch, and were delicious boiled. I wove a net from
vines  and  soon  added  several  varieties  of  fish   to   my
bouillabaisse.  I dug for clams. When the shelter was completed
I cleared a sunny spot for a vegetable garden and planted  some
of  the  seeds  I'd  found  in  the  trunk. I set snares, which
promptly  trapped  inedible  small  rodents,   fearsome-looking
reptiles,  and  an  unidentified  bird  I  came  to call a wild
turkey. I made a bow and arrow, and a  spear,  and  managed  to
miss every animal I aimed at. Somewhere in there, after about a
month,  I  started  my calendar: notches on a tree. I estimated
the time before that. Infrequently I wondered when the  CC  was
going  to check up on me, or if I was in fact stranded here for
the rest of my life. In the spirit of exploration,  one  day  I
prepared a backpack and a straw hat (most of me was burned dark
brown  by then, but the noonday sun was still nothing to trifle
with) and set out along the beach to determine the size  of  my
cage.  In two weeks I circum-ambulated what did indeed prove to
be an island. Along the way I saw the remains of a ship  washed
up  on a rocky part of the shore, a week-old beached whale, and
many other wondrous things. But there had been no sign of human
habitation. It seemed I was not to have my  Friday  to  discuss
philosophy  with.  Not too upset by this discovery, I set about
repairing the  depredations  wild  animals  had  worked  on  my
shelter  and  garden.  After  another few weeks I determined to
scale the volcano that sat in the center of the island, which I
had named Mount  Endew,  for  reasons  that  must  have  seemed
excellent  at  the  time. I mean, a Jules Verne hero would have
climbed it, am I right? This proved to be  a  lot  harder  than
walking on the beach, and involved much swinging of the machete
at  thatches  of tropical vines, wading of swamps infested with
flying insects and leeches,  and  barking  of  shins  on  rocky
outcroppings.  But one day I came to stand on the highest point
in my domain and saw what I could not have seen from sea level:
that my island was shaped something like a boot. (It took  some
imagination,  I'll  admit. One could just as well have seen the
letter  Y,  or  a  champagne  class,  or  a  squashed  pair  of
copulating  snakes.  But  Callie would have been pleased at the
boot, so I named the island Scarpa.) When I returned to my camp
I decided my traveling days were at an end. I  had  seen  other
places  I  might  have explored from my volcanic vantage point,
but there seemed no reason to do anything  about  them.  I  had
spied  no  curls  of  smoke,  no  roads,  no  airports or stone
monuments or casinos or Italian restaurants. Scarpa Island  ran
to  swamps,  rivers, jungles, and bogs. I'd had quite enough of
all of those; you couldn't get a decent drink in any of them. I
decided to devote my  life  to  making  life  as  easy  and  as
comfortable  as  possible,  at  least until the CC showed up. I
felt no urge to write, either  journalism  or  my  long-delayed
novel, which seemed in memory at least as awful as I had always
feared  it  was.  I felt very little urge for sex. My only real
drive seemed to be hunger, and it was easy  enough  to  satisfy
that.  I discovered two things about myself. First, I could get
totally involved in and wonderfully satisfied by  the  simplest
of  activities. Few of us today know the pleasure of working in
the soil with our own  hands,  of  nurturing,  harvesting,  and
eating  our  own crops. I myself would have rejected the notion
not long before. But nothing tastes quite  like  a  tomato  you
have  just  picked  from  your  own  garden.  Even rarer is the
satisfaction of the hunt. I got rather better with my  bow  and
arrow  (I  never  got  good),  and  could lie in wait for hours
beside a watering hole,  every  sense  tuned  to  the  cautious
approach  of  one  of  the  island's  wild pigs. There was even
satisfaction in pursuing a wounded creature; the pigs could  be
dangerous when cornered, enraged by a poorly-aimed arrow in the
hams.  I  hesitate to say it in these peaceable times, but even
the killing thrust of the knife was something to take pride and
pleasure in. The second thing I learned was that, if there  was
nothing that badly needed doing, I was capable of lying all day
in  my  hammock tied between two palm trees, watching the waves
crash onto the reef, sipping pineapple juice and home-distilled
rum from a hollowed cocoanut shell. At  such  times  you  could
take  your  soul  out  into  the  fresh air, hang it out on the
line--so to speak--and examine it for tears and thin  spots.  I
found  quite  a  few.  I mended a couple, set the rest aside to
talk over with the CC. Which I even began to doubt was going to
come at all. It got harder and harder to remember a time before
the island, a time when I had lived in a strange  place  called
Luna,  where  the  air  was  metered  and  gravity was weak and
troglodytes hid under rocks, frightened of the vacuum  and  the
sunlight.  There  were  times when I'd have given anything just
for somebody to talk to. Other times I had cravings for this or
that item of food that Scarpa was  unable  to  provide  me.  If
Satan  had come along with a brontoburger, he could have had my
freshly-patched soul in trade cheap, and hold the  onions.  But
most  of the time I didn't want people around. Most of the time
I was content with a wild turkey sizzling on  the  spit  and  a
slice  of  mango for dessert. The only real crab in my codpiece
were the dreams that started  to  plague  my  sleep  about  six
months  into  my  sojourn. At first I had them infrequently and
was able to shrug them off easily enough in  the  morning.  But
soon  I  was  having  them  every  week,  then every other day.
Finally I was being awakened every night, sometimes  more  than
once. There were three of them. Details varied, and many things
about them were indistinct, but each always ended in a horribly
vivid scene, more real than reality--assuming that word had any
meaning  for  me anymore, dreaming my dreams within a dream. In
the first, blood was  pouring  from  deep  gashes  in  both  my
wrists. I tried to stop the flow. It was no use. In the second,
I  was  consumed  in  flames. The fire didn't hurt, but in some
ways this was the most frightening of the three. In the last, I
was falling. I fell for a long time, looking up into  the  face
of  Andrew MacDonald. He was trying to tell me something, and I
strained to understand him, but before I could make  any  sense
of  it  I  was  always  pulled  up short--to wake up, bathed in
sweat, lying in my hammock. In the manner of dreams,  I  always
had  the  sense  there had been much more to it that I could no
longer remember, but there was that last image right  there  in
the  front  of my mind, obscuring everything else, occupying my
mind for most of my early morning hours. Then one day I noticed
by my rude calendar that I had been on the island for one year.
I suddenly knew the CC would appear to me that day. I had a lot
of things to talk to it about. I was seized by  excitement  and
spent  most  of  the  day  tidying  up,  preparing for my first
visitor. I looked on my works with  satisfaction;  I'd  done  a
pretty  decent job of creating something out of the wilderness.
The CC would be proud of  me.  I  climbed  to  the  top  of  my
treehouse,  where  I  had built a look-out tower (having an odd
thought on the way up: how and when had I built it, and  why?),
and  sure enough, a boat was approaching the island. I ran down
the path to the beach. The day was as close  to  dead  calm  as
those  waters  ever  got. Waves eased toward the shore to slump
onto the sand as if exhausted  by  their  long  trip  from  the
orient.  A  flock  of  gulls  was sitting on the water, briefly
disturbed by the passage of the boat I had seen. It was made of
wood. It looked like the kind of boat whalers used to  use,  or
the launch from a larger ship. Sitting in the boat, back toward
me,  rowing at a strong steady pace, was an apparition. It took
me a moment to realize  the  strange  shape  of  his  head  was
actually  a  rather unusual hat. It made a bell curve above his
head. I watched him row ashore. When he hit the beach he almost
toppled from his seat, then stowed the oars and stood,  turning
around  to face me. It was an old gentleman in the full uniform
of an Admiral of the British Navy. He had a bull  chest,  long,
spindly legs, a craggy face and a shaggy head of white hair. He
drew himself up to his full height, looked at me, and said:
     "Well? Are you going to help me beach this thing?"
     And  at  that moment everything changed. I still am unable
to fully describe just how it changed. The beach was the  same.
The  sunlight  streamed  down  just as it had before. The waves
never missed a beat.  My  heart  continued  to  meter  out  the
seconds  of  my  life.  But  I  knew  something fundamental and
important was no longer as it had been before.
     There  are  hundreds  of   words   describing   paranormal
phenomena.  I've examined and considered most of them, and none
fits what happened when the Admiral spoke. There are many words
for odd states of mind, for moods, for emotions and things seen
and not-seen, things glimpsed, things  incompletely  understood
or  remembered,  for  degrees of memory. Things that go bump in
the night. None of them were adequate. We're going to  have  to
come  up  with  some  new  words-- which was precisely the CC's
point in letting me experience this.
     I went into the water up to my knees and  helped  the  old
man pull the boat onto the shore. It was quite heavy; we didn't
get  it  far.  He  produced  a rope and tied the boat to a palm
tree.
     "I could use a drink," he said. "The whole point  of  this
was so I could have a drink with you. Like a human being."
     I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. He followed me
up the path to my Robinson Family tree house, stood admiring it
for a  moment,  and then followed me up the stairs and onto the
lower veranda. He  paused  to  admire  the  workmanship  of  my
wheel-and-pulley waterworks, which used the power of the nearby
stream to provide me with drinking and washing water high up in
the  tree. I showed him to my best rattan chair and went to the
sideboard, where I poured us both glasses of the very  last  of
my  best  whiskey.  I paused to wind up the Victrola and put on
one of my three scratchy cylinders: The  Blue  Danube.  Then  I
handed him his drink, took mine, and sat down facing him.
     "To indolence," he said, raising his glass.
     "I'm  too  lazy  to drink to that. To industry." We drank,
and he looked around again. I must have glowed with  pride.  It
was  quite  a  place, though I say it myself. A lot of work and
ingenuity had gone into it, from the dense-woven  mats  on  the
floor, to the slate fireplace, to the tallow candles in sconces
arrayed  around the walls. Stairs led off in two directions, to
the bedroom,  and  the  crow's  nest.  My  desk  was  open  and
cluttered  with  the pages of the novel I'd recently resumed. I
was bursting to tell him of the difficulties I'd had  producing
usable  paper  and  ink. Try it sometime, when you've got a few
spare months.
     "It must have taken a  lot  of  industry  to  produce  all
this," he said.