from  time  to  time--but  I  never  got  really
depressed, as in goodbye-cruel-world depressed.
     I concluded that keeping busy was the best therapy.
     #
     One of the one thousand, one hundred and  twentyone  other
people  who  died  in Nirvana was the mother of the Princess of
Wales,  the  King  of  England,  Henry  XI.  In  spite  of  his
impressive  title,  Hank  had  never  in his life done anything
worth a back-feed article in the Nipple,  until  he  died.  And
that's where the obit ran, the backfeed, with a small "isn't it
ironic"  graph  by  a cub reporter mentioning a few of his more
notorious relatives: Richard  III,  Henry  VIII,  Mary  Stuart.
Walter  blue-penciled most of it for the next edition, with the
immortal  words  "nobody  gives   a   shit   about   all   that
Shakespearean  crap,"  and  substituted  a sidebar about Vickie
Hanover and her weird ideas about sex that influenced an entire
age.
     The only reason Henry XI was in Nirvana in the first place
was that he was in charge of the plumbing in dome #3.  Not  the
air system; the sewage.
     But  the  upshot  was that, on my first free day since the
disaster,  my  phone  informed  me  that  someone  not  on   my
"accept-calls"  list wanted to speak to me, and was identifying
herself as Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. I drew a  blank  for  a
moment,  then realized it was the terrifying fighting machine I
had known as Wales. I let the call through.
     She spent the  first  few  minutes  apologizing  all  over
again, asking if her check had arrived, and please call me Liz.
     "Reason  I called," she finally said, "I don't know if you
heard, but my mother died in the Nirvana disaster."
     "I did  know  that.  I'm  sorry,  I  should  have  sent  a
condolence card or something."
     "That's  okay. You don't really know me well enough, and I
hated the boozing son-of-a-bitch anyway. He made my  life  hell
for  many  years. But now that he's finally gone . . . see, I'm
having this sort of coronation party tomorrow and I wondered if
you'd like to come? And a guest, too, of course."
     I wondered if the invitation was the result of  continuing
guilt  over  the way she'd torn me apart, or if she was angling
for coverage in the pad. But I didn't mention either  of  those
things.  I was about to beg off, then remembered there had been
something I'd wanted to talk to her about. I accepted.
     "Oh," I said, as she was about  to  ring  off.  "Ah,  what
about dress? Should it be formal?"
     "Semi,"  she said. "No need for any full uniforms. And the
reception afterward will be informal. Just a party, really. Oh,
and no gifts." She laughed. "I'm only supposed to accept  gifts
from other heads of state."
     "That lets me out. See you tomorrow."
     #
     The Royal Coronation was held in Suite #2 of the spaceport
Howard's  Hotel,  a  solidly  middleclass  hostelry  favored by
traveling salespeople and business types just in King City  for
the  day.  I  was  confronted  at  the  door  by  a  man  in  a
red-andblack military uniform that featured a fur hat almost  a
meter  high.  I  vaguely  recalled  the  outfit from historical
romances. He was rigidly at attention beside a guardhouse about
the size of a coffin standing on end. He glanced  at  my  faxed
invitation,  opened the door for me, and the familiar roar of a
party in progress spilled into the hall.
     Liz had managed  a  pretty  good  turn-out.  Too  bad  she
couldn't  have  afforded  to  hire  a  bigger hall. People were
standing elbow to elbow,  trying  to  balance  tiny  plates  of
olives  and  crackers with cheese and anchovy paste in one hand
and paper cups of punch and champagne in the other while  being
jostled  from  all sides. I sidled my way to the food, as is my
wont when it's free, and scanned it  dubiously.  UniBio  set  a
better  table,  I must say. Drinks were being poured by two men
in the  most  outrageous  outfits.  I  won't  even  attempt  to
describe them. I later learned they were called Beefeaters, for
reasons that will remain forever obscure to me.
     Not  that  my  own  clothes  were anything to shout about.
She'd said semi-formal, so I could have gotten away  with  just
the  gray fedora and the press pass stuck in the brim. But upon
reflection I decided to  go  with  the  whole  silly  ensemble,
handing  the  baggy  pants and double-breasted suit coat to the
auto-valet with barely enough time for alterations. I left  the
seat  and  the  legs loose and didn't button the coat; that was
part of the look my guild, in its infinite wisdom, had voted on
almost two hundred years ago when  professional  uniforms  were
being  chosen.  It  had been taken from newspaper movies of the
1930's. I'd viewed a lot of them, and was amused at  the  image
my  fellow  reporters  apparently  wanted  to project at formal
events: rumpled, aggressive,  brash,  impolite,  wise-cracking,
but  with hearts o' gold when the goin' got tough. Sure, and it
made yer heart proud ta be a reporter, by  the  saints.  For  a
little fun, I'd worn a white blouse with a bunch of lace at the
neck  instead  of  the  regulation  ornamental noose known as a
neck-tie. And I'd tied my hair up and stuffed it under the hat.
In the mirror I'd looked just like Kate Hepburn masquerading as
a boy, at least from the neck up. From there down the suit hung
on me like a tent, but such was the cunning architecture of  my
new  body that anything looked good on it. I'd saluted my image
in the mirror: here's lookin' at you, Bobbie.
     Liz spotted me and made her way toward me  with  a  shout.
She  was  already half looped. If her late mother had given her
nothing else, she had seemingly inherited  his  taste  for  the
demon  rum.  She  embraced  me  and thanked me for coming, then
swirled off again into the crowd. Well, I'd corner  her  later,
after the ceremony, if she could still stand up by then.
     What  followed hasn't changed much in four or five hundred
years. For almost an hour people kept arriving,  including  the
hotel  manager  who had a hasty conference with Liz--concerning
her credit rating, I expect--and  then  opened  the  connecting
door  to Suite #1, which relieved the pressure for a while. The
food and champagne ran out, and  was  replenished.  Liz  didn't
care   about   the   cost.  This  was  her  day.  It  was  your
proto-typical daytime party.
     I met several people I  knew,  was  introduced  to  dozens
whose  names  I  promptly forgot. Among my new friends were the
Shaka of the Zulu Nation, the Emperor of Japan,  the  Maharajah
of  Gujarat,  and  the  Tsarina of All the Russias, or at least
people in silly costumes who styled themselves that  way.  Also
countless  Counts,  Caliphs,  Archdukes,  Satraps,  Sheiks  and
Nabobs. Who was I to dispute their titles?  There  had  been  a
vogue  in  such  genealogy about the time Callie had grudgingly
expelled  my  ungrateful  squalling  form   into   a   lessthan
overwhelmed  world;  Callie  had  even  told me she thought she
might be related to Mussolini, on her mother's side.  Did  that
make  me  the  heirapparent  of  Il  Duce?  It wasn't a burning
question to me. I overheard intense debates about the rules  of
primogeniture--even  Salic Law, of all things--in an age of sex
changing. Someone--I think it was the Duke of York--gave  me  a
lecture  about  it  shortly before the ceremony, explaining why
Liz was inheritor to the throne, even though she had a  younger
brother.
     After  escaping  from  that with most of my wits intact, I
found  myself  out  on  the  balcony,  nursing   a   strawberry
Margarita. Howard's had a view, but it was of the cargo side of
the  spaceport.  I  looked  out over the beached-whale hulks of
bulk  carriers  expelling  their  interplanetary  burdens  into
waiting underground tanks. I was almost alone, which puzzled me
for  a  moment,  until  I remembered a story I'd seen about how
many people had suddenly lost their taste for surface views  in
the  wake  of  the Kansas Collapse. I drained my drink, reached
out and tapped the invisible curved canopy that held vacuum  at
bay, and shrugged. Somehow I didn't think I'd die in a blowout.
I had worse things to fear.
     Somebody held out another pink drink with salt on the rum.
I took  it  and  looked  over  and  up--and up and up--into the
smiling face of Brenda, girl reporter and apprentice giraffe. I
toasted her.
     "Didn't expect to see you here," I said.
     "I got acquainted with the  Princess  after  your  .  .  .
accident."
     "That was no accident."
     She  prattled  on about what a nice party it was. I didn't
disillusion her. Wait till she'd attended a few  thousand  more
just like it, then she'd see.
     I'd been curious what Brenda's reaction would be to my new
sex. To my chagrin, she was delighted. I got the skinney from a
homo-oriented  friend  at  the  fashion  desk: Brenda was young
enough to still be exploring her own sexuality, discovering her
preferences. She'd already been pretty sure she  leaned  toward
females  as  lovers, at least when she was a woman. Discovering
her preferences as a male would have  to  wait  for  her  first
Change.  After all, until quite recently she'd been effectively
neuter. The only problem she'd had in her crush on me was  that
she  wasn't  much  attracted to males. She had thought it would
remain platonic until I thoughtfully made everything perfect by
showing up at work as my gorgeous new self.
     I really, really didn't have the heart to tell  her  about
my preferences.
     And  I  did owe her. She had been covering for me, putting
my  by-line  on  the  Invasion  Bicentennial  stories  she  was
writing,  the  stories I simply could no longer bring myself to
work on. Oh, I was helping, answering her questions, going over
her drafts, punching up the prose, showing  her  how  to  leave
just  enough excess baggage in the stories so Walter would have
something to cut out and shout at her about and thus  remain  a
happy  man.  I  think  Walter was beginning to suspect what was
going on, but he hadn't said anything yet because expecting  me
to cover the Collapse and get in our weekly feature was unfair,
and  he  knew  it.  The thing he should have foreseen before he
ever came up with his cockamamie Invasion series was that there
would always be a story like the Collapse happening, and  as  a
good  editor  he  had  to  assign  his best people to it, which
included me. Oh, yeah, if you wanted  somebody  to  intrude  on
grief  and  ogle  bodies puffed up like pink and brown popcorn,
Hildy was your girl.
     "Tell me, sweetheart, how did you feel when  you  saw  the
man cut your daddy's head off?"
     "What?" Brenda was looking at me strangely.
     "It's  the  essential disaster/atrocity question," I said.
"They don't tell you  that  in  Journalism  101,  but  all  the
questions  we  ask, no matter how delicately phrased, boil down
to that. The idea is to get the first appearance of  the  tear,
the  ineffable  moment  when  the  face twists up. That's gold,
honey. You'd better learn how to mine it."
     "I don't think that's true."
     "Then you'll never be a great reporter. Maybe  you  should
try social work."
     I  saw  that I had hurt her, and it made me angry, both at
her and at myself. She had to understand these things,  dammit.
But  who  appointed you, Hildy? She'll find out soon enough, as
soon  as  Walter  takes  her   off   these   damn   comparative
anthropology  stories  that  our readers don't even want to see
and lets her get out where she can grub in the  dirt  like  the
rest of us.
     I  realized I'd drunk a little more than I had intended. I
dumped the rest of my drink in a thirsty-looking potted  plant,
snagged  a  coke  from  a  passing tray, and performed a little
ritual I'd come  to  detest  but  was  powerless  to  stop.  It
consisted  of a series of questions, like this: Do you feel the
urge to hurl yourself off  this  balcony,  assuming  you  could
drill a hole through that ultralexan barrier? No. Great, but do
you  want  to  throw a rope over that beam and haul yourself up
into the rafters? Not today, thank you. And so on.
     I  was  about  to  say  something  nice  and  neutral  and
soothing,  suitable  for  the  reassurance  of  idealistic  cub
reporters,  when  the  Jamaican  steel  band  which  had   been
reprising every patriotic British song since the Spanish Armada
suddenly  struck  up  God  Save  The  Queen, and somebody asked
everyone to haul their drunken asses down to the main ballroom,
where the coronation was about to commence. Not in those words,
of course.
     #
     There was another  band  in  the  ballroom,  playing  some
horrible  modern version of Rule Britannia. This was the public
portion of the show, and I guess Liz thought it ought  to  make
some  attempt to appeal to the tastes of the day. I thought the
music was dreadful, but Brenda was snapping her fingers,  so  I
suppose it was at least current.
     A  few  specialty  channels and some of the 'pads had sent
reporters, but the crowd in the ballroom  was  essentially  the
same folks I'd been avoiding up in the Suites one and two, only
they  weren't  holding  drinks. A lot of them looked as if they
wished the show would hurry  up,  so  they  could  hold  drinks
again, for a short time, at least.
     One  touch  Liz  hadn't expected was the decorations. From
the whispers I overheard, she'd only booked the  hall  for  one
hour.  When  the  coronation  was  over  a  wedding  party  was
scheduled to hold a reception there, so the walls  were  draped
in  white bunting and repulsive little cherubs, and there was a
big sign hung on the wall that said Mazel  Tov!  Liz  looked  a
little   nonplussed.  She  glanced  around  with  that  baffled
expression one sometimes gets after wandering  into  a  strange
place. Could there have been a mistake?
     But  the  coronation  itself went off without a hitch. She
was proclaimed "Elizabeth III, by  the  Grace  of  God  of  the
United  Kingdom  of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland
and of her other Realms  and  Territories,  Queen,  Empress  of
India, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith."
     Sure,  it was easy to snicker, and I did, but to myself. I
could see that Liz  took  it  seriously,  almost  in  spite  of
herself.  No  matter  how  spurious the claims of some of these
other clowns might have  been  to  ancient  titles,  Liz's  was
spotless  and unquestioned. The actual Prince of Wales had been
living and working on Luna at the time of the Invasion, and she
was descended from him.
     The original Crown Jewels had  naturally  not  accompanied
the  King  in  Exile to Luna; they were buried with the rest of
London--of England, of Europe, of the whole surface  of  Planet
Earth.  Liz had the use of a very nice crown, orb, and sceptre.
Hovering in the background as these items were produced  was  a
man  from Tiffany's. Not the one in the Platz, but the discount
outlet down on Leystrasse, where even as the tiara was  lowered
onto  Liz's head a sign was going up announcing "By Appointment
to Her Majesty, The Queen." The jewels were  hired,  and  would
soon reside in a window advertising the usual E-Z Credit Terms.
     A  procession was traditional after a coronation back when
the Empire had any real meaning--and even after it  had  become
just  a tourist attraction. But processions can be difficult to
organize in the warrens of Luna, where the cities  are  usually
broken  up into pressure-defensible malls and arcades connected
by tube trains. So after the ceremony we all straggled  into  a
succession  of  subway  cars  and  zipped  across town to Liz's
neighborhood, many of us growing steadily more sober and unsure
why we'd come in the first place.
     But all was well. The real party began when we arrived  at
the  post-coronation  reception, held in the Masonic Lodge Hall
half-way between Liz's  apartment  and  the  studio  where  she
worked.  In addition to its many other virtues the lodge didn't
cost her anything, which  meant  she  could  spend  what  royal
budget she had left entirely on food, booze, and entertainment.
     This bash was informal and relaxed, the only kind I enjoy.
The band was good, playing a preponderance of things from Liz's
teenage  years,  which  put  them  mid-way  between  my era and
Brenda's. It was stuff I could dance to. So I stumbled out into
the public  corridor  in  my  twotone  Oxford  lace-ups--and  a
clunkier  shoe  has  never  been invented--found a mail box and
called my valet. I told it to pack up the drop-dead shiny black
sheath dress slit from the ankles to you-should-only-blush  and
'tube it over to me. I went into the public comfort station and
changed  my  hair  color to platinum and put a long wave in it,
and when I came out,  three  minutes  later,  the  package  was
waiting  for  me.  I  stripped out of the Halloween costume and
stuffed it into the return capsule, cajoled my  abundance  into
the  outfit's  parsimonious  interior.  Just  getting into that
thing was almost enough to give you an orgasm. I left  my  feet
bare.  And  to hell with Kate Hepburn; Veronica Lake was on the
prowl.
     I danced almost non-stop for two hours. I  had  one  dance
with  Liz,  but she was naturally much in demand. I danced with
Brenda, who was a very good if visually unlikely terpsichorean.
Mostly I danced with a succession of men, and I turned  down  a
dozen  interesting offers. I'd selected my eventual target, but
I was in no hurry unless he suddenly decided to leave.
     He didn't. When I was ready I cut him out of the  herd.  I
put a few moves on him, mostly in the form of dance steps whose
meaning  couldn't  have  been  missed by a eunuch. He wanted to
join the rather sparsely-attended orgy going on in  one  corner
of  the  ballroom,  but  I  dragged  him off to what the Masons
called, too coyly in my opinion, snuggle rooms. We spent a very
enjoyable hour in one of them. He  liked  to  be  spanked,  and
bitten.   It's  not  my  thing,  but  I  can  accommodate  most
consenting adults as long as my needs are attended to as  well.
He  did  a  very  good  job of that. His name was Larry, and he
claimed to be the Duke of Bosnia-Herzegovina,  but  that  might
have been just to get into my pants. The couple of times I drew
blood he asked me to do it again, so I did, but eventually lost
my  .  .  . well, my taste for that sort of thing. We exchanged
phone codes and said we'd look each  other  up,  but  I  didn't
intend  to.  He  was  nice to look at but I felt I'd chewed off
about as much as I wanted.
     I staggered back into the ballroom drenched in  sweat.  It
had  been very intense there for a while. I headed for the bar,
dodging dancers. The faint-hearted had left, leaving about half
the original attendees, but those looked ready  to  party  till
Monday  morning.  I  eased  my pinkened, pleasantly sore cheeks
onto a padded barstool  next  to  the  Queen  of  England,  the
Empress of India, and the Defender of the Faith, and Liz slowly
turned her head toward me. I now knew where her impressive ears
came  from.  There  were  posters of past monarchs taped to the
walls here, and she was the spitting image of Charles III.
     "Innkeeper," she shouted, above the music. "Bring me salt.
Bring me tequila.  Bring  me  the  nectar  of  the  lime,  your
plumpest  strawberries,  your coldest ice, your finest crystal.
My friend needs a drink, and I intend to build it for her."
     "Ain't got no strawberries," the bartender said.
     "Then go out and kill some!"
     "It's all right, Your Majesty,"  I  said.  "Lime  will  be
fine."
     She  grinned  foolishly at me. "I purely do like the sound
of that. 'Your Majesty.' Is that awful?"
     "You're entitled, as they say. But don't expect me to make
a habit of it." She draped an arm over my shoulder and  exhaled
ethanol.
     "How are you, Hildy? Having a good time? Getting laid?"
     "Just did, thank you."
     "Don't thank me. And you look it, honey, if I may say so."
     "Didn't have time to freshen up yet."
     "You don't need to. Who did the work?"
     I  showed  her  the monogram on the nail of my pinkie. She
squinted at it, and seemed to lose interest, which  might  have
meant  that  Bobbie's  fears  of  falling  out  of fashion were
well-grounded-- Liz would be up on these things--or  only  that
her attention span was not what it might be.
     "What  was  I  gonna  say? Oh, yeah. Can I do anything for
you, Hildy? There's a tradition among my people  .  .  .  well,
maybe  it's  not an English tradition, but it's somebody's damn
tradition, what you gotta do is, anybody asks you for  a  favor
on your coronation day, you gotta grant it."
     "I think that's a Mafia tradition."
     "Is it? Well, it's your people, then. So just ask. Only be
real,  okay?  I mean, if it's gonna cost a lot of money, forget
it. I'm gonna be payin' for this fucking shivaree for the  next
ten fucking years. But that's okay. It's only money, right? And
what a party. Am I right?
     "As  a matter of fact, there is something you could do for
me."
     I was about to tell her, but  the  bartender  delivered  a
Margarita  in  its  component  parts,  and Liz could only think
about one thing at a time. She spilled a lot  of  salt  on  the
bar,  spread it out, moistened the rim of a wide glass, and did
things necessary to produce a too-strong concoction  with  that
total   concentration   of   the  veteran  drunk.  She  did  it
competently, and I sipped at the drink I hadn't really wanted.
     "So. Name it, kiddo, and it's yours. Within reason."
     "If you . . . let's say . . . if  you  wanted  to  have  a
conversation  with  somebody,  and you wanted to be sure no one
would overhear it . . . what would you do?  How  would  you  go
about it?"
     She  frowned  and  her  brow  furrowed. She appeared to be
thinking heavily, and her hand toyed with the layer of salt  in
front of her.
     "Now  that's  a  good one. That's a real good one. I'm not
sure if anyone's ever asked me that before." She looked  slowly
down  at  the  salt,  where  her  finger had traced out CC??. I
looked up at her, and nodded.
     "You know what bugs are like these days. I'm not  sure  if
there's any place that can't be bugged. But I'll tell you what.
I know some techs back at the studio, they're real clever about
these  things.  I could ask them and get back to you." Her hand
had wiped out the original message and written p-suit. I nodded
again, and saw that while she was without a  doubt  very,  very
drunk,  she  knew  how  to handle herself. There was a glint of
speculation in those eyes I wasn't sure  I  liked.  I  wondered
what I might be getting myself into.
     We  talked  a while longer, and she wrote out a time and a
destination in the salt crystals. Then someone else sat next to
her and started fondling her breasts  and  she  was  showing  a
definite interest, so I got up and returned to the dance floor.
     I danced almost an hour longer, but my heart wasn't really
in it.  A  guy  made  a  play  for  me,  and he was pretty, and
persuasive, and a very good, raunchy dancer, but in the  end  I
felt he just didn't try hard enough. When I'm not the aggressor
I can choose to take a lot of persuading. In the end I gave him
my  phone code and said call me in a week and we'd see, and got
the impression he probably wouldn't.
     I showered and bought a paper chemise in the locker  room,
staggered  to  the tube terminal, and got aboard. I fell asleep
on the way home, and the train had to wake me up.

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

        CHAPTER ELEVEN









     I've read about hangovers. You just about have to  believe
those  people  were exaggerating. If only a tenth of the things
written about them were true, I have no  desire  to  experience
one.  The  hangover  was  cured  long before I was born, just a
simple chemical matter, really, no tough science involved.  I'd
sometimes  wondered  if that was a good idea. There's an almost
biblical belief deep in the human psyche that we should pay  in
some  way  for  our over-indulgences. But when I think that, my
rational side soon takes over.  Might  as  well  wish  for  the
return of the hemorrhoid.
     When I woke up the next morning, my mouth tasted good.
     Too good.
     "CC, on line," quoth I.
     "What can I do for you?"
     "What's with the peppermint?"
     "I thought you liked peppermint. I can change the flavor."
     "There's  nothing  wrong  with  peppermint qua peppermint.
It's just passing strange to wake up with my mouth tasting like
anything but . . . well, it wouldn't mean anything  to  you,  I
don't  guess taste is one of your talents, but take my word for
it, it's vile."
     "You asked me to work on that. I did."
     "Just like that?"
     "Why not?"
     I was about to answer, but Fox stirred in  his  sleep  and
turned  over, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I
had shaken out a  toothcleaning  pill,  then  I  looked  at  it
sitting there in my hand.
     "Do I need this, then?"
     "No. It's gone the way of the toothbrush."
     "And  science  marches on. You know, I'm used to what they
call future shock, but I'm not used to being the cause of it."
     "Humans usually are the cause of the new inventions."
     "You said that."
     "But you can never tell when a human will take the time to
work on a particular problem. Now, I have no talent for  asking
questions like that. As you noted, my mouth never tastes bad in
the  morning,  so  why  should  I?  But  I have a lot of excess
capacity, and when a question  like  that  is  asked,  I  often
tinker  with  it and sometimes come up with a solution. In this
case, I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the  things  that
would  normally  rot  in your mouth while you are sleeping, and
changes them into things that taste good. They also clean  away
plaque and tartar and have a beneficial effect on gums."
     "I'm afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me."
     "It's in the water supply. You don't need much of it."
     "So   every  Lunarian  is  waking  up  today  and  tasting
peppermint?"
     "It comes in six delicious flavors."
     "Are you writing your own ad campaigns now? Do me a favor;
don't tell anyone this is my fault."
     I got into the shower and it turned on, gradually  warming
to  just  a  degree below the hottest I could stand. Don't ever
say anything about showers,  Hildy,  I  cautioned  myself.  The
goddam  CC  might  find  a  way to clean the human hide without
them, and I think I'd go mad without my morning shower.  I'm  a
singer  in  the  shower.  Lovers  have  told  me I do this with
indifferent esthetic effect, but it pleases  me.  As  I  soaped
myself I thought about a nanobot-infested world.
     "CC.  What  would  happen  if all those tiny little robots
were taken out of my body?"
     "Doing it would be impractical, to say the least."
     "Hypothetically."
     "You would be hypothetically dead within a year."
     I dropped the  soap.  I  don't  know  what  answer  I  had
expected, but it hadn't been that.
     "Are you serious?"
     "You asked. I replied."
     "Well . . . shit. You can't just leave it lying there."
     "I  suppose  not.  Then  let me list the reasons in order.
First, you  are  prone  to  cancer.  Billions  of  manufactured
organisms  work  night  and day seeking out and eating pinpoint
tumors throughout your body. They find one almost every day. If
left  unchecked,  they  would  soon  eat  you  alive.   Second,
Alzheimer's Disease."
     "What the hell is that?"
     "A  syndrome  associated  with  aging. Simply put, it eats
away at your brain cells.  Most  human  beings,  upon  reaching
their  hundredth  birthday  in  a  natural  state,  would  have
contracted it. This is an example of  the  reconstructive  work
constantly  going  on  in  your  body.  Failing brain cells are
excised and duplicated with healthy ones so the neural  net  is
not  disrupted.  You  would have forgotten your name and how to
find your way home years ago; the disease  started  showing  up
about the time you went to work at the Nipple."
     "Hah!  Maybe  those  things didn't do as good a job as you
thought. That would go a long way toward explaining . . . never
mind. There's more?"
     "Lung disease. The air in  the  warrens  is  not  actually
healthy  for  human  life. Things get concentrated, things that
could be cleaned from the air are not, because replacing  lungs
is  so  much  cheaper and simpler than cleaning up the air. You
could live in a disneyland to offset this; I  must  filter  the
air  much  more  rigorously in there. As it is, several hundred
alveoli are re-built in  your  lungs  every  day.  Without  the
nanobots, you'd soon begin to miss them."
     "Why didn't anyone ever tell me about all this?"
     "What  does  it  matter?  If you'd researched it you could
have found out; it's not a secret."
     "Yeah, but . . . I thought those kind of things  had  been
engineered out of the body. Genetically."
     "A popular misconception. Genes are certainly manipulable,
but they've  proved resistant to some types of changes, without
. . . unacceptable alterations in the gestalt, the  body,  they
produce and define."
     "Can you put that more plainly?"
     "It's difficult. It can be explained in terms of some very
complicated  mathematical  theories  having  to do with chaotic
effects and chemical holography. There's often no  single  gene
for  this  or that characteristic, good or bad. It's more of an
interference pattern produced by the overlapping effects  of  a
number  of genes, sometimes a very large number. Tampering with
one produces unintended side-effects, and tampering  with  them
all is often impossible without producing unwanted changes. Bad
genes  are  bound  up  this  way as often as good ones. In your
case, if I eradicated the faulty genes that insist on producing
cancers in your body, you'd no longer  be  Hildy.  You'd  be  a
healthier  person, but not a wiser one, and you'd lose a lot of
abilities and outlooks that, counterproductive though they  may
be in a purely practical sense, I suspect you treasure."
     "What makes me me."
     "Yes.  You  know  there are many things I can change about
you without affecting your . . . soul is the simplest  word  to
use, though it's a hazy one."
     "It's  the  first  one  you've  used that I understand." I
chewed on that  for  a  while,  shutting  off  the  shower  and
stepping  out,  dripping  wet,  reaching  for  a  towel, drying
myself.
     "It doesn't make sense  to  me  that  things  like  cancer
should be in the genes. It sounds contrasurvival."
     "From  an  evolutionary  viewpoint,  anything that doesn't
kill you before  you've  become  old  enough  to  reproduce  is
irrelevant  to  species  survival.  There's  even a philosophic
point of view that says cancer and things like it are good  for
the  race. Overpopulation can be a problem to a very successful
species. Cancer gets the old ones out of the way."
     "They're not getting out the way now."
     "No. It will be a problem someday."
     "When?"
     "Don't worry about it. Ask me again at the  Tricentennial.
As   a  preliminary  measure,  large  families  are  now  being
discouraged, the direct opposite of the  ethic  that  prevailed
after the Invasion."
     I  wanted to hear more, but I noticed the time, and had to
hustle to get ready in time to catch my train.
     #
     Tranquility Base is by far the biggest tourist  attraction
on  Luna,  and the reason is its historical significance, since
it is the spot where a human foot first  trod  another  planet.
Right?  If you thought that, maybe I could interest you in some
prime real estate on Ganymede with a great view of the volcano.
The real draw at Tranquility is just over the horizon and  goes
by  the  name  of  Armstrong Park. Since the park is within the
boundaries of Apollo Planetary Historical Preserve,  the  Lunar
Chamber  of  Commerce can boast that X million people visit the
site of the first Lunar landing every year, but the ads feature
the roller coaster, not the LEM.
     A good number of those tourists do find the time  to  ride
the  train  over  to  the  Base  itself and spend a few minutes
gazing at the forlorn  little  lander,  and  an  hour  hurrying
through  the  nearby  museum,  where most of the derelict space
hardware from 1960 to the Invasion is on display. Then the kids
begin to whine that they're bored,  and  by  then  the  parents
probably are, too, and it's back to the land of over-priced hot
dogs and not-socheap thrills.
     You  can't take a train directly to the base. No accident,
that. It dumps you at the foot of the thirty-story explosion of
lights that is the  sign  for  and  entrance  to  the  Terminal
Seizure,  what the ads call "The Greatest SphincterTightener in
the Known Universe." I  got  on  it  once,  against  my  better
judgment,  and  I guarantee it will show you things they didn't
tell you  about  in  astronaut  school.  It's  a  twenty-minute
MagLev,  six-gee, free trajectory descent into the tenth circle
of Hell that guarantees one blackout and seven  gray  hairs  or
your  money back. It's actually two coasters--the Grand Mal and
the Petit Mal--one  of  them  obviously  for  wimps.  They  are
prepared  to  hose  out the Grand Mal cars after every ride. If
you understand the attraction of that, please don't come to  my
home to explain it to me. I'm armed, and considered dangerous.
     I  walked  as  quickly as I could past the sign-30,000,000
(Count 'Em!) Thirty Million Lights!-and  noticed  the  two-hour
line  for  the  Grand  Mal ride was cleverly concealed from the
ticket  booth.  I  made  it  to  the  shuttle   train,   having
successfully  avoided the blandishments of a thousand hucksters
selling  everything  from  inflatable  Neil  dolls  to  talking
souvenir  pencil  sharpeners  to  put  a point on your souvenir
pencils. I boarded the train, removed a hunk  of  cotton  candy
from  a seat, and sat. I was wearing a disposable paper jumper,
so what the hell?
     The Base itself is an area large enough to play a game  of
baseball/6.  Those  guys never got very far from their ship, so
it made no sense to preserve  any  more  of  the  area.  It  is
surrounded by a stadium-like structure, un-roofed, that is four
levels  of  viewing area with all the windows facing inward. On
top is an un-pressurized level.
     I elbowed my  way  through  the  throngs  of  cameratoting
tourists from Pluto and made it to the suit rental counter. Oh,
dear.
     If  I  ever had to choose one sex to be for the rest of my
life, I would be female. I think the body  is  better-designed,
and  the  sex  is a little better. But there is one thing about
the female body that is distinctly inferior  to  the  male--and
I've  talked  to others about this, both Changers and dedicated
females, and ninety-five percent agree  with  me--and  that  is
urination. Males are simply better at it. It is less messy, the
position  is  more  dignified,  and  the  method  helps develop
hand-eye coordination and a sense of artistic expression, a  la
writing your name in the snow.
     But  what  the  hell,  right? It's never really much of an
annoyance . . . until you go to rent a p-suit.
     Almost three hundred years of  engineering  have  come  up
with  three  basic  solutions  to  the  problem:  the catheter,
suction devices, and . . . oh,  dear  lord,  the  diaper.  Some
advocate  a fourth way: continence. Try it the next time you go
on a twelve-hour hike on the surface. The catheter was  by  far
the  best.  It  is painless, as advertised . . . but I hate the
damn thing. It just feels wrong.  Besides,  like  the  suckers,
they  get  dislodged. Next time you need a laugh, watch a woman
trying to get her UroLator back in place. It could start a  new
dance craze.
     I've  never  owned a p-suit. Why spend the money, when you
need it once a year? I've rented a lot of them,  and  they  all
stank.  No  matter  how  they are sterilized, some odors of the
previous occupant will linger. It's bad enough in a man's suit,
but for real gut-wrenching stench you have to put on the female
model. They all use the suction method,  with  a  diaper  as  a
back-up.  At  a  place  like Tranquility, where the turnover is
rapid and the help likely to be  under-paid,  unconcerned,  and
slipshod,  some of the niceties will be overlooked from time to
time. I was once handed a suit that was still wet.
     I got into this one and sniffed cautiously; not  too  bad,
though  the perfume was cheap and obvious. I switched it on and
let the staff put it through a perfunctory  safety  check,  and
remembered  the  other  thing  I  didn't like about the suction
method. All that air flowing by can chill the  vulva  something
fierce.
     There  were  surgical  methods of improving the interface,
but I found them ugly, and they didn't make sense  unless  your
work  took  you  outside  regularly. The rest of us just had to
breathe shallowly and bear it, and try not to  drink  too  much
coffee before an excursion.
     The  air  lock  delivered  me onto the roof, which was not
crowded at all. I found a place at the  rail  far  from  anyone
else,  and  waited.  I  turned  off  my suit radio, all but the
emergency beacon.
     I said, "CC, what do I get out of it?"
     The CC is pretty good at picking up a conversation  hours,
weeks,  and  even years old, but the question was pretty vague.
He took a stab at it.
     "You mean the morning mouth preparation?"
     "Yeah. I thought it up. You did the  work,  but  then  you
gave it away without consulting me. Shouldn't there be a way to
make some money out of it?"
     "It's  defined as a health benefit, so its production cost
will be added to the health tax all Lunarians pay, plus a small
profit, which will go to you. It won't make you rich."
     "And no one gets to choose. They get it whether they  like
it or not."
     "If  they  object, I have an antibot available. No one has
so far."
     "Still sounds  like  a  subversive  plot  to  me.  If  the
drinking water ain't pure, what is?"
     "Hildy,  there's so many things in the King City municipal
water you could practically lift it with a magnet."
     "All for our own good."
     "You seem to be in a sour mood."
     "Why should I be? My mouth tastes wonderful."
     "If you're interested, the approval ratings  on  this  are
well  over ninety-nine percent. The favorite flavor, however is
Neutral-with-a-Hint-ofMint. And an unforeseen side  benefit  is
that it works all day, cleaning your breath."
     He'd  beaten halitosis, I realized, glumly. How did I feel
about that? Shouldn't I be rejoicing? I recalled the way  Liz's
breath  had smelled last night, that sour reek of gin. Should a
drunk's breath smell like a puppy's tongue? I was sure as  hell
being a crabby old woman about this, even I could see that. But
hell, I was an old woman, and often crabby. I'd found that as I
got older, I was less tolerant of change, for good or ill.
     "How  did  you  hear  me?" I asked, before I could get too
gloomy thinking about a forever-changing world.
     "The radio you switched off  is  suit-to-suit.  Your  suit
also  monitors  your vital signs, and transmits them if needed.
Using your access voice is defined as an  emergency  call,  not
requiring aid."
     "So  I'm  never  out from under the protective umbrella of
your eternal vigilance."
     "It keeps you safe," he said, and I told him to go away.
     #
     When Armstrong and Aldrin came in peace for  all  mankind,
it  was  envisioned  that  their landing site, in the vacuum of
space, would remain essentially unchanged for a million  years,
if need be. Never mind that the exhaust of lift-off knocked the
flag over and tore a lot of the gold foil on the landing stage.
The  footprints would still be there. And they are. Hundreds of
them, trampling a crazy pattern in the dust,  going  away  from
the  lander,  coming  back, none of them reaching as far as the
visitors' gallery. There are no other footprints  to  be  seen.
The  only change the museum curators worked at the site were to
set the flag back up, and suspend an ascentstage module about a
hundred feet above the landing stage,  hanging  from  invisible
wires.   It's   not  the  Apollo  11  ascent  stage;  that  one
crashlanded long ago.
     Things are often not what they seem.
     Nowhere in the free literature or the thousands of plaques
and audio-visual displays in the museum will you  hear  of  the
night  one hundred and eighty years ago when ten members of the
Delta Chi  Delta  fraternity,  Luna  University  Chapter,  came
around  on  their  cycles. This was shortly after the Invasion,
and the site was not guarded as it is now. There had just  been
a  rope  around  the landing area, not even a visitors' center;
postInvasion Lunarians didn't have time for luxuries like that.
     The Delts tipped the lander  over  and  dragged  it  about
twenty  feet.  Their  cycles  wiped out most of the footprints.
They were going to steal the flag and take  it  back  to  their
dorm,  but  one  of  them  fell  off  his  mount,  cracked  his
faceplate, and went to that great  pledge  party  in  the  sky.
Psuits  were  not  as safe then as they are now. Horseplay in a
p-suit was not a good idea.
     But not to worry. Tranquility Base was  one  of  the  most
documented  places in the history of history. Tens of thousands
of photos existed, including very detailed  shots  from  orbit.
Teams  of  selenolography  students  spent a year restoring the
Base. Each square meter was scrutinized,  debates  raged  about
the order in which footprints had been laid down, then two guys
went   out   there  and  tromped  around  with  replica  Apollo
moonboots, each step measured by laser, and were hauled out  on
a   winch   when  they  were  through.  Presto!  An  historical
re-creation passing as the real thing. This is  not  a  secret,
but very few people know about it. Look it up.
     I felt a hand flip the radio switch on my suit back on.
     "Fancy meeting you here," Liz said.
     "Quite  a  coincidence,"  I  said,  thinking  about the CC
listening in. She joined me, leaning on the railing and looking
out over the plain. Behind the far wall of the round  visitors'
gallery  I  could  see  thousands  of  people looking toward us
through the glass.
     "I come here  a  lot,"  she  said.  "Would  you  travel  a
half-million miles in a tinfoil toy like that?"
     "I  wouldn't  go  half a meter in it. I'd rather travel by
pogo stick."
     "They were real men in those days. Have you  ever  thought
about  it?  What it must have been like? They could barely turn
around in that thing. One of them made it back  with  half  the
ship blown up."
     "Yeah. I have thought about it. Maybe not as much as you."
     "Think  about  this, then. You know who the real hero was?
In my opinion? Good old Mike Collins, the poor sap  who  stayed
in  orbit. Whoever designed this operation didn't think it out.
Say something went wrong, say the lander crashes and these  two
die instantly. There's Collins up in orbit, all by himself. How
are  you  gonna deal with that? No ticker-tape parade for Mike.
He gets to attend the memorial service, and spend the  rest  of
his  life wishing he'd died with them. He gets to be a national
goat, is what he gets."
     "I hadn't thought of that."
     "So things go  right--and  they  did,  though  I'll  never
understand how--so who does the Planetary Park get named after?
Why, the guy who flubbed his 'first words' from the surface."
     "I thought that was a garbled transmission."
     "Don't  you  believe  it.  'Course, if I'd had two billion
people listening in, I might have fucked it up, too. That  part
was  probably scarier than the thought of dying, anyway, having
everybody watching you die,  and  hoping  that  if  it  did  go
rotten,  it  wouldn't  be your fault. This little exercise cost
twenty, thirty billion  dollars,  and  that  was  back  when  a
billion was real money."
     It  was  still  real money to me, but I let her ramble on.
This was her show; she'd brought me here, knowing only  that  I
was interested in telling her something in a place where the CC
couldn't overhear. I was in her hands.
     "Let's  go  for  a  walk,"  she  said,  and started off. I
hurried to catch up with her, followed her down several flights
of stairs to the surface.
     You can cover a lot of ground on the surface in  a  fairly
short  time.  The best gait is a hop from the ball of the foot,
swinging each leg out slightly to the side. There's no point in
jumping too high, it just wastes energy.
     I know there are still places on  Luna  where  the  virgin
dust  stretches as far as the eye can see. Not many, but a few.
The mineral wealth of my home planet is not great, and all  the
interesting  places have been identified and mapped from orbit,
so there's little incentive to visit some of  the  more  remote
regions.  By  remote,  I  mean  far  from  the centers of human
habitation; any spot on Luna is easily reachable by a lander or
crawler.
     Everywhere I'd ever been on the surface looked  much  like
the  land  around Tranquility Base, covered with so many tracks
you wondered where the big crowd  had  gone,  since  there  was
likely to be not a single soul in sight but whatever companions
you were traveling with. Nothing ever goes away on Luna. It has
been continuously inhabited by humans for almost two and a half
centuries.  Every time someone has taken a stroll or dropped an
empty oxygen tank the evidence is still there, so a place  that
got  two visitors every three or four years looks like hundreds
of people have gone by just a few minutes  before.  Tranquility
got  considerably  more  than  that.  There  was  not  a square
millimeter of undisturbed dust, and the litter was so thick  it
had  been  kicked  into  heaps here and there. I saw empty beer
cans with labels a hundred and fifty years old  lying  next  to
some they were currently selling in Armstrong Park.
     After a bit some of that thinned out. The tracks tended to
group  themselves into impromptu trails. I guess humans tend to
follow the herd, even when the herd is gone and the land is  so
flat it doesn't matter where you go.
     "You  left  too  early  last  night,"  Liz said, the radio
making it sound as if she was standing beside me when  I  could
see her twenty meters in front. "There was some excitement."
     "I thought it was pretty exciting while I was there."
     "Then  you must have seen the Duke of Bosnia tangling with
the punchbowl."
     "No, I missed that. But I tangled with him earlier."
     "That was you? Then it's your fault.  He  was  in  a  foul
mood.  Apparently  you didn't mark him enough; he figures if he
hasn't lost a kilo or two of flesh after pounding  the  sheets,
somebody just wasn't trying."
     "He didn't complain."
     "He  wouldn't.  I  swear,  I think I'm related to him, but
that man is so stupid, he hasn't got  the  brains  God  gave  a
left-handed  screwdriver. After you went home he got drunk as a
waltzing pissant and decided somebody had  put  poison  in  the
punch,  so  he  tipped  it  over  and  picked it up and started
banging people over the head with it. I had to  come  over  and
coldcock him."
     "You do give interesting parties."
     "Ain't  it the truth? But that's not what I was gonna tell
you about. We were having so  much  fun  we  completely  forgot
about  the  gifts,  so  I gathered everybody around and started
opening them."
     "You get anything nice?"
     "Well, a few had the sense to tape the receipt to the box.
I'll clear a little money on that. So I got to one that said it
was from the Earl of Donegal, which should have tipped me  off,
but  what  do I know about the goddam United Kingdom? I thought
it was a province of Wales, or something. I knew I didn't  know
the  guy,  but who can keep track? I opened it, and it was from
the Irish Republican Pranksters."
     "Oh, no."
     "The hereditary enemies of my  clan.  Next  thing  I  know
we're  all  covered  with  this green stuff, I don't wanna know
where it came from, but I know what it smelled like.  And  that
was the end of that party. Just as well. I had to mail half the
guests home, anyway."
     "I  hate  those jerks. On St. Patrick's day you don't dare
sit down without looking for a green whoopee cushion."
     "You think you got it bad? Every mick in King  City  comes
gunning  for  me  on the seventeenth of March, so they can tell
their buddies how they put one over on the bleedin' Princess o'
Wales. And it's only gonna get worse now."
     "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."
     "I'll crown 'em, all  right.  I  know  where  Paddy  Flynn
lives,  and I'm gonna get even if it harelips the Mayor and the
whole damn city council."
     I reflected that you'd have to  go  a  long  way  to  find
somebody  as  colorful  as the new Queen. Once again I wondered
what I was  doing  out  here.  I  looked  behind  me,  saw  the
four-story stadium around the landing site just about to vanish
over  the  horizon.  When  it was gone, it would be easy to get
lost out here. Not that I was worried about that. The suit  had
about  seventeen  different  kinds  of  alarms  and locators, a
compass, probably things I didn't even know about. No real need
for girl-scout tricks like noting the position of your shadow.
     But the sense of aloneness was a little oppressive.
     And illusory. I spotted another hiking party  of  five  on
the  crest  of a low rise off to my left. A flash of light made
me look up, and I saw  one  of  the  Grand  Mal  trains  arcing
overhead  on  one of the free-trajectory segments of its route.
It was spinning end over end, a  maneuver  I  remember  vividly
since  I'd  been  in  the front car, hanging from my straps and
watching the surface sweep by every two seconds when a big glob
of half-digested caramel corn and licorice  splattered  on  the
glass  in  front  of  me,  having  just missed my neck. At that
moment I had been regretting everything I  had  eaten  for  the
last  six  years,  and  wondering if I was going to be seeing a
good portion of it soon, right there beside the tasty treats on
the windshield. Keeping it down may be one of the most  amazing
things I ever did.
     "You  ever ride that damn thing?" Liz asked. "I try it out
every couple years, when I'm feeling mean. I swear, first  time
I think my ass sucked six inches of foam rubber out of the seat
cushion.  After  that, It's not so bad. About like a barbedwire
enema."
     I didn't reply--I'm  not  sure  how  one  could  reply  to
statements  like that--because as she spoke she had stopped and
waited for me to catch up, and she was punching  buttons  on  a
small device on her left hand. I saw a pattern of lights flash,
mostly  red,  then they turned green one by one. When the whole
panel was green she opened a service hatch on the front  of  my
suit  and  studied  whatever  she  found  in  there.  She poked
buttons, then straightened and made a thumbs-up gesture at  me.
She hung the device from a strap around my neck and regarded me
with her fists on her hips.
     "So,  you  want  to talk where nobody can listen in. Well,
talk, baby."
     "What's that thing?"
     "De-bugger. By which, it buggers up all the  signals  your
suit  is  sending  out,  but  not  enough so they'll send out a
search party. The machines up in orbit and down underground are
getting the signals that keep them happy, but it's not the real
stuff; it's what I want them to hear. Can't just step out  here
and  cut off your emergency freaks. That signal goes away, it's
an emergency in itself. But nobody can hear  us  now,  take  my
word for it."
     "What if we have a real emergency?"
     "I  was about to say, don't crack open if you want to keep
a step ahead of your pallbearers. What's on your mind?"
     Once again I found it hard to get started. I knew  once  I
got the first words out it would be easy enough, but I agonized
over those first words more than any first-time novelist.
     "This may take some time," I hedged.
     "It's  my day off. Come on, Hildy; I love you, but cut the
cards."
     So I started in on my third telling of my litany  of  woe.
You  get  better  at  these  things  as you go along. This time
didn't take as long as it had with either Callie  or  Fox.  Liz
walked along beside me, saying nothing, guiding me back to some
trail she was following when I started to stray.
     The  thing  was, I'd decided to tell it this time where it
logically should have  begun  the  other  two  times:  with  my
suicide  attempts.  And  it  was  a little easier to tell it to
someone I didn't know well, but not much. I  was  thankful  she
remained  silent through to the end. I don't think I could have
tolerated any of her unlikely folk sayings at that point.
     And  she  stayed  quiet  for  several  minutes  after  I'd
finished.  I  didn't  mind  that,  either.  As  before,  I  was
experiencing a rare  moment  of  peace  for  having  unburdened
myself.
     Liz  is  not  quite in the Italian class of gesturing, but
she did like to move her hands around when she talked. This  is
frustrating   in   a  p-suit.  So  many  gestures  and  nervous
mannerisms involve touching part of the head or body, which  is
impossible  when  suited  up. She looked as if she'd like to be
chewing on a knuckle, or  rubbing  her  forehead.  Finally  she
turned and squinted at me suspiciously.
     "Why did you come to me?"
     "I  didn't  expect  you  could solve my problem, if that's
what you mean."
     "You got that right. I like you well  enough,  Hildy,  but
frankly,  I don't care if you kill yourself. You want to do it,
do it. And I think I resent it that you tried to use me to  get
it done."
     "I'm sorry about that, but I wasn't even aware that's what
I was doing. I'm still not sure if I was."
     "Yeah, all right, it's not important."
     "What I heard," I said, trying to put this delicately, "if
you want  something  that's, you know, not strictly legal, that
Liz was the gal to see."
     "You heard that, did you?" She shot me a look that  showed
some  teeth,  but would never pass for a smile. She looked very
dangerous. She was dangerous. How easy it would be for  her  to
arrange  an  accident out here, and how powerless I would be to
stop her. But the look was  only  a  flicker,  and  her  usual,
amiable expression replaced it. She shrugged. "You heard right.
That's  what  I thought we were coming out here for, to do some
business. But after what you just  said,  I  wouldn't  sell  to
you."
     "The way I reasoned," I went on, wondering what it was she
sold,  "if  you're  used  to doing illegal deals, things the CC
couldn't hear about, you must have methods of  disguising  your
activities."
     "I see that now. Sure. This is one of them." She shook her
head slowly, and walked in a short circle, thinking it over. "I
tell you  Hildy,  I've  seen a rodeo, a three-headed man, and a
duck fart underwater, but this is the craziest thing I ever did
see. This changes all the rules."
     "How do you mean?"
     "Lots of ways. I never heard of that memorydump  business.
I'm  gonna  look  it  up  when  we get back. You say it's not a
secret?"
     "That's what the CC said, and a friend of mine  has  heard
of it."
     "Well,  that's  not  the real important thing. It's lousy,
but I don't know what I can do about it, and I don't  think  it
really concerns me. I hope not, anyway. But what you said about
the CC rescuing you when you tried to kill yourself in your own
home.
     "What  it  is, the main thing that me keeps walking around
free is what we call,  in  the  trade,  the  Fourth  Amendment.
That's the series of computer programs that--"
     "I've heard the term."
     "Right.  Searches  and seizures. An allpowerful, pervasive
computer that, if we let him loose, would make Big Brother seem
like my maiden aunt Vickie listening with a teacup against  the
bedroom  door.  Balance  that  with the fact that everybody has
something to hide, something we'd  rather  nobody  knew  about,
even  if it's not illegal, that lovely little right of privacy.
I think what's saved us is the people who make  the  laws  have
something to hide, just like the rest of us.
     "So  what  we  do,  in  the, uh, 'criminal underworld,' is
sweep for extra ears and eyes in our own homes . . .  and  then
do  our  business  right there. We know the CC is listening and
watching, but not the part that  types  out  the  warrants  and
knocks down the doors."
     "And that works?"
     "It  has so far. It sounds incredible when you think about
it, but I've been dodging in and out  of  trouble  most  of  my
life, using just that method . . . essentially taking the CC at
his word, now that you mention it."
     "It sounds risky."
     "You'd  think  so. But in all my life, I never heard of an
instance where the CC used any illegally-obtained evidence. And
I'm not just talking about making arrests. I'm talking about in
establishing probable cause and issuing warrants, which is  the
key to the whole search and seizure thing. The CC hears, in one
of  his incarnations, things that would be incriminating, or at
least be enough for a judge to issue a warrant for a search  or
a bug. But he doesn't tell himself what he knows, if you get my
meaning.  He's  compartmentalized. When I talk to him, he knows
I'm doing things that are against the law, and I know he  knows
it.  But that's the dealingwith-Liz part of his brain, which is
forbidden to tell the John  Law  part  of  his  brain  what  he
knows."
     We  walked a little farther, both of us mulling this over.
I could see that what I'd told her made her very uneasy. I'd be
nervous, too, in her place. I'd  never  broken  any  laws  more
serious  than  a  misdemeanor; it's too easy to get caught, and
there's nothing illegal I've ever particularly  wanted  to  do.
Hell, there's not that much that really is illegal in Luna. The
things  that  used  to  give  law enforcement ninety percent of
their  work--drugs,  prostitution,  and   gambling,   and   the
organizations   that   provided   these  things  to  a  naughty
populace--are all inalienable human rights  in  Luna.  Violence
short of death was just a violation, subject to a fine.
     Most  of the things that were still worth a heavy-duty law
were so disgusting I didn't even want to think about them. Once
more I wondered just what it  was  the  Queen  of  England  was
involved in that made her the gal to see.
     The biggest crime problem in Luna was theft of one sort or
another.  Until the CC is unleashed, we'll probably always have
theft. Other than that, we're  a  pretty  law-abiding  society,
which we achieved by trimming the laws back to a bare minimum.
     Liz spoke again, echoing my thoughts.
     "Crime just ain't a big problem, you know that," she said.
"Otherwise,  the  citizenry  in their great wisdom would clamor
for the sort of electronic cage I've  always  feared  we'd  get
sooner  or  later. All it would take would be to re-write a few
programs, and we'd see the biggest round-up  since  John  Wayne
took  the herd to Abilene. It's all just waiting to happen, you
know. In about a millisecond the CC could start singing like  a
canary  to the cops, and about three seconds later the warrants
could be  printed  up."  She  laughed.  "One  problem,  there's
probably  not  enough cops to arrest everybody, much less jails
to put them in. Every crime since the Invasion could be  solved
just like that. It boggles the mind just to think about it."
     "I don't think that's going to happen," I said.
     "No,  thinking  it  over,  what  the  CC's doing to you is
really for your own good, even if it turns my stomach. I  mean,
suicide's  a  civil  right,  isn't  it? What business does that
fucker have saving your life?"
     "Actually, I hate to admit it, but I'm glad he did."
     "Well, I would be too, you know, but it's the principle of
the thing. Listen, you know I'm going to  spread  this  around,
huh? I mean, tell all my friends? I won't use your name."
     "Sure. I knew you would."
     "Maybe  we should take extra precautions. Right offhand, I
can't think what they'd be, but I got a few friends who'll want
to brainstorm on this one. You know what the scary thing is,  I
guess.  He's  overridden  a basic program. If he can do one, he
could do another."
     "Catching you and curing you of your  criminal  tendencies
might be seen as . . . well, for your own good."
     "Exactly,  that's  exactly  where  that  kind  of bullshit
thinking leads. You give 'em an inch, and they take a parsec."
     We were back within sight of the visitors' gallery  again.
Liz  stopped,  began  drawing aimless patterns in the dust with
the tip of her boot. I  figured  she  had  something  else  she
wanted  to say, and knew she'd get to it soon. I looked up, and
saw another roller coaster train arc overhead. She looked up at
me.
     "So . . . the reason you wanted to know how to get  around
the CC, I don't think you mentioned it, and that was . . ."
     "Not so I could kill myself."
     "I had to ask."
     "I can't give you a concrete reason. I haven't done much .
. . well, I don't feel like I've done enough to . . ."
     "Take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end
them?"
     "Like  that.  I've  been  sort  of sleepwalking since this
happened. And I feel like I ought to be doing something."
     "Talking it over is doing something. Maybe all you can  do
except . . . you know, cheer up. Easy to say."
     "Yes.  How  do  you  fight  a  recurrent  suicidal urge? I
haven't been able to tell where it comes  from.  I  don't  feel
that  depressed.  But  sometimes  I  just  want  to  .  . . hit
something."
     "Like me."
     "Sorry."
     "You paid for it. Man, Hildy, I can't think of a  thing  I
would have done other than what you've told me. I just can't."
     "Well,  I  feel  like  I ought to be doing something. Then
there's the other part of it. The . . . violation. I wanted  to
find  out  if  it's possible to get away from the CC's eyes and
ears. Because . . . I don't want him watching if I,  you  know,
do  it again, damn it, I don't want him watching at all, I want
him out of my body, and out of my mind, and out  of  my  goddam
life,  because  I  don't  like  being  one  of  his  laboratory
animals!"
     She put her hand on my shoulder and I  realized  I'd  been
shouting.  That made me mad, it shouldn't have, I know, because
it was only a gesture of friendship and concern, but  the  last
thing  somebody crippled wants is your pity--and maybe not even
your sympathy--he just wants to  be  normal  again,  just  like
everybody  else.  Every gesture of caring becomes a slap in the
face, a reminder that you are not well. So damn your  sympathy,
damn  your  caring,  how  dare  you  stand over me, perfect and
healthy, and offer your help and your secret condescension.
     Yeah, right, Hildy, so if you're so independent  how  come
you keep spilling your guts to strangers passing on the street?
I barely knew Liz. I knew it was wrong, but I still had to bite
my  tongue  to keep from telling her to keep her stinking hands
off me, something I'd come close to half  a  dozen  times  with
Fox. One day soon I'd go ahead and say it, lash out at him, and
he'd probably be gone. I'd be alone again.
     "You  have to tell me how this all came out," Liz said. It
relaxed me. She could have offered to help, and we'd have  both
known it was false. A simple curiosity about how the story came
out  was  acceptable  to  me.  She  looked  at the walls of the
visitors' center. "I guess it's about time to piss on the  fire
and call in the dogs." She reached for the radio de-bugger.
     "I have one more question."
     "Shoot."
     "Don't  answer  if  you  don't want to. But what do you do
that's illegal?"
     "Are you a cop?"
     "What? No."
     "I know that. I had you checked out, you  don't  work  the
police beat, you aren't friends with any cops."
     "I know a couple of them fairly well."
     "But  you  don't hang with them. Anyway, if you were a cop
and you said you weren't, your testimony is inadmissible, and I
got your denial on tape.  Don't  look  so  surprised;  I  gotta
protect myself."
     "Maybe I shouldn't have asked."
     "I'm  not angry." She sighed, and kicked at a beer can. "I
don't guess many criminals think of themselves as criminals.  I
mean,  they  don't  wake  up  and say 'Looks like a good day to
break some laws.' I know what I do is illegal, but with me it's
a matter of principle.  What  we  desperados  call  the  Second
Amendment."
     "Sorry,  I'm not up on the U.S. Constitution. Which one is
that?"
     "Firearms." I tried to keep my face neutral. In truth, I'd
feared something a lot worse than that.
     "You're a gunrunner."
     "I happen to believe it's a basic human right to be armed.
The Lunar government disagrees strongly. That's why  I  thought
you  wanted to talk to me, to buy a gun. I brought you out here
because I've got several  of  them  buried  in  various  places
within a few kilometers."
     "You'd have sold me one? Just handed it over?"
     "Well, I might have told you where to dig."
     "But  how  can  you bury them? There's satellites watching
you all the time when you're out here."
     "I think I'll keep a  few  trade  secrets,  if  you  don't
mind."
     "Oh, sure, I was just--"
     "That's all right, you're a reporter, you can't help being
a nosy bitch."
     She  started  again  to  take  the  electronic device from
around my neck. I put my hand on it. I  hadn't  planned  to  do
that.
     "How much? I want to keep it."
     She narrowed her eyes at me.
     "You  gonna  walk  out  into  the bush, invisible, and off
yourself?"
     "Hell, Liz, I don't know. I'm not planning to. I just like
the idea that I can use it to be really alone if I want  to.  I
like the thought of being able to vanish."
     "It's  not quite that simple . . . but I guess it's better
than nothing."
     She named a price, I called her a stinking thief and named
a lower one. She named another. I'd have paid the first  price,
but  I  knew  she was a haggler, from a long line of people who
knew how to drive a hard bargain. We agreed soon, and she  gave
me  an  elaborate  set  of  instructions  on how to launder the
payment so  what  transactions  existed  in  the  CC  would  be
perfectly legal.
     By  then  I  was more than ready to go inside, as I'd been
trying my best to practice the fourth method  of  liquid  waste
management, and was doing the Gotta-Do-It Samba.

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

        CHAPTER TWELVE







     What  with covering the Collapse from the site and chasing
victims'   relatives,   dome   engineers,   politicians,    and
ambulances,  I  didn't make it into the newsroom for almost ten
days after my Change.
     It turns the world on its head, Changing. Naturally,  it's
not  the  world  that has altered, it's your point of view, but
subjective reality is in some ways more important than the  way
things  really  are, or might be; who really knows? Not a thing
had been moved in the busy newsroom when I strode into it.  All
the  furniture  was  just  where it had been, and there were no
unfamiliar faces at the desks. But  all  the  faces  now  meant
something  different.  Where  a  buddy  had sat there was now a
good-looking guy who seemed to be taking an interest in me.  In
place  of that gorgeous girl in the fashion department, the one
I'd intended to proposition someday, when I had the  time,  now
there  was  only  another woman, probably not even as pretty as
me. We smiled at each other.
     Changing is common, of course, part of everyday life,  but
it's  not such a frequent occurrence as to pass without notice,
at least not at my income level and that of most people in  the
office.  So  I  stood by the water cooler and for about an hour
was the center of attention, and I won't pretend I didn't  like
it.  My co-workers came and went, talked for a while, the group
constantly changing. What we were doing was establishing a  new
sexual  dynamic.  I'd  been male all the time I'd worked at the
Nipple. Everyone knew  that  the  male  Hildy  was  strictly  a
hetero.  But what were my preferences when female? The question
had never come up, and it was worth asking, because  a  lot  of
people  were  oriented  toward  one  sex or the other no matter
their present gender. So the  word  spread  quickly:  Hildy  is
totally  straight.  Homo-oriented girls might as well not waste
their time. As for heterogirls . . . sorry, ladies, you  missed
your  big  chance,  except for those three or four who no doubt
would go home and weep all night for what they could no  longer
have.  Well, you like to think that, anyway. I must admit I saw
no tears from them there at the cooler.
     Within ten minutes the crowd was completely  stag,  and  I
was  Queen  of  the  May. I turned down a dozen dates, and half
that many much more frank proposals. I feel it's  best  not  to
leap  right  into bed with co-workers, not until you have had a
chance to know them well enough to judge the  possible  scrapes
and  bruises  you  might  get  from  such an encounter, and the
tensions in the workplace that might ensue. I decided to  stick
with that rule even though I was about to quit my job.
     And  the  thing  was,  I  didn't know these guys. Not well
enough, anyway. I'd drunk with  them,  bullshitted  with  them,
mailed a few of them home from bars, argued with them, even had
fights  with  two of them. I'd seen them with women, knew a bit
of how they could be expected to behave. But  I  didn't  really
know  them. I'd never looked at them with female eyes, and that
can make one hell of a lot of difference. A guy who  seemed  an
honest,  reliable sensible fellow when he had no sexual designs
on you could turn out to be the worst jerk in the world when he
was trying to slip his hand under your skirt. You learn  a  lot
about  human nature when you Change. I feel sorry for those who
don't, or won't.
     And speaking of that . . .
     I kissed a few of the guys--a sisterly peck on the  cheek,
nothing  more--squared  my  shoulders,  and  marched  into  the
elevator to go beard the lion in his den. I had  a  feeling  he
was going to be hungry.
     Nothing  much happens at the Nipple without Walter hearing
about it. It certainly isn't his great personal  insights  that
bring him the news; none of us are sure exactly how he does it,
but  the  network of security cameras and microphones that lead
to his desk can't hurt. Still, he knows things he couldn't have
found out that way, and the general opinion is that  he  has  a
truly  vast  cabal  of spies, probably well-paid. No one I know
has ever admitted to snitching to Walter, and  I  can't  recall
anyone  ever  being  caught  at it, but trying to find one is a
perpetual office pastime. The usual method is  to  invent  some
false  but  plausible  bit of employee scandal, tell one person
about it, and see if it gets back to Walter. He never bites.
     He glanced up from his reading as I  entered  the  office,
then  looked  back  down. No surprise, and no comments about my
new body, and of course I had expected that. He'd  rather  die,
usually, than give you a compliment, or admit that anything had
caught  him  unprepared.  I  took a seat, and waited for him to
acknowledge me.
     I'd given a lot of thought to the problem  of  Walter  and
I'd dressed accordingly. Since he was a natural, and from other
clues  I'd  observed  over  the  years  of our association, I'd
concluded he might be a breast fancier. With that in mind,  I'd
worn  a  blouse  that  bared  my left one. With it I'd chosen a
short skirt and black gloves that reached to  the  elbows.  For
the  final touch I'd put on a ridiculous little hat with a huge
plume that drooped down almost over my left  eye  and  swooshed
alarmingly  through  the  air whenever I turned my head, a very
nineteen-thirtyish thing complete with a black net veil for  an
air  of mystery. The whole outfit was black, except for the red
hose. It needed black needle-tipped high heels, but that far  I
was not prepared to go, and everything else I had in the closet
looked  awful  with the hat, so I wore no shoes at all. I liked
the effect. From the corner of my eye, I could tell Walter did,
too, though he was unlikely to admit it.
     My guesses about him  had  been  confirmed  at  the  water
cooler  by  two  co-workers  who'd  recently  gone from male to
female. Walter was mildly homophobic, not aware of it, had been
baffled all his life by the very idea of changing sex, and  was
extremely  uncomfortable to find a male employee showing up for
work suddenly transformed into someone  he  could  be  sexually
interested  in.  He  would be very grouchy today and would stay
that way  for  several  months,  until  he  managed  to  forget
entirely  that  I  had  ever  been  male,  at  which  time  the
approaches would start. My plan was to play up to that,  to  be
as  female  as  a person could be, to keep him on the defensive
about it.
     Not that I planned to have sex with him. I'd rather bed  a
Galapagos  tortoise. My intention was to quit my job. I'd tried
it before, maybe not with the determination I was feeling  that
day, but I'd tried, and I knew how persuasive he could be.
     When  he  judged  he'd kept me waiting a suitable time, he
tossed the pages he'd been reading into a hopper,  leaned  back
in his huge chair, and laced his fingers behind his neck.
     "Nice hat," he said, confounding me completely.
     "Thanks." Damn, I already felt on the defensive. Resigning
was going to be harder if he was nice to me.
     "Heard you went to the Darling outfit for the body work."
     "That's right."
     "Heard he's on the way out."
     "That's  what he's afraid of. But he's been afraid of that
for ten years."
     He shrugged. There were circles of sweat in the armpits of
his rumpled white shirt, and a coffee stain on  his  blue  tie.
Once  again  I  wondered  where  he  found  sex  partners,  and
concluded he probably  paid  for  them.  I'd  heard  he'd  been
married for thirty years, but that had been sixty years ago.
     "If  that's  the  kind  of  work he's doing, maybe I heard
wrong." He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk.  I'd
just worked out that what he'd said could be a compliment to me
as  well  as  Bobbie,  which just threw me further off balance.
Damn him.
     "Reason  I  called  you  in  here,"  he  said,  completely
ignoring the fact that it was I who had requested this meeting,
"I  wanted  to  let  you  know  you  did real good work on that
Collapse story. I know  I  usually  don't  bother  to  tell  my
reporters when they've done a good job. Maybe that's a mistake.
But you're one of my best." He shrugged again. "Okay. The best.
Just  thought  I'd  tell you that. There's a bonus in your next
paycheck, and I'm giving you a raise."
     "Thanks, Walter." You son of a bitch.
     "And that Invasion Bicentennial stuff. Really  first-rate.
It's  exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for. And you were
wrong about it, too, Hildy. We got a  good  response  from  the
first  article,  and  the ratings have gone up every week since
then."
     "Thanks again." I was getting very  tired  of  that  word.
"But  I  can't  take credit for it. Brenda's been doing most of
the work. I take what she's done and do a little  punching  up,
cut a few things here and there."
     "I know. And I appreciate it. That girl's gonna be good at
hard news one of these days. That's why I paired you two up, so
you could  give  her  the  benefit  of  your  experience on the
feature writing, show her the ropes. She's learning fast, don't
you think?"
     I had to agree that she was, and he went on about  it  for
another  minute  or  two,  picking  out items he'd particularly
liked in her series. I was  wondering  when  he'd  get  to  the
point. Hell, I was wondering when I'd get to the point.
     So I drew a deep breath and spoke into one of his pauses.
     "That's why I'm here today, Walter. I want to be taken off
the Invasion  series."  Damn it. Somewhere between my brain and
my mouth that sentence had been short-circuited; I'd  meant  to
tell him I was leaving the pad entirely.
     "Okay," he said.
     "Now  don't  try  to talk me into staying on," I said, and
then stopped. "What do you mean, okay?" I asked.
     "I  mean  okay.  You're  off  the  Invasion  series.   I'd
appreciate  it if you'd continue to give Brenda some help on it
when she needs it, but only if it doesn't get  in  the  way  of
your other work."
     "I thought you said you liked the stuff I was doing."
     "Hildy,  you  can't  have it both ways. I did like it, and
you didn't like doing it. Fine, I'm letting  you  off.  Do  you
want back on?"
     "No . . . is this some sort of trick?"
     He  just shook his head. I could see he was enjoying this,
the bastard.
     "You mentioned my other work. What would  that  be?"  This
had  to  be  where  the punch line came, but I was at a loss to
envision any job he could want me to do that would require this
much buttering up.
     "You tell me," he said.
     "What do you mean?"
     "I seem to be having trouble using the language  today.  I
thought  it  was clear what I meant. What would you like to do?
You want to switch to another department? You  want  to  create
your own department? Name it, Hildy."
     I   suppose   I   was  still  feeling  shaky  from  recent
experiences, but I felt another anxiety  attack  coming  on.  I
breathed  deeply,  in  and  out,  several  times. Where was the
Walter I'd known and knew how to deal with?
     "You've always talked about a column," he was saying.  "If
you  want  it,  it can be arranged, but frankly, Hildy, I think
it'd be a mistake. You could do it, sure, but you're not really
cut out for it. You need work where you get out into the action
more regularly. Columnists, hell, they run  around  for  a  few
weeks  or  years, hunting stories, but they all get lazy sooner
or later and wait for the stories to come to  them.  You  don't
like  government  stuff and I don't blame you; it's boring. You
don't like straight gossip. My feeling is what you're  good  at
is  rooting  out the personality scandal, and getting on top of
and staying on top of the big, breaking story. If you  have  an
idea  for  a  column,  I'll  listen,  but I'd hoped you'd go in
another direction."
     Aha. Here it came.
     "And what direction is that?"
     "You tell me," he said, blandly.
     "Walter, frankly . .  .  you  caught  me  by  surprise.  I
haven't been thinking in those terms. What I came in here to do
was quit."
     "Quit?"  He looked at me dubiously, then chuckled. "You'll
never quit, Hildy. Oh, maybe  in  twenty,  thirty  more  years.
There's still things you like about this job, no matter how you
bitch about it."
     "I  won't  deny  that.  But the other parts are wearing me
down."
     "I've heard that before. It's  just  a  bad  phase  you're
going through; you'll bounce back when you get used to your new
role here."
     "And what is that?"
     "I told you, I want to hear your ideas on that."
     I sat quietly for some time, staring at him. He just gazed
placidly  back  at  me. I went over it again and again, looking
for mousetraps. Of course, there was nothing to guarantee  he'd
keep  his  word, but if he didn't, I could always quit then. Is
that what he was  counting  on?  Was  he  fighting  a  delaying
action,  knowing he could always bring his powers of persuasion
to bear again at a later date, after  he'd  screwed  me  and  I
started to howl?
     One thought kept coming back to me. It almost seemed as if
he'd known  when  I  walked into his office that I'd planned to
quit. Otherwise why the stroking, why the sugarplums?
     Did he really think I was that good? I knew I was good--it
was part of my problem, being so  proficient  at  something  so
frequently  vile--but was I that good? I'd never seen any signs
that Walter thought so.
     The main fact, though, I thought  sourly,  was  that  he'd
hooked  me.  I  was  interested in staying on at the Nipple--or
maybe at the better-respected Daily Cream--if I  could  make  a
stab at re-defining my job. But thoughts like that had been the
farthest  thing  from  my mind today. He was offering me what I
wanted, and I had no idea what that was.
     Once again, he seemed to read my thoughts.
     "Why don't you take a week or so to think this  over?"  he
said.  "No sense trying to come up with an outline for the next
ten, twenty years right here and now."
     "All right."
     "While you're doing that . . ." I  leaned  forward,  ready
for  him  to  jerk  all this away from me. This was the obvious
place to reveal his real intentions, now that he'd set the hook
firmly.
     "All right, Walter, let's see your hole card."
     He looked at me innocently, with just  a  trace  of  hurt.
Worse  and worse, I thought. I'd seen that same expression just
before he sent  me  out  to  cover  the  assassination  of  the
President  of  Pluto. Three gees all the way, and the story was
essentially over by the time I arrived.
     "The Flacks had a press release this  morning,"  he  said.
"Seems  they're  going  to  canonize  a  new  Gigastar tomorrow
morning."
     I turned it over and over, looking for the catch. I didn't
see one.
     "Why me? Why not send the religion editor?"
     "Because she'll be happy to pick up all the free  material
and  come right back home and let them write the story for her.
You know the Flacks; this thing is going to be prepared. I want
you there, see if you can get a different angle on it."
     "What possible new angle could there be on the Flacks?"
     For the first time he showed a little impatience.
     "That's what I pay you to find. Will you go?"
     If this was some sort of walterian trick, I  couldn't  see
it. I nodded, got up, and started for the door.
     "Take Brenda with you."
     I turned, thought about protesting, realized it would have
been just  a reflexive move, and nodded. I turned once more. He
waited for the traditional moment every movie fan  knows,  when
I'd just pulled the door open.
     "And  Hildy."  I turned again. "I'd appreciate it if you'd
cover yourself up when you come in here. Out of respect for  my
idiosyncrasies."
     This  was more like it. I'd begun to think Walter had been
kidnapped by mind-eaters from Alpha, and a  blander  substitute
left  in  his  place.  I  brought  up  some of the considerable
psychic artillery I  had  marshalled  for  this  little  foray,
though it was sort of like nuking a flea.
     "I'll wear what I please, where I please," I said, coldly.
"And if  you  have a complaint about how I dress, check with my
union." I liked the line, but it should have had a  gesture  to
go   with  it.  Something  like  ripping  off  my  blouse.  But
everything I thought of would have made me  look  sillier  than
him, and then the moment was gone, so I just left.
     #
     In  the elevator on my way out of the building I said "CC,
on line."
     "I'm at your service."
     "Did you tell Walter I've been suicidal?"
     There was, for the CC, a long pause, long enough that, had
he been human, I'd have suspected him of preparing a  lie.  But
I'd come to feel that the CC's pauses could conceal something a
lot trickier than that.
     "I'm  afraid you have engendered a programming conflict in
me," he said. "Because of a situation with Walter  which  I  am
not  at liberty to discuss or even hint at with you, most of my
conversations with him are strictly under the rose."
     "That sounds like you did."
     "I neither confirm nor deny it."
     "Then I'm going to assume you did."
     "It's a free satellite. You can assume  what  you  please.
The nearest I can get to a denial is to say that telling him of
your  condition  without  your approval would be a violation of
your rights of privacy . . . and I can add that I would find it
personally distasteful to do so."
     "Which still isn't a denial."
     "No. It's the best I can do."
     "You can be very frustrating."
     "Look who's talking."
     I'll admit that I was a bit wounded at the idea  that  the
CC  could  find  me  frustrating.  I'm  not sure what he meant;
probably my willful and repeated attempts to ignore his efforts
to  save  my  life.  Come  to  think  of  it,  I'd  find   that
frustrating,  too,  if  a  friend  of  mine  was trying to kill
herself.
     "I  can't  find  another  way  to  explain  his  .   .   .
unprecedented  coddling  of  me.  Like  he  knew I was sick, or
something."
     "In your position, I would have found it odd, as well."
     "It's contrary to his normal behavior."
     "It is that."
     "And you know the reason for that."
     "I know some of the reasons. And again, I can't  tell  you
more."
     You  can't  have it both ways, but we all want to. Certain
conversations between the CC and private citizens are protected
by Programs of  Privilege  that  would  make  Catholic  priests
hearing confession seem gossipy. So on the one hand I was angry
at  the  thought  the  CC  might  have  told  Walter  about  my
predicament; I'd specifically told him not tell anyone. On  the
other  hand, I was awfully curious to know what Walter had told
the CC, which the CC said would have violated his rights.
     Most of us give up trying to wheedle  the  CC  when  we're
five or six. I'm a little more stubborn than that, but I hadn't
done it since I was twenty. Still, things had changed a bit . .
.
     "You've overridden your programming before," I suggested.
     "And  you're one of the few who know about it, and I do it
only  when  the  situation  is  so  dire  I  can  think  of  no
alternative, and only after long, careful consideration.
     "Consider it, will you?"
     "I  will. It shouldn't take more than five or six years to
reach a conclusion. I warn you, I think the answer will be no."
     #
     One of the reasons I can hear  Walter  call  me  his  best
reporter  without  laughing out loud is that I had no intention
of showing up at the canonization the next day to meekly accept
a basketful of handouts and watch the show. Finding out who the
new Gigastar was going to be would be a bigger scoop  than  the
David  Earth  story.  So  I  spent the rest of the day dragging
Brenda around to see some of my  sources.  None  of  them  knew
anything,  though  I  picked  up  speculation  ranging from the
plausible--John Lennon--to the laughable -- -- Larry Yeager. It
would be just like  the  Flacks  to  cash  in  on  the  Nirvana
disaster  by  elevating a star killed in the Collapse, but he'd
have to have considerably more dedicated  followers  than  poor
Larry.  On  the  other  hand, there was a longstanding movement
within the church to give the Golden Halo to the  Mop-Top  from
Liverpool.  He  fulfilled  all  the  Flacks' qualifications for
Sainthood: wildly popular when alive,  a  twocentury-plus  cult
following,  killed  violently  before  his time. There had been
sightings and cosmic  interventions  and  manifestations,  just
like with Tori-san and Megan and the others. But I could get no
one to either confirm or deny on it, and had to keep digging.
     I did so long into the night, waking up people, calling in
favors, working Brenda like a draft horse. What had started out
as a bright-eyed adventure eventually turned her into a yawning
cadaverous   wraith,  still  gamely  calling,  still  listening
patiently to the increasingly nasty comments as  this  or  that
insider who owed me something told me they knew nothing at all.
     "If  one more person asks me if I know what time it is . .
." she said, and couldn't finish because her jaw  was  cracking
from  another  yawn. "This is no use, Hildy. The security's too
good. I'm tired."
     "Why do you think they call it legwork?"
     I kept at it until the wee hours, and stopped only because
Fox came in and told me Brenda had fallen asleep on  the  couch
in  the  other room. I'd been prepared to stay awake all night,
sustained by coffee and stims, but it was Fox's house, and  our
relationship was already getting a little rocky, so I packed it
in,  still  no  wiser as to who would be called to glory at ten
the next morning.
     I was bone weary, but I felt better than I had in quite  a
while.
     #
     Brenda  had the resilience of true youth. She joined me in
the bathroom the next morning looking none the worse for  wear.
I  felt the corners of her eyes jabbing me as she pretended not
to be  interested  in  Hildy's  Beauty  Secrets.  I  dialed  up
programs  on  the  various make-up machines and left them there
when I was through so she could copy down the  numbers  when  I
wasn't  looking.  I  remember  thinking  her mother should have
taught her some of  these  tricks--Brenda  wore  little  or  no
cosmetics,  seemed  to  know  nothing  about  them--but  I knew
nothing about her mother. If the  old  lady  wouldn't  let  her
daughter  have  a  vagina,  there  was  no  telling  what other
restrictions had been in effect in the "Starr" household.
     The one thing I  still  hadn't  adjusted  to  about  being
female again was learning to allow for the two to three minutes
extra  I require to get ready to face the world in the morning.
I think of it as Woman's Burden. Let's not get  into  the  fact
that  it's a self-imposed one; I like to look my best, and that
means enhancing  even  Bobbie's  artistry.  Instead  of  taking
whatever  the  autovalet  throws  into my hand, I deliberate at
least twenty seconds over what to wear. Then  there's  coloring
and  styling  the  hair  to  compliment  it, choosing a make-up
scheme  and  letting  the  machines  apply   it,   eye   color,
accessories,  scent  .  .  . the details of the Presentation of
Hildy as I wish to present her are endless, time-consuming .  .
. and enjoyable. So maybe it's not such a burden after all, but
the result on the morning of the canonization was that I missed
the  train  I had planned to catch by twenty seconds and had to
wait ten minutes for the next one. I  spent  the  time  showing
Brenda  a  few tricks she could do to her standard paper jumper
that would emphasize her best points--though picking  out  good
points  on that endless rail of a body taxed my inspiration and
my tact to their limits.
     She was coltishly pleased at  the  attention.  I  saw  her
scrutinizing  my pale blue opaque body stocking with the almost
subliminal moir of even lighter blue running through the weave,
and had a pretty good idea of what she'd be  wearing  the  next
day.  I  decided  I'd  drop some subtle hints to discourage it.
Brenda  in  a  body  stocking  would  make   as   much   sense,
fashion-wise, as a snood on a dry salami.
     #
     The  Grand  Studio  of  the First Latitudinarian Church of
Celebrity Saints is in the studio district, not  far  from  the
Blind  Pig,  convenient  to  the  many  members who work in the
entertainment industry. The exterior is not much  to  look  at,
just  a  plain warehouse-type door leading off one of the tall,
broad corridors of the upper parts of King City zoned for light
manufacturing-- which  is  a  good  description  of  the  movie
business,  come  to  think  of  it.  Over  the entrance are the
well-known initials F.L.C.C.S.  framed  in  the  round-cornered
rectangle  that  has  symbolized  television long after screens
ceased to be round-cornered  rectangles  anywhere  but  in  the
Flacks' Grand Studio.
     Inside  was  much  better.  Brenda  and  I  entered a long
hallway with a roof invisible behind multicolored spots. Lining
the hall were huge holos and shrines  of  the  Four  Gigastars,
starting with the most recently canonized.
     First  was Mambazo Nkabinde--"Momby" to all his fans. Born
shortly before the Invasion in Swaziland, a nation that history
has all but forgotten, emigrated to Luna with his father at age
three under some sort of racial quota system in effect  at  the
time.   As   a   young   man,   invented  Sphere  Music  almost
single-handedly. Also  known  as  The  Last  Of  The  Christian
Scientists,  he  died  at  the  age of forty-three of a curable
melanoma, presumably  after  much  prayer.  The  Latitudinarian
Church  was  not  prejudiced  about  inducting members of other
faiths; he had been canonized fifty  years  earlier,  the  last
such ceremony until today.
     Next  we  passed the exhibits in praise of Megan Galloway,
the leading and probably best proponent  of  the  now-neglected
art  of  "feelies." She had a small but fanatical following one
hundred years after  her  mysterious  disappearance--an  ending
that  made  her  the  only one of the Flack Saints whose almost
daily "sightings" could actually be founded in fact.  The  only
female out of four non-Changing Gigastars, she was, with Momby,
a  good  example  of  the  pitfalls  of  enshrining celebrities
prematurely. If it weren't for the fact that she  provided  the
only  costuming  role  model for the women of the congregation,
she might have been dethroned long ago, as the feelies were  no
longer  being  made  by anyone. Feelie fans had to be satisfied
with tapes at least eighty years old. No one in the Church  had
contemplated  the  eclipse  of an entire art form when they had
elevated her into their pantheon.
     I actually paused before the next shrine, the one  devoted
to  Torinaga  Nakashima: "Tori-san." He was the only one I felt
deserved to be appreciated for his life's work. It was  he  who
had  first mastered the body harp, driving the final nails into
the coffin he had fashioned for the electric guitar,  long  the
instrument  of choice for what used to be known as rocking-roll
music. His music still sounds fresh to me today,  like  Mozart.
He  had died in Japan during the first of the Three Days of the
Invasion,  battling  the  implacable  machines  or  beings   or
whatever they were that had stalked his native city, unbeatable
Godzillas  finally  arrived  at the real Tokyo. Or so the story
went. There were those who said he had died at the wheel of his
private yacht, trying his best to get the hell out of there and
catch the last shuttle to Luna, but in this case I  prefer  the
legend.
     And  last  but  indisputably first among the Saints, Elvis
Aron Presley, of Tupelo, Mississippi; Nashville; and Graceland,
Memphis,  Tennessee,  U.S.  of  A.  It   was   his   incredibly
stillascendant  star one hundred years after his death that had
inspired the retired ad agency executives who were the founding
fathers  of  the  Flacks  to  concoct  the  most  blatant   and
profitable  promotional  campaign  in the inglorious history of
public relations: The F.L.C.C.S.
     You could say what you want about the Flacks-and I'd  said
a  lot, in private, among friends--but these people knew how to
treat the working press. After the Elvis pavilion the crowd was
divided into two parts. One was a long, unmoving line, composed
of hopeful congregants trying to get a seat in the last row  of
the  balcony, some of them waving credit cards which the ushers
tried not to sneer at; it took more than just money to buy your
way into this shindig. The rest of the  crowd,  the  ones  with
press  passes  stuck  into  the  brims  of  their battered gray
fedoras, were steered through a gap in velvet ropes and led  to
a  spread  of  food and drink that made UniBio's efforts at the
ULTRATingle rollout look like the garbage  cans  in  the  alley
behind a greasy spoon.
     A  feeding  frenzy among veteran reporters is not a pretty
sight. I've been at free feeds where you needed  to  draw  your
hand  back quickly or risk having a finger bitten off. This one
was wellmanaged, as you'd expect from the Flacks.  Each  of  us
was  met by a waiter or waitress whose sole job seemed to be to
carry our plates and smile, smile,  smile.  There  were  people
there  who  would have fasted for three days in anticipation if
the Flacks had announced the ceremony ahead of  time;  I  heard
some  grousing  about that. Reporters have to find something to
complain about, otherwise they might  commit  the  unpardonable
sin of thanking their hosts.
     I  walked,  in  considerable  awe, past an entire juvenile
brontosaur carcass, candied, garnished with glace'd  fruit  and
with  an  apple  in  its  mouth.  They  were  rolling something
unrecognizable away--I was told it had been a  Tori-san  effigy
made entirely from sashimi--and replacing it with a three-meter
likeness of Elvis in his Vegas Period, in marzipan. I plucked a
sequin from the suit of lights and found it to be very tasty. I
never did find out what it was.
     I  built  what might easily qualify as the Sandwich of the
Century. Never mind what was in it; I  gathered  from  Brenda's
queasy expression as she watched my Flackite wallah carrying it
that  ordinary mortals--those who did not understand the zen of
cold cuts--might find some of my choices dissonant, to say  the
least. I admit not everyone is able to appreciate the exquisite
tang  of  pickled pigs knuckles rubbing shoulders with rosettes
of whipped cream. Brenda herself needed no  plate-carrier.  She
was schlumping along with just a small bowl of black olives and
sweet pickles. I hurried, realizing that people were soon going
to understand that she was with me. I don't think she even knew
what one item in ten was, much less if she liked it or not.
     The  room  the Flacks called the Grand Studio had formerly
been the largest sound stage at NLF. They had fixed  it  up  so
the  area  we saw was shaped like a wedge, narrowing toward the
actual stage in the front of the room. It  was  quite  a  large
wedge.  The  walls  on  either  side leaned in slightly as they
rose, and were composed entirely of thousands upon thousands of
glass-faced television screens, the old kind, rectangular  with
rounded  corners, a shape that was as important to Flackites as
the cross was to Christians. The Great Tube symbolized  eternal
life  and,  more important, eternal Fame. I could see a certain
logic in that. Each of the screens, ranging in size from thirty
centimeters to as much as ten meters across, was  displaying  a
different image as Brenda and I entered, from the lives, loves,
films, concerts, funerals, marriages and, for all I knew, bowel
movements and circumcisions of the Gigastars. There were simply
too  many images to take in. In addition, holos floated through
the room like enchanted bubbles, each with its smiling image of
Momby, Megan, Tori-san, and Elvis.
     The Flacks knew who this show  was  really  for;  we  were
escorted to an area at the edge of the stage itself. The actual
congregants  had  to  be  content  with the cheap seats and the
television  screens.  There  were  balconies   upon   balconies
somewhere  back  there,  vanishing  into the suspendedspotlight
theme the Flacks favored.
     Because we were late most of the seats right up front  had
been  taken.  I was about to suggest we split up when I spotted
Cricket at a ringside table with an empty chair beside  her.  I
grabbed  Brenda with one hand and a spare chair with the other,
and pulled both through the noisy crowd. Brenda was embarrassed
to make everyone scoot over to make room  for  her  chair;  I'd
have  to speak to her about that. If she couldn't learn to push
and shove and shout, she had no business in the news game.
     "I love the body, Hildy," Cricket said as I wedged  myself
in  between  them.  I preened a bit as a large pink pitcher was
set in front of me. These Flacks were trained well; I was about
to ask for lime wedges when an arm came around me  and  left  a
crystal bowl full of them.
     "Do I detect a note of wistfulness?" I said.
     "You  mean  because  they've  retired your jersey from the
great game of cocksmanship?" She  seemed  to  consider  it.  "I
guess not."
     I  pouted, but it was for show. Frankly, the whole idea of
having made love to her seemed to me by now an aberration.  Not
that  I  wouldn't  be  interested  again when I Changed back to
male, in thirty or so years,  if  she  happened  to  be  female
still.
     "Nice  job on that lovers-after-death pic out at Nirvana,"
I said. I was poking through the assortment of press perks in a
basket before me and trying to eat a part of my  sandwich  with
my  other  hand.  I found a gold commemorative medal, inscribed
and numbered, that I knew I could get four hundred for  at  any
pawnbroker  in the Leystrasse, so long as I got there quick and
beat every other reporter in Luna to the punch. A forlorn hope;
I saw three of the damn things depart by  messenger,  and  they
wouldn't be the first. By now the medals would be a drug on the
market. The rest of the stuff was mostly junk.
     "That was you?" Brenda said, leaning over to ogle Cricket.
     "Cricket, Brenda. Brenda, meet Cricket, who works for some
scurrilous  rag  or  other  whose  initials  are  S.S.  and who
deserves an Oscar for the job she is doing  covering  her  deep
despair  at  having  had only one opportunity to experience the
glory that was me."
     "Yeah, it was sort of gory," Cricket said, reaching across
me to  shake  hands.  "Nice  to  meet  you."  Brenda  stammered
something.
     "How much did that shot cost you?"
     Cricket looked smug. "It was quite reasonable."
     "What do you mean?" Brenda asked. "Why did it cost you?"
     We  both  looked  at her, then at each other, then back at
Brenda.
     "You mean that  was  staged?"  she  said,  horrified.  She
looked  at  the  olive  in  her hand, then put it back into the
bowl. "I cried when I saw it," she said.
     "Oh, stop looking like somebody just