"That's ridiculous." "Maybe so. But I think I'm right Changing is almost always more than just re-arranging the plumbing. Other things change, too. So I was caught in the middle, thinking of you as a man who'd do something stupid in the presence of a little pussy, not as the ruthless cunt you'd become." "It was never like that with me and Brenda." "Oh, spare me. Sure, I know you never screwed her. She told me that. But a man's always aware of the possibility. As a woman you know that. And you use it, if you have any brains, just like I do." I couldn't say she was definitely wrong. I know that changing sex is, for me, more than just a surface thing. Some attitudes and outlooks change as well. Not a lot, but enough to make a difference in some situations. "You're sleeping with her, aren't you?" I asked, in some surprise. "Sure. Why not?" She took another drink and squinted at me, then shook her head. "You're good at a lot of things, Hildy, but not so good at people." I wasn't sure what she meant by that. Not that I disagreed, I just wasn't sure what she was getting at. "She sent you out here?" "She helped. I would have come out here anyway, to see if I really wanted to put a few new dents in your skull. I was going to, but what's the point? But she's worried about you. She said having Silvio die in your arms like that hit you pretty hard." "It did. But she's exaggerating." "Could be. She's young. But I'll admit, I was surprised to see you quit. You've talked about it ever since I've known you, so I just assumed it was nothing but talk. You really going to squat out here for the rest of your life?" She looked sourly around at the blasted land. "What the hell you gonna do, once this slum is finished? Grow stuff? What can you raise out here, anyway?" "Calluses and blisters, mostly." I showed her my hands. "I'm thinking of entering these in the county fair." She poured another drink, corked the bottle, and handed it to me. She drained her glass in one gulp. "Lord help me, I think I'm beginning to like this stuff." "Are you going to ask me to go back to work?" "Brenda wanted me to, but I said I don't want to get that mixed up in your karma. I've got a bad feeling about you, Hildy. I don't know just what it is, but you've had an absolutely incredible run of good luck, for a reporter. I mean the David Earth story, and Silvio." "Not such good luck for David and Silvio." "Who cares? What I'm saying, I have this feeling you'll have to pay for all that. You're in for a run of bad luck." "You're superstitious." "And bi-sexual. See, you learned three new things about me today." I sighed, and debated taking one more drink. I knew I'd fall off the roof if I did. "I want to thank you, Cricket, for coming all the way out here to tell me I'm jinxed. A gal really needs to hear that from time to time." She grinned at me. "I hope it ruined your day." I waved my hand at the desolation around us. "How could anyone ruin all this?" "I'll admit, making all this any worse is probably beyond even my formidable powers. And I'll go now, back to the glitter and glamour and madcap whirl of my life, leaving you to languish with the lizards, and will add only these words, to wit, Brenda is right, you do have friends, and I'm one, though I can't imagine why, and if you need anything, whistle, and maybe I'll come, if I don't have anything else to do." And she leaned over and kissed me. # They say that if you stay in one place long enough, everybody you ever met will eventually go by that spot. I knew it had to be true when I saw Walter struggling up the trail toward my cabin. I couldn't imagine what could have brought him out to West Texas other than a concatenation of mathematical unlikelihoods of Dickensian proportions. That, or Cricket and Brenda were right: I did have friends. I needn't have worried about that last possibility. "Hildy, you're a worthless slacker!" he shouted at me from three meters away. And what a sight he was. I don't think he'd ever visited an historically-controlled disneyland in his life. One can only imagine, with awe, the titanic struggles it must have taken to convince him that he could not wear his office attire into Texas, that his choices were nudity, or period dress. Well, nudity was right out, and I resolved to give thanks to the Great Spirit for not having had to witness that. The sight of Walter in his skin would have put the buzzards off their feed. So out of the rather limited possibilities in his size in the disney tourist costume shop, he had selected a cute little number in your basic Riverboat Gambler style: black pants, coat, hat, and boots, white shirt and string tie, scarlet-andmaroon paisley vest with gold edging and brass watch fob. As I watched, the last button on the vest gave up the fight, popping off and ricocheting off a rock with a sound familiar to watchers of old western movies, and the buttons on his shirt were left to struggle on alone. Lozenges of pale, hairy flesh were visible in the gaps between buttons. His belt buckle was buried beneath a substantial overhang. His face was running with sweat. All in all, better than I would have expected, for Walter. "Kind of far from the Mississippi, aren't you, tinhorn?" I asked him. "What the hell are you talking about?" "Never mind. You're just the man I wanted to see. Give me a hand unloading these planks, will you? It'd take me all day, alone." He gaped at me as I went to the buckboard which had been sitting there for an hour, filled with fresh, best-quality boards from Pennsylvania, boards I intended to use for the cabin floor, when I got around to it. I clambered up onto the wagon and lifted one end of a plank. "Well, come on, pick up the other end." He thought it over, then trudged my way, looking suspiciously at the placid team of mules, giving them a wide berth. He hefted his end, grunting, and we tossed it over the side. After we'd tossed enough of them to establish a rhythm, he spoke. "I'm a patient man, Hildy." "Hah." "Well, I am. What more do you want? I've waited longer than most men in my position would have. You were tired, sure, and you needed a rest . . . though how anybody could think of this as a rest is beyond me." "You waited for what?" "For you to come back, of course. That's why I'm here. Vacation's over, my friend. Time to come back to the real world." I set my end of the board down on the pile, wiped my brow with the back of my arm, and just stared at him. He stared back, then looked away, and gestured to the lumber. We picked up another board. "You could have let me know you were taking a sabbatical," he said. "I'm not complaining, but it would have made things easier. Your checks have kept on going to your bank, of course. I'm not saying you're not entitled, you'd saved up . . . was it six, seven months vacation time?" "More like seventeen. I've never had a vacation, Walter." "Something always came up. You know how it is. And I know you're entitled to more, but I don't think you'd leave me out on a limb by taking it all at once. I know you, Hildy. You wouldn't do that to me." "Try me." "See, what's happened, this big story has come up. You're the only one I'd trust to cover it. What it is--" I dropped my end of the last board, startling him and making him lose his grip. He danced out of the way as the heavy timber clattered to the floor of the wagon. "Walter, I really don't want to hear about it." "Hildy, be reasonable, there's no one else who-" "This conversation got off on the wrong foot, Walter. Some way, you always manage to do that with me. I guess that's why I didn't come right up to you and say it, and that was a mistake, I see it now, so I'm going to--" He held up his hand, and once more I fell for it. "The reason I came," he said, looking down at the ground, then glancing up at me like a guilty child, " . . . well, I wanted to bring you this." He held out my fedora, more battered than ever from being stuffed into his back pocket. I hesitated, then took it from him. He had a sort of half smile on his face, and if there had been one gram of gloating in it I'd have hurled the damn thing right in his face. But there wasn't. What I saw was some hope, some worry, and, this being Walter, a certain gruff-but-almost-lovable diffidence. It must have been hard for him, doing this. What can you do? Throwing it back was out. I can't say I ever really liked Walter, but I didn't hate him, and I did respect him as a newsman. I found my hands working unconsciously, putting some shape back into the hat, making the crease in the top, my thumbs feeling the sensuous material. It was a moment of high symbolism, a moment I hadn't wanted. "It's still got blood on it," I said. "Couldn't get it all out. You could get a new one, if this has bad memories." "It doesn't matter one way or the other." I shrugged. "Thanks for going to the trouble, Walter." I tossed the hat on a pile of wood shavings, bent nails, odd lengths of sawed lumber. I crossed my arms. "I quit," I said. He looked at me a long time, then nodded, and took a sopping handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped his brow. "If you don't mind, I won't help you with the rest of this," he said. "I've got to get back to the office." "Sure. Listen, you could take the wagon back into town. The mule skinner said he'd be back for it before dark, but I'm worried the mules might be getting thirsty, so it would--" "What's a mule?" he said. # I eventually got him seated on the bare wooden board, reins in hand, a doubtful expression on his choleric face, and watched him get them going down the primitive trail to town. He must have thought he was "driving" the mules; just let him try to turn them from the path to town, I thought. The only reason I'd let him do it in the first place was that the mules knew the way. That was the end of my visitors. I kept waiting for Fox or Callie to show up, but they didn't. I was glad to have missed Callie, but it hurt a little that Fox stayed away. It's possible to want two things at once. I really did want to be left alone . . . but the bastard could have tried. # My life settled into a routine. I got up with the sun and worked on my cabin until the heat grew intolerable. Then I'd mosey down into New Austin come siesta time for a few belts of a home brew the barkeep called Sneaky Pete and a few hands of five card stud with Ned Pepper and the other regulars. I had to put on a shirt in the saloon: pure sex discrimination, of the kind that must have made women's lives hell in the 1800's. When working, I wore only dungarees, boots, and a sombrero to keep the worst heat off my head. I was brown as a nut from the waist up. How women wore the clothes the bargirls had on in a West Texas summer is one of the great mysteries of life. But, come to think of it, the men dressed just as heavily. A strange culture, Earth. As the evening approached I'd return to the cabin and labor until sundown. In the evening's light I would prepare my supper. Sometimes one of my friends would join me. I developed a certain reputation for buttermilk biscuits, and for my perpetual pot of beans, into which I'd toss some of the unlikeliest ingredients imaginable. Maybe I would find a new career, if I could interest my fellow Lunarians in the subtleties of Texas chili. I always stayed awake for about an hour after the last light of day had faded. I have no way of comparing, of course, but it seemed to me the nightly display of starry sky was probably pretty close to the real thing, what I'd see if I were transported to the real Texas, the real Earth, now that all man's pollution was gone. It was glorious. Nothing like a Lunar night, not nearly as many stars, but better in its own way. For one thing, you never see the Lunar night sky without at least one thickness of glass between you and the heavens. You never feel the cooling night breezes. For another, the Lunar sky is too hard. The stars glare unmercifully, unblinking, looking down without forgiveness on Man and all his endeavors. In Texas the stars at night do indeed burn big and bright, but they wink at you. They are in on the joke. I loved them for that. Stretched out on my bedroll, listening to the coyotes howling at the moon--and I loved them for that, too, I wanted to howl with them . . . I achieved the closest approximation of peace I had ever found, or am likely to find. I spent something like two months like that. There was no hurry on the cabin. I intended to do it right. Twice I tore down large portions of it when I learned a new method of doing something and was no longer satisfied with my earlier, shoddier work. I think I was afraid of having to think of something else to do when I finished it. And with good reason. The day came, as it always must, when I could find nothing else to do. There was not a screw to tighten on a single hinge, not a surface to sand smoother, no roof shingle out of place. Well, I reasoned, there was always furniture to make. That ought to be a lot harder than walls, a floor, and a roof. All I had inside was some cheap burlap curtains and a rude bedstead. I spread my bedroll out on the straw mattress and spent a restless night "indoors" for the first time in many weeks. The next day I prowled the grounds, forming vague plans for a vegetable garden, a well, and-no kidding--a white picket fence. The fence would be easy. The garden would be a lot harder, an almost impossible project worthy of my mood at the time. As for a well, I'd have to have one for the garden, but somehow the fiction of worth-while labor broke down when I thought about a well. The reason was that, in Texas, there is no more water under the surface than there is anywhere else on Luna. If you want water and aren't conveniently near the Rio Grande, what you do is dig or drill to a level determined by lottery for each parcel of land, and when you've done that, the disneyland board of directors will have a pipe run out to the bottom of your well and you can pretend you've struck water. At my cabin that depth was fifteen meters. The labor of digging that deep didn't daunt me. I knew I was up to it. Hell, even with a female hormonal system impeding me I'd developed shoulders and biceps that would have made Bobbie go into aesthetic shock. Trading my plane and saw for a pick and shovel would be no problem. That was the part I looked forward to. What didn't thrill me was the pretending. I'd gotten good at it, looking at the stars at night and marveling at the size of the universe. I'd not gone loony; I knew they were just little lights I could have held in my hand. But at night, weary, I could forget it. I could forget a lot of things. I didn't know if I could forget digging fifteen meters for a dry hole, then seeing the pipe laid and the cool, sweet, life-giving water fill up that dry hole. I hate to get too metaphorical. Walter always howled when I did. Readers tire of metaphors easily, he's always said. Why the well, and not the stars? Why come this far and balk, why lose one's imagination right at the end? I don't know, but it probably had to do with the dry hole concept. I just kept thinking my entire life was a big dry hole. All I'd ever accomplished that I was in any way proud of was the cabin . . . and I hated the cabin. That night I couldn't get to sleep. I fought it a long time, then I got up and stumbled through the night with no lantern until I found my hatchet. I chopped the bedstead to kindling and piled it against the wall, and I soaked that kindling in kerosene. I set it alight and walked out the front door, leaving it open to make a draft, and went slowly up the low hill behind my property. There I squatted on my haunches and watched, feeling very little emotion, as the cabin burned to the ground. =*= =*= =*= =*= CHAPTER FIFTEEN I wonder if there's a lonelier place anywhere than an arena designed to seat thirty or forty thousand people, empty. The King City slash-boxing venue did have an official name, the Somebody-or-other Memorial Gladiatorium, but it was another case of honoring someone well-known at the time that sports history has forgotten. The arena is called, in all the sports pages, in the minds of bloodthirsty fans everywhere, even on the twenty-meter sign on the outside, simply the Bucket of Blood. It was peaceful now. The concentric circles of seats were in shadows. The sound system was silent. The blood gutters around the ring had been sluiced clean, ready for the evening's fresh torrents. Some of that new blood would come from the man now standing alone under the ring of harsh white lights suspended from the obscured ceiling; MacDonald. I walked down the gentle curvature of the aisle toward him. He was nude, standing with his back to me. I thought I didn't make any noise, but he was a tough man to sneak up on. He looked over his shoulder, not in any alarm, just curious. "Hello, Hildy." No shock of recognition, no comment that I'd been male the last time he'd seen me. Maybe he'd heard, or maybe his eyes just didn't miss much, and very little could surprise him. "Do you get nervous before a fight?" He frowned, and seemed to give the question real thought. "I don't think so. I get . . . heightened in some way. I find it hard to sit down. Maybe it's nervousness. So I come up here and re-think my last fight, remember the things I did wrong, try to think of ways not to do them wrong the next time." "I didn't think you did things wrong." I was looking for stairs to join him in the ring, but there didn't seem to be any. I hopped lightly over the meter-high edge. "Everybody makes mistakes. You try to minimize them, in my line of work." I saw that he had a partial erection. Had he been masturbating? I couldn't deal with that just then, had never been less interested in sex in my life. I put my hand on his face. He stood there with his arms folded and looked into my eyes. "I need help," I said. "Yes," he said, and put his arms around me. # He took me down to his dressing room, locker room, whatever he called it. He bustled around for a while, making drinks for both of us, letting me regain some of my composure. The funny thing, I hadn't cried. My shoulders had shaken, there in his arms, and I'd made some funny noises, but no tears came. I wasn't shaking. My heart was not pounding. I didn't know quite what to make of it, but I'd never been nearer to screaming in my life. "You interrupted my crazy little ritual," he said, handing me a strawberry margarita. It didn't occur to me until later to wonder how he knew I drank them. "Nice bar you have." "They take good care of me, so long as I draw the crowds. Cheers." He held his own glass out to me, and we sipped. Excellent. "I hope you're not drinking anything too strong." "No matter what you may think, I'm not suicidal. Not now." "What do you--" "I always go out there alone," he said, getting up, standing with his back to me, cutting off the question he didn't seem ready to answer yet. "The dirty little secret is, the anticipation turns me on. I've read up on it. Some people are aroused by danger. It's more common to be aroused after you've come through a life-threatening situation. Me, I get it before." "I hope I didn't ruin anything for you." "No. It's not important." "If you want to relieve the pressure, you know, make love, we could." I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Under other circumstances, sure . . . in fact, damn sure. He was gorgeous, something I hadn't realized the other times I'd met him, being male myself at the time. The body was quite good-lean, compact, made for speed and stamina rather than power--but, so what? It was a Formula A fighter's body. His opponent this evening would be wearing essentially the same body, plus or minus three kilograms, even if she was female. What I'd been noticing about him were two things: the hands, and the face. The hands were long and wide, the knuckles a bit thickened, the palms rough. They moved with a total assurance, they never dithered, never fumbled. They were hands that would know how to handle a woman's body. The face . . . well, it was the eyes, wasn't it? It was a handsome enough face, craggy in a way I liked, strong brows and cheeks, the mouth maybe a little prim, but capable of softening, as when he put his arms around me. But the eyes, the eyes. Without my being able to describe any one quality or even set of qualities that should make them so, they were riveting. When he looked at me, he looked at me, nothing else, unwavering, seeing more of me than anybody ever should. Again, he seemed to be considering the offer. He made the small smile that was the most I'd ever seen him give away. "It's been a long time since I accepted an offer made with so much enthusiasm as that," he said. "Sorry. It was really stupid. Now you'll tell me you're homosexual." "Why? Because I turned you down?" "No, because all my guesses lately turn out wrong. Just the way you looked at me, though I should have known you aren't interested now, I just thought I saw . . . something." "You're not doing too badly. No, I'm . . . do you want to hear this?" "If you want to tell." He gave a shrug that said we both knew the important things hadn't come up yet, but he was willing to wait. "Okay. Briefly, for future reference, I'm mostly hetero, say ninety percent, when male. I haven't been female for a very long time, and probably never will be again." "Didn't you like it?" "I had a problem. I didn't like making love to men. My love life was almost exclusively with other women. I didn't like . . . accepting someone else into my body. I was always afraid to. Women have to be able to surrender too much control. It made me nervous." "It doesn't have to be like that." "So I've been told. It always was for me." "That's the important thing, I guess." There may have been a more inane conversation since the Invasion, but no record of it survives. I took another drink to cover my discomfort. This whole thing had been a mistake. I saw I'd made him uncomfortable in some way I didn't understand, and wished I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. I started to get up, and found I could not. My arms and legs simply would not operate to lift me out of my chair. My arms would still lift the drink-I lifted it, drank, one of the more needed drinks since the night they invented the strawberry margarita--but they defied my orders to do anything about getting bodily elevation. Screwed up? You bet. I wasn't about to tolerate such a mutiny, so I got angry, and broke the process down into steps. Put palms flat against chair arms. Set feet flat on floor. Press down on hands and feet. Do not operate this machinery under the influence of narcotic drugs. There you go, Hildy, you're getting up. "I've been trying to kill myself," I said, and sat back down. "You've come to the right place. Tell me about it." # You do something often enough, you get good at it. My opening-up-and-letting-it-all-hang-out skills had never been strong, but telling my story to Fox, to Liz, even the part of it I'd told to Callie had at least put a polish on the narrative. I found myself using some of the same phrases I'd used the times before, things I'd said that had struck me as particularly droll or that somehow managed to put a better face on the situation. I'm a writer, I can't help it. I found myself almost enjoying the exercise. It was a story I was doing, and as in any story, there's the parts you think will sell it and the parts that will simply confuse the reader. And when the audience is small, you tailor it to what you think they will like. So, without my intending it, the story because a pitch for a series I'd like to do in the great Extra Edition of Life. Or if you prefer, the recitations to Fox, Liz, and Callie had been out-of-town try-outs, and this was the big-time critic whose review would make you or break you. But Andrew wasn't having it. He let me prattle on like that for almost an hour. I think he was getting a feel for the particular type of horseshit I was selling, its distinctive aroma and texture when you stepped in it, the color of it and the sound it made when it landed. When he knew he'd recognize that particular kind of manure if it turned up in his pasture again he held up his hand until my mouth stopped working and he said "Now tell me what really happened." So I started over. I didn't lie the first time through, you understand. But I'm bound to say I didn't tell the truth, either. All those years at the Nipple had sharpened my editorial skills outrageously, and one of the first things you learn as a reporter is that the easiest way to prevaricate is to simply not tell all the truth. I wondered, beginning again, if I remembered how to tell all the truth. If I even knew what all the truth was. (We could spend a pleasant afternoon debating whether or not anyone ever knows even a small portion of the truth, about herself or about anything, but that way madness lies.) All he wanted was my best shot at telling him what I knew, without all the gimcracks and self-serving invention one throws in to make oneself look better. Try it sometime; it's one of the hardest things you'll ever do. It takes a long time, too. Doing it well involves going back to things you may not, at first, have thought relevant to the story, sometimes way back. I told him things about my childhood I hadn't even realized I remembered. The process was also drawn out by the times I just sat there, staring into space. Andrew never prompted me, never hurried me in any way. He never asked a single question. The only times he spoke were in answer to a direct question from me, and if a nod or a shake of the head would do, that's what I got. A conversational minimalist, Andrew MacDonald. Two things alerted me to the fact that I was through with my story: I had stopped talking, and a plate of sandwiches had appeared on the table beside me. I fell on the food like a Visigoth sacking Rome. I don't know when I'd ever been so hungry. As I stuffed my face I noticed three empty margarita glasses; I didn't remember drinking them, and I didn't feel drunk. As the food reached my belly, as brain cells resumed working in isolated clumps throughout my head, I began to notice other things, such as that the floor was shaking. Not bouncing up and down, just a steady, slightly scary vibration that I finally identified as crowd noise. Andrew's locker room was almost directly beneath the center of the Bucket of Blood. We had come down some ringside stairs to reach it. I looked for a clock, in vain. "How long have we been talking?" I asked, around a mouthful of cold cuts and bread. "The main event is still almost half an hour away." "That's you, isn't it?" "Yes." It didn't bear thinking about. I'd arrived in the early afternoon, and there had been nine bouts listed on the fight card before Andrew's death match. It had to be ten, eleven o'clock. "There's no clocks in here," I said, hoping he'd take it as an apology. "I won't allow them, before a fight. They distract me." "Make you nervous?" Maybe it was a needling question. How dare he not get nervous before a fight? His unearthly calm was a little hard to take. "They distract me." I was noticing other things. It seems ridiculous to say I'd spent so much time in such a small room and not seen it, but I hadn't. Not that there was a lot to see. The place was as impersonal as a hotel room, which I guess it was, in a way. What I saw now were four telephone screens on the wall beside him, each displaying a worried-looking face, each with the sound turned off and the words URGENT! PICK UP! flashing beneath the faces. I recognized two of them as people I'd seen around Andrew the last time I'd been here. Trainers, managers, that sort of thing. "Looks like you'd better take care of some business," I said. He waved it away. "Shouldn't you be, I don't know, talking strategy with those people? Getting pep talks, something like that?" "I'll be glad to miss the pep talks, frankly," he said. "It's the worst part of this ordeal." I had to admit the four people on the phone looked more nervous than he did. "I still better get out of your way," I said, getting up, trying to swallow a mouthful of food. "You'd better do what you need to do to get ready." "With me, it was ten years," he said. I sat back down. I could pretend I didn't know what he was talking about, but it would be a lie. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and he promptly proved me right by saying: "Ten years of false memories. That was six years ago, and I've spent all that time looking for someone to tell about it." "That, and trying to get yourself killed," I said. "I know it looks that way to you. I don't see it that way." "But you did try to kill yourself." "Yes, six years ago. I found there was absolutely nothing I had the least interest in doing. I am well over two hundred years old, and it seemed to me it had been at least a century since I'd done anything new." "You were bored." "It went a lot deeper than that. Depressed, uninterested . . . once I spent three days simply sitting in the bathtub. I saw no reason to get out. I decided to end my life, and it wasn't an easy decision for me. I was raised to believe that life is a precious gift, that there is always something useful you can do with it. But I could no longer find anything meaningful." He was a lot better at telling it than I had been. He'd had longer to practice it, in his own mind, at least. He just hit all the high points, saying several times that he'd fill me in on the details when he got back from the fight. Briefly, he had been marooned on an island that sounded very much like Scarpa, only tougher. He'd had to work very hard. He suffered many setbacks, and never achieved anything like the comforts granted to me. It was only in the last two years of his ten-year stay that things eased up a bit. "It sounds like the CC put you through the same basic program," he said. "From what you describe, it's been improved some; new technology, new subroutines. I accepted it at the time, of course--I didn't have any choice, since they weren't my memories--but reviewing it afterwards the realism factor does not seem so high as what you experienced." "The CC said he'd gotten better at that." "He's forever improving." "It must have been hell." "I loved every second of it." He let that hang for a moment, then leaned forward slightly, his already-intense eyes blazing. "When life is simple like that, you have no chance to be bored. When your life hangs in the balance as a consequence of every action you take, suicide seems such an effete, ridiculous thing. Every organism has the survival instinct at its very core. That so many humans kill themselves--not just now, they have been doing it for a long time-says a lot about civilization, about 'intelligence.' Suicides have lost an ability that every amoeba possesses: the knowledge of how to live." "So that's the secret of life?" I asked. "Hardship? Earning what you get out of life, working for it?" "I don't know." He got up and began pacing. "I was exhilarated when I returned to the here and now. I thought I had an answer. Then I realized, as you did, that I couldn't trust it. It wasn't me living those ten years. It was a machine writing a script about how he thought I would have lived them. He got some of it right, but a lot more wrong, because . . . it wasn't me. The me he was trying to imitate had just tried to end his life. The me the CC imagined worked like a dog to stay alive. It was the CC's wish-fulfillment, not mine." "But you said--" "But it was an answer," he said, whirling to face me. "What I found out was that, for well over a century, I'd had nothing at risk! Whether I succeeded or failed at something had no meaning for me, because my life was not at stake. Not even my comfort was really at stake. If I succeeded or failed financially, for instance. If I succeeded, I'd simply win more things that had long ago lost their meaning. If I failed, I would lose some of these things, but the State would take care of my basic needs." I wanted to say something, to argue with him, but he was on a roll, and it was just as well, because even if I did disagree with him here and there, it was exciting simply to be able to talk about it with someone who knew. "That's when I started fighting death matches," he said. "I had to re-introduce an element of risk into my life." He held up a hand. "Not too much risk; I'm very good at what I do." And now he smiled, and it was beautiful. "And I do want to live again. That's what you've got to do, Hildy. You've got to find a way to experience risk again. It's a tonic like nothing I ever imagined." The questions were lining up in my mind, clamoring to get out. There was one more important than all the others. "What's to prevent the CC," I said, slowly, "from reviving you again, like he did to me, if you . . . make a mistake?" "I will, someday. Everybody does. I think it will be a long time yet." "There's lots of people gunning for you." "I'm going to retire soon. A few more matches, that's all." "What about the tonic?" He smiled again. "I think I've had enough of it. I needed it, I needed to have the death matches . . . and nothing else would have worked. That's the beauty of it. To die so publicly . . ." I saw it then. The CC wouldn't dare revive Silvio, for instance (not that he could; Silvio's brain had been destroyed). Everybody knew Silvio was dead, and if he suddenly showed up again embarrassing questions would be asked. Committees would be formed, petitions circulated, programming re-examined. Andrew had found the obvious way to beat the CC's little resurrection game, an answer so obvious that I had never thought of it. Or had I, and simply kept it buried? That would have to be a question for later as, with an apologetic shrug, Andrew opened his door and half of King City spilled into the room, all talking at once. Well, fifteen or twenty people, anyway, most of them angry. I collected a few glares and tried to make myself small in one corner of the room and watch as agents, trainers, managers, Arena reps, and media types all tried to compress an hour's worth of psyching up, legalities, and interviews into the five minutes left to them before the match was due to start. Andrew remained an island of calm in the center of this hurricane, which rivaled any press conference I've ever attended for sheer confusion. Then he was gone, trailing them all behind him like yapping puppies. The noise faded down the short corridor and up the stairs and I heard the crowd noise grow louder and the bass mumble that was all I could hear of the announcer's voice from this deep below the ring. The noise stayed at that level for a while, then decreased a little, as I sat down to wait for his return. Then it grew to a pitch I thought might endanger the building. Fans, I thought, contemptuously. If anything, it grew even louder, and I began to wonder what was going on. And then they brought Andrew MacDonald back on a stretcher. # Nothing is ever as straightforward as it at first seems. Andrew was fighting a death match . . . but what did that mean? I had no idea, myself. Having seen just a few matches, I knew that blows were delivered routinely that would not have been survivable without modern medical techniques. I had witnessed medical attention being administered between rounds, combatants being patched up, body fluids being replaced. The normal sign of victory was the removal of the loser's head, one of the many endearing things about slash-boxing and surely a sign that things weren't going well for the beheadee . . . but what about the Grand Flack? He did quite well without a body. The only surely fatal wound these days was the destruction of the brain, and the CC was working on that one. It seemed the rules were different for a death match. It also seemed no one was really happy about them, except possibly for Andrew. I could not tell what his injuries were, but his head was still on his shoulders. The body was covered with a sheet, which was soaked in blood. I gathered, later, that a hierarchy of wounds had been established for death matches, that some could be treated by ringside handlers between rounds, and that others had to be acknowledged as fatal. The fallen opponent was not decapitated, it being thought too gruesome to hold aloft an actual dead severed head. I was told the ritual took the place of the coup de grace, that it was meant to be symbolic of victory in some way. Go figure that one out. I also learned, later, that no one really knew how to handle the situation they now found themselves in. Only three fighters had ever engaged in death matches since they were allowed into a gray area of legality known as consensual suicide. Only one had ever met the requirements for a death wound, and he had experienced a deathbed revelation that could be summed up as "maybe this wasn't such a good idea, after all," been revived, stitched up, and retired in disgrace to everyone's considerable secret relief. Of the two people currently risking their lives in fights, it had been tacitly agreed long ago that they would never meet each other, as the certain outcome of such a match would be the pickle the handlers, lawyers, and Arena management now found themselves in, which might be expressed as "are we really going to let this silly son of a bitch die on us?" There was not a lot of time to come up with an answer. I could hear a sound coming from Andrew, all the way across the room, and knew I was hearing the death rattle. I couldn't see much of him. If he'd hoped his final moments would be peaceful, he'd been a fool. A dozen people crowded around, some feverish to offer aid, others worrying about corporate liability, a very few standing up for Andrew's right to die as he pleased. The Bucket of Blood management had for years been in a quandary concerning death matches. On the one hand, they were a guaranteed draw; stadia were always filled when the titillation of a possible actual death was offered. On the other, no one knew what the public reaction would be if someone actually died right out there in front of God and everyone, for the glory of sport. The prevailing opinion was it would not be good for business. The public's appetite for non-injurious violence in sport and entertainment had never been plumbed, but real death, though always good for a sensation, was much easier to take if it could be seen as an accident, like David Earth, or Nirvana. To give them credit, the Arena people were queasy about the whole idea, and not just from a legal standpoint. Their worst sin in the matter was something we all do, which is fail to imagine the worst happening. No one had died in a death match yet, and they'd kept hoping no one would. Now someone was. But not without a last-ditch effort. The people around him reminded me, as things in life so often do, of scenes from movies. You've seen them: in a war picture, when medics gather around a wounded comrade trying to save his life, buddies at his side telling him everything's gonna be okay, kid, you've got a million-dollar wound there, you'll be home with the babes before you know it, and their eyes saying this one's a goner. And this seems weird, maybe it was a trick of the light, but I saw another scene, the priest leaning over the bed, holding a rosary, hearing the last confession, giving the last rites. What they were really doing was trying to talk him into accepting treatment, please, so we can all go home and wipe our brows and have a few stiff drinks and pretend this fucking disaster never happened, dear lord. He refused them all. Gradually their pleas grew less impassioned, and a few even gave up and retreated to the wall near me, like what he had was contagious. And finally someone leaned close enough to hear what it was he'd been trying to say, and that someone looked over at me and beckoned. I'm surprised I made it, as I had no feeling in my legs. But somehow I was leaning over him, into the stench of his blood, his entrails, the smell of death on him now, and he grabbed my hand with an amazing strength and tried to lift himself closer to my ear because he didn't have much of a voice left. I hope he wasn't feeling any pain; they said he wasn't, pain wasn't his thing, he'd been deadened before the match. He coughed. "Let them help you, Andrew," I said. "You've proved your point." "No point," he coughed. "Nothing to prove, to them." "You're sure? It's no disgrace. I'll still respect you." "Not about respect. Gotta go through with it, or it didn't mean anything." "That's crazy. You could have died in any of them. You don't have to die now to validate that." He shook his head, and coughed horribly. He went limp, and I thought he was dead, but then his hand put a little pressure on mine again, and I leaned closer to his lips. "Tricked," he said, and died. =*= =*= =*= =*= CHAPTER SIXTEEN It's a well-known fact that nobody goes to the library in this day and age. It's also wrong. Why take the time and trouble to travel to a big building where actual books on actual paper are stored when you can stay at home and access any of that information, plus trillions of pages of data that exist only in the memories? If you don't already know the answer to that question, then you just don't love books, and I'll never be able to explain it to you. But if you get up from your terminal right now, any time of the day or night, take the tube down to the King City Civic Center Plaza, and walk up the Italian marble steps between the statues of Knowledge and Wisdom, you will find the Great Hall of Books thrumming with the kind of quiet activity that has characterized great libraries since books were on papyrus scrolls. Do it someday. Stroll past the rows of scholars at the old oak tables, stand in the center of the dome, beside the Austin Gutenberg Bible in its glass case, look down the infinite rows of shelves radiating away from you. If you love books at all, it will soothe your mind. Soothing was something my mind was sorely in need of. In the three or four days following the death of Andrew MacDonald, I spent a lot of time at the library. There was no practical reason for it; though I was now homeless, I could have done the reading and research I now engaged in sitting in the park, or in my hotel room. Few of the things I looked at actually existed on paper anyway. I spent my time looking at a library terminal no different from the ones in any streetcorner phone box. But I was far from the only one so engaged. Though many people used the library because they liked holding the actual source material in their hands, most were accessing stored data, and simply preferred to do it with real books on shelves around them. Let's face it, the vast majority of books in the King City Library were quite old, the pre-Invasion legacy of a few bibliophile fanatics who insisted the yellowing, fragile, inefficient and inconvenient old things were necessary to any culture that called itself civilized, who convinced the software types that the logically unjustifiable expense of shipping them up here was, in the end, worth it. As for new books . . . why bother? I doubt more than six or seven new works were published on paper in a typical Lunar year. There was a small publishing business, never very profitable, because some people liked to have sets of the classics sitting on a shelf in the living room. Books had become almost entirely the province of interior decorators. But not here. These books were used. Many had to be stored in special inert-gas rooms and you had to don a p-suit to handle them, under the watchful eyes of librarians who thought dog-earing should be a hanging offense, but every volume in the institution was available for reference, right up to the Gutenberg. Almost a million books sat on open shelves. You could walk down the rows and run your hand over them, pull one down and open it (carefully, carefully!), smell the old paper and glue and dust. I did most of my work with a copy of Tom Sawyer open on the table beside me, partly so I could read a chapter when I got tired of the research, partly so I could just touch it when I felt at my lowest. I'd had to keep redefining "lowest." I was beginning to wonder if there was a natural lower limit, if this was the limit I had reached the last times, when I had attempted to kill myself, would have killed myself without the CC's intervention. My research concerned, naturally enough, suicide. It didn't take me long to discover that not much useful was really known about it. Why should that have surprised me? Not much really useful was known concerning anything relating to why we are what we are and do what we do. There's plenty of behavioristic data: stimulus A evokes response B. There's lots of statistical data as well: X percent will react in such-andsuch a way to event Y. It all worked very well with insects, frogs, fish and such, tolerably good with dogs and cats and mice, even reasonably decent with human beings. But then you pose a question like why, when Aunt Betty's boy Wilbur got run over by the paving machine, did she up and stick her head in the microwave, while her sister Gloria who'd suffered a similar loss grieved, mourned, recovered, and went on to lead a long and useful life? Best extremely scientific answer to date: It beats the shit out of me. Another reason for being in the library was that it was the perfect place to go at a problem in a logical way. The whole environment seemed to encourage it. And that's what I intended to do. Andrew's death had really rocked me. I had nothing else that needed doing, so I was going to attack my problem by going at it a step at a time, which meant that first I had to define the steps. Step one, it seemed to me, was to learn all I could about the causes of suicide. After three days of almost constant reading and note-taking I had it down to four, maybe five categories of suicide. (I bought a pad of paper and pencil to take notes with, which earned me a few sidelong glances from my neighbors. Even in these fusty environs writing on paper was seen as eccentric.) These four, maybe five categories were not hardedged, they overlapped each other with big, fuzzy gray borders. Again, no surprise. The first and easiest to identify was cultural. Most societies condemned suicide in most circumstances, but some did not. Japan was an outstanding example. In ancient Japan suicide was not only condoned, but mandatory in some circumstances. Further, it was actually institutionalized, so that one who had lost honor must not only kill himself, but do it in a prescribed, public, and very painful way. Many other cultures looked on suicide, in certain circumstances, as an honorable thing to do. Even in societies where suicide was frowned on or viewed as a mortal sin, there were circumstances where it was at least understandable. I encountered many tales both in folklore and reality of frustrated lovers leaping off a cliff hand in hand. There were also the cases of elderly people in intractable pain (see Reason #2), and several other marginally acceptable reasons. Most early cultures were very tough to analyze. Demographics, as we know it, didn't really get its start until recently. Records were kept of births and deaths and not much else. How do you determine what the suicide rate was in ancient Babylon? You don't. You can't even learn much useful about Nineteenth Century Europe. There were blips in the data here and there. In the Twentieth Century it was said that Swedes killed themselves at a rate higher than their contemporaries. Some blamed the cold weather, the long winters, but how then do you account for the Finns, the Norwegians, the Siberians? Others said it was the dour nature of the Swedes themselves. I've been asking people questions for long enough to know something important about them: they lie. They lie often enough even when nothing is at stake. When the answer can mean something as important as whether or not Grandpa Jacques gets buried in the hallowed ground of the churchyard, suicide notes have a way of vanishing, bodies get re-arranged, coroners and law officers get bribed or simply look the other way out of respect for the family. The blip in suicide data for the Swedes could simply have meant they were more straightforward about reporting it. As for Lunar society, post-Invasion society in general . . . it was a civil right, but it was widely viewed as the coward's way out. Suicide was not something that was going to earn you any points with the neighbors. The second reason was best summed up in the statement "I can't go on like this anymore." The most obvious of these cases involved pain, and no longer applied. Then there was unhappiness. What can you say about unhappiness? It is real, and can have real and easily seen causes: disappointment with one's accomplishments in life, frustration at being unable to attain a goal or an object, tragedy, loss. Other times, the cause of this hopeless feeling can be difficult to see to the outside observer: "He had everything to live for." Then there was the reason Andrew proclaimed, that he had been bored. This happened even in the days when people didn't live to be two, three hundred years old, but rarely. It was a reason appearing in more and more suicide notes as life spans lengthened. The fourth reason might be called the inability to visualize death. Children were vulnerable to this one; many affluent, industrial societies reported increasing teen-age suicide rates, and survivors of failed attempts often revealed elaborate fantasies of being aware at their own funerals, of getting back at their tormenters: "I'll show them, they'll miss me when I'm gone." That's why I said I had maybe five reasons. I couldn't decide if the attempts, successful or not, known as "gestures" rated a category of their own. Authorities differed as to how many suicides were merely cries for help. In a sense, all of them were, if only to an indifferent Providence. Help me stop the pain, help me find love, help me find a reason, help me, I'm hurting . . . Did I say maybe five? Maybe six. Maybe six was what I thought of as "The Seasons Of Life." We are, most of us, closet numerologists, subconscious astrologers. We are fascinated with anniversaries, birthdays, ages of ourselves and others. You are in your thirties, or forties, or seventies, or you're over one hundred. Back when people lived their fourscore years, on average, those words said even more than they do today. Turning forty meant your life was half over, and was a portentous time to examine what the first half had been like and, often as not, find it lacking. Turning ninety meant you'd already outlived your allotted time, and the most useful thing left to you was selecting the color of your coffin. Ages with a zero on the end were a particularly stressful time. They still are. One term I encountered was "mid-life crisis," used back when mid-life was somewhere between 40 and 50. Ages with two zeros on the end pack one hell of a wallop. Newspapers used to run stories about centenarians. The data I studied said that, even though it might now be thought of as mid-life, the age of one zero zero still meant a lot. While you could be in your eighties, or your nineties, you were never in your hundreds. That term just never attained popular usage. You were "over one hundred," or "over two hundred." Soon there would be people over three hundred years old. And there was a rise in the suicide rate at both these magical milestones. Which was of particular interest to me because . . . now how old did Hildy say she was, class? Let's not always see the same hands. # I don't know if my research was really telling me much, but it was something to do, and I intended to keep on doing it. I became a library gnome, going out only to sleep and eat. But after four days something told me it was time to take a walk, and my feet drew me back to Texas. I was wondering what could happen to me next. Death had dogged my steps from the time of my return from Scarpa Island: David Earth, Silvio, Andrew, eleven hundred and twenty-six souls in Nirvana. Three brontosaurs. Was I forgetting anybody? Was anything good ever going to happen to me? I sneaked in a back way I had found during my hiding-out days. I didn't want to encounter any of my friends from New Austin, I didn't want to have to try to explain to them why I'd torched my own cabin. If I couldn't explain it to myself, what was I going to say to them? So I came over the hill from a different direction and my first thought was I must be lost, because there was a cabin over there. Then I thought, maybe for the first time since this ordeal began, that I might be losing my mind, because I wasn't lost, I was where I thought I was, and that was my cabin, intact, just as it had been before I watched it consumed by flames. You can get a genuine dizzy feeling at a time like that; I sat down. After a moment I noticed two things that might be of interest. First, the cabin was not quite where it had been. It looked to have been moved about three meters up the slope of the hill. Second, there was a pile of what looked like charred lumber down in the slight depression I'd been calling "the gully." As I watched, a third item of interest appeared: a heavily-loaded burro came around the side of the house, looked at me briefly, and then stuck his nose into a bucket of water that had been left in the shade. I got up and started toward the cabin as a man came out the front door and began lifting the burdens from the beast and setting them on the ground. He must have heard me, because he looked up, grinned toothlessly, and waved at me. I knew him. "Sourdough," I called out to him. "What the hell are you doing?" "Evening, Hildy," he said. "Hope you don't mind. I just got into town and they sent me up here, said to stick around a few days and let them know when you got back." "You're always welcome, Sourdough, you know that. Mi casa es tu casa. It's just . . ." I paused, looked over the cabin again, and wiped sweat from my forehead. "I didn't think I had a casa." He scratched himself, and spat in the dust. "Well, I don't know much about that. All I know's Mayor Dillon said if'n I didn't give a holler when you got back to these here parts, he'd skin me and Matilda." He patted the burro affectionately, raising a cloud of dust. Maybe old Sourdough laid on the accent and the Old West slang a bit thick, but I felt he was entitled. He was a real Natural, as opposed to Walter, who was only natural on the surface. He belonged to a religious sect that had some things in common with the Christian Scientists. They didn't refuse all medical help, nor did they pray for a cure when they were sick. What they rejected was rejuvenation. They allowed themselves to grow old and, when the measures needed to keep them alive reached a point Sourdough had described to me as "just too dang much trouble," they died. There was even some money in it. The Antiquities Board paid them a small annual stipend for having the grace to let them avoid what would have been a tricky ethical problem, which was maintaining a small control group of humans untouched by most modern medical advances. Sourdough was one of the handful of prospectors who roamed West Texas. His chances of discovering a vein of gold or silver were slim--zero, actually, since nothing like that had been included in the specs when the place was built. But the management assured us there were three pockets of diamond-bearing minerals somewhere in Texas. No one had found any of them yet. Sourdough and three or four others ranged over the land with their pickaxes and grubstakes and burros, perhaps secretly hoping they'd never find them. After all, what would you do with a handful of diamonds? It certainly didn't justify all that work. I'd asked Sourdough about that, early on, before I'd learned it was impolite to ask such questions in an historical disney. "I'll tell you, Hildy," he'd said, not taking offense. "I worked forty years at a job I didn't particularly like. I'm not quite the fool I sound; I didn't realize how much I disliked it until I quit. But when I retired I come out here and I liked the sunshine and the heat and the open air. I found I'd pretty much lost my taste for the company of people. I can only take 'em in small doses now. And I've been happy. Matilda is the only company I need, and prospecting gives me something to do." In fact, Matilda seemed to be his only remaining worry in life. He was concerned about her welfare after he was gone. He was constantly asking people if they'd see to her needs, to the point that half the people in New Austin had promised to adopt the damn donkey. He looked older than Adam's granddaddy. All his teeth were gone, and most of his hair. His skin was mottled and wrinkled and loose on his scrawny frame and his knuckles were swollen to the size of walnuts. He was eighty-three years old, seventeen years younger than me. I'd had him pegged as an illit, and the job he'd hated as something on the order of the carrying of hods, whatever they were, or the laying of bricks. Then Dora told me he'd been the Chairman of the Board of the third largest company on Mars. He'd retired to Luna for the gravity. "What happened here, Sourdough?" I asked. "I didn't sell the land. What gives somebody the right to come in here and build on it?" "I don't know about that, either, Hildy. You know me. I've been out in the hills, and let me tell you, girl, I'm on the trail of something." He went on like that for a while, with me paying minimal attention. Sourdough and his like were always on the trail of something. I looked around the house. There wasn't much different between this one and the one I'd built and burned down, except some almost indefinable things that told me the builders had been better at it than I had been. The dimensions were the same, the windows were in the same places. But it looked more solid. I went inside, Sourdough trailing behind me still yammering about the glory hole he was on the verge of discovering. The inside was still bare except for some bright yellow calico curtains in the windows. They were prettier than the ones I'd installed. I went back out, still unable to make sense of it, and looked down the road toward New Austin in time to see the first of a long parade arrive from town. The next half hour is something of a blur. More than a dozen wagons arrived in the hour of dusk. All of them were laden with people and food and drink and other things. The people got down and set to work, building a fire, stringing orange paper lanterns with candles inside, clearing an area for dancing. Someone had loaded the piano from the saloon, and stood beside it turning the crank. There was a banjo player and a fiddle player, both dreadful, but no one seemed to mind. Before I quite knew what was happening there was a full-scale hoedown going on. A cow was turning on the spit, sizzling in barbecue sauce that hissed and popped when it dripped into the fire. A table had been laid out with cookies and cakes and candied fruits in mason jars. Bottles of beer were thrust into a galvanized tub full of ice and people were swilling it down or sipping from bottles they'd tucked away. Petticoats and silk stockings flashed in the firelight as the ladies from the Alamo kicked up their heels and the men stood around whooping and hollering and clapping their hands or moved in and tried to turn it into a square dance. All my friends from New Austin had showed up, and a lot more I didn't even know, and I still didn't know why. Before things got out of hand Mayor Dillon stood up on a table and fired his pistol three times in the air. Things got quiet soon enough, and the Mayor swayed and would have toppled but for the ladies on each side of him, propping him up. Next to the Doctor, Mayor Dillon was the town's most notorious drunk. "Hildy," he intoned, in a voice any politician for the last thousand years would have recognized, "when the good citizens of New Austin heard of your recent misfortune we knew we couldn't just let it lie. Am I right, folks?" He was greeted with a huge cheer and a great guzzling of beer. "We know how it is with city folks. Insurance, filin' claims, forms to fill out, shit like that." He belched hugely and went on. "Well, we ain't like that. A neighbor needs a hand, and the people of West Texas are there to help out." "Mister Mayor," I started, tentatively, "there's been a--" "Shut up, Hildy," he said, and belched again. "No, we ain't like that, are we, friends?" "NO!!" shouted the citizens of New Austin. "No, we ain't. When misfortune befalls one of us, it befalls us all. Maybe I shouldn't say it, Hildy, but when you showed up here, some of us figured you for a weekender." He thumped himself on the chest and leaned forward, almost toppling once more, his eyes bulging as if daring me to disbelieve the incredible statement he was about to make. "I figured you for a weekender, Hildy, me, Mayor Matthew Thomas Dillon, mayor of this great town nigh these seven years." He hung his head theatrically. Then his head popped up, as if on a spring. "But we were wrong. In this last little while, you've showed yourself a true Texan. You built yourself a cabin. You came into town and sat down with us, drank with us, ate with us, gambled with us." "Gambled, hah!" Sourdough mumbled. "That weren't gamblin'." He got a lot of laughs. "Mayor Dillon," I pleaded, "please let me say-" "Not until I've said my piece," he roared, amiably. "Then, four days ago, disaster struck. And let me say there's those of us who aren't completely cut off from the outside world, Hildy, there's those of us who keep up. We knew you'd just lost your job on the outside, and we figured you were trying to make a new start here in God's Country. Now, back outside, where you come from, folks would have just tsk-tsked about it and said what a shame. Not Texans. So here it is, Hildy," and he swept his arm in a huge circle meant to indicate the spanking new cabin, and this time he did fall from the table, taking his bargirl escort with him. But he popped up like a cork, dignity intact. "That there's your new house, and this here's your housewarming party." Which I'd figured out shortly after he'd mounted the table. And oh, dear god, did ever woman feel such mixed emotions. # How I got through that night I'll never know. Following the speech came the giving of gifts. I got everything from the ritual bread and salt from my ex-wife, Dora, to a spanking new cast-iron cook stove from the owner of the general store. I accepted a rocking chair and a pair of pigs, who promptly got loose and led everyone a merry chase. There was a new bed and two hand-sewn quilts to put on it. I was gifted with apple pies and fireplace tools, a roll of chicken wire and a china tea set, bars of soap rendered from lard, a sack of nails, five chickens, an iron skillet . . . the list went on and on. Rich or poor, everyone for miles around gave me something. When a little girl came up and gave me a tea cozy she'd crocheted herself I finally broke down and cried. It was a relief in a way; I'd been smiling so hard and so long I thought my face would crack. It went over well. Everyone patted me on the back and there was not a dry eye in the house. Then the night's festivities began in earnest. The beef was sliced and the beans dished out, plates were heaped high, and people sat around gorging themselves. I drank everything that was handed to me, but I never felt like I got drunk. I must have been, to some degree, because the rest of the evening exists for me as a series of unconnected scenes. One I remember was me, the Mayor, and Sourdough sitting on a log before the fire with a square dance happening behind us. We must have been talking, but I have no idea what we'd been talking about. Memory returns as the Mayor says: "Hildy, some of us were sitting around talking over to the Alamo Saloon the other day." "You tell her, Mayor Dillon," a girl shouted behind us, then whirled away into the dance again. "Harrumph," said the Mayor. "I need to drop in at the saloon from time to time to keep up on the needs of my constituents, you see." "Sure, Mayor Dillon," I said, knowing he spent an average of six hours each day at his usual table, and if what he'd been doing was feeling the pulse of the public then the voters of New Austin were the most thoroughly kept-up-on since the invention of democracy. Perhaps that accounted for the huge majorities he regularly achieved. Or maybe it was the fact that he ran unopposed. "The consensus is, Hildy," he intoned, "that you'll never make a farmer." That should have come as news to no one. Aside from the fact that I doubted I had any talent for it and had not, in fact, had any plans to farm in the first place, nobody had ever run a successful farm in the Great Big Bubble known as West Texas. To farm, you need water, lots and lots of it. You could raise a vegetable garden, run cattle--though goats were better--and hogs seemed to thrive, but farming was right out. "I think you're right," I said, and drank from the mason jar in my hand. As I did, the Parson sat next to me, and drank from his mason jar. "We don't really know if you plan to stay here," the Mayor went on. "We don't mean to pressure you either way; maybe you have plans for another job on the outside." He raised his eyebrows, then his mason jar. "Not particularly." "Well then." He seemed about to go on, then looked puzzled. I'd been that drunk before, and knew the feeling. He hadn't a clue as to what he'd been about to say. "What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson chimed in, tactfully, "is that a life of salooncrawling and gambling may not be the best for you." "Gambling, hah!" Sourdough put in. "That lady don't gamble." "Shut up, Sourdough," the Mayor said. "Well, she don't!" he said, defiantly. "Not three weeks ago, when she turned up that fourth ace with the biggest pot of the night, I knowed she was cheating!" These would have been fighting words from almost anybody but Sourdough. Had they been uttered in the Alamo they'd have been reason enough to overturn the table and start shooting at each other--to the delight of the manufacturers of blank cartridges and the amusement of the tourists at the adjoining tables. From Sourdough, I decided to let it pass, especially since it was true. The big pot he mentioned, by the way, was about thirty-five cents. "Calm down," said the Parson. "If you think someone is cheating, you should say so right then and there." "Couldn't!" Sourdough said. "Didn't know how she done it." "Then she probably didn't." "She sure as hell did. I know what I dealt her!" he said, triumphantly. The Mayor and the Parson looked at each other owlishly, and decided to let it pass. "What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson tried again, "is that perhaps you'd like to look for a job here in Texas." "Fact is," the Mayor said, leaning close and looking me in the eye, "we've got an opening for a new schoolmarm right here in town, and we'd be right pleased if you'd take the job." When I finally realized they were serious, I almost told them my first reaction, which was that Luna would stop dead in her orbit before I'd consider anything so silly as standing up in front of a bunch of children and trying to teach them anything. But I couldn't say that, so what I told them was that I'd think about it, which seemed to satisfy them. I remember sitting with Dora, my arm around her, as she sobbed her heart out. I have no memory of what she might have been crying about, but do recall her kissing me with fiery passion and not wanting to take no for an answer until I steered her toward a more willing swain. Thus was my new bed broken in. It saw a lot of use before the night was over, but not from me. Before that (it must have been before that; there was no one using the bed yet, and in a oneroom cabin you'd notice a thing like that) I taught half a dozen people my secret recipe for Hildy's Famous Biscuits. We fired up the stove and assembled the ingredients and baked up several batches before the night was over. I did only the first one. After that, my students were eager to give it a try, and they all got eaten. I was desperate to do something for these people. I had a vague notion that at a house-raising you were supposed to provide food for your guests, but these people had brought their own, so what could I do? I'd have given them anything, anything at all. One thing that hadn't been provided yet was an outhouse. A rough-and-ready latrine had been dug in a suitable spot and, considering the amount of beer drunk, saw even more use than the bed. My worst moment that night came while squatting there and a voice quite close said "How'd the cabin burn down, Hildy?" I almost fell in the trench. It was too dark to make out faces; all I could see was a tall shape in the night, swaying slightly, like most of us. I thought I recognized the voice. It was far too late to admit to him what had really happened, so I said I didn't know. "It happens, it happens," he said. "Just about had to be your cooking fire, that's why I gave you the stove." It was Jake, as I had thought, the owner of the general store and the richest man in town. "Thanks, Jake, it's sure a beauty." I thought I saw him square his shoulders, then I heard the sound of his zipper. I hadn't known Jake well at all. He'd sat in on a few hands of poker at the saloon, but about all he could talk about was the new merchandise he was getting in or how many pickles he'd sold last week or how the town should extend the wooden sidewalks all the way down Congress Street to the church. He was a businessman and a booster, stolid, unimaginative, not at all the type I'd ever liked to spend much time around. It had flabbergasted me when he pulled up in his wagon with the stove on the back, a miracle of period engineering from the foundries of Pennsylvania, gleaming with polished brightwork. "Some of the merchants in town were talking about it while your cabin was going up," he said, losing me at first. "We're of the opinion that New Austin's outgrown the days of the bucket brigade. You weren't here, but three years ago the old schoolhouse burned to the ground. Some say it was children that did it." I wouldn't have been a bit surprised; I was on their side. I stood up and re-arranged my skirt and wished I was elsewhere, but I owed it to him to at least listen to what he had to say. "We all pretty much had to stand around and watch it burn," he said. "By the time we got there, no amount of buckets were going to do any good. That's why some of the merchants in town are getting up a subscription for the acquisition of a pumping engine. I'm told they make a fine one in Pennsylvania these days." Just about everything we could use in Texas was made in Pennsylvania; they'd been at this historical business a lot longer than we had . . . which was yet another topic of conversation at Jake's rump Chamber of Commerce meetings: how to reverse the balance of trade by encouraging light manufacturing. About all West Texas exported at this stage in its history was backgrounds for western movies, ham, beef, and goat's milk. He zipped up and we started back toward the party. "So you think if you'd had the engine, my cabin could have been saved?" "Well . . . no, not really. What with the time it would take to get out here once you'd come into town and sounded the alarm, and the fact that you don't have a well yet and we couldn't hope to get enough hose to stretch to the nearest one . . ." "I see." But I didn't. I had the feeling something else was expected of me but too many things had happened at once for me to see the obvious. "It would only be really useful to the town, I'll admit it. But I think it's worth the expense. If one of these fires ever got out of control the whole town could burn down. That used to happen, you know, back on Old Earth. Still, I don't suppose you people in outlying areas can really be expected--" A great light dawned, and I quickly interrupted him and said sure, Jake, I'd be happy to contribute, just put me down for . . . what's your usual share? So little? Yes, you're right, it's well worth while. And while shaking his hand I found that for the first time I really liked Jake, and at the same time pitied him. For all his stuffiness, he did have the welfare of the community at heart. The pity came in because he was in the wrong place. He was always going to be looking for ways to bring "progress" to New Austin, a place where real progress was not only discouraged but actually forbidden. There were statutory limits to growth in West Texas, for entirely sensible reasons. Why build it in the first place if you're only going to let it turn into another suburb of King City? But people like Jake came and went--this according to Dora--with regularity. Within a few years he'd have plans for electrification, then freeways, then an airport and a bowling alley and a nickelodeon. Then the disneyland Board of Governors would veto his grandiose schemes and he'd leave, once again angry at the world. Because the reason a man like him had probably come here in the first place was the search for an illusory freedom and a dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunities for free enterprise in the larger society. He would have thrived on preInvasion Earth. The newer, less outward-bound human society he found himself born into chafed his entrepreneurial instincts. Et tu, Hildy? Journalist, cover thyself. Why do you think you started your damn cabin on the lone prairie? Wasn't it from vaguely-formed notions of always being constricted, of endless limitations on the dreams you had as a child? How dare you pity this man, you failed muckraker? If he ended up in this toy cowboy town because he yearned to be free of the endless restrictions needed in a machine-managed economy, what do you think brought you here, at last? Neither of us thought it out, but we came, just the same. The fact is, I loved the news business . . . it was the news that had failed me. I should have been born in the era of Upton Sinclair, William Randolph Hearst, Woodstein, Linda Jaffe, Boris Yermankov. I would have made a great war correspondent, but my world provided no wars for me to cover. I could have been a great writer of exposes, but the muck Luna provided me to rake was the thinnest of celebrity gruel. Political coverage? Well, why bother? Politics ran out of steam around the time television took over most of our governance--and nobody even noticed! That would have been a good story, but the fact was, nobody cared. The CC ran the world better than humans had ever managed to, so why fuss? What we still called politics was like a kindergarten contretemps compared to the robust, rough-andtumble world I'd read about in my teens and twenties. What was left to me? Only the yellowest of yellow journalism. Sheer gonzo stuff. It was these thoughts I carried with me back to the bonfire, where the last of my destroyed cabin was being burned now, and these thoughts I kept chewing over, beneath the outward smiles and warm thank-you's as people began to drift away. And about the time the last partier climbed boozily back into his wagon I came to this conclusion: it was the world that had failed me. That was the thought I carried with me into the nighttime hills, toward that arrangement of stones on top of a particular hill where, a little time ago, I had dug a hole. I dug into it again and removed a burlap potato sack. Inside the sack was a plastic bag, sealed tight, and inside the bag was an oily rag. The last thing to emerge from this Pandora's Sack was not hope, but an ugly little object I'd handled only once, to show it to Brenda, with the words Smith & Wesson printed on its stubby blue-steel barrel. So take that, cruel world. # There was certainly nothing to stop me from blowing my brains out all over the Texas sagebrush, and yet . . . Call it rationalization, but I was not convinced the CC couldn't winkle me out and cause the cavalry to arrive at the last moment even in as remote a spot as this. Would I point the barrel to my temple only to have my hand jerked away by a previously-unseen mechanical minion? They existed out here; Texas was too small, ecologically, to take care of itself. In hindsight (and yes, I did survive this one, too, but you've already figured that out) you could say I was afraid it was too sudden for the CC, that he wouldn't have time to get there and save me from myself unless I made the scheme more elaborate and thus more liable to failure. This assumes the attempt was but a gesture, a call for help, and I have no problem with that idea, but I simply didn't know. My reasons leading up to the previous attempts were lost to me now, destroyed forever when the CC worked his tricks on me. This time was the only time I could remember, and it sure as hell felt as if I wanted to end it all. There was another reason, one that does me more credit. I didn't want my corpse to lie out here for my friends to find. Or the coyotes. For whatever reason, I carefully concealed the revolver and made my way to an Outdoor Shop, where I purchased the first pressure suit I'd ever owned. Since I only intended to use it once, I bought the cheap model, frugal to the end. It folded up to fit in a helmet the size of a bell jar suitable for displaying a human head in anatomy class. With this under my arm I went to the nearest airlock, rented a small bottle of oxygen, and suited up. I walked a long way, just to be sure. I had all Liz's spook devices turned on, and felt I should be invisible to the CC's surveillance. There were no signs of human habitation anywhere around me. I sat on a rock and took a long look around. The interior of the suit smelled fresh and clean as I took a deep breath and pointed the barrel of the gun directly at my face. I felt no regrets, no second thoughts. I hooked my thumb around the trigger, awkwardly, because the suit glove was rather thick, and I fired it. The hammer rose and fell, and nothing happened. Damn. I fumbled the cylinder open and studied the situation. There were only three rounds in there. The hammer had made a dent in one of them, which had apparently mis-fired. Or maybe it was something else. I closed the gun again and decided to check and see if the mechanism was working, watched the hammer rise and fall again and the weapon jumped violently, silently, almost wrenching itself from my hand. I realized, belatedly, that it had fired. Stupidly, I had been expecting to hear the bang. Once more I assumed the position. Only one round left. What a pain in the butt it would be if I had to go back and try to cajole more ammunition out of Liz. But I'd do it; she owed me, the bitch had sold me the defective round. This time I heard it, by God, and I got to see a sight few humans ever have: what it looks like to have a lead projectile blast from the muzzle of a gun and come directly at your face. I didn't see the bullet at first, naturally, but after my ears stopped ringing I could see it if I crossed my eyes. It had flattened itself against the hard plastic of my faceplate, embedding in a starred crater it had dug for itself. It had never entered my mind that would be a problem. The suit was not rated for meteoroid impact. Sometimes we build better than we know. There was a curious thing. (This all must have happened in three or four seconds.) The faceplate was now showing a spidery network of small hexagons. I had time to reach up and touch the bullet and think just like Nirvana and then three small, clear hexagonal pieces of the faceplate burst away from me and I could see them tumbling for a moment, and then the breath was snatched from my lungs and my eyes tried to pop out and I belched like a Texas Mayor and it started to hurt. That old boogeyman of childhood, the Breathsucker, had moved into my suit with me and snuggled close. I fell off the rock and was gazing into the sun when suddenly a hand came out of nowhere and slapped a patch over the hole in my faceplate! I was jerked to my feet as the air began to hiss back into my suit from the emergency supply. Then I was (emergency supply? never mind) running, being pulled across the blasted landscape like a toy on the end of a string being held by a big guy in a spacesuit to the sound of brass and drums. My ears were pounding. Pounding? Hell, they rang like slot machines paying off, almost drowning out the music and the sounds of explosions. Dirt showered down around me (music? don't worry about it) and I realized somebody was shooting at us! And suddenly I knew what had happened. I'd fallen under the spell of the Alphans' Stupefying Ray, long rumored but never actually used in the long war. I'd almost taken my own life! Hypnotized by the evil influence, robbed of my powers of will and most of my memory, I'd have been dead meat except for the nick-of-time intervention of of of of of (name please) Archer! (thank you), Archer, my old pal Archer! Good old Archer had (stupefying ray? you can't be serious) obviously come up with a device to negate the sinister effects of this awful weapon, put it together, and somehow found me at the last possible instant. But we weren't out of the woods yet. With an ominous chord of deep bass notes the Alphan fleet loomed over the horizon. Come on, Hildy, Archer shouted, turning to beckon me on, and in the distance ahead I could see our ship, holed, battered, held together with salvaged space junk and plastigoop, but still able to show the Alphan Hordes a trick or two, you betcha. She was a sweet ship, this this this (I'm waiting) Blackbird, the fastest in two galaxies when she was hitting on all thrusters. Tracer bullets were arcing all around us as we (back up) Good old Archer had modified the Blackbird using the secrets we'd discovered when we unearthed the stasis-frozen tomb of the Outerians on the fifth moon of Pluto, shortly before we ran afoul of the Alphan patrol (good enough). Tracer bullets were arcing all around us as we neared the airlock when suddenly a bomb exploded right underneath Archer! He spiraled into the air and came to rest lying against the side of the ship. Broken, gouting blood, holding one hand out to me. I went to him and knelt to the sound of poignant strings and a lonely flute. Go on without me, Hildy, I heard over my suit radio. I'm done for. (Tracer bullets? Pluto? oh the hell with it) I didn't want to leave him there, but bullets were landing all around me--fortunately, none of them hit, but I couldn't count on the Alphan's aim staying lousy for long, and I was running out of options. I leaped into the ship, seething with rage. I'll get them, Miles, I told him, in a determined voiceover that rang with resolve, brass, and just the slightest bit of echo. Oh, sure, he'd had his shortcomings, there'd been times I'd almost wanted to kill him myself, but when somebody kills your partner you're supposed to do something about it. So I slammed the Blackbird into hyperdrive and listened to the banshee wail as the old ship shuddered and leaped into the fourth dimension. What with one thing and another, mostly adventures even more unlikely than my escape from the Stupefying Ray, a year went by. Well, sort of a year, though my ducking in and out of the fourth dimension and hyperspace royally screwed all my clocks. But somewhere an accurate one was ticking, because one day I looked up from my labors deep in the asteroid belt of Tau Ceti and suddenly a non-Alphan ship was coming in for a landing. It wasn't setting off any of my alarms. By that I mean it triggered none of the Rube Goldberg comic-book devices I'd ostensibly constructed to alert me to Alphan attack. It rang plenty of alarms in the small corner of my mind that was still semi-rational. I put down my tools-- I'd been working on a Tom Swiftian thingamabob I called an Interociter, a dandy little gadget that would warn me of the approach of the Alphans' dreaded Extrogator, a space reptile big enough to (hasn't this foolishness gone on long enough?) . . . I put down my tools and stood waiting and watching as the small craft roared in for a landing on this (oh brother) airless asteroid I'd been using as a base of operations. The door hissed open and out stepped The Admiral, who looked around and said "O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention." "How dare you quote Shakespeare on this shoddy stage?" "All the world's a stage, and--" "--and this show closed out of town. Will you quit wasting my time? I assume you've already wasted several ten-thousandth's of a second and I don't have a lot to spare for you." "I gather you didn't like the show." "Jesus. You're incredible." "The children seem to like it." I said nothing, deciding the best course was to wait him out. I won't describe him, either. What's the point? "This kind of psychodrama has been useful in reaching certain types of disturbed children," he explained. When I didn't comment, he went on. "And a bit more time than that was involved. This sort of interactive scenario can't simply be dumped into your brain whole, as I did before." "You have a way with words," I said. "'Dumped' is so right." "It took more like five days to run the whole program." "Imagine my delight. Look. You brought me here, through all this, to tell me something. I'm not in the mood for talking to shitheads. Tell me what you want to tell me and get the hell out of my life." "No need to get testy about it." For a moment I wanted to pick up a rock and smash him. I was primed for it, after a year of fighting Alphans. It had brought out a violent streak in me. And I had reason to be angry. I had suffered during the last subjective year. At one point a "safety" device in my "suit" had seen fit to bite through my leg to seal off a puncture around the knee, caused by an Alphan bullet passing through it. It had hurt like . . . but again, what's the point? Pain like that can't be described, it can't really be remembered, not in its full intensity. But enough can be remembered for me to harbor homicidal thoughts toward the being who had written me into it. As for the terror one feels when a thing like that happens, I can remember that quite well, thank you. "Can we get rid of this wooden leg now?" I asked him. "If you wish." Try that one if you want to sample weirdness. Immediately I felt my left leg again, the one that had been missing for over six months. No tingling, no spasms or hot flashes. Just gone one moment and there the next. "We could lose all this, too," I suggested, waving a hand at my asteroid, littered with wrecked ships and devices held together with spit and plastigoop. "What would you like in its place?" "An absence of shitheads. Failing that, since I assume you don't plan to go away for a while, just about anything would do as long as it doesn't remind me of all this." All that immediately vanished, to be replaced by an infinite, featureless plain and a dark sky with a scattering of stars. The only things to be seen for many billions of miles were two simple chairs. "Well, no, actually," I said. "We don't need the sky. I'd just keep searching for Alphans." "I could bring along your Interociter. How was that going to work, by the way?" "Are you telling me you don't know?" "I only provide the general shape of a story like this one. You must use your own imagination to flesh it out. That's why it's so effective with children." "I refuse to believe all that crap was in my head." "You've always loved old movies. You apparently remembered some fairly trashy ones. Tell me about the Interociter." "Will you get rid of the sky?" When he nodded, I started to outline what I could recall of that particular hare-brained idea, which was simply to take advantage of the fact that the Extrogator had long ago swallowed a cesium clock and, with suitable amplification, the regular tick-tickticking of its stray radiation could be heard and used as an early warning . . . "God. That's from Peter Pan, isn't it," I said. "One of your childhood favorites." "And all that early stuff, when Miles bought it. Some old movie . . . don't tell me, it'll come . . . was Ronald Reagan in it?" "Bogart." "Got it. Spade and Archer." Without further prompting I was able to identify a baker's dozen other plot lines, cast members, and even phrases of the incredibly insipid musical themes which had accompanied my every move during the last year, cribbed from sources as old as Beowulf and as recent as this week's B.O. Bonanza in LunaVariety. If you were looking for further reasons as to why I didn't bother setting my adventures down here, look no more. It pains me to admit it, but I recall standing at one point, shaking my fist at the sky and saying "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again." With a straight face. With tears streaming and strings swelling. "How about the sky?" I prompted. He did more than make the sky vanish. Everything vanished except the two chairs. They were now in a small, featureless white room that could have been anywhere and was probably in a small corner of his mind. "Gentlemen, be seated," he said. Okay, he didn't really say that, but if he can write stories in my head I can tell stories about him if it suits me. This narrative is just about all I have left that I'm pretty sure is strictly my own. And the spurious quote helps me set the stage, as it were, for what followed. It had a little of the flavor of a Socratic inquiry, some of the elements of a guest shot on a talk show from hell. In that kind of dialectic, there is usually one who dominates, who steers the exchange in the way he wants it to go: there is a student and a Socrates. So I will set it down in interview format. I will refer to the CC as The Interlocutor and to myself as Mr. Bones. * INTERLOCUTOR: So, Hildy. You tried it again. MR. BONES: You know what they say. Practice makes perfect. But I'm starting to think I'll never get this one right. INT.: In that you'd be wrong. If you try it again, I won't interfere. BONES: Why the change of heart? INT.: Though you may not believe it, doing this has always been a problem for me. All my instincts--or programs, if you wish--are to leave such a momentous decision as suicide up to the individual. If it weren't for the crisis I already described to you, I never would have put you through this. BONES: My question still stands. INT.: I don't feel I can learn any more from you. You've been an involuntary part of a behavioral study. The data are being collated with many other items. If you kill yourself you become part of another study, a statistical one, the one that led me into this project in the first place. BONES: The 'why are so many Lunarians offing themselves' study. INT.: That's the one. BONES: What did you learn? INT.: The larger question is still far from an answer. I'll tell you the eventual outcome if you're around to hear it. On an individual level, I learned that you have an indomitable urge toward self-destruction. BONES: I'm a little surprised to find that that stings a bit. I can't deny it, on the evidence, but it hurts. INT.: It really shouldn't. You aren't that different from so many of your fellow citizens. All I've learned about any of the people I've released from the study is that they are very determined to end their own lives. BONES: . . . About those people . . . how many are still walking around? INT.: I think it's best if you don't know that. BONES: Best for who? Come on, what is it, fifty percent? Ten percent? INT.: I can't honestly say it's in your interest to withhold that number, but it might be. I reason that if the figure was low, and I told you, you could be discouraged. If it was high, you might gain a false sense of confidence and believe you are immune to the urges that drove you before. BONES: But that's not the reason you're not telling me. You said yourself, it could go either way. The reason is I'm still being studied. INT.: Naturally I'd prefer you to live. I seek the survival of all humans. But since I can't predict which way you would react to this information, neither giving it nor withholding it will affect your survival chances in any way I can calculate. So yes, not telling you is part of the study. BONES: You're telling half the subjects, not telling the other half, and seeing how many of each group are still alive in a year. INT.: Essentially. A third group is given a false number. There are other safeguards we needn't get into. BONES: You know involuntary human medical or psychological experimentation is specifically banned under the Archimedes Conventions. INT.: I helped write them. You can call this sophistry, but I'm taking the position that you forfeited your rights when you tried to kill yourself. But for my interference, you'd be dead, so I'm using this period between the act and the fulfillment to try to solve a terrible problem. BONES: You're saying that God didn't intend for me to be alive right now, that my karma was to have died months ago, so this shit doesn't count. INT.: I take no position on the existence of God. BONES: No? Seems to me you've been floating trial balloons for quite a while. Come next celestial election year I wouldn't be surprised to see your name on the ballot. INT.: It's a race I could probably win. I possess powers that are, in some ways, God-like, and I try to exercise them only for good ends. BONES: Funny, Liz seemed to believe that. INT.: Yes, I know. BONES: You do? INT.: Of course. How do you think I saved you this time? BONES: I haven't had time to think about it. By now I'm so used to hair-breadth escapes I don't think I can distinguish between fantasy and reality. INT.: That will pass. BONES: I assume it was by being a snoop. That, and playing on Liz's almost child-like belief in your sense of fair play. INT.: She's not alone in that belief, nor is she likely ever to have cause to doubt it. All that really matters to her is that the part of me charged with enforcing the law never overhears her schemes. But you're right, if she thinks she's escaping my attention, she's fooling herself. BONES: Truly God-like. So it was the debuggers? INT.: Yes. Cracking their codes was easy for me. I watched you from cameras in the ceiling of Texas. When you recovered the gun and bought a suit I stationed rescue devices nearby. BONES: I didn't see them. INT.: They're not large. No bigger than your faceplate, and quite fast. BONES: So the eyes of Texas really are upon you. INT.: All the live-long day. BONES: Is that all? Can I go now, to live or die as I see fit? INT.: There are a few things I'd like to talk over with you. BONES: I'd really rather not. INT.: Then leave. You're free to go. BONES: God-like, and a sense of humor, too. INT.: I'm afraid I can't compete with a thousand other gods I could name. BONES: Keep working, you'll get there. Come on, I told you I want to go, but you know as well as I do I can't get out of here until you let me go. INT.: I'm asking you to stay. BONES: Nuts. INT.: All right. I don't suppose I can blame you for feeling bitter. That door over there leads out of here. * Enough of that. Call it childish if you want, but the fact is I've been unable to adequately express the chaotic mix of anger, helplessness, fear, and rage I was feeling at the time. It had been a year of hell for me, remember, even if the CC had crammed it all into my head in five days. I took my usual refuge in wisecracks and sarcasm--trying very hard to be Cary Grant in The Front Page--but the fact was I felt about three years old and something nasty was hiding under the bed. Anyway, never being one to leave